Balaji S. Srinivasan | The Network State

So we have, in the last session with Robin and Mark together suggested that as a civilization via the Yurisik of voluntary cooperation, we are increasingly climbing Pareto preferred hills. That was much of what we discussed in chapter two of the book, which I'll share today. We'll be moving on to chapter three, which I'll share after the call. And today we'll suggest that within a minimal set of rules of volunteerism, we can really lay the groundwork for others to construct and join complex cooperative arrangements in the physical and digital world with other rule sets. And many of you, I think, are aware of a talk, the Computer Security as the future of Law that Mark Miller gave in 1997, which foreshadowed much of the co evolution between the legal world and the cyber world that we see today. And in that talk he suggested that while legal systems are kind of gradually emerging to insulate us from the red in tooth and claw laws of biology, we have increasingly markets laying the rules of the game with different properties such as civilization emerge. And while legal systems are evolving, they are increasingly competing to establish neutral systems of rules that support cooperation without vulnerability. But I think as we are all aware, they are very imperfect and for instance, they struggle to insulators from many of the actors within that increasingly lead to corruption. In cyberspace, however, we have almost perfect realization of a neutral, simple framework of rules. And Mark suggested back then that we can gradually supplement our legal systems, moving from a system of smart contracts to distributed secure systems, to voluntary virtual communities to experiment with new rules that can then translate again into the physical world and habitat. Which Chip who's on the call was working on, was mentioned as one of the first virtual communities which for experimentation along the way in which from very simple beginnings people founded religions, waged wars, protested against them and experimented with self government. It's a really great write up. I'm going to share it here as well in the chat. But this talk was 24 years ago and so since then a lot has happened and we are already part of a bunch of different physical and digital communities that shape much of our lives. And in fact many of you here on this call are part of them and are actively shaping them. And maybe to name just a few, there are ambitious projects like seasteading charter cities, startup societies that seek to carve out territory to experiment with in dirt space. Then even recently, some municipal governments, such as Nevada and the US have even planned legislation that could enable companies to form governments. We have dirt space. While that's really contested, we have a lot of cyberspace alternatives emerging from Second Life to Earth to IO to Decentraland, in which one can hold property that corresponds to made up or real world coordinates. We have physical communities that many of you are part of, such as the embassy network or parallel polis, in which its members experiment with many new governance systems and financial systems. And we have even the first tools for creating transferable legal templates such as ULEX with Tom Bell emerging. And I think whether or not any of those alternatives become self sustaining sooner or later, they do already build an increasing menu of different polycentric communities that mesh the physical with the digital. And by joining different respective hierarchies in each one, I think we are helping to uphold voluntary interactions and cooperate increasingly across circles. And so one really incredible effort that Hippology has started is the Network State. And it already seeks to uphold its members right and use the digital to carve out space in the physical world. And the Network States seeks to start with a virtual community bootstrap, a digital economy that can then be forked to create new opt in polities. And these cloud cities eventually should allow their members to collectively negotiate with existing jurisdictions and crowdfund territory in the real world. So he's really using the digital to then translate again into the physical. So, Balaji, thank you so much for joining today. I know that the whole group is very excited to have you here. Thank you very much for taking the time and we're super eager to hear about your project.

All right, well, so I will project in a second, basically just as kind of a prequel here. I'm actually coming out with a book and an app and so on related to all this. If you go to balajs.com signup, you can just sign up for the email. Email, it'll be free and everything. I'll just send out my book link and app link when that's ready. I think I'm building something which I think of as the first book app where imagine you had a bible which had calls to action embedded in the middle. An obvious concept that I don't think anybody has done where like the to dos and so on, you don't just have the 10 commandments, you have a checklist and you have tasks and so on that are actually within that. Um, I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be cool. So basically, how does every country become a software country? Can you see the screen? Yep. Okay, great. Yes. All right, so just to jump right in. Right in. You know, we, we know the technology allows you to start Your own company, that's Google. Start your own community. Facebook, start your own currency. Bitcoin, Ethereum. And the current, you know, crypto boom, I think the fourth or the fifth, depending on how you count. And I think eventually it allows us to start our own cities and countries. And that's what I'm going to talk about right now. We are here and we are going here. And the fundamental construct that I think about in this context is something I call the network state. And the idea is that digital currency is part of a fundamental shift in human organization, really a return from sheer geography to shared ideas. So the left, you have a nation state like Russia, where the geography is primary and the ideology is secondary. The same country was running the intellectual software of communism and swapped it out for nationalism, but the geography remained constant and the ideology changed. By contrast, on the right hand side we have what I think of as a proto network state like Ethereum, where you have a large group of people organized by a shared belief and the belief is primary, but the geography is secondary. They can mass in China or in Mexico you have a community of millions of people that are transnational and they're unified by social networks and cryptocurrencies and shared belief as opposed to necessarily shared geography. And the thing about this is I think that the first step towards actually building a physical network state, as I'll come to, is that what we're doing is we're using technology to facilitate collective bargaining with existing governments. Now I actually created this slide four or five years ago and I've talked about this concept almost for 10 years and you're starting to see things like for example, Wall Street Bets, right, Where you have a collection of millions of people that are actually able to exert leverage on existing institutions. Where it's like a bottom up organization that forms into something that has that kind of leverage. I think one of the biggest things, conceptual things for everybody here to think about is this concept of crowd choice, which is not the sovereign individual, it's a sovereign collective, okay? It's a group of people who gets together and who aggregates their preferences to facilitate collective bargaining with existing governments. To give some examples, Elon Musk got a bunch of people to or which estates to compete for Tesla's factory. That's like Proto crowd choice where you have thousands of Tesla employees effectively collectively bargaining with the state, with Elon Musk as the union leader. And you have the Free State project where you have crowd migration and you have sites like teleport.org or nomad list which are search engines for digital nomads. If you put those three concepts together, right, A, the concept of a leader who collected bargains on behalf of his people, B, the idea of mass migration for belief, and C, new search engines and social networks that are based around mass migration on the basis of ideology. You get this concept of crowd choice where you can move from what I call 51% democracy to 100% democracy. 50, 51% democracy is what we currently have, where you have 51% can outvote 49% and impose their will. And then four years later it switches, and now the other, your 2% switches sides and then it switches the other way. And so you have something where it's like a Fosbury flop. It's a minimum consent to operate a state, 51% consents. The alternative is something where you go for like 100% consent. Because the root of democracy is consensual government. You know, the consent of the government, consent of the governed is what legitimizes it. So if you could get 100% democracy, that would actually be better than 51%. The way you can get that is with crowd choice. With crowd choice. And again, I'm just giving an overview. I'll go into a lot more detail. I think we can build these semi autonomous startup cities that are permitted by existing governments if we have enough people that can collectively bargain, and eventually we can get to the seasteads and Mars colonies. But step one is just getting people online to group together to think of themselves as a people and to start collectively bargaining, even with companies, by the way, to get 100 people to collectively bargain with a company to get a lower price for masks, right? And this is something where, you know, you, you take two seemingly opposed things, you know, which is the progressive concept of unions and the libertarian concepts of mobility and competitive government and the individual. And you, you take this thesis and antithesis and you have the synthesis of the sovereign collective. And I think that's a really important concept. Okay, so that's just a preview. Let's talk about how we actually go into a little more detail. So what are the technological drivers of the network state? Why is this actually feasible today? So you're probably familiar with this book, the Sovereign Individual, where the concept is that technology is the driving force of history and technology determines what political ideas are feasible at a given time. So this is very different than many political thinkers who think that the ideas are what's important. In a sense, all these ideas have been floating around forever, and it's just what's feasible at a given time. So in the 20th century, technology favored centralization. You had mass media and mass production. That's what caused a few folks to be able to set up these giga states of the US and the USSR and China and whatnot. And it favored centralization. And if you go both backward and forward in time, it favors decentralization. You go backward in time, let's say 1950 is peak centralization. So you have one telephone company and two superpowers and three television stations in roughly 1950, both backward and forward in time. And you decentralize. You have lots of power centers, you have the robber barons, you have private currencies, you have private banking. And eventually you go all the way back to 1776 and you have a bunch of pseudonymous people who started a new state with the Federalist Papers. Then you go forward in time and you get the decentralization of media and the Internet and cryptocurrencies. And that's what's happening now. Once you think of technology as a driving force of history, you realize that any idea you come up with, you want to actually assess it for its technological feasibility or look at any institution and ask yourself whether it is still technologically competitive. In many ways what's happening is we have these 20th century, 19th century, 18th century paper based institutions that simply were not set up for the Internet. Very few institutions that predated the Internet will survive the Internet. So technology is driving force of history. And as again, this is a thesis you're probably familiar with, but. But the ability to organize violence is changing. If property is cryptography, it doesn't matter if you have a million person army. No amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems, as Assange put it. And just to give you a bunch of headlines, Bitcoin means capital controls are now packet filtering. 3D printing means regulation is now DRM. The state is less capable of intraditing the possession of physical objects, from drones to prosthetics to 3D printed guns. Quantified self is actually changing the doctor patient relationship. Your medical license is becoming your software license. As more and more of the data becomes local, you can swap between different doctors to interpret it via telemedicine, which is finally being legalized in the US due to the whole Covid shock. And so it becomes something also where a significant amount of interpretation of that data is actually done by algorithms. This is when people tell me, oh, how can computer scientists get to medicine? I say, well, what's a doctor actually doing? They're prescribing lab tests, they're reading charts. Do you know who wrote the code that actually produces those diagnostic reports? Well, that's increasingly a software CEO that's running a clinical lab or a biomedical CEO that does a lot of software. More and more of medicine is actually being taken over by software. Who's programming the instruments of Boston Scientific or what have you, but you know, who's programming the MRIs or the cat scans? Those are all software engineers. And then you're making a decision, the doctor is making a decision downstream that. But there's an enormous amount of the actual supply chain that's going into this, which is basically, you know, software as opposed to a government granted medical license. A significant amount of the decisions that are being made in this supply chain, this information supply chain, are being made by software engineers. It's not really perceived yet, but it means over time your medical license becomes your software license. As more and more of your genomic data, other data becomes data local.

Okay.

Another concept, telepresence versus borders. Your immigration policy is now your firewall again. I gave a talk on a lot of this stuff in 2013. It keeps coming about. You know, the sovereign individual was even earlier, of course, but you know, Edward Snowden moving across borders with telepresence, you know, the remote economy, you know, which Covid has catalyzed, means that work is not just doable, you know, around the corner, but around the world. And for a long time I thought what was going to be the step function for remote, because Slack and other things are making it better year by year. And I thought it might be VR or something like that. And it turned out to be a cultural step function. One of the consequences of that, if you take the Boston Dynamics robots and you take this Edward Snowden and these telepresence kind of things and you put them together by 2030 or thereabouts, maybe sooner we will be able to step into like a VR suit and just animate a robot on the other side of the world. Right? And I don't know, there's a movie called Surrogates. It's actually a pretty good sci fi vision of this latency is a concern, of course, but you can do compensation. A lot of the video game stuff actually be helpful for this where you can do prediction. Most of the time you're not doing something where you immediately jerk like this. So maybe you might not be able to do robot fighting, but a lot of robot walking and other kinds of things, you could probably make it feel very Natural. And that changes all kinds of immigration conversations. Because you could teleport in a laborer, for example, who could do tasks and then come back home and that person wouldn't have to leave their culture. They could stay at home and still earn cryptocurrency or something like that. Across borders, they could come and telepresently. This changes all kinds of immigration conversations. It means your immigration policy is now your firewall. Another example, GoPros versus police testimony. Body cams mean that video evidence is more trusted than the sworn word of an officer of the state. So the state is just less trustworthy than the network. The network is taking over. Encryption versus search warrants. You know, encryption means that your ability to perform a search is your ability to decrypt a file, right? So you know, the FBI director lashes out at Apple and Google for encrypting smartphones. You know, going dark. Encryption is more powerful than even the federal government social networks versus a jury of peers. So this is a great article from actually almost 12 years ago where a Facebook status update provided an alibi. And so your most indisputable exculpatory evidence is now online. It's not your peers in the physical world testifying that you didn't do it. It is your status update. It is that cryptograph, eventually cryptographically verifiable timestamp. With healthcare.gov, you have the state basically failing. And you have half a dozen technologists that outdid all of the US government's efforts on healthcare.gov with warfare. There's a great clip over here from 2014 versus the suspected North Korean cyber attack. It says Mr. Obama has been hesitant to use the country's cyber arsenal to retaliate because for fear of North Korean retaliation. Now think about that. By the way, you know what a huge shift versus the war in Iraq. There was no fear that Iraq was going to. I mean, maybe there was some paranoid kind of thing, but there was no real fear that Iraq was going to be able to, you know, launch missiles or something against the US but when it comes to cybersecurity network security, a small country can defend itself. Or rather more precisely, everybody can play offense. Defense is, is harder. But small countries suddenly start to become able to defend themselves against the aggression of large states like the U.S. you know, you think about the Navy's newest warship is powered by Lennox. What is happening is gradually, as more and more stuff switches over to drones, as more and more stuff switches over to robotics, as more and more of these military systems which are being software controlled. It's not about who has the most manpower and material and guns. It's about who has the best engineers, who can hack the other side's drones and win. And so the return on having huge numbers of people is diminishing. I like a lot of what Matt Iglesia says, But I think 1 billion robots will definitely beat 1 billion Americans. I don't think you need lots and lots of people anymore. 12 people from Instagram were able to defeat, I think at least 12,000 from Kodak. And so I think that the leverage in warfare is changing. The entire logic of warfare is changing. The way states are set up is changing. And the legacy will still be operational for a while. But this is a 10, 20, 30 year kind of process, maybe shorter, maybe longer. The Internet tends to accelerate things. Okay, you put all these pieces together and what do we get? We essentially get something where a new leviathan is entering the picture. The way I think about this is that the most powerful force in the world, the leviathan, is shifting. It is moving away from the state to encrypted computer networks. And the only states that survive are those that become fused with the network, that gain properties of a state or properties of the network. So this is this kind of triptych, this trinity over here, this progression of Leviathans is something I think about a lot. You know, God, state, network, and the network as the next leviathan, the irresistible force hovering above that makes fallible men behave in pro social ways. Okay, so just to understand this, on the left we have God. And in the 1800s, why didn't people steal? They didn't steal because God would smite them. The most powerful force was the church. And people actually believed in God in a way that, you know, modern people don't fully understand. They thought of God as like an active force in the world, you know, and that's kind of why it was sort of adaptive to say, oh, that's a God fearing man, you know, because this powerful man, this powerful person who, you know, could do things and nobody could watch them or really check them if they still feared God, if they truly field hellfire for doing something wrong outside the view of someone else, their private decision making might be better. They actually really believed and feared that punishment. Right? So that's why a God fearing man, even if you didn't believe in God, you might want somebody who believed in a traditional view of God because they might be better behaved. And it's conventional, of course, for atheists to say, oh, well, what are you saying without God you wouldn't behave well. And then many of those same atheists will say, what are you, you crazy libertarians? You want to remove the state? It'll be anarchy and everyone will shoot each other. So that brings us to the next Leviathan, as by the late 1800s, you know, enough intellectuals no longer believed in God. You know, Nietzsche wrote God is dead. Well, you needed a new force to keep men in order. And that was the state. That's, you know, the essentially the uniform police forces, the boys in blue, the military, you know, even if you don't believe in God, you believe in, you know, the guys with guns. And so by the 1900s, why didn't you steal? Because the state would punish them. Of course, some of those states themselves would punish you and steal. Such as, you know, the ussr. So it's a total state. And you know, you have an example in the USSR where the state was against God. You know, like the USSR would dynamite churches. Stalin famously dynamited this gigantic church in Russia and turned into a swimming pool so that people would sort of trample upon, you know, the previous, you know, beliefs of Russians. Later, the Russians, after, you know, they shucked off communism, rebuilt that church, you know, from photos, which actually really amazing. So that's the state versus God, where state is going head to head, hammer and tongs against the prior Leviathan. Or you have the 1950s US which is like a God state hybrid. If you think about what is the Marine Corps at that time. It's for God and country. Right? And you know, for God and country is basically the God plus state kind of hybrid. So these Leviathans aren't necessarily always exactly opposed to each other. They can be synthesized. And now in the 2000s, we have a new force. In the 2000s, why don't you steal? Because the network won't let you. Either you lack the private key or your social network will have opprobrium or give you opprobrium or both. Right. And now whereas in, you know, the 1800s, the most powerful force was the church or the analog within, you know, another society. In the 1900s, the most powerful force. The US military. Right. Well, in the 2000s, the most powerful force is encryption, and I mentioned a God state hybrid, but there's other hybrids. For example, a God network hybrid would be like the Jewish diaspora prior to Israel. Okay, so people who all believe the same thing, they were distributed around the world in a social network that was connected by the low bandwidth mechanism of sending, you know, physical mail back and forth in Packages and that's like, you know, a God network hybrid. And you have a God state network hybrid. If you think about something, you know, this, a bad version is the Islamic State where they use the Internet to recruit lots of people to build a religious fundamentalist state in, you know, the middle of what used to be Iraq. And I think that you also have now, and this is kind of the topic is you have the network state hybrids and there's at least two forms. One is the form we're a little more familiar with, which is China as maybe a bad version and Estonia as a good version where an existing state gains the properties of effectively a software company. It's as if it's run by a software CEO and fuses with the network. The good version of that is Estonia with putting all of its services online, xroad and so on and so forth. Perhaps the bad version is the Chinese total surveillance state where AI is watching everything. Now you know, the Chinese government has actually delivered material results for its people. So it's, you know, it's, it's something where a lot of folks are loyal to the state because of that, you know, their living standards actually have improved dramatically. And the rule is basically simple, just do not contest the Chinese government on anything. But what they've built, where they've got cameras that can track you from room to room, is similar to the all seeing, all knowing God of old. You know, with AI, with constant monitoring, you may not be a God fearing man, but you are a gov fearing man in China because AI will know if you've done something wrong. It has qualities of computation that are beyond inhuman. So that's like the state fusing with the network. But there's also networks that can take on in our, in my view, state like properties. And so obviously we're seeing, you know, Facebook with lots of users, then you get a higher level of command not just via daily active user, but a daily inactive Hodler. Right? That's bitcoin, that's cryptocurrency. And by the way, this is also something where people, I think just everybody's prone to kind of thinking about this revolution is similar to the last. Everyone says, oh, cryptocurrencies. Well who uses them? Well with social networks, the knock of them, Wells. Oh, everyone's using them but they're not making money. So with social networks the use of predated the monetization and with cryptocurrencies the monetization predated the use in the most literal sense. They made money first before gaining Users now they've got 100 something million users. It's going to get to a billion, it's very clear. But so the next big thing never looks quite like the last. Just as a digression. So we have these networks that have got communities and they've got currencies, but how do they get geographies, cities and countries? I'll come to this point, okay, so encryption is now the most powerful force in the world. And the thing is that it is the basis for a new theory of property rights. You go back to Locke and the legitimate state is the one that protects property rights. Now I'll name a state that doesn't and that's San Francisco and I'll name a state that does. And that's Bitcoin and Ethereum. Right? And so that's really interesting. You would much rather have your property on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain then under the tender mercies of the government of San Francisco which will allow 30,000 car break in zero and you can't leave anything outside. Property rights are simply not guaranteed by the state. You know, and encryption is not just about property rights. It protects freedom of association. You know, you can do meetups, communication hardware development, software development, crowdfunding, you know, remote control of drones and robots, meetups in territory scattered by robots. So the full scope of what it means to have truly encrypted networks communicating peer to peer, I don't think people have fully thought through. So the rise of the network state. With encryption as a foundation of a new system of property rights, we can project how things are going to play out. We have virtual worlds of digital currencies with VR and cryptocurrency. That's an obvious thing. Virtual reality plus virtual currency. Because you have people in this virtual world who are from the US and Brazil and India and Japan and so on, and they're not going to have their traditional currencies there. You don't want to do some silly interbank conversion every single time someone pays each other in the game. So the game currencies become virtual, currencies become transnational currencies. This is already happening. This is an obvious thing where all the people who were working to make World of Warcraft gold are actually now earning real money. It's funny, there's a Far side cartoon from the 80s which is sort of mocking the idea that this kid will grow up to play video games for a life. It's got classified ads and it's like save the princess $15 an hour. Are you great at jumping over Oompas? $3 an hour. And it's parents who are looking at those classified ads. And it's meant to be a joke that of course this kid is not going to have a job playing video games in 10 years or 20 years when they grow up, but actually they do because esports is a big thing. And actually many jobs are becoming gamified. Plus, so virtual worlds, virtual currencies. And I think people have talked about the consumerization of enterprise. There'll be the gamification of enterprise, not just with emojis, but little micro payments, little crypto credentials earned for many kinds of task completions. Okay, so third is the spread of cloud communities. So transnational associations trump local ties. Our states have failed. In the west in particular, I should say the state has failed in the sense of whether you're talking public health, talking public schools, police, fire, you know, property rights, basic personal security, power, you know, it's just total collapse. And, you know, it's not like when I say that it's something where you're just at the beginning of that, you essentially have the generation of people. You know, my friend Yushan Wong was talking about this generation of people who thought about and built things like public infrastructure without turning everything into a political game. Those folks are dying or leaving the scene, and you just have a whole group of folks who just inherited a society they could never have built, right? They could never have founded it, they could never have created it, because it's too hard to build anything from scratch. And if you can't build something from scratch, you also don't know how to modify or upgrade existing systems. They're just fragile. And they're particularly fragile when a new shock like Covid comes in and people just flail. So I think I was warning some of my friends of what's in San Francisco is also going to come to Austin and Miami because Austin had adopted San Francisco's homeless policies, for example, and now they've managed to bring in California's power outages and whatnot, and probably the fires and other kinds of things, natural disasters, all of those types of things are in part just a function of a poor state, bad government that can't plan, and. And I think we're going to see more and more of that in the West. So as the state fails, as it becomes a collective that doesn't deliver anything to you, but asks much of you, I think transnational associations trump local ties, though I will say this, I think within Austin or San Francisco or something, if you wanted to reform the state, what you do is you start a local media company, meaning basically a blog, right? You just crank out a bunch of articles. Even at $10 per customer acquisition, that's only about less than $10 million to acquire every single person in San Francisco. And then what you do is you just organize a parallel shadow government online, a social network that's not just a higgledy piggledy network, but a social tree with a hierarchy as basically the shadow mayor of San Francisco and a bunch of shadow folks underneath who are the CTO and so on and so forth. And you just larp, right? This network union delivers goods to its people and you join the network union and you are part of this hierarchy and you just live action, role play it as if it was real thing. And as it gains scale, it's able to deliver more and more goods by convincing people rather than compelling people. And of course there's certain goods that you can only deliver with coercion, like police forces and so on and so forth. But it's remarkable how far you can get with convincing people. This is not a corporate context, this is a social context. And you don't quote, run for mayor in the sense of, wait for this sort of kabuki two or four year election cycle where there's all these personal attacks. You start building up the backlinks today where you're community organizing and you build this up online and you become a quote, community leader. I think this is the future where you use the network to organize outside the state. And that's a common theme here. Okay? So as you start building these communities, these network unions, these social trees, as opposed to just a social graph, there's an organization, organized hierarchy. As you start building these both locally and transnationally, the cloud starts taking physical shape. So those online groups that are delivering useful goods online to their people, for example, tutorials, for example, just boosting people's launches or product announcements or whatever on social media, you know, like helping promote their, their new initiative, helping defend them when they're attacked by other folks. Those, those groups online start meeting up offline and being up at larger, larger scale. And what this does, you know, like 10 people getting together in a city with 10 different Ubers coming to a dinner, is on a continuum with 10,000 people creating a new city and meeting there. Okay? And we know this from Burning man, you can see that 100,000 people can come together in a day. And this also shows, by the way, that there's actually a third axis. People often Think of this as NIMBY versus yimby, but it's really NIMBY versus Yimby versus what I call himby. And the reason is the NIMBY says don't build anything and the YIMBY says build vertically. But there's also Himby which says build horizontally and build horizontally. Outside of the context of cities, as cities used to be built, where you could just roll up an RV on a plot of land and that's your new home and and you have the MVP of what a building is, you just radically reduce the startup cost of starting a new city. The rules are basically just someone has a private plot of land and they just set the rules. And that's going to be just one person who decides whether you can build something or not. Ideally, if it's out in unincorporated land, whether it's Wyoming or someplace that is actually very easy to build. And when you do that like a Burning man style thing, guess what? You can just horizontally spread. Sprawl may be actually good. Why is sprawl good? It radically reduces building costs. You don't need to do all this stuff to build steel and glass and so on vertically. You can just spread out horizontally and you can iterate, you can move an entire city block around here. And then you grow up over time. And this is how of course, cities arose originally, didn't have skyscrapers in the 1800s when all these cities were settled, we're kind of going back to the future. And what that does is it means that people now start to organize in the cloud, organize these hierarchies take physical shape. And now once that, that happens, once that process happens more and more, you know, start in the cloud, end on land, you know, meet in the cloud, meet up on land. Once that becomes more and more routine. And you need actually apps around this because bringing 10,000 people to a location is harder than bringing 10. Now you can start doing things where those 10,000 people can negotiate with states and they can say, hey, we've got 10,000 software engineers, we will all come to Miami. If you legalize this COVID vaccine, for example, you say it's a sanctuary city versus the fda. Or you say, hey, make this a crypto capital, which is actually already happening, which Francis Suarez is doing. And this concept of collective bargaining with governments, we know it works because Amazon did it with HQ2 with just 25,000 people. New York and other places were putting in bids and New York has 27 million people. Why would they care about 25,000? That's only 0.1% of the population. Well, yeah, but it's probably like 1 or 2% of the revenue that comes in and it's got knock on benefits. So Maybe it's like 5 or 10% if it compounded there. And so a relatively small number of people can have enormous leverage if they collectively bargain. I think that's an important insight that a lot of what I consider ideological libertarians, they don't think about the collective. And conversely, a lot of progressives are sort of blind to the idea that states are dysfunctional though they're always into the collective. And I think putting both those insights together is how you get binocular vision rather than just having one color of the spectrum on its own. Okay, so combining all of these, what we can start doing once you start collective bargaining with governments is you have states that start to compete for citizens or groups of citizens and you join various, what I call these network unions, which are social networks that organize like unions which have clear leaders but you can opt in. Right. So basically an influencer, an online influencer today is the kind of person that becomes a leader of a network union. You stand for something, you have some beliefs, you have an opinion on how society should be organized, you have followers, you hopefully have some management capability or a friend who can manage. You organize them into a hierarchy and you have just digital tasks to do each. This is what I'm doing next by the way, so you can sign up for the book in the app when it comes out. And if you guys want to do your own, you can do that. And there's basically three paths, right? You can A be a citizen of an existing state, that's fine. B, you join one of these new network unions and maybe found your own network CSL come to or C, you actually found your own network state and you become the CEO of a new network state. You found your network union. So in order to make all of this happen, in order to make this migration feasible, people need to be able to move. And an important part of that is they need to actually become, need to become financially independent. So I'll get to that part in a second. So the, the thing about the network state, the reason that it's, it's coming about where you have these cloud formations that take physical shape that crowdfund cities and then than states and so on, is that smartphone mediated mass migration is going to apply the same pressure to countries that software has applied to companies. So if every company is a software company, basically the best companies are run by software savvy leaders, if they fail to adapt their customers leave, every country becomes a softer country. The best countries are run by software savvy leaders and they fail to adapt and their citizens leave. Right. So you think of actually exit as the most important right. In fact, actually, if you go to look at the UN Declaration on Human Rights ex in I think 1948, it talks about the right to emigrate as a fundamental right as distinct from the right to immigrate. You want to allow someone to leave your house unless they're in prison or something like that, but for them to immigrate, to come into your house, well, you might have something to say about that. So right to emigrate, the right to leave is a fundamental right that's probably more important than the right to merely vote. The Soviet Union granted the right to vote. It had all the kinds of procedural nonsense about it, but. But it didn't grant the right to leave. And you know, the right to leave is something where, you know, that's actually more fundamental. That's why Jackson Bannack was put into place to sort of shame the Soviet Union into allowing some of its people to leave at 1976 Jackson Bannack amendment. So this is going to cause, by the way, a new form of interstate conflict. It's interstate competition. And normally, you know, with geopolitics, the states that compete are the states that are geographically near each other. You know, like they are fighting over, you know, a mountain range or something like that. Now, just like Google News put every newspaper in competition with every other newspaper in 2002, the remote economy and, you know, the ability to be remote and work from anywhere is putting every city and every country into competition with every other city and country. Folks like Mer Suarez have figured this out. He's a software savvy leader. He'll be pulling folks in. It may turn out to be like Google News, where essentially most local newspapers just died. They were simply not set up to compete in this environment. And the very, very best just pulled in all of the talent. It's possible that also happens where you have, you don't need 10% of the world to be like Mayor SUAREZ. You need 10. And those folks will just suck up tons and tons of talent from other places and those other places won't be able to adapt in time. That's a possible outcome. We will see what happens. So that's a fundamental driver. Immigration will form network states and also reform existing states. And it is because of software that is becoming possible because these encrypted networks are forming because these people can kind of mass migrate together. Okay? So the concept of crowd choice mobile is making this more mobile. If you think about every kind of technology, virtually everything we're doing with technology is cutting the obligate ties to the land. For example, a social network. Even the question where are you? That is a very modern question. If you went and looked in old books in the year 1700, why would someone say, where are you? Maybe they'd send a letter to somebody, but they kind of know the address on the other side, so they know the guy is basically in this place. Where are you? Is a very, very modern question. Cause where are you? I'm on the other side of the table from you. Okay? You know, like, usually you just ask that when someone's in person. So one of the things that social networks has done which people don't usually think about is it's reduced the cost of moving because your friends don't even know that you've moved unless you've announced it. This is completely different from the world that many of us grew up in. In the 80s and the early 90s were where like, if you move, you would fall out of touch with people. Now the only way you fall out of touch with people is if you just decide not to contact them. They're always available, you know, or you block them or something. And you go down the list. And what many people don't really think about are things like, you know, for example, we talked about remote work, but video games have enabled remote play, right? You don't normally think about that, but just the fact that you can do it online, that you can play these video games online, well, that means that they're remote capable play and they've got billions of dollars that have gone into them. So you don't need to socialize with a zoom coffee, which is sort of an artificial thing. You can all play just Call of Duty or Fortnite together, right? Which a lot of companies are starting to do. And you can just go down the list of all these things and everything that just put on the Internet has just removed the tie, the obligate tie to location. And I've got dozens and dozens of examples of these. From accessing any entertainment from anywhere to digitizing your bookshelf to. To more futuristic things like drone delivery, which is actually operational, by the way, in China. Like drones will come to your hotel room door with snacks and stuff. Especially in Covid, a lot of that stuff has been accelerated. So all these things mobile is making us more mobile and translation, for example, that's going to come online, being built into phones where you can speak to people and they can hear in the foreign language, all these things. If mobiles make us more mobile. Well, law is also a function of latitude and longitude. And so as you change your X and Y, you change your governing law. Because tax rates, income tax, property tax, state, gasoline tax, sales tax, all those things vary by geography. So you put those together. If mobiles make us more mobile, and laws changing laws, function of latitude and longitude, it's going cheaper to change the law under which you live. Okay, so as you change your X and Y, you change your governing law, not just moving between states, but moving between countries. This also applies internationally. And we haven't really thought about this. The remote economy is now pushing this up. I mean, you guys have talked about this, a lot of folks in this community, but most of the world has not thought about this. And what we need to do is make the moral case for it as something which is about individual autonomy, but also about groups having collective self determination. And you know, we make the first case, we don't really make the second one. And the second one starts to become harder to argue with because you have a thousand people who are in one voice, who are pushing back against some institution that would try to delegitimize their desire for self determination. And at first that might sound silly. Oh, you're a people, are you? Well, you just grouped in a social network, you know, a few days ago or a few weeks ago, but once it becomes a few years ago, and there's a consistent kind of culture that's formed there, it becomes harder to dismiss. You know, many ways, you know, religion is just a cult that stood the test of time. That's probably true. And so, you know, for folks to take you seriously in terms of your aspirations for national self determination, you're going to need to show some staying power. But over time, if you're consistent enough, if you're evangelistic enough, people will capitulate. That's the story of Bitcoin, that's the story of Ethereum. We're seeing essentially folks give in to this stronger, smarter, more convincing, more convinced social network that actually has a sense of what it wants to build and what it wants to bring to the world. And so don't underestimate that power of collective belief. This is one of the biggest things I think a lot of libertarians have a blind spot on. Okay, so laws, functional latitude, longitude, as you change direction while you change your governing law, this applies internationally and this applies to collectives. And it's becoming easier to coordinate crowds online. Billions of people are now familiar with social networks and messaging apps. This is this great post which shows, you know, Facebook, the nations of world Facebook, China, India, WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera. And setting up a million person social network is really not that hard nowadays. You all know folks who have done it. It's actually remarkable the scale of that. We don't really perceive it because we see a number on a screen. We don't see an auditorium with all of your million users in one place. We're going to see that with V. So VR will make these crowds tangible. They'll make it make people realize how many folks you can see at the same time in VR. And that actually starts to build kind of a national identity online as another piece of the proto network state. So all the prerequisites are in place for TBAO sorting. If you think about TBAO's assumptions from the TBAO model of, you know, 50 years ago, all the prerequisites in place to gather group online and cheaply move it to a new location. If you look at his prerequisites and that's what enables crowdships, basically collective bargaining with governments. Take a thousand remote workers at 100k per year, aggregate their preferences and start trying to negotiate with mayors and governors. Okay, so now what you can do now this is applicable to some of you, not to others. This is more geared for maybe folks at the beginning of their careers. But you know, anybody can become financially independent by maximizing your personal Runway. And you know, in 2005 the playbook for becoming financial independent was come to Silicon Valley, found a company, Raise VC. Paul Graham wrote stuff on exact this but the 2021 playbook, really this is a 2017 playbook. When I first gave this particular slide is leave Silicon Valley, don't found a company and don't raise vc. Instead just get a remote work capable job, save money and now your personal Runway goes up. And the reason for this is that it's way easier to reduce your burn rate by 5x than increase your net worth by 5x. If you're willing to move to the middle of nowhere and cut your expenditure and just read Kindle and you know, like live on like not super tasty but super healthy food like you know, tomatoes and you know, fresh fruit or whatever. Well, fresh fruit can be kind of expensive but you know what I mean, like you're not spending a lot. You're basically reducing your consumption to Level of grad student. Well, you go from making, let's say 120 in San Francisco and spending 100k of it a year and having no savings to making 120, but only spending 30 or 40 a year in Bali, Indonesia and having a better quality of life. And so long as you deliver your stuff on time, and maybe you have a small community, a co working group that, that helps you give the social support that some people need. As long as you deliver yourself on time. Well, now you're banking 70 or 80k a year and your expenditure is only 40k a year. So every single year you work, you're building up one or two years of time off. All right, that's time off that you can use to start a company. You're angel investing in yourself. You're becoming financially independent and becoming financially independent. You know, here's just a basic calculation on this. You know, if you, you know, reduce your expenditure, becoming financially independent, building a personal Runway, the number of years you can go without working also makes you ideologically independent. You know, there's tools like Nomad, Listen, Teleport that will let you do this. They're basically search engines for like finding places to live. I co founded Teleport, we sold that a few years ago. And the thing though is that financial independence is also personal and ideological independence. If you remember the scene from Batman, but we downvoted you on social media and you can just respond the Bane voice. You think that gives you power over me? And the reason is that if you have financial independence, the passing crowd can't economically cancel you. You can just give the square jawed Chad, yes, you know, and they'll lose their focus in a day or two, you know, because they're just looking for some target to attack for. You know, it's like the Coliseum, except it's on Twitter and you'll go, you know, hiss in dismay. But they'll move on to the next thing. And nobody remembers anything that happened like a month or two ago. What was the scandal of August 2020? Who remembers, right? Like, you know, what about like March 2019, who knows, right? Like someone got canceled then, right? But no one's passionate about it because it's about the surprise more than the event itself, right? And so if you have the economic cushion, which anybody can build by cutting consumption, right, if you have the economic cushion, you can write out this, right, okay, so now in summary, right, Technological factors are changing the balance of power. Mass migrations of individuals will discipline states. You should get financially independent, which you can do by cutting consumption. And I've got much, much more on this and a better version of everything. But you can go to biologist.com and sign up there. Okay. And I'll send it up. Thanks.

Thank you. Wow. Okay. That was a lot to digest, but I think people have been keeping it happen. Thank you so, so much. I'm going to just kick off the questions and you tell us when you have to leave. It's totally fine. We are the hour, but I'll just kick it off and then we'll see how far we get. Alan Karp, you had the first question. Do you want to unmute yourself and perhaps say a few words about who you are then? Balaji?

Yeah, I'm Alan Karp. I'm a real technology bits and bytes kind of geek. I have a PhD in astronomy, but I've been playing with computers for 40 years. My overall impression is I think you're underestimating the importance of physical. I have my online community. We've got my network state, and the mayor of San Francisco says homeless people can camp out on my front yard. My network state. I mean, how does my network state give me any recourse?

Great question. And the answer is we're sort of post faculty and. Right. You know, Foucault's whole thing is you can just deconstruct anything and, you know, if enough people will say something, you can just change the software in people's heads. And what I've realized is actually you can. Let me give a somewhat longer answer. The short, really a short answer for a short answer is your network state, your people in the cloud can collectively exert leverage on that local government to either shame them into providing police forces or eventually start a city of their own. So I actually do believe the physical is very important. You're right. That we can't use, reproduce very easily, remotely. I guess you could do mail order, you know, IVF or something, but it's not that easy. You're absolutely right that physical is important. I think the key concept for me is that polities are a social technology which is installed in our brains and networks. Computer networks allow us to organize and say what society we want to build, and then we can materialize that offline. That's fine, but.

But there will be. There will be other people putting pressure to allow homeless people to camp on my front yard.

Sure. So I think what happens is what you want to do is move faster, escape things. You want to basically think about exit and mobility as the most important thing. And what this means is reducing consumption, reducing possessions, reducing like, like the bigger the house you have, the more stuff you have, the less leverage you have. Mobility is leverage against the state.

Okay, I don't buy it, but I'm an old guy, maybe I'm just not seeing it.

Okay, thanks Alan. Next one up we have Chris Weber. And Chris, perhaps two words about you so biology can put you into perspective.

Yeah, so I, I work on decentralized social networks and actually my present work is on moving the work that we've done on decentralized social networks such as Mastodon, Plumrad, et cetera to being able to move into virtual worlds type spaces. So I do think a lot about the governance type structures that this might enable and especially experimental cooperative low, basically like low risk of experimentation, virtual worlds where you can try some of these things out and see if they actually work. One of the things about as in terms of replacing physical governments that we have the traditional state that I think is an interesting challenge is that if we look at what's been done as in terms of the particular roles that markets and democracy have traditionally placed side by side, where markets allow for organic and distributed organization, that doesn't take a top down approach. But democracy in terms of one person, one vote can help prevent against runaway effects of plutocracy where it is. It's possible for those who have accrued so much power to basically just stamp out everyone else who's, you know, at a certain beyond, below a certain threshold.

Right.

So if we've done a good job of importing the networks type system, the market type systems into our networks, but we haven't seen those types of importing of traditional democratic systems. Is it possible to import them or are we going to find ourselves just incredibly vulnerable to Sybil attacks if we even try to bring them into the network because of the way that it's very easy and cheap often to create online identities in that you're not necessarily kind of, let's say immersed in meatspace in the way that we've used to be able to set up the one person, one vote type scenarios. So sorry if that was a bit rambly.

So let me, let me actually. So you actually help me articulate something which is democracy is vote with your ballot and capitalism is vote with your wallet. But one of the things I argue for is radically increasing our conceptual weight on a third force which is vote with your feet. Okay. And it is the right. If you think of these three sliders, right? Vote with ballot, vote with wallet, vote with feet, you have different kinds of governance systems that are set up to accommodate each of these. Right? And all three of these are actually factors in for example, the American political context. If you, if you have a graph, for example, which is the cost to vote in this fashion and the effectiveness or efficacy of the vote in terms of probability of changing the law under which you live. So let's say you vote with your ballot. Then you have a very low cost. It's like an hour or something to fill out the ballot, maybe go down to the polling station or whatever. And a very low probability of changing the law under which you live. It's like 1 over n to be the tie breaking vote and so on. It's more symbolic than anything else for most people. Then you can go up to this a little bit and you can say, okay, I'm going to make a political donation, I'm going to make $2,300 or whatever the limit is, or I'm going to donate to a pack and you're now voting with your wallet. That is probably somewhat more effective than voting with your ballot. The exact number of votes per dollar, as gauche as that term sounds, something that every candidate calculates and that the Washington Post occasionally publishes on like how many votes do you buy per dollar with this donation? And it's probably more than one. So you're buying 10 or 100 or whatever with your campaign ad purchase or indirect campaign ad purchases. So that's a slightly larger chance of changing the law under which you live. But it's still fractions of a percent, you know, fractions of fractions really. And then you have the third, which is vote with your feet. And now that's the most expensive. That may cost you not a few $thousand dollars, but $10,000 or more to like migrate, right, and pack all your stuff and so on and so forth. But it's by far the most efficacious in changing the law under which you live. Which is to say it's like 100% chance that you change the law because you're going from California to Texas or from Texas to Singapore or from Miami to, or New York to Miami, or from Oklahoma to Switzerland. You know what the law is on their side. You're actually purchasing the law with your move. And there's two things that technology can do here. The first is you can reduce, we can reduce the cost, we can reduce the barriers to exit. And we're already doing that. If you saw my like kind of 40 things, which I'll make all this nice, by the way. And I've got tons more content. Alison has seen much more content. This actually isn't even my best talk. I've got a lot more. So at least I think, I think I've got better stuff. You'll have to be the judge. Technology can do it. At least two really important things. First, you can reduce the cost of exit because nothing that says it has to be tens of thousands of dollars. You can have really cheap moving services. You can have digitization of your books. You could have, you know, for example, clothes that are in a new place. You can really push digital nomadism harder than we have, you know, and I think Covid is going to do that. And the second way you can do it is with when you start talking about collective bargaining with governments, you might be able to get into the golden upper left corner where there's a very low cost to vote and a very high probability of changing the law under which you live. That is to say, if you can get 10,000, 50,000 people in San Francisco to credibly commit, they're all going to crowd migrate to Miami unless the local government changes something. Well, I mean, San Francisco government is completely, you know, like, they're not responsive. So it probably won't work there. But for a. But let's say Austin, the Austin mayor might be actually concerned that a bunch of his citizens were going to move. Now you might say, why would the mayor care? Because they'll still be in power. Even if these citizens move, who cares? Well, the thing is that eventually they'll realize that they'd be king of nothing. Right. If your best citizens, if your artists and your computer scientists and so on all just find the city unlivable and leave, that's a huge black eye for you. That is a continuous vote of no confidence, which can be done at any time, as opposed to rather than doing a recall in this whole 20th century model of a waterfall where it's this process and so on, you just snap vote of no confidence, boom. Get a bunch of people online, give a list of demands, and if they're not met, move that's actually operating at the speed of the network. And so it's by including that third force of physical emigration. I think this also addresses Alan Karp's point, hopefully, which is the physicality is critically important, but what you can do is sort of digitize the credible threat of moving. And that also gets you leverage, and that reduces the cost of actually changing the political outcome. So let me pause there, get more thoughts.

Thank you. Next one up, we have Josh Tan.

Hi, I'm Josh, PhD student at Oxford and CS and also run something called the Meta Governance Project. The.

I guess.

Okay, so there's, I guess I have two small questions or two points. One first is there's actually there was a talk by a constitutional lawyer named Ilya Soman and he was at a couple years ago he wrote a book that I'll link to in the chat called Democracy and Political Ignorance. And it actually, in that book he makes like a very similar argument to what you're making here, which is that, you know, why will kind of smaller government, or how do I say it, like, what's the kind of issue with nation states? It's partly like he claims political ignorance and the solution to that is essentially voting with your feet. So he's making a connection between this idea of the fact that a lot of people vote in these national elections, but they don't really know that much. They're much more suited to making decisions where they're voting with their feet because they're more incentivized to do certain kinds of research. That's an argument for smaller governments in certain ways where he makes that connection. But I'm kind of curious one, are people really incentivized to inform themselves in these online settings? In my kind of research and sort of like experience is that typically there's so many decisions in these online communities, people don't really participate in the governance features of the existing sort of networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or only a very small subset of them. So in what sense is this really, you know, are we really piring new things? Are people actually like going to actually participate? The second question that.

Let me answer that one quick before I forget. So basically what you're saying is, would people be informed consumers of these network states?

Yes.

Okay. And my answer to that is, I mean, you know, as long as you have a lot of choices and I mean some of these will be very visible, right? Like in the sense of there'll be skyscrapers. Hey, sorry. There'll be skyscrapers coming out of the Midwest, you know, in a place that was nothing. And you build it like burning, because Burning man shows that we're basically 10,000x or more, less effective than we could be in the sense that you can build a hundred thousand person city in a day and San Francisco is building like one unit of housing a day or something like that. Right. So, so the thing is that the proof is in the pudding and our audio visual system is actually pretty good at determining tangible outcomes. So that's what I would say now with that said is if somebody doesn't trust their own judgment, you're effectively doing a liquid democracy thing where you're asking a smart friend's opinion and saying, hey, is this a good one to go to? Is this a good one to go to? But yeah, I think so long as there's choices of leaders. I'm not saying everyone needs to make their own choice on everything, but I want them to choose to not have a choice. You know, that say like you're, you're sort of choosing the, the, the what's called the prefix a menu as opposed to a la carte, right? You're basically the omakaze menu, right? Like where the chef chooses everything. You choose not to choose. That's great, go ahead, knock yourself out. But the macro, you must retain the consent to essentially give power of attorney to somebody else. Where's your second question?

Second one is I guess I should own up to the comment in the chat. So it's, I'm referencing someone like Barlow's original declaration and kind of a follow up piece asking like, okay, so you kind of declared the Internet as an intimate state 20 years ago. Why hasn't it actually happened?

It's happening. I think so I guess what's changed.

Since like the original 996 version of this? Well, what makes you think it's. Sorry, go ahead. No, just what makes you think it's gonna, it's gonna happen this time? This idea of like it's kind of like a cyber kind of libertarian state on the Internet?

I mean, so. Well, first is a lot of the things. All right, let me. What's the right way I put this? I actually think a lot of Barlow stuff was actually very good and very prescient. I think insofar as there'd be any critique of it, I'd say there's the Hegelian dialectic thesis, antithesis, synthesis. So thesis, you have the state antithesis, you have the network. Synthesis is the network state and you have states that take on properties of networks and networks that take on properties of states. So simply him being bold enough to put that out there as like the total opposite of this. It is often in that fusion that you can find something interesting where you take the good pieces of each. For example, I shouldn't say a prosaic example, but coinbase is something which. Why did it do so well? Well, it took Bitcoin, the trustless digital currency, and it said we're going to be the most trustworthy name in digital currency, where it took the thesis of, hey, you're going to trust your bank. And then antithesis of digital currency, where you don't need to trust anyone, say, okay, we're going to be the bank of digital currency, the trustworthy entity in this space. And I think folks who think very ideologically it's actually useful to identify polls, but folks who think pragmatically can make blends and not just take the pure primary colors of red, green and blue, but actually make paintings out of them. I mean, this is an obvious point. Chinese culture has concepts of yin and yang and what have you. This is something many cultures have. But basically that concept of a balance and a combination of things is one of the biggest things that American culture has recently lost. The US Used to be something where folks would talk across the aisle. There was a recognition that there was something to offer from different schools of thought that you'd blend together. But where you do see this, by the way, is as CEO, right? As CEO, you realize that many libertarian founders end up rebuilding the state. You come in as CEO, you have this strong will, this founder who's like, screw the bureaucracy. I hated being told what to do, I'm going to do it my way, etc. And as you start, if you're successful, many people fail, of course. But if you're successful and you start building up a revenue model and it starts working and you start gaining customers and you start gaining employees, well, as you go from one person to 10 people to 100 people, the 101st person who joins wants more structure. They don't want to figure out everything for themselves. The whole reason they're not founding a company is they wanted to come into something with more structure. And so they want rules, they want a bureaucracy. And what you find is that you switch over from burn rate to bus number as the most important figure you're monitoring. You start out with a burn rate where every single person has to be incredibly unique and pulling their own weight because you're trying to minimize burn rates. So they have to be super unique killers. And then you get to a multicellular organism where you flip over and you need to actually minimize or rather maximize the bus number, the number of people who can get hit by a bus so the company doesn't die. And now every person cannot be unique. If they're really unique and indispensable, then if they go away, your company dies. And so as CEO, you actually need to make yourself and all of them dispensable. And this is what causes the alienation of people from their jobs within these larger companies. And then eventually the cycle of life begins and a founder leaves and starts something new. And so in that context, you have the progressive, the conservative, the libertarian, various schools of thought, all interplaying. And I think that folks who think too ideologically don't mix those together. And so the John Perry Barlow thing is a very important component. But it's like, okay, it's electromagnetism. We also have gravitation and we have other forces, and we put them all together. Right.

Thank you very much. Okay, lovely. David, you're next.

I've unmuted myself. I was thinking about the physical element that somebody else raised. About 40 some years ago, I spent some time interacting with fellow libertarians in the Los Angeles area. And it eventually occurred to me that I'd been visiting a village of about 100 people spread over an area perhaps 50 miles across, that socially speaking, that set of people was a village. This was pre Internet, but nonetheless, there were other communication modules. And I'm wondering if that might be the best solution to the problem of physical interaction. And I was thinking especially of the context of universities or colleges, that the actual education is something you can get pretty easily in other ways. And I think a large part of what a college is providing is a whole bunch of young adults interested in interacting with each other, flirting with each other, maybe finding a mate, maybe getting into arguments, maybe setting up a future partnership, stuff like that. And I'm wondering if you could construct that by having a network college, as it were, where everybody was living within, you know, 20 miles of each other in multiple different legal jurisdictions and using the network, plus the fact that at 20 miles is easy enough to have a party on Saturday night. And more generally, I think. I think hybridizing, as it were, physical interaction with virtual interaction may be a fairly powerful tool.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think also Covid has just killed universities, and they're not going to be the same after this. And so I think we have a real shot at unbundling a lot of those features that you mentioned that are all there and then maybe rebundling them into something. I think that. Yeah, it's. I think there's several different experiments on this. You know, this is not exactly college, but I funded something called kibbo.com k I b b o.com, which is. Basically gives people a van that they can live out of, and they just have base stations around the US and you drive back and forth and there's base stations that you can kind of be at and you basically are going back to like a pneumatic peripatetic life and you can work from anywhere. You know, for the kind of person who wants to see the Rockies today and be in Vegas tomorrow, maybe see some friends in Austin the next day and so on and so forth, that's like almost like a gap year, like touring Europe kind of thing. Not exactly university, but it's similar and you can certainly meet lots of people. You know, your Tinder is now Geo unlocked. You know, a different phase of life for me, but for some of the young folks might be interesting. So. Yeah, so David, I do think that structures like that. I'm not sure if that specific one will work or rather I'm not sure if that specific one will be the only one that'll work, but I think we can try that as well as others.

Great. We have David Brin next.

Yeah, it's a compliment that I am just. I have been typing away and have 12 points here and I'll just stick them in the chat and just see how far I can go before Allison proves that actual palpable virtual reality exists by reaching out and smacking me. There's an awful lot that's wonderful here, like the right to leave. That's absolutely important. And cutting consumption can save us. And yes, banks are refusing to look at their fundamental business but simply liberating criticism. Citizens to leave and reassociate is important for the reasons you describe it. Enemies of the Western Enlightenment have been exploiting exactly this thing. And this is what happens to every revolution in what we can know, what we can see and what we can pay attention to. Going back to the printing press, glass lenses, always the worst uses come first and it's happening to us now. And enemies have encouraged incantatory Nuremberg rallies where people in vast numbers leave. They leave and self organize exactly as we were told they should do in Snow Crash and all the Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow and even I in Earth in Existence. I talk about self organizing networks and I'm going to link you to David Ronfelt's books about this. He's done a lot of theoretical work on this, but the fact is that most of these incantadori Nuremberg rallies have clustered in clades that chant incantations more primitive and fact free than almost any cult of the past and are just as immune to refutation. And your model by itself recreates feudal fiefdoms of devotion to the best hypnotizers that is what's going to happen, because that's exactly what we are seeing happen.

So the world that we have.

David, go ahead.

So I'd say three or four things. One is arguably we've been under the best hypnotizers for a long time in the sense of mass media or what have you, right? And so there's always storytelling is how any society comes together. You can frame it negatively or frame it positively. I think let me give something to your point though, and let me see if I can relate it to one of my fundamental laws of physics, which is the Internet increases variance. So there's more upside and more downside in everything. And that's a phenomenological observation. I think the underpinning of that is that the Internet disintermediates, so it removes mediators, so removes moderators, so it removes moderation. Because every node can connect to each other P2P. So the centralizing systems that were enforcing mediation, moderation, mediocrity, each of which are terms that have a different connotation and tone to them, like, oh, moderation is good, but mediocrity is bad. Right? Each of those things, these centralized entities, now all the nodes can just connect to each other outside of them. And so you get, as you said, some clusters that are terrible and some clusters that are Ethereum or the Polymath project or Y combinator or things like that. And so it is like, I don't know if you've done any chemistry, but you fractionate, you know, you centrifuge something and you centrifuge and you get different layers out. You have the supernatant and so on. And so that's what's happening where you're right, there is more downside. I'm not saying there, you know, you're going to get isis, right? Like, that's like one of these kinds of things. You talk about crazy people chaining slogans, but you also get YC and Ethereum. And I think, and here's my belief, I believe that on balance, the upside is so up that we can use it to fund things that buffer and take care of the downside.

And that's what optimists have always thought about every one of these revolutions, and they always proved right. Yeah, sure, pessimists were right.

Right.

Well, so then you're, you're. I think we're basically aligned then. I mean, you know, the thing is also that, you know, I think to bet against technology is to be on the wrong side of history, you know, to kind of remix, a famous saying. And so we, you know, like David Hilbert, we must. We will, right? We're going to drive the future. And yes, the printing press led to the thirty Years War. And what we're in the middle of now I think will be seen as the social war where it is essentially a war of networks versus each other, global networks. And that's just starting, by the way. Like the Democrat, Republican or whatever in the US is like, you know, that's like the 16, 19 or whatever of the, of the Protestant, you know, versus Catholic thing. There's all of these transnational networks that are going to be slugging it out from crypto to, you know, social networks and so on. And they're all expanding and contracting like this. And then eventually they're going to reform into physical polities that have a degree of stability and that block all communication from non partners, just like you'd block, you know, transactions from non partners and that accept from partners. And then that always shifts over time. So I think that's what's going to happen. And you know, whether it's what we should do is steer it in a good direction. You know, that's like the thrust of history and maybe we can make marginal changes on the sides. I'm going to drop a whole lot.

Of slug of text and some of these points into the chat. You can find them if you want or email me and I'll send it to you.

Sure. No, I appreciate the feedback. It's great.

It's really inspiring. Very, very interesting.

Thank you.

Two more folks. Is that okay?

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

Okay then. Okay, next one up we have Jazeer and then Daniel.

Hey, Balaji. I'm Jazeer, a founder of a token called Thorchain and a new one.

Awesome, sorry, go ahead. I said awesome, go ahead.

And a new one called Sif Chain, which is coming out soon. And I have a question for you around something I've been thinking a lot about in relation to like getting these actual communities to like really exist in real life in a way that like you do want to have sex with or have deep conversations with or whatever, all these people as opposed to just like we all seem to have similar interests and so on. To me, what it makes sense to do, like something I've been fixating on is this concept of like knowing what everyone in my tribe actually needs, getting them to make them better off. And then as a part of that, you know, if we need to move or we need to do something in relation to our network state or our nation state or whatever, we do that. And I'm wondering what you think about, you know, ideas like having a much deeper understanding of what the 150 people in your tribe need and then providing that for them or vice versa as a way to. To really, like, create stronger groups.

Yeah, so. So something I'm thinking, I've got. Actually, one of the chapters in this book is we're moving from, I think, the social graph to the social tree and the network union. Right? So a social graph is just everybody organized, higgledy piggledy, you know, you're friending this person or whatever you friend to this person from like 17 years ago or whatever, right. And then you move from that into a structure where there is a. A community leader and there's accountability and there's, you know, there's. There's someone who's a decision maker that people, you know, appoint by basically opting into this network. Right. So you have a social community leader, they have folks folding into them, who have folks folding into them, and they deliver goods to everybody who's in this hierarchy, just like a company does. But outside of a company context, for example, you know, with these power outages that are happening in Austin, they would organize food, they'd organize shelter, they'd organize blankets, that type of stuff. Right. As the state fails, you have these community organizations that arise. And even when the state isn't failing, they're helping you learn things, earn with your career, with social defense online and so on. And I think then what you do is those things start meeting up and they start building physical connection. People start going and saying, oh, I want to live near that community. Maybe I already do. Or maybe there's 30 people who are in a group house or a few group houses near each other, and now we'll kind of move to there. And you might have a few clusters, by the way, around the world. They may not all be in one place. There may be different clusters of this sort of social tree around the world. And when you start to get there, One of the things that I've talked about in some of the lectures Allison has seen is I think that people really underestimate how much the Internet has increased the viability of enclaves. So an enclave is like a piece of territory that is surrounded. It's landlocked. Right. And the reason an enclave historically was bad is without access to the sea. The sea was the original peer to peer network, is still the original peer to peer network, because once you've got access to the sea, Portugal can ship stuff to Brazil or to Macau or whatever, and no other nation can get in the way, right? And once you have these enclaves today, if you have enclaves today, if you go and crowdfund territory here and here and here, you can network them together and you actually have a more functional, like, like physical piece of land. And one of the things that I think can happen over time and this Allison sees some of these lectures, is if you look at the, you know, list of UN countries, right, about 30% of them have a population less than 1 million, and about 60% have a population less than 10 million. Many of us have built social networks that are larger than that. And a next step would be to have a dashboard which is showing not just the size of this social tree that you've built, right? Not just all the things they've done, but also the total amount of land that they own in all these enclaves around the world. And you start comparing that to UN countries and you start rising up the ranking. Just like there's this website called fiatmarketcap.com, which is showing how Bitcoin is rising versus other fiat currencies. So you'd actually show how your decentralized country has more land and people and GDP and so on than actual UN recognized countries and eventually get recognized. That's a totally crazy thing to say right now, but that's actually how you do it. You know, that's how you take the Internet and you use it to pull a bunch of pieces together. And so that's like this is like a piece of, you know, like maybe a much more practical and thought through strategy. But one of the concepts here is we start actually funding not simply company founders, but community founders. A community founder is somebody who is essentially the manager of a piece of real estate, who governs, who can come in, who adjudicates, disputes, who does the culture formation, and so on and so forth. And all those community founders fold into the CEO of the network state. And basically those are all pieces. You might have a ranch here, you might have an apartment building here, you might have a, you know, like a, like a, like a cul de sac here and so on and so forth. And those are all pieces. And then members of this network state can migrate back and forth. And over time it's got like the footprint of, you know, the Google offices worldwide, where there's like, you know, 100 offices of Google worldwide, and you can go in with your card key into any office and you're in a piece of Google in The same way that you've got like embassies worldwide, you can go into any embassy as a citizen of that country and they'll welcome you. You've got these pieces of your digital state worldwide. One of the things this does, by the way, is it makes you nuke proof. It's kind of hard to nuke all of these territories at the same time. Right? And it means that actually you push it from nuclear weapons being the big thing to cyber attacks being the big thing. It also means that you have some robustness to 20th century states, because if a local enclave gets attacked by its surrounding state, well, the citizens can move to other states, other, other pieces of your network, state and other enclaves, and all the members around the world can kind of gang up and return fire. If that state is actually attacking your enclave illegitimately, there's more to it. But this is how you start to actually have the Internet bleed into the physical world and start taking territory.

Thank you. Okay, and one final one for you. We have Daniel and David here.

David is not here. He is here, but behind the door. So just one me today. Hi, I'm Daniel Lieberman, one of the many Lieberman brothers and sisters who do five of us do businesses together since 2005. Currently we are directors of product at Snapchat, but in our transitions out, all four of us at the same time. So my question is, I'm like, I already asked some question in the chat, but I think that maybe a more interesting question would be imagining that we already are having a meta government, like someone is forming a meta government and there is this part of the governments right now which is, we believe important is taking a share of the income of its citizens as a group, funding like for social good of the group or maybe in all of the world. But that's based on the values of the meta government which people joined. And therefore if we have this right now, and let's say we are just forming this on top of the existing governments, like let's say you pay whatever taxes and you follow whatever rules of the countries of the you leave physically right now just because you have to obey the law. But at the same time you can add on top a meta government which, let's say gonna charge you additional 5% of your income. What would you want this government? Where, where will you be ready to pay this 5% of your additional taxes? What services this government should provide to you?

It's a great question. So by the way, a good analogy to that is like tithing, you know, for like A church or something, right? Yeah, exactly.

Mormons. Mormons basically charging this 10% and they have all the structure of additional education guarantees, this guarantee, this guarantee and that guarantee. So basically imagining that we are having a meta government right now, which we are all ready to subscribe based on the values which this meta government going to provide us and the service which meta government is going to provide us, what going to be the services for which you personally will be ready to pay 5%?

That's a great question. So I'm not sure 5% or whatever the pricing is the right number, but let's just say let's some surcharge. So here's a few things I think a lot about. One is a positive, some community of peers that actually are helping you in many different ways. For example, you're working out with them, they're helping you professionally in terms of job introductions and so on. Collaborations like that, you're learning from them. You may do open source projects with them, you may read books, you may hang out like this. Maybe it's childcare. You organize child care so that you know you have round robin childcare so that everybody gets some time off and so on. There's collective insurance pools for things like health insurance and other kinds of things, or even credit unions, because with crypto you can actually form a credit union with any large enough group of people if they opt into it. And there's social self defense basically if one of them is canceled online, then the community can both rise up and defend that person as well as potentially crowdfund or bring that person into the fold because they're being attacked by somebody outside. Once we start actually thinking about external attacks being attacks of other tribes, then that's actually a pretty important thing for people. And maybe they can reboot under a pseudonym or something like that. And then crowdfunding land, right? Like actually getting together and then crowdfunding land. And you know what I'd flip it as, by the way, is I think there's the 5% cost, but I think you might also get significant benefit, right? Because one of the things that's been amazing to me about crypto is just the scale of the money involved that's now been there for 10 years and it just keeps going up. Like the scale of the money involved, when you can actually align collective belief is astonishing. It's just actually crazy. And so just getting a thousand people to agree on something could unlock way more money. The thing about that is money is not at all everything, but it is something that's Tangible and quantifiable. And in our secular world, it's now a signal of the strength of belief. Right. Every religion will be publicly traded in the sense of you'll have Christian hodlers and Christianity is basically our. Do you believe? While you're still hodling. I'm kind of being tongue in cheek, but not exactly. Right, go ahead.

We personally believe that every human being going to be publicly tradable. And therefore by being publicly tradable, we will be able to collect our future value as companies do today for the next 30 years, let's say. And through these, basically we can kind of start forming the similar, like through the meta government dissimilar mechanisms as a state debt. But the debt is basically on the future income of the participant of this meta government. And therefore we will be able to collect a much larger capital to finance whatever infrastructural or scientific R and D educational expenses we collectively need.

That's right. And I think the one thing I will say though is I think that you want to start out. I mean, maybe I'm. I think there'll be 50 different business models, you know, for this, but. And you need a business model because you got to eat, you got to have it propagate. But I actually do think that once we start thinking about crypto and the things that come out of crypto and things that come out of encrypted networks as social technologies for kind of aligning human beings and having them do things between themselves that they couldn't do at smaller scale, that unlocks so much money, that so much wealth that it's, it's something where it's not that they have to pay 5%, but they actually gain by joining the network. I actually think it's going to be that much larger. So we'll see. But, but that's, that's my strong hypothesis.

Thank you.

Okay, without. I will give. Balaji, I just wrote you in the chat. I don't know if it's okay. I will give my final comments to Brewster. I will just shut up and if that's okay. Yeah. Do you mind?

Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, sure. Absolutely. This is Bruce Shakal of the Internet Archive.

Yes, hi.

Thank you for doing it. Oh, thanks. Welcome. Balajay. Okay. Completely mind blowing.

Fabulous.

Every sentence counted. Really impressive. And hello from Vancouver. You've woven together some of my favorite things. Embassy network, crypto, the Internet, Burning man, decentralized web. You're actually writing a book, which I kind of love, and Intentional Living Communities. And so, you know, it's just like you've sort of made the things that have been defining to me sort of make all sense together. Way to go. And added to it in meaningful ways. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I appreciate that. I think. I think that's exactly what I've tried to do, is a synthesis, you know, of a lot of different strands and technology because we actually have a culture, right? We have, you know, like, I almost call it an implicit religion, you know, with Satoshi Nakamoto as Jesus Christ and artificial intelligence as God and, you know, life extension as, you know, reversing age or living forever, rather as reversing aging, you know, eternal life, heaven as space exploration and, you know, and so on and so forth. And we. We have a culture and we have a set of things that we believe in that haven't actually been explicitly articulated. And people. It's almost like a set of training examples that have been given by, you know, to an AI, and you kind of mimic them. And, you know, it's. It's not. Not you, but one. One does make them. And what I've tried to do is kind of explicate them together because I think it's a positive culture which gets beyond a lot of the infighting around the world and actually refocuses technology on what it is, which is not the technology industry, but it is miracles. It is curing the deaf with cochlear implants and restoring sight with bionic eyes. It is reversing aging with life extension. It is reincarnation with. If you saw my tweet on this, where basically you can do eukaryotic chromosome synthesis so you can go and sequence people, and if they have high karma in their community when they die. Chromosome synthesis is getting better and better. We've made it work for bacteria. We can do it for smaller eukaryotes. You could resynthesize Brewster 2.0 in the future. I think that's actually much more practical than cryonics because you'd have the DNA sequence and you'd be able to basically clone yourself in the future. And then maybe you replay your experiences to that person and they've got actually, all right, do this, do this, and don't do this. Just like advice from the older you to the younger you, right? So pulling all those things together, that's a positive culture that I think the world needs. And I think it's something where you can do forks of that you can have. For example, Rod Dreher writes about the Benedict option. You could have the Christian version of A network state. You could have the vegan version of a network state, you could have the CrossFit version of a network state. But the very first network state is going to be the true technology version, which ties in all these threads that you've talked about, plus especially transhumanism and everybody in the last decade who talked about old things. We're doing, we're just doing apps and so on. I'm like, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. And I think that the key thing for that to innovate in the physical world is using everything we've done in the cloud to group a bunch of people together who have common strong belief and then push hard enough to change the laws in the physical world. Right? Starting with crowdfunding territory, with lobbying, with media, with whatever political stuff we need to do. We need to realize that actually you can only get so far with individuals and by a collective of folks, even outside of corporate structures, we can make a lot of things happen. So that's how I think about a lot of this.

Thank you. Well, I think we should just finish it now because this was finishing on a really, really high note and there's nothing one could possibly say to make it better than this. So thank you very, very much, Balaji. Thank you all for staying on for longer. Thank you especially for giving us all of your time. And yeah, I can't wait to see everyone for the next one. I think the next one up it may be Tyler Cohen, but I'll be following up with you and I'll be sharing a few apologies links. Okay, thank you everyone and thank you very, very much for joining. It's much, much thank you.

And oh, and remember the sign up, if you didn't already, maybe you can send out that link, Alison. So if anybody wants more and as.

Soon as you have other things to share and regarding the book and such, I'll also make sure that people here, I can follow up on that.

Okay, cool. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you, good night.