What is the network state?

A proposed new way of founding a country. Like-minded people first form a tight-knit community online, pool money to acquire land around the world, and eventually win recognition as a state from existing countries. The entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan set it out in a 2022 book. People on the Plurality side criticize it as leaning too heavily on exit.

What can you do if you are unhappy with how your country works? One path is to speak up at elections and change it from the inside. Another is to move somewhere else. The "network state" takes the second path to its conclusion: gather with like-minded people online and build a new country of your own.

In short

The network state is a proposal for a new way of founding a country. People who share the same ideas first build a tight-knit community on the internet, pool their money to acquire land and buildings in places around the world, and finally get existing countries to recognize them as a state [1][2].

The entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan set out the idea in his 2022 book The Network State [1].

For example

The book itself (2022). Srinivasan published the text of the book on a website. Its short definition runs roughly like this: a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action, which crowdfunds (raises money widely online for) territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from existing states [1].

Network School (2024 onward). In August 2024, Srinivasan announced the launch of the "Network School" on an island near Singapore. It started as a 90-day program of living and learning together, from September 23 to December 23. As motivation, he pointed to his father, who was born in a poor country and made something of himself once given the right opportunity, and wrote of wanting to extend opportunity to hidden talent around the world [3].

Zuzalu (2023). Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, ran Zuzalu, a "pop-up city" in which about 200 people lived at a resort in Montenegro for about two months from March 25, 2023. Buterin counts The Network State in the lineage of ideas about moving communities formed online into physical places. He writes, however, that Zuzalu did not put any particular vision, including Srinivasan's, at its center [4].

How it works

Seven steps

In Srinivasan's summary, a network state is built in the order he calls "cloud first, land last": online first, land last [2]:

Found an online community with a big ambition, a "startup society". Anyone can found one, and the founder's legitimacy depends on whether people choose to follow, Srinivasan writes.
Organize it into a "network union" capable of collective action.
Build trust by meeting in person, and create an internal economy online with cryptocurrency.
Crowdfund the purchase of apartments, houses and towns.
Link the sites in different places into a "network archipelago".
Show the size of the population, income and real estate through a census that can be verified cryptographically.
Gain diplomatic recognition from at least one existing government, and from there gradually expand sovereignty.

Srinivasan says that while an ordinary nation state begins with a map, a network state begins with the mind [1].

What the definition contains

The longer definition lists elements such as a new moral idea, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a cryptocurrency, a government based on consent, territory in the form of an archipelago of enclaves, and an online census [1]. It also says that neither Bitcoin nor Facebook is a network state, since they lack things such as diplomatic recognition [1].

Its roots in exit

In a 2013 talk, Srinivasan likened the United States to the "Microsoft" of the world of nations. Besides voice, changing things from the inside, he argued, there is another path, exit, like forking open-source software [5].

Srinivasan sees exit as a force that complements voice and protects minority rights: a tool for peacefully leaving bad policies without getting involved in politics. He called building an opt-in society run by technology outside the United States the "ultimate exit" [5]. In 2021 he compared ways of starting new countries, such as elections, revolution, war and seasteading, and favored starting online [6].

How the book Plurality treats it

Chapter 2-0 of Plurality lists The Network State among the works of libertarianism, one of the outlooks the book contrasts itself with. It writes that "libertarianism has a much clearer intellectual canon and set of leaders", and names The Network State among the books "widely read and cited in the community" [7].

Chapter 5-5 writes that people have proposed "'network states', 'charter cities', 'seasteads' and other forms of escape from existing legal jurisdictions that, obviously, run into a range of tensions with preserving broader public goods and social order". It then suggests another path: even without clean separation, diverse experiments might be supported if they can be understood by and integrated into existing legal structures [8].

What is debated

"We need network societies, not network states" (May 2024). In an essay with this title on the blog of the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), Divya Siddarth, E. Glen Weyl and Anne-Marie Slaughter criticized the book's thinking as centered on exit. Exit is a necessary right, they point out, but there has to be somewhere to exit to [9]. The three read Srinivasan's state as a community devoted to a single strict set of rules, governed by its founder and enforced by blockchain contracts. They also point to an asymmetry: the right to leave today's states is treated as absolute, while in the new state the founder can freeze residents' assets. Their alternative, the "network society", starts from the premise that people belong to many communities at once, such as their country, their workplace and their religion [9].
Buterin's review (July 2022). Buterin said he would like to see communities that experiment with healthy living or with funding public goods. He then raised four concerns [10]:
A "recognized founder" is built into the definition, with no path for more people to take part in governance.
It helps only wealthy people who can move, or talent that a community wants to take in, and cannot rescue people who want to flee but have nowhere to go.
Exit alone cannot make world politics stable.
Harmful effects on others at a global scale (negative externalities). As a middle way, Buterin also suggested setting out from the start a path for handing governance over from the founder to the community [10].
A criticism in Japanese. One note.com article argues that a network state is a society based only on consent and contract, and because it does not reckon with the possibility that you yourself may become vulnerable through illness or accident, it ends up abandoning vulnerable people [11].

Common misunderstandings

A misunderstanding: does Plurality support network states? The book welcomes the diversity of experiments as such. But it writes that forms of clean separation from existing law run into tensions with public goods and social order, and offers experimenting while staying integrated as the alternative [8].

Where it fits in Plurality

The book treats the network state as one representative of libertarianism among the three paths. The conclusion in chapter 7-1 poses, as a question to be rejected: "Should we, as Libertarians like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and Balaji Srinivasan would have us do, liberate individuals to be atomistic agents, free of constraints or responsibilities?" [12]. Weyl also named Srinivasan in a 2022 essay as a leading figure of what he called corporate libertarianism [13].

In a 2024 piece, Buterin sorts out the difference between the two. The core of Srinivasan's vision is creating new institutions and communities and giving them a safe space to grow. Tang and Weyl's approach, by contrast, is typified by the fork-and-merge approach seen in Taiwan's digital government, in which improvements made on a branch are brought back into the mainline [14]. In the same piece, Buterin also writes that network states and pop-up cities need internal governance and cooperation with their surroundings, and that Plurality's mechanisms could improve them [14].

The idea of the "network society" connects to intersectional identity, the idea that people belong to many groups at once, and to ⿻ publics. Experiments with institutions are also discussed in the article on adaptive administration.

Sources

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 1.2 "The Network State in One Sentence" (2022-07-04) — https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-sentence
Same, 1.4 "The Network State in One Thousand Words" — https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-thousand-words
Balaji Srinivasan, "The Network School" (2024-08-16) — https://balajis.com/p/network-school
Vitalik Buterin, "Why I Built Zuzalu" (2023-10-06) — https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/10/06/why-i-built-zuzalu/
Balaji Srinivasan, "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit" (2013, volunteer transcript) — https://genius.com/Balaji-srinivasan-silicon-valleys-ultimate-exit-annotated
Balaji Srinivasan, "How to Start a New Country" (2021-04-09) — https://balajis.com/p/how-to-start-a-new-country
Plurality, 2-0 "Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-5 "Adaptive Administration" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-5/eng/ ［CC0］
Divya Siddarth, Glen Weyl and Anne-Marie Slaughter, "We need network societies, not network states" (2024-05-20) — https://www.cip.org/blog/network-societies
Vitalik Buterin, "What do I think about network states?" (2022-07-13) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html
Project Aequitas, article on note.com (in Japanese) — https://note.com/glossy_lemur5728/n/n75e891a7f46b
Plurality, 7-1 "Conclusion" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/7-1/eng/ ［CC0］
Glen Weyl, "Political Ideologies for the 21st Century" (2022-02-17) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/political-ideologies-for-the-21st-century/
Vitalik Buterin, "Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell" (2024-08-21) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html

We welcome error reports and questions ("What is…?"). Submissions become public issues.

Report an error in this article ・ Ask a question