š The text explores three potential future scenarios for America: internal conflict between Maximalist vs Woke ideologies, Chinese control through systematic takeover, and international intermediate solutions.
š A major transition is examined from traditional nation-state systems to emerging network state models, representing a fundamental shift in political organization.
š The analysis breaks down the components of nation-states through multiple approaches - definitional, empirical, philosophical, and pragmatic - to understand their structure and limitations.
āļø Future conflicts are characterized as 'wars for minds, not lands,' emphasizing ideological rather than territorial battles in the digital age.
š The text outlines a tripolar world structure with three main power centers: NYT (moral), CCP (martial), and BTC (money).
āļø Each pole represents different forms of influence - moral power through media/narrative, martial power through state force, and money power through decentralized finance.
š The analysis explores how decentralization and recentralization forces shape conflicts and alliances between these three poles.
š Technology drives a transition from naturally physical to natively digital systems, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics.
The text explores the conflict between technological progressives and conservatives, examining how tech and media represent different forms of 'PC' (politically correct vs personal computer).
It presents a theory that news distortion in the present makes historical accounts equally unreliable, with networks initially providing freedom of speech before establishment counter-decentralization.
Four major theses are outlined: Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, and 'Future Is Our Past' as frameworks for understanding societal change.
The concept of 'startup societies' is introduced as a way to reunify technological and moral progress through parallel societies that can operate as digital unions, physical archipelagos, or recognized network states.
š This table of contents outlines a comprehensive framework for understanding 'Network States' as a new form of country formation beyond traditional methods like elections, revolutions, or wars.
šļø The book presents seven different pathways to start new countries, with Network States being positioned as the most innovative and viable option among alternatives like seasteading and space colonization.
š The content explores the tension between 'Political Power' and 'Technological Truth' as competing driving forces that shape historical trajectories and societal development.
š A central thesis examines the evolution of power structures from 'God, State, Network' - suggesting that network-based organizations are becoming the new dominant force, potentially surpassing traditional state power.
š The framework introduces 'cryptohistory' as cryptographically verifiable macrohistory, proposing blockchain technology as a method for creating robust, tamper-proof historical records.
Contents
1 Quickstart 8
1.1 Preamble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2 The Network State in One Sentence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.3 The Network State in One Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4 The Network State in One Thousand Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.5 The Network State in One Essay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.5.1 How to Start a New Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1. Election . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2. Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3. War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4. Micronations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5. Seasteading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6. Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
7. Network States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.5.2 Minimum Necessary Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.5.3 What Counts as a New Country? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.5.4 Most Countries are Small Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2 History as Trajectory 19
2.1 Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.1.1 Why History is Crucial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.1.2 Why History is Crucial for Startup Societies . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.1.3 Why Startup Societies Arenāt Solely About Technology . . . . . 24
2.1.4 Applied History for Startup Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2 Microhistory and Macrohistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2.1 History as a Cryptic Epic of Twisting Trajectories . . . . . . . . 29
2.2.2 Microhistory is the History of Reproducible Systems . . . . . . . 30
2.2.3 Macrohistory is the History of Non-Reproducible Systems . . . . 31
2.2.4 Bitcoinās Blockchain Is a Technology for Robust Macrohistory . 33
2.2.5 The Bitcoin Blockchain Can Record Non-Bitcoin Events . . . . 34
2.2.6 Blockchains Can Record the History of an Economy and Society 36
2.2.7 Cryptohistory is Cryptographically Veriļ¬able Macrohistory . . . 37
2.3 Political Power and Technological Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.3.1 Political Power as the Driving Force of History . . . . . . . . . . 39
1 2 CONTENTS
2.3.2 Technological Truth as the Driving Force of History . . . . . . . 42
2.3.3 A Collision of Political Power and Technological Truth . . . . . 47
2.3.4 A Deļ¬nition of Political and Technological Truths . . . . . . . . 48
2.3.5 A Balance of Political Power and Technological Truth . . . . . . 48
2.4 God, State, Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.4.1 What is the Most Powerful Force in the World? . . . . . . . . . 50
2.4.2 Rubber Hoses Donāt Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.4.3 The Network is the Next Leviathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Network > State: Trumpās Deplatforming . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.4.4 The State is Still A Leviathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.4.5 Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.4.6 Synthesis: The Network/God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
2.4.7 Synthesis: The Network/State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Positive Syntheses: BTC, Web3, Eļ¬ciency . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Negative Syntheses: USG, CCP, Monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.4.8 Synthesis: God, State, andNetwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.4.9 New Leviathan, New States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.5 People of God, People of the State, People of the Network . . . . . . . 62
2.5.1 American Tribes and Their Leviathans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Blue Tribe: Left-Authoritarians, Left-Libertarians . . . . . . . . 63
Red Tribe: Secular Nationalists, Internationalist Capitalists . . 70
The Realignment . . . . . . . . .
Network states succeed by attracting aligned immigrants who want to join their communities, with different states focusing on specific metrics like life expectancy or income distribution.
The process begins with founding a startup society as an online community, then organizing it into a network union capable of collective action for mutual benefit.
Physical manifestation involves building trust through offline meetups, creating a cryptocurrency-based internal economy, and crowdfunding physical nodes like apartments and towns.
The final stages include connecting physical communities into a network archipelago using web3 cryptopassports, conducting on-chain census for proof of scale, and ultimately gaining diplomatic recognition to become a true network state.
d those outside who apply. Roughly speaking, a successful network state
is one that attracts aligned immigrants, and an unsuccessful network state is one that
loses them. That doesnāt mean each network state must grow to inļ¬nity, or that all states need
accept the same kind of person, but that the community of network states as a whole is
focused on building admirable societies that people want to join. Diļ¬erent states will
focus on diļ¬erent metrics; imagine a network state premised on improving its citizensā
overall life expectancy, or one aimed at provably right-shifting the income distribution
for all. You get what you measure. 1.4. THE NETWORK STATE IN ONE THOUSAND WORDS 11
1.4 The Network State in One Thousand Words
Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, and new curren-
cies. But can we use it to create new cities, or even new countries? A key concept is to
go cloud ļ¬rst, land last ā but not land never ā by starting with an online community
and then materializing it into the physical world. We get there in seven steps:
1.Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of
something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company
or cryptocurrency.2And the founderās legitimacy comes from whether people opt
to follow them. 2.Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Givenasuļ¬cientlydedicated
online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union . Unlike
a social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates its members for
their mutual beneļ¬t. And unlike a traditional union, a network union is not
set up solely in opposition to a particular corporation, so it can take a variety
of diļ¬erent collective actions.3Unionization is a key step because it turns an
otherwise ineļ¬ective online community into a group of people working together
for a common cause. 3.Build trust oļ¬ine and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person mee-
tups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously
building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. 2Note however that just as one does not simply āstart a public company,ā one does not simply
āstart a network state.ā Instead, you begin with a startup society, which is to a network state what a
startup is to Google. Itās the embryonic form. 3Actions include: crowdfunding, job placement, bulk purchasing, and collective bargaining with
corporations andstates. Note that a network union is a useful endpoint in its own right. Just as small
businesses can provide value to customers without going public, network unions can provide value to
members without becoming network states. 12 CHAPTER 1. QUICKSTART
4.Crowdfund physical nodes. Once suļ¬cient trust has been built and funds have
been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to
bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. 5.Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into
anetwork archipelago , a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed
aroundtheworld. Nodesofthenetworkarchipelagorangefromone-personapart-
ments to in-person communities of arbitrary size. Physical access is granted by
holding a web3 cryptopassport, and mixed reality is used to seamlessly link the
online and oļ¬ine worlds. 6.Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically au-
ditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and
real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of
skepticism. 7.Gain diplomatic recognition. Astartupsocietywithsuļ¬cientscaleshouldeventu-
ally be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing
government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a
truenetwork state . The key idea is to populate the land from the cloud, and do so all over the earth. Unlike an ideologically dis
š Network states prioritize digital organization over physical territory, with the state functioning as an administrative dashboard rather than traditional geographic governance.
š Only decentralized networks (not centralized startup networks) can evolve into legitimate network states, distinguishing them from corporate entities.
šŗļø Network states exist on both physical and digital maps, where people can be physically proximal but digitally divergent in their network affiliations.
š Network states can be founded through multiple pathways including startup societies, parallel societies, and network unions, ultimately requiring external recognition to achieve legitimacy.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Breaking the Deļ¬nition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
5.3.2 What is the Network State System? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Assumption: Digital Primary, Physical Secondary . . . . . . . . 234
Assumption: The State Becomes An Admin Dashboard . . . . . 234
Assumption: Divide Networks Rather than Land . . . . . . . . 235
Assumption: Consent and Cryptography Constrain . . . . . . . 235
5.3.3 The Network State as a Term . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
5.3.4 Micronetworks and Multinetworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Startups create Networks, but Nations create States . . . . . . . 236
Startups create Networks, but Startups arenāt States . . . . . . 237
Startups create Centralized Networks, but Chains create Decen-
tralized Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Only Decentralized Networks can give rise to Network States . . 238
5.3.5 0-network, 1-network, N-networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
5.3.6 What is a (National) Network? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
A Verbal Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
A Computational Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
5.3.7 What does a Network State look like on a Map? . . . . . . . . . 241
The Physical Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
The Digital Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Example: Physically Proximal, Digitally Divergent . . . . . . . 242
5.3.8 How is a Network State Founded? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Startup Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Parallel Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
The Network Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
The New Tokenomics is Nation Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Path to the Network State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
The Bootstrap Recognizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Digital Civil Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Recognize Why We Need Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
5.3.9 Why Would we Found a Network State? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
Network States for the Technological Innovator . . . . . . . . . 250 CONTENTS 7
Network States for the Political Progressive . . . . . . . . . . . 251
5.3.10 How does a Network State Expand and Contract? . . . . . . . . 252
5.3.11 What is not a Network State? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
5.3.12 What Technological Developments enable Network States? . . . 256
6 Appendix 260
6.1 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
6.2 About 1729 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 Chapter 1
Quickstart
1.1 Preamble
Are you the kind of person who skims the beginning just to see whether to read the
entire thing? Youāre in luck. Weāve prepared one sentence, one image, one thousand word, and one essay summaries
of the concepts behind startup societies and network states. Just click those links if
youāre impatient. And of course, for the full experience, you can read it one page at a
time. Speaking of pages, every section of this book is online and shareable as an individual
web page. For example, the URL to this section is thenetworkstate.com/preamble. This allows you to link directly1to any bit of the book for discussion. Moreover, unlike
the typical book thatās frozen in time, think of this as a dynamic bookapp that gets
continuously updated. You can see the latest version online, or you can follow the
instructions at thenetworkstate.com/kindle.gif to get the latest version on your Kindle. When reading it, think of this work as a toolbox, not a manifesto. You donāt need to
agree with all of it to get something out of it. Weāve structured it in modular form
for that reason. Chapter 1 is an overview of the ideas. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present
an analysis th
A network state is an ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized community that spreads globally while maintaining unified purpose, contrasting with traditional centralized nation-states.
The progression from startup society to network state follows four stages: building collective capability, managing resources and real estate, and finally achieving sovereign recognition from existing nations.
The demand for 'clean slates' drives billions in spending on vacant land and new companies annually, demonstrating the financial and societal value of fresh starts without historical constraints.
Six conventional and unconventional methods exist for starting new countries (election, revolution, war, and three unnamed unconventional approaches), but the author favors a seventh alternative method.
aligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which
packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but
geographically decentralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of
varying size, but their hearts are in one place. Asthepopulationandeconomyofastartupsocietygrowcomparabletothatofalegacy
state, with millions of citizens and billions in income, it should eventually4be able to
attain recognition from existing sovereigns ā and ultimately the United Nations ā
just as Bitcoin has now become a bona ļ¬de national currency. 1.5 The Network State in One Essay
A proposition is not a nation, though it can become one. Here we describe a peaceful,
reproducible process for turning an online community premised on a proposition into
a physical state with a virtual capital: a network state , the sequel to the nation state. We want to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason we want a bare
plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buļ¬er, a fresh startup, or a clean
slate. Because we want to build something new without historical constraint. The ļ¬nancial demand for a clean slate is clear. People buy millions of acres of vacant
land and incorporate hundreds of thousands of new companies each year, spending
4Note the progression: from startup society, to network union, to network archipelago, and ļ¬nally
to network state. First build the collective muscle to do real things, then manage real money and real
estate, and ļ¬nally become recognized as a real state. 1.5. THE NETWORK STATE IN ONE ESSAY 13
billions just to get that fresh start. And now that it is possible to start not just new
companies but new communities and even new currencies, we see people ļ¬ocking to
create those as well. The societal value of a clean slate is also clear. In the technology sector alone, the
ability to form new companies has created trillions of dollars in wealth over the past
few decades. Indeed, if we imagine a world where you couldnāt just obtain a blank sheet
of paper but had to erase an older one, where you couldnāt just acquire bare land but
had to knock down a standing building, where you couldnāt just create a new company
but had to reform an existing ļ¬rm, we imagine endless conļ¬ict over scarce resources. Perhaps we donāt have to think too hard to imagine this world. It resembles our own. In the distant past people could only write on clay tablets, in the recent past they were
executed for contemplating entrepreneurship, and in the immediate present they are
arguing over replacing an ancient gas station. In these times and places, making a fresh
start has been technologically infeasible, politically impossible, or judicially punishable. Andthatāswherewearetodaywithcountries, cities, nations, governments, institutions,
and much of the physical world. Because the brand new is unthinkable, we ļ¬ght over
the old. But perhaps we can change that. 1.5.1 How to Start a New Country
There are at least six ways to start a new country; three are conventional and three
are unconventional. We will introduce them only to deprioritize them all in favor of a
seventh. 1. Election
The most conventional way to start a new country involves winning suļ¬cient power
in an election to either (a) rewrite the laws of an existing state or (b) carve out a new
one from scratch with the recognition of the international community. This is the most
widely discussed path, and by far the most crowded ā perhaps toocrowded. 2. Revolution
The second obvious way is a political revolution. We donāt advise attempting this. Particularly momentous elections are sometimes referred to as revolutions, though a
revolution frequently involves bloodshed. Revolutions are infrequent, but everyone
knows that they mean a new government. 3. War
The third conventional way to form a new state is to win a war. We donāt advise
attempting this either. A war is, of course, not independent from the other two. 14 CHAPTER 1. QUICKSTART
A network state is defined as a highly aligned online community that crowdfunds territory globally and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from existing states.
Unlike nation states that start with land and assign it to populations, network states begin with minds and attract humans to networks across the globe.
The complex definition includes requirements like moral innovation, national consciousness, cryptocurrency integration, consensual government, and measurable population/income metrics.
A network state could theoretically start as a one-person startup society and scale to millions of people with decentralized physical territories connected by the internet.
at leads to a concerning forecast for the near future, the problem of
AmericanAnarchyandChineseControl. AndChapter5presentsourproposedsolution
for maintaining liberal values in an illiberal world: startup societies and network states. If youāre a partisan of the US establishment or the CCP, you may not agree with our
problem statement at all. If youāre an orthodox Bitcoin maximalist, you likely wonāt
agree with every aspect of our proposed solution. And if youāre coming in from another
school of thought, you may only agree with parts of the problem or solution as weāve
framed them. Nevertheless, we believe thereās enough ļ¬exibility in the idea of the
network state that you can customize it and make it your own. 1An obvious feature, yet missing from the traditional ebook experience. 8 1.2. THE NETWORK STATE IN ONE SENTENCE 9
But what exactly isa network state? 1.2 The Network State in One Sentence
In one informal sentence:
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for
collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually
gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. When we think of a nation state, we immediately think of the lands, but when we think
of a network state, we should instantly think of the minds. That is, if the nation state
system starts with the map of the globe and assigns each patch of land to a single state,
the network state system starts with the 7+ billion humans of the world and attracts
each mind to one or more networks. Hereās a more complex deļ¬nition that extends that concept and pre-emptively covers
many edge cases:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of na-
tional consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action,
anin-personlevelofcivility, anintegratedcryptocurrency, aconsensualgov-
ernment limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded
physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves
a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a
measure of diplomatic recognition. OK, thatās a mouthful! Itās lengthy because there are many internet phenomena that
sharesomebutnotallofthepropertiesofanetworkstate. Forexample, neitherBitcoin
nor Facebook nor a DAO is a network state, because each lacks certain qualities ā like
diplomatic recognition ā which are core to anything weād think of as the next version
of the nation state. (If you want to skip ahead, we expand on each part of the deļ¬nition in Chapter 5. But
itāll make more sense if you read the text all the way through. For what itās worth,
the technical deļ¬nition of a nation state is similarly multi-clausal, because it needs to
exclude things we donāt typically think about, like stateless nations.) 10 CHAPTER 1. QUICKSTART
1.3 The Network State in One Image
A picture helps. The dashboard above shows what a million-person network state looks
like on the map. Speciļ¬cally, it depicts a network state with 1.7 million people, more
than 157 billion dollars in annual income, and a 136 million square meter footprint. The ļ¬rst thing we notice is that a network state isnāt physically centralized like a
nation state, nor limited in scale like a city state. Itās geographically decentralized and
connected by the internet. The second thing we see is that you could feasibly start this kind of country from your
computer. That is, just as Facebook grew from one personās laptop, a million-person
network state that owns a global archipelago of physical territory could start as a
one-person startup society, as shown in this gif: thenetworkstate.com/networkstate.gif. The third thing we see is how central the real-time census is to the network state. The
dashboard shown combines concepts from coins, companies, and countries to focus a
society on growthin people, annual income, and real estate footprint. Continued growth is a continuous plebiscite, a vote of conļ¬dence by the people inside
who remain an
Wars and revolutions can redraw state borders, but micronations fail because they lack the social support needed for legitimate statehood.
Seasteading proposes semi-permanent habitation in international waters using cruise ship technology, though scaled examples don't yet exist.
Space colonization, particularly Mars settlement through entities like SpaceX, represents the most prestigious but temporarily infeasible path to new states.
Network states offer a 'cloud first, land last' approach, starting with digital communities that eventually crowdfund physical territory nodes connected as networked enclaves.
Indeed, both elections and revolutions can lead to wars that end up carving out new
polities. Like a revolution, a war is infrequent and undesirable, but is a means by which
to redraw state borders. 4. Micronations
Now we get to the unconventional. The most obvious of the unconventional approaches
ā and the one most people think of when they hear the concept of āstarting a new
countryā ā occurs when an eccentric plants a ļ¬ag on an oļ¬shore platform or disputed
patch of dirt and declares themselves king of nothing. If the issue with elections is that
toomanypeople care about them, the issue with these so-called micronations is that
toofewpeople care. Because a state (like a currency) is an inherently social aļ¬air, a
few people in the middle of nowhere wonāt be able to organize a military, enforce laws,
or be recognized by other countries. Moreover, while an existing state may be content
to let people harmlessly5LARP a fake country in their backyard, an actual threat to
sovereignty typically produces a response with real guns, whether that be the Falklands
or Sakhalin. 5. Seasteading
Here is where things start to get interesting. Conceived by Patri Friedman and backed
by Peter Thiel, seasteading essentially starts with the observation that cruise ships
exist, and asks whether we could move from a few weeks on the water at a time to
semi-permanent habitation in international waters (with frequent docking, of course). Ifthe costofcruiseshipsfalls, this approach becomesmore feasible. Butwhilethere are
individuals who live on cruise ships year-round, we havenāt yet seen a scaled example.6
6. Space
Perhaps the most prestigious of the start-a-new-country paths is the idea of colonizing
other planets. Unlike seasteading or micronations, space exploration started at the
government level and has been glamorized in many movies and TV shows, so it enjoys
a higher degree of social acceptability. This path is typically received as temporarily
technically infeasible, rather than outright crazy. Elon Muskās SpaceX is one entity
seriously contemplating the logistics of starting a new state on Mars. 5A LARP is a live-action roleplaying game. It also describes adults playing a seemingly pointless
game of make-believe. 6We actually think seasteading can be revived in the long-term. Why? Because it can be made
part of the network state paradigm. You just need to grow a startup society capable of crowdfunding
a cruise ship. Your society wouldnāt start with something so expensive, of course; itād start by
getting much more modest pieces of territory around the world and connecting them into a network
archipelago. But once you have a startup society with tens of thousands of members, something as
crazy as a crowdfunded cruise ship becomes a possibility. 1.5. THE NETWORK STATE IN ONE ESSAY 15
7. Network States
Andļ¬nallywearriveatourpreferredmethod: thenetworkstate. Ourideaistoproceed
cloud ļ¬rst, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with
the digital community. We create a startup society, organize it into a network union,
crowdfund the physical nodes of a network archipelago, and ā in the fullness of time
ā eventually negotiate for diplomatic recognition to become a true network state. We
build the embryonic state as an open-source project, we organize our internal economy
around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture
in VR, and we create art and literature that reļ¬ects our values. When we crowdfund territory in the real world, itās not necessarily contiguous territory. Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves . Put another way, a network archipelago need not acquire all its territory in one place
at one time. It can connect a thousand apartments, a hundred houses, and a dozen cul-
de-sacs in diļ¬erent cities into a new kind of fractal polity with its capital in the cloud. Community members migrate between these enclaves and crowdfund ter
Bitcoin's path to legitimacy demonstrates how numerical success (market cap) can lead to societal recognition (legal tender status in sovereign states).
A startup society could follow Bitcoin's model by building measurable metrics like 1-10M digital citizens, cryptocurrency reserves, and physical holdings to achieve diplomatic recognition.
Most existing countries are surprisingly small, with 55% of UN-recognized states having populations under 10 million, making network states with similar populations viable.
Digital platforms already demonstrate the scale needed, with Facebook having 3B+ users and individual influencers commanding millions of followers, suggesting feasibility for building network states.
ting states like ASEAN, the OAS, the African
Union, the EU, or the United Nations. This combination of numerical and societal metrics matches the emergence of cryp-
tocurrency. Initially ignored, then mocked as an obvious failure, within ļ¬ve years after
its invention Bitcoin attained a billion-dollar market capitalization (a numerical suc-
cess) and was subsequently listed on CNBC and Bloomberg alongside blue-chip stocks
(a form of societalrecognition). At each step Bitcoin could keep ascending numerically
on its own, with greater societal recognition following in its wake. By 2020 it had
changed the trajectory of the Peopleās Bank of China, the IMF, Goldman Sachs, JP
Morgan, and the World Bank. By 2021, Bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador,
a sovereign state. And by mid-2022 the Central African Republic had followed, with
dozens more considering Bitcoin as legal tender, including Panama. 1.5. THE NETWORK STATE IN ONE ESSAY 17
1.5.4 Most Countries are Small Countries
Cryptocurrency could achieve these heights because money has both numerical and
societal aspects.7The numbers could be piled up before the societal accolades followed. Once Bitcoin had proven that it couldnāt be easily counterfeited or hacked, the shared
belief of the millions of cryptocurrency holders worldwide was enough to get BTC
from a value of zero to a market cap of billions, and from there to a listing on every
Bloomberg Terminal and exchange. Societal traction of this kind paved the way for
more numerical traction, and a virtuous cycle followed. Could a startup society follow a similar path? Yes. A cryptographically auditable
censuscouldprovethatagrowingstartupsocietyhad1-10Mcommitteddigitalcitizens,
large cryptocurrency reserves, years of continuous existence, and physical holdings all
over the earth. That numerical traction could then be used to achieve the societal
traction of diplomatic recognition. Why? Because most countries are small countries. A new state with a population of
1-10M would actually be comparable to most existing states. Thatās because of the 193
UN-recognized sovereign states, 20% have a population of less than 1M and 55% have
a population of less than 10M. This includes many countries typically thought of as
legitimate, such as Luxembourg (615k), Cyprus (1.2M), Estonia (1.3M), New Zealand
(4.7M), Ireland (4.8M), and Singapore (5.8M). These āuser countsā are surprisingly
small by tech standards! Of course, mere quantity is not everything. The strength of aļ¬liation to our hypo-
thetical network state matters, as does the time on the property, the percentage of net
worth stored in the currency, and the fraction of contacts found in the community. Still, once we remember that Facebook has 3B+ users, Twitter has 300M+, and many
7The idealized technical fact exists entirely independent of what any human thinks (like the value
ofg, the gravitational constant), while the idealized political fact is entirely about what humans think
(like the location of a national border). 18 CHAPTER 1. QUICKSTART
individual inļ¬uencers have 1M+ followers, it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we
canbuilda1-10Mpersonstartupsocietywithagenuinesenseofnationalconsciousness,
an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around
the world. With the internet, we can digitally sew these disjoint enclaves together into
a new kind of polity that achieves diplomatic recognition: a network state . Chapter 2
History as Trajectory
2.1 Prologue
Our history is the prologue to the network state. This isnotobvious. Founding a startup society as weāve described it seems to be about
growing a community, writing code, crowdfunding land, and eventually attaining the
diplomatic recognition to become a network state. What does history have to do with
anything? The short version is that if a tech company is about technological innovation ļ¬rst, and
company culture second, a startup society is the reverse. Itās about community culture
ļ¬rst, an
š¬ While tech companies like SpaceX use physics laws to innovate forward, startup societies must study history as their equivalent of natural laws for human behavior.
š History serves as compressed wisdom from countless social experiments, allowing founders to learn from past human experience rather than repeating costly mistakes.
šļø Historical examples like the Renaissance and Founding Fathers show that major innovations often began by rediscovering and building upon past knowledge.
āļø History has become weaponized in modern discourse, making historical knowledge essential for winning arguments and defending against 'offense archaeology' attacks.
d technological innovation second. And while innovating on technology means
forecasting the future, innovating on culture means probing the past. But why? Well, for a tech company like SpaceX you start with time-invariant laws of
physics extracted from data, laws that tell you how atoms collide andinteract with each
other. The study of these laws allows you to do something that has never been done
before, seemingly proving that history doesnāt matter. But the subtlety is that these
laws of physics encode in highly compressed form the results of innumerable scientiļ¬c
experiments. You are learning from human experience rather than trying to re-derive
physical law from scratch. To touch Mars, we stand on the shoulders of giants. For a startup society, we donāt yet have eternal mathematical laws for society.1History
is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity. It furnishes many accounts of how
human actors collide and interact with each other. The right course of historical study
encodes, in compressed form, the results of innumerable social experiments. You can
learn from human experience rather than re-deriving societal law from scratch. Learn
some history, so as not to repeat it. 1Though Peter Turchin is working on it. See his monograph War and Peace and War . Then look
at Ray Dalioās Principles for a Changing World Order , Strauss and Howeās The Fourth Turning , Will
and Ariel Durantās The Lessons of History , and Asimovās ļ¬ctional treatment of psychohistory. 19 20 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Thatās a theoretical argument. An observational argument is that we know that the
technological innovation of the Renaissance began by rediscovering history. And we
knowthattheFoundingFatherscareddeeplyabouthistory. Inbothcases,theystepped
forward by drawing from the past. So if youāre a technologist looking to blaze a trail
with a new startup society, that establishes plausibility for why historical study is
important. The logistical argument is perhaps the most compelling. Think about how much easier
it is to use an iPhone than it was to build Apple from scratch. To consume you can just
click a button, but to produce itās necessary to know something about how companies
arebuilt. Similarly, itāsonethingtooperateasamerecitizenofapre-builtcountry, and
quite another thing to create one from scratch. To build a new society, itād be helpful
to have some knowledge of how countries were built in the ļ¬rst place, the logistics of
the process. And this again brings us into the domain of history. 2.1.1 Why History is Crucial
You canāt really learn something without using it. One day of immersion with a new
language beats weeks of book learning. One day of trying to build something with a
programming language beats weeks of theory, too. In the same way, the history we teach is an appliedhistory: a crucial tool for both
the prospective president of a startup society2and for their citizens, shareholders, and
staļ¬. Itās something youāll use on a daily basis. Why? ā¢History is how you win the argument. Think about the 1619 Project, or the
grievance studies departments at universities, or even a newspaper āproļ¬leā of
some unfortunate. You might be mining cryptocurrency, but the folks behind
such things are mining history. That is, many thousands of people are engaged
full time in āoļ¬ense archaeology,ā the excavation of the recent and distant past
for some useful incident they can write up to further demoralize their political
opposition. This is the scholarly version of going through someoneās old tweets. Itās weaponized history, history as opposition research. You simply canāt win an
argument against such people on pure logic alone; you need facts, so you need
history. ā¢History determines legality. Wedenotetheexponentialimprovementintransistor
density over the postwar period by Mooreās law. We describe the exponential
declinein pharmaceutical R&D eļ¬ciency during the same period as Eroomās
law ā as Mooreās law in reverse. That is, over the
Network states represent a 'reverse diaspora' where communities form online first, then establish physical outposts called 'cloud embassies' around the world.
Unlike previous methods for creating new countries, network states use existing internet technologies rather than requiring breakthrough physical innovations like Mars rockets or seasteads.
The concept leverages proven scalability of online communities and digital currencies, creating what the author calls a 'scaled LARP' practiced by millions simultaneously.
New countries can be defined both numerically (five million people, thousands of square miles, billions in income) and societally (diplomatic recognition by existing nations).
ritory nearby,
with every individual dwelling and group house presenting an independent opportunity
for expansion. And with a thousand such enclaves, rather than four directions to
expand (north, east, south, and west), there are more like four thousand. What weāve described thus far is much like an ethnic diaspora, in which emigrants are
internationally dispersed but connected by communication channels with each other
and the motherland. The twist is that our version is a reverse diaspora : a community
that forms ļ¬rst on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together
in-person to build dwellings and structures. In a sense, you can think of each physical
outpost of this digital community as a cloud embassy , similar to the grassroots Bitcoin
embassies that have arisen around the world to help people better understand Bitcoin. New recruits can visit either the virtual or physical parts of a network state, beta test
it, and decide to leave or stay. Now, with all this talk of embassies and countries one might well contend that network
states, like the aforementioned micronations, are also just a LARP. Unlike microna-
tions, however, they are set up to be a scaledLARP, a feat of imagination practiced
by large numbers of people at the same time. And the experience of cryptocurrencies
over the last decade shows us just how powerful such a shared LARP can be. 1.5.2 Minimum Necessary Innovation
Letās pause and summarize for a second. The main diļ¬erence between the seventh
method (network states) and the previous six (election, revolution, war, micronations,
seasteading, and space) is that the seventh straddles the boundary between practicality
and impracticality. It is now feasible to build million-person online communities, start billion-dollar digital
currencies, and architect buildings in VR to then crowdfund into reality. The network
state concept stacks together many existing technologies, rather than requiring the 16 CHAPTER 1. QUICKSTART
invention of new ones ā like Mars-capable rockets, or permanent-habitation seasteads. At the same time, it avoids the obvious pathways of election, revolution, and war ā all
of which turn ugly, and none of which provide much venue for individual initiative. In other words, the network state takes the most robust existing tech stack we have ā
namely, the suite of technologies built around the internet ā and uses it to route around
political roadblocks, without waiting for future physical innovation. 1.5.3 What Counts as a New Country? Having outlined these seven methods, the careful reader will notice that we have played
a bit fast and loose with the deļ¬nition of what a ānew countryā is. First, whatdowe meanbyanewcountry? Onedeļ¬nitionisthatstartinganewcountry
means settling a wholly new territory, like colonizing Mars. Another deļ¬nition is that
simply changing the form of government actually changes the country, like France
moving from the Second French Republic to the Second French Empire. Rather than
using either these strict or loose deļ¬nitions, we will use both numerical andsocietal
deļ¬nitions of a new country. Thenumerical deļ¬nitionbeginswithvisualizingahypothetical nationrealestatepop.com
site similar to coinmarketcap.com , which aggregates the cryptographically audited
censuses of startup societies aspiring to become network states. This dashboard would
showinrealtimethenumberofcommunitymembers,theacreageofrealestateownedby
those members, and the communityās on-chain income. A startup society with ļ¬ve mil-
lion people worldwide, thousands of square miles of (discontiguous) community-owned
land, and billions in annual income would have indisputable numerical signiļ¬cance. This in turn leads us to the societaldeļ¬nition: a new country is one that is diplomati-
cally recognized by other countries as a legitimate polity capable of self-determination. A state with enough such bilateral relationships would have the societal signiļ¬cance
to gain accession to a group of pre-exis
Eroom's Law demonstrates how drug development costs have increased dramatically despite technological advances, mirroring stagnation in energy, aviation, and construction sectors.
Understanding historical incidents behind regulations (like thalidomide leading to FDA oversight) is essential for innovators to build superior alternatives and counter regulatory narratives.
Religious and political doctrines use historical narratives to establish moral frameworks, with establishment media serving as the primary vehicle for propagating these moral lessons.
Society's moral compass is determined by which historical narratives dominate public consciousness, creating a zero-sum competition between fundamentally different value systems like meritocracy versus socialism.
last several decades, the FDA
2Why do we refer to āstartup societiesā rather than ānetwork statesā here, and throughout this
chapter? Because a startup society is the embryonic form of a network state, just as a startup is
the embryonic form of a public company. Moreover, many startup societies will be able to achieve
their goals without gaining the diplomatic recognition necessary to become a network state, just as
many startup companies can operate indeļ¬nitely without going public. See Parallel Societies: Digital
Network Unions to get a sense of what can be done as a purely digital network union, or as a network
archipelago that just buys some land, without the need for full diplomatic recognition. 2.1. PROLOGUE 21
somehow presided over an enormous hike in the costs of drug development even as
our computers and our knowledge of the human genome vastly improved. Similar
phenomena can be observed in energy (where energy production has stagnated),
in aviation (where top speeds have topped out), and in construction (where we
build slower today than we did seventy years ago). Obviously, even articulating Eroomās law requires detailed knowledge of history,
knowledge of how things used to be. Less obviously, if we want to change Eroomās
law, if we want to innovate in the physical world again, weāll need history too. The reason is that behind every FDA is a thalidomide, just as behind every TSA
thereās a 9/11 and behind every Sarbanes-Oxley is an Enron. Regulation is dull,
but the incidents that lead to regulation are anything but dull. This history is used to defend ancient regulations; if you change them, people
will die! As such, to legalize physical innovation youāll need to become a counter-
historian. Only when you understand the legitimating history of regulatory agen-
cies better than their proponents do can you build a superior alternative: a new
regulatory paradigm capable of addressing both the abuses of the American reg-
ulatory state andthe abuses they claim to prevent. ā¢History determines morality. Religions start with history lessons. You might
think of these as made-up histories, but theyāre histories all the same. Tales of
the distant past, ļ¬ctionalized or not, that describe how humans once behaved -
and how they should have behaved. Thereās a moral to these stories. Political doctrines are based on history lessons too. Theyāre how the establish-
ment justiļ¬es itself. The mechanism for propagating these history lessons is the
establishment newspaper, wherein most articles arenāt really about true-or-false,
but good-and-bad. Try it yourself. Just by glancing at a headline from any es-
tablishment outlet, you can instantly apprehend its moral lesson: x-ism is bad,
our system of government is good, tech founders are bad, and so on. And if you
poke one level deeper, if you ask whyany of these things is good or bad, youāll
again get a history lesson. Because why is x-ism bad? Well, let me educateyou
on some history... The installation of these moral premises is a zero-sum game. Thereās only room
for so many moral lessons in one society, because a brainās capacity for moral
computation is limited. So you get a totally diļ¬erent society if 99% of people
allocate their limited moral memory to principles like āhard work good, meri-
tocracy good, envy bad, charity goodā than if 99% of people have internalized
nostrums like āsocialism good, civility bad, law enforcement bad, looting good.ā3
You can try to imagine a scenario where these two sets of moral values arenāt in
direct conļ¬ict, but empirically those with the ļ¬rst set of moral values will favor
3Here are examples of people writing about how socialism is good ( Would Socialism Better Our
Lives? ), civility is bad ( When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color ), law enforcement
is bad ( Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police ), and looting is good ( In Defense of Looting ). 22 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
an entrepreneurial society and those with the s
š¢ Knowledge of establishment media's historical contradictions (like The New York Times' nepotistic ownership) gives entrepreneurs moral authority to make independent hiring decisions without accepting lectures on diversity and democracy.
š§ History functions as a debugging tool for society, similar to how engineers use post-mortems and log files to identify system failures and revert to previously working configurations.
āŖ Just as programmers can use 'git revert' to undo problematic changes and progress along different branches, societies can learn from historical mistakes and choose alternative development paths without abandoning all progress.
š While startup company founders can outsource historical knowledge to others, presidents of startup societies must understand history themselves because creating new societies requires moral, social, and legal innovation relative to existing ones.
rganization. So long as you arenāt running a corporation based on hereditary nepotism where
the current guy running the show inherits the company from his fatherās fatherās
fatherās father, youāre more diverse and democratic than the owners of The New
York Times Company. You donāt need to take lectures from them, from anyone
in their employ, or really from anyone in their social circle ā which includes all
establishmentjournalists. Younowhavethemoralauthoritytohirewhoyouneed
to hire, within the conļ¬nes of the law, as SpaceX, Shopify, Kraken, and others
are now doing. And thatās how a little knowledge of history restores control over
your hiring policy. ā¢History is how you debug our broken society. Many billions of dollars are spent
on history in the engineering world. We donāt think about it that way, though. We call it doing a post-mortem, looking over the log ļ¬les, maybe running a so-
called time-travel debugger to get a reproducible bug. Once we ļ¬nd it, we might
want to execute an undo, do a git revert , restore from backup, or return to a
previously known-good conļ¬guration. Think about what weāre saying: on a micro-scale, knowing the detailed past of the
system allows us to ļ¬gure out what had gone wrong. And being able to partially
rewindthe past to progress along a diļ¬erent branch (via a git revert ) empow-
6Lest you think Iām exaggerating how dire the straits were for NYTCO, hereās a quote from former
NYT editor Jill Abramsonās book, Merchants of Truth : āThe new digital reality nearly kills two
venerable newspapers [NYT, WaPo] with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths
[BuzzFeed,Vice]withaballooningandļ¬ckleaudienceofmillennials.ā Theinternetposedanexistential
threat to NYTCO, so they became BuzzFeed in order to compete with them. What happened next
will astonish you. 7Hereās their history of slaveholding ( https://nypost.com/2020/07/18/
the-family-that-owns-the-new-york-times-were-slaveholders-goodwin/ ), opposition
to female publishers ( https://imgur.com/a/6eu5GxV ), bias against gays in the newsroom
(https://twitter.com/heerjeet/status/1270785679744618497 ), and track record of nepotistic
succession ( https://archive.ph/8MKmI#selection-665.0-665.299 ). 8A common stratagem is to āreport on but not investigateā an issue at another media corporation. This way they can claim a story was (nominally) covered, but Russell Conjugate it into impotence,
changing enough words to assert the facts were reported while simultaneously removing all emotional
response. The contrast to when theyāre actually going for the throat and trying to get someone ļ¬red
- as they frequently do to people outside media for trivialities - is stark. 24 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
ers us to ļ¬x that wrongness. This doesnāt mean throwing away everything and
returning to the caveman era of a blank git repository, as per either the carica-
tured traditionalist who wants to āturn back the clockā or the anarcho-primitivist
who wants to end industrialized civilization. But it does mean rewinding a bit to
then move forward along a diļ¬erent path9, because progress has both magnitude
anddirection . All these concepts apply to debugging situations at larger scale
than companies ā like societies, or countries.10
You now see why history is useful. A founder of a mere startup company can arguably
scrape by without it, tacitly outsourcing the study of history to those who shape
societyās laws and morality. But a president of a startup society cannot, because a new
society involves moral, social, and legal innovation relative to the old one ā and that
requires a knowledge of history. 2.1.2 Why History is Crucial for Startup Societies
Weāve whetted the appetite with some speciļ¬c examples of why history is useful in
general. Now weāll describe why itās speciļ¬cally useful for startup societies. We begin by introducing an operationally useful set of tools for thinking about the
past from a bottom-up and top-down perspective: history as written to the
š History serves as the foundation for compelling media narratives, with even fictional stories drawing from historical precedents like medieval Europe or the Cold War.
āæ Cryptocurrency's value fundamentally derives from its cryptographically verifiable historical record of transactions and ownership.
š Those in power control historical narratives by writing textbooks that celebrate their triumph, making textbook revision a priority for any new regime.
š¢ Understanding the true history of media corporations reveals their hypocrisy in lecturing tech companies about diversity while having worse records themselves.
econd set of values will not.4
ā¢History is how you develop compelling media. You can make up entirely ļ¬ctional
stories, of course. But even ļ¬ction frequently has some kind of historical an-
tecedent. The Lord of the Rings drew on Medieval Europe, Spaghetti Westerns
pulled from the Wild West, Bond movies were inspired by the Cold War, and
so on. And certainly the legitimating stories for any political order will draw on
history. ā¢History is the true value of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is worth hundreds of billions
of dollars because itās a cryptographically veriļ¬able history of who holds what
BTC. Read The Truth Machine for a book-length treatment of this concept. ā¢History tells you whoās in charge. Why did Orwell say that he who controls the
past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past? Because history textbooks are written by the winners. They are authored, sub-
tly or not, to tell a story of great triumph by the ruling establishment over its
past enemies. The only history most people in the US know is 1776, 1865, 1945,
and 1965 - a potted history of revolutions, world wars, and activist movements
that lead ineluctably to the sunny uplands of greater political equality.5Itās very
similar to the history the Soviets taught their children, where all of the past
was interpreted through the lens of class struggle, bringing Soviet citizens to the
present day where they were inevitably progressing from the intermediate stage
of socialism towards...communism! Chinese schoolchildren learn a similarly se-
lective history where the (real) wrongs of the European colonialists and Japanese
are centered, and those of Mao downplayed. And even any successful startup
tells a founding story that sands oļ¬ the rough edges. Inshort, ahistorytextbookgivesyouaheroāsjourneythatcelebratesthetriumph
of its establishment authors against all odds. Even when a historical treatment
covers ostensible victims, like Soviet textbooks covering the victimization of the
proletariat, if you look carefully the ruling class that authors that treatment
typically justiļ¬es itself as the champion of those victims. This is why one of the
ļ¬rst acts of any conquering regime is to rewrite the textbooks (click those links),
to tell you whoās in charge. ā¢History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by
mediacorporationsonādiversityā? Isitbecausethosemediacorporationsthatare
20-30 points whiter than tech companies actually deeply care about this? Or is
it because after the 2009-era collapse of print media revenue, media corporations
struggled for a business model, found that certain words drove traļ¬c, and then
doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors
4When we write about moral premises, we intentionally omit the preposition for compactness and
for eļ¬ect. Rather than writing āhard work is goodā we write āhard work good.ā Why? Dropping
the āisā reļ¬ects the underlying cognitive process. In the moment, itās not really about thought-out
arguments but visceral expression of fundamental moral values. 5Isnāt this broadly right, you might ask? Whatās been left out? Start with the reading list here. 2.1. PROLOGUE 23
in the process?6After all, if you know a bit morehistory, youāll know that the
New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an
organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally proļ¬ted from
slavery, blocked women from being publishers, excluded gays from the newsroom
for decades, ran a succession process featuring only three cis straight white male
cousins, and ended up with a publisher who just happened to be the son of the
previous guy.7
Suppose youāre a founder. Once you know this history, and once all your friends
and employees and investors know it, and once you know that no purportedly
braveestablishmentmediacorporationwouldhave everinformedyouofitinquite
those words8, youāre outside the matrix. Youāve mentally freed your o
Startup societies must begin with identifying moral issues rather than just technological problems, requiring historically-informed solutions to build purpose-driven communities.
The approach parallels tech startups but focuses on cultural and collective pitches to join communities rather than economic pitches to buy products.
Historical religious colonies in early America succeeded at higher rates than for-profit colonies because they had a clear moral purpose that united members.
The framework introduces concepts like the Network as a new Leviathan, the One Commandment, and cryptohistory as tools for understanding social organization beyond traditional state and religious structures.
ledger, as
opposed to history as written by the winners. We use these tools to discuss the emergence of a new Leviathan, the Network, a con-
tender for the most powerful force in the world, a true peer (and complement) to both
God and the State as a mechanism for social organization. And then weāll bring it all together in the lead-up to the key concept of this chapter:
the idea of the One Commandment, a historically-founded sociopolitical innovation
that draws citizens to a startup society just as a technologically-based commercial
innovation attracts customers to a startup company. Ifastartupbeginsbyidentifyinganeconomicproblemintodayāsmarketandpresenting
a technologically-informed solution to that problem in the form of a new company, a
startup society begins by identifying a moral issue in todayās culture and presenting a
historically-informed solution to that issue in the form of a new society. 2.1.3 Why Startup Societies Arenāt Solely About Technology
Wait, why does a startup society have to begin with a moralissue? And why does
the solution to that moral issue need to be historically-informed? Canāt it just be a
9The repeal of the Volstead Act is one of the cleanest examples. Prohibition was repealed, and
society moved along a diļ¬erent path. 10Only a few countries, like Estonia and Singapore, are as yet underpinned by a codebase in quite
the same way as a tech company like Google. But more will follow in their footsteps. Thatās one
of the theses of this book; see here. And the concept of ārecent history as useful for debuggingā still
applies even if the equivalent of git revert would be done in paper laws rather than digital code. 2.1. PROLOGUE 25
tech-focused community where people solve problems with equations? Weāre interested
in Mars and life extension, not dusty stories of defunct cities! The quick answer comes from Paul Johnson at the 11:00 mark of this talk, where he
notes that early Americaās religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-
proļ¬t colonies, because the former had a purpose. The slightly longer answer is that
in a startup society, youāre not asking people to buya product (which is an economic,
individualistic pitch) but to joina community (which is a cultural, collective pitch). Youāre arguing that the culture of your startup society is better than the surrounding
culture; implicitly, that means thereās some moral deļ¬cit in the world that youāre ļ¬xing. History comes into play because youāll need to (a) write a study of that moral deļ¬cit
and (b) draw from the past to ļ¬nd alternative social arrangements where that moral
deļ¬cit did not occur. Tech may be part of the solution, and calculations may well be
involved, but the moment you write about any societal problem in depth youāll ļ¬nd
yourself writing a historyof that problem. Forspeciļ¬cs, youcanskipaheadto Examples of Parallel Societies āoryoucansuspend
disbelief for a little bit, keep reading, and trust us that this historical/moral/ethical
angle just might be the missing ingredient to build startup societies, which after all
havenāt yet fully taken oļ¬ in the modern world. 2.1.4 Applied History for Startup Societies
Hereās the outline of this chapter. 1. We start with bottom-up history. The section on Microhistory and Macrohistory
bridges the gap between the trajectory of an isolated, reproducible system and
the trajectories of millions of interacting human beings. Because both these small
and large-scale trajectories can now be digitally recorded and quantiļ¬ed, this is
history as written to the ledger ā culminating in the cryptohistory of Bitcoin. 2. We next discuss top-down history. This is history as written by the winners,
history as conceptualized by what Tyler Cowen calls the Base-Raters, history
that justiļ¬es the current order and proclaims it stable and inevitable. It is a
theory of Political Power vs. Technological Truth . 3. We then talk about the history of power, giving names to the forces we just de-
scribed by identifying
The author proposes analyzing world power through three prime movers: God, State, and Network, rather than focusing on a single dominant force.
Modern conflicts like Blue/Red and Tech-vs-Media are reframed as multi-sided struggles between People of God, People of the State, and People of the Network.
The Network is emerging as a new force that can rectify historical distortions created by the State, challenging traditional narratives of inevitable progress.
Political founders can engage in 'ideology construction' rather than simply choosing existing platforms, as left and right positions have historically swapped sides.
The rise of cryptohistory and startup societies offers a counter-strategy against establishments that use political power to suppress technological truth.
the three candidates for most powerful force in the world:
God, State, and Network . Framing things in terms of threeprime movers rather
than one allows us to generalize beyond purely God-centered religions to under-
stand the Leviathan-centered doctrines that implicitly underpin modern society. 4. We apply this to the history of power struggles. With the God/State/Network
lens, we can understand the Blue/Red and Tech-vs-Media conļ¬icts in a diļ¬erent
way as a multi-sided struggle between People of God, People of the State, and
People of the Network . 5. We go through how the People of the State have used their power to distort recent 26 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
and distant history, and how the Network is newly rectifying this distortion in
āIf the News is Fake, Imagine History.ā
6. Having shown the degree to which history has been distorted, and thereby dis-
placed the (implicit) historical narrative in which the arc of history bends to the
ineluctable victory of the US establishment11, we discuss several alternative theo-
ries of past and future in our section on Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning,
and Future Is Our Past . These theses donāt describe a clean progressive victory
oneveryaxis, butinsteadasetofcycles, hairpinturns, andmirrorimages, asetof
historical trajectories far more complex than the narrative of linear inevitability
smuggled in through textbooks and mass media. 7. We next turn our attention to left and right, which are confusing concepts in
a realigning time, in Left is the new Right is the new Left . Sorry! We canāt
avoid politics anymore. Startup societies arenāt purely about technology. But
please note that for the most part this section isnātthe same old pabulum around
current events. We do contend that you need a theory of left and right to build
a startup society, but that doesnāt mean just picking a side. Why? While a political consumer has to pick one of a few party platforms oļ¬
the menu, a political founder can do something diļ¬erent: ideology construction. To inform this, weāll show how left and right have swapped sides through history,
and how any successful mass movement has botha revolutionary left component
and a ruling right component. 8. Finally, all of this builds up to the payoļ¬: the One Commandment . Using the
terminology we just introduced, we can rattle it oļ¬ in a few paragraphs. (If the
following is opaque in any way, read the chapter, then come back and re-read this
part.) If history is not pre-determined to bend in one direction, if the current establish-
ment may experience dramatic disruption in the form of the Fragmentation and
Fourth Turning , if its power actually arose from the expanding frontier rather
than the expanding franchise, if history is somehow running in reverse as per
theFuture Is Our Past thesis, if the revolutionary and ruling classes are in fact
switching sides, if the new Leviathan that is the Network is indeed rising above
the State, and if the internal American conļ¬icts can be seen not as policy dis-
putes but as holy wars, as clashes of Leviathans...then the assumption of the
Base-Raters that all will proceed as it always has is quite incorrect! But rather
than admit this incorrectness, theyāll attempt to use political power to suppress
technological truth. 11The concept of historical inevitability is found in both American democracy and Soviet commu-
nism, in many religions, and in ļ¬ctional settings like Ozymandias. Itās even seen in mirror image
in works like the Sovereign Individual. The way to understand this is that the āinevitabilistsā are
typically identifying a real and powerful trend, without modeling Sorosian reļ¬exivity and individual
initiative. That is, thereās a reļ¬exive backlash to any trend (āthe enemy also gets a moveā), and there
are also individuals who can start new trends. 2.1. PROLOGUE 27
The founderās counter is cryptohistory and the startup society. We now have
a history no establishment can easily corrupt, the cryptographical
Modern people avoid moral discussions but impose political beliefs forcefully, creating a problematic zero-to-one dynamic in social discourse.
The 'One Commandment' concept proposes starting new societies based on a single moral principle, similar to how tech startups focus on one innovation.
Examples include Digital Sabbath societies ('24/7 internet bad') or Keto Kosher communities ('carbs bad'), proving social value through subscriber attraction.
This Society-as-a-Service (SaaS) model applies startup techniques like financing and customer support to create consensual, subscription-based communities.
Multiple startup societies can operate in parallel, critiquing existing systems by building alternatives and eventually merging successful innovations.
ly veriļ¬able
history pioneered by Bitcoin and extended via crypto oracles. We also have a
theory of historical feasibility , history as a trajectory rather than an inevitability,
the idea that the desirable future will only occur if you put in individual eļ¬ort. But what exactly is the nature of that desirable future? After all, many groups diļ¬er with the old order but also with each other ā so a
blanket solution wonāt work. And could well be resisted. Thatās where the One
Commandment comes in. As context, the modern person is often morally reticent but politically evange-
listic. They hesitate to talk about what is moral or immoral, because itās not
their place to say whatās right. Yet when it comes to politics, this diļ¬dence is
frequently replaced by overbearing conļ¬dence in how others must live, coupled
with an enthusiasm for enforcing their beliefs at gunpoint if necessary. In between this zero and 1, in between eschewing moral discussion entirely and
imposing a full-blown political doctrine, in this ļ¬nal section we propose a one: a
one commandment. Start a new society with its own moral code, based on your
study of history, and recruit people that agree with you to populate it.12Weāre
not saying you need to come up with your own new Ten Commandments, mind
you ā but you do need One Commandment to establish the diļ¬erentiation of a
new startup society. Concrete examples of possible One Commandments include ā24/7 internet badā
(which leads to a Digital Sabbath society), or ācarbs badā (which leads to a Keto
Kosher society), or ātraditional Christianity goodā (which leads to a Benedict
Option society), or ālife extension goodā (which leads to a post-FDA society). You might think these One Commandments sound either trivial or unrealistically
ambitious, but in that respect theyāre similar to tech; the pitch of ā140 charac-
tersā sounded trivial and the pitch of āreusable rocketsā seemed unrealistic, but
those resulted in Twitter and SpaceX respectively. The One Commandment is
also similar to tech in another respect: it focusesa startup society on a single
moral innovation, just like a tech company is about a focusedtechnoeconomic
innovation. That is, as weāll see, each One Commandment-based startup society is premised
on deconstructing the establishmentās history in one speciļ¬c area, erecting a re-
placement narrative in its place with a new One Commandment, then provingthe
socioeconomic value of that One Commandment by using it to attract subscriber-
citizens. For example, if you can attract 100k subscribers to your Keto Kosher
society through deeply researched historical studies on the obesity epidemic, and
then show that theyāve lost signiļ¬cant weight as a consequence, youāve proven
12Itās entirely consensual. If people like the society, they join as a subscriber; if they donāt like it
after joining, they cancel their subscription. 28 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
the establishment deeply wrong in a key area. Thatāll either drive them to reform
ā ornotreform, in which case you attract more citizens. Akeypointisthatwecanapplyallthetechniquesofstartupcompaniestostartup
societies. Financing, attracting subscribers, calculating churn, doing customer
support ā thereās a playbook for all of that. Itās just Society-as-a-Service, the
new SaaS. In parallel, other startup societies are likewise critiquing by building, draining
citizens away from the establishment with their own historically-informed One
Commandments, and thereby driving change on other dimensions. Finally, dif-
ferent successful changes can be copied and merged together, such that the sec-
ond generation of startup societies starts diļ¬erentiating from the establishment
by two, three, or Ncommandments. This is a vision for peaceful, parallelized,
historically-driven reform of a broken society. Ok! I know those last few paragraphs involved some heavy sledding, but come back
and reread them after going through the chapter. The main point of our little preview
here was t
Creating a new society requires a genuine moral critique of the establishment backed by historical understanding, or it becomes just another consumer-focused community like a fancy Starbucks lounge.
A successful startup society needs a One Commandment that others can follow, plus a vision of the historical past that underpins it, similar to how technological vision underpins startup companies.
History can be understood as complex trajectories of human behavior, like projectiles with various flight paths - from simple parabolas to boomerangs, rockets, and powered drones executing complicated patterns.
Studying human history is uniquely challenging because it unfolds over decades (observers may die before seeing consequences) and humans actively try to deceive researchers about their actions, unlike inanimate objects.
o make the case that history is an appliedsubject ā and that you canāt start
a new society without it. Without a genuine moral critique of the establishment, without an ideological root net-
worksupportedbyhistory, yournewsocietyisatbestafancyStarbuckslounge, agated
community that diļ¬ers only in its amenities, a snack to be eaten by the establishment
at its leisure, a soulless nullity with no direction save consumerism.13
Butwithsuch a critique ā with the understanding that the establishment is morally
wanting, with a focused articulation of how exactly it falls short, with a One Com-
mandment that others can choose to follow, and with a vision of the historical past
that underpins your new startup society much as a vision of the technological future
underpins a new startup company ā youāre well on your way. Youmightevenstarttoseeahistoricalwhitepaperļ¬oatinginfrontofyou, thescholarly
critique that draws your ļ¬rst 100 subscribers, the founding document you publish to
kick oļ¬ your startup society. Now letās equip you with the tools to write it. 13WeWork deserves a mention here. I actually respect what Adam Neumann built; itās a decent
productthatpeopleused,whichisinsanelydiļ¬culttobuild,evenifitdidnātworkoutasaninvestment. The issue with a WeWork, though, is that it wasnāt really a community . The acid test is that you
couldnāt leave your laptop down in a WeWork, or have a conversation in a common area. The other
people there were strangers. Yes, you could get enclosed oļ¬ces within WeWorks, but the common
areas were more like an airport lounge or Starbucks than a community. In short, you need both a
physical membrane boundary and an ideological moral boundary in order to actually have a proper
community. 2.2. MICROHISTORY AND MACROHISTORY 29
2.2 Microhistory and Macrohistory
Inthebottom-upview,historyiswrittentotheledger. Ifeverythingthathappenedgets
faithfully recorded, history is then just the analysis of the log ļ¬les. To understand this
view weāll discuss the idea of history as a trajectory. Then weāll introduce the concepts
of microhistory and macrohistory, by analogy to microeconomics and macroeconomics. Finally, weāll unify all this with the new concept of cryptohistory. 2.2.1 History as a Cryptic Epic of Twisting Trajectories
What happens when you propel an object into the air? The ļ¬rst thing that comes to
mind is the trajectory of a ball. Throw it and witness its arc. Just a simple parabola,
an exercise in freshman physics. But there are more complicated trajectories. ā¢A boomerang ļ¬ies forward and comes back to the origin. ā¢Achargedparticleinaconstantmagneticļ¬eldissubjecttoaforceatrightangles,
and moves in a circle. ā¢Arocketwithsuļ¬cientfuelcanescapetheearthāsatmosphereratherthancoming
back down. ā¢A curveball, subject to the Magnus eļ¬ect, can twist in mid-air en route to its
destination. ā¢A projectile launched into a suļ¬ciently thick gelatin decelerates without ever
hitting the ground. ā¢A powered drone can execute an arbitrarily complicated ļ¬ight path, mimicking
that of a bumblebee or helix. So, how a system evolves with time ā its trajectory ā can be complex and counter-
intuitive, even for something small. This is a good analogy for history. If the ļ¬ight
path of a single inanimate object can be this surprising, think about the dynamics of
a massive multi-agent system of highly animate people. Imagine billions of humans
springing up on the map, forming clusters, careening into each other, creating more
humans, and throwing oļ¬ petabytes of data exhaust the whole way. Thatās history. And the timeframes involved make it tough to study. The rock you throw into the air
doesnāt take decades to play out its ļ¬ight path. Humans do. So a historical observer
can literally die before seeing the consequences of an action. Moreover, the subjects of the study donāt wantto be studied. A mere rock isnāt a
stealth bomber. It has neither the motive nor the means to deceive you about its ļ¬ight
path. Humans do. The people under the microscope
History is described as a 'cryptic epic of twisting trajectories' - unreliable narrators tell long-timescale stories with non-linear patterns that challenge simple predictive models.
Traditional assumptions about historical progress (moral arc bending toward justice, inevitable technological advancement, stable social orders) are contested as overly simplistic parabolic thinking.
Microhistory studies reproducible systems with controllable variables that can be reset and replayed, enabling quantitative measurement and precise analysis.
The Kalman filter exemplifies microhistory's practical importance - using accurate past measurements to predict future states in controllable systems like spacecraft navigation, where historical precision is literally life-or-death.
are fogging the lens. So: the scale is huge, the timeframe is long, and the measurements arenāt just noisy
but intentionally corrupted. 30 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
We can encode all of this into a phrase: history is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories . Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading. Epic,
because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your
own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns. Twisting, because
there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns. And trajectories,
because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to
the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time. Put that together, and it wipes out both the base-raterās view that todayās order will
remain basically stable over the short-term, and the complementary view of a long-term
āthe arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.ā It also contests
the idea that the fall of the bourgeoisie āand the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable,ā or that āno two countries on a Bitcoin standard will go to war with each
other,ā or even that technological progress has been rapid, so we can assume it will
continue and society will not collapse. Those phrases come from diļ¬erent ideologies, but each of them verbally expresses the
clean parabolic arc of the rock. History isnāt really like that at all. Itās much more
complicated. There are certainly trends, and those phrases do identify real trends, but
there is also pushback to those trends, counterforces that arise in response to applied
forces, syntheses that form from theses and antitheses, and outright collapses. Complex
dynamics, in other words. And how do we study complex dynamical systems? The ļ¬rst task is to measure. 2.2.2 Microhistory is the History of Reproducible Systems
Microhistory is the history of a reproducible system, one which has few enough vari-
ables that it can be reset and replayed from the beginning in a series of controlled
experiments. It is history as a quantitative trajectory, history as a precise log of mea-
surements. For example, it could be the record of all past values of a state space vector
in a dynamical system, the account of all moves made by two deterministic algorithms
playing chess against each other, or the chronicle of all instructions executed by a
journaling ļ¬le system after being restored to factory settings. Microhistory is an applied subject, where accurate historical measurement is of di-
rect technical and commercial importance. We can see this with technologies like the
Kalman ļ¬lter, which was used for steering the spaceship used in the moon landing. You can see the full technical details here, but roughly speaking the Kalman ļ¬lter uses
past measurements x[t 1];x[t 2];x[t 3]to inform the estimate of a systemās current
statex[t], the action that should be taken u[t], and the corresponding prediction of the
future state x[t+ 1]should that action be taken. For example, it uses past velocity,
direction headings, fuel levels, and the like to recommend how a space shuttle should be
steered at the current timestep. Crucially, if the microhistory is not accurate enough, if
the conļ¬dence intervals around each measurement are too wide, or if (say) the velocity
estimate is wrong altogether, then the Kalman Filter does not work and Apollo doesnāt 2.2. MICROHISTORY AND MACROHISTORY 31
happen. At a surface level, the Kalman ļ¬lter resembles the kind of time series analysis thatās
common in ļ¬nance. The key diļ¬erence is that the Kalman ļ¬lter is used on reproducible
systemswhileļ¬nanceistypicallya non-reproducible system. IfyouāreusingtheKalman
ļ¬lter to guide a drone from point A to point B, but you have a bug in your code and
the drone crashes, you can simply pick up the drone14, put it back on the launch pad
at point A, and try again. Because you can repeat the experim
Microhistory involves reproducible systems where repeated experiments yield consistent results, like drone guidance systems that can be tested and refined through iteration.
Financial markets represent non-reproducible systems because human counterparties adapt and react adversarially, making past performance unreliable for future predictions.
Accurate measurement of the past enables better prediction of the future - civilizations with strong microhistory capabilities can achieve feats like reaching the moon.
Macrohistory deals with non-reproducible systems like human civilization that have too many variables to reset and replay, requiring different analytical approaches than controlled experiments.
ent over and over, you
can eventually get very precise measurements and a functioning guidance algorithm. Thatās a reproducible system. In ļ¬nance, however, you usually canāt just keep re-running a trading algorithm that
makes money and get the same result. Eventually your counterparties will adapt and
get wise. A key diļ¬erence relative to our drone example is the presence of animate
objects (other humans) who wonāt always do the same thing given the same input.15
In fact, they can often be adversarial, observing and reacting to your actions, inten-
tionally confounding your predictions, especially if they can proļ¬t from doing so. Past
performance is no guarantee of future results in ļ¬nance, as opposed to physics. Unlike
the situation with the drone, a market isnāt a reproducible system. Microhistory thus has its limits, but itās an incredibly powerful concept. If we have
good enough measurements on the past, then we have a better prediction of the future
in an extremely literal sense. If we have tight conļ¬dence intervals on our measurements
of the past, if the probability distribution P(x[t 1])is highly peaked, then we get
correspondingly tight conļ¬dence intervals on the present P(x[t])and the future P(x[t+
1]). Conversely, themoreuncertaintyaboutyourpast, themoreconfusedyouareabout
where youāre from and where youāre going, the more likely your rocket will crash. Itās
Orwell more literally than he ever expected: he who controls the past controls the
future, in the direct sense that he has better control theory. Only a civilization with a
strong capacity for accurate microhistory could ever make it to the moon. This is a powerful analogy for civilization. A group of people who doesnāt know who
they are or where they came from wonāt ever make it to the moon, let alone to Mars. Can we make it more than an analogy? 2.2.3 Macrohistory is the History of Non-Reproducible Sys-
tems
Macrohistory is the history of a non-reproducible system, one which has too many
variables to easily be reset and replayed from the beginning. It is history that is not
14Yes, it could break. If so, use an identical one from the same factory. 15Functional programming aļ¬cionados will recognize this as being similar to the diļ¬erence between
pure and impure functions. A pure function like sin(x)always returns the same output given the
same input. An impure function like number_of_users() does not, typically because there is some
external state variable such as a database. 32 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
directly amenable to controlled experiment. At small scale, thatās the unpredictable
ļ¬ow of a turbulent ļ¬uid; at very large scale, itās the history of humanity. We think of macrohistory as being on a continuum with microhistory. Why? Weāll
make a few points and then tie them all together. ā¢First, science progresses by taking phenomena formerly thought of as non-
reproducible (and hence unpredictable) systems, isolating the key variables, and
turning them into reproducible (and hence predictable) systems. For example,
Kochās postulates include the idea of transmission pathogenesis, which turned
the vague concept of infection via āmiasmaā into a reproducible phenomenon: ex-
pose a mouse to a speciļ¬c microorganism in a laboratory setting and an infection
arises, but not otherwise. ā¢Second, and relatedly, science progresses by improved instrumentation, by better
recordkeeping. Star charts enabled celestial navigation. Johann Balmerās doc-
umentation of the exact spacing of hydrogenās emission spectra led to quantum
mechanics. Gregor Mendelās careful counting of pea plants led to modern genet-
ics. Things we counted as simply beyond human ken ā the stars, the atom, the
genome ā became things humans can comprehend by simply counting. ā¢Third, how do we even know anything about the history of ancient Rome or
Egypt or Medieval Europe? From artifacts and written records. Thousands of
years ago, people were scratching customer reviews into a stone tablet, one of the
ļ¬
šļø Historical knowledge has always depended on written records, from ancient tablets to Roman documents, making documentation crucial for understanding civilizations.
š± Modern digital technology creates unprecedented data volumes, with billions using social media and capturing photos/videos daily, recording more information per day than all of humanity did before 1900.
š° Digital history has commercial value through reputation systems and user behavior tracking, with platforms like Uber relying on historical data to prevent fraud and maintain trust.
š Bitcoin's blockchain technology offers solutions to major problems in digital history including corporate data silos, bot-generated content, censorship, and AI-generated fakes that threaten historical accuracy.
rst tablet-based apps. We know who Abelard and Heloise were from their letters
to each other. We know what the Romans were like from what they recorded. To
a signiļ¬cant extent, what we know about history is what weāve recovered from
what people wrote down. ā¢Fourth, today, we have digital documentation on an unprecedented scale. We
have billions of people using social media each day for almost a decade now. We also have billions of phones taking daily photographs and videos. We have
countless data feeds of instruments. And we have massive hard drives to store it
all. So, if reckoned on the basis of raw bytes, we likely record more information
in a day than all of humanity recorded up to the year 1900. It is by far the most
comprehensive log of human activity weāve ever had. We can now see the continuum16between macrohistory and microhistory. We are col-
lecting the kinds of precise, quantitative, microhistorical measurements that typically
led to the emergence of a new science...but at the scale of billions of people, and going
into our second decade. 16This is similar to the continuum between microeconomics and macroeconomics (disputed by the
Keynesians, who say that governments arenāt households), or the continuum between natural intelli-
gence and artiļ¬cial intelligence (disputed by those who think human intelligence is sui generis , rather
than something that was gradually formed by an evolutionary process and could be formed through a
computational process), or the continuum between microevolution and macroevolution (disputed by
those who think that sequence evolution isnāt species evolution, or [more reasonably] that abiogenesis
isnāt yet fully experimentally demonstrated). 2.2. MICROHISTORY AND MACROHISTORY 33
So, another term for āBig Dataā should be āBig History.ā All data is a record of
past events, sometimes the immediate past, sometimes the past of months or years
ago, sometimes (in the case of Google Books or the Digital Michelangelo project) the
past of decades or centuries ago. After all, whatās another word for data storage in a
computer? Memory. Memory, as in the sense of human memory, and as in the sense
of history. That memory is commercially valuable. A technologist who neglects history ensures
their users will get exploited. Proof? Consider reputation systems. Any scaled market-
place has them. The historyof an Uber driver or riderās on-platform behavior partially
predicts their future behavior. Without years of star ratings, without memories of past
actions of millions of people, these platforms would be wrecked by fraud. Macrohistory
makes money. This is just one example. There are huge short and long-term incentives to record all
this data, all this microhistory and macrohistory. And future historians17will study
our digital log to understand what we were like as a civilization. 2.2.4 Bitcoinās Blockchain Is a Technology for Robust Macro-
history
There are some catches to the concept of digital macrohistory, though: silos, bots,
censors, and fakes. As weāll show, Bitcoin and its generalizations provide a powerful
way to solve these issues. First, letās understand the problems of silos, bots, censors, and fakes. The macrohis-
torical log is largely siloed across diļ¬erent corporate servers, on the premises of Twitter
and Facebook and Google. The posts are typically not digitally signed or cryptograph-
ically timestamped, so much of the content is (or could be) from bots rather than
humans. Inconvenient digital history can be deleted by putting suļ¬cient pressure on
centralized social media companies or academic publishers, censoring true information
in the name of taking down ādisinformation,ā as weāve already seen. And the advent
of AI allows highly realistic fakes of the past and present to be generated. If weāre not
careful, we could drown in fake data. So, how could someone in the future (or even the present) know if a particular event
they didnāt directly observe was real? The Bitcoin blockchain gives
Bitcoin blockchain represents the most rigorous form of history ever created, being technically and economically resistant to revision through cryptographic primitives and financial incentives.
The blockchain records immutable who, what, and when data for every transaction since 2009, creating an 'immediatist model of history' where the past remains constantly present and verifiable.
Falsifying Bitcoin's historical record would require breaking multiple cryptographic systems simultaneously (digital signatures, hash functions, timestamps) while maintaining consistency across all connected records.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism creates a 'timechain' with statistically regular intervals, and the technology could potentially mark a new historical era comparable to the invention of written language.
The Bitcoin blockchain can record non-Bitcoin events through proof-of-existence techniques, allowing any historical event to be cryptographically verified for the cost of a single transaction.
one answer. It is
the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and
economicallyresistanttorevision. Thankstoacombinationofcryptographicprimitives
and ļ¬nancial incentives, it is very challenging to falsify the who, what, and when of
transactions written to the Bitcoin blockchain. Who initiated this transfer, what amount of Bitcoin did they send, what metadata
did they attach to the transaction, and when did they send it? That information is
recorded in the blockchain and suļ¬cient to give a bare bones history of the entire
17Assuming we make it past the Great Filter. 34 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Bitcoin economy since 2009. And if you sum up that entire history to the present day,
you also get the values of how much BTC is held by each address. Itās an immediatist
model of history, where the past is not even past - itās with us at every second. In a little more detail, whyis the Bitcoin blockchain so resistant to the rewriting
of history? To falsify the āwhoā of a single transaction youād need to fake a digital
signature, to falsify the āwhatā youād need to break a hash function, to falsify the
āwhenā youādneedtocorruptatimestamp, andyouādneedtodothiswhilesomehownot
breaking all the other records cryptographically connected to that transaction through
the mechanism of composed block headers. Some call the Bitcoin blockchain a timechain , because unlike many other blockchains,
its proof-of-work mechanism and diļ¬culty adjustment ensure a statistically regular
time interval between blocks, crucial to its function as a digital history. (I recognize that these concepts and some of what follows is technical. Our whirlwind
tourmayprovokeeitherfamiliarhead-noddingorconfusedhead-scratching. Ifyouwant
more detail, weāve linked deļ¬nitions of each term, but fully explaining them is beyond
the scope of this work. However, see The Truth Machine for a popular treatment and
Dan Bonehās Cryptography course for technical detail.) Nevertheless, hereās the point for even a nontechnical reader: the Bitcoin blockchain
gives ahistory thatās hard to falsify . Unless thereās an advance in quantum computing,
abreakthroughinpuremath, aheretoforeunseenbuginthecode, orahighlyexpensive
51% attack that probably only China could muster, it is essentially infeasible to rewrite
the history of the Bitcoin blockchain ā or anything written to it. And even if such
an event doeshappen, it wouldnāt be an instantaneous burning of Bitcoinās Library
of Alexandria. The hash function could be replaced with a quantum-safe version, or
another chain robust to said attack could take Bitcoinās place, and back up the ledger
of all historical Bitcoin transactions to a new protocol. With that said, we are not arguing that Bitcoin is infallible. We are arguing that it
is the best technology yet invented for recording human history. And if the concept
of cryptocurrency can endure past the invention of quantum decryption, we will likely
think of the beginning of cryptographically veriļ¬able history as on par with the begin-
ning of written history millennia ago. Future societies may think of the year 2022 AD
as the year 13 AS, with āAfter Satoshiā as the new āAnno Domini,ā and the block clock
as the new universal time. 2.2.5 The Bitcoin Blockchain Can Record Non-Bitcoin Events
For the price of a single transaction, the Bitcoin blockchain can be generalized to
provideacryptographicallyveriļ¬ablerecordofanyhistoricalevent, a proof-of-existence . For example, perhaps there is some oļ¬-chain event of signiļ¬cant importance where you
want to store it for the record. Suppose itās the famous photo of Stalin with his cronies,
because you anticipate the rewriting of history. The proof-of-existence technique weāre 2.2. MICROHISTORY AND MACROHISTORY 35
about to describe wouldnāt directly be able to prove the dataof the ļ¬le was real, but
you could establish the metadata on the ļ¬le ā the who, what, and when ā to a future
observer. Speciļ¬cally, given a proof-
Digital files can be timestamped on Bitcoin's blockchain using Merkle trees and OP_RETURN, creating tamper-proof historical records that would be nearly impossible to fake retroactively.
Other blockchains can use Bitcoin as a backup system by periodically recording their data summaries, gaining Bitcoin's security properties at the cost of $52k-$3M annually depending on frequency.
This 'industrial' use of Bitcoin may become dominant as transaction fees rise, potentially pricing out individual users while supporting high-value proof-of-stake chains that need objective validation.
The technology addresses fundamental problems like weak subjectivity in proof-of-stake systems by anchoring them to Bitcoin's objective longest-chain rule.
of-existence, a future observer would be able to conļ¬rm that
a given digital signature (who) put a given hash of a photo (what) on chain at a given
time (when). That future observer might well suspect the photo could still be fake, but
theyād know itād have to be faked at that precise time by the party controlling that
wallet. And the evidence would be on-chain years before the airbrushed oļ¬cial photo
of Stalin was released. Thatās implausible under many models. Whoād fake something
so speciļ¬c years in advance? Itād be more likely the oļ¬cial photo was fake than the
proof-of-existence. So, letās suppose that this limited level of proof was worth it to you. You are willing
to pay such that future generations can see an indelible record of a bit of history. How
would you get that proof onto the Bitcoin blockchain? The way youād do this is by organizing your arbitrarily large external dataset (a photo,
or something much larger than that) into a Merkle tree, calculating a string of ļ¬xed
length called a Merkle root, and then writing that to the Bitcoin blockchain through
OP_RETURN . This furnishes a tool for proof-of-existence for any digital ļ¬le. You can do this as a one-oļ¬ for a single piece of data, or as a periodic backup for any
non-Bitcoin chain. So you could, in theory, put a digital summary of many gigabytes
of data from another chain on the Bitcoin blockchain every ten minutes for the price
of a single BTC transaction, thereby proving it existed. This would eļ¬ectively āback
upā this other blockchain and give it some of the irreversibility properties of Bitcoin. Call this kind of chain a subchain. By analogy to the industrial use of gold, this type of āindustrialā use case of a Bitcoin
transaction may turn out to be quite important. A subchain with many millions of oļ¬-
Bitcoin transactions every ten minutes could likely generate enough economic activity
to easily pay for a single Bitcoin transaction.18
18But how could those non-Bitcoin chains be cryptographically veriļ¬able if they arenāt based on
proof-of-work, or are transitioning away? The short answer is that even a proof-of-stake chain can
have its chaintip hashed to every Bitcoin block via OP_RETURN . At roughly 10 minutes between blocks,
thatās 144 transactions per day or 52,560 transactions per year. Though Bitcoin transaction fees may
rise over time, so far theyāve been as low as one USD or as high as sixty USD, so this would cost
something between 52k to 3M USD per year in Bitcoin fees if you wanted to āback up to Bitcoinā
every 10 minutes. If you wanted to do it only every hour, itād be 1/6 this cost, and at once per day
itād be 1/144 this cost. These kinds of prices are aļ¬ordable for any external chain that is handling
signiļ¬cant value. A group called Veriblock did some research on this, which they called proof-of-proof,
and shipped a functioning product which at one point was a signiļ¬cant fraction of so-called OP_RETURN
transactions, but has now been discontinued as has USDTās Omni-Chain. Some people are against the use of OP_RETURN in this way, but itās a feature of Bitcoin that can be
used without anyoneās permission. So I think itās quite likely that high stakes proof-of-stake chains get
hashed to Bitcoin in some form. This addresses the issue Vitalik Buterin has termed weak subjectivity,
where some information external to the blockchain needs to be used to ļ¬gure out which chain is the
right one to follow - rather than the wholly objective measure of Bitcoin, which says āthe chain with 36 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
And as more people try to use the Bitcoin blockchain, given its capacity limits, it might
turn out that onlyindustrial use cases like this could aļ¬ord to pay suļ¬cient fees in this
manner, as direct individual use of the Bitcoin blockchain could become expensive. So, that means we can use the proof-of-existence technique to log arbitrary data to the
Bitcoin blockchain, including data from other chains. 2.2.6 Blockchains Can Record the History o
Bitcoin blockchain records complete economic history with every transaction since inception, accounting for every fraction of BTC down to one hundred millionths.
Bitcoin exists in a hybrid privacy state where transactions are public but companies like Chainalysis can deanonymize many addresses and users.
Various blockchain innovations are expanding capabilities beyond basic transactions, including zero-knowledge privacy, smart contracts, social networks, and identity systems.
As blockspace increases, more digital history of economy and society will be recorded on-chain in cryptographically verifiable yet privacy-preserving ways.
New proof techniques and cryptocredentials allow representation of non-financial data like diplomas, endorsements, and corporate abstractions on blockchain.
The evolution parallels bandwidth increases that now allow megabytes of JavaScript on mobile phones, representing a breakthrough in digital record-keeping.
f an Economy and
Society
We just zoomed in to detail how youād log a single transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain
to prove any given historical event happened. Now letās zoom out. As noted, the full scope of what the Bitcoin blockchain represents is nothing less than
the history of an entire economy. Every transaction is recorded since t= 0. Every
fractionofaBTCisaccountedfor, downtoonehundredmillionthofaBitcoin. Nothing
is lost. Except, of course, for all the oļ¬-chain data that accompanies a transaction - like the
identity of the sender and receiver, the reason for their transaction, the SKU of any
goods sold, and so on. There are usually good reasons for these things to remain
private, or partially private, so you might think this is a feature. The problem is that Bitcoinās design is a bit of a tweener, as it doesnāt actually ensure
that public transactions remain private. Indeed there are companies like Elliptic and
Chainalysis devoted entirely to the deanonymization of public Bitcoin addresses and
transactions. The right model of the history of the Bitcoin economy is that itās in
a hybrid state, where the public has access to the raw transaction data, but private
actors (like Chainalysis and Elliptic) have access to much more information and can
deanonymize many transactions. Moreover, Bitcoin can onlyexecute Bitcoin transactions, rather than all the other kinds
of digital operations you could facilitate with more blockspace. But people are working
on all of this. ā¢Zero-knowledgetechnologylikeZCash, Ironļ¬sh, andTornadoCashallowon-chain
attestation of exactly what people want to make public and nothing more. the most accumulated chainwork is the correct chain to follow.ā
Such an objective measure would be helpful in the event that many real-seeming blockchains are
put out on the internet at the same time by a motivated attacker who also has control over social
media (like China), such that youād need to pick the right chain from the head of this hydra with only
your trusty computer. With something like proof-of-proof, you could ļ¬rst orient by ļ¬nding the correct
Bitcoin blockchain amidst this mess, and then use it to ļ¬nd the proper heads of all other chains. The cryptopolitical implications of doing something like this are humorous, because some Bitcoin
Maximalists donāt like the use of OP_RETURN , and some users of non-Bitcoin chains want to have their
own fully standalone ecosystems, but the combination here would produce (a) a steady stream of fees
for Bitcoin miners, helping Bitcoinās security budget and (b) give a last-resort backup plan for the
security of other chains. 2.2. MICROHISTORY AND MACROHISTORY 37
ā¢Smart contract chains like Ethereum and Solana extend the capability of what
can be done on chain, at the expense of higher complexity. ā¢Decentralized social networks like Mirror and DeSo put social events on chain
alongside ļ¬nancial transactions. ā¢NamingsystemsliketheEthereumNameService(ENS)andSolanaNameService
(SNS) attach identity to on-chain transactions. ā¢Incorporation systems allow the on-chain representation of corporate abstrac-
tions above the level of a mere transaction, like ļ¬nancial statements or even full
programmable company-equivalents like DAOs. ā¢Newprooftechniqueslikeproof-of-solvencyandproof-of-locationextendthesetof
things one can cryptographically prove on chain from the basic who/what/when
of Bitcoin. ā¢Cryptocredentials, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Non-Transferable Fungibles
(NTFs), and Soulbounds allow the representation of non-ļ¬nancial data on chain,
like diplomas or endorsements. Whatās the point? If blockspace continues to increase, ever more of the digital history
of our economy and society will be recorded on chain, in a cryptographically veriļ¬able
yet privacy-preserving way. The analogy is to the increase in bandwidth, which now
allows us to download a megabyte of JavaScript on a mobile phone to run a webapp,
an unthinkable indulgence in the year 2000. This is a breakthrough in digital m
š Cryptohistory uses public blockchains to create a comprehensive, verifiable record of human activity that addresses problems like corporate silos, bots, censorship, and deepfakes.
š The concept envisions a 'ledger of record' containing all public human behavior - from tweets to birth certificates - digitally signed, timestamped, and cryptographically verified.
āļø This technology can serve opposing purposes: empowering individuals to resist historical revisionism or enabling totalitarian surveillance when centralized and stripped of cryptographic protections.
šļø Political power seeks to control historical narratives because society's morality derives from its understanding of the past, making control of history a tool for controlling present-day legitimacy.
acrohistory that addresses the issues of silos, bots,
censors, and fakes. Public blockchains arenāt siloed in corporations, but publicly acces-
sible. Theyprovidenewtools, likestakingandENS-styleidentity, thatallowseparation
of bots from humans. They can incorporate many diļ¬erent proof techniques, including
proof-of-existence and more, to address the problem of deepfakes. And they can have
very strong levels of censorship resistance by paying transaction fees to hash their chain
state to the Bitcoin blockchain. 2.2.7 Cryptohistory is Cryptographically Veriļ¬able Macrohis-
tory
We can now see how the expansion of blockspace is on track to give us a cryptographi-
cally veriļ¬able macrohistory , or cryptohistory for short. This is the log of everything that billions of people choose to make public: every
decentralized tweet, every public donation, every birth and death certiļ¬cate, every
marriage and citizenship record, every crypto domain registration, every merger and
acquisition of an on-chain entity, every ļ¬nancial statement, every public record ā all
digitally signed, timestamped, and hashed in freely available public ledgers.19
19All of this can be hashed to the Bitcoin blockchain as well via the Merkle root technique previously
described, for the price of just one (1) Bitcoin transaction. That wonāt solve the so-called data 38 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every
purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and
every step with a Fitbit ā all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to
replay the entire cryptographically veriļ¬ed history of a community.18Thatās the future
of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what
paper records were to oral records. Itās also a vision for what macrohistory will become. Not a scattered letter from an
Abelard here and a stone tablet from an Egyptian there. But a full log, a cryptohis-
tory. The uniļ¬cation of microhistory and macrohistory in one giant cryptographically
veriļ¬able dataset. We call this indelible, computable, digital, authenticatable history
theledger of record . This concept is foundational to the network state. And it can be used for good or ill. In decentralized form, the ledger of record allows an individual to resist the Stalinist
rewriting of the past. It is the ultimate expression of the bottom-up view of history
as whatās written to the ledger. But you can also imagine a bastardized form, where
the cryptographic checks are removed, the read/write access is centralized, and the
idea of a total digital history is used by a state to create an NSA/China-like system of
inescapable, lifelong surveillance.20
This in turn leads us to a top-down view of history, the future trajectory we want to
avoid, where political power is used to defeat technological truth. 2.3 Political Power and Technological Truth
In the top-down view, history is written by the winners. It is about political power
triumphing over technological truth. Why does power care about the past? Because the morality of society is derived
from its history. When the Chinese talk about Western imperialism, they arenāt just
talking about some forgettable dust-up in the South China Sea, but how that relates to
generationsofcolonialismandoppression, totheEightNationsAllianceandtheOpium
Wars and so on. And when you see someone denounced on American Twitter as an
x-ist, history is likewise being brought to bear. Again, why are they bad? Because of
our history of x-ism...
As such, when you listen to a regimeās history, which you are doing every time you
hear its oļ¬cial organs praise or denounce someone, you should listen critically. availability problem, but it will solve the proof-of-existence problem. 20This would be to the ledger of record what a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is to
Bitcoi
š Political authorities use proven techniques to selectively curate historical narratives that serve their current regime's interests and legitimacy.
š The "political determinist model" demonstrates that history is literally written by winners, making whoever claims to write the "first draft" automatically one of those winners.
š The "political mascot model" shows how states portray themselves as victims while championing oppressed groups, highlighting their enemies' crimes while suppressing their own atrocities.
š Modern examples from China, Russia, and the US reveal how each regime amplifies historical events that make rivals look bad while burying inconvenient truths about their own past actions.
ā° State narratives selectively use historical time periods, going back centuries when convenient (like 1619) but mysteriously avoiding other eras that would undermine current political messaging.
n; something that takes some of the concepts, but takes away the freedom. As weāll get to, these
correspond to benign and malign versions of the Network/State synthesis respectively. 2.3. POLITICAL POWER AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRUTH 39
2.3.1 Political Power as the Driving Force of History
How do the authorities use history? What techniques are they using? Itās not just a
random collection of names and dates. They have proven techniques for sifting through
the archives, for staļ¬ng a retinue of heros and villains from the past, for distilling the
documents into (politically) useful parables. Here are two of them. ā¢Political determinist model: history is written by the winners. People have heard
this saying, but taking it seriously has profound implications. For example, who-
ever claims to be writing the āļ¬rst draft of historyā is therefore one of the win-
ners. For another, history is whatās useful to the regime. A classic example is
Katyn Forest: the admission that the Soviets did it would have delegitimized
their postwar control over Poland during the 1945-1991 period, but once the
USSR collapsed the truth could be revealed. ā¢Political mascot model: history is written by winners pretending to be acting
on behalf of losers. This is a variant of the political determinist model, also
known as āoļ¬ense archaeology,ā and practiced by the modern American, Chinese,
and Russian establishments ā all of whom portray themselves as victims. The
techniqueistopickamascotthatthestate claimstochampion, suchastheSoviet
Unionās proletariat, and then go through history to ļ¬nd the worst examples of
the stateās current rival doing something bad to them. Take these real events, put them on the front page, and ensure everyone knows
of them. Conversely, ensure oļ¬-narrative events are ignored or suppressed as
taboo. AgaintakingtheUSSRasacasestudy, thisinvolvedļ¬ndingendless(real!) examples of Western capitalists screwing the working class, and suppressing the
worse (also real!) instances of Soviet communists gulaging theirworking class, as
well as cases of the working class itself behaving badly. Generalization to other
contexts is left as an exercise for the reader, but hereās a Russian example of what
an American would call āresponsibility to protectā (R2P). These techniques are used to write history that favors a state. Here are more examples:
ā¢CCP China : Todayās Chinese media covers the Eight-Nations Alliance, the
Opium Wars, and the like exhaustively in its domestic output, as these events
show the malevolence of the European colonialists ā who literally fought wars to
keep China subjugated and addicted to heroin. Their domestic history does not
mention the Uighurs, Tiananmen, and the like domestically. Xiās CCP did stress
the domestic problem of corruption via the āTigers and Fliesā campaign...but
thatās in part because the anti-corruption campaign was politically useful against
his internal enemies, and seemed not to ensnare his allies. ā¢US Establishment : Todayās US establishment covers 6/4/1989 and the 2022
Russo-Ukrainian War heavily, because they are real events that make China and
Russia look bad and the US look good. It does not mention the 1900 Eight-
Nations Alliance (when the US helped invade China with a ācoalition of the will- 40 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
ingā to defend European imperialism) or the 1932 Ukrainian Holodomor (when
The New York Times Companyās Walter Duranty helped Soviet Russia choke out
Ukraine) as these cut in the opposite direction. The current US narrative also does not stress the Cultural Revolution (which
bears too close a resemblance to present day America), or Western journalists
like Edgar Snow who helped Mao come to power, or the full ugly history of
American support for Russian and Chinese communism. This isnāt simply a
matter of the age of events ā after all, regime media goes back further in time
when convenient, distorting events from 1619 for todayās headlines, yet somehow
their time machine stutters o
šļø Every civilization presents politically useful history while downplaying inconvenient truths about themselves or their allies.
āļø The 'atrocity story' is a time-honored technique used by states to justify military action by emphasizing defensive nature and enemy savagery.
š”ļø In peacetime, toned-down atrocity stories justify expansions of political power through fear-based narratives about public safety.
āļø While many atrocity stories are fake or exaggerated (like Iraq's WMD), overcorrection leads to dangerous genocide denial, requiring careful balance between skepticism and recognition of real atrocities.
n the years 1932 or 1900. In modern America, as in
modern China, the history you hear about is the history the establishment ļ¬nds
to be politically useful against its internal and external rivals. ā¢The British Empire : The British in both WW1 and WW2 understandably em-
phasized the evils of Germany, but not so much the evils of their ally Russia, or
their own evils during the Opium Wars, or the desire for the Indian subcontinent
to breathe free, and so on. (This one is almost too easy as the UK is no longer
a contender for heavyweight champion of the world, so no one is oļ¬ended when
someone points out its past self-serving inconsistencies. Indeed, documenting the
UKās sins is now a cottage industry for Britainās virtue signalers, as beating up
on a beaten empire is far easier than tackling the taboos of a still live one.) Point being: once you get your head out of the civilization you grew up in, and look at
things comparatively, the techniques of political history become obvious. One of those
techniques deserves special mention, and thatās a peacetime version of the āatrocity
storyā:
One of the most time-honored techniques to mobilize public animosity
against the enemy and to justify military action is the atrocity story. This
technique, says Professor Lasswell, has been used āwith unvarying success
in every conļ¬ict known to man.ā
The concept is as useful in peacetime as it is in war. Why? Because states get their
people hyped up to ļ¬ght wars by stressing the essentially defensive nature of what they
are doing and the savage behavior of the enemy. But war is politics by other means, so
politics is war by other means. Even in peacetime, the state is predicated on force. And
this use of force requires justiļ¬cation. The atrocity story is the tool used to convince
people that the use of state force is legitimate. Coming from a diļ¬erent vantage point, Rene Girard would call this a āfounding mur-
der.ā Once you see this technique, you see it everywhere. Somewhat toned-down
versions of the atrocity story are the go-to technique used to justify expansions of
political power. ā¢If we donāt force people to take oļ¬ their shoes at the airport, people will die! ā¢If we donāt stop people from voluntarily taking experimental curative drugs, peo- 2.3. POLITICAL POWER AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRUTH 41
ple will die! ā¢If we donāt set up a disinformation oļ¬ce to stop people from making hostile
comments online, people will die! Indeed, almost everything in politics is backed by an atrocity story.21Thereās a some-
times real, sometimes fake, sometimes exaggerated Girardian founding murder (or at
least founding injury) behind much of what the government does. Sometimes the atrocity story is framed in terms of terrorists, sometimes in terms of
children...but the general concept is āsomething so bad happened, we must use (state)
force to prevent it from happening again.ā Often this completely ignores the death
caused by that force itself. For example, when the FDA āpreventedā deaths by cracking
down on drug approvals after thalidomide, it caused many more deaths via Eroomās
Law and drug lag. Andsometimestheatrocitystoryisjustcompletelyfake; beforeIraqwasfalselyaccused
of holding WMD, it was falsely accused of tossing babies from incubators. With that said, itās possible to overcorrect here. Just because there is an incentive to
fake (or exaggerate) atrocities does not mean that allatrocities are fake or exagger-
ated.22Yes, you should be aware that states are always āļ¬opping,ā exaggerating the
severity of the fouls against them or the mascots they claim to represent, trying to
bring in the public on their side, whether they are Chinese or American or Russian. But once youāre aware of the political power model of history, the next goal is to guard
against both the Scylla and the Charybdis, against being too credulous andtoo cynical. Because just as the atrocity story is a tool for political power, unfortunately so too is
genocide denial ā as we can see from Th
The author argues that to counter state propaganda and lies, we need independent 'technological truth' that can judge states from outside their influence.
The technological determinist model proposes that technology, not politics, is the true driving force of history since societies must preserve accurate technical knowledge to survive.
Scientific and technological facts create an unbroken chain of knowledge from ancient civilizations to today, transcending political ideologies and state distortions.
The trajectory model views histories as dynamical systems with complex patterns, similar to physics equations, where simple rules produce complicated societal trajectories.
Political ideologies cycle through time, but their feasibility depends on current technological capabilities rather than inherent political merit.
e New York Timesā Pulitzer-winning coverup
of Stalinās Ukrainian famine. To maintain this balance, to know when states are lying or not, we need a form of truth
powerful enough to stand outside any state and judge it from above. A way to respond
to oļ¬cial statistics not with either reļ¬exive faith or disbelief, but with dispassionate,
independent calculation. The bottom-up cryptohistory we introduced in the previous section is clearly relevant. But to fully appreciate it we need an allied theory: the technological truth theory of
history. 21Remy Munasiļ¬ās video on the topic is excellent: People Will Die! 22Not all laws are counterproductive either, though many new laws are. Thatās because new laws
are like code that is pushed live to production without even being read (let alone tested), often in
the face of tremendous opposition, aļ¬ecting millions of citizens, with minimal monitoring to ensure
theyāre producing the desired results, an extremely slow customer feedback cycle, and few ways to
truly opt out. Not alllaws, though! 42 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
2.3.2 Technological Truth as the Driving Force of History
The political power model of history gives us a useful lens: history isoften just Leninist
who/whom and Schmittian friend/enemy. But itās a little parched23to say that history
is always and only that, solelyabout the raw exercise of political power. After all, a
society must pass down true facts about nature, for example, or else its crops will not
grow24ā and its political class will losepower. This leads to a diļ¬erent set of tech-focused lenses for analyzing history. ā¢Technological determinist model: technology is the driving force of history . While
the political determinist model stresses that history is written ā and hence dis-
torted ā by the winners, and thereby propagates only that which is useful to a
given state, the technological determinist model notes that there are some key
areas ā principally in science and technology ā where many (if not most) soci-
eties derive a beneļ¬t from passing down a technical fact withoutdistortion. There
is after all an unbroken chain from Archimedes, Aryabhata, Al-Kwarizhmi, and
antiquity to all our existing science and technology. Hundreds of years later, we
donāt care that much about the laws of Isaac Newtonās time, but we do care about
Newtonās laws. In this model, all political ideologies have been around for all time
ā the only thing that changes is whether a given ideology is now technologically
feasible as an organizing system for humanity. Thus: political fashions just come
and go in cycles, so the absolute measure of societal progress is a cultureās level
of technological advancement on something like the Kardashev scale. ā¢Trajectory model: histories are trajectories. We mentioned this concept before
when we discussed history as a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories, but itās worth
reprising. If youāre technically inclined, you might wonder why we spend so
much time on history in this book. One answer is that histories are trajectories
of dynamical systems. If you can spend your entire life studying wave equations,
diļ¬usion equations, time series, or the Navier-Stokes equations ā and you can ā
you can do the same for the dynamics of people. In more detail, we know from
physics (and Stephen Wolfram!) that very simple rules can produce incredibly
complicated trajectories of dynamical systems. For Navier-Stokes, for example,
we can divide these trajectories up into laminar ļ¬ow, turbulent ļ¬ow, inviscid
23Thereās an amusing meme which illustrates the limits of political history. āTime is real,ā says
Aristotle. āTime is an illusion of the mind,ā says Immanuel Kant. āTime was invented by clock
companies to sell more clocks,ā says Karl Marx. 24Ofcourse, someregimesdidinterferewiththetransmissionofbasicscientiļ¬cfacts. Troļ¬mLysenko
famously said that wheat could become rye if only the working class willed it. He caused preventable
famines and murdered Mendelian geneticis
Soviet communism's denial of technological truth led to mass death, demonstrating that excessive political untruth creates natural selection pressure against ideologies that ignore reality.
Human behavior can be analyzed like fluid dynamics, with patterns of 'laminar good times' and 'turbulent revolutionary times' potentially predictable through data analysis of digital human interactions.
Digital environments and social networks are creating unprecedented opportunities for developing Asimovian psychohistory by analyzing the massive data exhaust humans produce online.
The helical model of history reconciles linear progress with cyclical patterns, suggesting we advance technologically with each turn while experiencing recurring social cycles.
ts for their bourgeois belief in ineradicable biology. His
ideology did gain him political power, for a time...but to what end? Subjects ruled under a political
ideology that completely denied technological truth ended up dying, which meant political power over
no one. From a 50,000 foot perspective, this was a form of natural selection pressure against the
spread of Soviet communism speciļ¬cally, and against a purely political determinist model of the world
more generally. A mind virus that kills its host rapidly isnāt a great mind virus. In other words, there
isa consequence for excessive untruth in service of political power, though that consequence might
simply be death of both ruler and ruled. 2.3. POLITICAL POWER AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRUTH 43
ļ¬ow, incompressible ļ¬ow, and so on, to describe diļ¬erent ways a velocity ļ¬eld
can evolve over time. These classiļ¬cations are derived from measurements made
of ļ¬uids over time. And the study of just one of these trajectory types can be a
whole research discipline. Thatās how rich the dynamics of inanimate objects are. Now compare that to
the macroscopic movements of millions of intelligent agents. You can similarly
try to derive rules about how humans behave under situations of laminar good
times, turbulent revolutionary times, and so on by studying the records we have
of human behavior ā the data exhaust that humans produce. This analogy is actually very tight if you think about virtual economies and the
history of human behavior on social networks and cryptosystems. In the fullness
of time, with truly open datasets, we may even be able to develop Asimovian
psychohistory from all the data recorded in the ledger of record, namely a way to
predict the macroscopic behavior of humans in certain situations without know-
ing every microscopic detail. We can already somewhat do this for constructed
environments like games25and markets, and ever more human environments are
becoming literally digitally constructed.26
ā¢Statistical model: history aids predictions . From a statisticianās perspective, his-
tory is necessary for accurately computing the future. See any time series analysis
or machine learning paper ā or the Kalman ļ¬lter, which makes this concept very
explicit. To paraphrase Orwell, without a quantitatively accurate record of the
past you cannot control the future, in the sense that your control theory literally
wonāt work. ā¢Helix model: linear and cyclical history can coexist . From a progressiveās perspec-
tive, history is a linear trend, where the āarc of historyā bends towards freedom,
and where those against a given cause are on the wrong side of history27. Others
think of history as cyclical, a constant loop where the only thing these technolo-
gists are doing is reinventing the wheel, or where āstrong men create good times,
good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times cre-
ate strong men.ā But thereās a third view, a helical view of history, which says
that from one viewpoint history is indeed progressive, from another itās genuinely
cyclical, and the reconciliation is that we move a bit forward technologically with
each turn of the corkscrew rather than collapsing. In this view, attempts to re-
store the immediate preceding state are unlikely, as theyāre rewinding the clock
ā but you might be able to get to a good state by winding the helix all the way
25In history, you canāt re-rerun the experiment. But for chess, you can. You can restore the initial
condition and replay the game. 26This is the open metaverse and augmented reality. But itās also social networks and ļ¬nancial apps. A very large fraction of human interactions now have something digital in the middle, just as they
grew to have a piece of paper from the state in the middle over the course of the last few centuries
(eg birth and death certiļ¬cates, property registries, and so on). 27People deemed to be on the wrong side of history arenāt just losing, theyāre ļ¬ghting against a
changing moral
𧬠The memetic evolution model suggests historical ideas survive like genetic mutations - those that provided technological or political advantages to their carriers were naturally selected over time.
š» The computational model argues that only data-driven analysis of complete historical datasets can avoid the inherent bias of selective storytelling and editorialization.
š§Ŗ The genomic model posits that DNA, languages, and artifacts provide more reliable historical evidence than texts, which can be fabricated or distorted.
šÆ The tech tree model reconciles individual agency with historical constraints, showing how great figures like Newton or Satoshi operated within the 'adjacent possible' of their era's available knowledge and tools.
ight also get to N out of
N simply by luck, if the population of N is small ā this is known as āļ¬xation by
genetic drift,ā where those with the mutation just happen to reproduce more than
others. But if the mutation confers some selective advantage s, if it aids in the
reproduction of its host in a competitive environment, then it has a better than
luck chance of getting to 100%. Similarly, those historical ideas that weāve heard
about can be thought of as those that aided or at least did not interfere with
the propagation of their respective carriers, often the authorities that write those
histories. Some of these ideas have tagged along by dumb luck, while others are
claims that were selectively advantageous to the success of the regime - often by
delegitimizing their rivals and legitimizing their own rule, or by giving them new
technologies. This is a theory of memetic evolution; the ideological mutations
that add technological edge or political power are the ones selected for. ā¢Computational model: history is the on-chain population; all the rest is editorial-
ization. Thereās a great book by Franco Moretti called Graphs, Maps, and Trees . Itās a computational study of literature. Morettiās argument is that every other
study of literature is inherently biased. The selection of which books to discuss
is itself an implicit editorialization. He instead makes this completely explicit by
creating a dataset of full texts, and writing code to produce graphs. The argu-
ment here is that only a computational history can represent the full population
in a statistical sense; anything else is just a biased sample. ā¢Genomic model: history is what DNA (and languages, and artifacts) show us. David Reichās Who We Are and How We Got Here is the canonical popular
summary of this school of thought, along with Cavalli-Sforzaās older book on the
History and Geography of Human Genes . The brief argument is: our true history
is written in our genes. Mere texts can be faked, distorted, or lost, but genomics
(modern or ancient) canāt be. Languages and artifacts are a bit less robust in
terms of the signal for historical reconstruction, though they often map to what
the new genomic studies are showing about patterns of ancient migrations. ā¢Tech Tree model: history is great men constrained by the adjacent possible . As
context, the great man theory of history says that individuals like Isaac Newton 46 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
and Winston Churchill shaped events. The counterargument says that these men
were carried on tides larger than them, and that others would have done the
same in their place. For example, for many (not all) Newtons, there is a Leibniz,
who could also have invented calculus. Itās impossible to fullytest either of these
theories without a Lenski-like experiment where we re-run history with the same
initial conditions, but a useful model to reconcile the two perspectives is the tech
tree from Civilization . Brieļ¬y, all known science represents the frontier of the
tree, and an individual can chooseto extend that tree in a given direction. There
wasnāt really a Leibniz for Satoshi, for example; at a time when others were
focused on social, mobile, and local, he was working on a completely diļ¬erent
paradigm. But he wasconstrained by the available subroutines, concepts like
Hashcash and chained timestamps and elliptic curves. Just like da Vinci could
have conceived a helicopter, but probably not built it with the materials then
available, the tech tree model allows for individual agency but subjects it to
the constraint of what is achievable by one person in a given era. The major
advantage of a tech tree is that (like the idea maze) it can be made visible, and
navigable, as has been done for longevity by the Foresight Institute. You might ļ¬nd it a bit surprising that there are as many diļ¬erent models for under-
standing history ā letās call them historical heuristics ā as there are programming
paradigms. Why might this be so?
History can be understood as analyzing humanity's complete 'log files' - all documents, artifacts, genes, and records left behind by society.
Historical heuristics serve as methods for distilling actionable insights from the vast data structure of human records and experiences.
Three concrete examples demonstrate how technological evidence (Tesla drive data, photo timestamps, blockchain records) successfully challenged false narratives from established media and institutions.
Technology is decentralizing truth determination away from centralized establishments like traditional media, providing more robust verification methods than previous 'gold standards.'
Well, just like the idea of statecraft strategies that
we introduce later, the study of history can also be analogized to a type of program-
ming, or at least data analysis. That is, history is the analysis of the log ļ¬les. ā¢Data exhaust model: history as the analysis of the log ļ¬les . Here, we mean
ālog ļ¬lesā in the most general sense of everything society has written down or
left behind; the documents, yes, but also the physical artifacts and genes and
artwork, just like a log āļ¬leā can contain binary objects and not just plain text. Extending the analogy, you can try to debug a program by ļ¬ying blind without
the logs, or alternatively you can try to look at every row of the logs, but rather
than either of these extremes youāll do best if you have a method for distilling
the logs into something actionable. And thatās why historical heuristics exist. They are strategies for distilling insight from
all the documents, genes, languages, transactions, inventions, collapses, and successes
of people over time. History is the entire record of everything humanity has done. Itās
a very rich data structure that we have only begun to even think of asa data structure. We can now think of written history as an (incomplete, biased, noisy) distillation of
this full log. After all, if youāve ever found a reporterās summary of an eyewitness video
to be wanting, or found a single video misleading relative to multiple camera angles,
youāll realize why having access to the fulllog of public events is a huge step forward. 2.3. POLITICAL POWER AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRUTH 47
2.3.3 A Collision of Political Power and Technological Truth
Weāve now deļ¬ned a top-down and bottom-up model of history. The collision of these
two models, of the establishmentās Orwellian relativism29and the absolute truth of the
Bitcoin blockchain, of political power and technological truth...that collision is worth
studying. Letās do three concrete examples where political power has encountered technological
truth. ā¢Tesla > NYT . Elon Musk used the instrumental record of a Tesla drive to knock
down an NYT story. The New York Times Company claimed the car had run
out of charge, but his dataset showed they had purposefully driven it around
to make this happen, lying about their driving history. His numbers overturned
their letters. ā¢Timestamp > Macron, NYT . Twitter posters used a photoās timestamp to dis-
prove a purported photo of the Brazilian ļ¬res that was tweeted by Emmanuel
Macron and printed uncritically by NYT. The photo was shown via reverse image
search to be taken by a photographer who had died in 2003, so it was more than
a decade old. This was a big deal because The Atlantic was literally calling for
war with Brazil over these (fake) photos. ā¢Provable patent priority . AChinesecourtusedanon-chaintimestamptoestablish
priority in a patent suit. One company proved that it could not have infringed
the patent of the other, because it had ļ¬led āon chainā before the other company
had ļ¬led. In the ļ¬rst and second examples, the employees of the New York Times Company
simply misrepresented the facts as they are wont to do, circulating assertions that were
politically useful against two of their perennial opponents: the tech founder and the
foreign conservative. Whether these misrepresentations were made intentionally or out
of ātoo good to checkā carelessness, they were both attempts to exercise political power
that ran into the brick wall of technological truth. In the third example, the Chinese
political system delegated the job of ļ¬nding out what was true to the blockchain. In all three cases, technology provided a more robust means of determining what was
true than the previous gold standards ā whether that be the āpaper of recordā or
the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized
establishment. 29By this, we mean that if all truth is relative and a function of power relations, the political party in
power can simply dictate what is t
The Ozymandias model warns that civilizations can collapse completely, as technological progress is not inevitable and even advanced societies have disappeared throughout history.
Lenski's bacterial evolution experiments reveal that history is not strictly ordinal - newer doesn't always mean better, as older strains can sometimes outcompete more recent ones.
The Train Crash model suggests learning from history's expensive failures (like communism) to avoid repeating catastrophic mistakes.
The Idea Maze model counters that overfitting to historical patterns can prevent innovation, as technological and social prerequisites change over time making previously failed concepts viable.
The Wright-Fisher model from population genetics explains how historical mutations (ideas, technologies) either spread to fixation or die out through natural selection processes.
climate which will condemn them for ļ¬ghting in the ļ¬rst place. 44 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
past 12āoāclock to get the reboot. Or you might just collapse. ā¢Ozymandias model: civilization can collapse. History shows us that technological
progress is not inevitable. The Fall of Civilizations podcast really makes this
clear. Gobekli Tepe is one example. Whether youāre thinking of this as an
astronomer (where are all the intelligent life forms out there? Is the universe a
dark forest?) or an anthropologist (how did all these advanced civilizations just
completely die out? ), itās sobering to think that our civilization may just be like
the best player in a video game so far: weāve made it the furthest, but we have
no guarantee that weāre going to win before killing ourselves28and wiping out
like all the other civilizations before us. ā¢Lenski model: organisms are not ordinal. Richard Lenski ran a famous series of
long-term evolution experiments with E. coli where he picked out a fresh culture
of bacteria each day, froze it down in suspended animation, and thereby saved
a snapshot of what each day of evolution looked like over the course of decades. The amazing thing about bacteria is that they can be unfrozen and reanimated,
so Lenski could take an old E. coli strain from day 1173 and put it into a test
tube with todayās strain to see whoād reproduce the most in a head-to-head
competition. The result showed that history is not strictly ordinal ; just because
the day 1174 strain had outcompeted the day 1173 strain, and the day 1175 strain
had outcompeted the day 1174 strain, and so on ā does notnecessarily mean
that todayās strain will always win a head to head with the strain from day 1173. The complexity of biology is such that itās more like an unpredictable game of
rock/paper/scissors. ā¢Train Crash model: those who donāt know history are doomed to repeat it. Another
way to think about history is as a set of expensive experiments, where people
often made certain choices that seemed reasonable at the time and ended up in
calamitous straits. Thatās communism, for example: a persuasive idea for many,
but one that history shows to not actually produce great results in practice. ā¢Idea Maze model: those who overļ¬t to history will never invent the future. This
is the counterargument to the Train Crash model ā past results may not predict
future performance, and sometimes you need to have a beginnerās mindset to
innovate. Generally this works better for opt-in technologies and investments
than top-down modiļ¬cations of society like communism. One tool for this comes
fromaconceptIwroteupawhileagocalledtheideamaze. Therelevantbithereis
thatjustbecauseabusinesspropositiondidnātworkinthepastdoesnātnecessarily
mean it wonāt work today. The technological and social prerequisites may have
dramatically changed, and doors previously closed may now have opened. Unlike
the laws of physics, society is not time invariant. As even the worldās leading
anti-tech blog once admitted:
28Naval Ravikant has tweeted about the concept of the āender,ā the single individual with the power
to end humanity. 2.3. POLITICAL POWER AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRUTH 45
Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasnāt. In this way, it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout
technologies. They donāt evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining
usefulness. Instead, theyseemhardly toadvance atall, moving forward
in ļ¬ts and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype
and defensive crouches ā until one day, in a sudden about-face, they
utterly, totally win. ā¢Wright-Fisher model: history is what survives natural selection. In population
genetics, thereās an important model of how mutations arise and spread called
the Wright-Fisher model. When a new mutation arises, itās in only 1 out of N
people. How does it get to N out of N, to 100%, to whatās called āļ¬xationā? Well,
ļ¬rst, it might not ever do that. It might just die out. It m
Political truths depend on collective belief and can be changed by shifting public opinion (like currency value, leadership, or borders), while technological truths exist independently of human belief (like mathematical constants or physical laws).
Power structures manipulate political truths by controlling narratives and consensus, similar to Orwell's 1984 where authorities can declare that 2+2=5 and find experts to support them.
Effective governance requires balancing political power with technological competence, as illustrated by the sayings 'the backwards will be beaten' (technological weakness leads to political defeat) and 'you and what army?' (individual expertise means nothing without political support).
The text contrasts US and Chinese establishments, suggesting Americans excel at global political manipulation while Chinese leaders have stronger technical backgrounds and focus on domestic consensus-building.
rue. Itās a fusion of Foucaltās relativistic deconstruction and 1984ās
social construction of truth. If 2+2 is whatever those in power say it is, then guess what? Those in
power will say 2+2=5 if they want, and theyāll even get Fields Medalists to go to bat for them. 48 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
2.3.4 A Deļ¬nition of Political and Technological Truths
It isnāt always possible to decentralize the determination of truth away from a political
establishment. Some truths are intrinsically relative (and hence political), whereas
others are amenable to absolute veriļ¬cation (and hence technological). Hereās the key: is it true if others believe it to be true, or is it true regardless of what
people believe? A political truth is true if everyone believes it to be true. Things like money, status,
and borders are in this category. You can change these by rewriting facts in peopleās
brains. For example, the question of what a dollar is worth, who the president is, and
where the border of a country is are all dependent on the ideas installed in peopleās
heads. If enough people change their minds, markets move, presidents change, and
borders shift.30
Conversely, a technical truth is true even if no human believes it to be true. Facts
in math, physics, and biochemistry are in this category. They exist independent of
whatās in peopleās brains. For example, whatās the value of , the speed of light, or the
diameter of a virus?31
Those are the two extremes: political truths that you can change by rewriting the
software in peopleās brains, and technical truths that exist independent of that. 2.3.5 A Balance of Political Power and Technological Truth
Once you reluctantly recognize that not everyaspect of a sociopolitical order can be
derived from an objective calculation, and that some things really dodepend on an
arbitrary consensus, you realize that we need to maintain a balance between political
power and technological truth.32
Towards this end, the Chinese have a pithy saying: the backwards will be beaten. If youāre bad at technology, youāll be beaten politically. Conversely, the Americans
also have a saying: āyou and what army?ā It doesnāt matter how good you are as an
individualtechnologistifyouārebadlyoutnumberedpolitically. Andifyouāreunpopular
enough, you wonāt have the political power to build in the physical world. 30This is what the US establishment is set up to manipulate globally, and the Chinese establishment
is good at domestically. 31This is where the US establishment is particularly out of its depth, but where the Chinese estab-
lishment is fairly strong. Most US politicians donāt have technical backgrounds, prominent journalists
canāt do basic math, and few of the people involved in the US establishment have built anything more
complicated than a bookshelf. Meanwhile, the Chinese establishment is ļ¬lled with engineers and has
built up their country over the last 40 years, even if the next generation of Chinese leaders may not
have such a background. 32Blockchains domove more aspects of politics into technology, by turning societal agreement over
a border into societal agrement over a number. But the software in peopleās heads still matters, as
blockchains only work if enough people hold their underlying asset (maintaining an nonzero price),
agree to run the same version of node and wallet software, and so on. Contrast this to, say, a helicopter
- which requires no societal consensus at all to work, as it depends solely on the laws of physics. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 49
Combining these views tells us to seek a balance between nationalism and rationalism,
where the former is thought of in the broadest sense as āgroup identity.ā Itās a balance
between political power and technological truth, between ingroup-stabilizing narratives
and inconvenient facts. And you need both. So thatās how the political and technological theories of history interrelate. Technolog-
ical history is the history of what works; political history is t
Political incentives favor narratives that maintain power, while technological incentives favor verifiable truths, creating tension between top-down and bottom-up views of history.
Three primary Leviathans (higher powers) govern human behavior: God for religions, State for political movements, and Network for cryptocurrency communities.
The historical progression shows God as the dominant Leviathan in the 1800s, replaced by the State after Nietzsche declared 'God is dead' in the late 1800s.
People's behavior is constrained by whichever Leviathan they worship - fear of divine punishment, state consequences, or network consensus - even when no human authority is watching.
The displacement of God by the State as the primary controlling force led to the massive ideological wars of the 20th century between competing state-based systems.
he history of what works
to retain power. Putting all the pieces together:
ā¢We have a political theory of history that says āsocial and political incentives
favor the propagation of politically useful narratives.ā
ā¢We have a technological theory of history that says āļ¬nancial and technical in-
centives favor the propagation of technological truths.ā
ā¢We have a set of examples that show how politically powerful actors were con-
strained by decentralizing technology. ā¢We have more examples that show that some facts really are determined by
societal consensus, while others are amenable to decentralized veriļ¬cation. ā¢And we understand why groups need both to survive; the backwards will be
beaten, while the unpopular will never have political power in the ļ¬rst place. Can we generalize these observations into a broader thesis, into an overarching theory
that includes the clash of political power and technological truth as a special case? We
can. And that leads us to a discussion of God, State, and Network. 2.4 God, State, Network
The collision between the top-down and bottom-up views of history, between history
as written by the winners and history as written to the ledger, between political power
and technological truth...that encounter is a collision of Leviathans. To understand this, imagine two schoolboys ļ¬ghting on a playground. Itās not long
before one of them says āmy dad can beat up your dad!ā Thereās profundity in this
banality. Even at a very young age, a child believes he can appeal to a higher power,
a Leviathan, a powerful man who can sweep the ļ¬eld of his enemies, including Robert
from recess. Men are not so diļ¬erent from children in this regard. Every doctrine has its Leviathan,
that prime mover who hovers above all. For a religion, it is God. For a political
movement, it is the State. And for a cryptocurrency, it is the Network. These three
Leviathans hover over fallible men to make them behave in pro-social ways. Once we generalize beyond God, once we realize thereās not one but threeLeviathans in
a Hobbesian sense, much becomes clear. Movements that arenāt God-worshipping reli-
gions are often State-worshipping political movements or Network-worshipping crypto 50 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
tribes. Many progressive atheists are by no means astatists; they worship the State as
if it were God. And many libertarian atheists may not believe in either God orthe
State, but they do believe in the Network - whether that be their social network or
their cryptocurrency. This deserves some elaboration. 2.4.1 What is the Most Powerful Force in the World? The ļ¬rst Leviathan was God. In the 1800s, people didnāt steal because they actually
fearedGod. They believed in a way thatās hard for us to understand, they thought
of God as an active force in the world, ļ¬ring-and-brimstoning away. They wanted
god-fearing men in power, because a man who genuinely believed in God would behave
well even if no one could punish him. That is, a powerful leader who actually believed
that eternal damnation was the punishment for violating religious edicts could be relied
upon by the public even ifno human could seewhether he had misbehaved. At least,
this is a rational retroļ¬tting of why being genuinely āgod-fearingā was important to
people, though they might not articulate it in quite that way. God was the ultimate
force, the Leviathan. By the late 1800s, Nietzsche wrote that āGod is dead.ā What he meant is that a critical
mass of the intelligentsia didnāt believe in God anymore, not in the same way their
forefathers did. In the absence of God, a new Leviathan now rose to pre-eminence, one
that existed before but gained new signiļ¬cance: the State. And so in the 1900s, why
didnātyousteal? BecauseevenifyoudidnātbelieveinGod, theStatewouldpunishyou. The full global displacement of God by the State (something already clearly underway
in France since 1789) led to the giant wars of the 20th century, Democratic Capitalism
vs Nazism vs Communism. Thes
Human society has evolved through three dominant power structures: God in the 1800s, the State in the 1900s, and now the Network (internet, social networks, crypto) in the 2000s.
Each era had different mechanisms for preventing theft - divine punishment, state punishment, and now network prevention through cryptography and social accountability.
Encryption has become the most powerful force on earth, surpassing even military might, because no amount of violence can solve certain mathematical problems that secure property and information.
While states can still use physical coercion (rubber hose attacks) to extract passwords, this approach doesn't scale due to the costs and complexities of finding, locating, and attacking countless individuals across jurisdictions.
Cryptography and pseudonymity are already limiting government power by protecting freedoms like speech, association, and privacy in ways that traditional legal protections cannot guarantee.
e new faiths replaced g-o-d with g-o-v, faiths which
centered the State over God as the most powerful force on earth. That brings us to the present. Now, today, as you can see from this graph and this
one, it is not just God that is dead. It is the State that is dying. Because here in the
early innings of the 21st century, faith in the State is plummeting. Faith in God has
crashed too, though there may be some inchoate revival of religious faith pending. But
it is the Network ā the internet, the social network, and now the crypto network ā
that is the next Leviathan. So: in the 1800s you wouldnāt steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you
didnāt steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you canāt steal
because the Network wonāt let you.33Either the social network will mob you, or
33The Network is not a wholly new force in human aļ¬airs, but it is newly powerful. As one example
of Networks before the internet, Communism can be thought of as a State/Network synthesis, with
the Soviet state as primary and its international āCominternā network of communist revolutionaries
as secondary (especially after Trotskyās murder). As another example, see this section on āCultureā
as a third force alongside Church and State in Jacob Burckhardtās Force and Freedom . Heād come to
similar conclusions almost 200 years ago, which I only discovered years after my 2015 talk on God,
State, and Network. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 51
the cryptocurrency network wonāt let you steal because you lack the private key, or
(eventually) the networked AI will detect you, or all of the above. Put another way, whatās the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In
the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange
put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesnāt
matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by
cryptography, the state canāt seize it without getting the solution to an equation. 2.4.2 Rubber Hoses Donāt Scale
Now, the obvious response is that a state like Venezuela can still try to beat someone
up to get that solution, do the proverbial rubber hose attack to get their password and
private keys ā but ļ¬rst theyāll have to ļ¬nd that personās oļ¬ine identity, map it to a
physical location, establish that they have jurisdiction, send in the (expensive) special
forces, and do this to an endless number of people in an endless number of locations,
while dealing with various complications like anonymous remailers, multisigs, zero-
knowledge, dead-manāsswitches, andtimelocks. Soataminimum, encryptionincreases
thecostof state coercion. In other words, seizing Bitcoin is not quite as easy as inļ¬ating a ļ¬at currency. Itās
not something a hostile state like Venezuela can seize en masse with a keypress, they
need to go house-by-house. The only real way around this scalability problem would
be a cheap autonomous army of AI police drones, something China may ultimately be
capable of, but thatād be expensive and we arenāt there yet.34
Until then, the history of Satoshi Nakamotoās successful maintenance of pseudonymity,
of Appleās partial thwarting of the FBI, and of the Bitcoin networkās resilience to the
Chinese stateās mining shutdown show that the Networkās pseudonymity and cryptog-
raphy are already partially obstructing at least some of the Stateās surveillance and
violence. Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can. And as described at
length in this piece, itās not just about protection of private property. Itās about using
encryption and crypto to protect freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of
contract, prevention from discrimination andcancellation via pseudonymity, individual
privacy,andtrulyequalprotectionunderrule-of-codeāevenastheStateāspaper-based
guarantees of the same become ever more hollow. Because the computer always gives
the same output given the same input code, unlike the fallible
The Network is emerging as the next Leviathan, becoming more powerful and just than traditional state structures across multiple dimensions.
Encryption enables organization outside state control by creating uncrackable communications, transactions, and digital borders that governments cannot penetrate.
Cryptoeconomy with Bitcoin provides money that states cannot easily freeze, seize, ban, or print, enabling financial systems beyond state control.
Social networks fundamentally challenge the Westphalian state model by making network identity more important than geographic proximity for community formation.
Mobile technology and virtual reality offer powerful alternatives to state-controlled physical environments through migration and digital escape.
Peer-to-peer communication undermines both state-controlled and state-controlling media by enabling direct information sharing with archival proof.
human judiciary with
its error-prone (or politicized) enforcement of the law. 34This works in another way: autonomous drones are a way for a state to wage war without paying
as many people, as it just needs to charge up its drones. Propaganda delivered over social media is
a diļ¬erent alternative to expensive boots on the ground. These techniques are, respectively, the CCP
and NYT coalitionsā ways around the economic constraints on military action imposed by BTC. See
the book Gold, Blood, and Power and our later chapter on The Tripolar Moment . 52 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
In this sense, the Network is the next Leviathan, because on key dimensions it is
becoming more powerful and more justthan the State. 2.4.3 The Network is the Next Leviathan
When we say that the Network is the next Leviathan, which we can abbreviate as
āNetwork > Stateā it is useful to give speciļ¬cs. Here are several concrete examples
where the Networkās version of a given social practice is more powerful than the Stateās
version. 1.Encryption > State Violence. When there is strong encryption government canāt
crack, that means communications states canāt eavesdrop on, transactions they
canāt intercept, and digital borders they canāt penetrate. It means nothing less
than the ability to organize groups outside state control, and thus a diminution
in the power of states tocontrol. 2.Cryptoeconomy > Fiat Economy. We just discussed this in the context of the
Networkās Bitcoin being money the State canāt easily freeze, seize, ban, or print. In theory this is just a special case of the point on encryption, but its implications
are broad: all manner of ļ¬nancial instruments, corporate vehicles, accounting,
payroll, and the like can be done on-chain outside the control of states. 3.Peer-to-Peer > State Media. There are two kinds of state media: state-controlled
media as in Chinaās Xinhuanet, or state- controlmedia as in Americaās The New
York Times. The latter controls the state, the former is controlled by the state,
but both ļ¬ght freedom of speech. Network-facilitated P2P communication is
anathema to them, particularly if end-to-end encrypted. Citations in particular
are worth calling out here ā archival references like Google Books, or NCBI, or
archive.is can be linked to prove a point, even if oļ¬cial State channels arenāt
presently favoring that point of view. 4.Social > National. Social networks change many things, but a critical one is that
they change the nature of community. Your community is your social network,
not necessarily the people who live near you. When the network identity is more
salient than the neighor relationship, it challenges the very premise of the West-
phalian state, which is that (a) people who live geographically near each other
share values and (b) therefore laws should be based on geographic boundaries. The alternative is that only people who are geodesically near each other in the
social network share values, and therefore the laws that govern them should be
based on network boundaries. 5.Mobile > Sessile. Mobile is making us more mobile. And law is a function of
latitude and longitude; as you change your location, you change the local, state,
and federal laws that apply to you. As such, migration is as powerful a way to
change the law under which you live as election. COVID-19 lockdowns may be
just the beginning of State attempts to control Network-facilitated physical exit. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 53
But in normal circumstances, smartphones are helping people move ever more
freely, while the borders of physical states are frozen in place. 6.Virtual Reality > Physical Proximity. As a complement to mobile, the Network
oļ¬ers another way to opt out of State-controlled physical surroundings: namely,
to put on a VR (or AR) headset, at which point you are in a completely diļ¬erent
world with diļ¬erent people surrounding you and diļ¬erent laws. 7.Remote > In-person. The Network allows you to work and communicate from
anywhere. Combined
š Network states operate by dividing the world by people rather than land, enabling voluntary subscription revenue from global diaspora communities.
š» Smart contracts and cryptographic verification are replacing traditional legal systems with more predictable, international, and programmable alternatives.
š Blockchain technology represents the most important development since writing itself, creating unfalsiļæ½able digital records that establish truth independent of government control.
š± Trump's 2021 deplatforming demonstrated that tech networks now wield more power than formal government institutions, proving the US establishment trumped the US government.
with mobile, this further increases leverage against the
State. The concept of the network state as a division of the world by people
rather than by land is particularly important here, as network states are natively
built for getting voluntary subscription revenue from people around the world. The diaspora isthe state. 8.International > National. The Network gives people more of a choiceover what
speciļ¬c State they are subject to. For example, they can move a server hosting
their website from country to country with a few clicks. 9.Smart Contracts > Law. The Stateās paper-based legal system is costly and
unpredictable. A similar set of facts in two diļ¬erent cities in the same country
could result in a diļ¬erent ruling. Lawyers are expensive, paper contracts have
typos and illogic, and cross-border agreements range from complex to impossible. Weāre still in the early days of smart contracts, but as we get well-debugged
and formally-veriļ¬ed contract libraries, this is an area where the Network is
poised to take over from the State. Imagine truly international law: itās done
programmatically rather than via pieces of paper, across borders outside the
domain of legacy states, and by global technologists rather than country-speciļ¬c
lawyers. 10.Cryptographic Veriļ¬cation > Oļ¬cial Conļ¬rmation. Perhaps the most important
arena in which the Network is stronger than the state is in the nature of truth
itself. As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important de-
velopment in history since the advent of writing itself, as itās a cryptographically
veriļ¬able, highly replicated, unfalsiļ¬able, and provably complete digital record
of a system. Itās the ultimate triumph of the technological truth view of history,
as there are now technical andļ¬nancial incentives for passing down true facts,
regardless of the sociopolitical advantages any given government might have for
suppressing them. To foreshadow a bit, this ledger of record is history written by
the Network rather than the State. These examples can be multiplied. As mentioned before, Uber and Lyft are better
regulators than the Stateās paper-based taxi medallions, email is superior to the USPS,
and SpaceX is out-executing NASA. If you think about borders, you now need to think
about the Networkās telepresence (which defeats physical borders) and its encryption
(which erects digital borders). Or if you care about, say, the US census, the Network
gives a real-time survey which is far more up to date than the Stateās 10 year process. 54 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
In short, if you can bring the Network to bear on an issue, it will often be the most
powerful force. This is essentially what every startup founder does, all the time: they
try to ļ¬gure out the Network way of doing something, without going through the State. Thereās an app for that! This is conceptually important, because a startup society founder that can reposition
a particular conļ¬ict such that it is the Network against the State has a chance to win. But if they go through the legacy State, theyāll be an alligator out of water, and they
will likely lose. Network > State: Trumpās Deplatforming
Applying the āNetwork > Stateā formulation to recent events, think about January
2021, when ā at the behest of the New York Times Company and all of mainstream
media ā Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter combined to deplatform a
sitting president and disappear his supportersā app from the internet. This was undeniable proof of the US governmentās impotence, because the āmost pow-
erful man in the worldā was clearly no longer even the most powerful man in his own
country. The informal Network (the US establishment) trumped the formal State (the
US government).35
Obviously, Trump and the Republicans werenāt in control of events. Less obviously,
elected Democrats werenāt either. Oh, sure, many of them added their voices to the
cacophony. But because the First Amendment constrains government capacity to re-
stra
The conflict between Network and State represents two competing Leviathans that will shape this century, similar to how God vs State conflicts shaped the last century.
Despite Network power in some areas, the State still wins many battles through arrests (Ulbricht, Assange, Snowden), regulations (GDPR), and internet censorship campaigns.
San Francisco's city government successfully drove out tech founders by turning the city into a 'hellhole,' effectively using State power to eliminate competition from new money.
Chinese tech founders went from being celebrated and integrated into the CCP establishment until 2018, when everything shifted and they faced crackdowns similar to their American counterparts.
in speech, they couldnāt tell the tech CEOs to shut down opposition voices - but
the publishers could. And because the ļ¬nal control over these networks is in private
hands, state oļ¬cials didnāt have the ļ¬nal say. Put another way, the people with their ļ¬ngers on the button are no longer elected
oļ¬cials of the state. Does the US government feellike it is in charge? That is what
Network > State means. 2.4.4 The State is Still A Leviathan
To be clear, the Network does not win everyconļ¬ict with the State. In many cases the
actualoutcomeisāState>Network.ā Indeed, theconļ¬ictbetweenthesetwoLeviathans
35Thereās a strong argument that the power of the presidency has been steadily declining since FDR,
who can be thought of as a four-term dictator who consolidated power, prosecuted his enemies, and
ruled till he died. All the āimperial presidencyā stuļ¬ like John Yooās memos and Obamaās executive
orders can be reconceptualized as attempts to still get something done from the White House despite
the reality that the presidencyās power was ever more dilute. Indeed, the US today has something similar to a āconstitutional monarchy,ā namely a ābureaucratic
presidencyā whereinthepresidentisinkeyrespectsanincreasinglyvestigialļ¬gure. Somewhorecognize
this think it can be turned around with a ātrue election.ā Others think youāll need to start over, with
startup societies and network states. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 55
will shape this century like the conļ¬ict between the God and State Leviathans shaped
the last. Some examples of āState > Networkā include Ross Ulbrichtās arrest by the US govern-
ment, the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, Chinaās crackdown on
cryptocurrency, the European Unionās GDPR regulation, the COVID lockdowns that
inhibited any digital nomadās ability to exit, the rising number of government internet
shutdowns, and the US establishmentās push to censor the internet. Letās review a few cases of particular importance: the techxit from San Francisco, the
political defeat of tech founders in China, the biasing of AI in the name of AI bias, and
the digital deplatforming of establishment critics in both the West and East. 1.SF city government > Bay Area tech founders. Despite how competent the tech
founders of SF were on the Network, the political billionaires of the San Francisco
city government managed to use their control of the State to turn the city into a
hellhole. Intentionally or not, this had the eļ¬ect of driving out the new money,
their potential competition. Yes, there have been some successful tech-funded recall eļ¬orts recently, but itās
likely too little, too late. Itās akin to a stock price showing a bit of an upward
trend after a huge and irreversible drop. Because the Bay Areaās monopoly is
over. Technology has now globally decentralized into web3, and San Francisco
(and even Silicon Valley) has now lost its position as the undisputed tech capital
of the world. You no longer needto go to the Bay Area to build a startup ā you
can found and fund from anywhere. This is, on balance, a good thing ā the fact that tech is no longer highly depen-
dent on the triple dysfunction of SF/CA/USA is crucial to the worldās future. Note also that while the defeat of tech in SF was due to State > Network, the
reason tech lives to ļ¬ght another day is thanks to remote work, which allowed
movement away from SF in a āTechxit.ā And remote work is a case of Network
> State. 2.CCP > Chinese tech founders. Until about 2018, Chinese tech founders were cel-
ebrated by the CCP. Imagine if Zuckerberg and Dorsey were given the equivalent
of Senate seats for their contribution to the economy, brought into the estab-
lishment rather than standing at a remove, and youāll get a sense of what the
tone was like. Jack Ma (Alibaba founder), Pony Ma (Tencent founder), and their
peers were either one of the 95 million CCP members (<7% of the country) or
praised by CCP media. Then everything shifted. Just like America, China had its own establ
China's CCP has prioritized national control over profits, spending trillions on lockdowns and banning entire industries like gaming and Bitcoin mining to maintain state power over technology networks.
The CCP's early banning of foreign social networks like Facebook and Twitter now appears strategically farsighted, preventing US tech companies from having deplatforming power over Chinese citizens.
AI ethics initiatives are described as a form of political control that biases algorithms to support establishment narratives rather than pursuing objective truth or falsity.
The author argues that AI bias programs function like historical political commissar systems, ensuring technological development remains compliant with regime preferences rather than allowing independent innovation.
ishment-
driven techlash.36The huge cost of pausing of the massive ANT Financial IPO
36Indeed, many events in America are now followed by a similar event in China, or vice versa. Some examples include (a) internet censorship, (b) nationalism + socialism, (c) social credit scores
/ cancel culture, (d) āhuman ļ¬esh searchā and Twitter mobs, (e) COVID lockdowns, (f) increasing
militarization, and (g) state takeover of tech companies. 56 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
on some regulatory pretense was a signal. For the last several years, the CCP has
put what it considers to be the ānational interestā over enormous sums of money,
incurring at least a trillion dollars in cost for COVID lockdowns, shutdowns of
IPOs, and overnight bans of entire industries like gaming and Bitcoin mining. This looks stupid. Maybe it is stupid. Or maybe they know something we donāt. TheCCPāsearlyactioninthe2000sand2010stobanforeignsocialnetworkslooks
farsightedinretrospect, asiftheyhadnātbuilttheirownWeiboandWeChat, then
US executives in Silicon Valley would have been able to deplatform (or surveil)
anyone from China with a keystroke. So, unfortunately, perhaps signaling that
there are āmore important things than moneyā and gearing for conļ¬ict will turn
out to put the CCP in a better position for what comes. Be that as it may, the Chinese techlash is an example of āState > Network.ā The
CCP-controlled Chinese State beat the international Network of Chinese tech
founders. But it didnāt win forever, as many of the most ambitious founders
and funders in China are now using the Network to move abroad and escape the
Chinese State. 3.Biasing AI with AI Bias. Jon Stokes has written at length about āAI ethicsā
and Iād encourage you to read his work. But in brief, this entire pseudoļ¬eld is
about putting a thumb on the scale of AI algorithms in the name of balancing
the scales, particularly at inļ¬uential tech giants like Google. Itās about ensuring
that members of the US establishment are always looking over the shoulder of
technologists, making sure that their code is 100% regime compliant37, just as
the Soviet Union did with its commissars, the NSDAP did with gleichschaltung ,
and Xi has done with Xuexi Qiangguo .38
The fundamental concept is about asserting moral control over a technological
ļ¬eld. AI āethicsā doesnāt really contest what is true or false, it contests what is
good and bad. And what is bad? Anything that advances a politically unfavor-
able narrative. As a concrete example, in 2021, Ukraine was widely reported to
be a corrupt country full of Azov Battalion Nazis. By mid 2022, those reports
would have been reclassiļ¬ed as ādisinformationā and pushed down to page 10 of
the search results39, if the AI bias people had their way. Now, the usual dodge is that thereās always discretion involved in the selection
of any machine learning training set, and judgment used in the conļ¬guration of
37A recurring theme in this book is that such a system of speech and thought controls arises when
an existing regime desires to preserve its power and there isnāt suļ¬cient ability of citizens to exit. If
they could do it, Microsoft would ban the competition ā and ban all their ads as disinformation. So
too for NYT and CCP. 38Note the CCP is injecting āred genesā into companies directly: the Partyās inļ¬uence is pervasive. 39This is also why people are increasingly using Twitter as a search engine. Censorship is more
detectable when itās individual accounts being silenced. This is part of the transition to web3: the
digitally signedweb, where every single data structure has a digital signature, is a huge shift from
web2. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 57
any algorithm, so who is to say what āunbiasedā means? But the goal here is
to make sure that discretion does not scatter randomly, or at the discretion of
the individual investigator, but instead consistently points in a single āethically
approvedā direction, whether that be submission to NYT (in Blue America) or
CCP (in China
AI ethics researchers are accused of being 'AI bias' advocates who use their positions at tech companies to centrally control and distort information for political purposes.
Google's monopolistic power allows a few zealots to potentially influence the search results and thoughts of billions of people worldwide.
Digital deplatforming operates similarly in both Eastern and Western systems - official government censorship in China versus unofficial private censorship in the US, both serving establishment interests.
The competition between God, State, and Network creates hybrid social orders where these three Leviathans remix together to form new syntheses rather than remaining pure forms.
). Itās centralized political control by another name. Note also that the name of their ļ¬eld has been chosen to ward oļ¬ attack. What,
are you against ethicsin AI? (These are the same people who speak mockingly
of āethics in journalismā when it suits them.) So, a better term for it is āAI bias,ā not as in the studyof bias, but as in the
study of how to bias AI. And the power the AI bias people have is enormous. A few zealots in the right places at big tech companies can and will distort
the Google results of billions of people, until and unless Googleās monopoly is
disrupted, or unless the right people within Google push to make their algorithms
transparent.40Newspeak isnāt a dystopia for them, itās an instruction manual. And they might well win. The episode where Merriam-Webster changed the
dictionaryinreal-timeforpoliticalpurposesisonlythebeginning; thenewGoogle
is about to use its power to centrally change thought. This is considerably worse than Baidu, which more straightforwardly ļ¬lters
searches that are āproblematicā for the CCP. Because the AI bias people pre-
tend that they are doing it for the powerless, when they are really doing it to
maintain the US establishmentās power. 4.Digital Deplatforming. Another example of the State trumping the Network, of
political power exercised against technological truth, can be seen in the muzzling
of regime-disfavored voices on social media. As always, this is obvious in China. Say something the CCP doesnāt like on
Sina Weibo and your post disappears, and possibly your account and maybe
youāre brought in for āteaā by the security forces. But in the West, if you say
something the regime doesnāt like on Twitter, your post disappears, and possibly
your account, and ā in American protectorates like the UK ā maybe youāre
brought in for āteaā by the security forces. Ah, didnāt expect that, did you? But click those links. The only reason that
UK-style hate speech laws havenātyet come to the US is the First Amendment,
which has also limited to some degree the totality of private attempts at speech
and thought control. Nevertheless, even by 2019 we could see the convergence of the American and
Chinese systems in this respect. Just as WeChat blocked mention of Tiananmen,
Facebook blocked mention of an alleged whistleblower. Operationally, itās the
40Itās hard to ask them to unbias the results. What does that mean, 1998-2011-era Google? Thatās
hard to specify and hard to diligence. Itās easier to push for open, transparent, search algorithms. This may come true in web3; see this talk. 58 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
same thing. In the East itās oļ¬cial government censorship, whereas in the West
itās unoļ¬cial private censorship, but thatās not a substantive diļ¬erence - itās
censorship as ordered by the Chinese and US establishments respectively. The
substantive diļ¬erence is that in the West thereās a third faction of decentralized
censorship resistance. The point is that sometimes Network > State (which is new), and sometimes State
> Network (which is what most people expect), and the competition between these
Leviathans will deļ¬ne our time. But is it always competition, or could it also be co-optation? 2.4.5 Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
As Larry Ellison put it, āchoose your competitors carefully, because youāll become a lot
like them.ā This is a tech founderās version of the Hegelian dialectic, where thesis and
antithesis mix to form a synthesis. In other words, when you have three Leviathans (God, State, Network) that keep
struggling with each other, they wonāt remain pure forms. Youāll see people remix
them together to create new kinds of social orders, new hybrids, new syntheses in
the Hegelian sense. We already mentioned the Chinese version of this fusion (āthe
backwards will be beatenā) in the context of political power vs technological truth, but
it goes beyond just the determination of truth to how society itself is organized. For
example:
ā¢God/State : the mid-century US was āfor go
š American political tribes are realigning around three Leviathans: God, State, and Network, with the gray tribe (tech progressives) primarily aligned with the Network Leviathan as internationalist astatists.
š Blue and red tribes are internally splitting, with some blues moving toward the Network (left-libertarians, web3 socialists) and some reds remaining loyal to the State (secular nationalists).
š° A potential Bitcoin vs Dollar conflict could accelerate realignment, creating strange bedfellows where some blues align with grays and reds for the Network, while other reds join blues to defend the American State.
šļø Blue tribe members face a critical choice between supporting neutral decentralized networks that treat all nations equally versus maintaining loyalty to US establishment dominance over the global 96% non-American population.
š Wokeness is better understood as a doctrine rather than a religion, encompassing both State and Network-aligned factions within the blue tribe's belief system.
NETWORK 63
As weāll see, the introduction of the Network Leviathan clariļ¬es some conļ¬icts and
splits some factions. 2.5.1 American Tribes and Their Leviathans
The whole world tunes in daily to watch the endless American digital civil war on
Twitter. (āI feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.ā) Countless
words have been written about this topic. But the lens of the Leviathans oļ¬ers a new
perspective on these warring tribes, on the conservative reds, progressive blues, and
libertarianish grays named by Scott Alexander. The gray tribe is the easiest to analyze. It is fair to say that they are primarily
peopleoftheNetworkLeviathan. Thesetechnologicalprogressivesarenotjustatheists,
they are also astatists, as they do not typically believe in either God or the State. They are genuinely internationalists in a way neither red nationalists nor blue faux44
internationalists are, as they donāt subscribe to American exceptionalism, and interact
with people from other countries through the Network as equals. The blues and the reds are more complex, however. Itās notas simple as āBlue equals
Stateā and āRed equals non-State.ā Not at all. A signiļ¬cant fraction of blues has now
gone to the Network; these are the left-libertarians, the web3 socialists. And a good
chunk of reds will remain loyal to the State; letās call them secular nationalists. So if and when things line up as Network vs State, if thereās a highly inļ¬ationary event
that pits the orange Bitcoin against the green Dollar, we may see an acceleration of
the ongoing realignment. Many blues will line up with grays and reds on the side of
the international Network, and many reds will side with blues to defend the centralized
American State. Letās explain. Blue Tribe: Left-Authoritarians, Left-Libertarians
Each member of blue tribe will have to make a choice in the years to come: are they
loyal to neutral decentralized networks that treat both Americans and non-Americans
equally,oraretheyactuallyjustloyaltotheUSestablishmentāessentiallynationalists
in disguise? Is their deļ¬nition of ādemocracyā commensurate with a world where the
4% (namely the Americans) rule the 96% (namely the non-Americans), inļ¬ating away
the globeās savings, destroying local cultures, and surveilling the world at all times? Or
do they believe the rest of the world deserves digital self-determination? In short, will
44Why call blues āfauxā internationalists? Because their relationship with other countries is not
really one of equals. The NGO type wants pets, not peers. The State Department type wants
members of the coalition-of-the-willing to get in line, not to go oļ¬ script. The blues are slightly
more diplomatic than the cartoonishly nationalist reds, but only slightly, and particularly in recent
years theyāve shifted away from Obama-era multilateralism to their own variety of unilateralism. See
Alvarezās work here, here, and here, published in late 2020 and which has held up quite well. 64 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
the internationally-minded liberal choose the decentralized Network or the centralized
State? To understand this choice, letās orient ourselves. The blue tribe is the most powerful
in Western society today, and has two45main internal factions: the left-authoritarians
who worship the State, and the left-libertarians who are (unconsciously) people of the
Network.46
Wokeness is a Doctrine, not a Religion
Before we begin, we need to understand that the blue belief system of āWokenessā isnāt
exactly a religion. Itās a doctrine, and it includes both people of the State and the
Network. That is, while itās become popular to talk about Wokeness as a religion, and while
thereissomething to this, itās more precise to talk about it as a doctrine: namely, āa
belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group.ā
The concept of a doctrine encompasses religious andpolitical beliefs, both God- and
State-worship. And nowadays the āother groupā could be a Ne
The text proposes 'doctrine' as an umbrella term encompassing religious doctrines (God-worshippers), political doctrines (State-loyalists), and network doctrines (Network-centrists), each with their own powerful 'Leviathan.'
Wokeness is analyzed as having religious-like characteristics (original sin, repentance, heresy suppression) but is better classified as a doctrine since its followers worship State or Network rather than God.
The author predicts that internal splits within the 'blue team' between State-worshippers and Network-followers will become crucial in escalating conflicts between traditional institutions and decentralized systems.
Left-authoritarians are characterized as State-worshippers who view government as the solution to all problems, treating taxes as 'secular tithes' and demonstrating unwavering fealty regardless of results.
twork entity of some
kind, like a social network or cryptocurrency. So now we have an umbrella term: doctrine. God-worshippers have religions (reli-
gious doctrines), State-loyalists have political parties (with political doctrines), and
Network-centrists have social networks or cryptocurrencies (with tightly enforced con-
tent moderation or crypto tribalism respectively, which are network doctrines). Each
doctrine has a Leviathan, a most powerful force. And a religion is then just a type of
doctrine. With this deļ¬nition, we can return to the question: is capital-W Wokeness, like Com-
munism and Nazism before it, a religion that evolved to jump over the formal principle
of church/state separation by posing as a non-religion? Well, as several have now ob-
served, Wokeness doeshave cognates to many aspects of Christianity ā we all have
the Calvinist original sin of bigotry, weāre going to the warm hell of climate change
unless we repent, unbelievers must ārecant,ā heresy must be suppressed, the Westās
beliefs must be evangelized at gunpoint, and so on. See Curtis Yarvinās How Dawkins
Got Pwned , John McWhorterās Woke Racism , Andrew Sullivan on Americaās New Re-
ligions, Noah Smith on Wokeness as Old-Time Religion , Tom Hollandās concluding
chapter in Dominion , Paul Graham on Heresy, and Michael Shellenberger and Peter
Boghossianās detailed infographic for perspectives on this topic. Butwhileitāsdirectionallyaccurate, callingwokenessareligiondoesnāt quiteļ¬tbecause
the wokes have a diļ¬erent theory of the prime mover. Wokeness is better termed a
doctrine, because itās actually crucial to note that wokes do notworship God; instead,
one faction of wokes worships the State and the other is, less consciously, people of
45There are still conventionally religious blues, people of God, but they are not among the elite. 46Redditās r/politicalcompassmemes abbreviates these as authleft and libleft respectively. 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 65
the Network. These internal denominational splits are deļ¬ned by choice of Leviathan. Andtheyāllbeimportantintheescalatingconļ¬ictbetweenStateandNetwork, between
DollarandBitcoin,betweenestablishmentjournalistsanddecentralizedmedia,between
the American government and the global internet, as these divisions promise to split
blue team in two. Blue State: Left-Authoritarians
Fortheleft-authoritariansamongtheblues, theirprimaryLeviathanistheState, which
isveryrealandcandoviolenceagainstits/theirenemies, asopposedtowhattheythink
of as an imaginary God. This is why State-worshippers mock the concept of āthoughts
and prayersā in favor of āpassing a law.ā The State exists, after all, and can organize
people to apply coercive force. But Godās vehicle, the church, no longer has enough
belief behind it (in the West at least) to do the same. This is also why left-authoritarians tend to take for granted that all ills can be solved
by āpraying for reliefā to the State, by forming some agency, by appropriating ever
more money. Taxes are secular tithes, and the Gov-fearing man is like the God-fearing
man ā you simply cannot pay enough money and respect to the state, because as the
DNC video says outright, āgovernment is the one thing we all belong to.ā Itās not about
results, itās about fealty. Even though they culturally love the State and hate the Network, itās important to
note that the left-authoritarians in the US havemanaged to recently take control of
big chunks of the Network, through placing sympathizers in key positions at Big Tech
companies during the techlash and Great Awokening of the 2010s. (There are incipient
signs of pushback here, though, at places like Netļ¬ix and even Google, where the very
wokest are being terminated.) What do left-authoritarians generally look like from an occupational standpoint? The
body of left-authoritarians are the NPCs paying the NYT monthly subscriptions for the
oļ¬cial ātruth,ā slavishly turning their heads with every new software update, in
The most powerful left-authoritarians operate outside formal government as professors, activists, bureaucrats, and journalists who control America's key institutions without democratic accountability.
This network (called the Paper Belt, Cathedral, or regime) avoids democratic oversight through tenure, tax-exempt foundations, and ideological purification while claiming to support democracy.
Their primary technique is manipulating procedural outcomes by getting truths labeled as disinformation or lies accepted as official truth, exemplifying their 'political power theory of truth.'
Media 'impact' means using government power to make previously voluntary actions mandatory or forbidden, with cancel culture and hit pieces being core features rather than aberrations.
Watergate is reframed as proof that corporate media achieved upstream control over elected government 50 years ago, representing a left-wing corporate takeover of America.
sisting
that masks donāt work before they do, reliably surging behind the current thing. These
are just foot soldiers, but interestingly the most important left-authoritarians arenāt
the elected oļ¬cials. AsYarvininparticularhasdocumentedatlength,themostimportantleft-authoritarians
are not formally part of the elected State at all. They are the professors, activists, bu-
reaucrats, and journalists. The key concept is that much of Americaās control circuitry has evolved to live outside
the formal state, thereby making it resistant to displacement by democratic election. They laud ādemocracyā but avoid it in practice, through dual class stock, tenure for
their bureaucrats and professors, tax-exempt compounding for their foundations, and
ideological puriļ¬cation of their organizations. As with the communists who endlessly
burbled about their ādemocratic peopleās republicsā while eschewing elections, the left- 66 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
authoritarians donāt actually subject their control of key institutions to a vote.47
There are diļ¬erent names for this left-authoritarian network that controls the state
from outside by āholding it accountable.ā We can call it the Paper Belt (which em-
phasizes their Rust-Belt-like technological backwardness), we can call it the Cathedral
(which emphasizes their holiness), we can call it the regime (which emphasizes their
illegitimacy), or we can call it simply the American establishment (which emphasizes
their enduring power). Later we will call it NYT/USD, to emphasize their source of
truth and digital economy relative to BTC/web3 and CCP/RMB. Itās important to understand that the power of the left-authoritarians comes from
gettingtheoļ¬cialsofthecentralizedAmericanStateand(morerecently)theexecutives
of the centralized Big Tech Network to crush their enemies. Themaintechniqueistoāmanipulateproceduraloutcomesā, oftenbygettingsomething
true to be oļ¬cially deemed disinformation (as in the example of the pre-2020 election
laptop story), or conversely getting something false to be deemed oļ¬cial truth (as
in the case of the Cambridge Analytica story). The left-authoritarians are the main
proponents of the political power theory of truth, as ātruthā is whatever they ļ¬nd
helpful to move political power into action. When an employee of a media corporation talks about an article having āimpact,ā for
example, they mean impact in the sense of a government truncheon impacting your
head, via a new rule or regulation. Go read the descriptions of the prizes they award
to each other, and youāll see them celebrate themselves for making something that was
previously volitional newly mandatory or forbidden. āOur report led to government
action!ā Whether that action was the bombing of Libya or the banning of plastic
straws makes no nevermind; impact is impact. Laws arenāt the only form of impact. Getting someone ļ¬red is too. We talk of hit
pieces and cancel culture as if theyāre aberrations, but theyāre actually the core of
left-authoritarian culture. Recall that the most prestigious thing any establishment
journalist ever did was Watergate: namely, getting a president ļ¬red while selling mil-
lions of copies of their newspaper. This episode has been endlessly romanticized, but hereās a diļ¬erent perspective on
it: the corporate takeover of America weāre supposed to be constantly vigilant for
actually already occured 50 years ago, just from the left, when a few privately-owned
media corporations cooperated to get Nixon ļ¬red and the Pentagon Papers leaked,
proving that the control circuitry outsidethe State was upstream of the mere elected
government and US military. Now, was Watergate a crime? Sure, but worse than the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? Worse than the Nasiriyah testimony? Worse than WMD? Worse than the lies used to
47They also arenāt diverse, despite how much they caterwaul about the topic. Look at techjournal-
ismislessdiversethantech.com or Haidtās study of committed progressives that shows the far left
The text explores hybrid models combining God, State, and Network elements, such as religious diasporas with communication networks and states with religious foundations.
A 'Network/God' concept emerges where AI systems could provide moral guidance by being trained on specific leaders' or philosophies' complete works, creating interactive digital advisors.
The author envisions Network/State fusions where online communities can crowdfund territory and eventually gain diplomatic recognition as legitimate governments.
All organizational structures (companies, cities, currencies, communities, countries) are becoming digitized networks, similar to how books, music, and movies became digital packets.
Both positive syntheses (like Bitcoin and Web3 efficiency) and negative Network/State combinations are possible as existing governments fuse with network technologies.
d and country.ā It stood against the
USSR, where people worshipped the State as God. (Though the US also had a
peer-to-peer Network component in the form of permitting capitalism within its
borders, and the USSR did too in the form of the āCommunist International,ā
the global network of spies fomenting communist revolution.) ā¢God/Network : this might be something like the Mormons, or the Jewish diaspora
beforeIsrael, oranyreligiousdiasporaconnectedbysomekindofcommunications
network. Itās a community of shared values connected by a communications
network without a formal state. ā¢God/State/Network : this is something like the Jewish diaspora afterIsrael. Our
One Commandment modelalsodrawsonthis, asastartupsocietycanbebasedon
a traditional religion or on a moral imperative thatās on par with many religious
practices, like veganism. These are political examples of mixing Leviathans, but there are other ways of thinking
about the concept. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 59
2.4.6 Synthesis: The Network/God
One important synthesis that deserves special mention is the āNetwork/Godā: a Net-
work God, an AI God, a GPT-9 or DALL Ā·E 10 that gives instant, superhuman answers
to diļ¬cult questions using the knowledge of all of humanity. After all, people already do conļ¬de to Google as if it were God, or at least a confessions
booth. In the 1980s there was a popular childrenās book called Are You There God? Itās Me, Margaret , and you can imagine an app version of this where people ask a given
AI God for advice. That god need not be a general AI. It could encode a speciļ¬c morality. It could be
tuned and trained on particular corpora rather than the general web. What would
Jesus do (WWJD), in an app? The Chinese Xuexi Qiangguo app could in fact be seen
as an early version of this ā āWhat would Xi Jinping do?ā ā though one could also
have decentralized versions. What would Lee Kuan Yew do? What would David Ben-Gurion do? What would
George Washington do? What would the people you respect advise in your situation? A language model trained on their corpora ā on all the public text and audio theyāve
emitted over their lives, which could amount to many millions of words ā may achieve
something like the sci-ļ¬ episode where people are revived by AI in an app. Thereās
already a v1, it just needs to be augmented with a VR simulacrum. And even though
this kind of thing is painted as negative in media like HerandBlack Mirror , itās really
not obvious that getting interactive advice from Lee Kuan Yewās app is worse than
getting it from Lee Kuan Yewās books. 2.4.7 Synthesis: The Network/State
The study of God/State/Network syntheses brings us to the fusion weāre most inter-
ested in: a Network/State, of which one of them is our titular network state. And
there are a few diļ¬erent ways to get to a Network/State fusion. The ļ¬rst is the from-scratch version described in chapter one, where an internet leader
builds a large enough network union online that it can crowdfund territory and eventu-
ally attain diplomatic recognition. But itās worth discussing other scenarios, where ex-
isting governments fuse with the network ā both positive and negative Network/State
syntheses. Positive Syntheses: BTC, Web3, Eļ¬ciency
Start with the observation that companies, cities, currencies, communities, and coun-
tries are all becoming networks. As an analogy, we used to think of books, music, and movies as distinct. Then they
all became represented by packets sent over the internet. Yes, we listened to music 60 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
in audio players and viewed books in ebook readers, but their fundamental structure
became digital. Similarly, today we think of stocks, bonds, gold, loans, and art as diļ¬erent. But all
of them are represented as debits and credits on blockchains. Again, the fundamental
structure became digital. Now, we are starting to think of diļ¬erent kinds of collections of people āā whether
communities, cities, companies, or countries āā all fundamentally a
Watergate marked a shift from state-controlled press (Soviet model) to press-controlled state in America, establishing media dominance over political power.
The author argues that American culture now celebrates destruction (firing people) over creation (achievements like moon landing), prioritizing accountability over innovation.
Left-authoritarian journalists have shifted tactics to target tech CEOs as state capacity declined, using harassment and content moderation to maintain control over emerging power centers.
Many left-authoritarian media figures are allegedly backed by old-money elites who remain immune from criticism, making journalists 'hit men for old money' rather than independent watchdogs.
to be
far white. 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 67
drive Americaās many wars? And, relevantly, worse than what JFK did to get elected? After all, contra his protestations, Nixon may well have been a crook, but as Seymour
Hersh has convincingly reported, so was John F. Kennedy ā yet the exposure of his
Watergate-level election shenanigans somehow waited till thirty years after he ascended
to the presidency over one Richard Milhous Nixon. Anyway, the problem isnāt just the asymmetry of the āaccountabilityā ā thatās not
really about hypocrisy, but hierarchy. The problem with Americaās left-authoritarians
is also that theyāve built a terrible culture. A society that puts Watergate on a pedestal
is just fundamentally diļ¬erent from one that puts NASA (or SpaceX) on a pedestal. Because if whatās applauded is putting a man out of work, rather than putting a man
onthemoon, therewillbealotofcancellationandnotalotofcreation. Firingsomeone
should be a necessary evil, not the highest good. We linger on Watergate because it was the moment when the left-authoritarian Amer-
ican Network outside the State became unambiguously ascendant. It was the public
demonstrationofaverydiļ¬erentmodelfromtheleft-authoritarianSoviets. TheSoviets
had a state-controlled press, but America now had a press-controlled state. After Watergate, the left-authoritarians knew that they were the boss of the boss, that
they could get the president ļ¬red, that they could āhold someone accountableā ā and,
conversely, that no one could really hold themaccountable in any way. For example,
what was the punishment for printing the ādisinformationā that led to, say, the Iraq
War, or the Holodomor? Suspension from social media? Reparations for the dead? Or
nothing? Much easier to pin it all on a single Nixon, or even a Stalin for that matter,
than a decentralized mass of nameless left-authoritarians.48
Two additional points before we move on from our God/State/Network-informed anal-
ysis of the left-authoritarians. First, more recently, as American state capacity has
declined, the left-authoritarians have shifted their targets to the new authorities: the
CEOs of tech companies in particular. They realize on some level that (a) Network >
State in many contexts and furthermore that (b) the Network-aided global ascent of
tech founders and populist leaders could reduce their control over the State, so they
have chosen to (c) strike ļ¬rst by gaining control of those tech companies that have
achieved state-like scale. Theirmodus operandi wasmuchthesameasitisforinļ¬uencingtheState: usereporting
to harass tech executives into ļ¬ring people that left-authoritarians donāt like, then push
them to enact policies that left-authoritarians dolike ā such as ācontent moderationā
over any message other than that emanating from approved establishment outlets. The
left-authoritarians have even admitted to this in unguarded moments; see for example
this character talking about how ājournalism is about raw powerā or this admission
that the mediaās explicit goal was to use the State as a billy club against the Network
for fun and proļ¬t. 48This school-of-ļ¬sh strategy is part of the defense. Individuals can be singled out, but a group can
only really be beaten by another group. 68 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Second, an important insight is that behind many of these left-authoritarian journalists
(andactivistsandnonproļ¬ts)isanold-moneyzillionaire, anepotisticheirofsomekind. You wonāt ļ¬nd someone at The Atlantic criticizing Laurene Powell Jobs, you wonāt ļ¬nd
someoneatNPRgoingafterSoros, andyouwonātļ¬ndsomeoneatTheNewYorkTimes
Company that even publicly admitsthat their boss, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, is a rich
white male nepotist. This puts their behavior into stark relief: the left-authoritarian
wants to get you ļ¬red, or get your boss to ļ¬re you, but wonāt even mention their boss. They are fundamentally just dogs on a leash, hit men for old money, assassins for the
establi
Cities and countries are increasingly becoming network-like entities where digital profiles and online interactions become fundamental to governance and citizenship.
Positive examples of network-state integration include El Salvador's Bitcoin adoption, Wyoming's DAO laws, and Estonia's fully digital government services that benefit citizens.
Both China and America are pursuing malign versions of network-state fusion by forcibly acquiring tech companies through media demonization, regulatory pressure, and quasi-nationalization.
The hostile takeover of centralized tech companies by centralized states threatens to create total surveillance systems, with anti-trust potentially becoming 'zero trust' backdoor access for governments.
s networks, where
the digital proļ¬les and how they interact become more and more fundamental. This is obvious for communities and companies, which can already be fully remote and
digital, but even already existing cities and countries are starting to be modeled this
way, because (a) their citizens41are often geographically remote, (b) the concept of
citizenship itself is becoming similar to digital single sign-on, (c) many 20th century
functions of government have already been de-facto transferred to private networks like
(electronic) mail delivery, hotel, and taxi regulation, (d) cities and countries increas-
ingly recruit citizens online, (e) so-called smart cities are increasingly administrated
through a computer interface, and (f) as countries issue central bank digital currencies
and cities likely follow suit, every polity will be publicly traded on the internet just like
companies and coins. And thatās just for pre-existing polities which retroļ¬t themselves with aspects of the
network. It doesnāt include the most fundamental network property of the de novo
network states described herein: namely that the citizenry itselfļ¬rst assembles in the
cloud and only then crowdfunds the earth. Examples of pre-existing states integrating with the network include (a) El Salvadorās
integration with the Bitcoin network, (b) Wyomingās decentralized autonomous or-
ganization (DAO) law and Norwayās cap table bill, which are integrations with the
Ethereum network, and (c) places like Estonia and Singapore, where every government
workļ¬ow is already online. In each of these cases, cities and states are fusing with
networks to ship new services that are useful to citizens. This is the benign version of the Network/State fusion, the one people will ļ¬ock to. Negative Syntheses: USG, CCP, Monopoly
The malign version of the Network/State fusion is what happened in China, and is
happening in America at the federal level with the tech crackdowns. In both the
Chinese and American cases the State is āacquiringā centralized technology companies
at gunpoint, fusing with the Network from above. In China the recipe was (a) a few years of media demonization plus (b) mandatory Xi
Jinping Thought sessions followed by (c) decapitation and quasi-nationalization āā as
is happening with Alibaba and ByteDance. In America during the techlash it was very
41Substitute the word āresidentā if you will for a city, as a city doesnāt have citizens in the passport-
carrying sense. 2.4. GOD, STATE, NETWORK 61
similar: (a) several years of media demonization plus (b) quasi-mandatory wokeness
within followed by (c) anti-trust, regulation, and quasi-nationalization. Sometimes the decapitation is forceful (Uber was an early target here) and sometimes
itās quasi-voluntary. Indeed, one thesis on why many of the major tech founders have
stepped down as of mid-2022, other than Zuck, is that they donāt want to become
personally demonized during the no-win antitrust process. Itās more explicit in China
that this wasnāt a choice ā Jack Ma is no longer in control of the company he founded,
and many other Chinese founders have been similarly relieved of their duties. Inotherwords, boththeChineseandAmericanestablishmentshaveinventedrationales
to essentially seize previously founder-controlled companies.42
That is, whatever the surface justiļ¬cation, these are hostile takeovers of centralized
tech companies by centralized states. Once taken over, these companies will be turned
into total surveillance machines and tools of social control. In China, this is already
obvious. But in America, anti-trust may mean zero trust. To be clear, this is partially a forecast for the future, and perhaps it can be averted, but
in the aftermath of any ostensibly āeconomicā settlement the US national security state
could get everything it ever wanted in terms of backdoors to Google and Facebook. The NSA wonāt need to hack its way in, itāll get a front door. And then it will likely
get hacked in turn, spray
Left-libertarians within blue America are primarily loyal to their online social networks rather than the Democratic Party or traditional institutions.
This group includes deplatformed sex workers, anarchists, and anti-establishment journalists who don't identify strongly with US institutions.
The decentralized Network gives them more leverage than traditional state institutions, allowing them to organize through hashtags and bypass establishment gatekeepers.
A cultural shift from 'coolness' to 'holiness' has split blue Americans, with some moving toward earnest State-worship while others remain network-oriented.
shment. Blue Network: Left-Libertarians
There is a split among blue Americans. Some of them, the left-libertarians, are actually
best modeled as people of the Network ā meaning, the social network. They truly
arenāt primarily loyal to the Democrat party or even the institutions that are upstream
of it, but to their community online ā which increasingly diverges from the party line. These are the deplatformed sex workers, the ones engaging in risky public activism
rather than the ones merely funding it, the anarchists, the journalists so consistent
in their beliefs that theyāre actually striking against their nepotistic owners, and the
ethical anti-imperialists. They really donātidentify with the US establishment that
much, even if they sometimes wish it would execute the redistribution strategy of their
dreams. Their primary people are the others in their social network. And that Network
is becoming their new Leviathan. For the professional protester, for example, they can use the oļ¬ine tactics from Beau-
tiful Trouble orRoots to Power to laboriously organize an in-person procession outside
a government oļ¬ce...or they can do the same thing online by simply posting a hash-
tag and materializing a digital crowd, then going direct with their cause rather than
negotiating with an establishment journalist for exposure. So whatās giving them more
leverage these days: the institutions that surround the legacy State, or the features of
the decentralized Network? Another factor pushing left-libertarians away from the US establishment is the strong
left-authoritarian shift towards holiness over coolness. Fredrik DeBoer actually dis-
cussed this shift while it was underway, while society was still transitioning from the
old-time religion of Judeo-Christianity to the new doctrine of wokeness:
Silicon Valley types, by contrast, believe in things...Tangible values about
progress and culture. The Californian ideology plus the blockchain or what-
ever. Thereās content there... The media has none of that. The old school media values of truth telling
and muckraking have long since been abandoned by the media itself, as real
values require sincerity and media culture abhors sincerity. You canāt sit
on Twitter all day telling shitty jokes about how nothing matters and then
turn around and say ābut also weāre the guardians of truth and democracy.ā 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 69
If Silicon Valley has captured the value of media for shareholders and is
slowly strangling the industry to death, righting the course will require
people within media who are willing to stand up and say, āHere are my
values. They are what they are. I embody them without irony and thus I
am vulnerable. If you value these things too you have to ļ¬ght to save our
industry.ā Suchapositionwouldrequireawillingnesstoleaveblanksarcasm
aside and to start writing again for the world instead of only writing to
appear clever to other writers. Can the media make this kind of move? I
donāt see how they can; the social capture of the entire industry is just far
too acute. As smart as this post was, things didnāt work out quite as DeBoer expected. The push
toward sincerity ā towards ļ¬lling that God-shaped hole ā ended up cleaving the blues
in two. That is, contra DeBoerās forecast (āI donāt see how they canā), some of the earnest
blues actually diddeclare themselves champions of āmoral clarityā, and have now gone
over purely to unironic State-worship, to applauding multi-day prayer vigils with Liz
Cheney for the wrongs visited upon their sacred Capitol. As Glenn Greenwald has
written about at length, thereās no daylight anymore between the Democrats and the
Department of Defense, no criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency by CNN. This fusion wasnāt the full communism that DeBoer sometimes claims to prefer, but it
was a fulsome declaration of values by the media49nevertheless. Itās the culmination of
the trend towards devout wokeness that Scott Alexan
Left-authoritarians have transformed wokeness from a revolutionary ideology into a ruling-class ideology, similar to how Christianity evolved over centuries according to Nietzsche.
Left-libertarian blues are beginning to reject state worship and explore decentralized media and web3 technologies as alternatives to traditional Democratic establishment structures.
The blue tribe is experiencing an internal split between those loyal to the centralized American State versus those attracted to the decentralized global Network.
Red tribe conservatives face a fundamental choice between supporting founding constitutional principles or enforcing edicts from an increasingly hostile federal establishment that undermines their values.
der identiļ¬ed years ago in āGay
Rites are Civil Rites.ā The left-authoritarians have done to wokeness in a few years
what Nietzsche noted had been done to Christianity over the span of eons: namely,
theyāve transformed it from a revolutionary ideology into a ruling-class ideology. But every action has a reaction, every activity spawns a Soros-like reļ¬exivity, and Scott
Alexander was actually ahead of the curve again here as well. Before āGay Rites are
Civil Ritesā, he also identiļ¬ed a second dynamic of relevance, the trend awayfrom
devout wokeness that he described in āRight is the new Left.ā And this brings us to
back to the left-libertarians. The kind of blue that listens to Gray Zone, Red Scare, or Jimmy Dore is repelled by
State worship. They donāt wantto choose something as down the middle as pledging
allegiancetotheAmericanļ¬agandthenationalsecuritystateforwhichitstands. They
actually believed the things they said against the establishment, and donāt endorse it
simply because itās ostensibly ātheirā team now wearing the NSA headsets. 49All blues arenāt in media, but to ļ¬rst order all media are blue. As CPI found, 96% of journalist
political donations went to Democrats. 70 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Blue State vs Blue Network
The left-libertarian subgroup of blues has begun to ļ¬irt with decentralized media and
web3, because theyāre realizing the Network could be more interesting than the declin-
ing American State. Could Substack be more remunerative than Sulzberger? Could
Satoshiās community deliver more for them than Bernieās? If they need to redeļ¬ne
all that as āsocialism,ā so be it! And if their funding stream is changing, their ide-
ology is slowly shifting too. Yes, they may have startedas mere pawns of Americaās
left-authoritarian establishment, but what they value is increasingly coming from the
decentralized global Network rather than the centralized American State. So they are
beginning to uncouple. And thatās the emerging Network-vs-State division within blue
tribe. Red Tribe: Secular Nationalists, Internationalist Capitalists
Each member of red tribe, the conservatives, will also have to make a choice in the
years to come: do they believe in the founding principles encoded in the Bill of Rights
and the Constitution, or will they simply enforce whatever edicts emanate from an
increasingly malign US establishment ā supporting statists in practice? Is their def-
inition of āAmericaā commensurate with a world where the US federal government is
itself the most determined opponent of liberty, inļ¬ating away their savings, decon-
structing conservative Americaās culture, and surveilling them at all times? Or do they
believe American cities and states deserve digital self-determination? In short, will the
American nationchoose the decentralized Network or the centralized State? This will eventually be a conscious choice. Right now, itās an unconscious three-way
split. The three-legged stool of Reaganism ā the religious conservatives, the secu-
lar nationalists, and the internationalist capitalists ā side with the God, State, and
Network Leviathans respectively. These are their primary identities, because they correspond to that thing which they
think of as the most powerful force in the world: almighty God, the US military, or
(implicitly) the global network of trade and communication that will soon simply be
identiļ¬ed with cryptocurrency. Red God: Religious Conservatives
During the Cold War, religious conservatives believed in an almighty God, unlike the
āgodless communistsā they fought against. Today, the people of God among the reds
have sharply reduced numbers, but their moral compass remains the man on high. Insofar as there is a religious revival, it may be driven by the One Commandment-
based startup societies we describe later on. See Rod Dreher on the Protestants,
Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari on the Catholics, and Tabletās Big Tent to get a
sense of their views. 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STAT
Red secular nationalists are national security hawks who reflexively support US foreign interventions despite recognizing domestic problems, viewing America through a 'Top Gun' Hollywood lens rather than confronting the reality of military failures abroad.
These individuals lack religious faith but worship the State as a substitute for God, believing in America as a 'shining city on a hill' even when this vision doesn't align with current reality.
Red nationalists have opposite blind spots from blue left-libertarians: they see domestic establishment problems but ignore foreign military destruction, while blue leftists see foreign policy failures but trust the same government to be benevolent domestically.
When confronted about China as justification for US military expansion, the author argues it would be better for countries to rearm themselves rather than rely on an increasingly chaotic US fighting a Second Cold War amid internal division.
E, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 71
Red State: Secular Nationalists
The people of the State among the reds are more prominent. These are the secu-
lar nationalists, the national security hawks, the people who may not like the left-
authoritarians but who will nevertheless reļ¬exively support the US in every foreign
intervention. They may agree that the US is trending in a bad direction, but they
think China is far worse. As such, theyāre still building drones, coding surveillance,
andcheeringvideoslikethisonewheretheUSadmitstofomentingthecolorrevolutions
that are often otherwise denied. Iām somewhat sympathetic to this group ā after all, they arenāt burning their own
country down! ā but unfortunately, on foreign policy they are helping to burn down
otherpeopleās countries, and often for no good reason. The issue is that in the absence of a compelling alternative, or an undeniable collapse,
youāre simply not going to convince a secular nationalist that America and China are
bothbecoming digital totalitarian states, or that a US establishment that has pushed
half a dozen countries into murderous chaos isnāt quite the moral exemplar that they
think it is. The reason is becausethe red statist is a secular nationalist: they donāt have a God,
but they do believe in the State, the good vision of America as a shining city on a hill. It really doesnāt matter if this doesnāt exist ā itās the USA from their youth and from
their movies. Itās Top Gun America, and theyāll keep paying to watch the inspiring
remakes, not the depressing footage of what the US military actually did in Iraq, Libya,
Afghanistan, and Syria. Thereās both a laudable aspect to this kind of loyalty, and a frustrating one. These
folks are like the Soviet soldiers that dutifully served in Afghanistan. You might argue
theyāre ļ¬ghting for a cause that is at best pointless and at worst evil, and that theyāll
only come home to ļ¬nd their shelves empty and their culture crushed...but you have
to acknowledge theyāre risking their lives regardless. Fundamentally, the red secular nationalist often understands how bad the US estab-
lishment is at home, but doesnāt want to hear about the needless destruction wreaked
by the US military abroad. In this they have the opposite set of blind spots from the
blue left-libertarian, who can clearly see the ruin of countries unfortunate enough to
experience a 21st century US āintervention,ā yet imagines the same government thatās
a chaotic destroyer abroad can become a benevolent redistributor at home. In other words, while the red secular nationalist maintains an implicit Hollywood-
movie-style belief in a US military that can beat up anyone, the blue left-libertarian
persists in their belief that the Stateās civilian government couldļ¬x anything at home
if only enough people willed it. Using the lens of the Leviathans, these are both clearly
waystheStatebecomesastand-inforGod, initsterribleFatherandbenevolentMother
forms respectively. 72 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
What about China, huh? Letās digress and engage the China point for a second, as itās the go-to argument of
the red secular nationalist. To paraphrase, the red nationalist often concedes that US
military intervention abroad has been regrettable, but CCP dominance would be so
much worse that we need the US military to not just stick around but to expand and
grow stronger. The short counterargument is that it may instead be best for countries to rearm, and
take on their own defense ā rather than having an increasingly chaotic US try to ļ¬ght
a Second Cold War on othersā behalf in the middle of an internal Cold Civil War and
what might become a Second Great Depression. That is, we get there by a diļ¬erent route, but we arrive at much the same conclusion as
an isolationist rightist or an anti-imperialist leftist. Whether you think America is too
good for the world, or whether you think itās an ill eļ¬ect on countries abroad, or some
complex combination of both, we may want (and observe) US
China is more oppressive domestically than the US but less destructive internationally because US military presence constrains Chinese expansion abroad.
The US establishment isn't more ethical than the CCP regarding civil liberties, but is less competent at implementing totalitarian measures due to political opposition and constitutional constraints.
During the Cold War, Soviet constraints made US military interventions more cautious and successful, but after 1991 America became a hyperpower that foments global chaos rather than maintaining stability.
China focuses on building functional infrastructure in Africa while America leaves destroyed regions in the Middle East, though China would likely become more aggressive without US military containment.
military withdrawal and
regional rearmament rather than a Second Cold War. Whatās the long-form version of the argument? Start with the observation that the
CCPismore oppressive at home than the US establishment, but itās also empirically
less destructive abroad. Why? Not because of benevolence, but because the CCP is checked by the US military
abroad. Thus China is focused on building up Africa while America is blowing up the
Middle East. Yes, you can argue the Chinese are building colonies in Africa...but
theyāre functional colonies, with new roads and ports to carry raw materials, unlike the
blasted hellscapes left by US military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the like. With that said, we should have no illusions: Chinaās neighbors in Southeast Asia know
the dragon would throw its weight around without a US military presence. Right now
it canāt, because China is boxed in by the US military. Conversely, at home the CCP
has no organized domestic political opposition, so it can be absolutely ruthless. The US establishment has the opposite set of constraints: unlike China, it doesnāt face
organized military opposition abroad, so itās highly incautious in its foreign policy. But
also unlike the CCP it doesface organized domestic political opposition at home, so it
canāt be as ruthless domestically as it wantsto be. Letās drill into the domestic point ļ¬rst, and then the military point. Itās really crucial to understand that the US establishment is notmore ethical than
the CCP when it comes to civil liberties. Itās just less competent! After all, the US
establishment also does warrantless surveillance via the NSA, unconstitutional search
andseizureviatheTSA,arbitraryconļ¬scationofpropertyviacivilforfeiture, andsoon. And thatās just whatās already been rolled out ā the ambitions of the US establishment
are just as totalitarian as the Chinese stateās, as we can see from its partially failed
attempts at disinformation agencies, civilian disarmament, digital censorship, and the
like. Up to this point, these pushes have not been thwarted by the āethicsā of the 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 73
US establishment, but by some combination of political opposition, Constitutional
constraint, and bureaucratic incompetence. They keep trying, though. The US establishment isnāt organized enough to coordinate
all the pieces, but unfortunately the recently captured Google, Amazon, Apple, and
Microsoft arecapable of that level of coordination, as we saw during the Parler deplat-
forming, and the Tiananmen-like censorship of the āwhistleblower.ā So weāll see what
happens. Now on the military point. During the Cold War, the Soviet constraint meant the US was more cautious in its
interventions, and actually generally achieved far better results. South Korea was
better oļ¬ than North Korea, West Germany was better oļ¬ than East Germany, and
Taiwan was better oļ¬ than Maoist China. Even given all the lies on all sides around
Vietnam, had the US won in South Vietnam, itās quite possible that would have been
a South Korea too; but because it lost, countless people had to ļ¬ee and communism
claimed many lives in Southeast Asia. After the Cold War ended, however, the US military became a hyperpower - and
gradually evolved into a global fomenter of chaos rather than the generally conservative
guardian of stability it was before 1991. The Iraq War can be seen as a transition point,
ascanSamanthaPowerāsR2PdoctrinethatleftSyriainruins. By2022, thequestionof
whether America produces chaos with its military interventions can hardly be gainsaid
ā even the most committed American nationalist is hard pressed to name a country
thatāsbetteroļ¬ after a recentUS military intervention, something that wasnāt that
hard to do from 1945-1991.50
OK, so letās put it all together. Thereistruth to the idea that the US military is checking China, and that China
would act more aggressively in the absence of the US military...but itās true in the
The author argues that neither US nor Soviet military power was entirely good or evil, but rather served as mutual restraints on each other's aggressive actions during the Cold War.
A 'third way' of decentralized defense is proposed, where countries like Japan and Germany re-arm themselves rather than relying on US protection or submitting to Chinese influence.
The 'Red Network' represents internationalist capitalists who view Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a new Leviathan that transcends both God and State power structures.
Conservative movements are identified as having three distinct power centers: God (religious), State (nationalist), and Network (crypto-capitalist), each with their own forms of fundamentalism.
same way the Soviet military was once checking the US, and then the US military
acted more aggressively in the absence of the Soviet military. That is, itās true that
the Soviet military was on balance nota force for good during 1945-1991, but itās also
true that the US military has on balance notbeen a force for good during 1991-2021. Itāscomplicated. EveniftheirmilitarydidinsomesenserestraintheUSfromrandomly
blowing up the Middle East, itās tough to argue that youād still want the Soviet Union
to still be around to limit US military intervention. Similarly, itās hard to contend that
the price of constraining Chinaās lawful evil ambitions in East Asia should be tolerance
for Americaās chaotic evil interventions in the Middle East, that defending against a
50No, Ukraine doesnāt count. The US military failed to deter, pushed the country into another
Syria-like conļ¬ict, and has basically been using Ukrainians to bleed Russians in a proxy war. A
million Ukrainian refugees, their country blown to smithereens, thousands dead, soaring gas prices in
Europe, a radicalized Russian population, and the threat of WW3 or even nuclear war - this is just
chaos, rather than competent deterrence. 74 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
potential Chinese drone armada should mean acceptance of endless destabilization by
the US military. Ideallythereāsathirdway, abetterchoice-andthatthirdwaymaysimplybe decentral-
ized defense , where countries like Japan and Germany re-arm, rather than outsourcing
everything to the US or folding to China. This has its own issues, of course ā but if
weāre moving back into the 1800s and 1700s, as per the Future is Our Past thesis, lim-
ited wars between gold-limited great powers are arguably preferable to gigantic global
conļ¬icts between unlimited superpowers. In short: the secular American nationalist has an option that doesnāt involve either
capitulating to China or pretending the US military is currently achieving fruitful
things abroad. That third way is to support regional rearmament rather than ļ¬ghting
everyone elseās wars on their behalf. Red Network: Internationalist Capitalists
Getting back to our original topic, the third group within red tribe are the interna-
tionalist capitalists. We identify them as people of the Network. This is arguably
something of a retcon, because the internet as we currently know it was barely a factor
during the Cold War.51However, this subgroup involved the folks in favor of commerce
and trade networks, both within and across borders ā the capitalists. Today, that kind of capitalism is almost synonymous with internet startups and tech-
nology. The most valuable companies in the world were born on the Network. And
the future of network capitalism is crypto-capitalism, because itās not just transactions
that can be represented on-chain ā itās entire ļ¬nancial statements, and companies
themselves, and eventually the entire economy. The rise of Bitcoin means red people of the Network have a very speciļ¬c way to think
about their Leviathan, something distinct from both God and the State. Because BTC
cannot be seized with one click by either the US or Chinese governments, itās a symbol
of international freedom and prosperity that is more powerful than any State. On balance, Iām sympathetic to this group as well, but it has its own internal issues. For one thing, Bitcoin Maximalism in particular is similar to Woke Capital in its funda-
mentalism. The main diļ¬erence is that maximalism is zealous mononumism (devotion
to a single coin) rather than monotheism (a single god) or monostatism (a single state). The Network doesnāt make the fanatical aspect of humanity vanish; it just moves it
from God or the State to the Network. Red State vs Red Network
We now see that the God, State, and Network Leviathans all have their supporters
within the conservative movement. 51SeealsothissectiononāCultureā asathirdforcealongsideChurchandStateinJacobBurckhardtās
Force and Freedom from the mid 1800s. It maps
The author proposes that startup societies need a 'One Commandment' - a moral innovation that provides higher purpose beyond just economic benefits to attract producers rather than consumers.
A benign network/state fusion offers administrative efficiency and citizen consent, but requires religious or moral purpose to create meaning and prevent consumer-minded participation.
The Network has emerged as a new Leviathan more powerful than the State in many contexts, changing the balance of power and causing instability when these forces conflict.
People can be categorized by their primary loyalty to God (thoughts and prayers), State (making laws), or Network (writing code), which determines their tactics, values, and approaches to problems.
ing all of your data over the internet. This is the malign version of the Network/State fusion, the one people want to exit
from. 2.4.8 Synthesis: God, State, andNetwork
Can we put all three Leviathans together in the modern era? Is there something thatād
ļ¬t? Yes. The benign version of the network/state synthesis weāve just described oļ¬ers
greater administrative eļ¬ciency, greater economic returns, and greater levels of citizen
consent. But it doesnāt yet oļ¬er greater purpose, or meaning. As a preview, thatās where the One Commandment comes in. The concept is that
you donāt want or need to start an entirely new religion to build a startup society,
but youdoneed a moral innovation of some kind. If all you have to oļ¬er is a higher
standard of living, people may come as consumers, but they wonāt come for the right
reasons. The consumer-citizen is coming to enjoy a great society, not to sacriļ¬ce to
make a society great. They wonāt understand the valuesthat underpin your startup
societyās valuation. And you likely wonāt be able to buildthat high valuation or higher
standard of living without a higher purpose, just as neither Apple nor America itself
42Whatās the alternative? Decentralize or be nationalized. The BTC/web3 pole that we introduce
later gives a way for founders to ship protocols that are more robust to seizure by the American or
Chinese establishments, as they donāt simply involve demonizing a company but instead a protocol
with the scale of a country. 62 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
was initially built for money alone. You want to recruit producers, not consumers, and
for that, youāll need a purpose. Thathigherpurposecouldbeatraditionalreligion, asinRodDreherās Benedict Option ,
but it could also be a doctrine with a deeply thought through āOne Commandment,ā a
moral innovation that inverts one of societyās core assumptions while keeping all others
intact. For example, taking the seemingly trivial moral premise that āsugar is badā and se-
riously carrying it through to build a Keto Kosher society involves a focused yet all-
encompassing change to every restaurant, grocery store, and meal within a jurisdiction. We give more examples later. 2.4.9 New Leviathan, New States
The concept of three Leviathans explains why a network state is now feasible. The
Network is a new sheriļ¬ in town, a new Leviathan, a new force that is more powerful
than the State in many contexts. That has changed the balance of power. While
syntheses arearising, so are conļ¬icts between Network and State. And that explains
much of todayās instability: when Leviathans wrestle, when Godzilla ļ¬ghts King Kong,
the earth trembles. 2.5 People of God, People of the State, People of the
Network
Weāve talked about the history of power, of God, State, and Network. Now letās talk
about the recent history of power struggles, between people of God, people of the State,
and people of the Network. Stereotypically, the people of God oļ¬er43thoughts and prayers, the people of the State
say āthere oughta be a law!ā, and the people of the Network write some code. The diļ¬erences go very deep. Itās a diļ¬erence in ļ¬rst steps and in ultimate loyal-
ties. Once you understand whether someone prioritizes the God, State, or Network
Leviathan you understand what tactics theyāll prefer, what values they hold, and where
theyāre coming from. To illustrate this, letās apply the lens of Leviathans to analyze (a) the internal divisions
withinAmericaāsconservativeredsandprogressiveblues, (b)theconļ¬ict betweenglobal
technology and the US establishment, and (c) the mental model of the base-raters loyal
to the US establishment. 43Iām somewhat sympathetic to some of the people of God, as thoughts and prayers are harder to
screw up than rules and regulations. Moreover, when tragedies occur, the American people of God
tend to be more genuinely charitable than the people of the State. The latter tend to feel that they
āgave at the oļ¬ceā. 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE
A political realignment is emerging where libertarians from both parties unite against authoritarians, replacing the traditional left-right divide with a Network-versus-State conflict.
The split within conservatives involves right-statists supporting traditional institutions like the dollar while right-capitalists back decentralized networks like Bitcoin.
This new coalition would pit internationalists and capitalists together against socialists and nationalists, fundamentally reshaping political alliances beyond the Reagan era framework.
The tech-versus-media conflict exemplifies this broader realignment, driven by economic disruption, geographic separation, demographic differences, and contrasting values between technical truth and political popularity.
While authoritarians would have numerical and institutional advantages domestically, libertarians would possess stronger individual talent and global support from iconoclasts worldwide.
to our concept of the Network, before the Internet. 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 75
An interesting point is that secular nationalists, being dispositionally conservative, can
often stick with a symbol long after its substance has changed. Think about the many
āRussian nationalistsā who stuck with the Soviet Union even when it was a complete
inversion of what had existed prior to 1917. Then compare this US Army ad from 2008
with this recent ad from 2021. So, in the event of any conļ¬ict between the Network and the State, such as a possible
struggle between the inļ¬ating dollar and the deļ¬ationary Bitcoin, the right-statists
could take the side of the national ļ¬ag while the right-capitalists take the side of the
digital currency. That is, if and when itās clear that the continuation of American
empire depends on the ability to continually inļ¬ate, the people of the State may side
with the legacy state, and the people of the Network will side with the decentralized
network.52So, thatās the Network-vs-State division within red tribe. The Realignment
If we add up all these pieces, we get a possible future where the left- and right-
libertarians from both parties line up against the left- and right-authoritarians. Weāre already starting to see this if we look at Substack vs establishment journal-
ists, Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald vs Fox News/NYT, BTC vs USD, web3 vs
Big Tech, the migration of ethnic minorities to the Republicans and the migration of
neoconservatives to the Democrats. People have talked about zombie Reaganism, but in this scenario a new coalition would
be ļ¬nally popping into view. And itās a totally diļ¬erent carving of the political spec-
trum than the Reagan era. Rather than nationalists and capitalists (the right) against
internationalists and socialists (the left), itās internationalists and capitalists (left- and
right-libertarians) against socialists and nationalists (left- and right-authoritarians).53
That Realignment would be the Network against the State. The authoritarians would
outnumber the libertarians domestically, and have the institutions on their side. But
the libertarians would have stronger individual talent, as theyād draw the iconoclasts,
and theyād also draw support from the rest of the world. 2.5.2 Tech vs Media, aka PC vs PC
Letās switch gears here and apply the lens of the Leviathans to a diļ¬erent conļ¬ict. Why are global technology and the US establishment at odds? ā¢Economics. You can say itās because technology disrupted everything from Madi-
son Avenue to Hollywood, as argued here. Looking at just the 80% drop in US
52Where do the red people of God land up? Well, itās a wildcard, but some will stick with the
devil they know, the state they grew up with, while others may bet on Bitcoin to enable the Benedict
Option and opt out of a sinful society. 53In the language of the political compass, the Reagan era was right-vs-left, whereas the Network-
vs-State era would be top vs bottom. 76 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
media revenue alone from 2008 to 2012, itās hard to believe that wasnāt a factor. ā¢Geography. You could note that the pre-2020 center of technology was Silicon
Valley, which is 3000 miles away from the Bos-Wash corridor that houses the US
establishment. ā¢Demographics. You can claim itās because tech is largely immigrant and the US
establishment is 20-30 points whiter. Certainly by the high evidentiary standards
ofAmericaāsleadingdisparateimpactanalystsandcriticalracetheorists, thisfact
alone is prima facie evidence that the US establishment is institutionally racist
towards their tech disruptors. ā¢Psychology. Youcancontenditāsduetoapsychologicaldiļ¬erencebetweentechni-
cal/ļ¬nancial types vs social/political elites, between people who focus on what is
true versus those who care about what is popular. This relates to the distinction
between technical and political truths. ā¢Metabolism. You might observe that the rivalry is particularly pronounced
Political progressives seek to gain control of government power to coerce others through mandatory policies and budget control, while technological progressives want freedom from such control.
If the State uses law to suppress American tech in the 2020s, it may gain domestic power but lose globally as technologists migrate overseas to more welcoming countries.
The argument that tech owes its existence to government funding is challenged, noting that most scientific innovation occurred either before or after the 1933-1970 period of peak state involvement.
The era of 1933-1970 when the US government achieved major projects like the Manhattan Project and Apollo represents an exceptional period rather than the historical norm for innovation.
r other...this is their mindset. The goal is to get a piece of this gigantic
baton that is the government, to get a club to coerce people (for their own good of
course), to maybe get a little budget along the way, and to ļ¬nally āchange the worldā
by changing the policy. To make something that was previously discretionary either
mandatory or forbidden, to redirect the ļ¬ow of printed money, to exert force through
the law. The primary goal of the political progressive is thus the opposite of the
technological progressive: their goal, verbalized or not, conscious or not, is to exert
power over others. Now, this is a caricature. Of course there are good people of the State, just like there
are bad people of the Network. It is possible to use a minimal amount of coercion for
good against genuinely bad actors; this truth is the diļ¬erence between minarchism and
anarchism. But obviously, these worldviews collide. One group wants no one to have power over
them, while the other seeks to exert power over others. 78 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
As a possible future scenario, one way this could be resolved is if the people of the
State use the law to smash American tech over the 2020s, thereby gaining more power
domestically. But tech has already gone global thanks to remote work, and most
technologists are immigrants already...so the people of the Network may simply shift
their attention overseas ā or not come in the ļ¬rst place. So the federal action would
merely drives away immigrant founders, and the American State would lose power on
a global scale. (Local and state governments in the US may respond diļ¬erently, which
is an intriguing twist). The same thing is also happening in China, by the way, where many of the most able
technologists are now alighting for new countries ā and no longer coming to the US,
where they arenāt welcome anyway. The Enormous State, not the Entrepreneurial State
As a bit of a sidebar, a frequent argument that American people of the State make is
thatthepeopleoftheNetworkowetheirvery existence totheState. Afterall, wasitnot
their god, the US government, that funded the internet? Do we not need public monies
to back basic research? And shouldnāt the people of the Network therefore dutifully
bow their heads and submit, joyfully paying ever more in tribute to the sacred Uncle
Sam? There are a few responses to this. One is that the antecedent of the people of the
Network were the pre-internet industrialists, who certainly were not well treated by
the State in the early 1900s. Another is that while the UK similarly gave rise to the
US insomesense, Americans do not genuļ¬ect in the direction of the British Isles ļ¬ve
times per day. But the deepest response starts by acknowledging a kernel of truth: there wasa period
from roughly 1933-1970 when the centralized US government did the Hoover Dam, the
Manhattan Project, and Apollo. The transistor and early internet came out of this era
as well. And there were some later innovations also catalyzed by the State (albeit often
by non-bureaucrats who managed to commandeer bureaucrat funds) like the Human
Genome Project and the self-driving car. However, both before andafter this period, the centralized State was not the locus
of technical and scientiļ¬c innovation. That should be obvious today for anything in
digitaltechnology; academiahasbeenraidedbytechcompaniesandventurecapitalists. But itās also true for the period beforethe (well-intentioned) Vannevar Bush memo
that kicked oļ¬ the government centralization of science. After all, most of physics ā
from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein ā was discovered before the National Science
Foundation (NSF) was even created. That said, letās talk about the 1933-1970 period itself. This period of āpeak stateā
was real, but in overstated form it has become the basis for books like Mazzucatoās
Entrepreneurial State ā which I disagree with, and which Mingardi and McCloskey
have rebutted at length in the Myth of the Entrepreneurial State . 2.5
The author argues that the 'Entrepreneurial State' concept is flawed because governments face no financial risk unlike true entrepreneurs who can lose their own capital.
Most scientific and mathematical breakthroughs occurred before government funding agencies existed, suggesting centralized state funding isn't necessary for innovation.
Mid-20th century state dominance in innovation was due to their ability to suppress other actors rather than superior innovative capacity, enabled by centralized technology of that era.
Both progressive and conservative Americans treat the State as a religious replacement, making them unable to rationally assess the possibility of state failure or alternatives.
The author introduces concepts like 'Flatland' to explain how people trapped in current systems cannot perceive higher-dimensional alternatives to state-centered organization.
. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 79
Hereās why I disagree with the thesis of the Entrepreneurial State :
ā¢The name itself is oxymoronic. As macroeconomists never tire of telling us,
governments arenāt households, because unlike actual entrepreneurs the state
can seize funds and print money. So there is no ļ¬nancial risk, and hence nothing
of āentrepreneurshipā in the entrepreneurial state. ā¢The book doesnāt consider the fact that most math/physics/etc was invented
prior to the founding of NSF, and therefore doesnāt need NSF to exist. ā¢It further doesnāt acknowledge that it was possibleto do science and technology
before the massive centralized state, through the distributed model of the āgen-
tleman scientist,ā and that this model is returning in the form of open source and
(now) decentralized science. ā¢It doesnāt take into account the waxing and waning of centralized state capacity
due to technology. ā¢It doesnāt contend with the state-caused slowdown in physical world innovation
that happened during the post-1970 period, which Thiel, Cowen, and J Storrs
Hall have all documented. ā¢It doesnāt look at how diļ¬cult VC or angel investing actually is, so it doesnāt
really ask whether those āinvestmentsā by the state had real returns. ā¢Most importantly, it doesnāt engage with the counterfactual of what would hap-
pen if we had many independent funding sources, rather than a single centralized
state. So, itās true that there was a period mid-century where all other actors besides the US
and USSR were squashed down and centralized states dominated innovation. But itās
not because they were necessarily better at innovating , itās because they were better at
dominating , due to the centralized tech of that time. It was more about the Enormous
State than the Entrepreneurial State. And thatās why the technological progressives of
the Network donāt reļ¬exively genuļ¬ect before the political progressives of the State. 2.5.3 The Base-Rater as a Flat-Curver
Someone who worships an almighty God wonāt readily change their beliefs. Neither
will someone who worships an almighty State. Once in a while, a religious millenarianās belief is put to the test when thereās a concrete
prediction made by the faith that doesnāt pan out. Thatās also what happened for the
āsecularā believers in communism when the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union
fell. These events are always fascinating for the non-believer - whether itās Heavenās
Gate, QAnon, āMueller Day,ā or the āwithering of the stateā, itās interesting to see what
happens when a prophecy doesnāt work out.55
55Not all prophecies fail, though. JFK did get a man on the moon prior to 1969. Einstein was 80 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Indeed, thatās why people wrote books like The God that Failed when they turned away
from communism. A Leviathan had given up the ghost. Whether that Leviathan was
God itself or the State, it was a crushing collapse of faith. As per the book of the same
title,Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More . This oļ¬ers a useful way of thinking about the blue and red statists alike, the left-
authoritarians and the secular nationalists we discussed earlier. The American State is
their God replacement, and they truly canāt envision a world without it. Whether they
think of it in terms of āthe Constitutionā (the conservative framing) or āour democracyā
(the progressive framing), the civic religion of the US istheir religion, especially when
faith in God has fallen oļ¬ a cliļ¬. So, they may not be dispassionately rational when forecasting whether their God, the
State, might fail. There are three ideas that are helpful here. ā¢The ļ¬rst idea is Flatland. The premise of Flatland is that itās a 2D plane,
and entities within Flatland canāt really understand 3D things. They encounter
spheres as circles that start as points, expand to their maximum radus, and then
contract back down. ā¢The second idea is the premise that historical time is far longer than human tim
Tech and media clash because media has the 24/7 speed to match tech's pace, making it the establishment's primary weapon against Silicon Valley disruption.
Both tech founders and socialist professors share ambitious intellectual traits, but tech represents a cultural fork from traditional US establishment power structures.
Computer science collapsed the distinction between words and deeds, transforming intellectuals who once advocated for policies into builders who actually create and manage systems.
The fundamental conflict is between 'people of the Network' (technological progressives who build voluntary systems) and 'people of the State' (who seek power through laws and coercion).
be-
tweenUStechandmedia. TheotherarmsoftheUSestablishment, likeacademia,
Hollywood, and government all needed multi-year cycles to ship anything, while
only the news media had the 24/7 metabolism to match techās DNA. So they
became the point of the spear for the US establishmentās counterattack. This
is also why tech favors newsletters, podcasts, slide decks, and other types of
fast-turnaround content that the establishment doesnāt natively specialize in. ā¢Bifurcation. You can remark that thereās a deep structural similarity between
a socialist professor and technologist founder: both feel like they should be in
charge. Thatās why tech is a cultural fork of the US establishment, just as the
US itself was a fork of the British Empire. Itās the same root, diļ¬erent branches. The ambitious intellectual who would in a previous life have become an academic
theorist, jurist, or journalist is now a founder, engineer, or investor.54Because
thereās a common thread between media and tech, which is the handling and
presentation of information. Computer science took it one step further: it col-
lapsed the distinction between the word and the deed, and turned a generation
of intellectuals into software CEOs. Many people who previously thought theyād
just advocate for a law to be passed and not worry about the details found out
how hard it was to build things, to manage people, to turn a proļ¬t, to be the
one in the arena. They became people of the Network. And then they came into
conļ¬ict with those who remained people of the State. All of these are factors. But the last one probably gets to the root of the issue, because
fundamentally, tech-vs-media is a clash of Leviathans. 54Sometimes literally, as in the case of Messrs. Graham, Thiel, and Moritz respectively. Paul
Graham was an academic computer scientist at Harvard, Peter Thiel has spoken about how he might
have gone for a Supreme Court clerkship, and Mike Moritz was a journalist before he became a venture
capitalist. 2.5. PEOPLE OF GOD, PEOPLE OF THE STATE, PEOPLE OF THE NETWORK 77
After all, the immigrant technologist moves betweencountries while keeping their tech-
nical skills and network connections. For them, the Network provides their primary
community, while the State is secondary. Conversely, the American establishmentarian
gains their power from the State. It is all about passing a law or inļ¬uencing a pol-
icymaker. And if the Network interferes with this process, perhaps by giving people
access to information that undermines the State? Then so much for the Network. Tech-vs-media is then best understood as a collision of fundamental values, between
the people of the Network and the people of the State. The Conļ¬ict: Technological Progressives vs Technological Conservatives
You can think of the āpeople of the Networkā as technological progressives, and the
āpeople of the Stateā as political progressives (charitably) or technological conservatives
(perhaps more realistically). Bothareseeminglyalignedatahighlevelonthegoalofsolvingproblemslikecontrolling
COVID-19, building housing, or reducing car crashes. But the people of the Network
usually start by writing code and thinking about individual volition, whereas for the
people of the State the ļ¬rst recourse is passing laws and collective coercion. Put another way, the people of the Network start by thinking about getting a piece
of the network to call their own. A domain name, something they can build up from
scratch, starting with a bare website like reddit.com and ending up with a massive
online destination that everyone voluntarily seeks out. The primary goal of the tech-
nological progressive, the tech founder is to build ā and for no one to have power over
them. By contrast the people of the State start by thinking about capturing a piece of the
state. To win an election, to inļ¬uence legislation via a nonproļ¬t, to write an article
that has āimpactā in the sense of impacting policy, to be appointed Undersecretary of
something o
Most people are 'base-raters' who assume everything stays constant because they only understand short cycles and lack historical perspective beyond their lifetime.
The collision of information networks has fundamentally changed how we perceive both present events and historical narratives about American dominance.
America is experiencing internal division resembling a 'Cold Civil War' that may prevent it from effectively competing in a potential Second Cold War with external rivals.
Fundamental questions are emerging across the political spectrum about whether the US establishment has ever been a genuine force for good domestically or internationally.
e. We live on a tiny piece of a grand historical curve, a trajectory that looks ļ¬at to
us over months and years, because historical time (usually) moves slowly. ā¢The third idea is what Tyler Cowen diplomatically calls a ābase-raterā, the es-
tablishment type who essentially thinks everything remains constant. This is the
kind of person whoāll sardonically remarks āOh, this time is diļ¬erent, huh?ā, not
realizing that (a) theyāre quoting that statement out of context, and (b) the ob-
viously fallacious opposite of that saying is the assertion that āthings will never
change.ā
Put these ideas together and you start to get a mental model of the base-raters, the
blue and red statists. They think everything will always stay the same, that itāll stick
at a base rate. The only cycles theyāre familiar with are short ones: the cycle of breath over a few
seconds, the cycle of sleep over one day, and the cycle of seasons over one year. But
they arenāt familiar with any cycle that extends beyond one human life, because they
usually donāt know much history beyond what the establishment has pointed them
towards. Because they donāt think about cycles, they donāt think about curves. They live on a
kind of Flatland, except rather than being ļ¬at as in the sense of two-dimensional, itās
ļ¬at as in the sense of a curve with zero-derivative. But as Ray Dalio has noted, things
may not stay ļ¬at in historical terms for long. As such, the blue and red statists may
correct that an atomic bomb could be built. Elon Musk did manage to get reusable rockets to work. The best technological prophecies are anchored in physical feasibility, not just human belief. 2.6. IF THE NEWS IS FAKE, IMAGINE HISTORY 81
be in for a rude shock. Using the lens of the Leviathans, they really think their God,
the State, can never fail. 2.6 If the News is Fake, Imagine History
The collision of Leviathans has knocked something loose. Access to all that information
from the Network has changed our perception of the present, and with it the perception
of the past. The historical inevitability and (even more importantly) the desirability of
the US establishmentās victory over all opponents is now very much in question. Both
outside and inside the US, thereās the sense that the US-dominated postwar order is
either on its last legs or already over, and that the ancient legislators and endless
remakes reļ¬ect a fading culture trying to hang on by its ļ¬ngernails to prevent what
comes next. Though people are gearing up as if on autopilot for a Second Cold War, itās not obvious
that the US will make it out of the ļ¬rst round given its internal Cold Civil War. The
decline in state capacity, in internal alignment, in budgetary resources, in wherewithal,
andinpoliticalwillistangible. Itāstruethatthemostdedicatedestablishmentariansdo
still operate as if the empire will always be there. But the question of what Americaās
role in the world should be next remains unanswered, because the question of what
America represents at home remains unanswered. Within the US, groups on both right and left are now asking themselves in diļ¬erent
ways: are we the baddies? The left asks whether the US is institutionally racist, the
right asks whether the US is irredeemably leftist, and more factions on each side56want
a national divorce. As we can see from the graphs, America is not really a single ānation stateā anymore;
itāsatleastbinational, withtwowarringgroups. Thereāsbeenacollapseininstitutional
trust, and in each other. And the questions now arising are fundamental. ā¢Is the US establishment a force for good in the world? ā¢Is the US establishment a force for good at home? ā¢Would others copy todayās America of their own free will? ā¢Would the US establishment tell you the truth? ā¢Was itevera force for good at home or abroad? 56The blue side has written Itās Time for a Bluexit (TNR 2017), Maybe Itās Time for America to
Split Up (NYMag 2018), and The Case for Blue State Secession (The Nation 2021). The red side
has
The Network (internet) enabled actual freedom of speech by routing information around traditional State censorship and media gatekeeping.
The US establishment historically controlled speech through centralized media ownership, where ordinary citizens had no practical voice unless employed by media corporations.
Starting in 2013, the threatened establishment launched a 'Counter-Decentralization' campaign, using moral attacks to regain control over tech companies and public discourse.
From 2013-2020, this establishment counterattack succeeded in 'wokifying' major tech companies, deplatforming opponents, and reversing the decentralizing effects of the internet.
unlike the sensors you own. Network rescue. Note something else: the onlyreason you are hearing about these
incidents, and the only reason the rebuttals to them ever came out in the ļ¬rst place, is
the Network. It is only because the Stateās ļ¬ltering of social media is not yet complete,
that their downranking of dissident voices not fully eļ¬cient, that their late-breaking
attempttoimposespeechandthoughtcontrolsonafreesocietynotfullyconsummated,
that (a) the initial refutations were even published and (b) that you are seeing some
of them combined into one document. This last point is worth hovering on. Why do we know about these distortions of the
present? Itās again because of a collision of Leviathans, because the Network routed
information around the State, giving people actualrather than ostensible freedom of
speech. 2.6. IF THE NEWS IS FAKE, IMAGINE HISTORY 85
The Network Delivered Actual Freedom of Speech
We elaborate on this in the Fragmentation Thesis , but the Network is accelerating a
great decentralization of Western society that began shortly after the peak centraliza-
tion of about 1950. Towards the end of this process, in our current era, the US establishment got so fat
and happy that it forgot how aggressive its predecessors had been in imposing speech
and thought controls. Basically, the establishment didnāt realize theyād inherited a
highly regulated, centralized communications apparatus where the vast majority of
Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned a media corporation
or were employed by one. As such, in the 1990s and 2000s, the American establishment could seem to eat its cake
and have it too ā enjoying the rhetorical windfall of claiming to have a free society,
while in practice holding an enormous distribution advantage over the common man
(ānever argue with a man who buys ink by the barrelā). Now, itwastrue that the US was more free than the USSR, but it is not true that
the US was more free than the Internet. As we discuss later, social media is Amer-
icanglasnost and cryptocurrency is American perestroika . So as the internet scaled,
and Americans actually got the rights to free speech and free markets that they were
nominally promised, the establishment started to feel threatened. Why? Because while speech only inļ¬uences volitional behavior (like voting), volitional
behavior in turn inļ¬uences coercive behavior (like legislating). So, if the US establish-
ment lost control over speech they would have lost control over everything. The Establishment Launched the Counter-Decentralization
Thus began the great Counter-Decentralization in 2013, the techlash plus the Great
Awokening, what Jack Bratich calls a āwar of restorationā by an establishment that
had been economically disrupted by the Network but that retained the capability to
morally denounce its enemies. The threatened US establishment increased the volume of attacks on their rivals in
both senses of the term; the sheer quantity of attacks and the level of vitriol soared,
as you can see from the charts. Their rivals were basically everyone ā tech, Trump,
China, Russia, Israel, Brazil, Hungary, Brexiteers, Macron ā everyone that wasnāt a
loyal part of the US establishmentās social network. And from 2013-2020, against all odds, this multifront campaign seemed to be working. Americaās establishment spent down huge amounts of reputation, but they managed to
wokify Google, Amazon, Apple, and the major tech companies, deplatform Trump and
get him out of oļ¬ce, and terrorize the country with massive riots. They completely
reversed course58from the Obama era, silently stole the China issue from Trump,
58RecallthatObamahadbeengenerallyfriendlywithtech, calledforaāresetā withRussia, dismissed 86 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
and polarized relations with Russia. They canceled, deplatformed, demonized, and
dominated for the better part of a decade. Then, suddenly, after February 2021, there was a distinct slackening of support, of
int
The author argues that the US establishment has lost control over the narrative due to repeated distortions of present and past events.
A comprehensive list of media failures from the last 5-15 years demonstrates how major news organizations have consistently misreported or fabricated stories.
The pattern includes Iraq War justification, Russiagate coverage, election predictions, fake podcasts, COVID misinformation, and suppressed military operations like the 2017 battle for Mosul.
The core premise follows the logic that 'if the news is fake, imagine history' - once people recognize current lies, they begin questioning historical narratives as well.
put out The Case for American Secession (Malice 2016) and National Divorce is Expensive, But
Itās Worth Every Penny (Reaboi 2021). For an overview of both, see An American Secession? Itās
Not that Far-Fetched (Bloomberg/WaPo 2021) and How Seriously Should We Take Talk of US State
Secession (Brookings 2021). 82 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
My perhaps idiosyncratic answers to these questions are: no, no, no, no, and yes. No, I
donāt think the US establishment is nowadays on balance a force for good abroad or at
home, or that the US model would be cloned today by someone setting up a new state,
or that the US establishment can be trusted to tell the truth. I do, however, think the
Cold War America of 1945-1991 was on balance better for its citizens and allies than
its Soviet opponents. But while I can justify57these answers, my responses arenāt as important as why these
questions are arising in the ļ¬rst place. The reason is that the US establishment has
lost control over the narrative. The distortion of the present, and the past, has caught
up to them. 2.6.1 Distortion of the Present
āIf the news is fake, imagine history.ā This pithy tweet reverses Orwell, because he who
is acknowledged to be faking the present can no longer distort the past. That is, once
enough people see that the establishment has been lying about todayās events, they
naturally begin to think the establishment might have been lying about yesterdayās
news as well. To calibrate this, letās start with a grab bag of media failures from the recent present,
the last 5-15 years or so. Youāll no doubt have your own list. ā¢Remember the āoopsā on the Iraq War, after the media corporations that were
supposedtoāholdthegovernmentaccountableā insteadhelpedjustifytheinvasion
of Iraq under false pretenses? ā¢Remember the thousands of reports on āRussiagateā that completely disappeared
after the Mueller report? ā¢Remember when the NYT said Hillary Clinton had a 91% chance to win, giving
the strong impression that the 2016 election wasnāt even close? ā¢Remember the detailed, emotional, multipart Caliphate podcast, endorsed by
Sam Dolnick, a senior member of The New York Times Companyās ruling Ochs-
Sulzberger family, which turned out to be completely fake? ā¢Remember the Miles Taylor episode, where a junior functionary was falsely rep-
resented as a senioradministration oļ¬cial? ā¢RememberwhenSulzbergerāsemployeespublishededitorialaftereditorialagainst
free speech, before they pretended they were for it, before they opposed it again? ā¢Remember when they said YouTubeās remaining freedom of speech was a bad
thing in the US, and then praised its freedom of speech the next day when it was
helpful in getting their content into Russia? 57SeeBitcoin is Civilization andGreat Protocol Politics for theses on domestic and foreign policy. 2.6. IF THE NEWS IS FAKE, IMAGINE HISTORY 83
ā¢Remember when Kara Swisher reported that innocent high school student Nick
Sandmann had done something wrong for merely standing still in front of a man
who strode up to him pounding a drum? ā¢Remember when Kara Swisherās Recode also said COVID-19 was ācontained,ā
before it ended up killing more than a million Americans? ā¢Remember all the oļ¬cial disinformation on COVID, how they called people
racists for warning about it, and said that masks didnāt work before they did? ā¢Remember when everyone switched sides on vaccines, and everything else related
to COVID, as Michael Solana ably chronicled here? ā¢Remember when the US establishment published reports credulously predicting
that inļ¬ation would be transitory? ā¢And remember when there was minimal mainstream coverage of the 2017 battle
for Mosul, the worldās largest military operation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003,
the war that Obama was supposed to have ended? You probably didnāt remember that last one, mainly because there wasminimal cov-
erage, but watch this and then ask why youāve never heard of it before. In each of these cases, we have something predicte
Establishment media creates massive reality distortions by amplifying favorable information 100X while suppressing unfavorable information 100X, creating net distortions of 10,000X or more.
Media outlets function as self-interested sensors rather than neutral reporters, deliberately misrepresenting numbers on inflation, crime, and other metrics to serve their agenda.
News organizations select stories based on narrative alignment rather than importance, promoting only content that supports establishment policies while attacking opponents and competitors.
Journalists maintain their positions despite being wrong by orders of magnitude (1000X+) because their job is manufacturing consent and wielding power, not accurately reporting truth.
Unlike aligned sensors (gas gauges, bank accounts, work dashboards), media corporations profit from misinformation since they face no consequences for deceiving their audience.
d to go to zero that ends up at
millions, or a certainty that winds up a nullity, or a hot war featuring the US military
and 482 suicide car bombings that somehow registered on the public consciousness as
zero. If the US establishment could erase Mosul from memory in the age of the internet,
you start to see how Putinās Russia could pretend the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was
just a āspecial operation.ā And you start to realize that itās not suļ¬cient to simply
ātake the articles with a grain of saltā, and discount them a bit. By listening to the
establishment, your perception of reality may be oļ¬ by one million fold. Patterns of Information Distortion
There are a few common patterns here, ways in which the information supply chain
has been distorted. Channel distortion. That which favors the US establishment is magniļ¬ed 100X, while
that which disfavors it is downranked 100X or silenced entirely, such that the net
distortion is 10,000X or more. We can think of this as analogous to channel distortion
in signal processing. Media corporations arenāt just censors, theyāre sensors- and
self-interested ones. That is, theyāre ostensibly measuring the world, but they actually
have self-interested reasons for reporting that some numbers are low (like inļ¬ation and
crime) and others are high (like whatever social ill they want to address). There are
many such channel distortions, including (a) absence of criticism of media owners, (b)
A/B testing to promote literal hate speech for more clicks, (c) self-referential quoting
to give the impression of impartiality, and so on. 84 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Narrative alignment. The way the establishment determines what to put on the front
page out of millions of possible stories should remind you of the political power theory
of history. Itās only things that support the narrative: their favored state policies
will always succeed, their disfavored tech competitors will always fail, their errors are
honest mistakes, your errors are ļ¬ring oļ¬enses, the opponents of the establishment are
x-ists and traitors, free speech is the enemy, and so on. Quantitatively speaking, itād be
relatively straightforward to use word2vec or something more recent to literally score
and rank stories for their narrative alignment. Power over truth. In these incidents, if you stop to count, you often realize that the
reports were oļ¬ not by say 50%, but by 1000X or more. Why do these āreportersā still
have their jobs, then? Because their job wasnāt to make money, but to make power. That is, they werenāt trying to predict the future correctly for the sake of making good
investments, but to repeat the party line to keep people in line. Theyāre like actors, in
that their role was to say (or write) the right thing at the right time, to manufacture
your consent, to misinform you about everything from weapons of mass destruction to
the probability of inļ¬ation, and to then claim democratic legitimacy after people voted
on the basis of their oļ¬cial misinformation. Comparison to an aligned sensor. Itās worth comparing the reports by these media
corporations to reports by an aligned sensor, one where there is no way for the sensor
to āwinā at your expense by distorting the information itās giving to you. Your gas
tank does not report that the gas is at 90% before suddenly dropping to 20%. Your
bank account does not zoom up in order to fake you out and get you to buy something
from the bank, and then silently down again, like an establishment journalist trying to
manipulate someone before an election. The metrics on your dashboard at work are
not typically falsiļ¬ed by people to make them more sensational. In each of these cases,
you are receiving reports from either a dispassionate machine or an institution (like
your company) where you have economic alignment and no signiļ¬cant principal/agent
issues. By contrast, the media corporation can report false information to you and still
make money; it has a mind and wallet of its own,
š The coalition that predated and arguably caused Trump has dissolved, with global audiences tuning out US establishment messaging and reassessing their relationship with America.
š° Gell-Mann Amnesia describes how people recognize media falsehoods in their area of expertise but trust the same sources on unfamiliar topics due to pre-internet hub-and-spoke information topology.
šļø Recognition of present-day misinformation has led people to question historical narratives, creating 'Gell-Mann America' where past events may be as distorted as current reporting.
š Historical examples challenge common narratives: Egypt's secular past, Nazi scientists in NASA, foreign involvement in the Russian Revolution, and The New York Times' own problematic history including slave ownership and Pulitzer-winning Soviet propaganda.
ensity. The coalition that had predated Trump, that had arguably caused Trump,
didnāt seem to outlive Trump. At the time of writing, itās hard to tell whether this is
a momentary shift or a permanent one, but social engagement is down. People have
tuned out. The US establishment is only talking to their hardcore supporters now. All
the other social networks theyāve attacked ā essentially everyone in the world who
isnāt a true blue American State-worshipper ā they arenāt listening anymore. Instead, theyāre reassessing their relationship with the US establishment, and with the
US itself. 2.6.2 Distortion of the Past
The distortion of Americaās present has led people to re-evaluate Americaās past. Once
theyrealizetheyāvehadGell-MannAmnesia, theystarttowonderiftheirmentalmodel
is one of Gell-Mann America. Recall that Gell-Mann Amnesia refers to the phenomenon where you read something
in the paper about an area you have independent knowledge of. Suppose itās computer
science. Whenyoureadarticlesonthetopic, youseegrievousfalsehoods, andinversions
of cause and eļ¬ect. Then you turn the page and read about, say, Palestine as if the
reporting on that topic was trustworthy. You forget what you just saw, that the
reporting was ļ¬awed in the area where you could independently check it. You get
amnesia. The mechanistic reason for Gell-Mann Amnesia is the hub-and-spoke topology of the
pre-internetinformationenvironment. Supposeyouwereanexpertincomputerscience,
another person was an expert on Japan, a third knew about the bond market, and so
on. You are spokes that are all connected to the hub (say, The New York Times)
but not each other. Each spoke has superior local information, and can falsify NYT
reports in their own domain, but has no mechanism for coordinating with other spokes,
let alone establishing a superior hub. Until the internet, the blockchain, and the advent
of cryptohistory. The long-term consequence of Gell-Mann Amnesia is Gell-Mann America. People know
now that we are systematically misled about the present. But at least we live in the
present, so we have local information that can falsify many news stories. We do not live
in the past, so all we know is that we may be wildly oļ¬-base in our understanding of
history. There are no people from the past around to give ļ¬rst hand accounts...though
we can read their books and sometimes watch their ļ¬lms. Here are some quick links that may surprise you about the past. concern over Russia as late as 2012, mocked Trumpās emphasis on China in 2015, and even produced
the relatively pro-China movie American Factory in late 2019. 2.6. IF THE NEWS IS FAKE, IMAGINE HISTORY 87
ā¢In 1958, President Nasser of Egypt laughed at the idea that Egyptian women
would ever be forced to wear the hijab. Surprise: the Muslim world was far more
secular within living memory. ā¢After World War 2, Operation Paperclip put reformed German scientists to work
on the American space program. Surprise: the real Hidden Figures were Nazis. ā¢Germany sent Vladimir Lenin into Russia, potentially as part of a strategy to
destabilize their then-rival in war. Antony Suttonās books document how some
Wall Street bankers apparently funded the Russian Revolution (and how other
Wall Street bankers funded the Nazis years later). Leon Trotsky spent time in
New York prior to the revolution, and propagandistic reporting from Americans
like John Reed aided Lenin and Trotsky in their revolution. Indeed, Reed was so
usefultotheSovietsāandsomisleadingastothenatureoftherevolutionāthat
he was buried at the base of the Kremlin Wall. Surprise: the Russian Revolution
wasnāt done wholly by Russians, but had signiļ¬cant foreign involvement from
Germans and Americans. ā¢The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns The New York Times Company, owned
slaves but didnāt report that fact in their 1619 coverage. ā¢New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for help-
ing the Soviet Union starve Ukraine into submission, 90 years before the Time
š° The author presents numerous examples of prominent journalists and officials who allegedly distorted major 20th century events, from Castro's rise to Soviet atrocities.
šµļø The text argues that establishment media organizations like The New York Times have consistently served as unreliable narrators throughout history.
š¬ Late 1990s movies about constructed reality reflected a collective realization that people had been systematically deceived by centralized authorities.
š The internet inadvertently enabled the rediscovery of suppressed truths that had been made 'unthinkable' through a progression from obvious to rude to unsayable.
š The author suggests that once threatening truths became so suppressed they went 'unthought,' they were forgotten as potential threats and left vulnerable to rediscovery online.
s
decided to instead āstand with Ukraine.ā
ā¢Herbert Matthews, also a New York Times correspondent, helped Castro win
power in Cuba, leading to the murderous Cuban revolution and the subsequent
Cuban missile crisis that almost resulted in nuclear war. ā¢Another American ājournalist,ā Edgar Snow, wrote books such as Red Star Over
Chinathat praised Chairman Mao to the heavens before, during, and after Mao
embarked on programs of mass murder and collectivization. ā¢President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, architect of the US administrative state,
recruited young men to sleep with gay seamen in order to entrap them. ā¢The American architect of Bretton Woods, the IMF, and the World Bank, Harry
Dexter White, spied for the Soviets. He was one of dozens, according to the
Venona decrypts, declassiļ¬ed after the end of the Cold War. ā¢Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States during Rooseveltās term in
1940, toured the Soviet gulag of Magadan and pronounced it ļ¬ne and dandy,
right before he just barely lost the VP nomination for 1944 to Harry Truman ā
who then became president in 1945. ā¢The āliberatingā Soviet Red Army raped its way across Eastern Europe in the
1940s, the same communists that The Times extolled as giving women a ābetter
sex lifeā in its 2017 anniversary series on the Russian Revolution. 88 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
ā¢The NYTās Otto Tolischus reported Poland invaded Germany in 1939, reversing
the direction of the Nazi assault. ā¢Seymour Hersh details in The Dark Side of Camelot how John F. Kennedyās men
in Illinois helped rig the 1960 election, an unmentioned scandal a full decade
before Watergate. And thatās just59the 20th century, with a focus on the Cold War! Once you start seeing that many dissonant facts, plenty of them from the same or-
ganizations like The New York Times Company that call themselves the āpaper of
recordā and the āļ¬rst draft of history,ā that literally run billboards calling themselves
the āTruthā...you start to realize that there is an unreliable narrator problem. What if Sulzberger is more like Keyser Sƶze? What if his employees are highly self-
interested professional prevaricators? What if theyāve always been like that? What
if you canāt trust anything they say, and by extension anything the US establishment
says, without checking it yourself? As the Cold War ended, and the internet rose in the late 1990s, a spate of movies
came out ā The Matrix ,Memento ,The Truman Show ,Fight Club ,The Game ,Men in
Black,The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind āā all about a constructed reality
where our memories arenāt real. Itās almost as if with the rise of the Network, that
there was a dim realization in the collective subconscious that everyone had been lied
to, deceived, anesthetized, sedated by the centralized States of the 20th century ā not
just by the fascists and the communists, but the democratic capitalists too. Just like someone who grew up in China and migrated to the US in adulthood would
ļ¬nd that theyād have been lied to ā that Mao wasnāt really ā7 parts good and 3 parts
bad,ā but far worse than that ā those who grew up in the US and migrated to the
Internet in adulthood are starting to realize that something is up. The reason is that the American establishment didnāt really understand what the inter-
net would mean for them. Because during the 20th century theyād made obvious-but-
threateningtruths, liketheexistenceofSovietspiesintheUS,rudetotalkabout. Then
a progression happened: after the obvious became rude, the rude became unsayable,
the unsayable became unthinkable, and the unthinkable went unthought. And once it
went unthought, it was no longer even thought about as a potential threat. Moreover,
the original people whoād consciously suppressed that obvious-but-threatening truth
had passed away. So these unthought ideas were then sitting there waiting in a dusty tome, waiting
for someone to happen upon them, and accidentally rediscover them and put them
on the internet. Whether Go
The establishment's historical hostility to new technologies (aviation, rocketry) parallels current resistance to digital information access and web3 technologies.
Control of information chokepoints like Google and fact-checkers represents a battle between traditional state power and decentralized network access to truth.
Hollywood movies unconsciously fill gaps in people's knowledge, creating distorted mental models of reality through what the author calls 'Jurassic Ballpark' effect.
Media systematically portrays certain groups (military, corporations) as villains while consistently depicting journalists, activists, and regulators as heroes, creating biased public perceptions.
The film industry has deliberately airbrushed uncomfortable historical truths like Cold War drama while promoting positive portrayals of establishment figures and even communists.
ogle Books or Wikileaks or the Soviet archives or the
censorship-resistant web, there are now too many secrets in plain view. 59The establishmentās hostility to technology has been a constant as well. Here are their early
denunciations of aviation (airplanes will never happen in a million years!) and rocketry (Goddard
doesnāt know physics!). 2.6. IF THE NEWS IS FAKE, IMAGINE HISTORY 89
The question now is whether a newly awakened US establishment can use its control
of chokepoints like Google and its various āfact-checkersā to suppress access to these
inconvenient truths, or whether web3-mediated services will make it permanently dif-
ļ¬cult for the State to suppress the Network. You as the reader may have some input
on that. 2.6.3 Jurassic Ballpark
As a not-so-side note, in addition to falsiļ¬ed newspapers and history textbooks, your
distorted impression of the past ā your Gell-Mann America ā likely comes from
movies, to a greater extent than you might think. If you havenāt studied something in
depth, yourmentalmodelofitoftenimplicitlyreducestoafewscenesfromaHollywood
movie. Letās call this phenomenon āJurassic Ballpark.ā If you recall the scene from Jurassic
Parkwhere they splice in amphibian DNA to spackle over the gaps in their genetic
reconstruction, thatās similar to what media consumption has done to your brain.60
Youāre unconsciously splicing movie scenes into real-life as a ballpark approximation. The gaps in your knowledge have been ļ¬lled in by TV and movies. These are unreliable
narrators. For example:
ā¢Whatās your image of the US military? Often something from Top Gun orTrans-
formers. Even the negative portrayals depict it as all-powerful.61
ā¢Whatās it like to run a business? The evil CEO is a TV trope. Countless sto-
ries cast a corporation with limitless resources62as the main bad guy, from the
Terminator franchise to Lost. ā¢Whoās going to save us from the virus? Why, the competent public servants at
the CDC, as portrayed in Contagion . By contrast, you very rarely see depictions of journalists, activists, professors, regula-
tors, and the like as bad guys. The public lacks televised narratives for how people in
those roles can go wrong. Thatās why the behavior of journalists in real life was such
a surprise to Paul Graham:
One of the biggest surprises of my adult life is how unethical reporters are. In movies theyāre always the good guys. āIn movies theyāre always the good guys.ā Indeed! If you think about it, superheros
are literally portrayed as journalists (thatās the day job of both Clark Kent andPeter
60Of course, Iām well aware of the irony that even this reference is itself dependent on a movie! 61The idea that the US military will win any battle where it really ātriesā is the true faith of this age,
believed by anti-imperialist leftists and American Greatness neocons alike. If that changes, everything
changes. In this sense both sides believe in the State Leviathan, though the former thinks of it as
Satan and the latter as God. 62Even though anyone who actually runs a company is well aware just how limited its resources
really are. 90 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Parker), and journalists are likewise portrayed as superheros (see movies like Spotlight
andThe Post ). The Intrepid Reporter is as much of a stock character as the Evil
Corporation.63You donāt hear much about the evil reporter, though. You donāt hear
much about the evil communist, either. Why? More than 20 years ago, Reason Magazine ran a story that still holds up well
today, called Hollywoodās Missing Movies , about how the ļ¬lm industry airbrushed the
drama of the Cold War out of the 20th century. So itās not just that the movie industry
ranpositiveportrayalsofUSestablishmentjournalists, theyalsoranpositiveportrayals
of out-and-out communists - but I repeat myself.64
There are exceptions. Once in a while you do see a House of Cards that depicts evil
nonproļ¬ts, Democrats, and journalists. Once in a while you do get a Dallas Buyers
CluborGhos
Popular media portrays evil capitalists at a ratio of over 1000:1 compared to evil communists, despite historical evidence of communist atrocities.
Fictional stories serve as real-world archetypes that shape public perception, with biomedical innovators typically portrayed as villains rather than heroes.
Standard textbooks, newspapers, and movies contain significant historical distortions that obscure the true nature of past events and ideologies.
The author provides extensive reading recommendations on techno-economic history and 20th century events to counter mainstream historical narratives.
tbusters that depicts evil regulators from the FDA or EPA. And more
recently youāve started to see a few movies that even depict evil communists, not in
theinterchangeablecartoonvillainsenseofaRockyIV,butintheideologicalsense-the
Lives of Others ,The Way Back ,Bridge of Spies , and the Death of Stalin respectively
depict the spying, gulaging, imprisoning, murdering Communist states for what they
really were. Still, these are very much exceptions. AI video analysis could quantify this, but if you
took the top N most popular movies and TV shows over the past several decades, in
terms of raw hours of footage watched, Iād bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of
scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists. Of course, these are ļ¬ctional stories, but as Grahamās quote illustrates, they serve as
real world archetypes. Even the FDA knows what a Tricorder is, and they think of it
as āgoodā only because it was portrayed as good in Star Trek. But most of the time
biomedical innovators are portrayed as evil, with all the attendant consequences. False
histories shape our reality. We all live in Jurassic Ballpark. 2.6.4 Further Reading
Perhaps you now agree that history has been distorted. But weāve only scratched
the surface. While we canāt recapitulate the history of the whole world here, we can
recommend some references that show how the past is diļ¬erent than you might think. We have idiosyncratically categorized them as ātechno-economic historyā and ā20th
centuryā history. If you click these links and even skim the books, let alone buy and
fullyreadthem, youāllstarttounderstandthedegreeofhistoricaldistortioninstandard
textbooks, newspapers, and movies. And youāll be equipped to answer the fundamental
questions we raised at the beginning of this chapter. 63Though it is rarely pointed out on screen just how many of those reporters are, in real life,
employed by evil corporations. 64This is no exaggeration. Bezmenov and Venona documented this at length. Then read about
John Reed (Leninās journalist), Walter Duranty (Stalinās journalist), Edgar Snow (Maoās journalist),
Herbert Matthews (Castroās journalist), and Pham Xuan An & David Halberstam (Ho Chi Minhās
journalists). 2.6. IF THE NEWS IS FAKE, IMAGINE HISTORY 91
First, some reading on techno-economic history:
ā¢patrickcollison.com/fast ā how fast construction once was. ā¢wtfhappenedin1971.com ā how many economic indicators went oļ¬ track in 1971,
around the time the US got oļ¬ the gold standard. ā¢J Storrs Hall: Whereās My Flying Car? ā how the world used to be on an
increasing energy production curve till the regulatory barrier of the 1970s (see
also the review by Roots of Progress). ā¢Matt Ridley: How Innovation Works ā how tech founders always had to ļ¬ght
against the establishment, much like the present day. ā¢William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson: The Sovereign Individual ā how
the centralized power of the 20th century is actually historically aberrant. ā¢Ray Dalio: Principles of the Changing Economic Order ā how todayās America
resembles the Dutch and British empires of the past in terms of its monetary
overextension. ā¢PeterTurchin: War and Peace and War āhowquantitativemethodscanidentify
recurrent cycles. ā¢William Strauss and Neil Howe: The Fourth Turning ā how a cyclic theory of
history forecasts a serious American conļ¬ict in the 2020s (written in the mid-
1990s). ā¢Brian McCullough: How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone ā
reminds us that the tech era is very new, only really about 10 years old, and only
began in earnest with iPhone adoption. ā¢Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers ā how the recent history of the Chinese tech build-
out in the 2010s shows that they arenāt just copycats. Then, some reading on 20th Century history:
ā¢Curtis Yarvin: Unqualiļ¬ed Reservations ā a broad survey of Western historical
anomalies, with a focus on the 20th and 19th centuries. ā¢Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago ā what the Soviet Union was
actually like.
The text presents a curated list of books that challenge conventional narratives about 20th century history, particularly focusing on Soviet communism, fascism, and American politics.
Several works reveal hidden connections between capitalists and revolutionary movements, such as Wall Street funding both Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions.
Multiple books document how major institutions like The New York Times and the US government systematically misrepresented historical events and were infiltrated by foreign agents.
The author argues that understanding these revisionist perspectives helps break free from establishment narratives that assume institutional goodness and historical inevitability.
The collection suggests that both US and USSR establishments used similar propaganda techniques to justify their authority through stories of moral superiority and predetermined destiny.
ā¢Yuri Slezkine: The House of Government ā how the Soviet Union actually
worked. ā¢Janet Malcom: The Journalist and the Murderer ā how journalists ābefriend and
betrayā their subjects for clicks, a book taught in journalism schools as something
of a how-to manual. ā¢Antony C. Sutton: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution andWall Street and
the Rise of Hitler ā how diļ¬erent groups of capitalists funded the communist 92 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
and fascist revolutions respectively. ā¢Ashley Rindsberg: The Gray Lady Winked ā how The New York Times system-
atically misrepresented the truth over the 20th century. ā¢Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke ā how World War 2 was far more brutal and
confusing than conventionally conveyed in textbooks. ā¢Sean McMeekin: Stalinās War ā how Stalin drove WW2, and (among other
things) sought to push Japan and the US into conļ¬ict so he wouldnāt have to
ļ¬ght either of them. ā¢Viktor Suvorov: The Chief Culprit ā how Stalin was preparing to attack Hitler
prior to Hitlerās attack on Stalin; vindicated by some of McMeekinās work. ā¢John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: Venonaand Diana West: American Be-
trayalā how the US was indeed riddled with communist spies before and after
World War 2. ā¢Kenneth Ackerman: Trotsky in New York and Sean McMeekin: The Russian
Revolution ā How the Russian Revolution was enabled by overseas money and
the German High Command in WW1. ā¢Ioan Grillo: El Narco ā Inside Mexicoās Criminal Insurgency ā how Mexico is
far more beset by violence than commonly understood, and how this relates to
recent American inļ¬uence. ā¢Wolfgang Schivelbush: Three New Deals ā how Rooseveltās New Deal was di-
rectly inspired by fascist Italy and Germany. ā¢Stephen Kotkin: 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin ā how the Soviets were in the
ļ¬nal analysis actually devout communists, not cynics. ā¢Frank Dikƶtter: The Cultural Revolution ā how Maoās cultural revolution re-
sembles the wokeness of modern America, with the BLM riots of 2020 proving
particularly similar. ā¢Cixin Liu: The Three Body Problem ā while ļ¬ctional, the ļ¬rst chapter of this
book illustrates the madness unleashed under Maoism, and what the Chinese
people endured before Deng. See also The Secret Document That Transformed
China. ā¢Bryan Burrough: Days of Rage and David Talbot: Season of the Witch ā how
America in the 1970s involved far more violent acts and domestic terrorism than
is commonly remembered. ā¢William H.Whyte: The Organization Man and JamesBurnham: The Managerial
Revolution ā how the US in the 1950s was much more corporatist and signiļ¬-
cantly less capitalist than is popularly remembered. 2.7. FRAGMENTATION, FRONTIER, FOURTH TURNING, FUTURE IS OUR PAST 93
ā¢Stephen Wertheim: Tomorrow, the World; The Birth of US Global Supremacy ā
how the US did not achieve world domination by accident, but intentionally set
out to do so. ā¢Amity Shlaes: The Forgotten Man ā how FDRās ābold, persistent experimenta-
tionā helped turn a recession into a Great Depression. ā¢Adam Fergusson: When Money Dies and Mel Gordon: Voluptuous Panic ā the
monetary and cultural character of the Weimar Republic, and how it resembles
present day America. ThisisfocusedontheWestandinparticular20thcenturyAmerica, butsomeonewhoād
grown up in China could probably prepare a similar list using global sources to debunk
various kinds of CCP propaganda. For example, the fact that North Korea is dark
makes Chinaās movie extolling their military support for the glorious North Korean
regime a little darker. 2.7 Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, Future
Is Our Past
New countries begin with new stories. Once weāve dislodged the āarc of historyā from our heads, that thing we didnāt even
know was there, the story that told us of the US establishmentās inevitability and
institutionalgoodness...onceweāverealizedjusthowsimilarthatstoryistotheUSSRās
similar narrative of inevitability and institutional goodness...once weāve realized we
canāt count on the US establishment to be the āleader of th
š¹ Native Americans should be viewed as brave warriors who fought valiantly rather than helpless victims, similar to how we remember the 300 Spartans.
šŗ Historical analysis reveals that virtually no ethnic group has peacefully occupied their land since 'time immemorial' - history is a boneyard of displaced peoples.
š The frontier period from 1492-1890 began with Columbus's voyage (driven by Ottoman blockades) and provided a crucial safety valve for American social tensions.
āļø The closing of the frontier created serious concerns about trade unions and class conflict, as cheap land had previously allowed workers to achieve independence rather than remain permanent wage laborers.
an tribes developed a technological edge
overanyoftheEuropeantribes, hadtheyinventedoceanicnavigation, theywouldlikely
have invaded Europe. We can infer this because (a) when the Mongols had a similar
technological edge they did invade Europe and (b) many North American tribes were
by contemporaneous accounts people accustomed to war. So, itās old-fashioned, but itās
probably healthier to think of the Native Americans more like the 300 Spartans than
as helpless victims ā brave warriors who fought valiantly but lost to superior forces. The second is that if you read books like Reichās Who We Are and How We Got Here , it
makes clear that history is a boneyard. Contra the opening notes of Microsoftās recent
Ignite conference, thereās probably not a single ethnic group on the planet that simply
peacefully occupied their plot of land since ātime immemorial.ā One tribeās homeland
was once their distant ancestorsā frontier. So, with that as preface, letās generalize the frontier thesis. One way of thinking about
it is that the frontier actually opened in 1492, well before the founding of the Americas. Whatās little known is that Columbusā voyage to the New World was in part driven
by the Ottoman blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean; it was an attempt to ļ¬nd an
alternative path to India around the Ottomans, but it ended up using technology to
reopen the frontier in the face of political roadblocks. From 1492 to 1890, Europeans had what they considered a frontier. It started with
transatlantic navigation and the discovery of the New World, then proceeded to Euro-
pean colonialism, and from there to the independence of the US and Western expansion
via Manifest Destiny. Towards the end of this period, authors like Charles Nordhoļ¬
inCommunistic Societies of the United States noted how important the frontier was,
how bad it would be if that avenue for ambitious men was closed oļ¬, and how nasty
the Trade-Unionists were getting. Hitherto, in the United States, our cheap and fertile lands have acted as
an important safety-valve for the enterprise and discontent of our non-
capitalist population. Every hired workman knows that if he chooses to use
economy and industry in his calling, he may without great or insurmount-
able diļ¬culty establish himself in independence on the public lands; and,
65Note again how history informs morality! 2.7. FRAGMENTATION, FRONTIER, FOURTH TURNING, FUTURE IS OUR PAST 97
in fact, a large proportion of our most energetic and intelligent mechanics
do constantly seek these lands... I do not doubt that the eagerness of some of our wisest public men for
the acquisition of new territory has arisen from their conviction that this
opening for the independence of laboring men was essential to the security
of our future as a free and peaceful state...
Any circumstance, as the exhaustion of these lands, which should materi-
ally impair this opportunity for independence, would be, I believe, a serious
calamity to our country; and the spirit of the Trades-Unions and Interna-
tional Societies appears to me peculiarly mischievous and hateful, because
they seek to eliminate from the thoughts of their adherents the hope or
expectation of independence. The member of a Trades-Union is taught to
regard himself, and to act toward society, as a hireling for life; and these
societies are united, not as men seeking a way to exchange dependence for
independence, but as hirelings, determined to remain such, and only de-
manding better conditions of their masters. If it were possible to infuse
with this spirit all or the greater part of the non-capitalist class in the
United States, this would, I believe, be one of the gravest calamities which
could befall us as a nation; for it would degrade the mass of our voters,
and make free government here very diļ¬cult, if it did not entirely change
the form of our government, and expose us to lasting disorders and attacks
upon property. Nordhoļ¬ was right. The aggression of the Trade-Unions eventuall
š¬ Hollywood movies can no longer realistically portray America as the world's savior due to declining competence and credibility after 2021.
šØš³ China is positioned to fill the narrative vacuum with blockbuster films showing Chinese heroes defeating Americans and saving the world.
š America needs new stories that decenter the US establishment while still promoting universal values, similar to how America bridged between the British Empire and the postwar world.
ā” These new narratives should turn the constant of US global leadership into a variable, enabling psychological preparation for decentralization and a multipolar world.
š Four alternative story frameworks are proposed: postwar consensus fragmentation, frontier thesis generalization, cyclical conflict theories, and viewing the future through historical parallels.
e free worldā or even to
successfully manage its domestic aļ¬airs anymore...whatās left? Weāre going to need new stories. Movies where the big decision doesnāt end up on the
USpresidentāsdesk, wheretheUSmilitaryisnātcountedontosaveusfromaliens. News
feeds that donāt put American events by default on the frontpage. Supply chains and
digital services that donāt rely on an increasingly unpredictable and anarchic America. Stories that decenter the US, in other words, but that still give the world hope. That movie point is a disorienting one, isnāt it? You might be tempted to say itās not
important. But itās all-important. We donāt tell ļ¬ctional stories about the Kazakhstani
military saving the world because it wouldnāt be realistic. And after 2021, it isnāt
realistic to make stories about the US establishment saving the world either. For example, a movie like 2011ās Contagion that depicts a competent CDC is now just
too far away from reality to permit suspension of disbelief. So instead we get a movie
like 2021ās Donāt Look Up , which depicts a chaotic America thatās still somehow the
center of events, still the country which the world relies on, but whose internal chaos
causes it to fall short. The next movie in that imaginary trilogy will probably not
center America. What could it center instead? 94 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Unfortunately, the default right now would be to center China. The Chinese are after
all putting out blockbuster movies like Wolf Warrior 2 andBattle of Lake Changjin
wheretheybeat the Americans, save the world, and end up as number one. They have
that civilizational conļ¬dence. And these movies are not laughable like they would have
been even a decade ago. China is a real contender for the crown, unlike Chad or Chile. So thatās the set of stories that is waiting in the wings. One response is to deny this and double down on American nostalgia, rolling out Top
Gun: Maverick and electing people born in the 1940s forever. This is what the US
establishment is currently doing, hanging on for dear life to the postwar order, denying
that any change is underway ā and thereby refusing to gracefully adapt. AnotherresponseistocomeupwithnewstoriesthatcenterneitherChinanorAmerica,
but that do center certain universal values - and that give a bridge between America
and what comes next, as America itself was a bridge between the British Empire and
the post-WW2 world. We give four concrete examples in this chapter. But to be clear, just because a story
decenters America doesnāt mean it has to be punitive. That is, these stories donāt
have to condemn the US, anymore than the postwar order of 1945-1991 put the UK
in the dock, or the 1991-2021 order really beat up on the Soviets that much. Indeed,
a new story could well feature past aspects of the US in laudatory ways. The main
commonality is that we need new stories that no longer assume the US establishment
will continue to be at the center of the world, or else people will be psychologically
unprepared for that eventuality. Another way of thinking about it is that the right kind of new story turns constants
into variables. Just as Bitcoin turned the constant of the US dollar into a variable, we
need new stories that turn the constant of the US establishment into a variable. By
decentering the US establishment in our mental models, we enable decentralization. We envision a world where the US may not be there for us, because it was not always
there in the past, and may not endure far into the future. Here are four such stories. The ļ¬rst is the tale of the fragmentation of the postwar
consensus. The second is a generalization of Fredrick Jackson Turnerās frontier thesis. The third recapitulates the Fourth Turning concept from Strauss and Howe, as well as
Turchin and Dalioās work, all of which predict signiļ¬cant conļ¬ict to come in the West. The fourth talks about how our future is our past, how the mid-20th century is like a
funhouse mirror moment, and how we are now seein
š Technology shifted from favoring centralization (pre-1950) to decentralization (post-1950), with peak centralization occurring around 1950 when there was one phone company, two superpowers, and three TV networks.
š¢ The mid-century US was highly corporatist with 90% top marginal tax rates designed to prevent new wealth accumulation, prioritizing joining big companies over entrepreneurship.
šŗ The fragmentation thesis explains how society moved from unified information sources (like everyone watching I Love Lucy together) to today's multiple filter bubbles and decentralized media.
šŗļø Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis identified the American frontier as crucial for ambition, national aspiration, and social experimentation, though this concept has been criticized since the 1960s as colonialist.
g a bizarre phenomenon where we
repeat past events but get opposite outcomes. All of them turn constants into variables, as they describe a pre-American era where
the US didnāt yet exist, and thereby prepare us for a post-American period where the
US in its current form no longer exists. 2.7. FRAGMENTATION, FRONTIER, FOURTH TURNING, FUTURE IS OUR PAST 95
2.7.1 The Fragmentation Thesis
The Sovereign Individual , written in 1999, is an incredible book that nailed many as-
pects of our digital future decades in advance, Bitcoin prime among them. We wonāt
recapitulate the whole thing here, but in short the thesis is that after many genera-
tions in which technology favored centralization (railroads, telegraph, radio, television,
movies, mass production) since about 1950 it is now favoring decentralization (transis-
tor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency). So by this measure, peak centralization was about 1950, when there was one
telephone company (AT&T), two superpowers (US/USSR), and three TV stations
(ABC/CBS/NBC). Even though the 1950s are romanticized in the US, and there were
certainly good things about the era, that level of centralization was not natural. This
was an enormous degree of cultural homogenization, conformity, and sameness relative
to the pre-1914 world just a few decades prior. Many aspects of individual initiative,
creativity, and freedom had been dulled down or eliminated in the standardization
process. Read William H. Whyteās The Organization Man or James Burnhamās Managerial
Revolution for a portrait of this midcentury time period. At the time, the mid-century
US was more corporatist than entrepreneurial. Yes, the system was capitalism, but
a highly managed and regulated sort of capitalism. It was all about joining the big
company and working your way up, not founding one, except for the rare and just be-
ginning startup phenomenon on the West Coast, which was a million-fold less common
than it is now. Everything was signiļ¬cantly to the economic left and social right of where it is today. Yes, the USA wasnāt communist, but it did have 90% top marginal tax rates, to stop
any new people from getting rich and potentially threatening the system FDR built. Similarly, the USSR was far more socially conservative than is commonly remembered,
doing things like taxing childless women to reduce their status if they didnāt reproduce. Typically, those who complain about ļ¬lter bubbles are actually complaining that there
is more than one. Namely, they are annoyed that all information doesnāt derive from
establishment sources only. That situation actually did obtain in the mid-century US,
when tens of millions of Americans all assembled in their living rooms at the same time
to watch I Love Lucy . Then it all decentralized, fragmented. The story is told in essays like Paul Grahamās
āRefragmentation,ā and in The Sovereign Individual . And we call this the Fragmenta-
tion thesis. 2.7.2 The Frontier Thesis
In the late 1800s, Fredrick Jackson Turner gave an inļ¬uential talk on the concept of
the frontier as the crucial driving force in American history. At that time, it was
understood that the free land of the frontier was crucial to the US in several ways - as 96 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
a way for the ambitious to seek their fortunes, as a national aspiration in the form of
Manifest Destiny, as bare land for social experiments. Today, of course, the concept of the frontier and Manifest Destiny is not only not
admired, but has been pathologized since the 60s by the same deconstructionism that
is one half of wokeness. You know the story: the American frontiersmen, like Columbus
before them, were racists, colonialists, and imperalists.65
But two points on this before we proceed. The ļ¬rst is that there were Ntribes ļ¬ghting in the Americas before the arrival of the
Spanish, the British, and the like. The Europeans simply represented tribes N+ 1,
N+2, and so on. Had one of the Native Americ
The closing of the American frontier in 1890 eliminated opportunities for ambitious individuals, forcing them into zero-sum competition that contributed to revolutionary movements and the deadly ideological conflicts of the 20th century.
After 1991, the internet reopened as a digital frontier, but recent centralization and political control threaten to close this new frontier as well, potentially returning society to zero-sum conflict.
Four potential frontiers exist today - land (7.7B people), internet (3.2B), sea (2-3M), and space (<10) - with the internet being the most practically accessible for expansion.
Multiple theories including The Fourth Turning and Turchin's work predict significant physical and monetary conflict in America during the 2020s, based on historical cycles of approximately 75 years between major upheavals.
y led to the commu-
nist revolutions which killed tens of millions of people globally, led to ālasting disorders
and attacks upon propertyā, and generally became the bane of the world. We can attribute some of this to the pause, to the closing of the frontier in 1890. That closing took away paths for ambitious men, and ensured that they couldnāt easily
become founders on their own plot of land - they had to become union organizers, or
revolutionaries, or demagogues of some kind. Without the frontier, it all became zero
sum. And thus we entered the steel cage match of the 20th century between fascism,
communism, and democratic capitalism. There were some important frontier-related
technological developments during this period in space shuttles (and cruise ships! ), but
the frontier itself was not open. Humanity managed to survive through a bloody 20th century. After 1991, the frontier
reopened as commerce on the internet was legalized. By the late 2010s, the combination
of centralization and wokiļ¬cation (in the West) and Xi-iļ¬cation (in China) threatened
to close this frontier too, but BTC and web3 and the open metaverse have given the
digital frontier a new lease on life. Today, if we assess where weāre at, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land,
the internet, the sea, and space. Right now, there are 7.7B people on land, 3.2B on
the internet, about 2-3M on the high seas, and less than 10 currently in space. 98 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
So, practically speaking, an āinternet frontierā is easier than the other three. If weāre
lucky, weāll be able to use the concepts from the network state to reopen the physical
frontier, through a hybrid internet/land strategy, as described in this book. To summarize, (a) the period of European greatness corresponded to the open frontier
from 1492-1890, (b) the period of total war corresponded to the closing frontier from
1890-1991 which ushered in a necessarily zero-sum world, (c) the peaceful reopening
of the digital frontier could lead us again to a time of greatness, (d) the American and
Chinese establishments are trying to close that frontier and trap us into the same steel
cage match of the 20th century, (e) but with suļ¬ciently good technology we might be
able to escape these political roadblocks and (f) reopen not just a digital frontier, but
a physical one: on remote pieces of land, on the sea, and eventually in space. This is
what we refer to as the generalized Frontier thesis. 2.7.3 The Fourth Turning Thesis
The Fourth Turning andAges of Discord both predict very signiļ¬cant unrest within
the US in the coming years. Ray Dalio does as well in Principles for Dealing with
the Changing World Order , though he conļ¬nes most of his comments to monetary
apocalypse. Their models are somewhat related. The Fourth Turning came out in 1997 and is based on a quasi-cyclical theory of Anglo-
American history, where conļ¬ict erupts roughly every 75 years. If you believe in these
patterns and want a possible underlying driver of them, 75 years is about one long
human lifespan. So perhaps those who do not remember66history really aredoomed
to repeat it. Turchinās predictions came out around 2008 in a Nature article, and heās written them
up at length in War and Peace and War . He has impressive timestamped graphs
with speciļ¬c forecasts as to why conļ¬ict will rise, using various measures for societal
instability like elite overproduction and the wage share of the masses. Dalioās thesis is that weāre about to experience events that have never happened before
in our lives, but have happened many times before in history. He goes back further than
the Fourth Turning to the British and Dutch empires, and has some quasi-quantitative
analysis to support his view. Allthreeoftheseworkspredictsigniļ¬cantphysicaland/ormonetaryconļ¬ictinAmerica
in the 2020s, and (in Dalioās case) a consequent changing of the world order. We call
this the Fourth Turning Thesis. 66Imagine a powered-up, open source,
Historical events are recurring in reverse order, with today's decentralization mirroring past centralization trends in opposite directions.
Technology favored Western centralization from 1754-1947 through mass media and production, but now favors decentralization from 1950 onward through digital technologies.
The East (China and India) follows a different pattern, becoming more internally unified after centuries of fragmentation, while the West experiences increasing decentralization.
Revolutionary classes that successfully overthrow establishments often become the new ruling classes, then fight subsequent revolutionaries in an ongoing cycle of power shifts.
that was gradually centralizing away from individual
princely states, and a United States that uniļ¬ed many European ethnicities. ā¢Today, weāre seeing so-far unsuccessful calls for wealth seizures in the US; back
then, we saw Executive Order 6102, the successful seizure of gold. ā¢Today, weāre seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and startup societies;
back then, in the 1770s, we saw pseudonymous founders of startup countries. ā¢Today, weāre seeing the re-encryption of the map; further back in time, before
1492, maps had terra incognita . Thecarefulobserverwillnote thattheseevents arenātallhappeningin exactly thesame
reverse order. Itās not A/B/C/D and then D/C/B/A like a melody. Moreover, the ļ¬rst
set of events is more spaced out over time, while the second is highly clumped together,
with internet-era events years, rather than decades, apart. Finally, the repetition of
each event is often not exactly the same as the previous, but often a āversion 3.0.ā For
example, Bitcoin is not simply the sameas gold, but a version 3.0 that combines some
aspects of gold and some aspects of digitized ļ¬at currencies. Still, there seems to be something going on. Whatās the unifying theory here? One model, as just discussed in the Fragmentation Thesis, is that technology favored
centralization in the West and especially the US from arguably 1754-1947 ( Join, or Die 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 101
in the French and Indian War, uniļ¬ed national government post-Civil War, railroads,
telegraph, radio, television, movies, mass media in general, and mass production). And technology is now favoring decentralization from roughly 1950 to the present day
(transistor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency). So, in the West, the grip of the centralized state has begun to slacken. The East is
a diļ¬erent matter; after a century of communism, socialism, civil war, and Partition,
China and India are more internally uniļ¬ed than theyāve been in a long time. Before we immediately jump to thinking that world is ending, though, we should note
that during the riseof Western centralized power people (understandably) complained
about centralized power and homogeneity, just as today during the fallof Western
centralized power they are complaining about fragmentation and lack of common voice. That doesnāt mean weāve come full circle, exactly. As per the helical theory of history,
we might have progressed orregressed. But there may be an underlying cycle: āthe
empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.ā
Anyway, this model would explain why weāre seeing an inversion: there was an upward
arc that favored the centralized State, but now weāre in the middle of a downward arc
that favors the decentralized Network.67So various historical events are recurring with
the opposite results, like the ļ¬uid ļ¬owing in reverse. And thatās the thesis on how our
Future is Our Past. 2.8 Left is the New Right is the New Left
Marxās concept of a class struggle has been so inļ¬uential that people donāt realize that
sometimes those revolutionary classes won, and became ruling classes. And then in
turn fought the subsequent revolutionary classes. In fact, they often did. Understanding this is important if you want to build a startup society. Unless you
are signiļ¬cantly diļ¬erentiated from the establishment ā unless you have a ā10X value
propositionā, as a venture capitalist would put it ā youāre not going to attract citizens. Social diļ¬erentiation means being revolutionary in some sense. Not necessarily in the
sense of the Paris Commune. But morally revolutionary in the sense of inverting some
premise that society at large thinks is good, yet that you can show ā through your
meticulous study of history ā is actually bad.68That moral inversion is the moral
innovation thatās the basis for a startup society, and it leads us ineluctably to left-vs-
right. 67In the West, at least. The East is a diļ¬erent matter! Itās a whole essay in its
Startup society founders must learn politics and history beyond just technology, unlike previous generations of tech entrepreneurs who only needed business skills.
The future may feature a "Centralized East and Decentralized West" as different regions adopt contrasting organizational approaches.
Moral progress is essentially moral inversion - introducing new moral premises that flip what people previously believed to be right or wrong.
Startup societies need missionary rather than mercenary motivations, requiring founders to unite technological innovation with moral purpose rather than focusing solely on tech.
own right, but the
future may be a Centralized East and a Decentralized West. 68A startup company can get away with mainly being technologically revolutionary, though there
is often the subtext of being morally revolutionary too, which is why āchange the world!ā is a big
motivation for many. Turning that subtext into text is crucial for a startup society, as opposed to
a mere startup company, as missionary societies tend to outperform mercenary ones. See the One
Commandment and the section on Parallel Societies . 102 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
2.8.1 Why Discuss Left and Right at All? Wait. Canātwejustdotechnologywithoutpolitics,orusetechnologytoescapepolitics? Unfortunately, no, because politics is about people who disagree with you. If youāre
working with computers, or robots, or pure math, you donāt have politics. If youāre
in a highly aligned society, you donāt have politics either. But to buildsuch a highly
aligned society from scratch, you need to think about politics. Put another way, if the startup founders of the 2000s and 2010s had to level up beyond
technology to learn business, the startup society founders of the 2020s need to add
history and politics to their curriculum. Because a theory of left and right is necessary
for nation formation. Our theory begins by discussing the split between visions of moral and technological
progress, the analogy between political and ļ¬nancial arbitrage, the market for revolu-
tionaries of both the political activist and tech founder type, and the concept of startup
societies as a way to reunify moral and technological progress. Next we discuss left and right as real constructs, using the spatial theory of voting to
obviate the objection that left and right donāt really exist, and qualifying our observa-
tion by noting these are point-in-time constructs. Subsequently we discuss how left and right change over time, using examples from
what we call the left, right, and libertarian cycles, in the context of both State-oriented
political movements and more recent Network-centric tech startups. Finally, we discuss several speciļ¬c āļ¬ippeningsā through history where winning teams
changed ideological orientation upon victory, and give a thesis on what the next ļ¬ip-
pening will look like. 2.8.2 Reunifying Technological and Moral Progress
Before we get into left-vs-right, the concept of starting a new project with a moral
rather than technological innovation will be unfamiliar to many tech founders. So letās
make it familiar. First, we need to understand the surprising similarities between startup founders and
political activists, between those focused on technological innovation and those inter-
ested in moral good. The turn-of-the-century progressives thought of these as the same
thing: progress was both technological and moral progress. Public sanitation, for ex-
ample, was both a technological innovation and a moral good (ācleanliness was next to
godlinessā). More recently, technological and moral innovators have grown to be at odds, because
the US establishment now regards its economic disruptors as enemies.69As weāll get
to, the idea of funding presidents of startup societies around the world could reunify
technological and moral progress. But what exactly do we mean by āmoral progressā? 69SeeTech vs Media, aka PC vs PC . 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 103
Moral Progress is Moral Innovation is Moral Inversion
If you want to produce moral and not just technological progress, youāre going to
have to introduce new moral premises that invert what people previously believed. So
one manās moral innovation is another manās moral inversion. Here are some speciļ¬c
examples:
ā¢smoking was acceptable, is now considered ābadā
ā¢alcohol was ābadā during Prohibition, is now acceptable
ā¢proļ¬t was ābadā under Communism, is now acceptable
ā¢college was once considered merely acceptable, but in the postwar era became
āgoodā
Some observations immediately come to mind. 1. First, from this list
The author proposes a 'Future Is Our Past' thesis where 1947's transistor invention serves as a mirror moment, with peak centralization around 1950 giving way to redecentralization.
Historical patterns are repeating with opposite outcomes - today's tech billionaires mirror past captains of industry, cryptocurrencies echo private banking eras, and current populist movements invert historical ones.
Contemporary conflicts mirror past tensions with reversed roles - The New York Times now supports Ukraine against Russia after previously supporting communist Russia against Ukraine, and Cold War dynamics are reshaping with China as the senior partner.
The decentralization trend suggests we're moving away from the 1950s model of concentrated power (one phone company, two superpowers, three TV stations) toward a more fragmented, historically familiar structure.
decentralized Google Lens-like thing that could scan the
computationalcuesinyourenvironment(centralizedanddecentralized)tomatchtohistoricalpatterns
and tell you whether this looked like a good or bad idea based on thousands of samples from other
people. 2.7. FRAGMENTATION, FRONTIER, FOURTH TURNING, FUTURE IS OUR PAST 99
2.7.4 The Future Is Our Past Thesis
Take a look at this video of unmixing a ļ¬uid. Isnāt that bizarre? You can see the
same process going backward in time, in an unexpected way. This is not the kind of
trajectory we expect to see, but it happens under certain conditions. And itās one model for whatās happening in the world, as we redecentralize after a
century of centralization. In other words, an important consequence of the fragmen-
tation thesis is that our future may be more like our past. If peak centralization was
around 1950, with one telephone company (AT&T) and two superpowers (US, USSR)
and three television stations (ABC, CBS, NBC), we grow moredecentralized as we
move ineitherdirection from that point. Essentially, the invention of the transistor in 1947 is like a mirror moment. And as you
go forward and backward in time you start to see events repeating, but as funhouse
mirror versions of themselves, often with the opposite outcome. Our future is our past . Letās go through some examples:
ā¢Today, the internet frontier reopens; back then, the western frontier closed. ā¢Today, we experience COVID-19; back then we experienced the Spanish Flu. ā¢Today, we have tech billionaires; back then we had the captains of industry. ā¢Today, founders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey seem to be winning against
establishment journalists; back then, the likes of Ida Tarbell demagogued and
defeated Rockefeller. ā¢Today, we have cryptocurrencies; back then we witnessed the era of private bank-
ing. ā¢Today, we have a populist movement of digital gold advocates; back then, we had
a populist movement againstgold in the form of the Cross of Gold speech. ā¢Today, we have the inļ¬ation and cultural conļ¬ict of Weimar America; back then,
we had the inļ¬ation and cultural conļ¬ict of Weimar Germany. ā¢Today, in Weimar America, we have right and left ļ¬ghting in the streets; back
then, in Weimar Germany, we had left and right ļ¬ghting in the streets. ā¢Today, the capitalists successfully teamed up with the generals against a sitting
president; back then, the generals sided with the sitting president against the
capitalists. ā¢Today, we have what Turchin considers antebellum-like polarization; back then,
we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization. ā¢Today, we have Airbnb; back then, we had ļ¬ophouses. ā¢Today, we have Uber; back then, we had gypsy cabs. 100 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
ā¢Today, The New York Times sides with Ukraine to ļ¬ght nationalist Russia; back
then, The New York Times sided with communist Russia to starve out Ukraine. ā¢Today, we see the transition from āneutralā to yellow journalism; back then, we
saw the transition from yellow to āneutralā journalism. ā¢Today, ļ¬gures like Mike Moritz think of China as energetic and America as la-
conic, but back then folks like Bertrand Russell thought of America as energetic
and China as laconic. We can think of more examples, with respect to the emerging Second Cold War. ā¢Today, weāre seeing the Chinese and Russians again line up against the West,
except this time, the Chinese are the senior partner in the relationship. ā¢Today, we may see a third group arise outside of the Cold War axis, except this
time rather than being the āThird Worldā and non-aligned, it may be āWeb3ā and
economically aligned. ā¢And today, depending on how the economics play out, that third faction may
come in ļ¬rst, the Second World may come in second, and the former First World
may end up last. And if we go back further in time:
ā¢Today, we see a US thatās gradually federalizing into individual states and an
Indian state thatās uniļ¬ed many subcontinental ethnic groups. Back in the late
1940s, we saw an India
Political arbitrage mirrors financial arbitrage by supporting low-status groups while attacking high-status ones, similar to buying low and selling high in markets.
The power to define who counts as 'comfortable' versus 'afflicted' is itself a form of political control that can maintain existing power structures.
Multiple axes of power exist simultaneously, allowing someone economically comfortable to be socially weak, creating complex dynamics of who gets targeted.
A market for revolutionaries exists where venture capitalists back technological founders while philanthropists support political movement leaders, both seeking status rewards from successful revolutions.
Historical examples show that early backers of revolutionary movements (Founding Fathers, Bolsheviks, civil rights activists) gained significant status rewards when their movements succeeded.
a moral inversion. Political Arbitrage and Financial Arbitrage
A moral inversion is a form of political arbitrage. Nietzsche criticized it when Chris-
tianity did it, but also had to admit it worked.71Why did it work? One view is that
āaļ¬ict the comfortable and comfort the aļ¬ictedā is essentially the same concept as
buy low/sell high. Youāre supporting something when itās low and shorting it when itās
high. The mood of the words is very diļ¬erent, of course. The political arbitrage of supporting
those with low status and attacking those with high status is typically framed as a
moral imperative, while the ļ¬nancial arbitrage of buying assets with low value and
71Nietzsche prized heroism rather than victimology, and didnāt like how the inversion of values
brought Rome low. But he also had to respect a winner, and somehow the victimologists didwin. A vantage point that unites these conļ¬icting observations is that winners tend to be content, while
losers can be highly motivated. But not all winners remain content forever; sometimes there are
defectors, who become counter-elites, and side with the ālosersā. The counter-elites and ālosersā then
form, respectively, the leadership and base of a revolutionary movement that attacks the winners to
establish a new ruling class ā if successful. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 105
sellingassetsofhighvalueisusuallyportrayedasadispassionatemechanismforgaining
ļ¬nancialcapital. Butrecallthatpeople dosometimesmakemoralargumentsforbuying
low and selling high (āit helps markets become more eļ¬cientā). So you might invert
the mood of the words on the other side too, and think of āaļ¬icting the comfortable
and comforting the aļ¬ictedā as a dispassionate mechanism for gaining political capital . Thereās a related observation: the concept of ābuy low, sell highā assumes there are
many diļ¬erent assets to choose from, many axes to arbitrage. By contrast, the concept
of āaļ¬ict the comfortable and comfort the aļ¬ictedā tacitly assumes only oneaxis of
powerful-vs-weak. However, multiple axes of power exist. For example, a man who
organizes a million dollars for charity may be economically comfortable, yet can be
socially weak relative to the establishment journalist who decides to aļ¬ict him for
his tweets. So the ability to designate just who exactly is ācomfortableā and who is
āaļ¬ictedā isitselfaformofpower. Someonewhocanpickwhotolabelasācomfortableā,
who can pick the axis of political arbitrage, can keep knocking down the ācomfortableā
while themselves remaining very comfortable. And that means the concept of āaļ¬icting
the comfortable and comforting the aļ¬ictedā can also be a mechanism for maintaining
political capital . Putting these ideas together, once you start reclassifying much of the moral language
ļ¬ying through the air as a kind of political arbitrage, you can start thinking about it
more rationally. Political arbitrage involves backing a faction that is politically weaker
today than it could or should be. An early backer that risks their own political capital
to make a faction more justly powerful can also gain a slice of that power should it
actually materialize. Think about the status that accrued to the Founding Fathers, to the early Bolshe-
viks, to Maoās victorious communists, to the civil rights activists, or to the Eastern
European dissidents after the Soviets fell. These very diļ¬erent groups of social revolu-
tionaries all took signiļ¬cant status risks ā and gained signiļ¬cant status rewards come
the revolution. The Market for Revolutionaries
Once we see the mapping between ļ¬nancial and political arbitrage, we realize there is
a market for revolutionaries. Today, therearetwokindsofrevolutionaries: technologicalandpolitical. Andthereare
two kinds of backers of these revolutionaries: venture capitalists and philanthropists. The backers seek out the founders, the ambitious leaders of new technology companies
and new political movements. And that is the market for revolutionaries. Equip
Moral innovation involves shifting societal values from good to bad or acceptable to unacceptable, with significant consequences even for partial shifts rather than complete reversals.
Unlike technological progress, moral progress is not straightforward - some innovations like Communism's 'profit is bad' premise led to catastrophic results despite good intentions.
People have a deep desire for moral progress and wanting to be 'the good guys' in a grand cause, which tech founders must recognize and channel constructively.
Consent can bound moral innovation's scope - communistic experiments in 1800s America succeeded because participation was voluntary, unlike forced 20th century communist revolutions.
Technology and morality drive each other bidirectionally - new tech creates new moral questions, while moral shifts open new technological possibilities.
Most moral innovations fail like technological ones, but consensual startup societies provide safer spaces to experiment with moral progress.
, you should be able to generate many more examples (we
avoided the very obvious ones). And you might realize that a signiļ¬cant fraction
of todayās public conversation is devoted to debating whether X is morally good
or bad, usually without stating it quite so bluntly. 2. Second, a moral innovation need not ļ¬ip something all the way from āgoodā to
ābadā. Simply ļ¬ipping it from ābadā to āacceptableā or āacceptableā to ābadā can
be highly consequential. 3. Third, we can see that moral progress is not as straightforward as technological
progress. The moral step forward that Communism proposed - the premise that
āproļ¬t was badā - was actually a terrible innovation that led to tens of millions
dead and a worse-oļ¬ world. By contrast, the Enlightenmentās moral innovations
were good, at least in the sense that they led to technological development. 4. Fourth, that last point shows that benchmarking what āmoral goodā means is
nontrivial. Does it mean deontologically good, or consequentially good? That
is, is this moral principle good in some abstract sense, or is it good because it
produces measurably good results?70
5. Fifth, if a given society has its moral foundations generally right, then most of
the proposed moral innovations or inversions will actually make people worse oļ¬
if imposed on the populace at large. All of this is true. Nevertheless, a key realization for a tech founder should be that a
signiļ¬cant fraction of people wantmoral progress. Just as much as the technologist
wants to get to Mars, a large chunk of society wants to feel like the good guys ļ¬ghting
in some grand cause. And if you donāt give them that cause, theyāll make one up,
and/or start ļ¬ghting each other. (Note that Mars is itself a moral cause when framed
in terms of ābacking up humanityā or āexploring the ļ¬nal frontierā.) 70Our argument is that a moral principle is consequentially good if it attracts people to your new
startup society, as per the One Commandment. 104 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Another realization is that consent can bound the scope of moral innovation. The
communistrevolutionsofthe20thcenturywereevilnotjustbecauseoftheirmurderous
results, but because they ran a giant human experiment on people against their will. Those who wanted to opt out, to exit, were stopped by Berlin Walls and Iron Curtains. But the forgotten American ācommunistic societiesā of the 1800s were generally good,
because only those who wanted to be there remained. Anyone who didnāt like it could
leave. Thatāswhythereopeningofthefrontierissoimportant: itgivesspacetomorally
innovate without aļ¬ecting those who donāt consent to the experiment. A third realization is that technological innovation drives moral innovation. While
human nature may be roughly constant, technology is not. So new tech causes the
introduction of new moral principles, or the re-evaluation of old ones. Consider the
premise that āfreedom of speech is goodā: that means one thing in 1776, another
thing during the era of highly centralized mass media, and yet another in an era when
everything reduces to speech-like digital symbols transmitted over the internet. A related realization is that moral innovation drives technological innovation. Once it
was no longer considered morally āevilā to propose a heliocentric model, people could
develop more accurate star charts, which in the fullness of time got us to oceanic
navigation, satellites, and space travel. Conversely, if you introduce the moral premise
that ādigital centralization is badā, you move down the branch of the tech tree that
begins with Bitcoin. A ļ¬nal realization is that just like most attempts at technological innovation fail, most
attempts at moral innovation will also fail. However, if those failures occur within the
boundedconļ¬nesofaconsensualstartupsociety, theyāremoreacceptableasthepriceof
moral progress. And if you think society has in many ways now generally become bad,
it may not that be that hard to ļ¬nd ways to improve on it through
Startup societies combine economic innovation (like tech companies) with moral change (like social movements) by allowing bottom-up adoption rather than top-down imposition of new ideas.
The left-right political spectrum is a measurable phenomenon that corresponds to the first principal component of political variation, but this axis rotates over time based on tribal positioning rather than fixed ideology.
Two-faction political systems emerge naturally because coalition-forming is game-theoretically optimal - when fighting over scarce resources, unified groups tend to defeat divided ones.
Left and right are temporary tactical positions rather than permanent classes, with left tactics focusing on delegitimizing existing order for redistribution and right tactics defending current arrangements against chaos.
d if these startup societies are
built out on the frontier, whether digital or physical, then the moral innovations are
no longer imposed top-down, but adopted bottom-up by the people who opt in. That
gives a better way to achieve the goals of ambitious young political reformers. In short, once we see that a tech founder builds a startup company to eļ¬ect economic
change, and a political activist builds a social movement to eļ¬ect moral change, we can
see how the startup societies we describe in this work combine aspects of both. 2.8.3 Two Ideologies
The Spatial Theory of Voting
Now we turn to left and right. The simplest approach is to talk about the left and right as if they are permanent
categories; youāll hear this when people talk about āthe leftā and āthe rightā as groups. The second order approach is to contest this binary. People will (correctly!) note
that realignments happen, that the left/right dichotomization doesnāt fully encode73
political behavior, that the masses arenāt as ideologically consistent as the elites, that
the categories vary over time, and so on. The third order approach is to acknowledge this complexity but invoke the spatial
theory of voting, which allows us to quantify matters. As reviewed in this PDF, the
spatial theory of voting allows us to analyze everything from Congressional votes to
Supreme Court decisions to newspaper editorials. When we do so, the ļ¬rst principal
component of political variation doesindeed correspond to the left/right spectrum. The fourth order approach is to then note that this (real!) axis actually rotatesover
time. Itās more about relative tribal positioning (voting with members of the same
political tribe) than absolute ideological positioning (voting for a constant ideological
position). Revolutionary tactics eventually succeed in gaining power for one tribe, and
ruling class tactics eventually fail to defend power for another tribe, so the āleftā and
ārightā gradually switch over historical timescales even as the tribal names remain the
same. Fights Create Factions
Two factions consistently arise because coalition-forming behavior is game-theoretically
optimal. That is, when ļ¬ghting over any scarceresource, if one group teams up and
the other doesnāt, the ļ¬rst group tends to win. This is a fundamental reason why humans tend to consolidate into two factions that
ļ¬ght each other over scarce resources till one wins. The winning team enjoys a brief
73Best example: the surveillance votes are splitting Republicans and Democrats on the basis of
Network vs State. The ālibertarianā moment happened but not within the State, within the Network. 108 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
honeymoon, after which it usually then breaks up internally into left and right factions
again, and the battle begins anew. After the French Revolution, factions famously
arose. After World War 2, the once-allied US and USSR went to Cold War. And
after the end of the Cold War, the victorious US faction broke down into internal
hyperpolarization. A strong leader might keep this from happening for a while, but the
breakdown of a victorious side into left and right factions is almost a law of societal
physics. Left and Right as Temporary Tactics, Not Constant Classes
The names for the two tactics that arise in these battles may hail from the French
Revolution74ā the left and the right ā but theyāre almost like magnetic north and
south, like yin and yang, seemingly encoded into our nature. The left tactic is to delegitimize the existing order, argue it is unjust, and angle for
redistributing the scarce resource (power, money, status, land), while the right tactic
is to argue that the current order is fair, that the left is causing chaos, and that the
ensuing conļ¬ict will destroy the scarce resource and not simply redistribute it. You can think of circumstances where the right was correct, and those where the left
was. A key concept is that on a historical timescale, right and left are temporary tac-
tics a
The tech ecosystem can be directly mapped to the political ecosystem, with venture capitalists analogous to political philanthropists and startups to NGOs.
Political activists follow a similar funding and growth trajectory as tech startups, from initial backing to mass movements, with the ultimate 'exit' being running countries rather than companies.
Historical examples like Soros backing Orban demonstrate how Western resources systematically support political 'founders' to build pro-Western governments, though these relationships don't always remain aligned.
Startup societies represent a new model that reunifies technological and political progress, allowing both tech founders and political activists to become 'presidents' with transparent funding mechanisms and citizen consent.
ped with this framework, you can map the tech ecosystem to the political ecosys-
tem. You can analogize tech founders to political activists, venture capitalists to polit-
ical philanthropists, tech trends to social movements, YC Startup School to the Oslo
Freedom Forum, the High Growth Handbook toBeautiful Trouble , startups to NGOs,
big companies to government agencies, Crunchbase to CharityNavigator, and so on. 106 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Just as there is an entire ecosystem to source and back tech founders, there is an entire
ecosystem to do so for political activists. Itās less explicit in key respects, of course. There arenāt term sheets between political philanthropists and their young proteges,
there arenāt āexitsā to the tune of billions of dollars, and we donāt usually see political
activists bragging about their funding in the same way that tech founders talk up
their investors. Indeed, often the funding trail is intentionally obscured, to frustrate
opposition research. But the process of going from a revolutionaryās bright idea to a small group with a bit
of funding to a mass movement is similar to the journey of a tech startup. And the
endgame can be even more ambitious; if the top tech founders end up running compa-
nies like Google and Facebook, the top political activists end up running countries like
Myanmar and Hungary.72Itās āgoing publicā in a diļ¬erent way. Take another look at the careers of political activists as varied as Aung San Suu Kyi,
Viktor Orban, Vaclav Havel, Hamid Karzai, Ahmad Chalabi, Joshua Wong, Liu Xi-
aobo, and the like. All of them ļ¬t this model. Western resources backed them to
come to power and build pro-Western governments in their region. That doesnāt mean
these political founders always won (Wong and Xiaobo very much did not) or executed
well (Karzai and Chalabi did not), or even stayed West-aligned indeļ¬nitely (Suu Kyi
and Orban did not). But if you track each of their careers back, youāll see something
like this episode, when Soros was funding Orban and both were on the same side as
revolutionary forces against the Soviets. At that point in time, Soros was the philan-
thropist and Orban his protege, much as a venture capitalist might back an ambitious
young founder. Thatās a classic example of how backers seek leaders in the market for
revolutionaries. Startup Societies Reunify Technological and Moral Progress
You might ļ¬nd it surprising, or disquieting, to think about all these diļ¬erent political
revolutions as being similar to VC-backed startups. But revolutions are diļ¬cult to
bootstrap, so thereās often a great power sponsor. The French were crucial to the
American Revolution, for example. Whatās the relevance for us? Well, the startup society reuniļ¬es the concepts of techno-
logical and political revolution, pulls together the two diļ¬erent kinds of progress, and
presents a new path to power. Because now both the tech founder and the political
activist can declare themselves presidents of a startup society. Backers can fund startup societies using the mechanisms of tech, out in the open, with
72There are of course tiers of victory below the ārunning a countryā level. For example, most
political founders would consider it a huge win to get government funding in perpetuity for their
activist organization. That means their original philanthropist no longer has to bankroll it, and future
funding comes oļ¬ the publicās books. Itās similar to a VC who has risked capital on a small startup,
and then seen it go public. Now they donāt have to shoulder all the risk, and can in fact begin reaping
some of the reward. The diļ¬erence is that when a political activistās group goes āpublicā it is merging
with the State, while when a tech company goes āpublicā it is merging with the Network of investors. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 107
explicit contracts, and consent by all citizens. But they can also achieve the moral
innovation desired by the political revolutionaries. An
Left and right are tactical positions rather than fixed characteristics - groups use leftist tactics when attacking power and rightist tactics when defending it.
Historical examples show the same cultural groups flip between left and right tactics across generations, like Protestants evolving from revolutionary challengers to establishment defenders.
Opening new frontiers reduces political conflict by providing alternatives to zero-sum power struggles, allowing dissatisfied groups to exit rather than fight.
Left and right function like 'ghosts' that move between different host populations over time, animating groups in cyclical conflicts over scarce resources.
s opposed to deļ¬ning characteristics of tribes. For example, Protestants originally
used left tactics relative to the Catholic Church in the time of Martin Luther. Then,
hundreds of years later, the American descendants of those revolutionaries - the Protes-
tant establishment, the WASPs ā used right tactics to defend its position as the ruling
class. As we discuss, many such ļ¬ippenings occur in history, where a given tribe uses
leftist tactics in one historical period and its cultural descendants use rightist tactics
in another. Whatās the guideline for when a tribe will use left or right tactics? The tribe thatās
defending (the ruling class) uses right tactics, and the tribe thatās attacking (the rev-
olutionary class) uses left tactics. Because institutional defenders tend to win, each
individual member of a revolutionary class feels like theyāre losing. But because insti-
tutional defenders have to constantly ļ¬ght swarms of revolutionaries to hold onto their
position, the ruling class also feels like itās on the back foot. While there are big victories where the tribe using right or left tactics manages to
sweep the ļ¬eld of their enemies for a brief interval, a new tribe usually arises that is
to their respective left or right, and the battle begins anew. Can we ever escape this
cycle of conļ¬ict over scarce resources? 74The concepts predate the French Revolution, though, even if thatās when those terms were ļ¬rst
used. Left and right go back at least to Christians vs Romans, and probably to the dawn of human
civilization. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 109
Frontiers Mitigate Factions
The key word there is scarce. Everything changes when the frontier opens up, when
there is a new realm of unoccupied space, where resources are suddenly less scarce. Thereās less obligate wrangling, because an aggrieved faction can choose ļ¬ght orļ¬ight,
voiceorexit. The would-be revolutionary doesnāt necessarily have to use left tactics to
overthrow the ruling class anymore, resulting in a right crackdown in response. They
can instead leave for the frontier if they donāt like the current order, to show that their
way is better, or alternatively fail as many startups do. The frontier means the revolutionary is simultaneously less practically obstructed in
their path to reform (because the ruling class canāt stop them from leaving for the
frontier and taking unhappy citizens with them), but also more ethically constrained
(because the revolutionary canāt simply impose their desired reforms by ļ¬at, and must
instead gain express consent by having people opt into their jurisdiction). These are, however, reasonable tradeoļ¬s. So while the frontier is not a panacea, it is at
least a pressure valve. Thatās why reopening the frontier may be the most important
meta-political thing we can do to reduce political conļ¬ict. Two Ghosts, Diļ¬erent Hosts
Weāve talked about the left and right as tactics. You can also think of them as two
ghosts, with diļ¬erent hosts. In any population, at any given time, one subpopulation
will be hosting the leftist ghost and the other will be animated by the rightist ghost. Left and right in this sense are almost like spirits that ļ¬it from host to host, occupying
the minds of millions of people at the same time, coordinating groups against each
other. And as you start looking at the history of religions or political movements, you
can start to see that each has a āleft modeā for revolutionary oļ¬ense and a āright modeā
for ruling class defense. Why then do people often discuss left and right as if they were permanent classes rather
than temporary tactics? One answer comes from an analogy to tech startups. Just like a startup wants to
maintainthepretenseofbeingārevolutionaryā foraslongaspossible,andabigcompany
wants to maintain the pretense of being ādominantā for as long as possible, so too does
it take a while for a revolutionary leftist to admit that theyāve becoming ruling class, or
for a self-conceptualized member of
Revolutionary movements follow a predictable pattern where leftist groups use radical tactics to gain power, then adopt rightist methods to maintain control once they succeed.
Historical examples like Christian Kings, Protestant Establishments, and Soviet Nationalists show how revolutionary ideologies fuse with institutional power structures over time.
The cycle spans centuries, as seen in Christianity's transformation from Roman Empire rebels to the ruling Catholic Church, which then faced Protestant revolutionaries 1000+ years later.
Each successful revolution creates a new ruling class that justifies its authority using the language of the original revolutionary movement, setting up future conflicts with new insurgents.
The alternative to this institutionalization after revolution appears to be endless violence and societal collapse, making some form of post-revolutionary order preferable despite its contradictions.
cycle is the story of how the revolutionary class becomes the ruling class. Thinkaboutthefollowingconcepts: ChristianKing, ProtestantEstablishment, Repub-
lican Conservative, Soviet Nationalist, CCP Entrepreneur, or Woke Capitalist. Each
of these compound nouns has within it a fusion of a once-left-associated concept and a
right-associated one. That preļ¬x is important: once-left-associated. At one point, Christians led a revo-
lutionary movement against the Roman Empire, Protestants led a decentralist move-
ment against the Catholic Church, Republicans led an abolitionist movement against
the South, the Soviets led an internationalist movement against the nationalist White
Russians, the CCP led a communist movement against the capitalists, and the Wokes
led a critical movement against American institutions. But then they gained power, and with power came new habits. The revolutionary
left that justiļ¬ed the riseto power morphed partially into an institutional right that
justiļ¬ed the useof power. By its nature, a revolutionary group adopts leftist tactics
to gain power, but once it wins, ļ¬nds it needs to use rightist tactics to maintain power
against a new crop of leftist insurgents. Lenin promised land, peace, and bread ā then
Trotsky quickly organized the Red Army. Thus does the leftist revolutionary rebuild a
rightist hierarchy. If you told this in story form, a manifesto-motivated group of revolutionaries would
ļ¬ght the man and gain power, only to have some Stalin character compromise the
revolution, capture it, and just become the man all over again. Then youād need a new
manifesto and revolution against that order. The excellent short ļ¬lm Dinner for Few
captures much of this dynamic.75
75If you watch Dinner for Few , an interesting point is that it implicitly reverses our helical theory 112 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
If we take the 1000-year view, this is the long cycle that starts with Christian revolu-
tionaries tearing down the Western Roman Empire by 476 AD, gives eventual rise to
the ruling Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire, and then (1000+ years later!) sees Martin Luther nail his Ninety-ļ¬ve Theses to the Church of Wittenberg in 1517
AD as a new manifesto that spawns a whole new crop of Protestant revolutionaries. Is there any alternative to this cycle, to a ruling class gaining power at the end of the
revolution? Well, if a revolution doesnāt result in somekind of order, it looks more
like a Pol Pot or Seven Kill Stele scenario, where the ārevolutionā is kept up through
endless killing. Something like that may be how past civilizations collapsed. Thus,somekind of order after the revolution is preferable. That brings us back to the
left/right titrations: Christian King, Protestant Establishment, Republican Conserva-
tive, Soviet Nationalist, CCP Entrepreneur, Woke Capital. Each of them justiļ¬es the
new ruling class, the new order, with the language of the revolutionary class. Note also that not every one of these titrations has exactly equal fractions of revolution
and institution. But the model happens repeatedly through history. A successful
revolutionary class becomes the institutional class, then a realignment happens, and
the new institutional class encounters a new revolutionary class.76
The Right Cycle
The right cycle is the story of this epistle: strong men create good times, good times
create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times create strong men. Hereās the visual:
of history, as the ending of the short ļ¬lm implies that every new turn of the left cycle leaves less
resources for the next one. This is the Malthusian/Ehrlichian view of a ļ¬nite pool of resources that
gets spent down by humanity. Now, there are actually some cases where this is true. The Soviet communists inļ¬icted widespread
environmental damage, including visibly draining the Aral Sea, leaving less for those that came after. And the Cambodian communists murdered anyone with glasses, likely inhibiting any future Renais-
Left and right political tactics are complementary strategies used by competing tribes, with revolutionary groups adopting left tactics and ruling groups using right tactics.
Political positions flip when groups gain or lose power - former revolutionaries adopt conservative tactics to defend their wins, while displaced rulers become revolutionary.
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated rapid position-switching in real-time, with Republicans and Democrats repeatedly adopting opposite stances on the same issues based on tribal opposition rather than consistent principles.
Left and right function like repelling magnets, where whatever position one group adopts forces the opposing group to take the mirror opposite stance, revealing that ideology often masks tribal interests.
Political alignments rotate over historical timeframes, with left/right tactics constantly swapping between different host groups as power dynamics shift.
the ruling class to admit theyāve actually become
dispossessed. Paradoxically, bothsuch admissions are demoralizing. Obviously, for the
former member of the ruling class to concede that theyāve completely lost is a blow to
morale. But for the former revolutionary to recognize theyāve won likewise takes the
sails out of their movement, the moral justiļ¬cation for their revolution. Another reason is that the switching tends to happen gradually, over historical
timescales. So itās not unreasonable to talk about āthe leftā or āthe rightā in a given
period. Today, though, weāre in a realigning time where the switching is more visible. 110 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
My Left is Your Right
Note that we take no position on whether left or right strategies are objectively āgood.ā
In our model, these are just tactics used by warring tribes, by two diļ¬erent social
networks going at it. The revolutionary tribe uses left tactics and the ruling tribe uses
right tactics. But if the tribe using leftist tactics starts winning, it starts using rightist
tactics to defend its wins, and vice versa. As an analogy, take a look at this GIF of two magnets. They repel each other into
mirror positions. Think of this as an analogy for left and right: my left is your right. Whatever you adopt, Iāll have to adopt the mirror tactic. Americans saw this in fast-forward during COVID. First the Republicans were con-
cerned about the virus, and the Democrats were calling people racists for paying atten-
tion to it. Then once Trump started saying the virus wasnāt serious, positions ļ¬ipped,
with the Democrats calling for (and implementing) lockdowns and the Republicans
ļ¬ghting them on libertarian grounds. Then Trump ļ¬ipped again to supporting vac-
cines, while Biden, Harris, and other Democrats said they wouldnāt trust a rushed
Trump vaccine. Then the vaccine came out (the same one developed under the Trump
Administrationās Operation Warp Speed!) and many Democrats were suddenly all in
favor of mandating that which they once wanted to avoid, while many Republicans
now booed this as an intolerable infringement on liberty. You can rationalize these twists and turns. Those who do so commonly invoke Keynes:
āWhen the facts change, I change my mind ā what do you do, sir?ā You might say that
the US was ļ¬rst too apathetic towards COVID-19, and then it overreacted. Committed
partisans can no doubt give logical explanations for the observed sequence of events. But forget about these details for a second and focus on the ļ¬ip-ļ¬ops. Whatever
position one group adopted, the other did the opposite. The parsimonious explanation
isthatitwasjustmagnetsrepelling, factionsļ¬ghting. Professedidealswerejustamask
for tribal interest. This ļ¬ts the model of left and right swapping over time, because
weāre now seeing those swaps happen in real-time. In such a period, the conļ¬ict is
more obviously tribal (āDemocrat-vs-Republicanā) than ideological (āleft-vs-rightā). Putting it all together, we propose that (a) left and right are quantiļ¬able phenomena
we can see via the spatial theory of voting, (b) the left/right axis is real but rotates
with time, (c) theyāre ancient and ineradicable concepts, arguably on par with yin/yang
or magnetic north/south, (d) theyāre complementary tactics to gain access to scarce
resources, (e) if one group uses a left tactic, the other is almost forced to adopt a
right tactic in response, and vice versa, (f) the frontier reduces political left/right
issues because it reduces conļ¬ict over scarce resources, (g) we can think of left as
revolutionary tactics and right as ruling class tactics and (h) the tactics constantly
swap hosts over historical timeframes. Letās now drill into that last point, perhaps the least obvious: namely the concept that
left and right change hosts over historical timeframes. Our study begins by introducing
the left, right, and libertarian cycles. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 111
2.8.4 Three Cycles
The Left Cycle
The left
Historical progress is possible despite cyclical patterns, as evidenced by humanity's technological advancement from paleolithic cavemen to medieval peasants and beyond.
The political cycle follows a pattern where strong, aligned groups (like Spartans) conquer decadent empires, but their success eventually breeds complacency and weakness in subsequent generations.
The libertarian cycle mirrors this pattern in business: disciplined founders create successful companies, but growth necessitates bureaucracy that attracts parasites who exploit the system without contributing value.
Both cycles demonstrate how initial strength and alignment inevitably lead to structural changes that enable freeloaders and ultimately cause institutional decay.
The transition from requiring indispensable individuals to needing dispensable employees represents a fundamental shift from unicellular to multicellular organizational structure.
sance. But those were both communist regimes, rather than capitalist ones, so where we may diverge
from the talented ļ¬lmmaker (Nassos Vakalis) is on the type of society that moves humanity forward
ā and whether progress is even possible. After all, at one point all humans (or their hominid ancestors) were in the state of nature, lacked
clothes and abodes. Then various technologies were invented that started creating wealth and sep-
arating man from ape. If we agree that a medieval peasant was in a sense richer than a paleolithic
caveman, we are acknowledging that long-run progress isfeasible. This contradicts the idea that every
new turn of the cycle necessarily leaves us worse oļ¬. 76We are in the middle of that realignment, both within the US and outside it. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 113
Thiscyclestartsfromtherightandbecomesleft. Ifweturnedthisintoastory, itādstart
with the rise of a small group of highly aligned Spartans. They grow on the borders
of empire, so-called āmarcher lordsā with a strong sense of ingroup spirit, what Ibn
Khaldun would call asabiyyah . Then they radiate out and start conquering the world. Their indomitable will carves a swath through the degenerate empire that surrounds
them. They eventually achieve total victory. Strong men create good times. But as they scale, they can no longer do everything on trust and need to start imple-
menting processes and taxes. They also start attracting lazy parasites to the wealth
theyāve created, people who want to join something great rather than build something
great. And they have within their walls many of the people they just conquered, who
donāt share their values and indeed didnāt much like being conquered. No one wants to
work as hard or be as ruthless as that early Spartan band, given the easy wealth now
available, so they enjoy themselves and busy themselves by ļ¬ghting with each other
over triļ¬es. So good times create weak men. Eventually this bureaucratic, disaligned, decadent empire falls to a new band of Spar-
tans from the outside. And thus do weak men create hard times, and in turn fall to
strong men. The Libertarian Cycle
The libertarian cycle is the story of how a libertarian founder rebuilds the state. First, alibertarian(ish)founderleavesthestiļ¬ingbureaucracyofabigcompanytostart
their own. Most immediately fail, but through pure maneuver warfare and relentless
execution, that founder might be able to make enough money to hire someone. In the
early days the most important quantity is the burn rate. Every single person must be
indispensable. Eventually, if successful, the company starts building up some structure. Conserva-
tivism takes over. With the business growing consistently, the founder adds structure, 114 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
career tracks, and a stable hierarchy. Now the most important quantity becomes the
bus number, the number of people who can get hit by a bus such that the company is
still functional. Suddenly every single person must now be dispensable . This is like the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity. The founder has to
invest in a bureaucracy that impersonalizes the company and turns every employee into
an interchangeable part. Otherwise, one person could quit and crash the company. Around this time, the parasites start entering. They donāt want the risk of a small
or even mezzanine-size business. They want lots of perks, high salaries, low workload,
and the minimum work for the maximum return. They arenāt truly equity-aligned;
the company is just a job that pays the rent. The interchangeability actually attracts
them! Theyknowtheydonātneedtopulltheirweight,thattheyarenātthataccountable
individually for the businessā success or failure. The system will support them. This
behavior is rational for them, but it degenerates into entitlement, and eventually causes
collapse of the companyās business model, though this may take a very long time. Finally, some stiļ¬ed employee decides to exit the
Revolutionary movements follow predictable cycles where leftists become institutional rightists, rightists become decadent leftists, and libertarians end up building bureaucratic states.
Successful tech startups demonstrate these political cycles on a 10-year timescale, starting as scrappy disruptors and eventually becoming the established incumbents they once challenged.
Effective organizations require a fusion of leftist revolutionary zeal and rightist hierarchical structure - pure ideology without practical order fails to achieve meaningful results.
The unified theory describes a centralization-decentralization-recentralization cycle where revolutionary ideologues break from establishments only to eventually build centralized empires that spawn new revolutionaries.
stultifying bureaucracy and become a
libertarian(ish) founder, and the cycle starts anew. As per the helical theory of history,
all progress is on the z-axis: they build the company, scale a bureaucracy to assist with
that, see it take over, and incentivize the best to exit. Thus does the libertarian founder
rebuild the state. The Uniļ¬ed Cycle
We can synthesize these into a uniļ¬ed theory of cycles. ā¢The left cycle starts with a group of revolutionary leftists that then become
institutional rightists. ā¢The right cycle starts with a group of determined rightists that then become
decadent leftists. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 115
ā¢The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideological libertarians that end up
building a bureaucratic state. Ifyouputthemtogether,yougetrevolutionary,determined,ideologues(aleft/right/libertarian
fusion) whose glorious victory ends in institutional, bureaucratic, decadence (a diļ¬erent
kind of left/right/libertarian fusion!) Most people havenāt studied enough history to have an intuition for cyclicity on a
100-year or longer timescale. But many people arefamiliar with the lifecycle of suc-
cessful tech startups, which exhibit this behavior on a 10-year timescale. Thatās about
the longest kind of experiment we can run repeatedly within a human lifetime. And
fortunately the results have been widely witnessed. That is, within our lives, weāve seen many examples of a startup disrupting an in-
cumbent77through scrappy tactics, becoming the incumbent themselves, and then
employing incumbent tactics to defend itself against a new wave of startups coming up
against it. Weāvealsoseenļ¬rsthandthatasuccessfultechstartupistypicallyaleft/rightfusion. It
has the leftist aspects of missionary zeal, critique of the existing order, desire to change
things, informal dress and style, initially ļ¬at org chart, and revolutionary ambition. But it also has the rightist aspects of hierarchy, leadership, capitalism, accountability,
and contractual order. If you only have one without the other, you canāt really build a
meaningful company. Right without left is at best Dunder Miļ¬in Paper Company78;
left without right is an idealistic co-op that never ships a product. Finally, weāve also seen that just like most revolutions, most startups do fail. Failed
startups donāt capture enough of the market for dollars, while the failed revolutions
donāt capture enough of the political market for followers. But those startups that do
succeedthen need to ļ¬ght oļ¬ both startups and even bigger companies, until and unless
they become a global goliath themselves (which is rare!). The uniļ¬ed theory is thus a centralization, decentralization, and recentralization cycle. Therevolutionary, determined, ideologuesbreakawayfromtheestablishment, andthen
- if they succeed - build a giant centralized empire, which subsequently degenerates and
spawns the next set of revolutionary, determined, ideologues. 77Usually with the help of what Peter Turchin calls counter-elites, high-ranking members of society
that are disaligned with the incumbent elites. In a startupās case the counter-elites would be venture
capitalists looking to fund disruption of a big company. In a revolutionary political movementās case,
theyād be disaļ¬ected nobles looking for a demographic to champion. 78Eventhisisunfairtotheļ¬ctionalDunderMiļ¬inPaperCompany. Someone, probablytheDunders
and Miļ¬ins, must have had a lot of passion for paper at some point in time. You could imagine a
time back when the interoļ¬ce memo system was basically the corporate intranet, that paper was to
every business what internet connectivity is today. Anyway, someone must have found it exciting at
some point. Because itās just too hard to start a company as a pure dollars and cents endeavor. John
Collison has similarly observed that almost everything you see ā this chair, that fountain ā was
someoneās passion project, given how hard it is to ship something competitive. 116 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRA
Political 'flippening' occurs when revolutionary Have-Nots overthrow the ruling class only to become new Haves themselves, creating cyclical power inversions.
The white working class underwent a dramatic political transformation from being the core of leftist movements (symbolized by Soviet hero Stakhanov) to becoming associated with right-wing politics (represented by Archie Bunker).
In the early 20th century, both communist and fascist movements claimed to champion the working man as the noble victim of capitalism and backbone of revolution.
Despite communist ideology's appeal covering 26% of the globe at its peak, the reality was that workers surrendered 100% of their earnings to the state, making it effectively a form of slavery with no real freedoms.
Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on
how to take it away.ā One could imagine a third installation in that ļ¬ctional trilogy,
and itād be about what happens when the Have-Nots win and become the Haves. We call this a political ļ¬ippening, after the term from cryptocurrency. A ļ¬ippening is
when the #1 suddenly becomes the #2, and vice versa. It occurs when a revolutionary
82The (revolutionary) left rarely underestimates the (ruling class) right, because guns, tanks, wealth
and other conventionally right-coded things are very tangible. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 119
class ļ¬ips a ruling class, only to become a new ruling class. The former ruling class
then gets pushed into oblivion...or becomes a new revolutionary class. Weāll cover several ļ¬ippenings in this section: the left/right inversion of the white
working class, the American and global ļ¬ippenings of the last 100 years, a set of
historical ļ¬ippenings that put these dynamics in broader context, and the ongoing
ļ¬ippening between the ascending world and the descending class. The Proletarian Flippening
Theļ¬rstļ¬ippeningstoryisabouttheinversionoftheworkingclass. HowdidStakhanov
become Archie Bunker? That is, how did the white working class ļ¬ip from the core of
the left to the core of the right in one hundred years? First: whoās Stakhanov, anyway? Heās the jacked Chad of socialist realism, the mythi-
cal Soviet worker who all the men wanted to be and all the women wanted to be with,
the one who supposedly shoveled the coal of ten men in one day, the comrade who was
a real bro, the guy in the āworkerās paradiseā who somehow took no vacation time at
all. Hereās a pic of the (likely ļ¬ctional) Aleksei Grigorevich Stakhanov, from the 1930s. And whoās Archie Bunker? Well, heās the bigoted patriarch of a once-popular 70s
show called All in the Family . Bunkerās role was to get dunked on in every episode by
āMeathead,ā his enlightened, college-educated son-in-law. Heās a foil for the TV showās
writers, representing all that is benighted and backward in the world. And hereās a pic
of the (deļ¬nitely ļ¬ctional) Archie Bunker, from 1971. So: these are two verydiļ¬erent portrayals of the white working class, just a few decades
apart! How did they ļ¬ip? Why did they ļ¬ip? The Working Class as Revolutionary Rationale
In the ļ¬rst half of the 20th century, the person all enlightened people claimed to care
about was the working man. The working man! Upton Sinclairās book was for him. Orwell and the Popular Front fought alongside Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War
for him. All the buckets of blood shed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin ā all of that was
ostensibly for him. Hitler too claimed to be for the working man, the Aryan one of
course; the full name of his faction was the National Socialist German Workerās Party. In hearing both the communists and fascists tell it, the working man was the most
honorable, humble, put-upon, long-suļ¬ering victim of a ruthless capitalist class...and
also the brave, muscular, tough backbone of the necessary revolution. Thatās the context in which the Stakhanov posters (and their Nazi equivalents) went
up everywhere. Of course, in practice, communism was slavery, because the workers had to surrender
100% of their earnings to the state. As such, the Stakhanov posters were more cynical
thananycapitalistbreakroominfographic. TheSovietworkercouldnātprotest,couldnāt
strike, couldnāt change jobs, couldnāt really buy anything with his āsalary.ā And those 120 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
were the lucky ones! The unlucky ones were forced by Trotsky to dig the White Sea-
Baltic Canal with their bare hands, or deported to Siberia by Stalin. As in Nazi
Germany, arbeitdid notmacht frei . But, bethatasitmay, communismhad traction. Atitspeakitcoveredā26%oftheland
surface of the globe.ā It was a secular ideology that commanded the zeal of a religious
movement ā pure State-worship, in our terminology, the total replacement of G-o-d
with G-o-v. Decades after it had somewh
Political movements need both 'left' (ideological justification) and 'right' (practical resources) components to succeed, like priests providing moral purpose and warriors providing action.
The left functions as society's 'operating system,' writing the moral code that coordinates masses by defining what is good, bad, permissible, and impermissible.
Even anti-Soviet conservatives in the 1980s combined right-wing arguments (capitalism, nationalism) with left-wing appeals (democracy, free speech) to win against an opponent claiming moral superiority.
Successful political fusion differs from passive centrism - movements can be energized by strategically incorporating ideas from their opposite side to address their inherent deficits.
ing against the Soviet
Union in the 1980s, they werenāt only making conventionally right-wing argu-
ments for capitalism and nationalism and traditional religion, they were also
making left-wing arguments for democracy and free speech. Without some of
that conventionally left-coded humanism they wouldnāt have won against a So-
viet Union which claimed greater holiness. The point is that in any holy war, the left is the word, and the right is the sword. Itās
the priest and the warrior; you need both. The left programs the minds. The priests and journalists, the academia and media,
they imbue the warriors with a sense of righteous purpose. They also justify the conļ¬ict
tothemanybystanders, convincingthemtoeithernotgetinvolvedāortogetinvolved
on the warriorsā side. In this concept of left, the priests transmit a revolutionary zeal
that justiļ¬es the war against the opposing order, blesses it, consecrates it, says it is
necessary and virtuous, motivates the warriors, boosts their morale, and turns them
into missionaries that can defeat any mercenary. The right furnishes the resources. They bring the warriors themselves, the farmers and
the miners, the engineers and the locomotives, the rugged physicality, the requisite
hierarchy, the necessary frugality, the proļ¬t and the loss, the determination and the
organization, the hard truths to keep a movement going that complement the moral
81Please note that I think Chiang Kai-Shek was far preferable to Mao in the Chinese Civil War,
because the people of Taiwan were far better oļ¬ than those in the PRC under Mao during the 1949-
1978 period. 118 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
premises that get a movement started, the point of the spear that prosecutes that holy
war. Why do you need both right and left to win? Unless itās a robot war (and weāll
get to that later) you need high-morale ļ¬ghters, so you obviously need the rightist
component as weāve deļ¬ned it. But the less obvious part is that you canāt win without
the leftist component either, because mercenaries will run out of morale well before
zealous missionaries. Just to linger on this, the right often underestimates anything thatās non-physical.82If
that describes you, donāt think of what the left does as just words, as woke slogans or
religious mumbo-jumbo. Think of what theyāre doing as writing the social operating
system, the software for society, the code that coordinates huge numbers of human
beings towards a common goal by telling them what is goodandbad, permissible and
impermissible, laudable and execrable. All logical deduction or martial action is then
downstream of these moral premises. To summarize: you really do need both the word and the sword to win a war, both
the left and the right. And that concept applies outside the context of literal war, to
a variety of large-scale political movements, because (to invert Clausewitz) politics is
war by other means. Again, this doesnāt mean that every movement has a precise 50%/50% titration of left-
and right-wing concepts, nor that there is some globally optimum combination of X%
left and Y% right that works across all time periods and societies, nor that the ācenterā
always wins. The main point is that a moribund left or right movement can often be
energized by infusing ideas from the other side. A group using right tactics often has a deļ¬cit of zealous meaning, and is hanging onto
a ruling class position while forgetting why they need to justify it from scratch to
skeptical onlookers. Conversely, a group using left tactics often has a lack of hard-
nosed practicality, attacking the ruling class without a concrete plan for what to put
in its place come the revolution. Forming a left/right fusion thatās informed by these
concepts is quite diļ¬erent from what we typically think of as a left/right hybrid, namely
passive centrism. 2.8.5 Four Flippenings
As Saul Alinsky put it in Rules for Radicals : āThe Prince was written by Machiavelli
for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for
The unified cycle theory differs from Marxism by proposing cyclical power shifts rather than a one-way progression to utopia, similar to Animal Farm's 'new boss same as old boss' concept.
Wealth concentration across generations is mathematically difficult to maintain due to inheritance splitting among descendants and economic instability over time.
Revolutionary success requires combining leftist tactics (holy justification for war) with rightist tactics (physical might to win), creating effective 'holy wars' that can actually succeed.
Historical revolutions follow a helical pattern where new leaders may be better or worse than predecessors, with occasional frontier-opening revolutions that genuinely advance humanity.
JECTORY
New Boss: NotExactly The Same As The Old Boss
The concept weāve described here isnāt Marxism79, which doesnāt have the concept of
groupsshifting sides from left to right and vice versa. The Marxist tacitly stipulates
only one transition, where the āpoorā beat the ārichā and usher in the inevitable age
of communism, and thatās it. There isnāt cyclicity in their theory of history. Itās a
one-way ascent to utopia. The uniļ¬ed cycle theory is more similar to the plot of Animal Farm , where the ānew
boss is just like the old boss,ā Nietzscheās concept of master religions, the Lessons
of History excerpt on systole/diastole, or Scott Alexanderās ļ¬nite automata model.80
These each tell a story of cyclicity; Orwellās book is focused on elite cyclicity (ānew
bosssameastheoldbossā), Durantāschaptertreatseconomiccyclicity, andAlexanderās
post discusses cultural cyclicity. But the uniļ¬ed cycle theory is not about a perfect circle at all ā the new boss may
79Marxism postulates that the āpoorā were always oppressed by the ārichā, even if these groups
actually shift dramatically over time. But a simple calculation shows that itās actually quite hard to
maintain wealth across generations. Assume that a man has 2 children, and 4 grandchildren, and 8
great-grandchildren, and so on. Then even a very rich man would be splitting his fortune over 2N
descendants by generation N. Assuming about 30 years between generations, few civilizations have
enough long-term stability to allow the consistent doubling of a fortune every 30-odd years, especially
if we take into account the annual debiting of living expenses. And this calculation assumes only two
children in each generation, where it could be more. If primogeniture were applied, rather than equal
distribution over all descendants, the eldest son would receive the whole fortune, but the other 2N-1
would be out of luck. So, itās actually quite hard for a rich manās descendants to remain ārich.ā When
you apply this concept not just to a single individual but the entire class of ārichā people, it vitiates an
implicit mental model of Marxism: namely that there has been a static class of ārichā people lording
it over the āpoorā for generations. 80Scott positions the switch from left to right as purely a matter of style, and there is some truth
to that. But I think there is also substance ā leftist tactics are for tearing down orders, and rightist
tactics for defending them. So what heās observing is more like VCs and founders leaving a successful
startup to then found/fund the competitor to that startup. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 117
be much better or worse than the old boss, may not be exactlythe same. Itās closest
to the helical theory of history, because we donāt necessarily come back to the same
place on the z-axis. Many of these revolutions may actually leave everyone worse oļ¬,
representing setbacks on the z-axis, just like many startups fail. There is however the
occasional crucial revolution ā usually frontier-opening in some sense ā that pushes
humanity forward on the z-axis and improves the world for the better. Holy War Wins Wars
One way of thinking about the uniļ¬ed cycle theory is to fuse our theory of left as
revolutionary class tactics and right as ruling class tactics. A leader needs aspects of
both to win. The left gives the holy justiļ¬cation to ļ¬ght the war, the right gives the
might to win the ļ¬ght, and together they allow that leader to prosecute a holy war. To take two examples:
ā¢Maowasacommunist, buthewasalsoabsolutelyaāstrongmanā createdbyāhard
times.ā He had that rightist ruthlessness about him, and unlike the stereotypical
vegan paciļ¬st of the libertarian left, his men were willing to impose capital pun-
ishment for any crime, real or imagined. Without some of that conventionally
right-coded physical might he wouldnāt have won against a Nationalist opposition
that was willing to use military force.81
ā¢Conversely, if you think of the Poles and Estonians revolt
Communist leaders worldwide gained power by championing the working class, only to enslave them in the name of liberation through figures like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
The American working class avoided communist revolution and identified with America rather than Soviet communism, culminating in events like the 1970 Hard Hat Riot where union workers attacked anti-war protesters.
The political left shifted its focus from the white working class (now portrayed as oppressors like Archie Bunker) to a new coalition of women, minorities, and LGBT groups representing over 50% of the electorate.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the Western left at a crossroads, having lost their centralized communist model while the New Left's identity politics coalition was still developing.
at calmed down in the post-Stalinist USSR,
it was in full murderous swing in the PRC and Cambodia. The political formula which
put the working man on a pedestal as the put-upon victim of the powerful enabled one
man after another to gain power worldwide ā Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot,
Castro, Kim Il-Sung ā and then enslave the working man in the name of liberating
him. The Working Class as Revolutionary Obstacle
Thensomethinginterestinghappened. TheUSmanagedtoavoidcommunistrevolution
(barely ā see Henry Wallace and Venona), scrape through the tumultuous 60s, and
split enough of the proceeds with the union workers that they identiļ¬ed with America
rather than the āgodless Russian commies.ā The physical manifestation of this was
the Hard Hat Riot in 1970, when American union workers beat up the ādirty hippiesā
cheering for North Vietnam. Now, suddenly, the heretofore ignored negative qualities of the working man were
brought to the fore. He was white, ļ¬rst of all. And racist, sexist, and homophobic. Ignorant, too. He needed to be educated by his betters. And thus All in the Family
with Archie Bunker began airing, depicting a very diļ¬erent kind of working man. Not
Stakhanov, not the uber-Chad of socialist realism, not the star of āboy meets tractor,ā
but an obese layabout that represented everything wrong with society ā and who was
now the oppressor. And who was he oppressing? Well, the newproletariat: women, minorities, and LGBT. Demographicsthatdidnāthavethatmuchpoliticalpowerwhencommunismwasroaring
to dominance in the early and mid 1900s, but which gradually grew to represent >50%
of the American electorate ā a political prize waiting for anyone who ļ¬gured out how
to tap into it. A political arbitrage opportunity, if you will, where the value of the
arbitrage was measured in power rather than money. And this is how the white working class moved from oppressed to oppressor. But one
more event had to happen: the fall of the Soviet Union. Communism Was Centralized Left
The women/nonwhites/LGBT group of āminoritiesā (which >90% of the global popu-
lation belongs to, if you stop to think about it) gradually became the core justiļ¬cation
for the New Left, just as the working class had been the justiļ¬cation for the Old Left. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 121
But there was a transitional period. For many years, the Western left still had a foot in both camps, with Soviet sympathiz-
ers coexisting with New Leftists.83After all, the hippies punched by union workers had
been aligned with āHanoiā Jane Fonda, and were pro-Communist or at least anti-anti-
Communist. They were āobjectively pro-Sovietā using the terminology Orwell disliked. Even as late as the mid 1980s, a lion of the Western left like Ted Kennedy oļ¬ered to
do a deal with the USSR if they supported him for the US presidency. The Soviet Union wouldnāt be around forever, though. For a variety of reasons, ranging
fromthewarinAfghanistan, therejuvenationofAmericanmoraleanddefensespending
underReagan, thefreedommovementsinEasternEuropeandtheBaltics, andofcourse
the total failure of their own economy to produce consumer goods, the USSR was on
its last legs. Gorbachev inadvertently doomed the empire in his attempt to reform it,
by liberalizing speech along with economics at the same time. The double whammy
of glasnost and perestroika destabilized a once tightly controlled system. Gorbachev
did do a bit of cracking down (the raid on the Vilnius Tower comes to mind), but
fundamentally he wasnāt as ruthless as Stalin, and a critical mass of his people wanted
capitalist consumer goods anyway. So, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and
an attempted restorative coup by āhardlinersā in August 1991, the whole evil empire
collapsed by Christmas Day 1991. At this point the Western left was at a crossroads. In China, 13 years earlier, Deng
Xiaoping had managed to outmaneuver Mao Zedongās chosen successors, throw the
so-called Gang of Four in jail, and turn China towa
After 1991, the centralized left (USSR, China under Mao) lost to the centralized right of the United States, ending the era of traditional communist leadership.
Wokeness emerged as the new decentralized left, combining civil rights movements with Foucaultian deconstructionism, lacking single leaders like Stalin or unified texts like The Communist Manifesto.
Unlike communists who embraced their political identity, wokes resist being labeled and claim to simply be 'good people' while engaging in deeply political activities like policy-making and symbolic territorial control.
The structure of wokeness resembles Protestantism rather than Catholic hierarchy - anyone can participate and spread the ideology through a network of NGOs, media outlets, and sympathizers rather than centralized command.
rds the ācapitalist road.ā Now, the
other big communist champion, the Soviet Union, was going down for the count. It appeared that the centralized left , the left with a designated and identiļ¬able leader,
the centralized left of the USSR and PRC, of Stalin and Mao...that centralized left
would eventually lose its nerve and be beaten by the centralized right of the United
States.84
So, after 1991, there was no more centralized left, no more communism, aside from
holdouts like Cuba and North Korea that were of no global consequence. Instead it
83We canāt really do the full complexity of the relationship between the Western left and the Soviets
justice in a few sentences, but see here. The short version is that prior to World War 2, Americans
were pivotal to the founding and operation of the Soviet Union, to a degree that has been completely
obscured today. Each thought of themselves as the senior partner in the relationship, as the one
who was using the other. After World War 2, there was a genuine title ļ¬ght between the two for
world dominance during the Cold War, with residual Soviet sympathizers among the Americans and
US-sympathetic defectors within the Soviet Union. But even as late as the mid 1970s, after the defeat
in Vietnam, it was not obvious that the US would win the Cold War. Eventually the American
establishment started thinking of the Soviets as beneath them, and started calling the most dedicated
communists āconservative hardliners.ā By 1991 the Soviets capitulated, not just because of internal
economic issues or external military pressure, but also due to losing much of the soft power support
from the Western left. 84Usingourterminology, withinthecontextoftheUSSR,theSovietgovernmentusedrightisttactics,
as it was the ruling class. In a global context, however, the Soviet Union used leftist tactics, as it was
attempting to foment revolution. 122 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
became all about the decentralized left, the fusion of the civil rights movement and
Foucaltian deconstructionism, what we now call wokeness. Wokeness is Decentralized Left
If youāll note, the wokes donāt have a single leader like Stalin. They have no single book
likeThe Communist Manifesto . They donāt even like to be named. This is notable for
a movement that is otherwise so interested in verbal prestidigation, in renaming things! Regardless of whether people call them āpolitically correctā or āSJWsā or āwokesā or
what have you, theyāll try to scratch oļ¬ the label and say that theyāre just being āgood
people.ā (You, of course, they have no problem calling you all kind of names.) You can call them Democrats, and thatās in the ballpark, but many wokes are more
radical than Democratic party candidates (though still vote for them) and many rank-
and-ļ¬le Democrats still arenāt wokes. You can also note that the boundaries of wokeness are ļ¬uid. Anyone can just start
voicing woke rhetoric. You may even sympathize with some of their stated ideas (as
opposed to their actual practice). I do85, in fact, at least with the motte version - whoās
against equal treatment under the law? Of course, it never stops there. You can notice that they do have their symbols and hashtags and ļ¬ags (which, when
hoisted, indicate control of territory as any ļ¬ag does) but that they often shy away
from admitting that what theyāre doing is deeply political. Itās again just being a āgood
person.ā Then they return to writing policies and renaming streets. They do have organizations, many NGOs and media outlets, of which Sulzbergerās
NYT is perhaps the most inļ¬uential. But thereās no single directing group, and thereās
a very long tail of sympathizers. Put it all together: no single leader, book, name, or organization. So if the communists
werecentralized left, the wokes are decentralized left. If communists were like Catholics
folding into a single hierarchy, wokes are more like Protestants where anyone can set
up a shingle as a preacher. Communism was State-ļ¬rst, Wokeness i
Republicans gained total moral authority after the Civil War victory in 1865, which they converted into economic dominance by the late 1800s.
Democrats gradually repositioned from the Confederate party to the party of the poor, with key shifts occurring through Bryan's 1896 speech, FDR's 1936 re-election, and the 1965 civil rights era.
From 1965-2015, Democrats converted their newly acquired moral authority into economic and cultural dominance, controlling 97% of journalist donations, 98% of Twitter employee donations, and over 91% of top university professors.
The cycle has now reversed, with Democrats holding 26 of 27 richest congressional districts and over 70% of US GDP, while Republicans have become the party of the economic and cultural proletariat.
sides,ā that Republicans were on the left in 1865 and
on the right by 1965, but not exactly how88that happened. HowdidtheGOPmovefromtheāRadicalRepublicansā ofLincolnāstime, totheconser-
vativeRepublicansofmid-century, totheproletariantruckersofthepost-Trumpparty? And how did Democrats go from secessionist Confederates to anti-anti-communist lib-
erals to woke capitalists? The Short Version
The short version is that the Republicans gained moral authority after the Civil
War, used that to gain economic authority, then got critiqued by the (repositioned)
Democrats for being so rich, then lost moral authority, and consequently also lost eco-
nomic authority, bringing us to the present day. The Democrats were on the opposite
end of that cycle. The 1865-2021 Cycle
Now the longer version. Letās warp back to 1865. Immediately after the Civil War, the Republicans had total
moral authority ā and total command of the country. During the process of Recon-
struction and what followed, they turned that moral authority into economic authority,
and became rich by the late 1800s. After all, you wouldnāt want to have a Confederate-
sympathizing Democrat traitoras head of your railroad company, would you? Gradually, the Democrats began repositioning89from the party of the South to the
party of the poor. A major moment was William Jennings Bryanās āCross of Goldā
speech in 1896. Another huge move was FDRās re-election in 1936, when black voters
shifted 50 points from Republican to Democrat, though they still voted Republican at
87Note that wokeness does not actually beneļ¬t the āmarginalizedā. Communism promised liberation
for the workers only to push them into the slavery of the Gulag. Wokeness purports to beneļ¬t the
āmarginalizedā but is hard at work on fully immiserating them through inļ¬ation and destroying the
stability of their neighborhoods. Weāre still in the relatively early stages, but the signs do not look
good. 88Dinesh DāSouza would deny it happened at all! If youāre interested, hereās his case, and then also
Eric Fonerās. 89Everything didnāt shift, of course. Over this period the Republicans remained a nationalist party. But the Democrats ļ¬ipped from being a secessionist party to an internationalist party. For example,
Woodrow Wilson was all about the League of Nations, and one of FDRās ļ¬rst acts in oļ¬ce was
recognizing the Soviet Union. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 125
the municipal level.90The wrap up was in 1965 when black voters moved another 10-15
points towards Democrats, though the civil rights era was really just the culmination
of a multi-decadal trend. After 1965 the Democrats had complete moral authority. And over the next 50 years,
from 1965-2015, the Democrats converted their moral authority into economic author-
ity. You wouldnāt want a Republican bigotas CEO of your tech company, would you? Now that cycle has reached its zenith, and a critical mass of high income and status
positions in the US are held by Democrats. Some stats and graphs will show the story. Democrats have:
ā¢97% of journalistsā political donations
ā¢98% of Twitter employeesā political donations
ā¢>91% of professors in the top US universities
ā¢26 out of 27 of the richest congressional districts
ā¢>77% of political donations from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google
Meanwhile, the Republicans have by many measures become the party of the economic
and cultural proletariat. There are of course exceptions like the Supreme Court and
state legislatures which are majority Republican, but see this chart from the Brookings
Institute, which shows that >70% of US GDP is now in Democrat counties. See also
this set of graphs from 2019, and thatās beforethe money printing and small business
destruction that occurred during COVID. The dominance is even more total when one
thinks about cultural institutions.91Whatās the Republican Harvard ā is it Bob Jones
University? Whatās the Republican Hollywood ā some guys on 4chan making memes? So, Democrats have
Communists were primarily people of the State (centralized through Soviet government), while modern 'wokes' are primarily people of the Network (operating through media, academia, nonprofits, and civil service outside elected government).
The left's tactical evolution mirrors technological shifts: 20th century communism used factory strikes to gain state control, while 21st century wokeness uses internet cancellations to gain network control.
Both strikes and cancellations appear to help their respective groups but ultimately harm them over time - strikes led to union dues and reduced competitiveness, while cancellations create mutual vulnerability and low-trust societies.
The American left shifted from championing the working class (Stakhanov) to attacking it (Archie Bunker) once integration defused revolutionary potential, finding new justification in representing 'marginalized' groups as Woke Capital.
s Network-ļ¬rst
Just as an aside, thereās a subtlety if we apply the lens of the Leviathans. While
Communists were centralized, they were not entirelypeople of the State. The reason is
that they had both the Soviet state and the international Comintern network of spies
and revolutionaries. But they were primarily people of the State after 1917, as the
global movement was downstream of the Soviet government.86
85Just as I sympathize with the working man, but know that the answer wasnāt socialism, commu-
nism, or fascism. 86Until the Sino-Soviet split, which was notable because of how formal it was. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 123
Wokes are the opposite. They are primarily people of the Network, as their habitat is
outside the elected State. The control circuitry for the US government resides outside
it, in media, academia, nonproļ¬ts, and the unļ¬reable civil service. But just as the communists donāt control all states (though they wanted to), the wokes
do not control all networks (though they want to). Their major weakness is that they
donotyet have total control over the English internet, the Chinese internet, or the
global crypto networks. But the wokes are trying manfully to gain such control. And
the switch from glorifying Stakhanov to denouncing Archie Bunker actually helps with
this, as social media users are much more helpful in gaining power over the Network
than factory workers. Why? In the 20th century, the factory ļ¬oor was the scene of the action and communism
was all about the strike. This was a collective action that seemed to help workers,
by redistributing wealth from the hated bosses. Over the medium term, of course,
adversarial unionization actually harmed workers because (a) they had to pay union
dues that gobbled up much of the pay raises, (b) they got a second set of managers in
the form of the union bosses, (c) their actions lead to a reduction in competitiveness of
theirstrike-riddenemployer,and(d)intheeventtheircountryactuallywentcommunist
they lost the ability to strike completely. Nevertheless, union organizing helped the
communists gain inļ¬uence over states. General strikes could bring entire countries to
a halt. In the 21st century, the internet is the scene of the action and wokeness is all about the
cancellation. Thereās no factory ļ¬oor, no formal union leader, no centralized direction
from Moscow. Instead, anyone can decide at any time to use the rhetoric in the air to
lead a campaign against their āoppressorā in combination with others who subscribe to
one or more woke principles. Itās open source, itās decentralized left. Like the strike, the cancellation is a collective action that seems to help the āmarginal-
izedā, by redistributing status from the hated oppressors to the cancellers. The likes,
retweets, and followers get redistributed in real-time. Over the medium term, however,
cancellation actually harms the āmarginalizedā because (a) everyone can now cancel
each other on some axis, making life highly unpleasant and (b) constant cancellation
leads to a low-trust society. Nevertheless, cancellation helps wokes gain control of net-
works. Social media swarms in the 2010s could bring tech executives to their knees,
just as general strikes in the 20th century could bring countries to a halt. From Working Class to Wokest Class
So, thatās how Stakhanov became Archie Bunker. Once the US had integrated its
working class tightly enough to defuse its revolutionary potential, and centralized right
beat centralized left in the USSR and PRC, the left needed a new group it could use to
justify its revolution. It found it in the āmarginalizedā that it has now ridden to power 124 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
as Woke Capital.87From the working class, to the wokest class. The American Flippening
The second ļ¬ippening is about the inversion of the Republican and Democrat parties
over the last 155 years. As context, most Americans know vaguely that the Republican
and Democrat parties āswitched
Democrats have transformed from a revolutionary opposition party into the establishment ruling class, while Republicans are repositioning as the party of the revolutionary working class.
This role reversal explains recent political flip-flops, with Democrats now defending institutions like the FBI and national security apparatus while Republicans criticize imperial influence and support free speech.
The parties have undergone a 155-year arc where Democrats evolved from the defeated Civil War faction to America's ruling class, similar to how a startup becomes an established corporation.
Political affiliations are becoming so entrenched that Democrats and Republicans primarily marry within their own parties, potentially creating distinct ethnic-like groups over generations.
The author uses a Dune quote to illustrate how parties change their principles based on power: demanding freedom when weak, restricting it when strong.
become the party of the ruling class, of the establishment. And
the Republicans are repositioning as the party of the proles, of the revolutionary class. This is why you see Democrats doing things like:
ā¢tearing up over the Capitol six months after tearing down George Washington
ā¢denouncing free speech
ā¢setting up disinformation oļ¬ces
ā¢shifting from investigating the government to āinvestigatingā the citizenry
ā¢scripting the recruiting ads for the CIA and military
ā¢putting Pride ļ¬ags on attack helicopters
90SeeHow Blacks Became Blue and page 30 of Farewell to the Party of Lincoln . 91Note that the logic of disparate impact typically isnāt applied here; lack of representation of a
politicalclass is not assumed to be due to discrimination. Yet note that Democrats only want to marry
other Democrats, and Republicans typically marry other Republicans. So over just a generation or so,
these political groups are fated to themselves become ethnic groups, much like what happened with
Sunnis and Shiites or Protestants and Catholics. The ideology inļ¬uences the biology. 126 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
ā¢advocating for corporations to ļ¬re people at will
ā¢defending deplatforming as a private property right
ā¢embracing the national security establishment
ā¢allocating two billion dollars for the Capitol Police
ā¢approving 40 billion dollars for war
Itās like the quote from Dune: āWhen I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom
because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away
your freedom because that is according to my principles.ā Now that the Democrats are
strong, they are acting like rightists. And now that the Republicans are weak, you see
them acting like leftists:
ā¢criticizing Americaās imperial inļ¬uence in the world
ā¢opposing war and military aid
ā¢not trusting the FBI or the police
ā¢expressing qualiļ¬ed sympathy for Americaās current rivals
ā¢talking positively about unions
ā¢introducing anti-discrimination laws to protect Republicans
ā¢lobbying for free speech
This explains the weird ļ¬ip-ļ¬ops of American politics over the last few years. Weāre
in a realigning time where many institutional things are ļ¬ipping from blue to red and
back before ļ¬nally going bright blue or red. Free speech is now coded red, while the
FBI is now blue. Because Democrats are the ruling class now. Note that this isnāt an endorsement of either side, just an observation that two ultra-
long-timeframe sine and cosine waves have now shifted into the opposite relative phase. The parties that many identify with and implicitly think of as constant were not con-
stant. The radical Republicans attained socioeconomic power and their defense of this
order made them conservative; the reactionary Democrats lost socioeconomic power
and gradually repositioned as revolutionary. Now theyāre ļ¬ipping again. This doesnāt mean everything is ļ¬ipping, of course. Democrats are still pro-choice,
Republicans still pro-life. Republicans still have an institution or two, like the Supreme
Court and some states. Just as Democrats after the Civil War were very weak, but not
eradicated, and able to serve as spoilers. However, the two parties have ļ¬ipped on all the institutional bits, even if many Repub-
licans maintain the Monty-Python-like pretense that the conservative America of their
youth has just suļ¬ered a ļ¬esh wound, and many Democrats maintain the Soviet-like
pretense that the ruling class is still a revolutionary party. Mexico has a great name for 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 127
this kind of thing, the PRI or āinstitutional revolutionary party,ā but thereās a more
familiar metaphor: the startup. As noted earlier, a successful startup wants to thinkitās still the scrappy underdog,
because thatās good for recruiting and morale. But now the Democrats are no longer a
startup. The party has completed a 155 year arc from the defeated faction in the Civil
War to Americaās ruling class. Thereās a Ship of Theseus aspect to this, though. All t
The author describes a 'Global Flippening' where communist countries became ethnonationalist while capitalist countries became 'ethnomasochist' over the past 30 years.
China is characterized as the world's most right-wing country, embracing Han ethnonationalism and pursuing irredentist reunification with the premise that 'Chinese people are the best.'
The United States is described as the world's most left-wing country, practicing 'ethnomasochism' with policies that supposedly disadvantage white people and promote global revolution.
The global political spectrum has shifted from being defined by politico-economic ideology in 1988 to being defined by ethno-cultural positions by 2022.
ay be the next step in the American Flippening: the conļ¬ict between the
decentralized people of the Network and the centralized people of the State, between
global technology and the American establishment. The Global Flippening
The third ļ¬ippening is about the global reversal of the last 30 years, where the com-
munist countries became ethnonationalists and the capitalist countries became ethno-
masochists. In this ļ¬ippening, the countries on the economic left moved to the cultural
right, and countries on the economic right moved to the cultural left. The ideologies
reversed, but the geopolitical rivalries remained the same. 130 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
The visual above tells the story. The most right-wing country in the world is now
CCP China, the ethnocentric champion of the Han, the place where āsissy menā are
now banned from TV and whose self-admitted goal is irredentist reuniļ¬cation. Its
core premise is ethnonationalism, which can be paraphrased as āChinese people are the
best.ā96
Conversely, Woke America is to America as Soviet Russia was to Russia. It is the
most left-wing country in the world, the place where whites go to the back of the line
for vaccinations and the self-admitted sponsor of global revolution. Its core premise is
ethnomasochism, which can be paraphrased as āwhite people are the worstā.97
At this point, you may be sputtering in disbelief, in which case I refer you to these96
two97footnotes to give a tissue for that sputtering. You may think this is obvious, in
which case read this section only for entertainment. You may argue that the right and
left categories have no meaning; if so, go read the earlier section on the spatial theory of
voting and note that thereās always a ļ¬rst principal component in any map of ideology
space. Or you just may be confused, contending that the US is still āconservativeā and
China is still ācommunist,ā and want proof of the switch. So hereās the detailed argument. 96If you want a citation on Chinese ethnonationalism, the US DoD wrote about this in The Strategic
Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States . As they noted āIn
Chinese history and contemporary culture, the Chinese are seen to be unique and superior to the rest
of the world. Other peoples and groups are seen to be inferior, with a sliding scale of inferiority.ā
97If you really need a cite on American ethnomasochism, hereās an employee of the establishmentās
paperofrecordstatingthatāracismisineverything. Itshouldbeconsideredinoursciencereporting, in
our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, itās less about the individual instances
of racism, and sort of how weāre thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all
of the systems in the country.ā 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 131
The Global Axis in 1988 was Politico-Economic
First, what was the political spectrum in 1988, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall? From right to left:
ā¢USA: center right under Reagan
ā¢Western Europe (NATO): center / center right
ā¢Switzerland: neutral center
ā¢PRC: migrating right, less ideological, hard to place under Deng Xiaoping
ā¢India: left, socialist
ā¢USSR, Warsaw Pact: far left
I donāt think any of these ideological positions should be too controversial. These
countries explicitly identiļ¬ed themselves as conservative, socialist, or communist re-
spectively. India was socialist, but not a member of the Warsaw Pact and not pointing
guns at the West. China was nominally communist, but also not hostile to the West,
and entering the second decade of the capitalist reforms begun by Deng in 1978. The
US was the champion of the capitalist right in spots like Chile and South Korea, and
the USSR was the global sponsor of the communist left in places such as Cuba and
North Korea. The Global Axis in 2022 is Ethno-Cultural
By 2022, what did the global political spectrum look like, right after the Russo-Ukraine
war? ā¢US Establishment: ethnomasochist f
American political coalitions have essentially flipped positions over 155 years, with 2021 Democrats geographically and demographically resembling 1865 Republicans in their Northeast-liberal versus conservative-Southern divide.
The current political alignment mirrors ancient tribal conflicts dating back to the English Civil War, with Massachusetts descendants of Roundheads and Virginia descendants of Cavaliers continuing their ideological battles across centuries.
Born revolutionaries like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Elon Musk have abandoned the Democratic Party as it shifted from revolutionary to ruling class, driven by their fundamental opposition to irrational authority rather than specific policy disagreements.
While party symbols and some policies remain constant, the ideological core has shifted as natural revolutionaries become anti-establishment independents who resist any form of institutional control.
he parts got swapped out, and
the parties switched sides, but somehow the triumphant Democrat coalition of 2021
ended up geographically and demographically similar to the Republican lineup of 1865:
Northeastern-centric liberals arrayed against conservative Southerners in the name of
defending minorities. And if you go even further back in time, this mirrors the English Civil War of the 1640s. Brieļ¬y, the people that came to Massachussets were the ideological descendants of the
Roundheads, and the ones who settled Virginia 20 years later were the descendants
of the Cavaliers, so it isnāt a surprise that descendants of the same two tribes went
to war about 200 years later92in the mid 1800s, or that their ideological descendants
are gearing up for another conļ¬ict right about now. See Scott Alexanderās review of
Albionās Seed for the quick version. Not Everything Flipped
You could plot the geographical, demographic, and ideological coalitions of the two
parties over the last 155 years. Youād see a few diļ¬erent staggered sine wave-like
phenomena before they snap into the funhouse mirror image of 1865 that is 2021. But
if we drill into the ideological aspects of the ļ¬ip we see some interesting things. At the surface level, the symbols remain intact: Democrats and Republicans still use
the same logos, just like the Chinese Communist Party has kept the hammer and sickle
more than 40 years after Deng Xiaopingās capitalist revolution. On a policy level, as
noted, not everything has ļ¬ipped: Democrats remain pro-choice, Republicans remain
pro-life. But on an ideological level, thatās worth a bit of discussion. Certain kinds of people are born revolutionaries. So when the Democrats ļ¬ipped over
from revolutionary class to ruling class, when they shifted from (say) ādefunding the
policeā to funding the Capitol Police93, the born revolutionaries got oļ¬ the bus. Itās
not necessarily any one issue like the police, or military, or COVID restrictions, or
regulations ā the trigger is diļ¬erent for each person ā but the common theme is that the
born revolutionary just has a problem with what they perceive as irrational authority. 92The fact that the same two tribes keep ļ¬ghting periodically over at least 400 years means we might
reconceptualize the speciļ¬c reasons for their ļ¬ght as more irreducibly tribal than passingly ideological,
more like Hatļ¬elds and McCoys than any grand battle of ideas. In this framework, if one tribe adopts
left tactics the other must adopt right tactics, and vice versa. 93Yes, the ļ¬ip was already baked many years before this, but this is a particularly obvious public
example. 128 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Visualize the startup founder who just cannot adjust to a big company after an ac-
quisition, or the writer who just refuses to hold back a story because of his editorās
political demurrals. Born revolutionaries of this stripe include Glenn Greenwald, Matt
Taibbi, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and many Substackers and tech founders. They just
canāt bend to the establishment. But they also have real disagreements with each
other, which is why theyāre independents, and why they canāt mouth a party line. So
the born revolutionary is really far more anti-establishment, and hence today anti-
Democrat, than pro-Republican. Many of the most accomplished in tech and media
sharethischaracteristicātheydonātwanttolistentoauthoritybecausetheythinkthey
know better, and in their case they often actually do. Theyāre fundamentally insubor-
dinate and disobedient, rule breakers and novelty seekers, ideological rather than tribal,
founders rather than followers ā and thus sand in the gears of any establishment. Other kinds of people are ideologically predisposed in the opposite direction, to what
some might call āimperialismā and others could call ānational greatness.ā As the Re-
publicans fully ļ¬ipped over from ruling class to revolutionary class, and went from or-
ganizing the invasion of Iraq to disorganizedly invading the Capitol, the
Political figures like David Frum and Liz Cheney are compared to risk-averse corporate executives who join established companies and leave when trouble emerges, switching sides based on institutional loyalty rather than ideology.
The current American political landscape contains four distinct types: revolutionary Democrats, ruling-class Republicans who don't understand the shift, anti-establishment revolutionaries, and anti-revolutionary ruling class figures.
Independent thinkers tend to migrate toward revolutionary movements while herd-minded followers gravitate to the ruling class, similar to how talent leaves established tech companies like Google for startups.
Technology represents a potential third faction that could reshape future political conflicts, with decentralized tech movements (Bitcoin, web3) likely opposing ruling class censorship and control while Silicon Valley companies support the establishment.
neocon types
like David Frum and Liz Cheney switched sides. In our tech analogy, these are the big
company executives who only join a company once it has 1000+ people and leave out
the back when the writing is on the wall. Theyāll take less upside in return for less
downside, and are more focused on guaranteed salary and prestige. Theyāre cyclical,
as opposed to counter-cyclical like the revolutionaries. They follow the school-of-ļ¬sh
strategy, goingwiththecrowdatalltimes. Andinthiscontext, theiranimatingcharac-
teristic is not so much that theyāre āpro-Democratā but that theyāre anti-revolutionary. Much of the national security state and military establishment is also like this; they are
fundamentally rule-followers, institutional loyalists, and top-down in their thinking. So that means that right now, immediately after the American realignment, we see
all four types: (a) revolutionary class Democrats who still think of their party as the
underdog, (b) ruling class Republicans who similarly (as David Reaboi would put it)
ādonātknowwhattimeitis,ā (c)revolutionaryanti-establishmenttypeslikeGreenwald,
and (d) ruling class anti-revolutionaries like Frum and Cheney. Over time, if history is any guide, the independent thinkers will move away from
the ruling class to the revolutionary class, while a much larger group of herd-minded
followers will join the ruling class. Returning to our tech analogy94, think about how
a few of the most independent-minded people have left Google, while many more risk-
averse people have joined it. At Google, there isnāt much of the early startup spirit left,
but there is a paycheck and stability.95Thatās similar to the dynamic that characterizes
the Democrats in their formal role as Americaās ruling class: they largely control the
establishment, but theyāre losing the talent. 94Again, the reason we use the startup-to-bigco analogy so much is because itās one of the few
long-term cycles that millions of people are familiar with today. We canāt lean on the history of, say,
Rome as heavily because itās just not taught by schools or movies. 95Facebook is the exception here, the tech company with the most potential for rebirth and internal
alignment, because itās still led by its original founder. Itās what Samo Burja would call a ālive player.ā 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 129
The Second American Civil War? Returning to the previous section, is 2021 really just a repeat of 1865? Well, if history
is running in reverse as per the Future-is-our-Past thesis, maybe not. Maybe 1861-1865
has yet to happen; maybe the Second American Civil War is yet to come. We discuss
this possibility later in our sci-ļ¬ scenario on American Anarchy . However, if we really push on the historical analogies, thereās another factor that was
just incipient during the 1860s but that dominated the era to follow. After North-vs-
South slugged it out, America shifted its attention to the (Wild) West. Similarly, after
whatever Democrat-vs-Republican donnybrook might ensue, we may shift our focus to
tech. Because technology is a third faction. A group that was once identiļ¬ed with the West
Coast before the pandemic, but is now best thought of as decentralized network. At least, about half of it can be thought of in this way. The technology companies
still physically headquartered in Silicon Valley would likely be heavily involved on
the US establishment side in any Second American Civil War, providing surveillance,
deplatforming, anddigitalenforcementfortherulingclass. Butthedecentralizedglobal
technologists ā those that are into the overlapping but quite diļ¬erent movements that
are BTC and web3 ā would have a very diļ¬erent attitude. They may not really
be āpro-Republicanā, but they would be anti-ruling-class, and especially against the
inļ¬ation and censorship the ruling class would need to support its war machine. Any
truly global, decentralized platform would natively resist censorship requests by the
US establishment. That m
Revolutionary movements throughout history consistently transform from insurgent forces into ruling establishments, with their ideologies shifting from left to right upon gaining power.
Early Christianity evolved from a revolutionary anti-Roman force into the hierarchical Holy Roman Empire, while Protestant heretics eventually became the WASP establishment in America.
The US military now uses cultural messaging to frame China as racist, leveraging Western anti-racist ideals through pop culture figures rather than official spokesmen to win global influence.
Modern 'Woke Capital' represents the latest flippening, where marginalized groups have become the rhetorical justification for American imperialism, similar to how communism rationalized Russian power.
ility between the Sino-Russians and the US Establishment.99Even if the geopolitics
have remained similar, with the Chinese and Russians of Mackinderās world island still
aligned against the Anglo-Americans, the ideologies have ļ¬ipped. 99To make this explicit, see this declassiļ¬ed DoD brieļ¬ng from 2013. Here, the US military recom-
mends calling China āracistā to help win its defense competition, and to push these messages through
pop cultural ļ¬gures rather than directly through oļ¬cial spokesmen. Hereās a quote: āThe āChina is
a racist stateā message of the United States will help win allies in global, popular culture, which is
heavily inļ¬uenced by ideals rooted in Western, left wing political thought, including strong currents
of anti-racism. Popular cultural ļ¬gures from ļ¬lm, music, television, and sports, will be far better able
to call attention to Chinaās racism for younger audiences worldwide than will oļ¬cial or semi-oļ¬cial
Washington.ā 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 135
The Historical Flippenings
Our fourth ļ¬ippening story is a survey of historical ļ¬ippenings. How did the revolu-
tionary class become the ruling class, through history? ā¢From Christian crash to Christian kings. Early Christianity was the original
communism; it delegitimized and then tore down the Roman Empire. Then,
many generations later, the HolyRoman Empire that consciously took the name
ofitsdistantpredecessorturnedChristianityintowhatNietzschecalledaāmasterā
religion, one that fortiļ¬ed hierarchy rather than undermining it. Christians were
on the left in Roman times as the revolutionary class. Then, upon winning,
descendants of those Christians eventually went to the right as the ruling class. ā¢From Protestant heresy to WASP establishment. Much later, Martin Luther be-
gan a Protestant insurgency against the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire. Even later than that, descendants of these Protestants made it to the US to give
rise to the WASP aristocracy! Protestants were on the left as the revolutionary
class. Then upon winning, eventually descendants of those Protestants went to
the right as the ruling class. ā¢From ChiCom revolutionary to princeling. Todayās Chinese Communist Party is
another example. What do people call the descendants of the early Communists,
who fought both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-
Shek to gain full control of China? Why, they are princelings . A more cut-and-
dried example of the transition from revolutionary class to ruling class would be
hard to ļ¬nd. ā¢From marginalized minority to Woke Capital. And perhaps the most important
contemporary example is Woke Capital. The women, minorities, and LGBT
groups that replaced the working class as the Democrat partyās base are now to
Woke America what workers and peasants were to Soviet Russia: their mascots,
with all politics done in their name. It didnāt really matter to the communists
that workers and peasants actually went to the gulag in the Soviet Union, and it
doesnāt really matter to the wokes if women and minorities actually suļ¬er from
crime and inļ¬ation in Woke America ā what matters for the movement is the
power gained by the rhetoric. So the CIA and Army now frontpage their female spies and soldiers. The US
State Department tells us Black Lives Matter. And when American helicopters
descend on their targets they do so while ļ¬ying the rainbow ļ¬ag. The meme
is now real: wokeness now justiļ¬es American nationalism just as Communism
rationalized Russian imperialism. Itās what tells those pulling the triggers that
theyāre killing for a higher cause, that theyāre morally superior to those in the
gunsights. Itās the revolutionary ideology that justiļ¬es the ruling class. We could do more, but you see the pattern. Once youāve seen several cases of historical
ļ¬ippenings, itchangesyourperspectiveoncurrentevents. Theideologicalshiftsbecome
morepredictable. Itāsabitlikeanexperiencedinvestorwhoāsseenmanyacompanyrise 136 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTOR
The primary political axis has shifted from capitalism-vs-communism to ethno-cultural divisions between ethnomasochism and ethnonationalism.
Cryptocurrency and cryptography now represent the neutral middle ground, offering pseudonymous meritocracy as an alternative to both American and Chinese approaches.
The United States is described as a binational state with two warring ethnicities (Democrat and Republican) rather than a unified nation.
This represents a rough inversion of the 20th century, with formerly communist countries now on the ethnocultural right while the capitalist bloc is on the ethnocultural left.
Europe has shifted rightward on ethno-cultural issues compared to the US establishment, reversing their 1988 positions.
The US-China rivalry establishes these superpowers as the primary poles of the new global political spectrum.
ar left, denoted by the Progress Flag
ā¢Western Europe: center left, but with increasing variance
ā¢BTC/web3: pseudonymous center
ā¢India, Israel, Singapore, Visegrad: center right
ā¢Republican America: nationalist right
ā¢CCP China, Russia: ethnonationalist far right, the Z ļ¬ag and āWe Will Always
Be Hereā
The ļ¬rst thing we note is that the major axis has shifted. The primary axis is no longer
the politico-economic axis of capitalism-vs-communism, but the ethno-cultural axis of
ethnomasochism-vs-ethnonationalism. Is it the ultimate evil for a state to consciously
represent its majority race (as America contends) or is it the ultimate good (as China
contends)? Or should it be neither, as the pseudonymous economy contends? The second thing we see is that the middle has shifted. Switzerland is no longer
neutral, as itās siding with the US now. Cryptocurrency and cryptography is now 132 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Switzerland, what Obama called the āSwiss bank account in your pocket.ā And ā as
just noted ā it oļ¬ers an ethical alternative to both American ethnomasochism and
Chinese ethnonationalism, namely pseudonymous meritocracy. The third thing we note is that we donāt use the American ļ¬ag to represent the US
establishment as it is very much a disputed symbol, with some in the establishment
claiming it while others claim it is disturbing. So instead, we use the Progress Flag
for the US establishment as (a) this is proudly raised by the State Department and in
the White House and (b) it sharply distinguishes the establishment from a Republican
America that very much does notļ¬y the Progress Flag, but might instead ļ¬y the Thin
Blue Line ļ¬ag or (eventually) the ļ¬ag of Bitcoin Maximalism.98
The fourth thing (which is not on the ļ¬gure) is that we donāt think of Republican
America as coincident with the US establishment anymore. Thatās because the US
is abinational state with two warring ethnicities (Democrat and Republican) rather
than a single nation state. We didnāt put a separate Republican ļ¬ag on the ļ¬gure,
though, as placing it on the nationalist right would seem to cluster it near China, and
Republicans dislike China as much as they dislike the Democrats. So you need to go
to more dimensions than just a linear axis, which we discuss in the next chapter on
NYT/CCP/BTC . The ļ¬fth thing we note is that Europe is now broadly to the rightof the US Estab-
lishment on ethno-cultural issues, whereas it was to the left of the US in 1988. (See
Macron and Orbanās comments, for example, if this isnāt on your radar.) The last and most important thing is that this is a rough inversion of the 20th century,
as the formerly communist/socialist countries are on the ethnocultural right, while the
capitalist bloc is on the ethnocultural left. Evidence for the Global Political Spectrum of 2022
How can we establish that this ethnocultural axis is a reasonable one-dimensional
representation of reality? Letās do it in stages. 1.Existence of an axis. First, the #1 and #2 powers of this era are the US and
China, establishing these as the poles of someaxis in the ļ¬rst place. ā¢Hereās a graph of global GDP, showing the US and China as #1 and #2. ā¢Hereās a graph of global military power, again #1 and #2. ā¢Hereās Ian Bremmerās G-2 concept. 98For example, the Thin Blue Line ļ¬ag is the Twitter cover photo of cryptocurrency pioneer Nick
Szabo. His worldview is actually logically consistent, in that heās eļ¬ectively a minarchist rather
than an orthodox crypto-anarchist. He is for the kind of positive-sum society that allows people to
peacefully build wealth, and therefore against looting and rioting. While he can rely on cryptography
to defend his Bitcoin, he supports the police to maintain order for everything else. 2.8. LEFT IS THE NEW RIGHT IS THE NEW LEFT 133
ā¢And here are several books and articles that talk about this include Destined
for War,The United States vs. China (FT review), and Getting China
Wrong. 2.Unity of NYT, Harvard, and Democrats as the US E
The author argues that America's informal establishment (NYT, Harvard) and formal government are aligned on the 'ethnomasochist left,' evidenced by overwhelming Democratic support in journalism and academia.
The New York Times consistently labels countries like China, Russia, India, Israel, and European nations as 'fascist' or 'authoritarian,' positioning them as culturally right-wing.
China and Russia actively promote traditional family values and cultural conservatism, placing them significantly to the right of contemporary American establishment positions.
European leaders like Macron explicitly reject American 'woke' culture, indicating that even Western allies view the US establishment as culturally leftward of their own positions.
A new global divide has emerged between 'ethnonationalist' and 'ethnomasochist' cultural positions, replacing the old capitalist-communist economic divide as the primary axis of international conflict.
stablishment. Next, letās
establish that there is alignment between Americaās informal government (NYT,
Harvard, etc) and the formal government (elected Democrats and career bureau-
crats). Basically, we want to show that (a) this an interconnected social network
and (b) it is on the ethnomasochist left. ā¢The Progress Flag was raised over the U.S. State Department and
ā¢The Progress Flag is raised in the White House by the US Press Secretary
and a Navy Admiral
ā¢97% of journalistsā political donations went to Democrats
ā¢90.1% of Harvard students voted Democrat
ā¢98.82% of partisan contributions at Harvardās FAS went to Democrats
ā¢90% of professors at top universities are Democrat
ā¢NYTās use of ethnomasochist words went exponential in the 2010s
ā¢The graphs in Yglesiasā article on the Great Awokening show that white
Democrats are to the cultural left of black Democrats on many issues
3.NYT denunciation of entities to their right. Third, letās show that the US estab-
lishmentās leading paper, the New York Times, has run articles indicating that
China, Russia, India, Israel, Singapore, Hungary, and France are āfascistā and
āauthoritarianā and hence to its right. We note that none of these countries are
being denounced as ācommunistā or to NYTās left. ā¢China: āCan China Be Described as āFascistā?ā
ā¢Russia: āWe Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.ā
ā¢India: āThe Rise of Modi: Indiaās Rightward Turnā
ā¢Israel: āIsraelis May Have Committed Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza
Protests, U.N. Saysā
ā¢Singapore: āDavid Marshall, 87, Opponent Of Singapore Authoritarianismā
ā¢Hungary: āHe Used to Call Viktor Orban an Ally. Now He Calls Him a
Symbol of Fascism.ā
ā¢France: āFranceās Far Right Turnā
4.China and Russia are to the cultural right of the US. Next, letās establish that
China and Russia take culturally conservative positions on marriage and family
that put them substantially to the right of todayās West. 134 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
ā¢Russia: see their actions in favor of ātraditional familiesā, and Richard Hana-
niaās piece on Russia the āGreat Satan in the Liberal Imaginationā. ā¢China: read about their ban on āsissy menā and promotion of traditional
marriage and family. 5.Europe is also to the cultural right of America. Now, letās show how European
countries have put out statements noting that they are actually alsoto the right
of America on ethnocultural issues, albeit not as far from the US as China and
Russia are. ā¢France on wokeness: Macron, France Reject American āWokeā Culture
Thatās āRacializingā Their Country
ā¢Visegrad on immigration: Visegrad Four grouping push back on new EU
migration plan
ā¢UK on immigration: The UKās āAnti-Refugee Billā: What Everyone Should
Know
So if you put all those together, we have (a) the existence of a US/China axis, (b) a
group of institutions that can be reasonably regarded as the voice of the US establish-
ment, (c) a set of NYT denunciations of other countries as being to the right of the US
establishment, (d) positions from China and Russia that are far to the ethnocultural
right of the US establishment, and (e) a set of statements from European heads of state
like Macron and Orban indicating that the US establishment is also to their left. Note that even if you dispute the absolute position of any given country on this axis,
itās now hard to argue with their relativeposition. That is, if you click the links above,
youāll see that NYT does think of Russia and China (and France, Hungary, India,
Israel, and so on) as all being to its right on ethnocultural matters. And Russia and
China do think of the US establishment as being to their left on the same things. I belabor this point because itās somewhat implicit. The capitalist-vs-communist di-
vide of the 20th century was an oļ¬cial, declared economic divide. By contrast, todayās
ethnonationalist-vs-ethnomasochist divide is an unoļ¬cial, undeclared cultural divide. It is nevertheless the primary global axis of conļ¬ict, and a very real reason for hos-
t
šļø Startup societies must be built around a single moral premise - one commandment - rather than trying to address multiple complex issues like traditional political parties.
š± These communities should be internet-first and founded as righteous yet peaceful protests against existing power structures, supported by censorship-resistant digital history.
šÆ Founders become 'moral entrepreneurs' who attract single-issue movers (not just voters) by demonstrating a better way of life focused on one specific societal problem.
š Parallel societies can evolve from purely digital network unions to physical network archipelagos or even diplomatically recognized network states, depending on their goals.
Y
and fall talking to a ļ¬rst-time entrepreneur. When youāve seen it before, the pattern
recognition calms your nerves and allows you to distinguish the truly āunprecedentedā
from the highly precedented. 2.9 The One Commandment
2.9.1 Communities are Causes First, Companies Second
Every new startup society needs to have a moral premise at its core, one that its
founding nation subscribes to, one that is supported by a digital history that a more
powerful state canāt delete100, one that justiļ¬es its existence as a righteous yet peaceful
protest against the powers that be.101
To be clear, itās a huge endeavor to go and build an entire moral ediļ¬ce on par with a
religion, and work out all the practical details. Weāre not advising you come up with
your own Ten Commandments! But we do think you can come up with onecommandment. One new moral premise. Just one speciļ¬c issue where the history and science has convinced you that the estab-
lishment is wanting. And where you feel conļ¬dent making your case in articles, videos,
books, and presentations. These presentations are similar to startup pitch decks. But as the founder of a startup
society, you arenāt a technology entrepreneur telling investors why this new innovation
is better, faster, and cheaper. You are a moral entrepreneur telling potential future
citizens about a better way of life, about a single thing that the broader world has
gotten wrong that your community is setting right. By focusing on just one issue, you can set up a parallel society with manageable com-
plexity, as you are changing only one civilizational rule. Unlike a political party, youāre
not oļ¬ering a package deal on many issues that people only shallowly care about. With
theonecommandmentyouareinsteadoļ¬eringa single issue community, andattracting
not single-issue voters but single-issue movers. The Concept of a Parallel Society
Just as a note on terminology, we consider a startup society to be a new community
builtinternet-ļ¬rst, premisedonasocietalcritiqueofitsparentcommunity, andfounded
for the purpose of addressing that speciļ¬c societal problem in an opt-in way ā namely,
by recruiting people online to voluntarily form an alternative society that shows a
better way. The implication is that a startup society is still pretty small and near the
beginning of its ambition, just like a startup company. 100Seems like a high bar, but scholarly archives, search engines, and social networks keep getting
silently censored. And sometimes not so silently. So you need something like IPFS or Bitcoin to store
a state-resistant digital history. 101As Antonio Garcia-Martinez put it, āwould you die for the DAO?ā 2.9. THE ONE COMMANDMENT 137
Aparallel society is roughly equivalent to a startup society, but the implication is that
it could be much larger in scale. Itās parallel because it stands apart from mainstream
societyasaparallelversion, asafork. Itāsnotsetupin opposition tothemainstreamon
every dimension, but a parallel society iscertainly diļ¬erentiated from the mainstream
on a key axis. You can think of the relationship between āstartup societyā and āparallel societyā as
similar to the relationship between āstartupā and ātech companyā; the former is early
stage, while the latter can be of any stage. The analogy works in another way. Just like a ātech companyā can refer to a fully
remote organization, a partially physical company with some oļ¬ce space, or a globally
recognized multinational like Google, a āparallel societyā is also an umbrella term that
can denote a wholly digital network union, a partially physical network archipelago, or
a diplomatically recognized network state. Thatās important, because you may be able to realize the goals of your startup society
with a purely digital network union, you may need the physical footprint of a network
archipelago, or you might need the formal legal recognition of a full network state. It
all depends on the nature of your one commandment: can it be accomplished purely
at the
The text describes different types of startup societies, from purely digital network unions to physical network archipelagos requiring diplomatic recognition as network states.
A 'cancel-proof society' is proposed as a digital network union built around the commandment that 'cancellation without due process is bad' to protect members from social media mob attacks.
This cancel-proof community would function as both a professional guild providing networking and job opportunities, and as cancellation insurance offering support during social media controversies.
The community would implement internal due process to fairly evaluate accusations against members, distinguishing between minor infractions deserving small penalties versus career-destroying public shaming.
community level, does it require a physical buildout, or does it require changes
to the legal system? A few speciļ¬c examples will make this clear. Weāll describe startup societies based on a
wholly digital network union, others based on a partially physical network archipelago,
and yet others that need diplomatically recognized network states. 2.9.2 Examples of Parallel Societies: Digital Network Unions
Renewal Culture: the Cancel-Proof Society
Letās start with an easy example of a one commandment-based startup society, which
only requires a purely digital network union and doesnāt require a full physical footprint
like a network archipelago, let alone diplomatic recognition like a network state. This is the cancel-proof society. Suppose youāre the hypothetical founder of this startup society. You begin with a
historyofthelast15yearsshowingallthebizarreexamplesofsocialmediacancellation,
something like Jon Ronsonās So Youāve Been Publicly Shamed . You note that these cancellations represent a moral failure by the people of the State
and the CEOs of the Network. Their partisan warfare and engagement algorithms
trapped many innocents in the crossļ¬re of social war. Now a stray comment by a
civilian is routinely turned into a human sacriļ¬ce to make an ideological point. Itās as
if a passerby took such oļ¬ense to your oļ¬ine comment to a friend that they opened
ļ¬re. 138 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Those who agree that normal online behavior shouldnāt come with risk of a social
death penalty imposed by random people are the basis of your new society. They agree
with your historically informed, moral critique. And the one commandment may be
something like ācancellation without due process is badā. How do you implement this? One solution is just a network union that provides a
combination of (a) guild and (b) cancellation insurance. You assemble a group of people in a Discord, optionally take a stake in each other by
issuing a DAO token, and work together to promote each otherās work and help each
other out. This could be a guild of, say, graphic designers or young adult ļ¬ction writers
or electrical engineers. The token of the DAO would be optional ā it wouldnāt be meant
to be some massive new thing like Ethereum. Itās just a way to record who contributed
time and/or money to the startup society, and how much they did. People would give
in order to get, a bit like StackOverļ¬ow Karma. And those with more money than
time may buy the token to support those in the guild with more time than money. Now, 99% of the time this startup society is just doing āpeacetimeā activities, like
helping people ļ¬nd jobs, organizing promotion for new product launches of members,
facilitating introduction, or just hanging out at meetups. But 1% of the time someone in the guild is under social attack. In that situation, the
guild can choose to publicly respond as one or ā if grievously outnumbered ā can
quietly support the aļ¬ected party with a new job after the uproar has died down. In
such a circumstance, the one commandment kicks in, and there is internal due process
around the attempted cancellation. Did the person actually do something wrong, and
if so, is the correct penalty more like a hundred-dollar ļ¬ne or an apology rather than
a career-ruining publicly calumny? The concept is that this kind of startup society serves a dual purpose: itās useful in
āpeacetimeā but it also gives people a community to fall back on in the event of digital
cancellation. And thatās how one could build a cancel-proof culture. 2.9.3 ExamplesofParallelSocieties: PhysicalNetworkArchipela-
gos
Keto Kosher: the Sugar-free Society
Next, letās do an example which requires a network archipelago (with a physical foot-
print) but not a full network state (with diplomatic recognition). This is Keto Kosher, the sugar-free society. Start with a history of the horrible USDA Food Pyramid, the grain-heavy monstrosity
that gave cover to the corporate sugariļ¬cation of the globe and the ob
š± Digital Sabbath societies would shut off internet from 9pm-9am and create Faraday cage rooms to help members regain control over technology addiction and improve focus.
š¢ These communities would organize as network archipelagos with physical properties like apartment buildings, gyms, and eventually entire neighborhoods to enforce their lifestyle principles.
š More advanced network states could establish medical sovereignty zones that operate independently of FDA regulations, allowing unrestricted access to treatments and off-label prescriptions.
esity epidemic. Also discuss the cure in the form of keto and low-carb diets. Then operationalize this cure in the form of a partially physical network archipelago. 2.9. THE ONE COMMANDMENT 139
Organize a community online that crowdfunds properties around the world, like apart-
ment buildings and gyms, and perhaps eventually even culdesacs and small towns. You
mighttakeanextremesugarteetotallerapproach, literallybanningprocessedfoodsand
sugar at the border, thereby implementing a kind of āKeto Kosher.ā
You can imagine variants of this startup society that are like āCarnivory Communitiesā
or āPaleo Peopleā. These would be competing startup societies in the same broad area,
iterations on a theme. If successful, such a society might not stop at sugar. It could get into setting cultural
defaults for ļ¬tness and exercise. Or perhaps it could bulk purchase continuous glucose
meters for all members, or orders of metformin. Digital Sabbath: the Partially Oļ¬ine Society
Cars are on balance a good thing. But you can overdo them. Mid-century America
did. It obscured the San Francisco waterfront with ugly elevated highways, impeding
the walkability of this beautiful area. That highway was removed in the late 20th
century.102And the removal was an acknowledgement that sometimes we can have too
much of a good thing. 24/7 internet connectivity is like that. Itās good that weāre doing things like Starlink,
to bring internet access to the entire world, to provide free online education, and to
get them into the global economy. But itās bad if you can never disconnect from the internet. Thatās why apps like
āFreedomā aresopopular. Thatāswhypeopleusecommitmentdevicesliketimedcookie
jarstohidetheirphones. ThatāswhyappslikeTwitterandSnapchatgotpopularonthe
basis of artiļ¬cial constraints, like limited characters or disappearing messages, because
they were optimizing for fallible humans rather than infallible machines. Thatās why
Tsinghua cuts oļ¬ the internet at night, why Apple now provides screen time metrics,
and why books like Atomic Habits andIndistractible sell so well. What if this optimization for fallibility didnāt have to be an individual thing? What
if there were a society that helped you with internet distractions and self-control, that
recognized that the internet was good, but that times and places without the internet
were also good ā just as cars are good, but a San Francisco waterfront without cars
is also good? One way of accomplishing this would be a Digital Sabbath society where the internet is
just shut oļ¬ at night, from 9pm to 9am. Some buildings and rooms would furthermore
be enclosed in Faraday cages, to put them oļ¬ine on purpose. Areas would start to
be ļ¬agged as online and oļ¬ine areas, a bit like smoking and non-smoking areas on
planes. All internet use would be conscious and focused, as opposed to unconscious
and involuntary. 102Of course, fentanyl addicts were soon added in its place. But there was a window where people
beneļ¬ted from the walkable waterfront. 140 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Over time, such a society could even try to build apps to give individuals back control
over their internet use, with open source machine learning tools running locally on
devices in a privacy-protecting way to prioritize notiļ¬cations, block distractions, and
encourage productivity. The Digital Sabbath society is an example of a network archipelago thatās focused on
improving self-control around internet use. For obvious reasons, youād need a physical
footprint, and wouldnāt be able to do this purely digitally. 2.9.4 Examples of Parallel Societies: Recognized Network
States
Your Body, Your Choice: the post-FDA Society
Now letās do a more diļ¬cult example, which will require a full network state with
diplomatic recognition. This is the medical sovereignty zone, the FDA-free society. You begin your startup society with Henningerās history of FDA-caused drug lag and
Tabarrokās history of FDA interference with so-called āoļ¬ labelā prescrip
Startup societies should focus on a single moral commandment rather than comprehensive reform, combining political fervor with startup focus to address one specific state failure.
Medical sovereignty societies could challenge FDA authority by gaining diplomatic recognition from foreign governments or sanctuary states that refuse to enforce federal medical regulations.
These parallel societies take existing societal frameworks and add one crucial innovation rather than attempting total revolution from scratch, making change more feasible and testable.
Modern society shows a paradox where people hesitate to evangelize religious morals but readily promote political ethics, despite both being doctrinal systems with life directives.
tion. You
point out how many millions were killed by its policies, hand out t-shirts like ACT-UP
did, show Dallas Buyers Club to all prospective residents, and make clear to all new
members why your cause of medical sovereignty is righteous. But to actually achieve personal medical sovereignty, your startup society would need
some measure of diplomatic recognition from a sovereign outside the US ā or perhaps
a state within the US. It would need to actually be what we call a network state, as it
would need legal recognition from an existing government. For the case of doing it outside the US, your startup society would ride behind, say, the
support of Maltaās FDA for a new biomedical regime. For the case of doing it within
the US, youād need a governor whoād declare a sanctuary state for biomedicine. That
is, just like a sanctuary city declares that it wonāt enforce federal immigration law, a
sanctuary state for biomedicine would not enforce FDA writ. With this diplomatic recognition, you could then take the existing American codebase
and add one crucial new feature: the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any
medical product without third party interference. Your body, your choice. Thatās how
youād get an FDA-free zone. 2.9.5 Analysis of Parallel Societies
Now we see why a focused moral critique is so important. It combines (a) the moral
fervor of a political movement with (b) the laser-focus of a startup company into (c) a
one-commandment based startup society. 2.9. THE ONE COMMANDMENT 141
Such a society is not a total revolution. We arenāt starting completely de novo. Each
startup society is simply taking a broken aspect of todayās world, often a State-caused
or at least State-neglected calamity, writing the history of that state failure, and then
building an opt-in community to solve the problem. Itās a tightly focused parallel society making one impactful change. Why Not More Than One Commandment? Why is it so important to introduce onecommandment rather than zero or N? The short answer is that you donāt want to write something as complex as a social
operating system from scratch, and in fact others will prevent you from doing so. But
you also donāt want to avoid innovating on a broken society. So introducing one (1)
tightly focused change at a time in a startup society with opt-in citizens allows testing
of the new commandment. The longer answer revolves around an important paradox of modern society: namely,
thatmanypeoplefeeluncomfortableevangelizingreligiousmorals, yetverycomfortable
evangelizing their political ethics. The ļ¬rst part is easy to understand. Westerners are nowadays often shy about telling
others to practice their religion. Why? They may feel they havenāt ļ¬gured it all out,
so who are they to say? Or they know they canāt live up to their ideal moral code,
like someone who wants to diet but canāt always restrain themselves, so they refrain
from commentary to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. They also may not want to be
attacked as a crazy cult leader. All of these are understandable hesitations for either
(a) evangelizing a traditional religion, (b) inventing a wholly new one, or (c) forking an
existingreligion. (Thelast iskindof like startinganew denominationofProtestantism,
where you keep much of the old codebase but add in some crucial distinctive factors.) But think about the second part. While there is great hesitation in Western society
aroundreligious evangelism, there is seemingly no hesitation around political evange-
lism. Indeed, thisis considered an ethical duty, usually in exactly those terms, with
the word āethicalā used in place of āmoralā but serving a very similar role, and with at
least two large competing political parties ļ¬ghting for the souls/votes of their believers. Therein lies the paradox: while political and religious movements can both be con-
sidereddoctrines103, in that they come packaged with a number of directives on how
peoplemustlive, the same person who is shy about tell
Startup societies should adopt exactly one moral commandment - not zero to avoid passive conformity, but not many to avoid total warfare with existing systems.
While older religious codes can be adopted more easily in startup societies through private practice, older political codes face greater challenges due to public law constraints.
The Soviet Union's collapse demonstrates how parallel systems can catalyze peaceful reform better than direct confrontation or incremental change within existing systems.
Historical examples like the US vs USSR and China's reforms driven by Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore show that successful parallel systems with different moral premises can drive transformation.
Modern technology may enable building parallel systems without requiring contiguous territory and military conquest as was necessary in the 20th century.
ing other people about morality
is often incredibly conļ¬dent when yelling at other people about politics. Thatās why we advise one commandment for your new startup society. Itās something
in between being too shy and too overbearing. Itās in between avoiding religious-
sounding evangelism entirely and indulging in political-sounding evangelism too much. Donāt avoid taking a moral stance, because that means you passively succumb to your
103A doctrine can also be based not just on God, or State, but on the Network. That is, not just on
religion, or politics, but on a global coin, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. 142 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
surroundings. But also donāt try imposing an all-encompassing political ideology to
start, because thatās too hard and means total warfare with your surroundings. Instead, just pick oneļ¬aw in modern society that you dofeel conļ¬dent in building a
startup society to redress, and go with that. One commandment, not zero or N.
What About Older Doctrines? Sofarweāvetalkedaboutaonecommandment,butimplieditisa newmoralinnovation,
like cutting out sugar or limiting internet use. What about older religions, political
codes, and moral commandments? You can certainly return to an older known religious code, adopting it in whole or in
part. In a startup society, where everyone opts in, you can make this happen more
easily because religion in many countries is mostly about private practice: so long as
people agree in a peer-to-peer fashion to practice their religion a certain way, the state
allows them to do it. Itās harder to return to an older political code, because you are now talking about
public law rather than private law. Still, if you build a large enough startup society,
and pick the right laws, there is probably something at the town, city, or province level
that you can do ā either within the West or outside it. 2.9.6 Parallel Systems Catalyze Peaceful Reform
How did the US beat the USSR? Because it built and defended a parallel system. Rewind back to how the Soviet Union fell. As Stephen Kotkin noted in a brilliant
interview, the most important fact about the Soviet Union was that they genuinely
werecommunists. Outsiders perceived the Soviets to be cynical, but they were wrong;
their cynicism had limits. At the end of the day, the Soviets were devout believers in
their ideology. How could it be otherwise? Soviet citizens werenāt stupid, and people knew there were
things that didnāt add up, but they were operating within a constrained information
environment. The censorship was so pervasive that it controlled thought. The degree
of self-deception was so all-encompassing that even the nomenklatura like Boris Yeltsin
didnāt know how truly poor the Soviet Union was till he visited an American supermar-
ket and threw up his hands at how far behind the USSR was. Unlike Orwellās OāBrien,
the Soviet leaders deceived themselves too. So, fundamentally, any proposed edits by Soviet elites to the USSR would have been
just on the margins. They were information and values constrained. They actually
needed a totally diļ¬erent system. Yet their system resisted both revolutionary and
incremental reform. The solution was the parallel system of the United States. An alternative society start-
ing from diļ¬erent moral premises that eventually produced undeniably better results. 2.9. THE ONE COMMANDMENT 143
Thatās the same basic thing that reformed the Peopleās Republic of China. The mere
existence of successful parallel systems in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and especially Singapore
is what drove Deng Xiaoping to adopt capitalism. Ezra Vogelās book is excellent on
this. So, in both cases, it was a parallel system that beat the Soviet system and the Maoist
system. Parallel Systems Once Required Contiguous Land, Now They Donāt
In the 20th century, the only way to build a parallel system was to ļ¬ght and win a war
(often a hot one) against the communists or fascists who were intent on conquering
your territory. The parallel sys
šŗšø Woke Capital represents America's ruling class ideology combining capitalism with decentralized censorship and imperial power projection.
šØš³ Communist Capital describes China's system where capitalism operates under centralized Communist Party control with Leninist-Confucian characteristics.
āæ Crypto Capital embodies a stateless, decentralized form of capitalism built on Bitcoin and web3 technologies that resists traditional power structures.
š These three ideologies form the only billion-person scale coalitions with sufficient technological capability to survive the ongoing digital power struggle.
The world has transitioned from American unipolarity in the 1990s to a new tripolar configuration by the 2020s, with three distinct power centers emerging.
Modern power dynamics mirror mid-20th century patterns where moral power (NYT), martial power (CCP), and money power (BTC) compete for global influence.
Historical precedent shows the USSR functioned as a 'moral power' through Communist proselytization, using ideological conviction to recruit sympathizers and plant moles worldwide despite its violent actions.
Today's power centers operate primarily as networks rather than traditional nation-states, representing a fundamental shift in how global influence is exercised and maintained.
h the same as the American Establishment, featuring many of
the same folks on the ārightā who advocated for the invasion of Iraq two decades ago. So itās quite
conceivablethe establishment could dialup the āpatriotismā anddial down the āprogressivismā without
breaking a sweat. 3.3. A BIPOLAR AMERICA AND A TRIPOLAR TRIANGLE 147
That is, a similar tripolar conļ¬guration has occurred before. But ļ¬rst letās establish
how it came about today. 3.3 A Bipolar America and a Tripolar Triangle
In 1990, as the USSR was clearly falling apart, Charles Krauthammer wrote an inļ¬u-
ential essay called the Unipolar Moment. It made the point that with the Cold War at
an end, the US was the sole dominant power on the planet, and would be for roughly
a generation, after which point āmultipolarity will come in time.ā5This thesis held up
well: unipolarity was true in the 1990s, mostly true6in the 2000s, much less true with
the rise of Asia, technology, and American polarization in the 2010s, and no longer true
in the 2020s. As of 2022, we no longer have a unipolar world. Nor is it just ambiguously multipolar,
with an unspeciļ¬ed number of power centers. Instead, we have a bipolar America and
a tripolar triangle. And we can visualize these poles as follows:
5Understandably, neither the global internet nor China were recognized as possible new poles in
his essay. Both were still at the base of their respective exponentials. To Krauthammerās credit, he
budgeted for known unknowns, poles that could arise which one couldnāt see at that time. 6Huntingtonās alternative Clash of Civilizations thesis began proving more apposite in the 2000s. He modeled the world not as unipolar, or as a sum of random interstate rivalries, nor as a group of
atomized individuals, but as constituted of civilizational blocs that would eventually clash with each
other. 148 CHAPTER 3. THE TRIPOLAR MOMENT
3.4 Moral Power, Martial Power, Money Power
In the mid-20th century, the decline of the British Empire presaged a three way ļ¬ght
between a moral power, a martial power, and a money power ā roughly, left vs right vs
center. Back then, the Soviet Union was the moral power, the Nazis were the military
power, and the Americans were the money power. Today, NYT is the moral power,
CCP is the martial power, and BTC is the money power. In each case, we also ļ¬nd that the moral power plants moles for espionage, the martial
power excels at manufacturing, and the money power leads in media. But while in the
mid-20th century these three powers were states, today they are primarily networks.7
3.4.1 Moral State, Martial State, Money State
Back up for a second. How could we possibly say that an entity like the USSR, which
killed millions of people, was a āmoralā power? Because the USSRās primary strategy
wasCommunistproselytization8, theunceasingevangelismofamalign(butconvincing)
moral doctrine that managed to capture more than a third of the earthās population
by mid-century. It did have a colossal military, but spoke endlessly of peace; it seized
everyoneās property, but claimed it didnāt care about money; and its self-image was
that of saintly selļ¬essness. It is in this sense that the Soviet Union was a moral power . Its moral power9allowed it to plant moles in every country, which compensated for its
7As per our thesis: The Network is the Next Leviathan. 8See Douglas Hydeās Dedication and Leadership Techniques . 9Another way of thinking about it: the Sovietsā moral conviction gave them license to do highly 3.4. MORAL POWER, MARTIAL POWER, MONEY POWER 149
lack of money and manufacturing. American sympathizers funded the buildout of the
Soviet state, handed it diplomatic recognition, distracted Japan on its behalf, supplied
it with the Lend-Lease Act during WW2 and nuclear weapons afterward, and generally
propped up the USSR throughout its life.10
Nazi Germany also infamously murdered millions of people. While similar to the USSR
in many respects, its primary strategy was diļ¬erent. It was an empha
The 21st century approach shifts from State-centric territorial defense to Network-centric parallel systems, creating opt-in digital societies that can eventually merge successful elements.
One-commandment-based startup societies focus on single moral premises (like 'keto' communities) that scale to transform entire aspects of life in intellectually consistent ways.
Different experimental societies can coexist and support each other's right to exist while exploring contradictory approaches to governance and lifestyle choices.
Today's world is becoming tripolar between NYT (American Establishment), CCP (Communist Party of China), and BTC (Global Internet), each with distinct sources of truth and digital economies.
tems of the US and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
were maintained against the USSR and PRC at enormous cost by ļ¬ghting for large
contiguous regions of land. That was a very State-centric approach. In the 21st century, our approach suggests a Network-centric way to build parallel
systems: create one opt-in society at a time, purely digitally if need be, justifying it
with a historical/moral critique of the present system that delegitimizes State violence
against them and allows the experiment to continue. Many will fail, but for those that succeed, we can merge together the good changes and
discard the bad ones, and eventually get a parallel society that diļ¬ers in many respects
from (say) the original US codebase, but that maintains enough similarity that itās
ābackwards compatibleā and citizens can migrate over. Much like the relation of the
USA to Europe during the 1800s, this is a way to reproducibly build a New World on
the internet to reform existing states. 2.9.7 Four Points on One Commandments
Letās review. First, by starting with a seemingly simple moral premise and taking to its logical
conclusion, a one-commandment-based startup society ends up changing huge swaths
of life, but in a focused, exit-constrained, and intellectually consistent way.104Just
think about what āketoā really means when itās extrapolated out to the scale of an
entire town, and sugar poisoning is taken as seriously as lead poisoning. Second, one-commandment-based societies allow for scalable, parallel, consensual ex-
ploration of sociopolitical space. Diļ¬erent groups that disagree with each other on how
tolive canneverthelesssupportthe meta-concept ofmany diļ¬erent one-commandment-
based experiments. And indeed, both a carnivore community and vegan village would
likely have better health outcomes than the default Western diet, even if these com-
munities disagree on core moral premises. 104By āexit-constrained,ā we mean that everyone present in a given startup society can cancel their
subscription and leave at any time. 144 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY AS TRAJECTORY
Third, thereās a network eļ¬ect between societies. Each starts oļ¬ highly focused, of
course ā much as a startup company tries to attract customers with a single focused
product, each startup society tries to attract subscribers with a single focused com-
mandment. And as with a startup company, any individual experiment towards a new
sociopolitical order may succeed or fail. But so long as someone-commandment-based
startup societies succeed, they can copy each otherās proven moral innovations. Fourth, each of these one-commandment-based startup societies is supported by a
history. Listen to someone from the Keto Kosher society and theyāll be able to rattle
oļ¬ an account of how the USDA Food Pyramid led to epidemic obesity. Chat with a
Benedictine Option monk and youāll hear about the religious culture theyāre trying to
preserve. And talk to a citizen of the post-FDA society and theyāll give you a history of
the few strengths and many weaknesses of the FDA, from ACT-UP to drug lag. Some
such societies are focused on new technologies and some are not, but all of them are
based on an ethical code premised on their reading of history. And thatās why history
is the foundation of any new startup society. Chapter 3
The Tripolar Moment
3.1 NYT, CCP, BTC
Todayās world is becoming tripolar. It is NYT vs CCP vs BTC. Thatās the American
Establishment vs the Communist Party of China vs the Global Internet. Each of these three poles has a source of truth online: paper (NYT), party (CCP1), or
protocol (BTC). Each has a digital economy that surrounds that source of truth: the
dollar economy, the digital yuan2, or the web3 cryptoeconomy. Each pole is a network
in its own right, which stands outsidethe state; the NYT network gives direction to
the American state, the CCP network leads the Chinese state, and the BTC network
stands outside all states. And each has a governing ideology. ā¢Woke Capital3is the ideology
Nazi Germany represented a 'martial power' focused on brute force and military supremacy, but failed due to inability to build global coalitions and driving away scientific talent.
Mid-century America succeeded as a 'money power' through democratic capitalism, superior media capabilities, and industrial coordination that ultimately defeated both fascism and communism.
The current era features three network-based powers that operate above traditional states: NYT as moral power, CCP as martial power, and Bitcoin as money power.
NYT functions as a moral network using tactics similar to the Soviet Union, including moral pressure campaigns and espionage-like investigative methods to influence power structures.
The shift from state-based to network-based power represents a fundamental change in how global influence operates in the modern world.
sis on martial
valor,onpurebruteforce,ontheshellsthatwouldsupposedlyhisslouderthananymere
words. It did have an inescapable propaganda apparatus, but its moral preaching was
martial; it did leave some money-oriented businesses intact, but said it was socialist;
itsraison dāĆŖtre was ruthless self-interest. It is in this sense that Nazi Germany was a
martial power . Tosupportthismartialpower, theGermansneededatremendousmanufacturingbuild-
out, which they accomplished. Many historians believe the German military had, on
a pound-for-pound basis, the best equipment in the war. But because they lacked
the capitalistās ability to cooperate across borders, they drove away some of their best
scientists prior to murdering others, ensuring theyād never gain the atomic bomb. And
because their morality amounted to Aryan supremacy, which didnāt appeal to anyone
other than their co-ethnics, they never managed to build a large enough global coalition
to win - which is why the 70M Germans were eventually beaten by the 50M British,
the 150M Americans, and the 150M Soviets. As for the mid-century Americans, their primary strategy was democratic capitalism,
as opposed to Soviet communism or national socialism. They preached a morality,
but framed it in terms of a capitalist-friendly four freedoms; they built an arsenal of
democracy, but it arose from their commercial industrial base. It is in this sense that
WW2 America was a money power . Accompanying the money power was media power, just as capitalism went with democ-
racy. The Americans were much better at media than the Nazis (who couldnāt argue in
English) and incrementally better than the Soviets (whose propaganda was ultimately
undermined by their lack of prosperity). The media battle was a close-run thing, but
in the end blue jeans out-competed the Red Army. So: in this tripolar conļ¬guration, after a titanic struggle, the money power in the center
didend up winning over both the martial power on the right (by 1945) and the moral
power on the left (by 1991). immoral things, including assassination, terrorism, subversion, and espionage. Click those links or
read Haynes and Klehrās Venona. 10āāIf the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war,ā [Khrushchev] wrote in
his memoirs. āOne-on-one against Hitlerās Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and
would have lost the war.āā
Read the full piece. The conventional wisdom is that the US won WW2. The unconventional
wisdom is that the Russians did with sheer manpower. The v3 is that the US really did beat Nazi
Germany, because Soviet communists couldnāt proļ¬tably coordinate their economy, and needed an
arms bailout from the stable industrial base of the USA. 150 CHAPTER 3. THE TRIPOLAR MOMENT
3.4.2 Moral Network, Martial Network, Money Network
Today, the decline of the US empire has led to the rise of a moral power (represented
by NYT), a martial power (CCP), and a money power (BTC). The diļ¬erence relative
to mid-century is that each of these are networks that are upstream of states, rather
than primarily states themselves. NYT: The Moral Network
TheNYT-centerednetworkofjournalistsāhold[s]powertoaccountā andtherebystands
above any mere elected government. Its go-to tactics are moral badgering and mole-
driven espionage, just like the Soviet Union. On the moral point, go back and look at any recent NYT headline and note how many
of the articles involve a moralrather than factual premise as the core point. Free
speech is bad, white people are bad, communism was good...this is the kind of thing
they are focused on.11And it is in this sense that NYT is a moral power. On the espionage point, as just discussed, we know that the Soviets were past masters
at subversion. Their moral convictions made them feel that invading the privacy of
others, stealing secrets, destroying lives with Zerzetsung12ā all of that was acceptable
for the great moral cause of communism. Because they werenāt as good at building as
the US or even
š CCP membership requires rigorous screening including written tests, personal background checks, and at least one year of probationary period with strict behavioral standards.
š Members face lifelong commitments including mandatory attendance at meetings, essay writing, donations, and copying important speeches by hand.
āļø Party discipline is strictly enforced with consequences ranging from internal warnings and reflection essays to loss of party status and office titles for violations.
š Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has shifted from economic focus to militarist nationalism, investing heavily in AI, drones, and military capabilities while promoting reunification goals.
courses, where he will learn about
the partyās constitution, after which he will have to take and pass written
tests... 152 CHAPTER 3. THE TRIPOLAR MOMENT
Upon passing the tests, the applicant will required to submit more materi-
als to the party branch, including personal information of himself and his
parents. Information about his employment and his parentsā political aļ¬l-
iations also have to be disclosed. Probationary party membership will be
granted upon:
ā¢passing the screening,
ā¢being recommended by two party members, and
ā¢discussions and approval after a meeting with the party branch... Probation lasts at least a year. At the end of the probation period, the
party branch decides whether to admit the applicant, extend the probation
or expel him. Lest one misbehave during the probationary period, there are consequences if the ap-
plicant does not behave up to strict standards:
In the ensuing one-year probation period, the admission process can still
be stopped if āparty disciplineā is breached. And if you are ļ¬nally cleared by the Party to join, you have a lifelong commitment to
uphold, as Mo Chen writes:13
When the CCP hold a top tier meeting, you will be in your local party
branch conference room to watch it live, and write essay on thoughts after
view. Natural disasters happen, donate, mandatory. Oh you donāt know where
to ļ¬nd the donation box? Donāt worry, it is deducted already from your
salary...
Everytime the Chairman of China releases important article address the
issues of current aļ¬airs and overarching strategy for the next ļ¬ve years,
you write that article 10 times, handwritten, due tomorrow. Thankfully,
these are like, once every ļ¬ve years. If you break the law, no matter how small, you get a āParty Internal Warn-
ingā post. And yes, you write [a] reļ¬ection essay about what had led you
astray, and how wrong you realize you are... If it is serious, you are back to
probation period... even more serious? The double policy, you lose both
your party status and oļ¬ce title...
13Despite their 95M person scale, CCP members comprise only 7% of Chinaās massive 1.4B popula-
tion, which is why admission can be so selective. Indeed, as described, the process selects for diligence,
ideological alignment, and moderate levels of intelligence and initiative: enough smarts and ambition
to ļ¬ll out an application to be part of an important group, but not enough to do something oļ¬ the
beaten track. In other words, itās similar to modern Americaās college application process. 3.4. MORAL POWER, MARTIAL POWER, MONEY POWER 153
Seems very alien to a Western mindset! What people would choose to constantly post
new essays regurgitating the latest in regime propaganda, and indoctrinating their
coworkers and family members? But it all ļ¬ts if you think of them as Chinaās New
York Times subscribers. Think about this scene in Team America: World Police , where the Janeane Garofalo
ļ¬gure says, āAs actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say
what we read on television like itās our own opinion.ā Then, just swap out the NYT
mobile app with Xuexi Qiangguo . As the saying goes, āParty, government, army, society and education, east, west, south
and north, the party leads on everything.ā Itās almost the same for the American
Establishment, except the paperleads on everything. Americaās CCP are its NPCs. Why Is CCP Martial? From 1978 to 2013, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, the CCP was
focused on economic growth. But under Xi Jinping, itās taken a turn towards militarist
nationalism. It builds most of the worldās physical products, its military budget is
already >1/3 that of Americaās, it has a more focused task (āreunify Chinaā rather
than āpolice the worldā), it produces military recruiting videos like We Will Always Be
Here, and - most importantly - it is investing heavily in AI and drones. On that last point, China is just better at deployment in the physical world than the
US government or military, as w
American journalists are criticized as 'surveillance capitalists' who use questionable methods like doxxing, stalking, and printing hacked data while claiming moral authority.
Establishment media outlets engage in anti-competitive collusion by agreeing on 'truth' to avoid fact-checking each other, with no accountability for those who hold government accountable.
The Chinese Communist Party operates as a distributed network of 95 million members spread throughout society, rather than being concentrated solely in government positions.
CCP membership requires an arduous application process including essays on Marxism-Leninism, vouching by eight people, exams, and at least a year-long probationary period.
Germany (the Soviet munitions came from America via Lend-Lease),
stealing/destroying was the best thing they could do. Sulzbergerās employees and American journalists in general are similar. Theyāre the
Stasi with a stock symbol, the original surveillance capitalists. Itās always phrased in
the passive voice, but how exactly did āThe New York Times obtainā the things they
print? The story behind the story is more interesting than the story, and the behind
the scenes footage would show you a diļ¬erent movie than the one they want you to
watch. In short, much like the communists, the journalistsā moral conviction gives them the
license to doxx private citizens, to go through peopleās garbage, to use secret identities
(and then claim they donāt), to print hacked data, to solicit leaks of private information
while demanding to keep their own information private, to induce people to break
contracts, to stalk people at their homes, even to cover up enormous genocides and
start giant wars...always in the service of the bottom line, and some purported higher
good. The establishment journalist claims to speak truth to power, but somehow never gets
around to investigating themselves or each other. As Bloomberg admitted in a moment
11Of course, they donāt state it quiteso explicitly. At least, they used to not do so. Nowadays
the most zealous Sulzberger employees have been pushing for āmoral clarityā in all of their articles. They seem not to realize that it was the facade of objectivity that gave them power, punctuated only
occasionally by an emotive denunciation. Dropping this facade boosted their subscriber numbers,
gaining them money at the expense of power. 12Yes, technically a Stasi thing, but the GDR was a Soviet puppet state and trained by the Soviets. 3.4. MORAL POWER, MARTIAL POWER, MONEY POWER 151
of candor, they āreport on but do not investigate Reuters and CNBCā because they
are ādirect rivalsā. We occasionally hear about incidents like the episode where ABC
got CBS to ļ¬re the Robach leaker, or when NBC tried to stiļ¬e Ronan Farrowās work,
but those are the just the tip of the iceberg. Thereās an enormous incentive for estab-
lishment journalists to engage in anti-competitive collusion, because if they all agree
on what is ātrueā, who can then fact-check them? No one can āhold accountableā those
with the power to hold the government accountable. CCP: The Martial Network
This one may require the most explanation as itās the most foreign to Western expe-
rience. First weāll describe why CCP is primarily a network, and then why itās now
mainlymartial. We donāt pretend to be China experts ā few are! ā but these are
relatively basic points that are still not that well known. Why Is CCP a Network? TheCCPnetworkofpartymembersislessseparatefromtheChinesestate, asitdoesnāt
pretend to be at a great remove from the levers of power as NYT does. But the party is
not thesameas the state. Indeed, there are 95 million CCP members, and they donāt
all have senior government positions anymore than every registered Democrat has a
plum spot in the Biden administration. Instead, they are spread out through society. How does it work? Joining the CCP is itself nontrivial, which selects for the most dedicated members. TheSouth China Morning Post outlines the āarduousā application process:
An application must be ļ¬led to the applicantās closest party committee or
branch, with a letter explaining:
ā¢why he is applying for membership,
ā¢why he believes in the Communist Party, and
ā¢areas in which he feels he has fallen short of the requirement to become
a member. But it doesnāt end there, according to Merics:
Applicants must write essays on Marxism-Leninism and on current political
developments. Eight colleagues, neighbors and acquaintances have to vouch
for an applicantās reputation. After applying, the applicant must take courses and then pass an exam, only to then
be put into a yearlong (at least) probationary period:
The applicant will then attend party
China is emerging as the primary martial power globally, with manufacturing capabilities and population advantages that could shift the balance from America's traditional military dominance.
The New York Times represents moral power that transcends state boundaries, while China's Communist Party embodies martial power, and Bitcoin networks constitute a new form of money power.
Bitcoin and web3 technologies are evolving beyond just monetary influence to become a decentralized media power that could challenge traditional establishment media outlets.
These power structures aren't pure forms - each network possesses overlapping capabilities across moral, martial, and monetary domains, creating complex interdependencies in global influence.
e can see from (a) the public infrastructure comparison,
(b) the multibillion dollar failures of the American Ford-class aircraft carrier, the F-35
manned aircraft, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Zumwalt destroyer, and (c) the
fact that all the manufacturing know-how and the factories themselves are in China. Robotics could shift manufacturing out of China, but until then it is quite possible that
the āarsenal of democracyā is more like the āarsenal of communism.ā14
Note however that just because China becomes primarily a martial power does not
mean it will necessarily win a physical conļ¬ict. The Nazis too in our framework were
primarily a martial power, and did not win. Then again, while the Nazis were out-
numbered by the US/UK/USSR by a 5:1 ratio (70M to 350M), the Chinese outnumber
the Americans by a roughly 4:1 ratio (1.4B to 330M), so past performance may not be
predictive of future results. 14If youāre interested in a counterargument, Peter Zeihan has written at length about how weak he
thinks China is, how its economy will fail, its demographics will mean it grows old before it grows
rich, and how it canāt ļ¬eld a blue water navy. You can read his work here. I disagree for the reasons stated here. In short, China makes physical things, so the underpinnings
of its economy are more robust in crunchtime than one based on inļ¬ation and importation. It is
amazingatautomation, androboticstrumpsdemographicswhenitcomestomanufacturingormilitary
prowess. And it ships goods all over the world, is buying ports with debt-trap diplomacy, and can
build infrastructure on a colossal scale even as the US is losing that capability ā so itās implausible
that it wonāt ever be able to ļ¬eld a blue water navy, though it might well be an unmanned one. See also Christian Brose in the The Kill Chain and Kai-Fu Lee in AI Superpowers . 154 CHAPTER 3. THE TRIPOLAR MOMENT
BTC: The Money Network
This one is almost too obvious, so we wonāt belabor it. The global network of BTC
holders in a key sense also stands abovestates, like the NYT network stands above the
American state and the CCP network stands above the Chinese state. Why? Because
itās very hard for states to seize Bitcoin, in the absence of some kind of quantum
computing breakthrough. But itās primarily a money power rather than a moral power like NYT, or a martial
power like CCP. The less-obvious point is that BTC ā and its adjacent group of web3 users ā are be-
coming a mediapower that will eventually topple the NYT, much as the 20th century
USās media power eventually outcompeted that of the Soviet Union. Why? Decentral-
ized media. You can see early signs of this with Substack, Mirror, and NFTs...but in
brief, thebestcontentcreatorshavebetterthingstodothanworkfortheestablishment. They can become publishers of their own, by founding their own media companies. As
with the CCPās transition to a martial power, the BTC/web3 transition to a money
andmedia power is not at all conventional wisdom. 3.4.3 Overlaps and Exceptions
Of course, these arenāt pure forms. NYT is a publicly traded multibillion dollar corporation, and is certainly able to inļ¬u-
ence the Fed and other huge ļ¬ows of money. And it can spur much of the US military
into action with a fake article or three. So it has money and martial power, even if it
is primarily a moral power. CCP endlessly preaches to its citizens via Xuexi Qiangguo , and until recently was
focused entirely on business. So it has a moral and money power as well, though it is
becoming primarily a martial power. Finally, Bitcoin certainly makes a set of implicit moral arguments: inļ¬ation is bad,
centralization is bad, pseudonymity is good, and the like. And it has a martial power,
though itās entirely defensive, as the combination of encryption and physical decen-
tralization render it resistant to 20th-century-style military attacks. But it is, perhaps
obviously, fundamentally a money power. One can do a similar exercise for the US/USSR/NSDAP triangle. 3.5 Sub
Three major ideological poles dominate global discourse: CCP demanding submission through power, NYT demanding sympathy through guilt, and BTC demanding complete sovereignty through self-sufficiency.
Each pole legitimizes itself by taking a useful societal concept to an extreme while denouncing its opposite, with the NYT pole being particularly effective since 99.99% of people can be labeled as oppressors on some dimension.
All three extremes are ultimately undesirable when taken to their logical conclusions: total submission leads to digital totalitarianism, forced sympathy creates irrational emotional breakdowns, and absolute sovereignty destroys the division of labor that enables modern civilization.
The geographic influence of these poles varies significantly, with CCP dominance on Chinese internet, NYT strength in English-speaking spaces, and BTC gaining traction globally while facing pushback from both other poles.
mission, Sympathy, Sovereignty
Each pole legitimizes themselves by appealing to a societally useful concept, and takes
it to an extreme as part of denouncing its opposite extreme. The CCP is the most obvious: you must submit. Theyāre the Chinese Communist
Party, and theyāre powerful, so you must bow your head. This is very simple and 3.5. SUBMISSION, SYMPATHY, SOVEREIGNTY 155
straightforward and easy to understand, though it only really works for them within
China and the Chinese internet. The NYT pole is slightly more subtle: they demand you must sympathize . After all
arenāt you white, or male, or straight, or cis, or abled, or wealthy, or a member of one
of an ever-multiplying number of privileged categories ā and therefore an oppressor on
somedimension? Because youārepowerful, you must sympathize, and bow your head
to those you have ostensibly oppressed. Itās a left-handed version of the submission
ideology. It can get anyone to bow their head in the name of empowering them,
because 99.99% of the world is an āoppressorā on at least some dimension. This pole is
strongest on the English-speaking15internet, weakest on the Chinese internet, and of
intermediate strength outside that. TheBTCpoleistheoppositeofbothofthese. Itdemandsyoumustbe sovereign . That
means rather than bending to the CCP, or slitting your wrists as NYT demands, you
hold your head up high. You hold your private keys locally, you donāt trust centralized
corporations or governments, youāre self-suļ¬cient and autarkic, youāre living oļ¬ the
grid. This pole is strong on the global internet, though itās facing pushback from both
CCP and NYT. 3.5.1 Extremes and Counter-Extremes Are Undesirable
The subtlety here is that each of these poles has an element of truth to it. You donāt
want a CCP society where everyone has no recourse but to submit, because that can
easily become a now-digital totalitarianism. On the other hand, you also donāt want a
society where no one submits to anyone, because that looks like San Francisco, where
people can run into Walgreens and steal everything. You donāt want the NYT-run society where everyone has no recourse but to sympa-
thize with the current thing, because that results in what Matt Yglesias has called the
Great Awokening: the emotive and irrational breakdowns that set America on ļ¬re and
continue to roil US society. Yet you also donāt want the society where no onesym-
pathizes, because that looks like the Grand Theft Auto environment of 1990s Russia,
the low-trust post-communist society where any cooperative endeavor is regarded as a
scam. Finally, and perhaps least obviously, you donāt want the society where everyone must
be sovereign, because taken to its irrational16limit that means pumping your own
15OnceoutsidetheUS,itāsobviousthatwokenesscomesfromAmerica. Seeforexamplethispieceby
the Irish Angela Nagle, or this piece by the UKās Economist, both of which can see wokenessā American
origins from the small bit of cultural distance that Europe still aļ¬ords. Consider the episode when
an American tried to cancel a Finn for using the Finnish word aave. Or the fact that the BLM
protests spread digitally from the US to the rest of the world, while itās hard to think of a situation
where the reverse has happened. And consider that pronoun choice itself assumes the use of English
(many languages lack gendered pronounces), such that āLatinxā is an American imposition on Spanish
speakers. 16As you will, Bitcoin Maximalism takes many libertarian leanings to their irrational limits, just as 156 CHAPTER 3. THE TRIPOLAR MOMENT
water from out of the ground, growing your own food, not trusting any vendor or
person other than yourself, and generally ending the division of labor that makes cap-
italism run. Extreme autarky might sound romantic, but in the absence of robotic
breakthroughs going truly oļ¬-grid is a recipe for dramatic regression in the standard of
living. Conversely, of course you donāt want a society where no one has the possibil
The world is restructuring around three competing poles: NYT (American establishment), CCP (Chinese state), and BTC (decentralized blockchain networks).
Different alliance combinations create distinct geopolitical scenarios - states can team up against networks, or networks can align with one state against another.
Each pole has internal conflicts with dissidents who share national identity but oppose the establishment's methods and policies.
Countries and groups seeking sovereignty from both US and Chinese control will be driven toward the BTC/web3 pole for decentralized alternatives.
The ultimate goal isn't pure decentralization but conscious recentralization into voluntary startup societies that maintain independence from major powers.
. The CCP has ābannedā Bitcoin many times
over the years, but those bans have materially grown in severity. The most recent
action was just short of a seizure. 3.6.2 Two Poles vs the Third
NYT + CCP vs BTC. This is the State vs the Network. Itās when the NYT-controlled
American empire and the CCP-controlled Chinese empire team up to attack BTC,
perhaps on the grounds of āclimateā or some other thinly veiled excuse to maintain
state power. NYT + BTC vs CCP. This is Western voice and exit together vs Eastern control. Itās
whenNYTāsinterestsindisruptingtheChineseregimeandBTCāsinterestsinproviding
globally uncensorable savings overlap to provide a thorn in the side for CCP. The web3
part of BTC/web3 becomes particularly important here, because it provides hard-to-
censor global services that complement digital gold, which on its own is necessary but
not suļ¬cient for freedom. BTC + CCP vs NYT. This is the post-American world against the American empire. Against the inļ¬ating dollar, China and crypto together can do something neither can
alone. The CCP/RMB pole runs a Chinese system that is already at scale, capable
of operating completely outside the dollar, and based on a more modern digital yuan
therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented
absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.ā 158 CHAPTER 3. THE TRIPOLAR MOMENT
to boot. The BTC/web3 part of this aligns American dissidents18with global crypto
holders, and promotes neutral protocols19that take away American root access (but
also donāt grant it to China). 3.6.3 Intrapolar Conļ¬icts
Near each pole there is an internal dyad representing the conļ¬ict within. We represent
this as an inscribed triangle within the tripolar triangle. Near the NYT pole are the American dissidents, the non-woke liberals, centrists, and
conservatives who disagree with the US establishmentās platform of speech controls,
inļ¬ation, and unending warfare - but still identify as American ļ¬rst, and donāt want
to see China become number one. Near the CCP pole are the Chinese liberals, the internationalist capitalists who thought
times were better under Hu, as well as the many groups left and right whoāve seen their
fortunes dim under newly aggressive Chinese nationalism...but, again, who still see
themselves as Chinese ļ¬rst, and donāt want to bend to American imperialism. Near the BTC pole is the web3 community and the tens of millions of Bitcoin holders
who donāt identify as Maximalists...but who also still subscribe to many of the inter-
nationalist principles that presuppose an internet without American orChinese root
control over the ļ¬nancial or communication systems. 3.6.4 The Road To Recentralization
And what about other countries and people who donāt deļ¬ne themselves with reference
to the Americans, the Chinese, or the blockchain? Well, there will be a lot of pressure
to identify with the ļ¬rst two poles...which will drive any group that doesnāt want to be
under the thumb of the US establishment or the CCP to the third pole of BTC/web3. That is, one of our premises is that the Indians, Israelis, American dissidents, Chinese
liberals, techfounders/investors, andpeoplefromothercountriesthatwantto maintain
their own sovereignty will need to avail themselves of BTC/web3 for decentralized
communication, transaction, and computation. But to fully explain why, weāll need to go through a scenario for the future that isnāt
about remaining under the thumb of US or Chinese centralization, nor about falling
into crypto-anarchic decentralization, but rather about consciously recentralizing into
opt-in startup societies. 18SeeBitcoin is Civilization for the long-form argument on why American dissidents will line up
behind Bitcoin. 19SeeGreat Protocol Politics for a full article on why neutral protocols and national stacks will be
chosen by all countries that donāt want to be under American or Chinese control. Chapter 4
Dece
š Human systems create feedback loops where people react to predictions themselves, sometimes making them self-fulfilling prophecies unlike physical systems.
š Competing curves represent multiple simultaneous technopolitical movements rising and falling over time, like how people meet spouses or social networks gaining market share.
šÆ Only two types of predictions matter: physical predictions (testable by experiment) and financial predictions (tested by volatile markets).
š Government statistics are unreliable for prediction due to political manipulation, as seen with COVID deaths, crime rates, and inflation reporting.
ticipate. In systems made of human
beings, putting something out into the world results in a reaction, and then a reaction
to that reaction, and so on, often resulting in positive and negative feedback loops
rather than textbook convergence to equilibria. Thus, when collecting data on such
systems, let alone forecasting them, one must keep in mind that people will reactto
predictions themselves, sometimes to make them come true. In social science, unlike
physical science, every row in a dataset represents a human being with a mind of their
own. The concept of competing curves refers to the fact that there are many simultaneous
technopolitical movements competing at the present moment, diļ¬erent phenomena ris-
ing from zero to aļ¬ect millions over the course of years, months, or even days. For
example, if you take a look at this graph of how people met their spouses, you can see
several diļ¬erent curves rising and falling as diļ¬erent cultural movements ācome online,ā
history with a point, history that is not (as Henry Ford once said) bunk. 4I learned to do this the hard way ā in 2013 I gave a series of lectures, where some bits held up
reasonably well, while others were very much time capsules from that era (GChat, anyone?). Benedict
Andersonās otherwise excellent book Imagined Communities has the same issue, as it opens with a
reference to the conļ¬ict between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China as being a momentous event in the
history of nationalism, which it arguably was not5in retrospect. 135As he describes, it was notable for a Marxist to see three newly independent, ostensibly communist
countries ļ¬ghting with each other in the name of nationalism. He thought of nationalism as an illusion;
that was what led him to write the book. 4.1. THE POSSIBLE FUTURES 161
until the internet just dominates everything. Another example is the market share of
social networks over time; a third is Ray Dalioās graph of the rise and fall of nations. Thepointisthatyoucanidentifytheplayers, butnotalwaystheoutcome, inacomplex
multiactor process. Applying this to our scenario analysis, we have some trends that
are synergistic and others that are antagonistic. For example, many trendlines point to
diminished American power, but at least one points in the other direction: the Westās
willingness to weaponize its tech giants for domestic and foreign conļ¬icts alike. Does
this give American dominance another few years, another decade, or many more than
that? We can identify the curves but not always which ones win out. Predictability has its limits. In our view there are two kinds of predictions that matter:
the physical and the ļ¬nancial. The physical prediction is a very speciļ¬c bet on the
trajectory of a ball, on a genomic base call, or on the electron conļ¬guration of an
orbital. Itās checked by reproducible experiment, and your device fails if it fails. The
ļ¬nancial prediction is at the opposite end of the spectrum: itās a macroscopic bet on
the volatile, reļ¬exive behavior of other human beings. Itās checked by the unforgiving
market, and your fund fails if it fails. We arenāt as interested in betting on manipulation-prone government statistics. Ac-
cording to the Chinese government of 2021, the number of COVID deaths in China
from mid 2020-2022 was zero. According to the San Francisco government of 2021,
the crime rate in SF was declining. According to the US establishment of 2021, the
inļ¬ation of the dollar was transitory. All this reminds us of the Soviet government of
1932, who said the harvest in Ukraine was glorious. As we discuss later, it isuseful to create on-chain shadow statistics that are more
veriļ¬able, reliable, and censorship-resistant than these easily faked indicators. But
outside of that, predictions on oļ¬cial government statistics are otherwise uninteresting
because of how obviously political they are. So we steer clear of that kind of thing
ā in our analysis of possible futures, weāll either predict something is technologically
(and hence
š The author proposes a "recentralized center" approach that combines elements from three competing poles rather than embracing extremes of sovereignty, centralization, or decentralization.
š Historical alliances between major powers (US, USSR, Nazi Germany) shifted constantly during WWII, demonstrating the fluid nature of tripolar conflicts that Orwell captured in 1984.
āļø Three major contemporary conflicts are emerging: NYT (US establishment) vs CCP (China), NYT vs BTC (Bitcoin/decentralization), and CCP vs BTC, representing clashes between different power structures.
š The startup society concept leading to network states aims to balance founder leadership with citizen exit rights and digital checks and balances as an alternative to current polarized systems.
ity
of being sovereign at all, as this leaves us all subject to the not-so-incipient digital
totalitarianism that CCP has already rolled out and NYT wishes it could. 3.5.2 A Recentralized Center
One might argue āand Iwould agreeā thatwhile these threepoles and theiropposite
three extremes are bad, they are not all equallybad, and you donāt necessarily need
to be dead center. For example, Iād personally err much closer to the sovereignty pole
than our current culture, and try to develop the technologies to enable this. However, we should recognize that diļ¬erent strokes will suit diļ¬erent folks. And rather
than trying to impose preferences on everyone, what we really want are a varietyof
points in between these three undesirable poles: diļ¬erent fusions for diļ¬erent groups. The construction we outline in this book ā the startup society that ultimately becomes
a network state ā ideally combines aspects of all three. For example, it does have a
clear founder to provide direction, but it ensures every citizen has the right to freely
leave should they choose, that coinholders also have a say, and a number of other digital
checks and balances. This concept is the basis of the recentralized center, an idea we
discuss in depth later. 3.6 Conļ¬icts and Alliances
A tripolar triangle leads to surprisingly complicated dynamics. During the Great De-
pression, FDRās US admired the Nazis and the NYT wrote encomiums to them, as
documented in Three New Deals andThe Gray Lady Winked . Then, after the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR and the Nazis kicked oļ¬ World War 2 by invading Poland
together, with the USSR standing by as the Nazis fought the Anglo-Americans, and the
US-aligned UK seriously contemplating bombing the Soviets. Later, the USSR and the
Nazis fought each other during Barbarossa. Then, the US and the USSR teamed up
to ļ¬ght the Nazis. Finally, the US and USSR split Germany between themselves and
fought each other during the Cold War. Thatās why Orwell wrote in 1984 about how
āOceania had always been at war with Eurasiaā17ā because the coalitions between
wokeness takes many liberal precepts to their (il)logical conclusions. 17āAt this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in
alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers
had at any time been grouped along diļ¬erent lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four
years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely
a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily
under control. Oļ¬cially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: 3.6. CONFLICTS AND ALLIANCES 157
states switched all the time. With networks rather than states, the coalitions are even more ļ¬uid, with several
existing simultaneously. 3.6.1 One Pole Against Another
NYT vs CCP. This is the obvious one, the Thucydides trap, the Great Power conļ¬ict
between the US and China that many have predicted. But thereās a subtlety here. Many regular Chinese people donāt want such a conļ¬ict, and many Americans donāt
either, but those who are invested in imperial ambitions on both sides ā the paper
subscribers and the party members ā are into it. Networks are driving the states to
war. NYT vs BTC. This is another obvious one, the American regulatory state (which NYT
is upstream of) against the decentralized network. We are seeing this push with eļ¬orts
like the failed 2021 House Bill and the āconcerned.techā letter. Note the demographics
ofthesignatoriestothelatter: itisalmostentirelywhiteWesternerscomplainingabout
the US establishment losing root control over the global ļ¬nancial system. It is doubtful
that their enthusiasm for the dollar will be shared by Americans hit by inļ¬ation ā or
by people overseas. This conļ¬ict is the American establishment vs the Global Internet. CCP vs BTC. Yet another obvious one
The author advocates for analyzing multiple possible futures rather than a single predetermined outcome, emphasizing human agency and controlled experimentation over historical inevitability.
The text presents a 'practical history' focused on events that make network states feasible, similar to how entrepreneurs use 'why now' slides to justify their timing.
Future predictions face significant challenges due to rising internet-driven volatility in social media (viral/canceled) and cryptocurrency (moon/rekt) that affects both individuals and entire countries.
The concept of reflexivity creates feedback loops where participants' understanding of situations actually influences the situations themselves, making predictions more complex.
The author's goal is to materialize startup societies that gain diplomatic recognition as network states and rebuild high-trust societies through recentralized governance.
ntralization, Recentralization
4.1 The Possible Futures
Itās not about thefuture, itās about the possiblefutures. Why? Because causality exists. Because we can run controlled experiments. Because
human action can inļ¬uence outcomes. Because we arenāt communists that believe
in the historical inevitability of utopian outcomes, but technologists that believe in
individual initiative subject to practical constraints.1
The previous two chapters were about those constraints, about the past and the im-
mediate present. They orient us to discuss several possible futures, before picking out
one trajectory to focus on - the one where we materialize many startup societies, get a
few diplomatically recognized as network states, and rebuild high-trust societies via a
recentralized center. Some caveats before we begin, though. When it comes to the past, every history is, inevitably, just a story.2That is, any
tale of the past is necessarily abridged, abbreviated, edited, and idiosyncratic. You
canāt convey 5000 years of written records any other way. And our tale of History
as Trajectory is no diļ¬erent: itās like the āwhy nowā slide at the beginning of every
entrepreneurās deck, a practical history3of particular events that lead to the feasibility
1See the section here on the Tech Tree model of history to reconcile the āgreat manā and āhistorical
inevitabilityā theories. The great man can steer the tech tree, but they canāt reinvent everything from
scratch. 2While weāre not able to give a full treatment of history, you might want to check out something
like Will and Ariel Durantās āThe Lessons of Historyā. 3It is of course partly tongue-in-cheek to cite the āwhy nowā slide as a kind of history. But thereās a
deeper point: just as the culture of the merchant was on the periphery of feudalism, and then became
central to the whole thing as society transitioned from subsistence agriculture to industrial capitalism,
so too are we transitioning from the industrial age to a technological age driven by entrepreneurs and
investors. Tech culture, startup culture, and now BTC/web3 culture is becoming global culture. And
the modest āwhy nowā slide is a little piece of that - itās history for pragmatists, functional history,
159 160 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
of the network state. But we cited our references, so you can check our facts. On the topic of the present, our chapter on the Tripolar Moment is the section of the
book that is likely to be the most dated. Intentionally so, because we endeavored to
move most references to current or near-past events to this section.4So, think of that
chapter as being very much a worldview circa mid-2022; like the Kalman ļ¬lter, we
reserve the right to incorporate new information to update it. Now to the subject of the future. As youāll see we do believe a recentralized center
of pragmatic network states canemerge, and describe several scenarios where this
could happen. But our projections are just scenarios, and throughout we keep in mind
volatility, reļ¬exivity, competing curves, and the consequent limits to predictability. First,volatility is rising because the internet increases variance. Social media is social
volatility (go viral or get canceled), and cryptocurrency is ļ¬nancial volatility (go to
the moon or get rekt). Volatility makes correct predictions more diļ¬cult, but oļ¬ers
upside for those who predict correctly. And volatility is good for insurgents and bad
for incumbents, because the former only need to get lucky once while the latter need
to keep staying lucky. Itās no longer just individuals that are subject to high volatility,
as entire countries can rise and fall overnight. So, in a high volatility environment,
only Bezos-style invariants remain constant. All other observations should be taken as
tentative ā they are true until they are suddenly not. Reļ¬exivity is Sorosā term for the feedback loop between participantsā understanding
of a situation and the situation in which they par
The author acknowledges that historical analysis may be flawed and future predictions uncertain, but argues that models can still be useful despite their limitations.
Two analytical frameworks are introduced - Sociopolitical and Technoeconomic axes - to help compress complex data into understandable patterns for evaluating startup societies and network states.
A detailed dystopian scenario is presented featuring American Anarchy (triggered by government Bitcoin seizures leading to a Second Civil War between networks rather than states) and Chinese Control (intense surveillance state crackdown).
The author suggests that in this scenario, both the US and China would implement competing versions of digital surveillance states, with the US copying Chinese methods while formally deputizing Big Tech companies as surveillance arms.
physically) feasible, or that it could result in a ļ¬nancial return, or both. And weāll give recipes for how to make those predictions reality, or prevent them from
becoming reality, in the form of ļ¬ctional scenarios on good and bad futures. So, to recap: our history is just a story, our analysis of the present may presently
be dated, and our forecasts for the future may be confounded by volatility, reļ¬exivity,
competingcurves, andthelimitsofpredictability. Withthatsaid, allmodelsarewrong,
but some are useful; so with caveats cataloged and provisos provided, letās proceed! 4.1.1 Analytical Axes and Scenario Analyses
We start by describing new lenses to view the world in the sections on Sociopolitical
andTechnoeconomic axes. These are mental models that hopefully help compress large
amounts of data into rough patterns. Next, in the section on Foreseeable Futures , we put on our tech investor hats and 162 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
project out into the near future, describing developments we anticipate. These arenāt
just random investment theses, though; theyāre pieces of the future that are relevant
to startup societies and network states. We then game out one speciļ¬c science ļ¬ction scenario in detail that we think is unfor-
tunately quite plausible: American Anarchy, Chinese Control, and the International
Intermediate . In this scenario, we project a Second American Civil War triggered in
part by a broke US government that attempts Bitcoin seizures, a situation we call
American Anarchy. Unlike the ļ¬rst Civil War, this would be a stochastic struggle be-
tween two Networks rather than an explicit dispute between two States. It would be
more undeclared than declared, more invisible than legible. And this conļ¬ict could end
in decentralization and disunion instead of centralization and consolidation. As radical
as that sounds, many thinkers from across the political spectrum already foresee some-
thing like this happening in diļ¬erent ways, including Stephen Marche, David Reaboi,
Barbara Walter, and Kurt Schlichter, though like me none of them are particularly
happy about the prospect. Meanwhile, in this ļ¬ctional scenario, the CCP implements an intense domestic crack-
down on the other side of the world to maintain stability, preventing Chinese people
from freely leaving the digital yuan network with their property, a result we refer
to as Chinese Control. As America descends into anarchy, the CCP points to their
functional-but-highly-unfree system as the only alternative, and exports a turnkey ver-
sion of their surveillance state to other countries as the next version of Belt and Road,
as a piece of āinfrastructureā that comes complete with a SaaS subscription to Chinaās
all-seeing AI eye. In the name of putting a lid on the anarchy and restoring ādemocracyā, the US es-
tablishment then silently copies CCPās methodology without admitting theyāre doing
so, much as they cloned Chinaās lockdown after loudly denouncing it. Similarly, after
spending a decade pretending to decry āsurveillance capitalismā, the US establishment
formally deputizes many Big Tech companies as oļ¬cial arms of the surveillance state. However, the establishmentās implementation of this digital lockdown is as tragicomic
as the CCPās version is totalitarian, and is porous enough to permit serious resistance. 4.1.2 Strong Form and Weak Form Models of the Future
This is the world we could be barreling towards. You donāt have to believe in it to
found a startup society, though. So why talk about it at all then? Because in a high
volatility time, itās worth thinking through models of how our future could be very
diļ¬erent from our present.6
6For diļ¬erent views, you can Ray Dalioās Principles for the Changing World Order , Barbara Walter
andStephenMarcheāswritingsonapossibleSecondAmericanCivilWar,PeterZeihanāswork,orDavid
Reaboi and Kurt Schlicter. All of them also think the current age will soon be giving way. Of them, I
agree with Dalio on about 70%,
The author envisions a future collision between three extreme ideologies: American anarchy/wokeness, Bitcoin maximalism, and Chinese Communist control.
A fourth alternative called the 'International Intermediate' could emerge, comprising 80% of the world population who reject both anarchy and tyranny.
The solution involves building 'startup societies' and 'network states' as pragmatic alternatives that balance submission, sympathy, and sovereignty.
The goal is creating a 'Recentralized Center' of high-trust communities that offer concrete improvements over propaganda, coercion, and surveillance states.
but heās a bit more bullish on China than I am and doesnāt take BTC
or technology into account as a factor. I agree with Walter/Marche and Zeihan on perhaps only 20-
30%, but itās worth reading them for the US establishment and heterodox neocon views respectively. 4.1. THE POSSIBLE FUTURES 163
Think of the American-Anarchy-vs-Chinese-Control scenario as a strong form model
of how NYT, BTC, and CCP could collide, with startup societies and network states
arising out of that atom-smasher as deliberately created alternatives to Wokeness,
Maximalism, andChinese Communism. The weak form model is that things donāt work out precisely this way (few things do! ),
but that the general trend is correct. That is, in the future the US Establishment
doeslose relative control, the CCP doestry to exert absolute control, and Bitcoin
Maximalists doadvocate for no control. The way of life propounded by each of these
ideological communities will get extreme, but will also be itself justiļ¬ed as a reaction
to the other two perceived extremes, as discussed in Extremes and Counter-Extremes
Are Undesirable . So weāll still need to build societies with consciously chosen tradeoļ¬s
between submission, sympathy, and sovereignty, instead of unconsciously capitulating
to either an extreme or counter-extreme. And that again leads us to startup societies
and network states. So, using the strong-form scenario as a base, we discuss a number of Victory Conditions
and Surprise Endings fordiļ¬erentfactions. Wealsogiveabitmoredetailonthedesired
outcome, the trajectory we want to shoot for: a Recentralized Center of high-trust
societies. 4.1.3 Building the Future Rather than Defaulting Into It
Our goal in thinking all this through is not pessimistic but pragmatic: to change
what we can change, by setting up a fourth pole as an alternative to the failing US
establishment, to maximalist crypto-anarchy, andto the centralized surveillance state
of the CCP. We call the raw material for this fourth pole the International Intermediate . It in-
cludes American centrists, Chinese liberals, Indians, Israelis, web3 technologists, and
essentially everyone from around the world that wants to avoid both the American and
Chinese whirlpools. At ļ¬rst blush, this group represents ~80% of the world population and has little in
common save their disinclination towards both anarchy and tyranny. But a subset of
them will be smart enough to realize that exit is a stopgap, not a solution. People tend
to imitate what they see, and if American Anarchy and Chinese Control are the most
prominent games in town they will eventually be imitated. So isolationism is oļ¬ the table. Yet so is direct intervention, as both the American and
Chinese theaters will snarl against any outside interference. The answer then is innovation rather than isolationism or interventionism. A subset
I agree with Reaboi and Schlicter that conļ¬ict will arise, but think the form of that struggle will be
driven by international and technological factors to a much greater extent than most US conservatives
currently appreciate, because the American theater is becoming the acted-upon, and not simply the
global actor. 164 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
of the International Intermediate needs to build something better than both American
Anarchy and Chinese Control, a concrete improvement over the propaganda, coercion,
surveillance, and conļ¬ict that may soon characterize the two pillars of the global econ-
omy. In other words, the rest of the world will need to lead. They canāt hope for the US
establishment or CCP to ļ¬gure it out. And thatās the Recentralized Center : a circle of
startup societies and network states built by pragmatic founders, a group of high-trust
communities architected as intentional alternatives to failed states and surveillance
states alike. 4.2 Sociopolitical Axes
Old mental models for understanding the world are quickly going out of date. Not
only are things changing faster, things are chan
India as a country is rapidly developing with hundreds of millions gaining internet access and becoming the third-largest producer of tech unicorns after the US and China.
The global Indian diaspora represents a powerful 'Network' force that may become as influential in the 2020s as the Chinese State was in the 2010s, with Indians achieving leadership positions in major corporations and politics.
A new political axis is emerging between transhumanists who embrace technology to fundamentally change humanity and anarcho-primitivists who reject technology and want to return to pre-industrial life.
These new sociopolitical dimensions are developing rapidly and may blindside those still viewing the world through outdated lenses, similar to how the 2008 financial crisis caught many unprepared.
ging faster on new dimensions . New
sociopolitical axes are emerging. Seeing the world through old lenses risks being caught
blindsided by the political equivalent of a runaway truck. People who thought the
ļ¬nancialcrisisof2008wasunthinkablejustwerenātlookingattherightgraphs. Michael
Burry was, though. In the same spirit, what are some new graphs we could look at, new themes for conļ¬ict
and cooperation, new sociopolitical axes that are underestimated? Thatās what this
section is about. 4.2.1 International Indians
I am moderately bullish on India, but extremely bullish on Indians. Why? Well, ļ¬rst letās talk about India the country. If youāre in the West, havenāt
been paying attention to India, and think itās still just an uninteresting āThird World
country,ā you can be forgiven for that. But take a look at the following links to orient:
ā¢Here is a visual comparison of parts of Los Angeles vs India. ā¢Hereās a graph showing hundreds of millions of Indians getting cheap mobile
internet service over the last ļ¬ve few years
ā¢Hereās an amazing economic survey of India showing growth over the last decade
ā¢Hereās a chart showing India is now #3 in tech unicorns after the US and China. ā¢Hereās a post that discusses the overall picture: The Internet Country
Putting that all together, there are now signiļ¬cant chunks of the āascending worldā
which are cleaner and better maintained than the ādescending worldā environments of
Los Angeles and San Francisco. That doesnāt mean the curves are the same ā just
that they overlap in a way that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. 4.2. SOCIOPOLITICAL AXES 165
Next, letās talk about the Indian diaspora. There are about ļ¬ve million people of Indian
ancestryintheUS,UK,Canada, andAustralia, andafairbitmoreifweincludethefull
South Asian diaspora. They have done quite well over the last few decades. While the
ļ¬rst generation came over with portable technical skills in medicine and engineering,
the second generation within the West speaks English without an accent and with
full cultural ļ¬uency - resulting in many Indians in law, ļ¬lmmaking, and media. Some
have even ascended to the commanding heights of politics and technology, like Kamala
Harris, Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella. That sets up an interesting State-plus-Network dynamic. Using our terminology, the
IndianStatemay take one step back for every two steps forward, even though itās been
moving forward as of late. But the Network of the global Indian diaspora is just on
an exponential rise. Indeed, I think the 2020s will be for the Indian Network what the
2010s were for the Chinese State - somewhat ignored at the beginning of the decade,
but an important global force by the end of it. Recall that āChina had its ļ¬rst unicorn in 2010, and it took ļ¬ve years for it to get to
ļ¬ve unicorns; the year after that, it had twenty. Ecosystems develop very slowly, and
then all at once.ā
Please donāt think of this as Indian triumphalism at all ā I actually ļ¬nd it surprising! Itās just recognition of an unexpected new player entering the arena that many still
underappreciate. For further context, you might read A New Idea of India orOur Time
Has Come . 4.2.2 Transhumanism Versus Anarcho-Primitivism
An important emerging political axis is transhumanism versus anarcho-primitivism. Brieļ¬y, transhumanists think technology is good, and want to use technology to change
humanity in fundamental ways. Conversely, anarcho-primitivists think technology is
bad, and want to to return to the wild, de-industrialize, and abandon technology. They
think of humans as pollution on this great Earth. There are right and left varieties of each, though they overlap. Left transhumanists like
Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum to some extent give rise to right anarcho-
primitivists, and vice versa. Basically, left transhumanists make changes to the human
body that rightists ļ¬nd aesthetically unappealing. Conversely, right transhumanists
advocateimprovementstothehumanbodythatl
People have hierarchical identities with one primary identity that supersedes all others, whether tied to city, country, company, or cryptocurrency.
Criticism of someone's primary identity triggers irrational defensive responses because these identities are non-negotiable and deeply personal.
Primary identities typically involve significant economic, social, or political stakes - homeownership for city patriots, equity for company patriots, holdings for crypto enthusiasts.
The identity stack explains seemingly puzzling reactions, like why criticism of San Francisco angers residents while they remain indifferent to criticism of their employers.
Twitter bios reveal these identity hierarchies in action, with people listing their most important identifications first and foremost.
eftanarcho-primitivistsļ¬ndterrifying. It works in reverse as well. Some anarcho-primitivists advocate a back-to-the-land
kind of traditional masculinity that some transhumanists ļ¬nd constraining. And some
anarcho-primitivists want a Unabomber-like end to industrial civilization which would
(among other things!) destroy the supply chains needed for the life extension sought
by transhumanists. 166 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
4.2.3 The Identity Stack
An issue that confused me for a while is why criticism of San Francisco seemed to anger
some people irrationally. Couldnāt they also see that prices and feces were both up and
to the right at the same time? Eventually what I realized is that everyone is patriotic
aboutsomething , and those people were patriotic about their city, while others were
patriotic about their countries, companies, or even their cryptocurrencies. To elaborate on this point, for someone who identiļ¬es themselves as a San Franciscan,
criticism of the city is taken personally, because that isnāt a swappable piece of their
life. Their company? Thatās just a job, itās replaceable, what they really care about is
the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio, the 49ers - a sort of romantic identiļ¬cation with
the city itself, and many of the people that live there. Others aļ¬liate with their national identity ļ¬rst, above their city identity - theyāll move
between military bases at the drop of a hat, which are interchangeable, but they are
willing to kill and die for the ļ¬ag with which they identify. Or they might be ābasedā
out of Seattle for a time, signifying that their location is immaterial, while signaling
their deep love for democracy online, an identity that is non-negotiable. Still others are patriotic about their companies, those things theyāve founded and
funded, breathed life into, those entities that took all their capital and intellect to
build, which are always far more fragile than they look from the outside, and which
some callous outsider could break for likes with a few morale-draining tweets. And yet others characterize themselves by their cryptocurrencies, thinking of them-
selves ļ¬rst and foremost as Bitcoiners or Ethereans. These folks are often digital
nomads, indiļ¬erent as to whether they see the sunset in San Francisco or Singapore, or
what crypto exchange lives or dies, so long as they can check in with their community
of holders each day. In each case, thereās typically a large economic, social, or political stake in the thing
people are identifying with. The city patriot may be a homeowner or otherwise invested
in city governance. The country patriot may have signed a military contract. The
company patriot may be a founder or early employee with a signiļ¬cant equity stake. And the cryptocurrency patriot is often a sizeable holder of coins. Now, not all things are like this; people can be right-handed without identifying them-
selves as right handers, they can do something without being something. So top-level
identity, primary identity - thatās precious, itās rare, itās the identity that supersedes all
others. People might use seven daily apps but they have even fewer primary identities
- usually only one. Primary identities need not just be about city, country, company, or cryptocurrency. Theycanberelatedtoreligion, ethnicity, orprofessionslikeājournalistā andāprofessorā. Thereās a huge up-front sacriļ¬ce required to become a tenured professor, or to publicly
convert to a new religion, and for this reason such primary identities often make it to
the fore of someoneās Twitter bio. 4.3. TECHNOECONOMIC AXES 167
Example: Twitter Bios
Hereās a concrete example of the identity stack, with three Twitter bios:
ā¢Jim: #HereWeGo #SteelerNation ā All Things PA ā Father ā Husband ā
#Christian ā #ArmyVet
ā¢Billy: Immutable money, inļ¬nite frontier, eternal life. #Bitcoin
ā¢Bob: Army retired, anti-terrorist assistance program, husband, father, grandfa-
ther, Iraq vet, educator, but most importantly an
Primary identity from one's 'identity stack' is crucial for building great companies, currencies, and civilizations as it must supersede all other affiliations.
The internet dramatically increases variance by enabling instant extremes - from 30-second clips to 30-episode binges, gig work to crypto windfalls, creating volatility in all aspects of life.
Internet disintermediation removes middlemen, mediators, moderators, and mediocrity, connecting previously isolated nodes that can form either terrible outcomes like Twitter mobs or amazing collaborations like ETH Research.
The internet acts like a centrifuge, unbundling traditional institutions (albums into songs, newspapers into articles) then rebundling them into new flexible formats (playlists, Twitter feeds) with much higher variance than before.
AMERICAN! Again, everybody is patriotic about something. Jim loves his city; Billy is patriotic
about technology and transhumanism; Bob would ļ¬ght for the American ļ¬ag. The collection of all that deļ¬nes someone, in rank order, is their identity stack . The top
of the identity stack is the primary identity: the Pittsburgh Steelers for Jim, Bitcoin
for Billy, and America for Bob. And, as noted, primary identity is precious. Itās the identity that supersedes all others. To build anything great ā a company, a currency, a civilization ā an aļ¬liation must
beat out the rest of the identity stack to become someoneās primary identity. Thatās a
high bar to meet. 4.3 Technoeconomic Axes
4.3.1 The Internet Increases Variance
The internet increases variance. Digitization allows situations to be taken to their
logical conclusion, instantly, even when that digital logic doesnāt quite work in physical
reality. This means things can ļ¬ip from zero to one, without warning. An overnight
success, ten seconds in the making. The only certainty is rising volatility. 168 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
First, the observation: over the last 20 years, weāve gone from 30 minute sitcoms to
30 second clips and 30 episode Netļ¬ix binges. From a stable 9-5 job to a gig economy
task or a crypto windfall. From a standard life script to 30 year olds living with their
parents and 20 year old startup CEOs. This is a very general phenomenon. You see it in the dashboard of every internet
disruptor. With Uber, for example, relative to the time of a standard taxi ride, some
Uber trips are much longer and others much shorter. Why is this happening? Because the internet connects people peer-to-peer. It disinter-
mediates. In doing this it removes the middleman, the mediator, the moderator, and
the mediocrity. Of course, each of those words has a diļ¬erent connotation. People are
happy to see the middleman and mediocrity go, but they donāt necessarily want to see
the moderator and mediator disappear. Nevertheless, at least at ļ¬rst, when the internet enters an arena, once the Network
Leviathan rears its head, this is what happens. Nodes that had never met before,
could never have met before, now connect peer-to-peer. They can form something
terrible like a Twitter mob, or they can form something amazing like ETH Research. You get extreme downside and extreme upside.7
One analogy is to a centrifuge. If you take a sample of biological ļ¬uid from your body
andcentrifugeit, youāllseeabunchoflayersthatwerepreviouslymixedtogether. Then
they all get separated out. Thatās what the internet is doing to society, to institutions. Itās just centrifuging it into its constituent parts, whether that be albums separated
into songs or newspapers disaggregated into articles. Thatās the unbundling. Then comes the rebundling. The songs get grouped into
playlists, the articles grouped into Twitter feeds. This step too is proļ¬table; itās not
the same as what came before, itās a v3, itās a ļ¬exible bundle. Itās the helical theory of
history, where from one standpoint weāve come full circle (ārebundling into an album-
like playlistā) but from another axis weāve made amazing progress (āanyone can play
any individual song and create whatever playlist they wantā). With that said, that rebundling is still higher variance than the pre-internet bundles
that preceded them. There are millions more playlists than albums, millions more
Twitter feeds than newspapers. BlueAnon, QAnon, SatoshiAnon
Astheinternetincreasesvariance, weseemoreupsideandmoredownsideineverything. Technologists focus on the upside, because the gain from the wins (like search engines,
smartphones, social networks, and artiļ¬cial intelligence) should compound while the
losses should be one-oļ¬s. That is, once you ļ¬nd a winning formula, or a rebundling, you
7Another example is Bitcoin. Itās the Unix of money. You can send millions with a keystroke or
rmyour entire fortune. Thatās more upside and more downside, by making people
The internet increases variance by enabling both exceptional upward deviations (like Satoshi Nakamoto) and downward ones, but establishments only see the negative outliers while missing the brilliance.
Social media functions as 'American glasnost' by increasing social volatility through viral fame or cancellation, while cryptocurrency serves as 'American perestroika' by creating extreme financial volatility.
The parallel to Soviet reforms suggests that like Gorbachev, Obama may have been America's reformer who unleashed technological forces (2008-2016) without fully understanding the destabilizing consequences.
Most pre-internet institutions will not survive because they weren't designed to handle the massive digital pressure and peak levels of social and financial stress that internet-driven variance creates.
power users, and
taking away the system administrator. 4.3. TECHNOECONOMIC AXES 169
can cheaply scale it across the rest of the network relatively quickly. So, this probably
should lead to more netupside over time, just like every past technological revolution
has. I think weāre already way in the black with the internet (almost every piece of
information ever in billions of peopleās hands for free at any time, for starters), but it
depends on your metric. Conversely, the establishment can only see the downside outcomes. That is, the
BlueAnons can only see the QAnons who are worse than median, not the Satoshi-
Anons who are far better than median. Itās a bit like Paul Grahamās concept of the
Blub programmer. Just like the Blub programmer can look down to see incompe-
tence, but canāt look up to see brilliance, the establishmentarian canāt comprehend the
upwards deviations of the internet. They think itās just weird. JustlikeHollywoodoncecomparedNetļ¬ixtotheAlbanianArmy, theUSestablishment
doesnāt yet understand how much better Satoshi Nakamoto or Vitalik Buterin is than
every apparatchik they have in the Federal Reserve system. And they donāt understand
that upward deviation is creating a more competent group of global leaders than the
American establishment, a more meritocratically selected group than the nepotists of
the East Coast. Just as it allowed Satoshi to rise. Social Media is American Glasnost, Cryptocurrency is American Pere-
stroika
There are two particular ways that the internet increases variance worth noting: social
media and digital currency. ā¢Social media increases social volatility . You can go viral or get canceled, experi-
encing large overnight gains8or losses in status. ā¢Digital currency increases ļ¬nancial volatility . You can go to the moon or āget
rekt,ā experiencing large overnight gains or losses in ļ¬nancial status. Thereās a parallel in history for this: glasnost and perestroika. Mikhail Gorbachev, the
last Soviet leader, thought he could reform Soviet society by allowing more free speech
(via glasnost) and free markets (via perestroika). He didnāt quite understand what he
was in for. The resultant instability helped bring down the Soviet Union. Similarly, social media is like American glasnost and cryptocurrency is American per-
estroika. Just as Gorbachev unleashed free speech and free market reforms because he
believed communism could be reformed, the US establishment actually bought their
own narrative in the 1990s and 2000s about their ostensibly free and democratic soci-
ety. Only now are they realizing that the many speech and thought controls that their
predecessors had set up and hidden in plain sight - like stringent regulations and high
8Financialstatus(money)ismoremeasurablethansocialstatus,becauseyourbankaccountbalance
is objectively measurable. But social status has become fairly measurable too, via likes, retweets,
followers, replies, and backlinks. 170 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
capital requirements for broadcast content production - was actually the key to their
continued power. Now that itās clear that the Internet is to the USA what the USA was to the USSR, that
itās truly free speech and free markets, they are trying to tamp down the American
Spring theyāve unleashed, but it may be too late. Obama was in a sense arguably
Americaās Gorbachev, as he allowed technology to grow mostly unimpeded from 2008-
2016, to billions of users, without fully realizing what would ensue. The 100-Year Information Tsunami
Few institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet. Why? Because the internet increases variance, it causes huge surges of digital pressure
on older institutions that just werenāt built for it. They canāt handle the peak levels
of social and ļ¬nancial stress that the internet can unleash. Theyāre like seaside towns
that werenāt built for a thousand year ļ¬ood. Michael Solanaās post JUMPis quite good
on this topic. Indeed, this is a good analogy, b
š Information waves propagate through dynamic social networks rather than physical space, creating new forms of digital communication patterns.
š Digital transformation follows a three-phase pattern: physical version ā intermediate digitized form ā natively digital version (like cash ā PayPal ā cryptocurrency).
š° Traditional newspapers represent incomplete digitization - still printable content that hasn't fundamentally innovated beyond putting offline experiences online.
š Natively digital news will evolve into personalized dashboards focused on actionable metrics rather than random stories, and cryptographically verified event feeds replacing unreliable social media content.
āļø The future of news will be built on blockchain-based event feeds where billions of writers and sensors contribute directly to an immutable ledger of record.
ecause one of the ways to think about the internet is as
a carrier of massive information waves . Most normal waves propagate in physical space
āā the standard partial diļ¬erential equations (PDEs) are 1-, 2-, or 3-dimensional (e.g. longitudinal waves like a slinky, transverse like electromagnetic waves, or earthquake-
stylesphericalwaves). But theseinformationwaves propagateonhighlydynamicsocial
networks where the topology9of connection & disconnection changes quite a bit. 4.3.2 Naturally Physical to Natively Digital
The digital is primary and the physical is now secondary. Three Phase Transition
The digital transition happens in three phases: thereās the physical version, the inter-
mediate form, and then the internet-native version. If youāre into electrical engineering,
you can think of this as analog, to analog/digital, to natively digital. ā¢One example is the transition from a piece of paper, to a scanner which scans
that ļ¬le into a digital version, to a natively digital text ļ¬le which begins life on
the computer and is only printed out when it needs to be. ā¢Another example is the transition from face-to-face meetings, to Zoom video
(which is a scanner of faces), to natively digital VR meetings. ā¢Yet another example: physical cash, to something like PayPal or ļ¬ntech (which is
just a scan of the pre-existing banking system), to the truly native digital version
of money: cryptocurrency. 9You might still be able to visualize it if you embed the underlying graph into a manifold of some
kind and then think of the wave as propagating on that. 4.3. TECHNOECONOMIC AXES 171
Once you see this pattern you can see it everywhere, and you can look for those spaces
where weāre still stuck at the v2, at the scanned version, where weāve taken the oļ¬ine
experience and put it online, but not fundamentally innovated. Truly Digital News: Dashboards, On-Chain Event Feeds
Newspapers are actually only partially digitized. In 1996, the primary version of The
New York Times was the physical paper and the mirror was the website. Then, grad-
ually, more and more weight got shifted to the digital version. Now it can fairly be
said that the physical paper is just a printout of the website, a snapshot at a particular
time. And there are online-only features like interactive graphics that are impossible
to replicate in the physical paper. Most importantly, the comments section is really
social media, particularly Twitter, where all the reporters are located. But this is still really just a newspaper, put online. Most of it canbe printed out. Whatās the next step in this evolution? What does natively digital news look like? There are at least two concepts of interest here: morning dashboards replacing the
morning newspaper, and cryptographically veriļ¬able event feeds replacing tweets of
unveriļ¬able content. Dashboards > newspapers. If you are in tech, the ļ¬rst thing you look at each day
may be a personal or company dashboard, like your ļ¬tbit or your sales. This is good. The ļ¬rst thing you look at each day shouldnāt be random stories someone else picked. Should be carefully selected metrics you want to improve. This is a good vector of
attack to deļ¬nitionally disrupt newspapers. If we think about it from Clayton Christensenās ājobs to be doneā perspective, news-
papers have this incredible pride-of-place ā ļ¬rst thing you look at in the morning! ā
but typically do not add enough value to deserve that position. On-chain event feeds > Twitter > newspapers. Onekeyobservationisthatjustasmany
sports articles are digest of box scores, and many ļ¬nancial articles are summaries of the
dayās stock action, so too are many political and tech articles merely wrappers around
tweets. Because news breaks on Twitter. So, eventually, the next kind of newspaper will look
something like a cryptographically veriļ¬ed version of Twitter. The ļ¬rst draft of history
will be the raw on-chain event feed, written directly to the ledger of record by billions
of writers and sensors aroun
š° Future newspapers will become on-chain event feeds with digitally signed crypto oracles replacing traditional corporate media structures.
š COVID-19 permanently flipped society from physical-first to digital-first, with the internet finally capable of supporting entire sectors that previously resisted digitization.
š» Most value creation is already digital, with information workers spending majority of time on screens and physical products deriving value from digital blueprints.
šØļø Physical transactions are becoming analogous to 'printing' or 'materializing' digital commands, where button clicks trigger complex real-world delivery processes.
d the world. In other words, truly digital newspapers will be on-chain event feeds. Digitally signed
crypto oracles, not corporations. Remote Work to Remote Life
My friend Daniel Gross remarked that 2020 will be seen by future historians as the
year when the internet age truly began. 172 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
The lasting impact of COVID-19 is that it ļ¬ipped the world from physical to digital
ļ¬rst. Because the internet in 2000 or 2010 couldnāt bear the load of the entire physical
world. But by 2020, it kind of could. Now itās not just about remote work, but remote
life. During the pandemic, every sector that had previously been socially resistant to the
internet (healthcare, education, law, ļ¬nance, government itself) capitulated. Those
aspects of society that had been very gradually changing with technology shifted
overnight. For example, the convention of politeness shifted: now it was rude to ask
for an in-person business meeting, as youād do it remote if at all possible. With vaccination, many of these things have ļ¬ipped back, but they wonāt come back
all the way. Digitization was permanently accelerated. It used to be that the physical world was primary, and the internet was the mirror. Now that has ļ¬ipped. The digital world is primary and the physical world is just the
mirror. Weāre still physical beings, of course. But important events happen on the
internet ļ¬rst and then materialize in the physical world later, if ever. From Printing to Materializing
All value eventually becomes digital, because we are generalizing the concept of āprint-
ingā from inking a piece of paper to actually materializing digital things in the physical
world. This is counterintuitive, and youāll have objections. But letās get there in a few
steps. 1.Much value creation is already digital. If youāre reading this, youāre probably
an information worker. You may not have thought about it this way, but the
majorityofyourwakinghoursareprobablyspentinfrontofonescreenoranother
ā a laptop for work, a phone on the go, a tablet for reading, and so on. So,
most of your life is alreadyspent in the Matrix, in a sense, even before the
advent of widespread AR/VR. Short of a pullback to an Amish or Andaman
Islander existence, most of your life is and will be digitally inļ¬uenced in some
form. Moreover, much of the value in the physical world comes from blueprints
created on a computer in some form; eg, the iPhones manufactured in Shenzhen
gain much of their value from the designers in California. So, a good fraction of
valuecreation is largely digital. 2.More value creation is becoming digital. Read Packy McCormickās article on
āThe Great Online Game,ā and think about every information worker essentially
pressing buttons to earn cryptocurrency in a giant globalized internet economy. Thatās what 2030 or 2035 is on track to look like. 3.Much spending is already digital. Think about what fraction of your spending
already goes to digital goods like books, music, software-as-a-service, and the
like. Now think about what fraction of the remainder goes through a digital
interface of some kind, whether through an ecommerce website like Amazon or a 4.3. TECHNOECONOMIC AXES 173
point-of-sale terminal via Apple Pay. So, itās already fairly uncommon for people
in industrialized societies to do a fully oļ¬ine purely physical transaction, which
might be conceptualized as āhand a ļ¬ve dollar bill over at a farmerās market for
several tomatos.ā
4.Many actions can be analogized to printing. Now take this one step further and
thinkabouttheremainingoļ¬inecomponentsasāprintingā somethingout, though
youcanusethewordāmaterializingā ifitsuits. YouhitabuttononAmazonanda
complicated multijurisdictional delivery process ensues, resulting in a box landing
at your front door. You hit a button on Uber and a car arrives. You hit a button
on Doordash and food arrives. You hit a button to rent an Airbnb, and then
another to open the smart lock, and the door to housing opens.
š¤ True productivity gains require eliminating humans from the loop entirely through zero-delay robotic task completion, not just digitizing documents.
š Infrastructure development speed varies dramatically by country - China builds train stations 3000x faster than the US upgrades existing ones.
š The internet has natural borders created by language barriers and software incompatibilities, forming distinct continental-scale digital territories.
š± AR glasses represent the next convergence device that will bridge physical and digital worlds, combining existing technologies from major tech companies.
entially, representing a complex project on disk in something like Google Docs
may not be the productivity win we think it is. Humans still need to comprehend
all those electronic documents to build the thing in real life. So the problem may be in the analog/digital interface. Do we need to actuate
as fast as we compute? That would mean zero-delay robotic task completion
will be the true productivity unlock. And that we havenāt gone full digital yet. So long as humans are still in the loop, we wonāt get the full beneļ¬ts of digital
productivity. 10100-1000X is not an exaggeration. A Caltrain station improvement lasted from November 2017
to fall 2020, which is about 3 years. Three years vs nine hours is (3 * 365 * 24)/9 = 2920, which
means the US needs almost 3000X as long to upgrade a train station as China does to build one from
scratch. 4.3. TECHNOECONOMIC AXES 175
I donāt know the answer, but I think the line-by-line proļ¬ling approach used on the
tunnels is a good but slow way to ļ¬nd out exactly what went wrong, while the approach
of looking at other countries and time periods ā namely, studying history ā could
actually be the fast way of ļ¬guring out what might be right. 4.3.4 Linguistic Borders of the Internet
If the organic borders of the physical world are rivers and mountain ranges, the organic
borders of the internet are software incompatibilities and language barriers. The ļ¬rst of these is obvious: Facebookās ecosystem is distinct from Googleās is distinct
from Ethereumās, because the backends donāt fully overlap, because theyāre incompat-
ible at the software level. The second is a bit less obvious. You can imagine the internet being cut up into
continental-scale pieces, with the English-language internet being the largest with bil-
lions of people, the Chinese-language internet being the second largest with 1.3 billion,
and so on for the Spanish-language, Japanese-language, Korean-language, Russian-
language internets. One huge diļ¬erence between the English internet and Chinese internet is that the
former is global and arguably decentralized while the latter is heavily concentrated in
China with the CCP maintaining root control over most key nodes. Another important consequence is that the English internet is about to admit a billion
new users in the form of all the Indians who are newly coming online. And because the
Indian internet becomes a much bigger part of the English-language discourse, it will
be diļ¬cult for the US establishment to censor the English-language internet as much
as they want to, because hosting can be based in the sovereign country of India. 4.3.5 Network Defects
A network defect is when increasing the size beyond a certain point decreases the value
ofthenetwork. Metcalfeāslawdoesnātincludethisdynamicasutilityisprojectedtojust
increase to inļ¬nity as network size grows, but there are a few diļ¬erent mathematical
models that predict this outcome, such as congestion-based models or this post by
Vitalik. Repulsion within a network is a key dynamic that can lead to network defect. The idea
is that two or more subgroups within a network have such conļ¬ict that it reduces the
global value of the network for both, until one of them defects to another network. So
itās a network ādefectā in both senses of the term: a failure and a political defection. 176 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
4.4 Foreseeable Futures
4.4.1 AR Glasses Bridge Physical and Digital Worlds
Augmented reality (AR) glasses may be the most foreseeable invention of all time. In the 90s and 2000s, people talked about the convergence device . Gates imagined it
would be a smart television, but it turned out to be the iPhone. Whatās the next
convergence device? I think itās AR glasses. Take the following technologies:
ā¢Snapchatās Spectacles
ā¢Facebookās Oculus Quest
ā¢Google Glass Enterprise
ā¢Appleās AR Kit
ā¢Augmented reality apps like Pokemon Go
If you put all those together, you get a vision of augmented reality glasses that give
AR glasses will blend digital and physical worlds by providing instant access to AI metadata, virtual teleportation, and computer-guided instructions for any task.
These devices could become as ubiquitous as phones since people already spend over 50% of their waking hours looking at screens, making the transition natural.
Cryptocurrency enables experimental macroeconomics by allowing anyone to issue currencies and test monetary policies with real participants and billions in potential value.
Two-sided marketplace experiences reveal that both naive libertarianism and progressivism fail because people respond to incentives, but platform operators have immense power to shape those incentives.
you instant-on access to the digital world in your ļ¬eld of view, and perhaps darken
with another touch to give you virtualreality. Anyone can teleport into or out of your
ļ¬eld of vision with your consent, you can āright clickā on any object to get AI-informed
metadata on it, and you can get computer-guided instructions to execute almost any
physical procedure from repairing a machine to sewing. We know that millions of people manage to wear glasses all day, and theyāre lighter
than headsets and easy to take on and oļ¬. So these may become as ubiquitous as
phones. It will be an engineering marvel to get there, of course, and while Apple is a
strong contender Facebook may be the most likely company to be able to ship them
given its progress with Oculus and founder-led innovation. Why will AR glasses be so big? If you think about how much of your life is spent
looking at a screen, whether itās a laptop or a phone or a watch, >50% of your waking
hours is already spent in the matrix. AR glasses would reduce āscreenā time in one
sense, freeing you up to compute on the go without looking at a screen per se, but
increase digital time in another sense, as people would constantly have these HUDs
active to see the world. This means even more of our daily experience will blend not just the physical world
dominatedbynaturallaw, butthedigitalworldrunbyhuman-writtencode. Theoļ¬ine
world still exists, physics and biology still exist, but algorithms and databases run even
more of human existence. The Network surrounds us to an even greater extent than
the State did. If combined with some kind of gesture interface (gloves, rings, or perhaps just sophis-
ticated motion tracking), you might be able to use your hands to do anything in the
digital realm. So, with AR glasses, the digital and physical realms fully blend, and
people would actually be able to see and interact with an open metaverse in real life. 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 177
4.4.2 Experimental Macroeconomics
Cryptoeconomics is transforming macroeconomics into an experimental subject. Why? Because you can actually issue a currency, set a monetary policy, get opt-in
participants, and test your theories in practice. The proof is in the pudding. And, if
successful, the pudding is worth many billions of dollars. This refutes the premise that economics and business are wholly disjoint. They arenāt
disjoint at all. Microeconomics is the theory of individuals and ļ¬rms, which is directly
related to running a business. Each price you set, each company you start, is a kind of
microeconomic experiment (albeit usually a poorly-controlled one). Macroeconomics, by contrast, until recently was oļ¬-limits to experiment. A ļ¬rst step
forward was MITās Edward Castronova early work on virtual economies like World of
Warcraft. Now anyone can create a cryptocurrency, set monetary policy, and see what
happens. Perhaps the closest thing to experimental macroeconomics prior to cryptocurrency was
the experience of setting up & scaling massive two-sided marketplaces like Airbnb,
eBay, Google Ads, etc. You quickly learn that ideology is a poor guide. Naive libertarianism and progressivism
both fail. Why? Basically, people want to make money on those platforms. They
absolutely do respond to incentives, unlike the naive progressive model that itāll all
be altruistic behavior. But the marketplace operator has immense power to shape
incentivesforgoodorill. SothenaivelibertarianbeliefinafullydecentralizedHayekian
order does not always come about. 4.5 American Anarchy, Chinese Control, Interna-
tional Intermediate
Here we give a bit more detail on a sci-ļ¬ scenario11in which the US descends into a
chaotic Second American Civil War, the CCP responds with the opposite extreme of
a total surveillance state that traps wealth in its digital yuan network, and the rest of
the world - if weāre lucky - builds a stable alternative of opt-in startup societies that
peacefully rejects these extr
The future economy will become fully digital where all value starts on computers, generates cryptocurrency, and can buy either digital goods or pay robots to materialize physical items.
Despite revolutionary technological advances like computers, internet, and digital tools, we're experiencing a productivity mystery where expected gains haven't materialized in the physical world.
Six theories explain the missing productivity: distraction by social media, dissipation through bureaucracy, divergence where only focused elites benefit, dilemma of wasteful spending, dumbness in Western decision-making compared to efficient countries like China, and delay until robotics fully automates human bottlenecks.
The transition to full automation is already underway with robots existing for every step from farm to table, suggesting humans may become the limiting factor until complete mechanization arrives.
You can do the
same for the door to your coworking space oļ¬ce, or the door to your electric car. So, more and more of the goods people prize in the physical world are in a sense
āprintedā out. 5.Many printing actions can be fully automated. Today, thereās a human in the loop
forthingslikefooddelivery. Butasroboticsimproves, thiscouldintheorybecome
a completely electromechanical process, just like printing. Every individual step
from the farm to table could be automated. As this visual shows, there are
already robots for each step: robots in the fertilizer factories, for harvesting, and
for last-mile delivery. As an exercise, itād be useful to a full stack example where
someone āprintsā out an apple and itās fully robotically grown and delivered, even
if in practice youād have stockpiles of apples rather than (slowly!) growing them
on demand. So, if you put all that together, all value is digital. Everything starts on the computer,
generates cryptocurrency, and can be used either to buy digital goods or to pay robots
to materialize things in the physical world. Humans will still exist, of course, but the economy will become the cryptoeconomy. All value goes digital. 4.3.3 The Productivity Mystery
What is the productivity mystery? Well, we really should be in the middle of a golden
age of productivity. Within living memory, computers did not exist. Photocopiers did
not exist. Even backspace did not exist. You had to type it all by hand. It wasnāt that long ago that you couldnāt search all your documents, sort them, back
them up, look things up, copy/paste things, email things, change fonts of things, or
undo things. Instead, you had to type it all on a typewriter! If youāre doing information work, relative to your ancestors who worked with papyrus,
paper, or typewriter, you are a golden god surļ¬ng on a sea of electrons. You can make
things happen in seconds that would have taken them weeks, if they could do them at
all. 174 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
We should also be far more productive in the physical world. After all, our predeces-
sors built railroads, skyscrapers, airplanes, and automobiles without computers or the
internet. And built them fast. Using just typewriters, slide rules, & safety margins. This is a corollary to the Thiel/Cowen/Hall concept of the Great Stagnation. Where
has all that extra productivity gone? It doesnāt appear manifest in the physical world,
for sure, though you can argue it is there in the internet world. There are a few possible
theses. 1.The Great Distraction. All the productivity we gained has been frittered away
on equal-and-opposite distractions like social media and games. 2.The Great Dissipation. The productivity has been dissipated on things like forms,
compliance, and process. 3.The Great Divergence. The productivity is here, itās just only harnessed by the
indistractable few. The founders of tech unicorns, for example, may have more
ability to focus online than most. 4.The Great Dilemma. The productivity has been burned in bizarre ways that
require line-by-line āproļ¬lingā of everything, like this tunnel study. 5.The Great Dumbness. The productivity is here, but weāve just made dumb deci-
sions in the West while others have harnessed it. See for example China building
a train station in nine hours vs taking 100-1000X10that long to upgrade a Cal-
train stop. Now, yes, Iām sure not every train station in China is built in nine
hours, and wouldnāt be surprised if some regions in the US (or the West more
broadly) do better than SFBA. But feels likely that a systematic study would
ļ¬nd a qualitative speed gap, 10-100X or more. 6.The Great Delay. The productivity will be here, but is delayed till the arrival of
robotics. That is, for things we can do completely on the computer, productivity
has measurably accelerated. It is 100X faster to email something than to mail
it. But a slow human still needs to act on it. So, in this hypothesis, humans are
now the limiting factor. Ess
The author presents three scenarios for America's future: progressive prosperity, dystopian tyranny, or anarchy - with anarchy being the most under-theorized possibility.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have proven capable of effective governance despite having unified control, suggesting institutional failure rather than authoritarian takeover.
America exhibits clear signs of state decay including infrastructure failures, social unrest, institutional distrust, and federal fragmentation that mirror failing state characteristics.
The predicted outcome is not fascism or communism but complete anarchic breakdown where all hierarchy and authority become illegitimate, leading to chaos rather than order.
This anarchy scenario serves as context for why alternative governance models like startup societies and network states may become necessary.
emes. To be clear, you donāt need to believe in this scenario to build startup societies and
network states. But itās a mental model for the future, which we present for the same
reason that Ray Dalio put out a (somewhat euphemistic) model of how the US order
11Whatās my level of conļ¬dence in this? About what it was in my 2013 talk on Silicon Valleyās
Ultimate Exit. I think that talk holds up reasonably well, but as per Sorosā reļ¬exivity the trends I
identiļ¬ed at the time gave rise to counter trends which were not yet observable, like the turnaround
of Microsoft by Satya Nadella, the rise of Trump, and the web3 movement as an alternative to US
and Chinese tech companies alike. 178 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
could fall to an external competitor, and Peter Turchin put out a (less euphemistic)
model of how the US could fall into internal disorder. 4.5.1 American Anarchy
Prosperity, Tyranny, or Anarchy? The progressive vision is that the West is getting more free, equal, and prosperous.12
The dystopian vision is that weāre actually in the incipient stages of tyranny, whether
that be fascist or woke respectively. Whatās under-theorized is a third possibility:
namely that, in the US at least, the inconclusive power struggle between Democrats
and Republicans means America is headed for anarchy. As the events of 2021 unfolded, it became clear that even with uniļ¬ed control of the
federal government, the Democrats were no more eļ¬ective than the Republicans had
been with comparable power four years earlier. Neither faction proved capable of
implementing the total top-down domination that some in their party advocated and
many in the other party feared. Meanwhile, the non-partisan state-capacity of the US as a whole continued to visibly
decay. Squint past the pandemicās half-ignored, TSA-like COVID regulations and you
saw a half-ignored, TSA-like COVID regulator ā namely, a failing state that people did
half-ignore, and arguably had to half-ignore, because the USA itself was now the TSA,
and the TSA, they knew, was safety theater. Today, in the territory governed by this inept bureaucracy, we now see power outages,
supply-chain shortages, rampant ļ¬ooding, and uncontrolled ļ¬res. We see riots, arsons,
shootings, stabbings, robberies, andmurders. Weseedigitalmobsthatbecomephysical
mobs. We see a complete loss of trust in institutions from the state to the media. We
see anti-capitalism and anti-rationalism. We see states breaking away from the US
federal government, at home and abroad. And we see the End of Power, the Revolt of
the Public, the defeat of the military, the inļ¬ation of the dollar, and - looming ahead
- an American anarchy. Whatās coming isnāt fascism or communism, like the left-wing and right-wing pundits
would have us believe, even though they donāt believe it themselves. Whatās coming is
the exact opposite of that, a world where the civilized concepts of freedom and equity
are extrapolated to their decivilizational limit, where you aināt the boss of me and we
are all equal, where all hierarchy is illegitimate and with it all authority, where no one
is in charge and everything is in chaos. 12On a long enough timescale, this is arguably true. See the many graphs from Hans Rosling and
Steven Pinker to this eļ¬ect. Still, civilizational collapse doesoccur, and as everyone from Elon Musk
to Matt Ridley will tell you, things like Mooreās law donāt happen by accident - people need to drive
those innovations to keep us moving forward in time. As an antidote for anti-empirical doomerism,
Iām all in favor of Rosling and Pinker, and indeed recommend their work. But we need to also avoid
anti-empirical nonchalance. Thielās determinate optimism is better than the belief that someone else
will take care of it. 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 179
We can argue this may be preferable to the status quo, in the same way some think
the chaotic Russia of the 1990s was on balance better than the
Economic stagnation and inflation are driving widespread unhappiness as people face declining living standards after years of artificial prosperity from monetary policy.
Rising inequality and social media exposure fuel destructive envy, creating negative-sum competition where people seek to pull others down rather than build themselves up.
Recent military failures in pandemic response and Afghanistan reveal a significant gap between US military rhetoric and actual capabilities, undermining credibility.
US states are increasingly pulling away from federal authority in a multi-decade trend toward decentralization, though this political fragmentation receives little national media attention.
of printing money. But now that we face potentially years of
inļ¬ation and stagnation, unhappiness will increase. Already youāre seeing articles
coming trying to acclimatize people to lower standards of living, to āeat bugs and
live in a pod.ā And Turchinās cliodynamical graphs put numbers to these feelings. 4.Envy is increasing. This is normally phrased in terms of āinequalityā, and that is
indeed one way to look at it, but letās rotate it by a few degrees and talk about
envy. The return of great fortunes, the rise of social media, and the decline in
religion has led to escalating envy. Every day, people can see others online who
appear to be better oļ¬ than they are, and who appear to be rising while they are
falling. Whether that rise is real or not, whether it is due to the other personās
own eļ¬orts or not ā it doesnāt really matter to the person who feels they arenāt
getting ahead, who feels they are falling behind. Without a rising tide that lifts all boats, the ārationalā act for some is to sink the
other boats, to pull escaping crabs down into the bucket. Why? Because misery
loves company, and because stopping someone from getting too far ahead means
theycanātoutcompeteyouforhousesormates. Theonlywayoutofthisnegative-
sum trap is to build provably positive-sum systems and high-trust societies. But
thatās exactly what the US establishment is not doing.13Itās fomenting hatred
on social media every day, and giving new reasons not to trust it ā whether that
be the insistent assurance that inļ¬ation is transitory or all the other episodes of
oļ¬cial misinformation. 5.Foreign military defeat looms. Leaving aside your feelings about the pandemic,
13Itās also not what the Maximalists or the CCP oļ¬er. The Maximalist interprets Bitcoinās trust-
minimization to mean that no one should be trusted, rather than thinking of Bitcoin as a way to choose
whom to trust, as a tool to rebuild a high-trust society. And the CCP, like the US establishment,
doesnāt really give a convincing message to the world at large on why it should be trusted, instead
pushing a top-down message of loyalty through coercion. 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 181
the military propaganda beforehand is worth reviewing. In 2018, the US De-
partment of Defense put out press releases on its preparation for a pandemic, on
its sophisticated vaccines...and then nothing happened. This was the ļ¬rst time
many in the public had the opportunity to directly compare statements about
āsecret military programsā to the actual results, just as you might compare pro-
jections by corporate executives to the actual results. And the size of that gap
was remarkable. It indicated that at least some of the US military was just words,
and not real. I remarked on this in early 2021, months before the defeat in Afghanistan gave
yet another example of the gap between US military rhetoric and reality, where
Kabul wasnāt going to fall in a few days and then it did. As of this writing, weāre four months into the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022. After an initial surge of attention, global interest in the conļ¬ict has dropped oļ¬
a cliļ¬. The New York Times and other establishment media outlets have now
instructed the US administration to pursue peace, and various reports indicate
that the Ukrainians are quickly plowing through ammunition stockpiles while the
Russians are gaining ground with long-range artillery. To be clear, itās not at all
obvious what will happen - thereās fog of war with everything - but in the event
of an outright Russian victory, deļ¬ned as gaining territory they didnāt have prior
to the war, that wouldnāt augur well for the US establishment. 6.US states are pulling away from the feds. Thereās enormous coverage of US poli-
tics at the national level, because it attracts clicks from all over. But local politics
doesnāt get the same attention. However, if youāve been paying attention, there
hasbeen a multi-decadal trend wherein states have been pulling
States are increasingly diverging from federal authority on key issues like guns, immigration, and abortion, representing a reversal of FDR-era centralization.
Both old left and right ideologies supported hierarchy and sacrifice, while new political movements on both sides fundamentally reject all forms of authority as illegitimate.
National divorce and secession have entered mainstream political discourse, with Texas Republicans officially including secession in their platform.
Bitcoin Maximalism emerges as a radical ideology that completely rejects state power through opposition to inflation-based government funding, potentially challenging woke ideology from an unexpected libertarian angle.
away from the
federal government and each other on matters like guns, immigration, abortion,
gambling, marijuana, and other matters. This is part of the Future is Our Past
thesis: itās reversing the de facto 10th Amendment repeal by FDRās government,
and more broadly is part of the gradual Western decentralization since the peak
centralization of 1950. 7.Authority has lost respect. The old American left said something like āwe all need
to work for the common goodā while the old right said something like āpay your
dues and youāll achieve the American dream.ā The new left says āwe are all equalā
and the new right says āyou aināt the boss of me.ā So, the old left/right combina-
tion supported self-sacriļ¬ce and a stable hierarchy14, while the new one attacks
all hierarchy as fundamentally illegitimate, as oppressive or tyrannical. This is
reļ¬ected in the defacement and degradation of virtually every US institution over
the last few decades, from the oļ¬ce of the presidency to the statues of American
founders. George Washington and the US Capitol are no longer sacred. 14It had many other ļ¬aws, like the suppression of individualism, political centralization, restriction
of technological innovation, and mass seizure of assets. Weāre not romanticizing it. But that mid-
century ideology, which was itself the result of enormous conļ¬ict, was a recipe for a more stable order
than what we have now. 182 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
8.National divorce is discussed. Secession is now oļ¬cially part of the platform
for Texasā Republicans. And there have been an increasing number of pieces on
the topic of ānational divorceā from Democrats and Republicans alike, including
NYMag (āNo, We Canāt Get a National Divorceā), Stephen Marche ( The Next
Civil War ), Barbara Walter ( How Civil Wars Start ), Michael Malice (āThe Case
for American Secessionā), David Reaboi (āNational Divorce Is Expensive, But Itās
Worth Every Pennyā), and the American Mind (āThe Separationā). 9.Radicalized movements reject the status quo. There have been countless words
written on wokeness, on how itās a radical ideology that thinks of the US as in-
trinsically corrupt ā as systemically x-ist for many values of x ā and therefore
doesnāt really seek to reform America so much as to capture the state to com-
pletely transform it. See Wesley Yang, Richard Hanania, Matthew Yglesias, John
McWhorter, Bari Weiss, and many others for discussion of diļ¬erent aspects of
this. The thing about wokeness is that itās not just a superļ¬cial weed growing out
of the topsoil. It has a root system, a theory of history and ethics thatās built
on thousands of papers, on generations of academic humanists, on Foucault and
Derrida and the like, on deconstruction and critical race theory and so on. I
happen to think of it as a mostly evil doctrine, as sophisticated evil promoted in
the name of good, but I recognize it has ideological content. The Republican party isnāt really capable of dealing with that. But Bitcoin
Maximalism is. If you havenāt heard of it, you will. Bitcoin Maximalism is by
far the most important ideology in the world that many people havenāt heard of
- yet. Thereās philosophical depth to Maximalism. It represents a root-and-branch re-
jection of the inļ¬ation that powers the US government and thus pays for every-
thing. It fuses the worldview of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and Ron Paul with
Bitcoin. It naturally aligns with the loss of trust in institutions, with the suspi-
cious individual who (understandably!) no longer trusts the federal government
or US institutions on anything. Itās not merely an edit to the state, itās the end of
the state. And itās a push from an ideological direction the Wokes are ill-prepared
for, because itās an aracial ultra-libertarianism rather than the white nationalism
that folks like Marche and Walter thinkwill be their foe. If you want to understand Bitcoin Maximalism, read The Bitcoin Standard or
the tweets from accounts at hive.one/bitc
Bitcoin Maximalists believe Bitcoin is the only legitimate cryptocurrency and all other digital assets are fraudulent, creating a powerful ideological movement similar to religious monotheism.
The author argues that Bitcoin serves as a 'Schelling Point' for Americans who no longer believe in traditional religion, offering them a choice between allegiance to one state or one coin.
A potential trigger for civil conflict could be a sequence of ruinous inflation, soaring Bitcoin prices, and government attempts to seize Bitcoin from citizens.
The author proposes an alternative 'polystatist, polynumist, polytheist' model with many network states, many coins, and many beliefs as alternatives to centralized systems.
oin (not all are Maximalists). But be
aware: just like wokes who reject ācivilityā on ideological grounds, maximalists
have developed verbal justiļ¬cations for being ātoxic.ā
I disagree with the fundamental moral premise of Maximalism, which is that
Bitcoin is the only coin and all other digital assets are sins.15I donāt believe in
15Just as the Communist pathologized proļ¬t, and the Christian fundamentalist pathologized in-
terest, the Maximalist pathologizes issuance. Itās certainly possible to abuse these ļ¬nancial tools, to 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 183
one coin anymore than I believe in one state or one god. But I understand the
power that such a belief system has. Americans donāt believe in one god anymore,
donāt believe in monotheism. So their choice is between one state and one coin,
between ideological monostatism and mononumism. That is, to beat something like the US establishment in a civil conļ¬ict, you donāt
just need bravery, you need a more powerful Schelling Point. Thatās what Bitcoin
is for the Maximalists: the one coin thatās the alternative to the one state. If and
when the dollar collapses due to inļ¬ation, the orange coin becomes the new blue
jeans, the global symbol of freedom and prosperity. (And whatās the alternative to thatalternative? Many network states as al-
ternative to one nation state, many coins as alternatives to the one coin, many
beliefs as the alternative to one belief system. Thatās the polystatist, polynumist,
polytheist model we describe later on in the Recentralized Center .) 10.Bitcoin seizure could be the trigger event. All of this is a combustible mix, and
there are many possible trigger events, but one that I see as particularly likely is
a combination of (a) ruinous inļ¬ation followed by (b) a soaring BTC/USD price
and then (c) the attempt by an insolvent federal government to seize Bitcoin from
citizens. On the Bitcoin side, this isnāt a short-term price prediction or anything, and there
are of course various possible failure modes16for BTC that could prevent Bitcoin
from being the speciļ¬c cryptocurrency that drives this scenario. Nevertheless,
because the Bitcoin protocol has mostly been technologically ļ¬xed for a while,
its partisans have focused to a much greater extent on political innovation ā like
getting it recognized as a sovereign currency. Add in the moral importance that
Maximalists attach to Bitcoin, and its global name recognition, and BTC is likely
to be the coin of contention. On the other side, the general concept of asset seizure isnāt really even very sci-ļ¬
given the overnight freezing of funds for Canadian truckers and 145M Russian
nationals. The main diļ¬erence is that cryptocurrency is built to be hard to freeze. exploit workers for proļ¬t, to charge usurious interest rates, or to issue fraudulent ļ¬nancial instruments. But the answer is a system of competitive regulators: not (a) zero regulation, nor (b) the monopoly
regulation of the corrupt SEC, nor (c) the decentralized āregulationā of calling everyone a scammer all
the time just as wokes call everyone x-ists, but rather (d) a system of multiple reviewers that provide
checks and balances on market participants, and who are themselves checked and balanced by market
exit. 16A partial list of failure modes: (a) there could be a bug in the code, (b) centralized quantum
decryption could come online faster than expected and without decentralized quantum-safe encryption
tomatch,(c)minerscouldgetpressuredtocensortransactionsasMarathonwas,(d)ESGattackscould
be used against mining, (e) non-pseudonymous developers could be personally targeted, (f) enough
BTC might be left on centralized exchanges to freeze it, (g) a Great Firewall-like approach could
be used to interfere with Bitcoin at the port/packet level, potentially interfering with the protocolās
implicit assumption of a global, connected, relatively low-latency internet, and so on. I still think
Bitcoin can succeed, but my conļ¬
The author predicts America is heading toward a Second Civil War between two main factions: 'Wokes' aligned with federal government/Democrats/dollar versus 'Maximalists' aligned with state governments/Republicans/Bitcoin.
Traditional political coalitions will fracture as people of all races may switch to Bitcoin Orange due to inflation crushing savings, while institutional loyalists may flip to Dollar Green regardless of previous party affiliation.
Tech companies will play a crucial role in the conflict, with older woke firms like Google supporting the establishment side while newer founder-controlled companies in places like Miami and Texas lean toward the decentralized side.
Three key factors building toward conflict include extreme political polarization making America a 'binational country,' dramatically reduced state capacity compared to mid-century America, and declining economic prosperity despite recent relative wealth.
authoritarian Soviet
Union of the 1980s. We can argue it may be inevitable; as the Chinese proverb goes,
āthe empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.ā And we can argue
that this transitional period of anarchy may be lamentable, but that itās better than
the other team being in charge, and that we can build a better order on the other side. Maybe so, and thatās what this book is about. But prior to any rebundling, I think
weāre on track for quite the unbundling. Maximalist vs Woke
With that poetic introduction over, letās get down to speciļ¬cs. Rather than seeing
an indeļ¬nite continuation of the postwar order, or the long Second Cold War between
the US and China that many are preparing for, the US may be on track to descend
into an American Anarchy, a chaotic Second American Civil War between the US
Establishment and its people. We foresee two main factions. The ļ¬rst will align around the US federal govern-
ment, NYT/establishmentmedia, wokeness, thedollar, andtheDemocratparty; theyāll
say theyāre ļ¬ghting for ādemocracyā against āinsurrectionists.ā The second will align
around state governments, decentralized media, maximalism, Bitcoin, and the Repub-
lican party; theyāll say theyāre ļ¬ghting for āfreedomā against ļ¬at ātyranny.ā We canāt
predict their names, but rather than Democrat Blue and Republican Red, letās call
them Wokes and Maximalists, or (more neutrally) Dollar Green and Bitcoin Orange. Crucially, in this scenario, many non-whites will switch sides from Democrat Blue to
Bitcoin Orange, because whether black, white, Latino, or Asian, everyoneās savings
will be crushed by inļ¬ation. Many tech founders and independent writers will also go
Orange; tools like Square Cash will facilitate mass exodus to Bitcoin, and newsletter
writers will put out narratives that contest establishment media. Conversely, many institutional loyalists will ļ¬ip from Republican Red to Dollar Green,
including the police, military, and neoconservatives, simply because they are in the
ļ¬nal analysis the kind of team players and ānatural conservativesā who would have
fought for both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. My country, right or wrong. The role of centralized tech companies will be key. By default theyāll swing to the
Dollar Green side, but many tech founders will lean Bitcoin Orange, so we could see
centralized tech companies supporting both sides ā with older and fully wokiļ¬ed ļ¬rms
like Google ļ¬rmly on the Green side, and newer founder-controlled ļ¬rms located in
places like Miami and Texas trending Orange. How America Builds Towards Conļ¬ict
How could something as radical as a Second American Civil War happen? You could
write a book on this, and several people have, but in lieu of that weāll give a bullet
pointed list. Before reviewing it, you might want to re-read Ray Dalio, Peter Turchin, 180 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
and Strauss & Howe if you want more context, as we wonāt be able to recapitulate
every citation that informs this projection. Done? OK, here we go. 1.Political polarization is way up. All the graphs show this now. The US is not
really a ānation stateā any more, but a binational country comprised of two war-
ring ethnic groups that disagree on fundamental moral premises. It is about āgod,
gays, and gunsā, but itās also also about censorship, surveillance, and inļ¬ation. 2.State capacity is way down. ThecompetentAmericaofmid-century, theleft/right
fusion that FDR put together, the America that combined a powerful centralized
state with social conservatism, the America depicted in countless movies, the
America that won World War Two and the Cold War ā that country is over. This US government canāt build a bathroom in San Francisco, let alone a cost-
eļ¬ective ļ¬ghter jet, destroyer, combat ship, or aircraft carrier. 3.Economic prosperity is declining. All the political inļ¬ghting of the last decade
happened during a period of relative prosperity, even if it was based on the
artiļ¬cial expedient
A potential US government attempt to seize Bitcoin could trigger a Second American Civil War, similar to FDR's gold seizure but during a period of declining state capacity.
States might refuse to enforce federal Bitcoin seizure laws, potentially justified by Constitutional amendments protecting cryptocurrency rights alongside free speech and gun rights.
Any future American civil war would be fundamentally different from the first - focused on controlling minds through digital networks rather than conquering physical territory.
The modern political divide shows ideology and geography only weakly coinciding, making traditional territorial warfare impractical since both sides are geographically intermixed.
Digital space has become the new battlefield where deplatforming, cancellation, and forced symbolic compliance represent attempts to control minds and digital territory.
dence in cryptocurrency is bolstered by the fact that other coins
exist with diļ¬erent failure modes. 184 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
A bankrupt state can and will try to seize funds held at centralized exchanges,
but for those that have taken their funds oļ¬ exchanges, the state will need to go
house-to-house, and rubber hoses donāt scale. A US establishment attempt to seize Bitcoin in a time of high inļ¬ation would be
like a repeat of FDRās gold seizure (Executive Order 6102), except itād be done
during a time of declining state capacity rather than rising centralization. The reason something like this could be the trigger event is that neither side could
easily back down: Wokes would have no power if their state went bankrupt, and
Maximalists would have no money if they surrendered to the state. Thus, this seems like a relatively foreseeable event that could kick oļ¬ the Sec-
ond American Civil War ā especially if the seizure bill is passed by the federal
government and some states refuse to enforce it. How could that happen? A state-level refusal to enforce might just be part of the
growing divergence between states from the federal government and each other,
similar to the justiļ¬cation for sanctuary cities and the like. But if you wanted
a statutory rationale, you could imagine a Constitutional Amendment proposed
to ban Bitcoin seizure, something that would put the right to hold BTC on par
with the right to free speech and the right to bear arms. Such an amendment
could be ratiļ¬ed by many states in the run up to a possible seizure bill. Even if
it didnāt pass nationally, any ratifying states would then cite their ratiļ¬cation to
justify their refusal to enforce. A War for Minds, Not Lands
Itās a mistake to think a Second American Civil War would look anything like the ļ¬rst
Civil War, or like World War 2 for that matter. Itād be nothing like the movies with
huge movements of uniformed soldiers, tanks, and planes. Instead itāll just be a continuation and escalation of what weāve seen over the last
several years: a network-to-network war to control minds, rather than state-to-state
war to control territory. A fusion of Americaās domestic conļ¬icts on social networks
and its foreign conļ¬icts in the Middle East. The best way to visualize this is to look at the physical map of Union-vs-Confederate
right before the Civil War, the physical map of Republican-vs-Democrat by county,
and then the digital map of Republican-vs-Democrat in the same period. Intheļ¬rstCivilWar, ideologyandgeographystronglycoincided. Thevictorycondition
for the North was obvious: invade the South. Conquer the territory to conquer the
minds. They didnāt have to kill every last Confederate, they just had to show that
resistance was futile to get the remaining Confederates to stop ļ¬ghting. In any second Civil War, ideology and geography would only weakly coincide. Look
again at that map by county. Is one side really going to invade the other? Or vice 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 185
versa? Is the US establishment going to seize corn ļ¬elds or will its opponents move to
capture big blocks of cities? Is either side going to use huge bombs on territories where
theyād kill at least 30% of their own team? Could nuclear weapons be targeted enough
to use as political tools to get the other side to concede? No. Instead itāll be a war for minds, not lands. And if we look at the map of digital
space, suddenly much becomes clear. Here, the two sides are fully separated, as the
Union and Confederacy were. And now we can see why thereās been such an emphasis
on cancellation, deplatforming, silencing, and shunning...on making people say certain
words and hoist certain symbols. Because making a person or a company post a
particularhashtagindicates control of minds whichisinturn control of digital territory . All the discussion over the last few years around āfree speechā doesnāt really engage the
fundamental issue, which is th
The current era represents an information war where victory comes through invading minds rather than territory, with control over digital networks being the primary battlefield.
Big tech companies have become de facto privatized governments of the Western world, making control of these networks essential for maintaining power over populations.
Decentralized networks like Bitcoin and Web3 represent forms of resistance that cannot be easily controlled by traditional power structures or individual actors.
The future conflict will shift from Red-vs-Blue politics to Bitcoin-Orange-vs-Dollar-Green, where Bitcoin Maximalists become the revolutionary class challenging the established Dollar Green ruling class.
at this is a time of information war, where the victory
condition for one side is to invade the minds of the other side ā because it cannot
feasibly invade the territory. To invade the minds of the other side, and to control the digital networks ā because
the tech companies that greenlight transactions, communications, and online behavior
have in many ways become the de facto privatized governments of the Western world. The power to determine what people can and cannot do in the digital world belongs to
the people who run these networks. And so controlling these networks, by controlling
the minds of people who run them, is the key to maintaining control over the US in a
digital time. Thatās why thereās been such a push by the US establishment to wokify
the big tech companies. However, a network that canāt be controlled in this way, and that isnāt run by any one
person ā like Bitcoin ā well, thatās a form of resistance. The set of web3 networks that
are more decentralized17than centralized Silicon Valley tech companies, that are run
by communities ā those too are a form of resistance. As such, if the ļ¬rst Civil War was the āWar Between the Statesā, the second Civil War
will be the āWar Between the Networks.ā The graphs weāve shown relate to Red-vs-
Blue, but add a tint of yellow to each group and rotate it a bit. Then youāll get what
we think is the likely future axis of conļ¬ict, which is Bitcoin-Orange-vs-Dollar-Green. In areas where Greens control the state, they may use militarized police, tech company
surveillance, deplatforming, denunciation in media, arrests, seizures, and the like. In
those areas, Orange may respond with an insurgency campaign that looks like Northern
Ireland or the Middle East. But in areas where Oranges control the state, and Greens
17Another issue where Web3 Technologists disagree with Bitcoin Maximalists is on the question of
decentralization. Maximalists contend that Bitcoin is decentralized and all other networks are not,
that decentralization is a binary property. Because they are mononumists, they sometimes refer to this
in monotheistic terms as an āimmaculate conceptionā, using a term from Christian theology. The short
counterargument is that obviously Bitcoin wasnāt decentralized on day zero, when Satoshi Nakamoto
was the only user, so it must have become moredecentralized over time ā and so how exactly did that
happen, and what are the metrics for decentralization? A full counterargument, along with proposed
metrics for intermediate levels of decentralization, is in this piece on Quantifying Decentralization . 186 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
are in the minority, these tactics could reverse. Think about the BLM riots, or Jan 6,
or the doxxing of Supreme Court Justices by angry establishmentarians, or the various
street ļ¬ghts between right and left, or the constant digital struggle that plays out online
every day, and project out a future where those kind of network warfare tactics become
daily occurrences. Like the portmanteau ālawfareā, think of this as ānetwar.ā
Maximalist vs Woke Rotates Left and Right
The reason the terms āleftā and ārightā donāt exactly ļ¬t for the projected conļ¬ict of
OrangevsGreenisthatinmanyrespectstheBitcoinOrangewouldbethe revolutionary
classfaction and the Dollar Greens would be the ruling class faction.18
Basically, those who side with the US establishment in this scenario would be the
same personality type as those who sided with the ancien regime during the French
Revolution: theyād be ļ¬ghting to preserve the past. Their message would be one of
particularism, of American nationalism, of continued dollar supremacy. By contrast, those who side with Bitcoin Maximalism would be a revolutionary per-
sonality ļ¬ghting to overturn what they saw as tyranny. Their message would be one
of universalism, of a system that puts everyone worldwide on the same playing ļ¬eld ā
and that doesnāt privilege America over the rest of the globe like the dollar does. This w
The US establishment finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being the technologically conservative faction for the first time, opposing disruptive technologies like social media and the internet.
Bitcoin Maximalists represent a radical departure from both Trump's nostalgic past and the establishment's attempt to freeze the present, embracing an uncertain future and willing to destroy the fiat system entirely.
Maximalists could win a war of attrition against the US establishment because every rise in BTC/USD represents a victory, and the government cannot easily seize Bitcoin globally due to its decentralized nature.
An estimated 300 million cryptocurrency holders worldwide create a new form of international support network for Maximalists, as foreign Bitcoin holders indirectly support the movement simply by not selling their holdings.
ill be an extremely uncomfortable position for the US establishment, because
for the ļ¬rst time19in memory theyāll represent the technologically conservative faction,
the less universalist side, the pre-modern side. But you can already see the foreshadowing in terms of how legacy media inveighs
against technology, how they hate the future, how they want to jam social media and
the internet back into the garage, how they want to turn back the clock on all those
things that have disrupted their political control. Maximalism is thus a kind of leapfrogging. If Trump invoked a mythical past, and the
US establishment represents an attempt to freeze the present in amber, the Bitcoin
Maximalists are willing to drive the system towards an uncertain future. Thatās why
a fair number of conservative Republicans will side with Green, and why revolutionary
Democrats will side with Orange. Bitcoin Maximalism is a movement that knows it
canāt āMake America Great Againā, because that America no longer exists and perhaps
never did, so itās willing to take the entire ļ¬at system down. Orange is thus comfortable with a higher level of chaos than a suddenly conservative
US establishment. It is ok with the uncertainty of crypto-anarchy over the certainty of
inļ¬ationary tyranny. And it is not looking to mend the federal government, but to end
it. Unlike the reformist Republican, Maximalism is playing to win. And so it might. 18SeeLeft is the new Right is the new Left . 19There weretimes during the 20th century when American progressives thought the USSR was
more modern; as Lincoln Steļ¬ens said, āI have seen the future, and it works!ā But by the end, the
Soviets felt gray and stiļ¬, not revolutionary. 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 187
Who Wins? Itās extremely diļ¬cult to forecast what happens, but I do think that in the long run
the Maximalists may win at least someterritory in a Second American Civil War,
because theyāll eventually outlast the money printing of the US establishment. The
value proposition in the American regions that go Maximalist will be āfreedomā, though
others will perceive it as anarchy. Why could Maximalists win a war of attrition? Every day the price of BTC/USD goes
up is another victory in the Maximalist social war against the US establishment; every
day it goes down is a temporary defeat.20Because the US government canāt invade
the rest of the world, and because other states wonāt necessarily listen to it, it canāt
easily seize Bitcoin globally. So long as the long-term price trend is up, which is not
guaranteed, then Maximalists win. That does lead to a related point: with an estimated 300M cryptocurrency holders
worldwide at the time of writing, hundreds of millions of people who arenāt Maximal-
ists already believe in Bitcoin. And itās on track to be billions by 2030. So long as
those holders donāt sell their Bitcoin, thatās a fundamentally new international support
network of a kind that MAGA Republicans donāt have. That is, a man in Brazil doesnāt
necessarily care about American Republicans vs Democrats ā heās not an American
nationalist, and doesnāt have a dog in that ļ¬ght ā but he may well hold Bitcoin. And
so long as he doesnāt sell BTC for dollars, heās indirectly supporting Maximalists. Yet
his foreign support comes in an intangible and ideological form that feels acceptable to
the proud American Bitcoin Maximalist, as opposed to (say) the explicit support of a
foreign military getting involved on US soil. With that said, the US establishment could also win a war of attrition. Their starting
advantages are immense: the universities, the media, the military, the intelligence
agencies, most of the tech companies, and the federal government itself. The US
establishment also has an elite global support base: all the people who sympathize
with it around the world: the McKinsey types, the Ivy grads, the frequent ļ¬yer class,
and the people who still think America is the country from the mov
Bitcoin Maximalists may paradoxically support anti-crypto regulations to boost Bitcoin's price, viewing other digital assets as harmful competition rather than supporting the broader crypto ecosystem.
A potential US territorial split could see the Northeast and West Coast maintaining establishment control branded as 'democracy' while other regions pursue different paths, forcing people toward ideological extremes.
Political violence and civil conflict lack the romantic, targeted nature people fantasize about - instead resembling random, destructive chaos that affects everyone indiscriminately like 'Godzilla trudging through town.'
The geopolitical scenario presents two dystopian futures: American Anarchy in the West and Chinese Control in the East, with the US potentially attempting a coup in China that would likely fail but trigger total authoritarian control.
ies.21Even if
the establishment canāt force foreign governments to seize BTC, they may try seizing
Bitcoin for their own reasons, though other states will instead vector towards the
direction of economic freedom. 20This is why Maximalists may actually push laws against holding other coins in their jurisdiction. You might think that such advocacy would be an ideologically inconsistent fusion of anti-Fed and
pro-SEC, but there is a logic to the illogic. Maximalists are in favor of anything that makes ānumber-
go-upā, what they think of as bringing the price of Bitcoin up in the short run. Many have convinced
themselves that investment into the web3 cryptoeconomy actually harmsthe price of Bitcoin rather
than supporting it. Again, just like a Communist pathologizes proļ¬t, or a Christian fundamentalist
pathologizes interest, a Maximalist pathologizes the issuance or purchase of any digital asset other
than Bitcoin. 21Thereās a perhaps apocryphal concept called āParis Syndromeā for the shock experienced by those
whoād only known the movie version of Paris, and then were faced with the dreary reality of what it
actually is. 188 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
Moreover, even if the US establishment does lose someterritory, it will likely hang
on to the Northeast and the West Coast. The value proposition in those regions that
stick with the establishment will be ādemocracyā, though others will perceive it as ļ¬at
ātyrannyā. During all this, the pressure of conļ¬ict could force people to the ideological extremes. TheclosestmoviearchetypesfortheGreenandOrangesidescouldbeamoreoppressive
versionofPortlandiaandamorefunctionalversionofMadMax. Cartoonishcaricatures
come to life. Wars Arenāt Romantic
If itās not abundantly clear, I take no sides here, and am not rooting for anarchy. Iād
prefer a stable world where we could focus on mathematics and getting to Mars than
the chaos that may soon ensue. And I have no illusions about how bad civil conļ¬ict can
get; there are no unscathed winners in wars. Read David Hines for a good depiction of
what political violence is actually like. Political violence is like war, like violence in general: people have a fan-
tasy about how it works. This is the fantasy of how violence works: you
SMITE YOUR ENEMIES IN A GRAND AND GLORIOUS CLEANSING
BECAUSE OF COURSE YOUāRE BETTER. Grand and glorious smiting isnāt actually how violence works. Iāve worked
a few places that have had serious political violence. And Iām not sure how
to really describe it so people get it. This is a stupid comparison, but here:
imagine that one day Godzilla walks through your town. The next day, he
does it again. And he keeps doing it. Some days he steps on more people
than others. Thatās it. Thatās all he does: trudging through your town,
back and forth. Your townās not your town now; itās The Godzilla Trudging Zone. Point: civil conļ¬ict is not romantic, itās not targeted, itās not proportional. Itās insane. If you think the scenario of American Anarchy is a possibility, you probably want to
get as far away from it as you can, regardless of your āsympathiesā with either side. And then you should help build a peaceful alternative to American Anarchy. But not
the alternative that China will oļ¬er, which weāll cover next. 4.5.2 Chinese Control
Attempted Coup Leads to Total Control
While in the West we may see American Anarchy, in the East we could see Chinese
Control. Before the US enters serious internal conļ¬ict, it could support some kind of China Coup 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 189
ā whether with words or with more than that ā as written about by Roger Garside in
the eponymous book China Coup , as hinted at by parties as diļ¬erent as George Soros
and Americaās JSOC, and as previously accomplished in many acknowledged regime
changes and unacknowledged Color Revolutions around the world. For reasons weāll get into, I donāt think such a coup is likely to be successful. But
the reaction to
The CCP is predicted to implement an AI-powered surveillance crackdown that treats all citizens as potential threats and severely restricts their ability to leave the country with assets.
Chinese passport issuance has already dropped 95% since the pandemic, with outbound travel similarly restricted, while other countries increasingly deny entry to Chinese nationals due to espionage concerns.
The combination of digital yuan financial control, WeChat social monitoring, and physical movement restrictions will trap Chinese liberals and dissidents who want to escape the system.
The CCP is systematically shutting down opposition across all ideological spectrums - from Maoist to democratic to religious to technologist - positioning itself as the sole acceptable authority.
any coup attempt by the CCP could be the most intense crackdown
on domestic opposition weāve ever seen. It would be an AI-powered ripping up of
Chinese society by the roots that puts every citizen under suspicion and makes it very
diļ¬cult for Chinese nationals to leave with their property, to ārunxueā. It may also be
accompanied by deniable (or overt) Chinese retaliation against the US for attempting a
coup, retaliation which could take the form of targeted shortages of key physical goods
to exacerbate American inļ¬ation and supply chain woes. If and when the coup is quashed, the CCP will then export their coup-defeating surveil-
lance state to other countries. And their value proposition to the world will be Chinese
Control ā the complete opposite of American Anarchy. China Blocks the Exits
A speciļ¬c prediction is that weāll see a world where it becomes increasingly diļ¬cult for
Chinese people to leave the country or get their property out of the digital yuan ecosys-
tem without CCP permission. Take the existing hukousystem of internal passports,
the WeChat system of red/yellow/green travel restrictions based on health status, the
aggressive COVID lockdowns, and the recent passport restrictions ā then fuse them
with a surveillance state that can track people globally, a WeChat superapp that can
unperson them, and a digital yuan that can freeze their assets. Therearetrendsthatpointinthedirectionofdigitalandphysicalmovementrestriction
already. Chinesepassportissuancehasalreadydeclineddramatically, downā95percent
in the ļ¬rst quarter compared to before the pandemic.ā Outbound travel is similarly
down 95%, with 8.5 million people leaving China in 2021 relative to 154 million in
2019. China has also been using COVID quarantine codes to stop people from moving
money or moving around. And Chinese capital controls, always strict, may get even
more intense with the rollout of the digital yuan. So that makes exit hard. Conversely, on the entrance side, while it will still be possible for approved Chinese
citizens to travel to places like Iran or Russia that are eļ¬ectively military allies, the
countries where the Chinese state lacks a hard power presence will start turning down
Chinese nationals due to espionage concerns. This has already been happening. This combination of outbound restrictions imposed by theirgovernment and inbound
restrictions from othergovernments will make life hard for the Chinese liberals and
internationalists who disagree with the system, the ārunxueā types. They wonāt be
able to politically dissent, but itāll also be hard for them to leave the country with their
property, as many will want to do. Such an act will be prevented or portrayed as a
traitorous run-on-the-bank, particularly if the economy isnāt doing well. Think about 190 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
how enthusiastic Putin has been about the ārenationalization of the elitesā, and how
closely the CCP has been watching Western tactics during the Russo-Ukraine War. They recognize that any commercial linkage with the West is a point of vulnerability
during a conļ¬ict. So itās quite likely that CCP will increasingly make it diļ¬cult for
people to exit physically or digitally. The Path to Chinese Control
What are the factors that lead us to this prediction, that CCP will emphasize the
āloyaltyā part of Hirschmanās triad and turn strongly against both voice andexit? 1.Shutting down opposition across the spectrum. This plot from MERICs is worth
looking at, as it reminds us that the CCP is not solely against US-style ādemoc-
ratizationā, but also against many diļ¬erent kinds of ideologies that diļ¬er from
the party-stateās current line. Whether that opposition is Maoist (like Bo Xilai),
democratic (like Hong Kong and Taiwan), Islamic (like the Uighurs), Christian
(like the churches), technologist (like Jack Ma and other founders), or even ultra-
nationalist, the CCP stands at the middle of an ideological circle and constantly
monitors everyone for de
China has built a comprehensive surveillance system combining ultra-nationalism, AI technology, and digital control through platforms like WeChat.
The government piloted population control during COVID using health codes and has restricted citizens' ability to leave the country physically and digitally.
China exports its surveillance technology globally through smart city infrastructure, positioning it as anti-Western imperialism defense.
A potential coup attempt could trigger full deployment of the surveillance system against the population, with significant nationalist popular support making democratic reversal unlikely.
viation. 2.Inculcating Chinese nationalism. Just as the US has gone through a Great Awo-
kening since the 2013, Chinese society has been driven by Xuexi Qiangguo into a
phase of ultra-nationalism. There is opposition to this internally, but it remains
to be seen whether it actually ļ¬ipsthe nationalism or simply moderates it. 3.Building a surveillance state. Much has been written on this, but the sheer scale
of what has been built isnāt well understood. While itās worth being aware of
Gell-Mann amnesia, this is actually an area where US establishment media is
closer to reality than it is domestically, in part because relative to the Chinese
state itās actually opposition media. See videos like this from DW and this. 4.Hooking it into AI. Read Kai-Fu Leeās AI Superpowers and then read this, this,
andthis. SupplementitwithDanWangāsletters, orthis2019postfromaChinese
intellectual published at Reading the Chinese Dream that is still able to question
the deployment of all the surveillance. 5.Piloting the system during COVID. The green/yellow/red health codes rolled out
on WeChat during the early days of COVID are used for travel restrictions - and
have been repurposed to simply prevent people from traveling in a deniable way. 6.Cutting oļ¬ digital and physical exit. Misbehavior in China can get you removed
from WeChat, which is like unpersoning you given how many services itās hooked
into, public and private. More recently, China has repeatedly made it diļ¬cult
to leave the country on the grounds that doing so would spread COVID: āTrips
in or out of the country made by mainland citizens in 2021 plunged nearly 80%
compared with the level in 2019, NIA data showed.ā
7.Selling to other governments. Both China and the US have sold surveillance 4.5. AMERICAN ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 191
technology to the globe, but one diļ¬erence is that China can execute better in
the physical world - so smart cities built with Chinese technology have full-stack
surveillance. 8.Justifying as anti-imperialism. The educational system and the big-screen movies
likeBattle of Lake Changjin andWolf Warrior 2 position China as defending
itself from Western imperialism. And this ļ¬lters down to the small scale, like
this video of an oļ¬cial defending Shanghaiās lockdown with the narrative that
China will eventually have a war with the US, so citizens need to get in line for
the lockdown. 9.Pointing to relative stability. The āHarmonious Societyā narrative begun under
Hu Jintao has been mentioned less in an international context by Xi Jinping,
who has not exactly been pursuing harmony abroad. But itās still a useful tool
to justify social control ā like NYT talks about censorship and social controls to
preserve ādemocracyā, CCP talks about censorship to maintain āharmony.ā
10.China Coup could be the trigger event. The US establishment has put out videos
and articles that come close to calling for a coup in China. George Soros broadly
hints at it in speeches like this. And folks like Roger Garside literally wrote a
book on it. An attempted coup, whether actually American-backed or simply accused of being
such, could be the trigger event for rolling out a fearsome system of Chinese Control. AI would be turned on the population, and any even mildly Western-sympathic groups
would be pattern-recognized and dug out by their roots. Nationalist mobs might par-
ticipate, online or even in person. It could get very ugly. The last part is important: Chinese Control would have signiļ¬cant popular support. The country is heavily nationalist now. It is possible the swing towards nationalism
partially reverses ā there are signiļ¬cant factions in China who do not like the current
trend ā but I think itās too much to think that China is going to āgo democratic.ā
Americaās internal chaos means it is simply not an admirable model for much of the
world anymore, and while some educated Chinese liberals may indeed want to runxue,
there is momentum towards national
šØš³ Chinese Control scenario may attract people seeking stability over freedom, potentially drawing Chinese diaspora back while repelling some elites.
š International Intermediate represents countries and groups wanting to avoid both American Anarchy and Chinese Control, seeking a third path.
š®š³š®š± India and Israel are positioned as key leaders of this third pole due to their tech entrepreneurship, global flexibility, and strategic alignment.
š» A subset called the 'Recentralized Center' could use web3 technology to build alternatives, unlike the unaligned Third World movement of the Cold War.
ANARCHY, CHINESE CONTROL, INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIATE 193
by the establishment press. This could make a good number of Chinese ancestry people
leave rather than be singled out in the event of a hot conļ¬ict. So, thatās what could happen to China: signiļ¬cant inļ¬ows of Chinese ancestry people,
along with some outļ¬ows (or blocked outļ¬ows) of elites. And the Chinese Control scenario weāve described, while dystopian to the ambitious
and freedom-seeking, will likely be acceptable to many people who prize stability over
all else and see scenes of ļ¬ames and gunļ¬re (whether representative or not) coming
from American Anarchy. It wonāt be trivial to beat the average standard of living that
Chinese Control may be capable of delivering. It will appeal to many. And that brings
us to the International Intermediate. 4.5.3 International Intermediate
Whatās the International Intermediate? Theyāre just the people who donāt want their societies to descend into American An-
archy, but also want a better option than Chinese Control. Thatās India and Israel,
but also American centrists, Chinese liberals, global technologists, and people from
other places that want to steer a diļ¬erent course from the US establishment, from
crypto-anarchy, andfrom Chinese Control. Why mention India and Israel so prominently? Call it a hunch, but those two groups
are #1 and #2 in immigrant tech founders in the US. India is, separately, also #3 in
tech unicorns after the US and China. At the state level India and Israel are now highly
aligned, and at the individual level Indians and Israelis tend to be globally ļ¬exible and
English-speaking. So, insofar as there is a third technological pole outside the US and China, it will prob-
ably have signiļ¬cant Indo-Israeli character, with servers positioned in their respective
territories, and deals inked across borders. Of course, it will also have contributions from all around the world. Itās probably
easier to say who the International Intermediate is notthan who it is. Itās not the US
establishment, or places heavily aligned with it. And itās not China or heavily China-
aligned regions like Russia and Iran. But it could include places like the Visegrad
countries (anti-Russia but also skeptical of much in America), or South Korea (which
elected a pro-Bitcoin head of state), or even Vietnam (now pulling away from China
to side more with India). Because itās āeveryone elseā, by default this International Intermediate is just raw ma-
terial ā the 80% of the world that is not American or Chinese is just a formless mass
without internal structure. Indeed, thatās what happened to the āThird Worldā during
last centuryās Cold War. The Non-Aligned countries werenāt just not aligned with the
US or USSR, they werenāt aligned with each other. This time, however, rather than being the Third World / non-aligned movement, a 194 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
subset of the many billions of people in the International Intermediate can align around
web3 to try to build alternatives to American Anarchy and Chinese Control. And that
subset we call the Recentralized Center . 4.6 Victory Conditions and Surprise Endings
Many video games have the concept of good and bad endings, like Shattered Union
and Starcraft. Weāll take that approach with the sci-ļ¬ scenario we outlined, describing
someVictory Conditions for diļ¬erent factions as well as Surprise Endings that give an
unexpected twist. Again, this is a way to think through an uncertain future with some
scenario analysis, not a hard and fast set of predictions. 4.6.1 The Victory Conditions
The āBase Rate Fallacyā Fallacy
This is a scenario where the US establishment wins, and averts American Anarchy. In 2020, Tyler Cowen wrote about how ābase-ratersā and āgrowthersā diļ¬er regarding
the coronavirus. Growthers looked at the growth rate of the virus, which at the time
was exponential. Base-raters start by asking how often something has happened before;
they assume things will more or less
Chinese ultra-nationalism among youth appears to be a deeper ideological current that transcends Xi Jinping or the CCP and may outlast current leadership.
China would likely export its surveillance state technology to other countries as a turnkey solution for preventing unrest and maintaining political control.
Despite negative Western coverage, China has achieved remarkable economic and technological success since 1978, rising to become the world's #2 economy, military, and tech hub.
The US establishment has squandered its post-1991 global dominance and employs many of the same authoritarian tactics as China, but with less competence and effectiveness.
China's growing credibility from actual execution attracts some people while simultaneously driving others away, similar to how a successful company like Microsoft both attracts and repels talent.
China faces declining soft power in regions where it lacks hard power, with increasing suspicion toward Chinese nationals that often goes unrecognized as potential racism.
ism among much of Chinaās youth. I may be
wrong about this, but putting it all on one person or even one party doesnāt feel right. The ideological current towards Chinese ultra-nationalism feels stronger than Xi the
person, or even the CCP, and may outlast him in the event of a black swan. Anyway, with the coup defeated, CCP would then sell a turnkey version of their coup-
defeating surveillance state to other countries as a way to (a) stop any possible con-
tagion of American anarchy, (b) control crime, (c) prevent increasingly mobile citizens
from leaving with their funds to other countries, and (d) prevent unrest of any kind, le-
gitimate or not. It would ensure that any leader currently in charge remains in charge,
and would be picked by many governments for exactly that reason. 192 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
China Caveat
Thereās an important caveat to all this. Much Western coverage of China is unremit-
tingly negative. And certainly the scenario described herein is not a particularly rosy
one. But we need to temper that negativity with a dose of realism. First, why are we even discussing China? Why arenāt we discussing Chad or Chile? Because China has on balance executed phenomenally well since 1978. After Deng
Xiaopingās reforms, the country really has risen to the workshop of the world, with an
enormous trade surplus, a surfeit of hard currency, and dozens of huge new cities. Itās
the #2 economy, the #2 military, and the #2 in tech unicorns. All of that happened
from a standing start over the last 40-odd years, since Dengās turnaround of China
(called Boluan Fanzheng). Conversely, over the last 30 or so years, the US establishment has squandered perhaps
the greatest lead in human history, going from complete and uncontested dominance in
1991 to internal conļ¬ict and potentially implosion. Moreover, as noted in What about
China, huh? , itās not that the US establishment is more ethicalthan the CCP when
it comes to civil liberties, itās just less competent. After all, the US establishment
also does warrantless surveillance via the NSA, unconstitutional search and seizure via
the TSA, arbitrary conļ¬scation of property via civil forfeiture, censorship of political
keywords just like WeChat, and has pushed for disinformation agencies, civilian dis-
armament, digital censorship, and the like. The US establishment copied the CCP
on lockdown, without ever really admitting it was doing so, and funded the lab that
may have leaked the coronavirus. Itās also bombed and destabilized many countries
around the world. And if weāre honest, over the last two decades, the US has killed
and displaced far more people abroad than the CCP has. That might be hard to hear for a Westerner, but what all of that means is that (a)
the CCP does have some cred with many āneutralā countries, (b) it also has cred with
huge swaths of its own population thanks in part to both nationalist propaganda and
actual execution, (c) that relative cred will grow if America descends into anarchy, (d)
the cred will make it easier for CCP to roll out more Chinese Control at home and
abroad, and (e) the cred will actually attract some Chinese ancestry people back to
China even as others want to leave. Wait ā that last point seems paradoxical. How could people want to come to Chinese
Control if weāve just spent all this time talking about so many want to leave? Think about Microsoft. Itās a strong company. Most people in the world would be glad
to get a job at Microsoft. But many of the very best would ļ¬nd it stiļ¬ing, and would
instead strike out on their own to join or found a tech company. Thereās simultaneously
a demand for some people to join Microsoft while others want to leave. In the case of China, this is compounded by Chinaās evaporating soft power in regions
where it doesnāt have hard power. The climate of suspicion towards Chinese nationals
has ramped up dramatically in recent years, and itās generally not ļ¬agged as āracismā 4.5. AMERICAN
China could achieve economic dominance through AI-driven robotics and digital currency, enabling centralized coordination of entire supply chains without human self-interest interfering.
This techno-communist model would create hyperdeflation and unprecedented living standards within China while maintaining strict authoritarian control over all economic activity.
China might weaponize this economic autarky by physically sanctioning opposing nations, similar to how America used economic warfare against Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
A 'duopoly of digital despotism' could emerge where the US and China secretly cooperate to suppress decentralized technologies like Bitcoin that threaten both their centralized power structures.
ckchain, which is what the digital yuan may be. This is doubly true if AI-driven robots are carrying out many of these functions. China
might be able to internalize huge swaths of the economy. It could mean full stack
production of everything, hyperdeļ¬ation of living costs within China, where labor be-
comes electricity. In this scenario, no oneperson can make a pencil, but Chinacan
make a pencil, because they can algorithmically coordinate the supply chain of millions
of cooperating humans in a way no one has ever been able to do before. Theyād still
need the raw materials, but their alliances with African countries, Russia, and places 196 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
like Iran might take care of that. Itās essentially the vision of Red Plenty , Soviet-style central planning made feasible
with superior computation androbotics ā so that the robots actually did what you
said theyād do, and didnāt have that pesky self-interest getting in the way like humans
did. Itād be a riļ¬ on Aaron Bastaniās fully automated luxury communism, where the
communistic parts would be the robotic parts ā as they would lack any economic
interests of their own, and move as one. In this win scenario, the Chinese Communists might have the highest standard of living
on the planet, as much higher than the US as the US was relative to the USSR, not
only because they actually make physical things, but because they could see the full
stack, have data on everything, track every transaction, and deploy AI and robotics in
the physical world. Of course, that standard of living would be achieved in an ethnonationalist society
with a bone to pick with the US in particular. And it might result in a Greater East
Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere 2.0, this time under Chinese rather than Japanese terms. Everyone would have to bend to Chinese hard power to get the beneļ¬t of their robotic
economy. In this scenario, the Chinese might even choose to copy the tactics America used in
the Russo-Ukrainian war: namely, physically sanction any group or state that opposes
them, thereby cutting them oļ¬ from the supply of goods from an increasingly physically
autarkic China. I donāt like this world, because it cuts against the convenient outcome of the late 20th
century, in which the system that produced freedom also produced prosperity. But the
experience of two-sided marketplaces shows it is a possibility. 4.6.2 The Surprise Endings
Duopoly of Digital Despotism
In this surprise ending, the U.S. establishment and the CCP work together to stop the
global Bitcoin and web3 insurgents. It would be like the US and the USSR aligning
against the Third World. Now, therewasactuallyoneexamplewherethathappened, whentheUSandtheSoviet
Union were on the same side, and that was the ļ¬rst Iraq War in 1990. The Soviet Union
actually voted with the US in the UN Security Council to condemn Iraq. That was a
huge moment, because normally they were reļ¬exively oppositional. The explicit version would be something like this, where the otherwise hostile US
establishment and CCP both decide that BTC and/or web3 are a threat to their power,
and try to denounce it at the level of the UN, a bit like their quasi-cooperation on non-
political issues. 4.6. VICTORY CONDITIONS AND SURPRISE ENDINGS 197
Thereās also an implicit version of it, where they team up without teaming up. The US
establishment on many levels admires the CCP crackdown on speech. For example, in
The Atlantic they said China took the right course on internet speech, and in the NYT
they noted that Free Speech Is Killing Us. The US establishment did copy Chinese
lockdown, without admitting it. And so you could imagine them teaming up without teaming up, where China does
something, then the US establishment copies it, maybe without acknowledging it, and
theytherebyperformanunacknowledgedpincerattackagainsttechnologiesthatoppose
them, a bit like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. We call that scenario the duopoly of digital despotism. Bitcoin E
The 'base rate fallacy fallacy' suggests that assuming change will happen may be wrong, as the Western post-war order might simply continue indefinitely in a zombified but functional state.
China could potentially achieve autarkic success by creating a digital communist system that solves traditional economic calculation problems through comprehensive data collection.
The digital yuan combined with AI could theoretically enable China to centrally plan their entire economy by tracking every transaction, vendor, and supply chain component in real-time.
Unlike the libertarian 'pencil' story that emphasizes distributed knowledge, China's approach would use centralized digital systems to coordinate all economic activity, similar to how Uber's central planning beat Sidecar's decentralized pricing.
stay the same. So, base-raters assume the post-war order remains intact; the dollar remains number
one; the USA stays number one; China will collapse like Japan; everybody always says
the West is declining, but itāll always reinvent itself; itāll be okay; youāre too concerned
or worried about this, etc. If the Base Rate Fallacy is assuming tomorrow will be like today, then the Base Rate
FallacyFallacyis assuming that the Base Rate Fallacy is always a fallacy. After all,
tomorrow often is like today! The growther always thinks that change is going to
happen, but it may not. Sowhatdoestheestablishmentwinscenariolooklike? Itāsthesamethingweāvealready
got. The post-war order just keeps on keeping on in a zombiļ¬ed fashion. Thereās no
dramatic acceleration or collapse. Instead, the West just keeps reinventing itself and
all is mostly well. If you want a faithful rendition of this worldview, this thread by Vuk Vukovic is decent. I disagree with many bits of it, including the idea that discord is our strength. And I
think in general that the thread is fairly anti-empirical; the graph of long-run interest
rate trends alone shows that something is going to run out of juice eventually. Still,
itās worth a hearing. China Can Make a Pencil
This is a scenario where the CCP wins, and Chinese Control triumphs. 4.6. VICTORY CONDITIONS AND SURPRISE ENDINGS 195
How might China become the most prosperous and stable country in the world, even
if itās unpopular in some places abroad, and even if the US attempts to ļ¬nancially or
socially sanction it? China would become an autarkic autonomous autocracy. To understand this, letās start with a famous libertarian story: āThe Pencil.ā The
idea is that no one person can make a pencil. After all, a seemingly simple pencil is
composed of wood, graphite, yellow paint, the metal that contains the eraser, and the
eraser rubber itself. But creating each of these things in-house would require running a
variety of diļ¬erent agricultural and mining operations. So instead of having one person
do all of that, the capitalist system makes a pencil in a ānetworkedā way. We use
prices as an API, so that diļ¬erent organizations can spin up, produce components in a
cost-eļ¬ective way, use their proļ¬ts to grow or maintain themselves, and adapt without
coordinating with each other. But that was then. Maybe Chinese Communism with the digital yuan is diļ¬erent. What happens if you have a computer system which really doesknow about every
vendor, that has every record of every payment, that can actually see the global supply
chain, and that knows every single person (or robot) required to make that pencil? It is
a large, but ļ¬nite problem after all. Maybe such a system can solve Hayekās calculation
problem. We already have proof points for this. If you run a two-sided marketplace, youāll ļ¬nd
contra Hayek that not allknowledge is local. For example, Sidecar lost to Uber because
drivers set prices themselves, as opposed to setting them centrally. Hayekians would
agree that Sidecarās approach was optimal: drivers have local knowledge and central
planning canāt work. But Uberās central planning didwork. They had a global view
of supply & demand. And riders wanted speed, not price shopping. So, thatās what this win scenario contemplates. If China integrates AI with the digital
yuan, and makes their entire economy computable, at their scale they might actually
be able to make a pencil. And everything else. Recall that previous abstractions like āsix degrees of separationā or āwritten historyā be-
came very real once social networks digitized decades of interaction and communication
by billions of people. So too would previous verbal abstractions like āthe economyā or
āthe supply chainā become actual computable objects when you have every transaction
and vendor in the same database. Basically, all the blockchain supply chain concept
actually couldwork, but only if all payments (and hence receipts) are on-chain ā or
in something likea blo
Bitcoin could end human wars by preventing governments from seizing money to fund conscription, equipment, and military operations.
The 20th century saw unprecedented total wars because centralized states could seize all resources and propagandize entire populations for massive conflicts.
Robot soldiers present a new threat as they cannot be propagandized like humans and don't need payment, only electrical charging for operation.
The author proposes 'volitional recentralization' as an alternative to anarchic decentralization or coercive centralization, emphasizing new leadership and moral progress.
nds Human War, but not Robot War
A key thesis of The Sovereign Individual ā and an important argument for Bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies more generally ā is that if a government cannot seize money, then it
cannot start wars. Why? If a state canāt coerce, it canāt pay to enforce conscription, or pay the conscripts
themselves, or seize the money to pay for all the equipment needed to prosecute the
expensive industrialized wars of the 20th and early 21st century. Thereās a book called Gold, Blood, and Power: Finance and War Through the Ages
that describes how ļ¬nance was a weapon of war, and that the 20th century was one of
the ļ¬rst times where huge wars have been fought without any country running out of
money. The only thing the countries ran out of were bodies, because they were giant
centralized states that could seize everything in their territory, and could propagandize
everyone in their territory, and could just drive total war. So the Nazis, Soviets, and
Americans just grabbed everything in their territory to ļ¬ght these wars, like enormous
ghosts that commanded millions of bodies in these titanic ideological combats. How did they command those bodies? If you think about The Tripolar Triangle, the
lower left corner of NYT is voice, and itās convincing people with words. The lower
right corner of BTC is choice or exit, and itās convincing people with money. You can
think of these as left and right democracy respectively. But thereās a third pole. The top pole is loyalty. Itās CCP. Today, itās AI. And itās
convincing people without convincing people at all. Because theyāre all literally one. Itās harmony. And robots ļ¬t at that pole. Why? Because unlike a human soldier, a
robot canāt be propagandized. And unlike a human soldier, a robot doesnāt need to be
paid, just charged. So: the problem is that Bitcoin could end human war, but not robot War. There would
still be the question of funding the industrial capacity to manufacture the robots in the
ļ¬rst place. But if you could get past that bootstrap problem...then thereās a scenario
where CCPās AI beats both BTC and NYT, and war keeps going. And now the only 198 CHAPTER 4. DECENTRALIZATION, RECENTRALIZATION
reliable soldiers are robot soldiers that canāt be propagandized by NYT and donāt need
to be paid in BTC. 4.7 Towards a Recentralized Center
Our base scenario doesnāt contemplate an extended Second Cold War between com-
munism and capitalism. But we do think that the choice between American Anarchy and Chinese Control can
be seen as a kind of global ideological struggle of a diļ¬erent kind, as a choice between
decentralization and centralization. Do you go with the failed centralization of NYT and the declining US establishment? The total decentralization of Bitcoin Maximalism? Or the totalitarian centralization
of the CCP? A better answer might be: none of the above. That instead of choosing either anarchic
decentralization or coercive centralization, we choose volitional recentralization . 4.7.1 In Defense of Recentralization
When you mention a recentralized center, at ļ¬rst it seems laughable. The centralists
will say āwhatās the point of decentralizing then? Just stick with our existing system!ā
And the decentralists will say ānew boss, same as the old boss, I prefer freedom!ā
Derisive references to Rube Goldberg Machines and Animal Farm will abound. But the whole point is that the new boss is notthe same as the old boss, anymore
than Apple was the same as BlackBerry, Amazon was the same as Barnes and No-
ble, or America was the same as Britain. Recentralization means new leaders, fresh
blood. Just as companies and technologies keep leapfrogging each other, so too can
new societies with One Commandments combine moral and technological innovation
to genuinely progress beyond our status quo. Recentralization is not about going full circle and making zero progress. Itās the helical
theory of history. Recentralization, done right, is a cycle back to centralization from
one vantag
Yuval Harari argues that despite distrust in old institutions, society still needs new, more diverse institutional structures to curate reliable information rather than relying on unfiltered free markets of ideas.
The Protestant Reformation example demonstrates how attempts to eliminate institutional authority repeatedly fail, as people eventually recreate new centralized interpretive bodies after experiencing chaos from unlimited individual interpretation.
The concept of 'recentralized center' proposes that competing institutional interpretations create innovation through marketplace dynamics, bringing in new perspectives while maintaining necessary organizational structure.
The text introduces a transition from discussing current institutional problems to exploring why the 400-year-old Westphalian nation-state system might be ready for transformation into network states.
e point but a step forward from another. I donāt agree with him on everything, but Yuval Harari has a good quote on this:
I mean we need institutions actually more, but there is this wave of distrust
against them. Now, it doesnāt mean we need the old institutions. It doesnāt
mean that we have to stick with the old media. Maybe we need new media
institutions, which will be more diverse, which will give more people a
chance to voice their opinions, but in the end we will need to build these
institutions. The idea that we can just do without them, that weāll have
just this free market of ideas and anybody can say anything, and we donāt
want institutions to kind of stand in the middle, and curate and decide 4.7. TOWARDS A RECENTRALIZED CENTER 199
what is reliable and what is not reliable, this doesnāt work, itās been tried
so many times in history. You know, if you look at religious history, to take a counter example, so you
have in Christianity, again and again these people coming and saying, āyou
know, we donāt want the Catholic Church, this institution, letās just every
person can read the Bible for himself and know the truth, what is more
simple than that, why do we need an institution,ā and you have the Refor-
mation, the protestant Reformation. And within twenty years or ļ¬fty years,
they realize that when you let every person read the Bible for themselves
you get 100 diļ¬erent interpretations, [each] radically diļ¬erent. So eventually someone comes and says āNo, these are the correct interpreta-
tionsā and you get the Lutheran church. And after 100 years, someone says
āwait, but the whole idea of the Reformation was to get rid of the Church
so we donāt want the Lutheran church. Let every person just read the Bible
and understand by themselves.ā And you have chaos. And after 50 years,
you have the Baptist church, and this church, and that.. you always go back
to institutions. So itās the same with the kind of information explosion that
we have right now. Note that in this example the Protestants, and then the Lutherans, and then the
Baptists had to attractpeople to their interpretations. Many other competing de-
nominations did not. This process of constantly forking and innovating and having it
compete in the marketplace brings in new blood. And thatās the concept of the recentralized center. The way to demonstrate itās a step
forward is via mass exodus of people from both American Anarchy and Chinese Control
to the recentralized center, to high-trust startup societies and network states. Chapter 5
From Nation States to Network States
5.1 Why Now? Why now? After almost 400 years of the Westphalian nation state, why do we think
the status quo could change? First, the status quo. What is the modern nation state, anyway? What is a nation, for
that matter? How was state formation enabled long ago by technological innovations
like mapmaking and print capitalism? When did the political events transpire that led
to the rise of the nation state? And what were the historical alternatives? Then, thechange. Whatarethecontemporarycatalysts, thetechnologicalandpolitical
developmentsthatpromisetoaltercenturiesofpractice? Whataretheconcepts,charts,
calculations, and citations that suggest big changes are in the oļ¬ng? And what might
a network state even look like? 5.2 On Nation States
You may think you know what a nation state is, but you probably havenāt given it
much thought. Poke on the abstraction a bit, and fun ensues. You start realizing how
diļ¬erent the nation is from the state, how tricky it is to determine who qualiļ¬es as a
ānation,ā how confusing our modern terminology around this topic is, and how many
other modes of human organization represent potential competitors to the nation state. That exploration opens the door to the network state. In the process, youāll encounter all those philosophers people vaguely recall from school. You know, Locke and Rousseau, Plato and Aristotle, the subjects of countless boring
book reports ā many
The nation state system functions like an exclusive club with eight rigid rules that govern territorial control, citizenship, and sovereignty across the globe.
Unlike traditional political theory, network states transform political science into applied technology, giving ordinary people the ability to implement political theories in practice.
The current system assumes complete territorial division with no unexplored land (terra incognita) or unclaimed territory (terra nullius), creating a static global map.
The UN serves as a Schelling Point that maintains legitimacy for the nation state system, backed by US military force and global governmental agreement on the current world order.
of them make a showing in this chapter. But their presence
here is diļ¬erent from the typical dryasdust college lecture, because the network state
makes political science an appliedscience, more like political technology. You are
listening with intent to repeat. That is, just like cryptocurrencies gave people other
200 5.2. ON NATION STATES 201
than the Fed Chair a reason to learn about everything from seignorage to demurrage,
cryptocountries give people other than the Founding Fathers the ability to put political
theory into political practice. But only if you understand that theory, so letās dive in. 5.2.1 What is a Nation State? The most obvious deļ¬nition is that a nation state is a geographic region of the world
ruled by a group of humans we call a government. Itās what we talk about when we
refer to ācountriesā like the United States of America and the Peopleās Republic of
China. Itās a ļ¬ag-labeled region on a political map of the globe. Britannica provides a more precise deļ¬nition, namely that a nation state is a āterrito-
rially bounded sovereign polityā that is āruled in the name of a community of citizens
that identify themselves as a nation.ā And that latter bit is key, because a nation state
is notjusta government that controls a territory. Itās supposed to be a government
thatrepresents a distinct people, a nation. 5.2.2 What is the Nation State System? Thereās an excellent passage from Joshua Keating in his book Invisible Countries on
the peculiarity of the nation state system. He analogizes the system to a selective club
with the following eight rules:
ā¢Rule 1: A country is a territory deļ¬ned by borders mutually agreed
upon by all countries. ā¢Rule 2: A country must have a state that controls (or at least seeks
to control) the legitimate use of force within its territory, and a pop-
ulation of citizens. ā¢Rule 3: Every spot on the earthās landmass must be occupied by a
country. ā¢Rule 4: Every person on the planet must be a citizen of at least one
country. ā¢Rule 5: On paper, all countries have the same legal standingāTuvalu
has just as much right to its countryhood as China, Somalia just as
much as Switzerlandāeven if they are politically and economically
highly unequal. ā¢Rule 6: Consent of the people within each country is preferred, but
not required. Tyranny or de facto anarchy within a country is not
grounds for loss of club membership. ā¢Rule 7: Under some circumstances, one or more countries may invade
oroccupyanothercountry,butnoteliminateitscountryhoodorredraw 202 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
its borders. ā¢Rule 8: The currently existing set of countries and the borders be-
tween them should be left in place whenever possibleāthat is, the
club prefers not to admit new members. Keating goes on to note that the rules of this club are backed by the institutions of
the UN and the military force of the US, and that the agreement of billions of people
through their governments on the current world order is what preserves ācartographic
stasis.ā
Note that even if one thinks of the UN as ineļ¬ectual, itās a Schelling Point for the
system. Nothing else has as much legitimacy, as many backlinks. Assumptions of the Nation State System
We can describe the assumptions of the nation state system in a diļ¬erent lens, one
that makes it easier to understand the diļ¬erences between this system and the network
state system we will introduce in the following pages:
ā¢Physical ļ¬rst. The physical map of the world is primary. ā¢Composition . In theory, a nation state is composed of a single nation (the people)
and an administrative entity (the state). In practice, some ānation statesā are
really multinational empires, while some nations are stateless nations. ā¢No terra incognita. The modern nation state system takes for granted that there
is noterra incognita : that the map of the physical world is fully known, such that
it can be subdivided. ā¢No terra nullius. The system also takes for granted that thereās no terra null
The modern world is completely divided with no unclaimed land, where every territory belongs to exactly one state with precisely demarcated borders.
State legitimacy primarily comes from physical control through violence rather than electoral choice or human rights, as any group controlling territory long enough eventually gets recognized.
Each state maintains a domestic monopoly on violence through police forces that can escalate force against citizens until they comply with laws.
The current nation-state system is ultimately guaranteed by the USA (Pax Americana), which can destabilize any other state through invasion, sanctions, or surveillance.
The term 'nation state' combines two distinct concepts: nation (people with shared ancestry/culture) and state (government), which are often conflated but fundamentally different.
ius ,
no unclaimed land. With few exceptions, every piece of land on the surface of
the earth is spoken for by one and only one state. Much of the ocean is likewise
split up this way, aside from international waters. ā¢Top-down division of land. The fully visible map is carved into geographical
regions called states, with borders precisely demarcated by latitudes and longi-
tudes. ā¢One state per citizen. People are typically citizens of just one state, changing
citizenship is infrequent, and most citizens are governed by the same state as
their parents. The primary method of citizenship is still jus sanguinis , by birth. ā¢Legitimacy from physical control and electoral choice. A nation stateās legitimacy
comes from a few sources. First, the state needs to be good enough at violence to
actually control the territory it claims. Second, but really secondarily, the state
is supposedly legitimized by the support of their underlying nation and their
demonstrated respect for universal human rights. (Itās unfortunately a secondary
point because any group that is in de facto control of territory for long enough 5.2. ON NATION STATES 203
eventually gets recognized.) Ideally, a legitimate state reļ¬ects the will of its
people while also respecting the rights of the individual ā giving voice to the
masses and the minority alike. ā¢Centralized administration. The administrators of the state, frequently an exec-
utive and a legislature, write laws on paper to specify what is mandatory and
forbidden. These laws are typically interpreted by a judiciary and enforced by
men with guns. And in the nation state system, every piece of land is adminis-
tered by exactly one state, regardless of who is on it. ā¢Domestic monopoly of violence. Eachstatekeepsorderwithinitsbordersthrough
apoliceforce. Citizenswhodefythelawaresubjecttoincreasinglevelsofviolence
until they comply, as per Grand Theft Auto . ā¢International sovereignty via military. In principle, states arenāt supposed to
interfere with the domestic aļ¬airs of other states. In practice, a state only main-
tains sovereignty if it is competent enough in defending against domestic and
foreign rivals alike, via its police, intelligence agencies, and military. ā¢Diplomatic recognition via bilateral and multilateral fora. States may sign bilat-
eral agreements with each other, or they may be recognized by multilateral fora
like the UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), and the G-20. Diplomatic recognition is a matter of both politics
and paperwork, and the lack of recognition can isolate a state and/or its citizens. ā¢Treaties manage cooperation and constraint. A set of cross-border compacts at-
tempt to govern interstate interaction and limit abuses, promising things like hu-
man rights and freedom of movement ā declarations that are frequently ļ¬outed. ā¢Pax Americana. Finally, while it was not always so, the guarantor of the cur-
rent nation state system is the USA, which is where the UN is headquartered,
and which purports to āprovide global leadershipā and āchampion the rules-based
international order.ā All other states must hope that this guarantor of the rules-
based order doesnāt decide to invade, surveil, sanction, strafe, or otherwise desta-
bilize them. These cover the six essential parts of the state: borders, population, central govern-
ment, international sovereignty, diplomatic recognition, and the domestic monopoly on
violence. 5.2.3 The Nation State as a Term
Understanding the term ānation stateā requires us to distinguish the nation (a group
of people with common descent, history, culture, or language) from the state (their
government). They are not the same. Even though ānationā is often conļ¬ated with āstate,ā the term ānation stateā has two
wordsforareason. Theļ¬rstword( nation)hasthesameetymologicalrootasānatality.ā 204 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
It once denoted a group of people with shared ancestry. The second word ( state) re
Nations are groups of people sharing culture and ancestry, while states are the governing entities that hold monopoly of violence over territory.
Micronations like Sealand fail because they start with territory and government rather than emerging from an aligned people and their culture.
True nation-states historically formed when nations created states to govern them, with Japan serving as a textbook example of this alignment.
Modern discourse has moved away from ethnic-based nation-state concepts toward proposition nations and multiethnic states to avoid encouraging separatism and ethnic conflict.
fers
to the entity that governs these people, that commands the police and the military, and
that holds the monopoly of violence over the geographic area that the nation inhabits. In a sense, the nation and the state are as diļ¬erent as labor and management in a
factory. The former are the masses and the latter are the elite. The textbook nation state is something like Japan, in which a single group with shared
ancestry and culture (the Japanese) occupies a clearly delineated territory (the islands
of Japan) and is ruled by a clear sovereign (the Japanese government) which is repre-
sentative of the people in some sense (originally via the divine, contemporaneously via
the Diet). 5.2.4 Micronations and Multinations
This gives us a new perspective on why micronations like Sealand donāt work: they
start backwards, from the territory and the government, rather than working forwards
from a people and their culture. The latter process is how nation states historically
emerged: a state was set up by a nation to govern it, not vice versa...though then that
self-same state often began the process of assimilating others into its founding nation,
so it was a bidirectional process. Bidirectionalitynotwithstanding, theeggofthenationprecedesthechickenofthestate. From this perspective, a better term than micronation is really microstate, because itās
not a micro- nationunless it represents a small groupof aligned people. A single person
self-proclaiming a government is just a tiny state. As the saying goes, you and what
army? Without a nation, there is no army - and no legitimacy.1
Ontheothersideofthespectrumisanempire, ormultination. TheRomanEmpire, the
Ottoman Empire, and the Soviet Empire contained many nations and ethnic groups. This vantage point allows us to rectify more vocabulary. The concept of a multi-
national corporation, for example, is something of a misnomer; the right term is a
multi-statecorporation (which operates across polities), as opposed to a multi- national
state (which manages the aļ¬airs of many diļ¬erent ethnic groups within its boundaries). 5.2.5 0-nation, 1-nation, N-nations
In between 0-nation microstates and N-nation empires are 1-nation states, governments
thataresetuptomanagetheaļ¬airsofasingleethnicgroupinadeļ¬nedterritory. How-
ever, while this kind of terminology is not exactly deprecated , itās a bit old-fashioned. Itās not how we tend to talk about nation states in the current year. 1To be clear, even if the goal is to gain the minimum necessary sovereignty gradually and peacefully
- which we strongly recommend! - the founder of a startup society will need an āarmyā in the sense
that Gandhi had an āarmy.ā That means a large group of people committed to building their network
state. Itās a collective LARP, not just one person daydreaming to themselves. 5.2. ON NATION STATES 205
First, today we often discuss multiethnic states ā multinations, like the USA ā which
are really more like the empires of yore than a classical monoethnic nation state. Sec-
ond, many contend that physical borders donāt matter in the age of the internet. Third,
modern discourse focuses to a much greater extent on proposition nations , where shared
ideas are the organizing principle rather than shared inheritance. Fourth, and most
importantly, conļ¬ict between ethnic groups within states can result in civil war, mass
deportation, totalitarian brainwashing, ethnic cleansing, forced conversion, and cul-
tural destruction, the kind of process that recently resulted in the formations of East
Timor and South Sudan. Later, weāll talk about how network states address these issues, but these are the (un-
derstandable!) reasons why the distinction between the nationand thestatehas fallen
out of favor. Scholars donāt want to inadvertently encourage separatism or irredentism
or worse, lest people think itās not a realnation state unless the political entity (the
state) represents all the members of a single ethnicity (the nation) in all the lands
a
Americans paradoxically support nationalist movements abroad (Ukraine, Tibet) while being skeptical of similar movements domestically or in allied nations like Brexit.
The traditional definition of a nation requires a large group united by common descent, history, culture, or language inhabiting a particular territory, but this definition is inherently fuzzy.
Emerging technologies like Bitcoin, web3, and remote work are enabling people to exit legacy arrangements and form new groups, making the question of what constitutes a nation critically important again.
Historical examples like Japan, Spain, Turkey, and Israel demonstrate that nations exist on a spectrum - from perfectly aligned nation-states to complex multiethnic empires to diasporic peoples who later established states.
round the world where they preponderate. Or at least, they donāt want to do so domestically. Because the average American is
a bit schizophrenic when it comes to terminology like this. He can easily understand
the desire of, say, the Ukrainian people to break free of the Russian empire, or for the
Tibetan nation to have their own government separate from the Chinese state, or for
the Persian people to distinguish themselves from the theocracy of Iran. But the same
person is typically more skeptical that Britain should have exited the European Union,
let alone that the āTexan nationā should have its own sovereign state. Thecynicalmightsaythatnationalaspirationsgetairtimeinproportiontothenational
interest; themorecynicalmightsaythateventhetermānationalinterestā isyetanother
misnomer, because itās more like the āstateās interestā given that the American state
rules more than one nation. This, however, leads us to the key question of what exactly
constitutes a nation. 5.2.6 What is a Nation? This question was once all-important: what groups are signiļ¬cant enough to be called
nations, candidates for a state of their own? It will soon be all-important again, as
important as āwhat is a currency,ā and for similar reasons: because Bitcoin, web3, the
metaverse, remote work, mobile, and the internet allow people to exit legacy arrange-
ments and form new groups more easily than at any time in the recent past. But which
of these groups should be considered a ānationā? A Deļ¬nitional Approach
Letās start with Oxfordās deļ¬nition by way of their free service Lexico:
A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or
language, inhabiting a particular country or territory. 206 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
From that deļ¬nition, we can extract the following properties:
ā¢A large body of people : has to be of a substantial size (10-100k+?) ā¢united: members see themselves as being part of the same group. ā¢common descent : shared genetics, have intermarried more with each other than
people outside the nation. ā¢(or) history : shared past, have lived near each other for some time. ā¢(or) culture : shared dress, food, mannerisms, religion, and/or customs. ā¢(or) language : shared spoken and/or written tongue. ā¢inhabiting a particular...territory : found in a speciļ¬c region of the globe. Each of these pieces can be poked at. How large is ālargeā? How do we measure whether
a group of people is united? How localized to a particular territory does a nation have
to be, or can it be nomadic? And why do we have a complex āORā statement buried
in the middle, where common descent, history, culture, orlanguage all ļ¬gure in? Our
ļ¬rst instinct is that the deļ¬nition of a nation is a little fuzzy, and our instinct is right. An Empirical Approach
To ground our discussion, letās go through speciļ¬c examples of groups that have been
called nations:
ā¢The Japanese : They line up with the deļ¬nition perfectly. The Japanese at one
point did have quite an empire, and there is a Japanese diaspora in the US
(and Brazil)...but most people of Japanese ancestry live on the islands of Japan,
speak the Japanese language, are governed by the Japanese state, and live in an
essentially monoethnic polity. ā¢The Spanish : They have a nation state today, but in the past they had an
international empire that then contracted, leaving them mostly to themselves
on the Iberian Peninsula. They left behind a global footprint in the form of 20
countries that speak Spanish, yet do not consider themselves part of the Spanish
nation state. ā¢The Turks : They are a multiethnic state today that is also the successor to an
even larger empire, the Ottoman Empire, with a deļ¬nitionally Byzantine history. ā¢The Israelis : Theirstatusasanationstatechangedwithtime. TheJewishpeople
were once a stateless nation, a diasporic group united by common ancestry and
tradition without a land or government to call their own. Then, within living
memory, they founded the state of Israel. (H
šŗļø Nations exist in various forms: some have their own states (Japan, Spain), others remain stateless (Kurds, Catalans), and some have partial sovereignty (Taiwan).
š¤ Proposition nations like America, Singapore, and France attempt to forge unified identities from multiple ethnic groups through shared ideals rather than common ancestry.
šļø Civilization states like China and India encompass multiple ethnic groups but maintain unity through centuries of shared cultural history and common civilization.
āļø Many modern states, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, are artificial constructs imposed by colonial powers with arbitrary borders that ignore natural cultural and geographic boundaries.
šÆ The question of what constitutes a legitimate nation remains highly contentious because recognition determines a group's ability to claim territory and political sovereignty.
šļø A legitimate state requires six key elements: defined territory, population, central government, interstate sovereignty, diplomatic recognition, and domestic monopoly on violence.
š States are political-legal entities bound by laws and hierarchy, while nations are cultural-ethnic identities bound by shared language, ancestry, and bottom-up solidarity.
š¤ The pragmatic test for statehood is UN membership and diplomatic recognition, as social viability from other states is necessary for legitimacy.
š Edge cases like Taiwan, Kosovo, and Somaliland demonstrate varying degrees of state-like qualities but lack full international recognition due to powerful opponents.
or more nations that live within that territory
3.Central government : the ability to create laws
4.Interstate sovereignty : in theory, control over domestic aļ¬airs without interfer-
ence by other states
5.Recognition : diplomatic recognition by other states
6.Domestic monopoly on violence : the ability to maintain order inside the territory
A failed state in the midst of civil war wouldnāt ļ¬t, for example, because it wouldnāt
be able to prevent foreign powers from interfering (item 4), nor would it be able to
control violence domestically (item 6). A micronation doesnāt count because it lacks
territory (item 1) and population (item 2). And an administrative subdivision of the
US like Arkansas also wouldnāt count, because it lacks recognition by foreign states
(item 5) and control relative to Washington, D.C. (item 3). However, a subdivision
can sometimes becomean independent state. The Comparative Approach
How about a comparison? Precisely because theyāre so often conļ¬ated, itās worth
addressing in detail just how a state diļ¬ers from a nation. ā¢The state is a political and legal entity, while a nation is a cultural, ethnic, and
psychological identity. ā¢The state is bound by laws and threat of force, while a nation is bound by
sentiments and linguistic/genetic/cultural alignment. ā¢The state is top-down and hierarchical, while the nation is bottom-up and peer-
to-peer. ā¢And, as above, the state has a ļ¬xed territory, a government and sovereignty over
a territory, while a nation typically has shared language, culture, and/or ancestry. Nations may not always have a single state. The Kurds lack a state, while the Koreans
are split into two states. Conversely, states may govern one or more nations. The
British state governs the English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nations, while the Soviet
state governed more than 100 diļ¬erent nationalities. While some contend that the distinction between nation and state is an intrinsically
European idea, there are actually diļ¬erent words for these concepts across languages. 5.2. ON NATION STATES 211
The Pragmatic Approach
Perhaps the simplest test for whether something is a bona ļ¬de state is whether itās a
member of the United Nations General Assembly. Does it have suļ¬cient diplomatic
recognition? Is it considered a state by other entities weād consider states? In a word,
is itrecognized ? This is important because even the very largest groups of people, like
the Chinese and the Indians, are outnumbered by the rest of the world; social viability
is necessary for state viability. A couple of excellent books on this topic are Invisible Countries andNot on the
Map, which review edge cases like Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Transnistria, North-
ern Cyprus, Somaliland, South Ossetia, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic,
Kosovo, and Taiwan. Each of these entities has a greater or lesser degree of internal
state-like-ness, with Taiwan being the most legit, but all of them lack some degree of
full interstate recognition ā often due to a powerful regional or global opponent. While weāre discussing the UN, a better name than the āUnited Nationsā might be
the āSelected States.ā After all, many stateless nations donāt have a seat in the United
NationsGeneralAssembly, liketheKurds, theCatalonians, ortheTibetans. Andmany
countries that dohave seats are more akin to multinational empires than single-nation
states. The Philosophical Approach
Keynes said āPractical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any in-
tellectual inļ¬uences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.ā Meaning, if
you donāt know what intellectual software youāre running, youāre probably running it
unconsciously. So, itās hard to survey the many thinkers that led to the modern state,
because we donāt always understand the full scope of their impact. Weāll try anyway. Hereās another necessarily imprecise set of summaries of what dif-
ferent political theorists thought about the state. ā¢Plato: the state should make possi
Philosophers and theorists have proposed widely divergent definitions of what constitutes a nation, ranging from voluntary consent (Rousseau) to shared language and descent (Herder) to imagined communities (Anderson).
Key tensions emerge in defining nations: primordialism versus propositionism, the need for sufficient scale versus maintaining unique culture, self-determination versus external sponsorship, and imagined communities versus real cultural ties.
Despite centuries of theoretical work, there remains no single agreed-upon test for determining whether a group qualifies as a nation, though cases can be made by appealing to different standards.
The text suggests that perhaps a nation is simply 'a group that can convince enough other people that it's a nation,' highlighting the subjective and constructed nature of national identity.
f people voluntarily consents to being bound by the same
governing authority, they are a nation. ā¢Marx: a nation is a convenient group supported by a Great Power to destabilize
a rival. Regarding communism, the nation is a group to lead to acquire political
supremacy and a boundary to transcend to unite the proletariat. ā¢Locke: if two groups lay claim to the same territory, the more ārational and
industriousā should be considered a nation. ā¢John Stuart Mill : if a group consents to the same governing authority, and is
capable of attaining control over a piece of land, they should be considered a
nation. Millās concept of utility, however, trumps consent. ā¢Hegel: a nation is formed by its institutions imbuing a sense of shared ethics. War tests that ethical duty and is not inherently evil, but a natural condition of
anarchic interstate relations. ā¢JG Herder : If a group shares language and descent, it is a nation, a concept
known as primordialism. Moreover, small nations should be independent from
larger nations that want to assimilate them into diļ¬erent languages. ā¢JG Fichte : likeHerder, separatelanguagesandethnicitiesdeļ¬neseparatenations. Moreover, a state can build a nation through education, guiding the populace
towards a shared cultural and linguistic identity. ā¢Ernest Renan : a nation is those with ācommon gloriesā and sacriļ¬ces in the
past and āthe will to continue them in the present.ā The existence of a nation 5.2. ON NATION STATES 209
is represented by a ādaily plebisciteā that constitutes the present consent of a
people. ā¢Ernest Gellner : nations are peoples sharing (via schooling) language, culture,
and forms of communication particularly adapted to modern society. ā¢Benedict Anderson : nations are just social constructs, imagined communities,
based on linguistic connections driven by āprint capitalism.ā
ā¢Eric Hobsbawm : nations must have a historic association with a current state,
a long-established linguocultural administrative elite, and a proven capacity for
conquest. These deļ¬nitions both overlap and conļ¬ict. Some tensions include:
ā¢Primordialism vs propositionism. A nation can be a group with shared ancestry,
culture, and language, but it can also be based purely on ideas and voluntary
association. ā¢Scale vs uniqueness. A nation needs suļ¬cient scale to be able to defend itself, so
it should adopt a broad deļ¬nition of national membership. But it needs to also
avoid becoming so assimilated into a large-scale group that thereās no distinct
culture to defend. ā¢Self-determination vs external sponsorship. A nation is based in part on self-
identiļ¬cation as a nation, but in practice needs to also be capable of delivering
real world results (being ārational and industriousā) and of attracting the support
of a Great Power patron. ā¢Imagined communities vs real linguocultural ties. A nation is an imagined com-
munity and a social construct, but it needs to share enough of the same language
and culture to feasibly assemble that construct. These divergences mean there isnāt yet a single test for whether a group is a nation,
though one can make a more or less persuasive case in any given instance by appealing
to diļ¬erent standards. However, with modern tools, we might be able to tidy up that
fuzziness. Later in this chapter, weāll introduce a computational approach to deļ¬ning
a nation that complements the empirical and philosophical approaches. And weāll talk
abouthowthesetheoriesofnationalorigininļ¬uenceastartupsocietyfounderāsstrategy
for ācustomer acquisition,ā or in this case citizen acquisition. But for now, what is a nation? Perhaps itās just a group that can convince enough
other people that itās a nation. 5.2.7 What is a State? Itās also worth spending time on the other half of the nation state deļ¬nition: what
exactly is a state? 210 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
The Deļ¬nitional Approach
This helpful video enumerates six properties of a state:
1.Border: a clearly deļ¬ned territory
2.Population : one
šļø Different political philosophers offer distinct visions of the state's purpose, from Aristotle's highest good to Marx's proletariat organization to Locke's contract enforcement.
š» These political theories function like programming paradigms - different approaches to solve similar governance problems, each with strengths for particular challenges.
š Statecraft strategies are often combined within single governments, just as programming codebases mix different paradigms to complement each other's strengths.
ā ļø Historical pairings like Marx-Rousseau (left) and Schmitt-Carlyle (right) show how theoretical visions justify state force, despite their departure from economic or political reality.
šÆ Purely contractual states focused on wealth maximization face vulnerabilities from meaning-driven rival narratives that provide stronger evangelistic appeal.
ble the conditions under which everyone can
provide for themselves and seek the Good. ā¢Aristotle: all communities aim at some good, and the state is the highest kind of
community, aiming at the highest of goods. ā¢Locke: The state is legitimate if it enforces contracts and acts as the guarantor
of private property. ā¢Carlyle: The state should be run by a hero that provides order. ā¢Schmitt: The state embodies a clear friend-enemy distinction. ā¢Marx: The state is meant to organize the proletariat against the ruling class. ā¢Keynes: The state should intervene to smooth the business cycle and support full
employment. 212 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
ā¢Rawls: The state distributes social goods and economic opportunities equally to
its free citizens according to the theory of justice as fairness. ā¢Hobbes: The state possess absolute authority, and this powerful Leviathan makes
anti-social men behave in pro-social ways. ā¢Rousseau : The state is legitimate if people have consented to a āSocial Contractā
in which they self-rule and ideally do not abdicate sovereignty to potentially
disaligned representatives. ā¢Samuelson : The state is meant to provide public goods that private actors would
not be able to supply. ā¢Lee Kuan Yew : The state should provide its people with the maximum enjoyment
of freedoms and respect the family unit. The state should embrace multiple
nations yet demand loyalty. Statecraft Strategies and Programming Paradigms
Again, this isnāt just desiccated theory. Itās important to understand these ideas be-
cause they are used implicitly or explicitly by the founders and leaders of actually
existing states. From a computer science standpoint, these schools of thought are statecraft strategies
that are analogous to programming paradigms. That is, you can often solve the same
problem from (say) an object-oriented, functional, or imperative standpoint. But cer-
tain problems are easier to tackle with a particular paradigm, while others become
much harder. So too for these varying theories of the state. Moreover, rather than being used in
isolation, these statecraft strategies are often fused within a single legal codebase, much
as diļ¬erent programming paradigms can complement each other within a companyās
codebase. For example, Karl Marxās zero-sum worldview made it easy to justify a Soviet state
withamassiveRedArmytodestroythecapitalistoppressors. Jean-JacquesRousseauās
writingbycontrastdidnātgivemuchjustiļ¬cationfortheuseofforceitself, butfurnished
a vision of consensual communistic utopia that sat just on the other side of the Red
Armyās liberating violence. Carl Schmitt and Thomas Carlyle are a roughly equivalent
pairing on the right, with Schmitt advocating that a hero use state force against the
enemy and Carlyle talking up the bounteous order that would arise as a result. Marx and Rousseauās failure mode was their departure from economic reality, as they
didnāt take into account self-interest. Schmitt and Carlyleās failure mode was their
departure from political reality, as they didnāt take into account the interests of the
other guy. But their statecraft strategies were once inļ¬uential enough to drive some
of the most powerful states in world history, so we need to understand them, even if
we must also discard them. Think about how PHP is a programming language that 5.2. ON NATION STATES 213
āsucksā according to many engineers, yet somehow led to many of the most popular
apps of all time (Facebook, WordPress, Slack, etc), and youāll get the point. It is also possible to run completely in another direction, and have a purely contractual
state run on an implicitly Hayekian/Lockean paradigm, maximizing some measure of
wealth without any of the meaning that the Marxist or Schmittian state narratives
provide. That also has its vulnerabilities, as a vacuum of meaning can be ļ¬lled by
a rival whose statecraft strategy involves constant evangelism; this is why the Pla-
tonic/Aristotlean state narratives have a
š¾ Japan represents the ideal nation state where language, ancestry, culture, and territory align perfectly within clear boundaries.
š Most nation states are much messier than Japan, with populations spread fractally across territories, split between countries, or scattered globally like pre-Israel Jewish communities.
šļø Modern nation states were founded during key historical periods including the Peace of Westphalia (1648), American/French Revolutions (1776-1800s), and post-WWII decolonization (1945-1991).
šŗļø The rise of accurate mapmaking technology in the 1500s was essential for creating nation states, as territorial sovereignty requires precise boundary definition.
good point when they prioritize purpose. Thestrengthsandweaknessesofvariousstatecraftstrategiescanbediscussedatlength,
and weāll return to this topic. But for now: before you design your ideal state, you
should have some idea of what others thought their ideal state to be, and how that
worked out. 5.2.8 What does a Nation State look like on a Map? The simple answer is that a nation state is a colored blob on a map. But we can think
of that map as a superposition of various underlying maps showing where members of
the nation are located ā for example, where the speakers of the language, those with
shared alleles, and those with similar culture reside, overlaid on the legal boundaries
of the state). Again, Japanisourcanonicalexample. Theunderlyingmapsalllineup. Mostspeakers
of the Japanese language, most people with Japanese ancestry, most holders of the
Japanese yen, most practitioners of Shintoism, and most people who are culturally
Japanese live in the islands of Japan administered by the Japanese government. Other nations are much messier than that. ā¢Some nations have spread fractally around a territory, as in the Balkans. ā¢Some nations have spread around the world, as did the Jewish community pre-
Israel (still true to a signiļ¬cant extent today). ā¢Some previously uniļ¬ed nations have been split between territories for historical
reasons, as are North and South Korea. ā¢Other nations are deļ¬ned by multiple overlapping maps, because one variable
alone is not enough to delimit them. For example, if you just said that all people
who speak Spanish are members of the Spanish nation, you would misclassify
millions of people across continents who do not think of themselves as part of the
same community. ā¢Some ānation states,ā like Indonesia, have odd-looking boundaries ā in part,
because they are really multinational states. ā¢Some ānation states,ā like France and the United Kingdom, have surprisingly
distributed global footprints because they are really the remains of multinational 214 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
empires. In general, the idealized nation state is one where the members of a given group ā
the nation ā are physically centralized within a single bounded set on the surface of
the globe. That may seem trivial, but later in this chapter weāll explore physically
decentralized polities in the context of network states. 5.2.9 How were Modern Nation States Founded? There are a few diļ¬erent angles on the question of how nation states get founded. The Historical Angle
The ļ¬rst angle is to think about when many states were founded on roughly the same
principles at the same time. We can deļ¬ne a few critical moments in history. ā¢WW2 and Cold War (1945-1991) : todayās states were founded under the aegis
of the postwar order. After World War II, within Europe large-scale population
transfers created monoethnic states. Meanwhile, outside Europe, the colonies
owned by Western European powers experienced ādecolonizationā and then ar-
guably ārecolonizationā by the USSR or USA respectively in the name of commu-
nism or capitalism. Another clutch of independent states arose after the collapse
of the USSR in 1991. ā¢American Revolution, French Revolution, Great Divergence (1776-1800s) : Writ-
ers like Benedict Anderson date the rise of European nationalism in its modern
sense to the āGreat Divergenceā of the early 1800s, after the French Revolution,
which was in turn inspired by the American Revolution. ā¢30 Years War, Spanish/Dutch War, and Peace of Westphalia (1618-1648) : The
Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War between Protestants and Catholics
that had been kicked oļ¬ by the Reformation, and ushered in the concept of states
with bounded territorial sovereignty as opposed to the unbounded authority of
the Catholic Church. ā¢Rise of mapmaking and print capitalism (1500s) : The rise of mapmaking tech-
nologies enabled the creation of accurate maps. We take this for granted today,
but without good maps there were no e
Nation states have multiple potential founding points ranging from ancient civilizations to modern Westphalian sovereignty, depending on whether one focuses on the 'nation' or 'state' component.
National independence often requires external patronage from Great Powers who support liberation movements that align with their geopolitical interests, making self-determination insufficient alone.
Many modern countries like India, Israel, and Singapore were founded within living memory (1947-1965), proving that new nation-building including military institutions is still possible.
Aspiring nation-builders face a Catch-22 where they're seen as either dangerous for wanting military power or unrealistic for lacking it, creating embedded contradictions in the founding process.
xplicit borders beyond terrain, only grad-
ual diminishment of the power of one sovereign as its territory bled into that of
another. ā¢Ancient era. Civilization states like China and India date their origins back to
antiquity, and can point to certain continuities of language, culture, and religious
practice. ā¢Prehistory. Primordialists argue that the nations that underpin states predate
written history, as their linguistic, genetic, and cultural bonds stretch back thou-
sands of years. In other words, nations are naturally occurring phenomena, more 5.2. ON NATION STATES 215
like the periodic table of the elements than a social construct, with boundaries
that are obvious in a Potterian sense. Any real modern nation state was in this
sense founded millennia ago. Importantly, the whole world didnāt get modern nation states at the same time. For
example, Westphalian sovereignty was initially established withinWestern Europe, but
not outside it. European nation states were supposed to honor each othersā borders, in
principle at least, so they went abroad to conquer other places. But these junction points in history are still useful ways to think about the founding of
nation states, with one or the other looming larger depending on whether one is more
focused on the ānation,ā the āstate,ā or the ānation stateā combination. From a practical standpoint, clearly you canāt found a civilization state like China or
India without thousands of years of history. But you might be able to distill a new
ānationā like the Mormons (est: 1830) from the mass of Americans, or alternatively
architect an impressive new nation state like āEā-stonia (est: 1991) from the same
nation oppressed by the dreary Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Patronage Angle
An alternative approach is to look at the details of how speciļ¬c nation states were
founded. One thing that pops out to us when studying enough of these histories is that
national independence is not solely a matter of self-determination, because the fate of
many nations is not determined wholly by their own eļ¬orts. For example, the Soviets were āanti-imperialistā when that meant getting Western-
sympathetic capitalists out, and Soviet-sympathetic communists in. The French sup-
ported the ļ¬edgling American nation when that meant poking a thumb in the eye of
their British rivals. And todayās Americans havenāt been too vocal on the Kurds or
Yemenis given their alliances with the Turkish and Saudi states, but are extremely
enthusiastic about the Ukrainians, Taiwanese, and Uighurs given their conļ¬icts with
the Russian and Chinese states. As such, to achieve its ambitions a stateless nation may also need a patron, a kind of
venture capitalist Great Power. Self-determination is not enough. The Military Angle
Many countries were founded within living memory, but because they were often
founded by force, some donāt believe itās possible to found new countries withoutforce. Or is it? They say you cannot found a Pentagon; they donātsay you canāt found a
competitor to the post oļ¬ce, or the taxi medallion system, or to NASA. They instead
go right to the thing where we donāt have comparably recent foundings...or do we? After all, the Pentagon itself was built by human beings just like you and me in 1943. India, Israel, and Singapore were likewise founded in 1947, 1948, and 1965 respectively,
and have their own defense department equivalents. 216 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
Of course, there are other interpretations of this challenge. It could mean āOK, it
happenedawhileago, butIdonātthinkthePentagon-formingprocesscanberepeated,ā
orperhapsāItwouldbebadtoraiseamassivenewarmy,asthatwouldbedestabilizing,ā
or even, āCome on, you canāt found the most powerful military in the world from
scratch.ā But answering these kinds of questions presents an embedded Catch-22. Either someone thinking about starting new countries must want to create a powerful
new military (dangerous!) or else they donāt have
Digital entities can achieve defense through non-violent means like encryption and decentralization rather than traditional military force, similar to how Google and Bitcoin protect millions without armies.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established the modern nation-state system by dividing territory with clear borders and sovereign governments, replacing the previous era of feudal lords and competing religious authorities.
Nation states expand through four primary mechanisms: demographically (births/immigration), geographically (conquest/acquisition), economically (trade/markets), and ideologically (education/conversion).
Nation-state formation is bidirectional, where nations create states that then influence and reshape the nations themselves, with successful states often drawing in adjacent populations over time.
any guns and will get crushed by
those that do (dangerously naive). One answer is that you donāt need to get full sovereignty but can instead contract
with an existing sovereign for defense. In fact, this is that this is actually what most
ārealā countries already do ā few truly have full sovereignty, as most contract out their
defense in a similar manner way to the US or (nowadays) China. Another answer is that you could write a book just on this (and perhaps weāll need to
add another chapter), but for a fundamentally digital entity with physical decentral-
ization around the world, the primary mode will be nonviolent digital defense through
secrecy, pseudonymity, decentralization, and encryption. In diļ¬erent ways, Google and
Bitcoin protect many millions of peopleās digital footprint without an enormous army. 5.2.10 Why were Nation States Founded? Another way of asking this is: what came before the nation state? The short answer is that people had diļ¬erent identity stacks. In Europe, the populace
didnāt think of themselves as all being primarily āFrenchā or āGermanā till much later
on. They instead thought of themselves on the basis of their feudal lord or region
(Brittany, Prussia) or religion ( e.g., Protestant/Catholic). Transnational entities like
the Catholic Church also claimed dominion over all believers, no matter where they
might be, so there was a question as to whether Pope or King had ultimate authority
in any given jurisdiction. Wars ensued. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 resolved these issues and is considered by many to
be the origin of the European nation state. The Westphalian peace divided territory
by lines on a map. Over each territory thus delineated, there was a government that
represented the people in that territory, with the right to exercise force on their behalf. And these āsovereignā states were supposed to leave each other alone. In theory, the state was meant to be an innovation in violence reduction. You stay
in your lane, I stay in mine. Clear sovereigns would keep domestic order, and the
principle of national sovereignty would deter aggression from abroad. It didnāt entirely
work out like that, of course; both intrastate and interstate conļ¬ict still occurred. But
the abstraction of nation states may still have been preferable to the preceding era of
fuzzy bordered empires and conļ¬icting sovereigns. 5.2. ON NATION STATES 217
5.2.11 How does a Nation State Expand and Contract? There are at least four ways a nation state expands:
ā¢Demographically. By reproduction or immigration. A nation grows when it sees
more birth than death. A state grows when one of its constituent nations expe-
riences demographic growth, or when it adds immigrants, which may be from a
diļ¬erent nation. Note that there can be a diļ¬erence here between expansion of
the state and the nation! ā¢Geographically. By conquest ( e.g., Ivan the Terribleās expansion of Russia), by
acquisition ( e.g., the Louisiana Purchase), or by agreement ( e.g., Singaporeās
involuntary separation from Malaysia). ā¢Economically. By trade and opening of markets. This is not always peaceful: see
the British East India Company, Smedley Butler, and the Opium Wars. ā¢Ideologically. By education and conversion. Revolutionary France invested heav-
ily in educating all citizens to speak French, expanding the self-identiļ¬ed French
nation. Similarly, Christian, Muslim, and Communist groups spent immense ef-
fort on evangelism. Of course, while some of this evangelism grows the support
base of a nation state (like Maoism did for the PRC and arguably Wahhabism
did for Saudi Arabia), other kinds of viral ideas cut across the boundaries of state
and nation alike in destabilizing ways. 5.2.12 How did States Inļ¬uence Nations, and Vice Versa? Nation state formation is bidirectional; nations create states which inļ¬uence nations,
and so on. While a nation must come ļ¬rst, many of historyās most successful nation
states drew adjacent (and then non-adjacent) people into t
šļø Nation states historically formed through cultural dominance, with linguistic minorities adopting the ruling group's language - only 2.5% of 'Italians' spoke Italian before unification.
šŗļø Political boundaries create feedback loops that reinforce cultural divisions, as seen in Korea where the 38th parallel has separated populations for 70 years.
š« Multiethnic empires, stateless nations, transnational movements, and nomadic tribes all fail to meet nation state criteria for different structural reasons.
š Modern entities like multinational corporations and ethnic diasporas represent transitional forms that lack either true national consciousness or full state governance.
he founding population by
means ranging from cultural appeal to rape and pillage. Prior to Garibaldi, only about 2.5% of āItaliansā spoke what we now know as Ital-
ian, but what was then the Florentine dialect of Italian. Similarly, before the French
Revolution, less than 50% of France spoke todayās oļ¬cial variety of French. And un-
til Bismarckās uniļ¬cation of Germany, there was rivalry between Prussia and Austria
(āGerman dualismā) for exactly how and whether a āGermanyā should be formed. A related phenomenon is the feedback loop between political borders and national
culture. The 38th parallel didnāt have pre-existing historical signiļ¬cance in Korean
culture, but after the Korean War the rate of intermarriage between the new āNorth
Koreanā and āSouth Koreanā groups plummeted. This state of aļ¬airs has persisted for
70 years; the longer it continues, the larger the cultural gap between the two groups. Hard political boundaries of this kind serve much the same purpose as natural physical
boundaries in the past like rivers, mountains, and deserts. They impede allelic and
cultural diļ¬usion, and thus contribute to nation-forming dynamics. Thereās a feedback
loop between the political/territorial and the linguistic/genetic/cultural. 218 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
5.2.13 What is not a Nation State? What is nota nation state? I donāt mean this in the trivial way that a banana is not
a nation state. I mean, what is another large-scale way of organizing people in the
physical world that is not a nation state? Put another way, to understand what something is, we need to understand what it
is not. We live in a world of nation states, so conceptualizing something diļ¬erent is
diļ¬cult. The ideal counterexamples are things that are close, but not quite there. Here
are a few:
1.Multiethnic empires like the Soviet Union were not traditional nation states be-
cause they had more than one nationality within their boundaries. 2.Stateless nations like the Kurds are not nation states because they lack a formally
recognized territory and government. 3.Transnational movements like the Catholic Church are not nation states because
thesetofallbelieversisnotcontainedwithinaterritorialstatethatitadministers. (The Church does have Vatican City, but that is about as ceremonial as the
British Royal Family.) 4.Terrorist groups like ISIS which operate across borders and have seized territory
at times arenāt considered states because they lack diplomatic recognition (due to
their heinous crimes!). That said, the Soviet Communists were the ISIS of their
day, and they just had to hold out 16 years for FDR to recognize them, so with
enough persistence this designation can change. 5.Nomadic tribes like the Romani and Masai are not nation states, because they
migrate between countries. Indeed, most of humanity used to live like this, with
farming/soldiering being a relatively recent innovation, and we may return to
something like it with the advent of digital nomadism. 6.Multijurisdictional corporations like Google have more people on their servers
than most countries, and do control huge chunks of their usersā lives, such as
their messages and balances. However, they are a transitional form towards our
concept of the network state, as their users lack the national consciousness of a
nation and their governance lacks the qualities weāve come to expect from a state. 7.Ethnic diasporas like the Japanese or Armenian diasporas are not nation states. They may have business districts, and some degree of community organization
in those regions, but they are just a tendril of a nation rather than a full nation,
and certainly lack the properties of a full state. 8.Local clans like the Pashtun and Hazara of Afghanistan are not nation states. They are diļ¬erent nations within a failed state. 9.Supranational entities liketheEuropeanUnion, WTO,orIMFarealsonotnation
states, and are more similar to the Catholic Church in terms of their cross- 5.2. ON NATION S
Three foundational technologies enabled modern nation states: mapmaking (defining borders), printing (standardizing language and law), and firearms (democratizing power away from feudal knights).
Mapmaking required sophisticated technology like compasses and telescopes to create accurate world maps that could be divided into nation states with defined boundaries.
Print capitalism motivated commercial printers to standardize languages for larger markets, similar to how Facebook and Google wanted everyone online to expand their customer base.
Network states represent a new organizational model that starts as startup societies and scales toward diplomatic recognition, requiring elements like social networks, cryptocurrency, and physical territories.
TATES 219
jurisdictional inļ¬uence.2
5.2.14 WhatTechnologicalDevelopmentsunderpintheModern
Nation State System? We donāt typically think of mapmaking, printing, and shooting as novel activities,
because the underlying technologies were invented so many generations ago. But they
were each foundational to our modern concept of states with borders, where men with
guns enforce written laws. 1.Mapmaking. Itās only possible to have a map of the world which we divide into
nation states if we have a map of the world. You donāt have to be a cartographic
connoisseur to know that such a map did not exist in 1492, when Columbus sailed
the ocean blue in search of an India to trade with. āYe oldeā maps with āhere be
dragonsā had to be painstakingly crafted. Prior to modern GPS, there was an
enormous tech stack around mapmaking, including compasses, telescopes, and
celestial navigation. 2.Printing. Not just the printing press, but the entire practice of print capitalism
helpedgiverisetothenationstate. JustasFacebookandGooglewantedeveryone
on the internet so they could expand their customer base, the new commercial
printers of the 1500s wanted everyone to speak the same language so they could
maximize sales for their goods. 3.Shooting. āGod made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.ā Feudalism was
enforced by horseback-riding knights in shining armor with heavy swords; guns
changed that. Others have written about the transition to the gun age, but in
short, guns reduced the importance of physical inequality. Any man (or, even-
tually, woman) with a gun could kill any other man, even if the shooter was old
and frail and the shootee was Sir Lancelot himself. The advent of ļ¬rearms (and
crossbows, and cannons) destabilized the feudal hierarchy; a strong right arm was
suddenly worth less than a strong left brain, as the technology and supply chain
required to produce muskets was suddenly worth more. The gun helped catalyze
the transition from feudal hierarchy to nationalist republic and helped promote
the ārepublicanā ideals of the American and French Revolutions. So: a combination of mapmaking, printing, and shooting helped set the stage for the
post-Westphalian nation state, where a map delimited borders, a printed document
established the law, and a guy with a gun shot you for crossing those borders or
breaking the law. 2El Salvadorās adoption of Bitcoin in contravention of IMF dictates is, in its own way, similar to a
Protestant state ļ¬ipping the bird to the Catholic Church. 220 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
5.3 On Network States
The network state system starts from diļ¬erent assumptions than the nation state sys-
tem (which you can review here). 5.3.1 What is a Network State? Earlier we gave descriptions of the network state in one sentence, one thousand words,
and one essay. We also showed what a million-person version looks like on a map (see
above). Hereās that one sentence deļ¬nition again:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of na-
tional consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action,
anin-personlevelofcivility, anintegratedcryptocurrency, aconsensualgov-
ernment limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded
physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves
a large enough population, income, and real estate footprint to attain a
measure of diplomatic recognition. Keep in mind that this deļ¬nition references the ļ¬nal form of a diplomatically recognized
network state. But you canāt get diplomatic recognition for a made-up country right
oļ¬ the bat, so you canāt found a network state directly. Instead, you found a startup society and hope to scale it into a network state that
achieves diplomatic recognition from a pre-existing government, just as you donāt found
apubliccompany directly, butinsteadfoundastartupcompanyandhopetoscaleitinto
a public company that achieves ādiplomatic recognitionā from a pre-existing exchange
like the
Network states evolve through specific waypoints: startup society ā network union ā network archipelago ā diplomatic recognition, similar to startup scaling phases.
A network state is built on a selective social network (1-network) where members must apply and demonstrate alignment through values, not just money, creating a literal smart contract version of Rousseau's social contract.
Every network state requires a moral innovation - a core principle that members believe is good while the outside world thinks it's bad (or vice versa), such as 'sugar bad' or religious beliefs.
Network states develop national consciousness where members feel part of the same community with shared values, functioning more like a complete graph where most nodes are connected rather than typical fragmented social networks.
NASDAQ. Moreover, to extend the analogy, the process of scaling a startup involves waypoints -
like āseed startup,ā āseries B startup,ā and āunicornā - prior to achieving the status of a 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 221
public company. So too there are at least two waypoints between startup society and
network state worth noting: the network union and the network archipelago. Turning a startup society into a network union makes it a digital community capable of
collectiveaction. Turningthatnetworkunionintoanetworkarchipelagomanifeststhat
collective action in the real world, as the community crowdfunds physical properties
around the world and connects them via the internet. Finally, an impressive enough
network archipelago can achieve diplomatic recognition from an existing government,
thereby becoming a true network state. The Deļ¬nition
Thatās the process of getting to a network state. Now letās drill into each part of our
proposed deļ¬nition. ā¢A social network. The people of a network state form their nation online. Social
rather than geographic proximity is the core organizing principle. But this isnāt
a typical social network like Facebook or Twitter; itās what we call a 1-network
where there is just onecoherent community present, rather than many separate
communitiesasonFacebookorTwitter. Itāsnotquiteacompletegraph-everyone
doesnāt have to be friends with every single other node - but itās much closer to
that than a typical social network. Admission to this social network is selective, people can lose their account privi-
leges for bad behavior, and everyone whoās there has explicitly opted in by apply-
ing to join. That application process could involve public proof of alignment via
writing, a career history that demonstrates common values, or the investment of
time and energy into the society to obtain digital assets. Joining the network that
underpins a network state is nota purely economic proposition, not something
that can be bought with money alone. Itās a concrete version of Rousseauās social
contract as a literal smart contract, one that all sign before entering, a way to
turn an abstract proposition into an actual nation. ā¢A moral innovation. A network state grows out of a startup society that is
premised on a moral innovation, where everyone within the society thinks some
principle X is good that the rest of the world thinks is bad, or vice versa. This is
the proposition part of a proposition nation. For example, the moral innovation
could be as trivial-seeming as āsugar badā or ā24/7 internet badā, or as heavy-
weight as āthis traditional religion is goodā. The moral innovation draws people
in. It gives a reason for the society to exist, a purpose thatās distinct from the
outside world, a universalist complement to the particularist sense of national
consciousness, an ideological mission that others will nod their heads at even if
they donāt share (āok, I understand why someone might want a sugar-free society,
or a Benedict Option communityā). The reason we put such a high priority on a moral innovation is that missionary
societies outcompete mercenary ones, not just in theory but in practice. For 222 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
example, the historian Paul Johnson once pointed out that the for-proļ¬t colonies
in America failed but the religious ones had the cohesion and commitment to
make it through the brutal winters (see 11:00 here). We discuss this at length in
the chapter on the One Commandment. ā¢A sense of national consciousness. Everyone in a network state feels like theyāre
part of the same community, sharing the same values and culture. Theyāre a
nation in the sense of Renan...āto have done great things together, to want to do
more.ā Again, itās much more like a complete graph than a typical social network,
as almost every node is friendly with a very large fraction of other nodes. ā¢A recognized founder. A state, like a company, needs a leader. Especially early
on. But truly strong leadershi
Network state founders need concentrated authority (the 'Triforce') to make difficult non-consensus decisions, similar to how startup founders maintain control through dual-class stock.
Collective purpose serves as a unifying force for nations, with historical examples including the Puritans' 'City on a Hill,' Japan's Meiji-era transformation, and JFK's moon landing goal.
Modern America lacks collective purpose and has devolved into zero-sum tribal warfare where each side believes it must defeat the other before progress can occur.
Network states must include network unions that enable collective action through digital interfaces, unlike current social networks that only provide individual metrics without team coordination.
p comes from consent and buy-in, not propaganda
or force. Hence, itās important to have a recognized founder, one that people
actually listen to and choose to follow by joining the community. Can that founder break up the Triforce, splitting their authority into some kind
of multisig? Sure, just like the founder of a startup company can choose to give
up board seats. But itās easy to give away power and hard to consolidate it,
and you need that power sometimes to make hard but important non-consensus
decisions.3Thatās why dual-class stock to maintain control is used by both the
US establishment and their opponents. As with giving up corporate board seats, giving up some power may be the right
thing to do at some point for the network state founder. But in the event that
a network state degenerates into a bureaucracy - as many mature organizations
do - a key part of the network state model is that it is, like the startup model,
built to always allow peaceful exit. Anyone can, at any time, leave to found a
new startup society and try scaling it into a network state. ā¢A capacity for collective action. This is tightly related to the concept of national
consciousness. Itās a combination of collective purpose (which is like the mission
statement of a company, but for a community) and the capacity to acton that
purpose. First, letās understand the idea of collective purpose through some examples. The
PuritanswantedtobuildaāCityonaHill.ā TheJapaneseaftertheMeijiRestora-
tion replaced their previous mission statement of āRevere the Emperor, Expel the
Barbariansā with āEnrich the Country, Strengthen the Military,ā turning their
society around 180 degrees and thereby building the ļ¬rst non-white industrialized
power. And while the process of Indian Independence and Partition was messy
beyond belief, on the other side the collective purpose of independence uniļ¬ed
3Read Ben Horowitz on courage: āOn the surface, it appears that if the decision is a close call, itās
much safer to go with the crowd. In reality, if you fall into this trap, the crowd will inļ¬uence your
thinking and make a 70/30 decision seem like a 51/49 decision. This is why courage is critical.ā But
courage alone is not always enough - you need suļ¬cient control to be able to executethat courageous
decision. Thatās where founder control comes in. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 223
the Indian nation in a way it never had been before, with hundreds of so-called
āprincely statesā and countless ethnic groups now integrated into a single India.4
As one more example, JFK once focused the US on the common purpose of
āachieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.ā This was a collective purpose diļ¬erent
from but allied with the also-valid zero-sum goal of defeating communism. It was
perhaps the penultimate great thing the US accomplished as a uniļ¬ed country,
with the defeat of the Soviet Union as the last. These collective purposes helped unify their respective nations. They may be
imperfect, but once thereās no collective purpose at all, people start wondering
who they are. āWho are we?ā That directionlessness leads to what we see in
todayās US, split into two tribes whose only ācollective purposeā is to win a zero-
sum game against the other - a game each thinks it must win before being able
to move forward to the promised land. Next, supposing we have a collective purpose, what does collective action towards
that purpose look like? This is why the process of building a network state
includes a network union. From the very outset it organizes people to work
together for the beneļ¬t of their chosen community through the familiar interface
of their screens. This, again, is quite diļ¬erent from current āsocialā networks
like Twitter, which give individual scores for likes and followers but no team
dashboard, no way of setting and achieving tangible goals as a group. ā¢An in-person level of civility. In the 90s and 2000s it was att
Online civility has declined as internet nastiness became normalized, but high-trust societies require maintaining in-person levels of respect both offline and online.
Network states utilize integrated cryptocurrency as their digital backbone to manage all bureaucratic processes across traditional borders through encryption-protected systems.
Physical presence is established through crowdfunded archipelagos of real estate clusters worldwide, networked together using internet connectivity and emerging technologies like AR.
Government legitimacy comes from substance and consent rather than process, with laws reflecting the moral consensus of people who can freely opt in or out of the system.
ention-getting when
people were grossly incivil to each other online, as it was a funny contrast to the
generally civil oļ¬ine world. Now itās just old, and not funny anymore. Moreover,
internet ideologies have emerged that justifyrandom nastiness with slogans like
ācivility is tone policingā or ātoxicity is social defense.ā Yet a society where ev-
eryone is constantly disrespectful to everyone else doesnāt seem like a progressive,
public-spirited society. And the conservative US of the 1950s managed to main-
tain a strong level of self-defense becausethey were internally civil. So whether
one is coming from the left or right, pulling together a high-trust society means
in-person levels of civility towards community fellow members, both oļ¬ine and
online. High trust in turn comes from alignment towards a collective purpose and
a sense of national consciousness. ā¢An integrated cryptocurrency. This is the digital backbone of the network state. It manages the internal digital assets, the smart contracts, the web3 citizen lo-
gins, the birth and marriage certiļ¬cates, the property registries, the public na-
tional statistics, and essentially every other bureaucratic process that a nation
state manages via pieces of paper. Because itās protected by encryption, it can
coordinate all the functions of a state across the borders of legacy nation states. 4See this map and this one to get a sense of what India looked like prior to Independence. Itās
much like a map of Central Europe before Bismarck. 224 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
ā¢An archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories. This is the physical footprint
of the network state. Rather than buying territory in one place, or trying to
negotiate sovereignty up front, you build the community in the cloud and then
crowdfund physical real estate on the earth. Thatās oļ¬ce space, yes, but also
homes and shops - just spread all around the world in clusters, rather than con-
centrated in one place. You network these clusters together using the internet
into a network archipelago, eventually using newer technologies to make them
more real. For example, you can make the ļ¬ag of a network state appear to
anyone with augmented reality glasses and the right NFT, as per this visual. You can also make doors open on command for community members, where their
ENS name is their login. The point is that a network state is nota purely digi-
tal thing. It has a substantial physical component: all the buildings around the
world crowdfunded by its members. ā¢A consensual government limited by a social smart contract. Now we get to
the government. Many people make the mistake of thinking the laws (or the
land) come ļ¬rst when starting a new state, but laws should only come after the
formation of an organic people ā of a network nation ā not before. Thatās because
laws encode the implicit understanding of a people. Contra the concept that you
ācanāt legislate moralityā, thatās all you can do: set up laws that reļ¬ect the moral
consensus of a people as to what is encouraged and discouraged, acceptable and
optional, mandatory and forbidden. How is that moral consensus arrived at? It could be through a 51% democracy
(where 51% of people can outvote the other 49%) or it could be via a 100%
democracy (where 100% of people have migrated into a system and can migrate
out at any time), or it could be via one of the zillions of techniques for satisfying
preferences described in the literature. The speciļ¬cs donāt matter as much as the ethics. That is, what makes a govern-
ment legitimate is not process but substance.5Given the consent of the governed,
any form of government is internally legitimate. The question is then whether it
will be considered externally legitimate, whether the world at large will accept
this government - but that is an empirical question more than an ethical one. Put another way, if people can opt in to bungee jumping and skydiving, if eu-
thanasia is legal, then experimenting wit
Corporate governance experiments should be legal as long as employees can freely consent and opt out, similar to how Ford customers don't need to understand internal company structure.
The concept of consent-based governance extends from corporations to network states, where legitimacy comes from measurable consent rather than traditional elections.
Social smart contracts combine Rousseau's social contract theory with blockchain technology, allowing users to grant limited digital privileges in exchange for community membership.
Physical territory governance becomes possible through ENS (Ethereum Name System) logins that can control smart locks and grant access to startup society-managed spaces with user deposits.
h self-governmental systems that vary
dramatically from the status quo should also be legal. Many of them wonāt work,
but many projects donāt work either; that doesnāt mean we stop people from
trying. One way of thinking about this is that the typical Ford customer doesnāt care
about how Fordās internal aļ¬airs are managed. The buyer doesnāt care whether
5There is a tendency to equate āelectionsā with legitimacy, but the Soviets held many elections,
and communist states tend to proclaim themselves the Democratic Peopleās Republic of So-and-So. Didnāt make it so. What you really want is the consent of the governed, and some way to measure
that, such as on-chain evidence. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 225
Ford is organized by product or by function, whether theyāre run top-down by the
CEO or in a consultative way with the board, whether they pay market salaries
or incentivize more heavily with stock. Ford could be a holocracy or a co-op. So long as everyone has consented to be governed by the Ford CEO by signing
an employee agreement, and can leave if that agreement is no longer congenial,
Fordās internal arrangements are ethical. This logic works so long as you can opt out of Fordās ecosystem completely. Haveyoudriven a Ford, lately? Itās trickier when itās something like Google,
which is so powerful that itās hard for the non-Chinese portion of the planet to
fully opt out of. Then you might want some kind of say in what goes on inside
the Googleplex. Still, most companies arenāt Google. Setting aside the edge
case of āinescapable global ubiquityā for now, the ethical case for allowing opt-in
experiments in corporate governance is pretty strong, for taking a broad view of
the āconsent of the governed.ā
Now extend that idea to non-corporate governance, with coin governance as a
proof point, and network states as an endpoint. Questions arise. How could
consent be given? How could others measure that consent was freely given? And what if someone wants to retract that consent, perhaps right before theyāre
subject to an act of governance they donāt like? In practice, we say that a user has consented to be governed by a startup society
if he has signed a social smart contract that gives a system administrator limited
privilegesoverthatuserāsdigitallifeinreturnforadmissiontothestartupsociety. This portmanteau term combines Rousseauās concept of the āsocial contractā with
the blockchain concept of the āsmart contract.ā
Signing the social smart contract is very similar to depositing your funds with
a centralized exchange, or locking them up in a smart contract with admin keys
ā youāre taking conscious risk with an on-chain asset in return for admission
to a digital ecosystem. Now imagine using your ENS6to ālog inā to a startup
society, thereby giving it limited privileges over your account in order to enter
that startup society. What does that log in entail? The simplest version of this is using your ENS
to log into a startup society community. A more sophisticated version is using
your ENS to enter a part of the so-called āopen metaverseā governed by a startup
society. But the most interesting version is using your ENS to log into oļ¬ine
territory owned by a startup society, as in the aforementioned example where an
ENS handshake opens a smart lock, or the one where it shows a glowing sigil. You might also have to put down a deposit to physically enter a startup society
managed territory. 6ENS stands for āEthereum Name Systemā. You can check it out at ens.domains. There are other
crypto name systems as well, like SNS (the Solana Name System); ENS is just the adoption leader at
time of writing. 226 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
You can extrapolate that ENS-login-to-physical-world example dramatically. As
more physical territories are crowdfunded by a startup society, and more smart
devices within those territories are owned by the society, it can exert consensual
digital governance within those territories on all who opted in b
Network states use social smart contracts where citizens opt-in to digital governance by signing with their ENS names, similar to depositing coins on a centralized exchange.
Digital enforcement includes freezing deposits and locking ENS access after digital trials, but offers more consent than current systems because citizens can choose between multiple startup societies.
Physical law enforcement remains delegated to legacy societies until network states achieve diplomatic recognition, while physical policing increasingly relies on autonomous robots controlled digitally.
Virtual capitals serve as cloud assembly points starting from Discord channels and evolving into VR/AR metaverse environments where citizens can collaboratively design physical nodes using virtual architectural blueprints.
y signing the
socialsmartcontract. Forexample, ifsomeonemisbehaveswithinagivenstartup-
society-owned jurisdiction, after a Kleros-style digital trial, their deposits could
be frozen and their ENS locked out of all doors for a time period as a punishment. This is at ļ¬rst blush similar to whatās already happening in both the West and
China, where Canadian trucker funds are being frozen and WeChat QR codes are
being used as instruments of digital control...but with one enormous diļ¬erence,
which is that ifwe can build many diļ¬erent startup societies to choose from,
thenthere is much more practical consent of the governed, because there are
many startup societies to choose from with explicit social smart contracts. Essentially, the key insight is that āgovernmentā is becoming synonymous with
digital government. In any US-establishment- controlled territory your Google
account will soon be frozen for crossing the US establishment. In any CCP-
controlled territory your WeChat account can be frozen for crossing the CCP. But
in any crypto-anarchic territory there may not be much in the way of functional
digital services at all. So if one wants modernity constrained by cryptography, the
concept of the āsocial smart contractā is one way to achieve consensual, limited
government ā to limit what a government can do by tightly limiting its access to
your digital identity and resources, much like you can control exactly how much
you deposit onto a centralized exchange. That sounds good at ļ¬rst. Then it sounds bad. Because if governance is limited
solely to the digital realm, only to on-chain assets and smart locks, how does a
startup society deal with physical criminals? The short answer is that for a long
time, it doesnāt ā it leaves that to the surrounding legacy society, much like a
centralized crypto exchange collaborates with traditional oļ¬ine law enforcement. Eventually, if and when that startup society becomes a network state ā in the
sense of achieving diplomatic recognition from a legacy sovereign ā then it can
potentially take on physical law enforcement duties. In the meantime, physical law enforcement itself is gradually turning into some-
thing done with autonomous robots - whether they be legged robodogs, rolling
cameras, or ļ¬ying drones. So more law enforcement is being done from a com-
mand line. And that trend gradually converges with the concept of digital law
enforcement by a network state. To summarize: when we say that a network state has āconsensual government
limited by a social smart contractā, we mean that it exercises authority over
a digital (and, eventually, physical) sphere constituted solely of those people
whoāve opted in to its governance by signing a social smart contract with their
ENS names, in much the same way they might āopt inā to the governance of a
centralized exchange by depositing coins there. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 227
ā¢A virtual capital. A network state is physically distributed, but its people still
digitally assemble in one place. That cloud assembly point could initially be
something as modest as a Discord channel, but will eventually be a private sub-
network of the open metaverse. That means a virtual reality (VR) environment
with parts that can be seamlessly projected into the physical world with aug-
mented reality (AR) glasses, so that you can see digital people, buildings, or
objects in the real world, like this. Access to a network stateās virtual capital,
like everything else in a network state, is gated by web3 login limited to citizens. The most ambitious version of this allows community members to gather online
to create virtual architectural blueprints for new physical nodes of the network
state, as per this tweet. The reason this is feasible is that architecture is moving
to VR. You could imagine a much higher resolution version of Minecraft that
gets materialized into the physical world by a crowdfunded contractor (or by
community members with construction experience themselves).
Network states must conduct real-time on-chain censuses proving population, income, and real estate footprint to establish credibility with skeptical observers.
Blockchain technology enables proof-of-human, proof-of-income, and proof-of-real-estate verification to create verifiable statistics about startup societies.
Diplomatic recognition from existing governments distinguishes network states from startup societies, similar to how NASDAQ listing distinguishes public companies from startups.
Essential components like social networks and recognized founders cannot be removed from the network state definition without fundamentally breaking the concept.
Think about the
scene from Fight Club where the camera swivels around the room to show price
tags on everything, and now imagine that in VR, with the cost to materialize
each virtual structure in the physical world hovering above it. ā¢An on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate
footprint. A distributed society needs a distributed census. Unlike the US census,
and more like Facebookās census of its userbase, a startup societyās census can be
conducted in real-time rather than every ten years. But a skeptical world wonāt
just take those numbers on faith, given a ļ¬edgling startup societyās incentive
to overestimate them. They may trust the US government, or even Facebook
(a public company) on its audited user numbers, but not some upstart startup
society - not without some proof. But how do you prove that a given startup society reallyhas 10,000 residents
and one billion dollars in annual income and 10M square meters in its real es-
tate footprint? Each of these elements can be established via on-chain data. We
already have techniques for proof-of-human, proof-of-income (via on-chain ac-
counting) and proof-of-real-estate (via blockchain real estate). We can get into
technical detail on how you solve the ācrypto oracle problemā of getting oļ¬-chain
data reliably onto the blockchain, but the short version is that you can use a sta-
tistical estimator to take into account the fact that individual oracles may have
errors. By accumulating the censuses of all startup societies in a hypothetical
nationrealestatepop.com site similar to coinmarketcap.com , you could track
in realtime the number of startup society members, the acreage of real estate
owned by those members, and their on-chain GDP.7
ā¢Attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. Now we come to the main event:
7The same techniques a network state uses to prove its ownnumbers on chain can be used to create
so-called āshadow statisticsā that replace the oļ¬cial statistics of legacy governments. For example,
if you donāt believe the US government numbers for inļ¬ation, youād do something like the post at
thenetworkstate.com/inļ¬ation to generate an alternative on-chain dashboard for inļ¬ation. 228 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
diplomatic recognition. Diplomatic recognition by a pre-existing government is
what distinguishes a network state from a startup society, just as ādiplomatic
recognitionā by an exchange like the NASDAQ distinguishes a public company
from a startup. Diplomatic recognition requires a putative state to have clout, and clout is in
turn established by a publicly veriļ¬able on-chain census of population, income,
and real estate, to provethat your growing society is as large as you say it is. Thatās why the aforementioned census is important. Putting all that together, we can see that the deļ¬nition of a network state culminates
in attaining diplomatic recognition from a pre-existing government, which requires far
more substance, leadership, physical presence, and long-term commitment than a typ-
ical online community, or even a cryptocurrency. It may be a LARP, but itās not done
on a lark. Breaking the Deļ¬nition
You can start to see why we have several parts to the deļ¬nition. If you subtract one
part you get something that doesnāt quite match our intuition of what the next version
of the nation state should be. Letās do that, subtracting each part just to see how it
breaks. ā¢No social network. If thereās no social network, you have no digital proļ¬les,
no messaging, no community fora, no mass media, and no easy way to recruit
from the internet. Youād essentially be living an Amish life, relying on pieces of
paper or oļ¬ine cues to determine who was part of your new state and how they
interacted. This isnāt going to succeed the nation state. ā¢No recognized founder. With no recognized leader, you have no way of making
contentious decisions or setting the agenda.8A founder is the best kind of leader,
because they have t
Network states require legitimate leadership through founding rather than force, unlike dictatorships or media oligarchies that impose authority.
Essential components include national consciousness, collective action capacity, and in-person civility to function as a cohesive society.
Financial sovereignty through integrated cryptocurrency is crucial after widespread deplatforming events affecting truckers and entire nations.
Physical territory archipelagos are necessary for substantive parallel societies and to be taken seriously as nation-state successors, while virtual capital prevents the centralization weaknesses that historically doomed city-states.
he legitimacy associated with building an organization from
scratch. Unlike a dictator, their authority isnāt forcedupon the population, and
anyone can exit at any time. And unlike a media oligarchy, a founderās authority
doesnāt arise from propagandistic bombardment but from free choice. ā¢No sense of national consciousness. If there is no sense of national consciousness,
there is no nation underpinning the network state. Itās just a bunch of random
people with nothing in common. ā¢No capacity for collective action. A group of people that lacks a capacity for
collective action - like most online communities, frankly - isnāt going to get any-
where.9Even if they have national consciousness, without the capacity to orga-
8This seems obviously bad, but because itās easier to split up power than to consolidate it, you
see this failure mode all the time - in San Franciscoās vetocracy, in the Polish Parliament, in public
companies with too many board members, in bureaucratic DAOs, and in co-ops. 9This is also why ultra-libertarian startup societies tend to fail. Theyāre right about the desirability
of founding new societies, but wrong in their estimate of how much cooperation and self-sacriļ¬ce is 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 229
nize (which arises in part from a leader), they certainly canāt build a state. ā¢No in-person level of civility. A group of people that constantly tears each other
down wonāt build an outhouse together, let alone a state. More deeply, the folks
who throw around slogans like ācivility is tone policingā or ākill your heroesā are
actually engaged in endless status competition , because they have rejected the
current hierarchy but not yet accepted a new one. In a functioning, legitimate
hierarchy (see diagram here) thereās a mechanism for dispute resolution that
doesnāt involve summoning a mob for every slight. ā¢No integrated cryptocurrency. After the ļ¬nancial deplatforming of Western proles
and foreign elites, of Canadian truckers and 145M Russians, itās clear that digital
ļ¬nance is a weapon of war. So without a sovereign digital currency (and, more
generally, a sovereign system of record) there is no sovereignty.10
ā¢No archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories. You can do many things
online, but not everything. Without physical territory you canāt build FDA-
free zones, or NRC-free areas, or the Keto Kosher community, or many kinds
of substantive parallel societies. You also canāt meet, mate, mingle, and do all
the other things humans do in person. And most importantly youāre not going
to be taken seriously as a successor to the nation state without a large physical
footprint. The approach of knitting together crowdfunded physical territory into
a network archipelago addresses these issues. ā¢No virtual capital. Network states are not city states. City states were defeated
by nation states for a reason: they are physically centralized and have limited
scale. So particularist city states populated by small ethnic groups get rolled up
by universalist nation states (or empires) with many ethnic groups.11
needed to build said societies. Basically, the libertarian is correctly calibrated on how foolish it is to
contribute to āsocial cooperationā in a declining-trust society like todayās US, where the establishment
isessentiallyscammingitssubjectsoutoftheirlifesavings(viainļ¬ation)andtheirlives(viainvasions). But the libertarian often overcorrects, not realizing that while low trust is the optimal strategy for a
failing state, high trust will be needed to build a desirable high-trust society. In other words, you just
need a diļ¬erent mindset for living in a failing state than when building a startup society. 10Note that this is complementary to Bitcoin. Just as any investor can choose to either hold shares
in a corporation or liquidate them for dollars, they can now choose to hold dollars or liquidate them
for Bitcoin. So too can they choose to hold a network stateās integrated cryptocurrency, or liquidate
it for Bitcoin
Network states can issue their own cryptocurrencies that compete with Bitcoin, motivated by both growth potential and ideological alignment with the state's vision.
The financial system evolves through three versions: traditional fiat currency, Bitcoin-only systems, and new opt-in fiat currencies backed by Bitcoin's power.
Network states require virtual capitals stored on blockchain rather than physical ones to avoid invasion and centralization risks from traditional nation states.
Cryptographically auditable census data is essential for network state legitimacy, requiring transparent and verifiable population, income, and real estate metrics that others can independently verify.
if they donāt believe that network state will grow faster than BTC. For example, they might think the global Bitcoin economy will grow at only 5% per year start-
ing in 2035, but that this network state will grow in annual income at 50% per year. Growth is of
course not the only reason to buy and hold a network stateās cryptocurrency - thereās also a consump-
tion/patriotism reason. For example, you want to see that network state succeed, because you want
to see a post-FDA world or Keto Kosher society emerge. Issuing a new digital ļ¬at currency for a new state does not mean weāre just coming āfull circle.ā Itās
the helical theory of history, where itās a cycle on some dimensions and an advance on others. Think
of it as a version 3.0 of the ļ¬nancial system: from the v1 of bad ļ¬at dollars to the v2 of Bitcoin-only
to the v3 of new opt-in ļ¬at currencies checked by the power of Bitcoin. 11San Marino is the exception that proves the rule, the only surviving city state that didnāt get
rolled up into a 20th century universalist empire. 230 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
Thatās the reason a network state has a virtual capital rather than a physical one. Think of it as āremote-ļ¬rst,ā but for a society. In a remote company, nothing
oļ¬cially exists unless itās online, in an internal system of record like GitHub. Similarly, in a remote society, nothing oļ¬cially exists unless itās on-chain, in the
blockchain system of record for that society. Put another way: if you donāt consciously set the capital of your network state
to be virtual, itāll be physical. And if itās physical, the capital is centralized in
one place, and can get invaded by a nation state. But if itās instead a virtual
capital, with a backend that is encrypted and on-chain, then - in the fullness of
time - you can host an entire subset of the metaverse there, assuming blockspace
increases as bandwidth did. ā¢No on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate
footprint. The US Census is in the US Constitution for a reason; you need to
know something about your people to run a government. But for a network state,
the challenges are diļ¬erent than those that faced the Founding Fathers. The hard part isnāt how to collectthe data; with modern technology it can be
slurped up and dashboarded in real-time, rather than collected every ten years
on millions of pieces of paper. No, the hard part is getting people to believethe
data, given the huge incentives for faking the numbers.12
That means establishing a cryptographically auditable information supply chain,
a transparent way of gathering the numbers for the network state census. That
means showing the work so that people donāt needto trust you, and can run the
computation themselves.13
Why is this important? Think again about the emergence of Bitcoin. Price was a
signal, asignalofstrength. Millionsoftradesacrossdozensofexchangesproduced
a signal that was reliable enough for companies and eventually governments to
act upon. Price is why Bloomberg listed Bitcoin on a ticker in 2013. And price
is why El Salvador recognized Bitcoin as a sovereign currency in 2021. Weāre not
talking about the short-term price here, which is and will be highly volatile, but
the long-term price - the secular trend. Similarly, if people can check for themselves that thereās a startup society that
has built itself into an network archipelago with 10M square meters of land, over
12Think about how much people want to be in the top 30 coins on Coinmarketcap, or at the top
of the Substack leaderboard, or among the list of unicorns. I agree with Thiel that often the goal
is to escape competition. But competition can also sometimes be good, as it incentivizes people to
work harder to win. And the competition to build startup societies into network states with large
populations, incomes, and real estate footprints can be good...so long as we set it up from the start
with an eye towards cryptographic auditability. 13Pa
Organizations that transparently show their work build more trust than those that simply demand it, as outsiders can independently verify claims.
Diplomatic recognition is essential for network states to become legitimate, as without it they face invasion risks and lack access to sovereign privileges like trade deals and debt markets.
Micronations fail because they lack both organic communities and legitimacy, having no answer to questions of military backing or recognized authority.
The network state system differs from nation states by being digital-first, composed of national networks that self-identify as nations and governance networks that function differently from typical social media companies.
radoxically, the organization that demands trust can get less of it, while the organization that
shows their work - thereby not asking for trust - builds up more of it. This is rational: if an outsider
can independently conļ¬rm every claim that can reasonably be checked, they have more reason to give
the organization beneļ¬t of the doubt on claims that cannot be so checked. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 231
10 billion dollars in annual income, and 100k people, then that starts to become
a society worthy of diplomatic recognition. ā¢No measure of diplomatic recognition. Many libertarians donāt get the concept
of diplomatic recognition, just like many progressives donāt get the desirability of
starting new countries, so this point is worth discussing. What happens if you donāt have diplomatic recognition? Then you arenāt in the
club of legitimate states. That means any government can invade you at will,
and the others will just shrug. It also means you donāt have access to things like
sovereign debt markets. You canāt ink trade or passport deals. You likely canāt
buy many goods and services that corporations or states sell only to other states,
because youāre not considered a legitimate government by the rest of the market. You certainly canāt write new regulations for your jurisdiction, because others do
not recognize your lawful authority over that jurisdiction, and can (again) invade
you at will. Basically, without diplomatic recognition, you arenāt considered real. Thatās why
micronations donāt work. They have no organic community, so they have no
answer to the question of āyou and what army?ā And even more importantly, no
answer to the question of āyou and what legitimacy?ā
You can think of diplomatic recognition by a pre-existing state as a ānon-binding
commitment to not invade.ā Subsequent to recognition, the startup society now
gains the ability to write laws governing the physical world in their patch of
territory without being invaded - at least by the recognizing state.14This is why
werequirediplomatic recognition in the deļ¬nition of a network state. This gives you a sense of why each of the parts of the deļ¬nition exist. A network state
is at least as complex as a nation state, but the diļ¬erence is that the latter already
exists, so we take for granted how it works. Whatās next? Once the ļ¬rst diplomatic recognition comes, and the ļ¬rst true network
state arises, more will follow. That means we need to start thinking about the network
state system. 14There are many intermediate forms here. Weāll call out two. First, the pre-existing government
that ļ¬rst recognizes the network state - the ābootstrap recognizerā - may not be a UN member. It
could instead be a city or province. Think about how Wyoming passed a DAO law and Miamiās mayor
took a salary in Bitcoin, well before the US government as a whole formally embraced cryptocurrency. Even a positive press release by a city about a ļ¬edgling startup society gets it on base, moving them
incrementally to the ultimate goal of recognition by sovereign states and eventually membership in
the UN (or whatever succeeds it). Second, diplomatic recognition is a negotiation, not a blank check. A sovereign state that recognizes
another may revoke that recognition if the second one starts legalizing heroin or becomes a base for
terrorism. Or it may just actlike itās revoking recognition, without formally doing so. 232 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
5.3.2 What is the Network State System? The next step is to outline the assumptions of the network state system as a whole. Read this and compare it to those of the nation state system. ā¢Digital ļ¬rst. The digital network of the internet is primary. ā¢Composition . A network state is composed of a national network (the equivalent
of the nation) and a governance network (the analog of the state). Unlike a
typical social network, a national network self-identiļ¬es as a nation. Unlike a
typical social network company, a governance network is
š Network states achieve sovereignty through private key cryptography rather than traditional military power, making it difficult for foreign rivals to seize control of legitimate governments.
š¤ Digital diplomatic recognition between network states operates through blockchain interoperability, allowing citizens to transfer their digital assets and records when moving between states.
āļø Public blockchains function as international law for network states, facilitating cooperation while cryptographically constraining state power through binding code.
āæ Bitcoin serves as the ultimate guarantor of the network state system, acting as a 'government of governments' that prevents monetary manipulation and limits state overreach.
š The system assumes a 'digital first' world where all significant human activities begin online and physical reality becomes downstream of code rather than paper laws.
i-
vate keys (so foreign states and corporations cannot interfere in domestic aļ¬airs)
and by enabling exit (so citizens can execute ļ¬nancial and electoral votes of no
conļ¬dence if need be, both as individuals and as groups). ā¢International sovereignty via cryptography. For a network state, sovereignty is
private keys. If access to the aforementioned administrative interface is con-
trolled by private keys rather than a username/password combination, then the
same encryption techniques that make it diļ¬cult for an outsider to seize an indi-
vidualās private keys can make it diļ¬cult for a foreign rival to steal a legitimate
governmentās private keys. This is a completely new way of defending sovereignty,
a complement and/or replacement for the military. ā¢Digital diplomatic recognition. Networkstatescanrecognizeeachotherbilaterally
(similar to an API integration) or multilaterally ( e.g., by supporting the same
blockchains). When people exit to other network states, whether digitally or
physically, they bring their most valuable possessions with them in the form of
private keys. Some of these keys give access to property in global blockchains,
others give access to physical goods like cars and houses, and still others give
access to records hosted on state-run chains, like their netizen proļ¬le in the
network state they just left. Diplomatic recognition is then about interoperability
and compatibility: are the ļ¬le formats and on-chain records used by one network
state honored by another? ā¢Chains manage cooperation and constraint. Public blockchains are the equivalent
of international law in a network state system. They facilitate economic and 234 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
social cooperation between network states and their netizens, but also constrain
those states with cryptographically binding code. ā¢Pax Bitcoinica. The ultimate guarantor of exit, and of the network state system
at large, is Bitcoin. As cryptocurrency rises in strength, Bitcoin or something like
it becomes a government of governments. It sits above every state and constrains
it from printing inļ¬nite quantities of money, from lawlessly seizing the funds of its
citizens, and from waging forever war. In doing so, it limits that which will never
limit itself. And even if the Bitcoin protocol speciļ¬cally fails, or its cryptography
has a bug, the concept of cryptocurrency and the choice it represents will not
disappear from this earth. Assumption: Digital Primary, Physical Secondary
One point we touched on above, but that bears repeating, is that the network state
system assumes the world has ļ¬ipped to digital ļ¬rst : all nontrivial human-created
events start in the cloud and then, if important, are āprinted outā into the physical
world. Think about anything a human does today: all oļ¬ce work is online, as is much social-
ization. Courts are now online, as are politicians. So is money. So is agriculture, and
manufacturing, and shipping. The phone has indeed become the remote control for
the world. Many previously oļ¬ine devices ā cars, doors, desks, weights, coļ¬eemakers,
even toothbrushes ā are coming online. Even pacemakers leave a digital trace. The physical still exists, of course. There are still physical human beings, there are
still physical plots of land, there are still physical rivers and mountains. And for some
law enforcement and military functions a network state will need physical robots. But in a network state, everything physical is downstream of lines of code and enforced
by cryptography, just as in a nation state, everything physical is downstream of pieces
of paper and enforced by the police and military. Assumption: The State Becomes An Admin Dashboard
A second assumption is that once every interface is digital, it can be put online. And
once online, in the absence of private keys, it can be centrally controlled. So, the network state system assumes that states like the USA and PRC will continue
centralizing the power of their tech
š Network states operate as digital governments with invisible subnetworks and unclaimed digital territories like domain names and metaverse plots.
š„ Citizens can migrate both digitally and physically between multiple network states, holding membership in several simultaneously unlike traditional nation-states.
š Legitimacy derives from voluntary consent and cryptographic protection, ensuring free choice and basic rights like speech and property without coercion.
āļø Governance networks write laws in code enforced by cryptography, creating polycentric law where people can switch between different administrative providers.
š„ļø Network states maintain root access to control all digital infrastructure from money to dwellings, checking tech company power through distributed governance.
set up by that national
network as the legitimate government of that digital people. ā¢Terra incognita returns. The network state system assumes many pieces of the
internet will become invisible to other subnetworks. In particular, small network
states may adopt invisibility as a strategy; you canāt hit what you canāt see. ā¢Terra nullius returns. The network state system further assumes that unclaimed
digitalterritoryalwaysexistsintheformofnewdomainnames,cryptousernames,
plotsoflandinthemetaverse, socialmediahandles, andaccountsonnewservices. ā¢Bottom-up migration of people. The network state system embraces the fuzzy
divisionoftheinternetintodiļ¬erentsovereignsubnetworks. Itisaprobabilistic
digital division of peoplerather than a deterministic physical division
ofland.People migrate digitally and physically between network states; the
citizenry is as dynamic as the land of a nation state is static. ā¢N networks per citizen. Unlike the nation state system, where most people have
citizenship in only one state, in the network state system, every person can in
principle be a member of more than one state, just as they can hold passports
in more than one country, or be holders of more than one cryptocurrency, or be
users of more than one social network. Of course, they can spend most of their
time in one network state. ā¢Legitimacy from physical migration and digital choice. The power of network
states is constrained by consent and cryptography. First, recall that the gover-
nance network of a given network state is the analog to the state of a traditional
country. This governance network only has control over those digital citizens (ne-
tizens) that have opted in, individually or collectively, to its governance, much as
one explicitly signs an employment contract when joining a company or implicitly
signs a social contract when stepping across a border. A given national network
can choose a governance network as an administrator, thereby forming (or join-
ing) a network state with an on-chain record of their collective decision. Or an
individual can join a network state on their own. Cryptography ensures that
this choice is demonstrably free and uncoerced, because no state can easily seize
an individualās private keys. Cryptography further guarantees basic rights like
freedom of speech, free migration, private property, freedom of digital assembly
and the like, so long as each user has exclusive access to their private keys. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 233
ā¢Decentralized administration. The group of people that administers a network
state, which we call a governance network, is composed of a founder/chief execu-
tive and their engineers. They write laws in code to specify what is mandatory,
encouraged, discouraged, and forbidden. These laws are interpreted by impar-
tial servers and enforced by cryptography. In the network state system, each
social subnetwork can choose which governance network administers them, as
determined both by their physical location and where their digital property lies. Over time, this means polycentric law: people in a given physical area can switch
between network states (and thus governance providers) just as they switch be-
tween Uber and Lyft as taxi regulators, or Bitcoin and Ethereum as monetary
regulators. ā¢Domestic monopoly of root access. Thegovernancenetworkofanetworkstatehas
root access to an administrative interface where law enforcement can ļ¬ip digital
switches as necessary to maintain or restore domestic order, just like the sysad-
mins of todayās tech companies. Of course, postulating the existence of such an
interface presupposes a world where everything from money to messaging, doors
to dwellings, farms to factories, ļ¬ying drones to walking droids can be controlled
from a single computer ā but that world isnāt far oļ¬, and today there are few
checks on the digital power of the tech companies that are bringing it into being. The network state system checks this power in two ways: by maintaining pr
Current digital power operates transnationally without consent, creating an all-seeing surveillance system that can deplatform and sanction millions at will.
Network states propose dividing the world by voluntary network membership rather than geographic territory, similar to how the Peace of Westphalia divided power by land.
Citizens gain power through cryptographic and physical exit rights, allowing them to freely choose or leave network states rather than being bound by birth location.
Network states derive legitimacy from bottom-up consent of opted-in citizens rather than top-down declarations, with incompetent states losing members to exit.
The network functions as nation, territory, and state simultaneously - forming communities online, creating digital territories in the metaverse, and enforcing laws through code.
companies into one all-seeing dashboard, capable
of surveilling, deplatforming, freezing, and sanctioning millions at once, or anyone at
will. This digital power is currently exercised transnationally and without the consent
of the governed. They have no true free choice of administrator. The network state system assumes that we canāt fully put this genie back in the bottle,
but we can constrain it. Speciļ¬cally, we grant that every legitimate state will need
such power to govern its subnetwork, for the same reason any centralized service needs
a system administrator with root access. But we also build decentralized services that 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 235
do not have any single system administrator, and tools for the physical and digital exit
of citizens. Assumption: Divide Networks Rather than Land
Justasinthepre-Westphalianperiod, wheretheCatholicChurchexertedtransnational
control, the digital power wielded by the American and Chinese empires invalidates
traditional notions of sovereignty. The Peace of Westphalia equivalent is a network
state system that limits the digital power of states solelyto those who have opted in. Just as post-Westphalian nation states were limited in control to people within their
territory, post-Satoshian network states will be limited in control to people whoāve
opted into their network. It is a division of the world by network rather than by land. Assumption: Consent and Cryptography Constrain
So, inshort, intheworldofthenetworkstate, bothstatesandcitizensalikearepowered
up. Network states have a root dashboard with full access to every digital aspect of the
network they govern. They also have security from outside interference because access
to these dashboards is gated via private keys rather than passwords. However, this immense digital power is typically deployed nonviolently (unlike with
existing states) and constrained by cryptographic and physical exit, rather than by
paper laws or toothless treaties. This is what powers up citizens, who freely choose
whether to enter or exit, either collectively or individually. Thus, the legitimacy of a network state comes not from top-down declamations, but
from bottom-up consent, as each netizen has opted in. A truly oppressive or incompe-
tent network state loses them to exit, or doesnāt gain citizens in the ļ¬rst place. And
no state is strong enough to block the ultimate exit that cryptocurrency represents. 5.3.3 The Network State as a Term
We can unpack the term ānetwork stateā in several useful and complementary ways. 1.The network is the nation. The organic, voluntary, bottom-up nation that un-
derpins the state is formed online in a network. This could be on the basis of
language, culture, proposition, or some combination thereof. This represents a
digital remedy to the phenomenon Putnam identiļ¬ed in Bowling Alone . In the
year 2000, we were bowling alone but by 2020 we were posting together. COVID-
19 accelerated this process ā people were spread apart in the physical world but
packed together online. 2.The network is the territory. VR isnāt yet fully mature, but when it is, weāll
identify the territory of a network state as a subnetwork of the open metaverse. We can understand this if we think about domain names, social proļ¬les, and ENS
names ā digital land can be created for free, but access to that land can become
very valuable (and, when deplatforming is in the cards, very contentious). The 236 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
analogy to land goes very deep ā to fully understand it, you need to understand
graph layouts, but in short you can make maps of networks given any graph
adjacency matrix. And if you use the distance metric of ānumber of degrees of
separation in a social network,ā that looks quite diļ¬erent from the map you get
from a geographical distance matrix. 3.The network is the state. How does a network state create and enforce laws? Digitally. ItāsLockeāsjustiļ¬cationofthestateastheprotectorofprivateproperty,
in the
Traditional paper-based legal systems will become obsolete as smart contracts and blockchain-based governance create more efficient, testable law enforcement mechanisms.
The Network represents a new form of Leviathan that combines community and cryptography as the ultimate source of power, replacing traditional God/State authority structures.
Network states integrate four key elements: the people (national network), digital territory (metaverse), governance rules, and enforcement power all within a unified blockchain framework.
Unlike traditional nations where people precede states, network founders must focus on 'nation discovery' - finding existing communities with unexpressed national identities rather than building from scratch.
Major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter failed as quasi-governments because they lacked legitimate social contracts and proper digital property rights frameworks.
form of a digital registry. And itās Lessigās code-is-law, but on-chain. Our
entire antiquated process of adversarially writing high-stakes laws on paper at
the last minute, deploying them in production to hundreds of millions of people
without any testing, and then getting them interpreted in unpredictable ways by
regulators and solicitors will be seen as a bizarre relic of an older time. Paper
laws will go the way of powdered wigs. 4.The Network is the Leviathan. Here, we capitalize Network as itās being used
in the sense of God, State, Network. The Network here is a candidate for the
most powerful force in the world, where the Leviathan in the Hobbesian sense
is not divinity (God) or military (the State) but community and cryptography
(Network). From this viewpoint, the Network State can be seen as a fusion of
Leviathans, like the God/State combination of the mid-century USA, where the
Marines fought for āGod and Countryā and where Americans pledged allegiance
to the ļ¬ag āunder God.ā
So: in a network state, the network is the lives (national network), the land (metaverse
subnet), the law (governance network), and the Leviathan (Bitcoin network) all packed
into one. Itās the people, the digital territory they occupy, the rules that bind them,
and the power that enforces those laws. 5.3.4 Micronetworks and Multinetworks
We noted earlier that a micronation is really a microstate, and many ānation statesā
are actually multinational empires. These concepts generalize to networks. We can think of a micronetwork as a startup that intends to build a social network,
but has zero users. So a micronetwork is like a micronation that plants a ļ¬ag, but
has zero citizens. Similarly, a multinetwork like Facebook is a billion-person-scale
socialnetworkwithmanysubnetworksunderonecompany...justlikethemultinational
Roman Empire, where many diļ¬erent groups were ruled by one state. Perhaps thereās
a reason Zuck admires Augustus. But the analogy breaks down in an important way. Startups create Networks, but Nations create States
In a āmicronetwork,ā aka a startup, the startup createsthe network that it ends up
managing, both in the sense of the people in that network and the digital domain itself. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 237
Zuck came ļ¬rst, then registered thefacebook.com ; only then came the users. But in a
real nation, the people and their physical domain precedethe state. For example, the
Japanese people and islands predate the current Japanese government. Thatās one way people went wrong with micronations. You canāt just treat them like
a normal startup where you start with one person and build an impersonal product! The prospective network state founder needs to think about ānation buildingā from day
one. Thatās not just community building on steroids ā ideally, that nation building
process is really nation discovery . In other words, thereās an existing community out
there with an unexpressed national identity at the top of their identity stack, and they
want to crowdfund territory and build their decentralized Zion. The network state is
then just a catalyst for this. Startups create Networks, but Startups arenāt States
Of course, people have also gone wrong with the startup-to-state analogy in a diļ¬erent
way: by thinking startups could act just like states without a legitimating process. Suppose we try the analogy that āstate is to a startup as nation is to network.ā That
is, just as a state manages a nation and sets its laws, a startup like early Facebook or
Twitter manages a social network and sets its policy. This worked, until it didnāt. Facebook and Twitter have succeeded beyond anyoneās
expectations, yet they werenāt set up to be governments. People didnāt consciously
sign a social contract to be governed by them. Facebook and Twitter grew to take over
much of peopleās lives, but have no concept of digital property rights. Seizures and
silencing werenāt part of the bargain. StartupscreateCentralizedNetworks, butChainscreateDecentrali
Two key approaches can add legitimacy to centralized networks: freeing the backend (creating decentralized infrastructure like Bitcoin) and freeing the login (enabling web3 authentication that allows user contact outside the platform).
True network states require decentralized features that give users the right to exit with all their digital assets, unlike current platforms where users are essentially locked in without their valuable data.
Social networks can be categorized into 0-networks (startups with no users), 1-networks (coherent communities), and N-networks (massive global platforms), with only 1-networks serving as viable bases for network states.
N-networks like Facebook or Twitter represent billions of users unified only by superficial desires rather than coherent communities, making them equivalent to multinational empires that lack the cohesion necessary for legitimate governance.
zedNet-
works
There are at least two ways to add genuine choice, and hence legitimacy, to centralized
networks. 1.Free the backend. On a free spot of land, you can have a nation without a
governing state. Similarly, if we had a free region of the cloud, we could have
a network without a governing startup. Thatās what Satoshi did: he reopened
the frontier, gave us a cloud without corporations. He showed us how to create
digital networks without any single centralized authority. One extension of that
gives us decentralized social networks, the basis for an open metaverse. So thatās
one way to solve the problem: build digital land that isnāt controlled by any
single startup. Anyone on that land could then freely choose between governance
networks. 2.Free the login. The other, related way out is to retroļ¬t an existing centralized
socialnetworktoenableweb3login, suchthatuserscancontacteachother outside
the service and their usernames are not locked into the system. Note that this 238 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
is far more substantive than merely allowing users to āexport their dataā ā itās
more like the capability to message your followers without Facebook or Twitterās
permission. Only Decentralized Networks can give rise to Network States
Without one or ideally both of these features (decentralized backend and decentralized
login), a micronetwork might grow into a multinetwork, just like 0-person Facebook
became 3 billion-person Facebook...but it wouldnāt have the legitimation of exit that
enables a true network state. The millions of people on current platforms (and future
ones) must be given the option to leave15withall their digital valuables in order for
their stay to be considered uncoerced. 5.3.5 0-network, 1-network, N-networks
We know that multinational empires tend to have the same failure modes as microna-
tions: the state doesnāt actually represent a single distinct people, and thus fails on
that basis. Towards that end, itās worth taking the overloaded term of āsocial networksā and disag-
gregating it into 0-networks, 1, networks, and N-networks, just as we did for microna-
tions, nation states, and multinational empires. Hereās a concrete example:
ā¢0-network : Facebook at inception, 1 person founder, no users
ā¢1-network : Facebook at Harvard, one month after founding
ā¢N-network : Facebook today, 3+ billion users
And hereās the underlying deļ¬nitions that inform that example:
ā¢0-network : an aspirational social network startup with no users
ā¢1-network : a coherent community
ā¢N-network : a massive global network of networks
In more detail:
A0-network is a startup with aspirations for creating a large social network, messaging
app, two-sided marketplace, crypto exchange, or other digital watering hole where
15Think about the diļ¬erence between the employees of Facebook Inc, vs the users of Facebook. The
former can leave with their salaries and vested equity, and as such are OK with Zuck having total
control as CEO. The latter are locked in, and cannot leave, and did not realize how valuable their
digital property was to them. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 239
people interact. Note that not every online service ļ¬ts this deļ¬nition; some apps like
Mathematica or Photoshop are pure utilities.16
AnN-network is the equivalent of a multinational empire. Itās nota good base for a
network state, for the simple reason that it doesnāt represent a single nation, a set of
coherent people. For example, the 300M users of Twitter or the 3B+ users of Facebook
are uniļ¬ed by nothing more than a desire for likes. Of course, some of the subnetworks
of an N-network may have enough asabiyyah to form a network state. A1-network is the basis for a network state, something like a focused subreddit, a
moderated Facebook group, a PHP BB forum, a large Telegram channel, or the follow-
ing of a single Twitter inļ¬uencer. Of course, not all subreddits would be 1-networks,
butr/ketowith its intense dietary culture is much closer than a globa
Nations can be redefined as densely connected subgraphs in social networks, where people cluster more tightly with each other than with outsiders based on various distance metrics.
Six key distance metrics define national clustering: geographic, network, genetic, linguistic, economic, and ideological distances between individuals.
A computational approach using machine learning can identify 1-networks (proto-nations) by analyzing these distance metrics on large social networks like Twitter with 300M users.
This mathematical framework transforms the traditionally fuzzy concept of nationhood into quantifiable, data-driven analysis that can automatically detect emerging network states.
l forum like
r/worldnews . A 1-network typically has some basic form of moderation (a moderator
can ban you, an inļ¬uencer can block you), some community norms, and mechanisms
for enforcement. It doesnāt have allthe criteria of a nation ā the shared language,
customs, history, and culture ā but itās like a proto-nation. The following of a single large YouTube or Twitter inļ¬uencer is probably the best kind
of 1-network out there, in the sense of a proto-nation for a network state, because it
has shared context and history, as well as pointers towards a leader who can act as a
dispute resolver. 5.3.6 What is a (National) Network? We now have a few deļ¬nitions in hand:
ā¢the properties of a nation
ā¢the idea of a network state as a combination of a national network (the people)
and a governance network (the state)
ā¢and the just-introduced concept of a 1-network as a proto-nation, an embryonic
version of the national network that underpins a network state
We also earlier noted that the deļ¬nition of a nation was a bit fuzzy, both in the
dictionary sense and according to diļ¬erent thinkers. With those preliminaries, we can
now give a computational answer to the question of āwhat is a nation?ā
A Verbal Description
You can redeļ¬nea traditional nation as a densely connected subgraph in a social net-
work. Basedonsomemetricāsuchaslinguisticdistance, genomicdistance, ideological
distance, or cryptocurrency holdings ā the nodes of a bona ļ¬de nation should group
more tightly with each other than they do with other networks. 16Though as soon as you name something like that, you start asking whether it might be useful to
build a social network around that tool, just like we have communities of plumbers and electricians. 240 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
In mathematical terms, nations are highly connected subgraphs of a global network
according to one or more network distance metrics, like
ā¢geographic distance : great circle distance on surface of earth
ā¢network distance : degrees of separation in a social network
ā¢genetic distance : eg,Fst(ļ¬xation index) or another measure
ā¢linguistic distance : eg, lexicostatistical measures
ā¢economic distance : eg, 1 ā cosine similarity
ā¢ideological distance : degree of similarity in belief as expressed by spatial theory
of voting
The advantage of this deļ¬nition is that while itās still fuzzy (how connected exactly
does the subgraph have to be? ), itās now amenable to quantitative analysis. Given a
network, a set of distance metrics, and some parameter choices, the subgraphs pop out. By this deļ¬nition, a real nation would have more ingroup than outgroup connections,
more ādomesticā than āinternationalā calls. A Computational Approach
Hereās how youād actually do that computation. ā¢Begin with any large N-network like Twitter with K= 300Musers andNpostu-
lated subnetworks. Calculate any or all of the following distance metrics between
individuals, if you have available data, using the deļ¬nitions from the preceding
section. ādp(geographic distance)
ādn(network distance)
ādg(genetic distance)
ādl(linguistic distance)
āde(economic distance)
ādi(ideological distance)
ā¢Suppose we have six such metrics. Calculate them on Kpeople, to form a K
K6tensor of distances. ā¢Also collect a training set of labeled edges, where two people are marked as being
part of the same 1-network or not, designated by Y= 1. For example, you might
put two English-speaking Bitcoin holders who own guns, subscribe to r/keto,
and follow each other on Twitter in the same 1-network. ā¢Now use any machine learning technique to estimate P(Y= 1jd1::6). Something
like Naive Bayes can work, or something more sophisticated. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 241
ā¢Finally, set a threshold of say P(Y= 1jd1::6)>0:50. All the densely connected
subgraphs that pop out of that process are the 1-networks. Inotherwords, givenasetofpostulatedmeasuresofnationalsimilarity, abitoftraining
data, and a parameter choice, we can clustera large network into subgraph
Network states appear as archipelagos of interconnected enclaves in physical space, with territory crowdfunded globally and linked digitally like Indonesia but separated by internet rather than ocean.
In digital space, network states exist as densely connected subgraphs within social networks, operating with fundamentally different properties than physical space including higher dimensionality and plasticity.
Digital borders between networks are invisible by default, unlike the highly visible borders of nation states, creating a return to 'terra incognita' where network boundaries remain hidden from outside observation.
The re-encryption of the digital world represents a tactical retreat from public exposure, as previous decades saw the entire world uploaded in unencrypted form enabling unprecedented surveillance capabilities.
s. Applied
to continental scale social networks like Facebook and Twitter, weād be able to see
diļ¬erent kinds of clusters pop out for diļ¬erent parameter choices, much like you do
with the lasso. Assuming you could get access to a global dataset like Facebook or Twitterās network
(or scrape it), you could turn all philosophical disputes about what a nation is into
simply a set of parameter choices. That means a nation is a subnetwork in a global
social graph. 5.3.7 What does a Network State look like on a Map? The ļ¬rst thing is to specify which map we mean: a map of the physical world, or of
the digital world? The Physical Map
In physical space, a network state looks like an archipelago of interconnected enclaves. As the dashboard above shows, netizens crowdfund territory around the world, link
those pieces together digitally, and then use technologies like web3 logins and mixed
reality to seamlessly link the online and oļ¬ine. Each such node of the network state represents a group of digital citizens who have
chosen to live together in the physical world. As shown in the dashboard, the network
stateās population, income, and real estate is summed over all netizens across all net-
work nodes. As the state grows, these numbers can, over time, become comparable to
the footprint of legacy nation states, including the real estate footprint. So, a network state is a physically distributed state, a bit like Indonesia, but with its
pieces of land separated by internet rather than ocean. The Digital Map
In digital space, a network state looks like a densely connected subgraph of a large
social network. In our terminology, itās a 1-network, not an N-network. To gain some
intuition for digital space, realize that it is very diļ¬erent from physical space:
ā¢Dimensionality . Youdonāthavejustthetwodimensionsoflatitudeandlongitude,
in a complex social network, you might need N dimensions to properly represent
the graph structure. ā¢Plasticity . Imagine one day, South Africa suddenly appeared near NYC, with
a footbridge to connect the two. Thatās like Spotify doing a deal with Uber;
suddenly, two huge networks get bridged and people can start walking across. 242 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
This will become much more obvious as metaverse subnetworks are connected
and disconnected by management on the basis of diplomatic relations between
network states. ā¢Speed. Take a look at the full global footprint of the British Empire at its zenith,
and now realize that Facebook achieved greater global penetration than that in
just a few years. ā¢Elasticity . Itās hard to create more land (Dubai has done some work in the area,
and cruise ships arguably count), but itās easy to create more digital land ā
albeit hard to make it valuable. The value of land is based on location, location,
location, but for digital real estate itās connection, connection, connection. ā¢Invisibility . We take for granted that we can see the Franco/German border, that
we know who is on either side. But no one can really see the Facebook/Twitter
border, the set of users that have accounts on both services but use them both for
roughly 50% of their time online. Borders between nation states are by default
highly visible, borders between networks are by default invisible. This last point is truly deep: weāre going back to terra incognita , toterra nullius , to
the time of secret societies, to the time of āHere Be Dragons.ā The open web is already
dark to all but Google, the social web is already dark to all but Facebook and Twitter
et al., and while the third web will have some parts that are globally transparent, much
of it will be intentionally private and encrypted. This is not a bad thing; in many ways, what we did over the last few decades was
upload the entire world in unencrypted form online. Never before has it been possible
for so many to stalk anyone. The re-encryption of the world has started with a tactical
retreat from public social networks towards Signa
Digital mapping becomes increasingly difficult as online spaces are dynamic and unstable, unlike fixed physical territories that formed the basis of traditional nation-states.
The United States exemplifies a '2-network' state where physically proximate populations are digitally divergent and ideologically opposed, while network states aim for the opposite - physical dispersion but digital alignment.
Network states require focused '1-network' communities rather than fragmented 'N-network' platforms, emphasizing cohesive digital communities over massive but divided user bases.
The path to network state formation follows a startup-like progression: network unions (fully digital organizations), network archipelagos (with crowdfunded physical territory), and finally network states (with diplomatic recognition).
l groups, but it will go much further. We may have hit peak map. Cartography becomes harder in a digital space thatās
darker and more dynamic than the well-lit physical world. Continents, once discovered,
donāt tend to move on you, but the internet brings us back to the time of Pangaea ā
millions of nodes can disconnect and reconnect elsewhere all at once should they see
ļ¬t, and new supercontinents of 100M+ connected users like TikTok can just arise out
of nowhere. In short, our intuitions for digital space are just completely diļ¬erent from physical
space. Weāllreturntothistopic, butrecognizethatitreallyisafundamentaldiļ¬erence:
while the nation state is based on a deterministic physical division of landinto states,
the network state is based on probabilistic digital division of peopleinto subnetworks. Example: Physically Proximal, Digitally Divergent
Take a look at this tweet. It shows that in physical space, the red and blue areas of the
United States are cheek-by-jowl, but in digital space they are wholly disjoint. Thus,
the US is not really a ānationā state. Itās at least a binational state, what weād call a 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 243
2-network, with two strongly connected subgraphs at each otherās throats. These two
nations are packed into the same physical environment, but are far apart mentally. A network state makes the opposite tradeoļ¬. Itās a group of people spread out in
physical space, but highly aligned in digital space. Itās a 1-network, not an N-network. 5.3.8 How is a Network State Founded? We just talked about the need for a 1-network to be the basis of a network state,
unlike an N-network. A 1-network is a focused, moderated community like Ethereum
Research, while an N-network is something like Facebook in the early 2020s, with N
communities under its multibillion-person banner (where N is very large). But thereās another constraint for network state creation beside the 1-network, and
thatās the constraint of reality. Saying āIām founding a network stateā is a little like
saying āIām founding a billion-dollar public company.ā Itās not an impossible goal17,
but itās diļ¬cult, and we want to avoid terminological dilution and encourage realistic
ambition. If we think about the startup community, we have a few deļ¬nitions that allow us to
talk about stages. We have startup companies and tech companies. We have seed, VC,
and growth investors. We have bootstrapped companies and we have venture-backed
companies. We have early stage vehicles, billion-dollar unicorns, and trillion-dollar tech
giants. Along the same lines, letās introduce a few deļ¬nitions that help us establish the path
to the network state. As umbrella terms, weāll use the concepts of startup societies and parallel societies,
whichareroughlyanalogoustostartupsandtechcompaniesrespectively. Likeastartup
(and unlike a small business), a startup society is a small group with ambitions of doing
big things. Like a tech company (and unlike a legacy entity), a parallel society is a
small-to-large group of people with at least one proposed major innovation relative to
how things were done before. As sequential terms, weāll talk about network unions, network archipelagos, and net-
work states. These are roughly analogous to seed, Series B, and public companies
respectively in terms of how much eļ¬ort it takes to build them. A network union is
fully digital but is a real organization with money and a purpose, like a seed startup
that no longer merely exists on paper but has daily todos and folks doing things. A
network archipelago has built up enough money to crowdfund physical territory, like
a Series B company that has earned enough money to be taken more seriously. And a
network state has achieved diplomatic recognition from at least one legacy state, like a
public company that has jumped through all the necessary hoops to be recognized by
the NASDAQ. 17Indeed, the purpose of this book is to show that network states are feasible and desirable, but not
inevitable.
Network unions demonstrate their strength through public displays of alignment, showing organized coordination and mutual cooperation to the world at large.
Positive-sum attention occurs when groups coordinate publicly (like tango dancers, orchestras, or parades), earning admiration and respect from observers who recognize the skill and trust required.
Negative-sum attention results from public infighting within organizations, diminishing the status of all parties involved and signaling dysfunction rather than coordination.
Ritualized conflict (like sports or debates) differs from destructive public disputes because it follows agreed-upon rules and both parties can maintain respect regardless of outcome.
onversely, if theyāve managed to do great things together as
part of a network union, theyāll be able to do more. And that is in fact Renanās deļ¬nition of a nation:
To have done great things together, to want to do more, such are the es-
sential conditions to form a people...Man is not a slave to his race, or his
tongue, or his religion. See also this earlier piece on network unions, before we tightened up some of the
deļ¬nitions. Public Displays of Alignment
Anetworkuniondoesnātjustdoprivateactionsforthecollectivebeneļ¬tofitsmembers. It also does public actions which show the world at large how organized, aligned, self-
sacriļ¬cing, and mutually cooperating the members of the network union are. Call these
public displays of alignment , a decorous riļ¬ on the American concept of PDA. As motivation, think about the many movies that center the tango in a campy-yet-
serious way. Dramatic music plays as man and woman lock eyes across the room
before beginning a series of complicated pirouettes. The dance ļ¬oor clears a circle as
everyone pauses to watch. The whole room is now paying rapt attention to this couple,
even if they didnāt know them before. Thatās an example of positive-sum attention: because these two paid attention to each
otherin a public and synchronized way, others paid respectful attention to them. That 246 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
couple must love each other very much ā or at least must practice very much ā and
their coordination demands admiration. Even the onlooker who doesnāt much care for
dancing must give a grudging nod. Other examples of positive-sum attention like this include orchestras, parades, the good
kind of ļ¬ash mobs, basketball games, and the types of gymnastic enterprises common
to college football halftime shows wherein cheerleaders form tall human pyramids that
require complete trust in the people at the base. All of these are examples of public multi-party coordination where people are creating
art together in a high-trust society. The coordination is pleasing to the eye. But it also
indicates to the audience that the people involved have practiced before, that theyāre
aligned, that they arenāt all playing whatever notes they want at whatever time, that
there is some pre-arranged give and take. Public displays of positive-sum attention
show that two or more people can work together as a team. The opposite also exists: negative-sum attention. When two people who are supposed
to be aligned ļ¬ght in public, when a corporation like the Washington Post melts down
on Twitter, or when a whole country broadcasts its endless internal conļ¬ict to the globe
each day, bystanders have a diļ¬erent reaction. Itās not one of admiration and respect
for the tight coordination. Itās the opposite. The conļ¬ict causes a diminution of status
for all parties involved. The phrase āteam of rivalsā draws our attention because rivals
canāt really make up a team. A organization characterized by public inļ¬ghting isnāt an
organization, itās an occasion for popcorn or pity. Two notes before we move to the main point. First, the kind of public conļ¬ict seen in a hard-fought NBA game or an Oxford-style
debate is diļ¬erent, because a viewer could come away with respect for bothwinner and
loser. Why? That kind of conļ¬ict is between clearly delineated parties, within certain
rules that both entertain and constrain. Itās ritualized conļ¬ict, itās expected. The loser
often gets paid for showing up. So itās not a lose/lose ļ¬ght, not a cartoonish bar brawl. Second, itās impossible to run any organization of suļ¬cient scale without somedegree
of internal misalignment. You donāt get to 500 million friends without making a few
enemies. Thereās always someone with hard feelings ā the envious, the disgruntled,
the ļ¬red. They might start a ļ¬ght to gain what they could not by other means. The
consequent loss of status that accompanies a public ļ¬ght is like the loss of money that
accompanies a bad earnings report. Itās not desirable
š Startup societies are internet-first communities designed to solve specific social problems through opt-in participation, serving as the foundation for larger network states.
šļø The progression from startup society to network state follows a clear path: network union ā network archipelago ā network state, with each stage representing increasing scale and legitimacy.
š° Founding a 1M person network state with diplomatic recognition is estimated to be as difficult as building a 10M person social network or billion-dollar company.
š¤ Network unions differ from social networks or DAOs by having a clear leader, shared purpose, crypto-based systems, and daily collective actions that build genuine community bonds and national consciousness.
Weāll have to work to create the future we want. 244 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
Those are rough deļ¬nitions. Letās get a bit more precise. Startup Societies
Youāre founding a startup society, not a network state. A startup society is a new community built internet-ļ¬rst, usually for the purpose of
solving a speciļ¬c social problem in an opt-in way. The implication is that this society
is still pretty small in population. A parallel society is roughly equivalent to a startup society, but can be much larger in
scale. This is an umbrella term for a network union, network archipelago, or network
state. And now we have a way to talk about origins in a realistic way. Youāre founding a
startup society. You begin as a network union, maybe crowdfund territory to become
a network archipelago, and could someday grow into a network state. All of these are
types of parallel societies. This communicates the point that there are diļ¬erent paths to a network state, and
diļ¬erent (and completely valid) intermediate end points ā just like you can run a
small business, a lifestyle business, do a merger/acquisition, or found a āmereā unicorn
rather than going public and achieving a trillion dollar valuation in the public markets. Iād roughly calibrate the diļ¬culty of founding a 1M person network state that achieves
diplomatic recognition from at least one city, state, or country at about the level of
founding a 10M person social network or a billion dollar company. Why? Because
small countries like Tuvalu, El Salvador, and the like havealready signed business
development deals with startups, so itās no longer unheard of ā just diļ¬cult. However, even if your ultimate goal is a unicorn, you donāt start out by saying āIām
founding a unicorn.ā You say youāre founding a startup. By analogy, what do you say, rather than āIām founding a network stateā? The closest
thing out there was once āIām starting a decentralized autonomous organizationā (a
DAO). Thatās better than āIām starting a social network,ā because a DAO at least
has an implicit concept of national identity, in the form of common coin-holding. A
social network does nothave this, because most social networks, by dint of being social
utilities, ļ¬y past 1-networks and become N-networks if they are successful. However,
DAOs also are bedeviled by the downsides of markets and politics respectively: ļ¬y-by-
night speculators and bureaucratic boondoggles abound. So, if you want to eventually build a network state, you should instead start by saying
āIām founding a startup society.ā
Parallel Societies
We also use the term parallel society . This is roughly equivalent to a startup society,
but can be much larger in scale. Itās an umbrella term for a network union, network 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 245
archipelago, or network state. It emphasizes that you have a possibly huge society
running in parallel to legacy society, with at least one big piece that is wildly diļ¬erent
from the existing world. We discussed parallel societies in Chapter 2 . The Network Union
A network union is a social graph organized in a tree-like structure with a leader, a
purpose, a crypto-based ļ¬nancial and messaging system, and a daily call-to-action. Itās
the underpinning of the new nation behind a network state. It forms dense peer-to-peer
connections, not simply leader-to-follower. And it acclimatizes its members to working
together as a society towards a common purpose. Thatpurposemakes it diļ¬erent from a social network like Twitter, a subreddit, or even
a DAO. The purpose isnāt to waste time, or aimlessly speculate on a token. Itās to
advance the collective interests of its members through daily actions, organized by a
network union leader. That common purpose creates a culture, and gradually turns a group of people into
a 1-network, a network with national consciousness, into the foundation of a network
state. Think about it: if people wonāt even show up to vote online, they donāt care
about the community. C
Network unions must demonstrate public displays of alignment (PDA) to show external unity and coordination, similar to how politicians unite after primaries or countries form alliances.
Digital PDAs could include collaborative projects like crypto-Wikipedia or collective virtual reality art that proves real human coordination to the outside world.
Tokenomics principles now apply to nation formation, requiring network union founders to develop comprehensive nation formation strategies with detailed parameter choices.
The path to network statehood follows three stages: network union (digital collective action), network archipelago (acquiring physical properties), and network state (gaining diplomatic recognition).
, but itās absolutely survivable. To make up for the loss of money, you work harder next time. But to make up for
the loss of status, you take a beat and ļ¬gure out how to reunify your organization and
show a united front to the world. In a phrase, you need some PDA: a public display of
alignment. Politicians do public displays of alignment all the time. They trash each other during
the primaries and then raise each othersā hands in the general election. Theyāre putting
their diļ¬erences behind them to build a united front. Countries do this too ā thatās 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 247
what peace treaties, mutual defense pacts, joint military exercises, and international
organizations are all about. The visual of ļ¬ags ļ¬ying together shows others that theyāre
one unit. And that brings us to the concept of public displays of alignment for a network union. Itās important to startby organizing the network union to do private tasks that the
group as a whole beneļ¬ts from. But eventually you want to show the external world
that your network union can do impressive public things as a group. So, whatās the digital version of a parade, or of a group singing in unison like the
Estonian Singing Revolution? It might be something like a crypto-Wikipedia, or some
kind of collectively authored art in virtual reality, perhaps like Minecraft or Redditās
r/place. It may need to involve proof-of-human so onlookers know that this piece of
digital art involved real people. Butwhateveritis, publicdisplaysofalignmentareawayforanetworkuniontonotjust
quietly deliver value for its members (as it should), but to also publicly demonstrate to
the world that itās a tightly coordinated unit ā and worthy of being treated as such. Proving to the world that your network union can coordinate like an organic nation is
a ļ¬rst step in the long process towards eventual diplomatic recognition. The New Tokenomics is Nation Formation
In the 2000s, most technologists didnāt care that much about how national currencies
were run. The parameter choices of a currency were things only central bankers cared
about. Whatās the interest rate? Is it a deļ¬ationary, inļ¬ationary, or even demurrage
currency? Which actors have root access to the system and under what circumstances
can they be deplatformed? And so on. But all those details and more became important for people founding new currencies. Thus, the concept known as ātokenomicsā arose: setting up the ļ¬nancial and social
incentives of a new cryptoeconomic community in a user- and organization-aligned
way. Similarly, all previously obscure details of how nations and states formed are newly
relevant to network union founders. Thereās an idea maze for nation formation just as
there is for cryptoeconomics. The ļ¬rst question any network union founder needs to
be able to answer is: what is your nation formation strategy? Path to the Network State
We can now deļ¬ne a path to the network state:
1.Network union. A wholly digital entity, organized in a social tree structure, that
engages in collective action on behalf of its members. The collective action is key
for building organizational muscle. 2.Network archipelago. A network union that begins acquiring and networking 248 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
properties in the physical world. The physical interaction is key for building
trust. 3.Network state. A network archipelago that gains diplomatic recognition from at
least one legacy state. The diplomatic recognition is key for attaining sovereignty. Of course, the delineation between these categories is fuzzy. For example, a network
archipelagowith100k+people, billionsinannualcollectiveincome, andalargephysical
footprint around the world could be deemed a shadow network state. It would have
more organization than most stateless nations, as it would actually have a state and
land, just not all in one place. All it would lack is recognition. Slight fuzziness notwithstanding, this is a realistic path from a single network uni
šļø A 'bootstrap recognizer' is the first existing government to formally recognize a network state, similar to how El Salvador recognized Bitcoin, creating legitimacy through official acknowledgment.
š Network archipelagos seeking statehood should identify potential bootstrap recognizers among existing nations with many 'bi-nationals' who hold dual citizenship loyalties.
š¤ Digital civil society through network unions and archipelagos can rebuild voluntary associations that once strengthened America, addressing the social isolation described by Putnam's 'Bowling Alone.'
šÆ Network states require more than just community and economic alignmentāthey need national consciousness, collective purpose, and formal recognition to achieve legitimate statehood.
on
founder to something big. The Bootstrap Recognizer
We call the ļ¬rst government to recognize a network state a bootstrap recognizer , named
after the computer science concept of a ābootstrapā system that boots up another. The bootstrap recognizer is to a network state what El Salvador was to Bitcoin: the
formal acceptance of the new system by the old to form something stronger than either
of them individually. Each network archipelago that wants to become a network state should have a thesis
on who its bootstrap recognizer is. It will likely be an existing state with many ābi-
nationalsā that have formal legal citizenship with their existing nation state but have
mentally migrated to become dual citizens of their new network state. The historical
analog is those who identiļ¬ed as Israelis or Indians even before their states became
formally independent. Note that while a bootstrap recognizer will initially have to be a nation state, once
there are many network states of signiļ¬cant scale, network states could bootstrap the
recognition of other network states. Digital Civil Society
Network unions, network societies, and other forms of digital civil society are valuable
endpoints in themselves. For example, a serious open source project could have an associated network union
that advances the collective interest of (say) a guild of ReactJS programmers, without
any need to buy land. Or a ļ¬tness inļ¬uencer could turn their online community into a network archipelago,
replete with gyms around the world, organizing people to get discounted keto-friendly
food. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 249
You can probably come up with other kinds of structures. The overall idea is to build
digital civil society , allthosecommunityorganizationsthatarenāteitherthestateabove
or the isolated individual below, the kind of non-political voluntary associations that
once built America, according to Tocqueville:
I do not wish to speak of those political associations...Here it is a question
only of the associations that are formed in civil life and which have an ob-
ject that is in no way political... Americans of all ages, all conditions, all
minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial
associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other
kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, im-
mense and very small; Americans use associations to give fĆŖtes, to found
seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send
missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons,
schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing
a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Every-
where that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in
France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an
association in the United States. These had vanished by the year 2000, according to Putnam:
Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the
last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer
organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less fre-
quently, and even socialize with our families less often. Weāre even bowling
alone. The network union and network archipelago are ends in themselves. They give us a
roadmap for rebuilding digital civil society, to start doing things together with purpose
and substance online, to move away from the distracting entropy of social media and
the news towards communities of conscious intent. And from these network unions and
network societies, we will form network states. Recognize Why We Need Recognition
We just described why network states need more than community, and even more
than economic alignment ā they need a sense of national consciousness, of collective
purpose, as provided by a network union. Now letās discuss why we need recognition. A fun one liner is that crypto made progre
Traditional regulations have held back trillions in economic value, from taxi regulations blocking ride-sharing to financial regulations hindering cryptocurrency adoption.
Network states represent a shift from political science to political technology, allowing experimental governance through opt-in participation rather than coercive systems.
The state should be viewed as humanity's most important platform that currently cannot be upgraded, but network states offer a path to iterative improvement.
Network states appeal to diverse political progressives by offering paths for young politicians, community organizers, policy experimenters, and idealists to build voluntary governance systems.
Unlike traditional 51% democracy where majorities impose on minorities, network states achieve 100% democracy through voluntary opt-in participation by all members.
antiquated taxi regulations held back one hundred
billion dollars in the form of Uber/Lyft/Grab/Didi, that ļ¬nancial regulations
held back one trillion dollars in the form of Bitcoin/Ethereum, and communism
held back the Chinese people to the tune of ten trillion dollars (namely the entire
Chinese economy). ā¢The data . Technologists can think of new opt-in states as experiments. Just
as the ability to start new currencies moved us from observational to empirical
macroeconomics, the ability to start new countries takes us from the realm of
political science ā the study of what is ā to political technology, the engineering
of what can be. ā¢The platform . We can think of the state as our most important platform, more
important even than Apple or Amazon, the place where much of our data and
lives are hosted. Right now, we canāt upgrade the state. What if we could? ā¢The ethics . Just as many kinds of things become easier to build in the presence of
a cooperative centralized server, many more things become easier in the presence
ofacooperativecentralizedstate. Anetworkstatebuildsasocietywhereeveryone
has broad support for technological innovation. You want a country where people
cheer Mission Control, not boo Musk and Bezos, and now we can build one. Of course, network states arenāt for every technologist. If you care mainly about
compilers or programming languages, you can get by under the current dispensation. And if all you want is a steady paycheck at Big Tech, a network state is not for you. But if you care about accelerating innovation in the physical world, we ļ¬nally have an
answer. Network States for the Political Progressive
Why should political progressives want to start new cities and countries? ā¢If youāre a young politician, perhaps you donāt want to wait till youāre 70 years
old to pay your dues and make your mark. 252 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
ā¢If youāre a community organizer, network unions give you a digital community to
organize, sometimes against states and corporations, but also for the beneļ¬t of
individual membersā open source projects, businesses, and consulting gigs. ā¢If youāre an advocate for a stateless nation like the Catalonians or the Kurds,
network unions and eventually network states give a new path to recognition. ā¢If youāre a policy wonk, network states allow you to run ethical experiments on
policy, with opt-in participants that are as interested in governance innovation as
you are. You can experiment with digital democracy, new forms of government,
or anything you think interesting. ā¢If youāre an idealist, network states bring back the voluntary communes of the
mid-1800s America, where people could opt-in to build their own vision of utopia. ā¢If youāre an anarchist, network unions oļ¬er a vision of horizontal collaboration
in the absence of traditional governance and without coercion. ā¢If youāre an urban planner, network societies allow you to build support and
amass funding to crowdfund your vision of the good. In short, whether you want to experiment with reforms or entirely new forms of gov-
ernment, thereās likely something in the concept of network unions, network societies,
and network states that will suit you. Moreover, these structures are far more democratic than the coercive governance struc-
tures of the legacy system, because theyāre all opt-in. 100% of members of a network
union or network state have chosen to be there, rather than 51% imposing their will
on a reluctant 49%. Network states are models for 100% democracy, not merely 51%
democracy. With that said, the concept of a network state isnāt a panacea. Many political progres-
sives will be attracted to existing governments for one very simple reason: they already
exist, and already have socioeconomic power. You donāt need to build everything from
scratch. But for the idealists and the ambitious who are excited about the possibility of doing
exactly that, thereās nothing more politically interesting than a new s
š Network states can expand peacefully through six vectors: demographic, geographic, digital, economic, ideological, and technological growth rather than violent territorial conquest.
šļø Geographic expansion occurs through crowdfunding physical territory purchases, creating a peaceful alternative to traditional territorial acquisition through warfare.
š” The system operates on positive-sum principles where competition drives innovation rather than zero-sum battles over borders, shifting focus from territorial control to digital influence ('backlinks').
š Network states can scale from a single founder to million-person communities through voluntary participation and innovation, mimicking the growth pattern of successful tech companies.
šÆ Unlike traditional nation-states, network states function as proposition nations that explicitly tie ideological evangelism to recruitment and citizenship policies.
š The model leverages digital territory's lack of scarcity and reopens the concept of unclaimed frontier space for experimentation and growth.
tate. 5.3.10 How does a Network State Expand and Contract? Network states give a wholly new way for states to expand. They can grow peacefully
in the digital world rather than violently in the physical world. The network state
formation process can begin with a single founding inļ¬uencer and scale to a million
person physical community. We can break out the underlying vectors of growth as follows:
1.Demographically. Most obviously, a network state (or a predecessor entity like a
network union or network archipelago) can grow its userbase through recruitment 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 253
and reproduction. For the latter, the growing state will need some policy to
recognize the new family members as netizens, such as jus sanguinis . 2.Geographically. As the citizenry of a network state grows, it can start crowd-
funding more territory in the physical world. This is a peaceful mechanism for
territorialexpansion. Notethatthesepurchasesneednotbefromsovereignstates,
though they may ultimately be. 3.Digitally. A complement to geographical growth is digital growth: more domain
names, crypto usernames, and social media handles under ownership of netizens
and the network state. 4.Economically. The people of a network state will earn income and invest on
chain. Those numbers, or an aggregate thereof, can be made public to the world
via crypto oracles, thereby showing cryptographically provable growth in GDP
and net worth. 5.Ideologically. Because a network state is fundamentally a proposition nation, itās
constantly evangelizing its beliefs. But unlike a traditional nation stateās soft
power, which is not directly tied to immigration policy, here the evangelism is
explicitly connected to recruiting. 6.Technologically . Why call this point out separately? Technological progress is a
deļ¬ning feature of a network state to an even greater degree than its nation state
predecessor. A network state understands that in the absence of innovation, its
at-will citizens will leave for more advanced jurisdictions in the same way people
left Blockbuster for Netļ¬ix. But because technological innovation is non-zero
sum, the relentless competitive pressure for mobile citizens means the network
state system is positive-sum , which is very unlike the nation state systemās zero-
sumstruggle for territory. The network state system is not about the battle for borders, but for backlinks (in a
generalized sense). Many of the things that states traditionally fought over can now
be abstracted and turned into an economic game. This is a step forward, for the same
reason that it was a huge advance whenever nations resorted to trade rather than
conquest to gain access to each othersā natural resources. What underpins the new dynamic of network states is the intrinsic lack of scarcity of
digital territory, the return of unclaimed land and terra nullius , the reopened frontier. As we discuss later on, it was this frontier, this room for experimentation, that built
America in the ļ¬rst place. Voice was important, but so was choice. Thus, just like a tech company or a social network, a network state provides a smooth
path from a single person with a computer and no other resources to a million person
global network. Constant, nonviolent growth is now possible ā not by conquest or
coercion, but through volition and innovation. 254 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
5.3.11 What is not a Network State? As with nation states, itās useful to give examples that are adjacent to network states,
but donāt quite ļ¬t. First, weāll go over conceptually far away examples; then, a number
ofstructuresthataremuchcloser, whichcanbecomenetworkunions, networksocieties,
and network states. First, letās discuss some things that are actually quite far away from network states,
but that are often discussed in the same breath. Each has some important similarities
(a social network, a global physical footprint) but lacks a key dimension. 1.Your startup. As discussed earlier, donāt go aro
Network states should evolve through stages: start as network union, crowdfund territory to become network archipelago, then gain diplomatic recognition.
Twitter exemplifies an N-network of competing hostile clans rather than a unified 1-network community with shared values.
WeWork failed as true community because it remained a low-trust utility space where people couldn't leave laptops unattended or speak freely.
Google has massive global footprint and makes governance decisions, but users don't see it as legitimate government and employees view it as company not embryonic nation.
Bitcoin enables uncensorable transactions and constrains governments, but only addresses one function while lacking unified vision among holders.
Political parties come close to network states with shared vision and governance plans, but lack shadow administrative structures and property ownership.
und saying that youāre starting a
network state. Say that youāre starting a network union, and build up a commu-
nity thatās capable of doing collective actions online. Then crowdfund territory
and turn your online community into a network archipelago with physical pres-
ence. Finally, if all the stars align, gain diplomatic recognition and thendeclare
your society a network state. I know this might seem a bit like the Marxist insis-
tence on the diļ¬erence between socialism and communism, but the counterpoint
is that nations haveacquired land and gained diplomatic recognition before ā
and we note that itās important when they do. They just havenāt done it in quite
this way, with this progression. Thatās why we want separate terms for network
union, network archipelago, and network state. 2.Twitter, the social network. Twitter is a babble of competing and hostile clans,
many of whom donāt speak the same language or (even more importantly) share
the same values. In our terminology, it is very much an N-network, not a 1-
network. Iām not sure how many true national networks there are within Twitter
(itād depend on the parameters of our computational algorithm for national dis-
tillation), but for the US alone itās at least two ā arguably much more. 3.WeWork, the coworking space. WeWorkās woes notwithstanding, they built a
useful product. But it was more like a utility than a true community, more like
a Starbucks than a small town. Think about it: in a coworking space, the couch
might be leather and the coļ¬ee might be decent, but you donāt leave your laptop
out of sight because you donāt know anyone there. You need to get a conference
room to speak freely, you need to use a privacy screen; in general, itās not a
high-trust zone. Thatās not a true community. 4.Google, the company. Google the company has a large global physical footprint
and an even larger digital footprint, with millions of square meters and billions
of users around the world. It also makes many digital governance decisions per
day. But its usersarenāt a community, and they donāt really think of Google
as a legitimate government. Conversely, while its employees do call themselves
Googlers, they think of their employer as a company rather than a country in
embryo. And they arenāt really at the stage where they want to work hard on
building a new nation. 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 255
5.Bitcoin, the crypto protocol. There are hundreds of millions of holders of Bit-
coin worldwide, and the ideas of Satoshi are core to modern thinking on digital
governance. Nevertheless, Bitcoin does only one thing: facilitate uncensorable
transactions in Bitcoin. It can be thought of as a meta-government, because it
constrainsnetworkandnationstatesalike, butitissilentonthe1000otherthings
that even a minarchist agrees a government should do. Moreover, while there is
somecommonalityoffeelingbetweenBitcoinholders, therealsostrongdiļ¬erences
ā Maximalists are only a subset of the community. Overall, the similarity be-
tween Bitcoin holders is probably more at the level of English-language speakers
than, say, Japanese-language speakers. They can understand each other, or at
least understand each othersā premises, but they donāt all have the same vision
of the good. In short, a digital currency is a prerequisite for a digital country,
but they are not equivalent. Next, letās go through some things which are close to a network state, in the sense
that they can be converted to an (all-digital) network union or a (digital + physical)
network archipelago, but are not quite there. 1.A political party. A political party is close. It has a shared community, it has a
sense of self and non-self, it has a vision for governance should it gain power, and
so on. What it doesnāt have is a āshadowā structure where it can administrate
the lives of its members even when it is outside of the formal government. It also
typically doesnāt own property, or formally facilitate the mingling and migration
of party membe
Network unions can emerge from existing communities like hacker houses, subreddits (r/keto), influencer followings, and DAOs that have shared purpose and governance structures.
City states differ fundamentally from network states because they're geographically concentrated and vulnerable to invasion, while network states are decentralized and encrypted for protection.
Network states represent a v3 evolution of governance that combines the massive scale of nation states with the innovation and consent-based nature of small city-states.
The path to network states requires first building digital strength through network unions, then adding physical territory via network archipelagos, and finally gaining diplomatic recognition.
rs. But all that can be done 24/7 withoutneeding to win the vote
in a general election, and network unionization may become an interesting route
for any minority party. 2.A network of hacker houses. If all the people in this network know each other well
enough to leave their laptop on a couch with the conļ¬dence that no one will steal
it, then itās a high-enough trust community to be a proto network archipelago. It may need to layer on governance. 3.r/keto.A subreddit for diet, like r/keto, has a community, a governance struc-
ture via moderators, and a shared purpose. Donāt laugh ā strict dietary rules
have been important for religious practice for centuries, and they are an excellent
shibboleth for group membership. To build a network union, the members of
r/ketowould need some kind of collective action that members do together (like
bulk purchases of keto food or reviews of keto books). To turn it into a network
archipelago, they might need to start keto clubs and restaurants and link them
together (networked physical territory). Their vision might stop at a cohesive
society, instead of an all-encompassing state; their network archipelago might be
partof a network state that rejected not just the USDA Food Pyramid, but also
the US Fed pyramid schemes. 4.An inļ¬uencer or CEOās following. A popular content creator or CEO is a good
candidate for pulling together a network union. Thereās alignment, thereās an
existing group, and thereās leadership. But theyād need to ļ¬gure out a purpose 256 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
for their community (if an inļ¬uencer) or a purpose beyond the merely commer-
cial (if a CEO). Thatāll be easier for activists and technologists, and harder for
entertainers and pure salesmen. 5.DAOs and NFT communities. As noted earlier, these are also quite close to being
network unions, but they need to ensure they have members who are there for
the long-term cause rather than for the short-term pump. If so, they can start
pulling together communities of purpose towards collective action. 6.A city state. This bears mentioning too: a city state is nota network state. Why? Because a city state is concentrated in one location, and can be invaded
by a stronger power, while a network state is geographically decentralized and
encrypted. It canāt easily be physically invaded without going after all of its
territories (many of which may be unlisted, or literal single person apartments),
which would be a politically fraught multi-jurisdiction campaign. And it canāt be
digitally invaded without breaking the encryption that protects its constituent
blockchain. So a network state can be thought of as a v3 of the state, that
combines aspects of the scaled nation states of the 20th century with the nimble
citystatesthatprecededthem. Ithasthepotentialmassivescaleanddefensibility
of a billion person nation state, while preserving the innovation and consent of
a small opt-in community. Itās similar to how Bitcoin combines aspects of gold
(v1) with Fedwire (v2) to produce a v3 system. In short, you need a strong community to even have a chance of building a network
state. Twitter at large is not it, Google Inc is not it, Bitcoin is not it ā these lack
either a single self-conscious nation, a functional state, or both. A political party is closer. A very tight-knit NFT community or inļ¬uencer/CEO fol-
lowing is even closer. To get on the path to network states, they would ļ¬rst build
digital strength via the network union, then add physical territory via the network
archipelago, and then gain diplomatic recognition in a true network state. 5.3.12 WhatTechnologicalDevelopmentsenableNetworkStates? Venture capitalists are fond of asking the āwhy nowā question to entrepreneurs. Why
now? Why can we contemplate founding network states today, and not 5 or 10 or 20
years ago? Whatās changed in the world? Well, a lot has changed. Here are some of the key enablers of the network state:
1.The Internet is to the USA as the Ame
The internet serves as a 'cloud continent' similar to how the Americas provided new territory for expansion, but with unlimited digital land creation potential.
Bitcoin acts as a foundational constraint on legacy states by guaranteeing individual and network state sovereignty while demonstrating that powerful institutions can be replaced.
Web3 technology enables network states through community blockchains, decentralized digital passports, and censorship-resistant communities independent of legacy state control.
Remote work capabilities and satellite internet like Starlink make previously uninhabitable areas economically viable for digital communities to establish permanent settlements.
Mobile technology enables 'Tiebout sorting' where people can easily change jurisdictions by moving locations, effectively choosing the laws under which they live.
ricas were to the UK. Of course, the
internet enables the whole thing. But the manner in which it enables the network
state is worth discussing. Think of the internet as a cloud continent, a sort of
digital Atlantis that came down from the heavens sometime around 1991 and
has parked itself over the middle of the Paciļ¬c Ocean. Every day, everyone who
spends (say) 8 hours online is doing the equivalent of ļ¬ying up to this cloud from
Menlo Park or Tokyo for business or pleasure, and then ļ¬ying back down. While 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 257
there, they see new things, meet new people, and sometimes ļ¬ght them. So far,
what weāve described is much like the settling of the Americas from 1492-1890,
but there are at least two key diļ¬erences. First, of course, the cloud had no
pre-existing people. Second, unlike the vast-but-ļ¬nite soil of America, you can
create new digital land ad inļ¬nitum in the cloud. As we discuss later on, that
reopening of the frontier changes everything. It means that the Internet is to the
USA as the Americas were to the UK: a wide open territory that ultimately gave
birth to new states and ways of thinking. 2.Bitcoin constrains legacy states. Bitcoin is the next most important prerequi-
site for the network state. As a government of governments, it guarantees the
sovereignty of both the individual citizen andthe network state itself. Neither
can have their funds stolen by each other, or by a hostile third party. Bitcoin has
also created new fortunes outside the ļ¬at system, demonstrated that institutions
as powerful as the Fed canbe replaced in a few decades, and pioneered an entirely
new way of designing web services in a decentralized manner. 3.Web3 enables new chains, decentralized identities, and censorship-resistant com-
munities. With web3, we can set up a blockchain as the backbone of each network
state. This is the community chain that the state-appointed leadership has root
over, as a complement to a public chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum that serves as
an external check and balance. We can create decentralized identities similar to
ENS and SNS to serve as digital passports for the network state, deļ¬ning citizen-
ship on the basis of single sign-on access to network state services. And we can
allow not just censorship-resistant communication, but censorship-resistant com-
munities, voluntary gatherings of people that can exist outside the interference
or surveillance of legacy states. 4.Remote and Starlink open up the map. The moment something is put on the
internet, it becomes remote friendly. And everything is going on the internet. Moreover, remote doesnāt just mean around the corner, it means around the
world. Starlink, and satellite broadband more generally, powers up remote fur-
ther, by making huge swaths of the map newly economically feasible. Nothing
now prevents a suļ¬ciently motivated digital community from setting up their
own Burning Man equivalent in the middle of nowhere, except this time for per-
manent habitation, and with an eye towards incorporating formal towns and and
cities. This complements our earlier point: through the internet, weāre reopening
the frontier, and making previously godforsaken areas of the map much more
attractive. Unlike past eras, you donāt no longer need to be near a port or mine
to build a city; you just need to be near an internet connection. 5.Mobile makes us more mobile. Law is a function of latitude and longitude,
so if you can easily change your latitude and longitude, you can change the
law under which you live. Thatās why the most important long-term conse-
quence of the smartphone is Tiebout sorting. That is, all of the assumptions in
Charles Tieboutās famous paper from the 50s become feasible with suļ¬ciently 258 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
advanced phones. With digital nomad search engines like āteleport.orgā and āno-
madlist.comā, some people can choose who they want, while others move where
they like. 6.VR builds a capital in the clou
The author acknowledges multiple contributors who helped with research, fact-checking, web development, art, and logistics for the book.
The publisher 1729 is named after the Ramanujan number, symbolizing 'dark talent' - overlooked people with unconventional but correct ideas.
1729 represents a community focused on finding and supporting people who could found startup societies and network states.
The organization attracts people interested in cutting-edge fields like cryptocurrencies, seasteading, transhumanism, space travel, and life extension.
ommunicate policies, and the cryptography
to enforce them. Chapter 6
Appendix
6.1 Acknowledgments
This book took a fair bit of work to put together, and I want to credit the people who
worked closely with me to make it happen. @zane1729helpedwithallaspectsofthebook,fromresearchandfact-checkingtoproof-
reading and transcribing to ļ¬gures to code. @gfodor wrote the entire ebook reader and
site. @jonst0kes coded the commemorative book NFT and managed our community. @aaraalto did the cover and NFT art. @elijahmadonia worked on ļ¬gures and web
design, while @0FJAKE and @xenbh helped with book logistics. Their contributions
were invaluable. Oh, and one more thing...
6.2 About 1729
The publisher of this work is 1729. Itās named after the Ramanujan number, which
symbolizes for us the dark talent : all those people from the middle of nowhere, passed
260 6.2. ABOUT 1729 261
over by the establishment, with crazy-but-correct ideas, who could do great things if
only given the opportunity. These are exactly the kinds of people who we expect will
found startup societies and network states. Itās also a community for people interested in mathematics, cryptocurrencies, seast-
eading, transhumanism, space travel, life extension, and initially-crazy-seeming-but-
technologically-feasible ideas...like network states themselves. If you want to join us, the ļ¬rst step is to subscribe to the newsletter via the widget
at thenetworkstate.com. Youāll also get free bonus chapters for The Network State as
they are released.
Virtual and augmented reality technologies are cutting ties to physical land by allowing digital construction of spaces that can be projected onto earth, enabling distributed territories to connect coherently.
Social media disintermediated traditional media by allowing anyone to build massive followings and making personal contacts infinitely portable across platforms.
Tech giants like Google and Facebook demonstrated what's possible from humble beginnings, while the startup ecosystem showed that significant achievements can be accomplished with minimal resources.
Network states can solve the fundamental problem where legacy states lack technical competence and digital networks lack democratic legitimacy, creating a new model of governance that combines both strengths.
d, AR mirrors it on the land. Virtual reality (and
more generally the open metaverse) are yet another way in which the obligate
ties to the land are being cut. We can now build full castles in the sky, and then
with augmented reality project them onto the earth. For a network archipelago
or network state, thatās a powerful way to link distributed physical territories
together into a coherent whole. 7.Social disintermediated the media. Again, this one is almost too obvious, but so-
cial media allowed anyone to build a massive following online, it disintermediated
the legacy media, and (in combination with messaging apps and related tools) it
made oneās contacts inļ¬nitely pportable. 8.GAFAM showed us whatās possible, startup/VC showed us how. None of the web3
world would be possible without the web2 and web1 worlds. Google showed us
whatcouldbedonefromagarage. Facebookshoweduswhatcouldbebuiltfroma
dorm room. The entire startup industry has shown us that big things can be done
on a shoestring. Without the trillion dollar companies and billion user networks,
we wouldnāt feel like we could build million person network states. In particular,
as Gilles Babinet observed, once you see partial transfers of sovereignty in the
digital world, you know more may come. From the postal service to Gmail, from
taxi medallions to Uber and Lyft, from the banks to Bitcoin, from the maps to
Google Maps, from the FCC to WhatsApp, from the courts to moderators, legacy
states control less and digital networks control more. Of course, the former lack
technical competence and the latter lack democratic legitimacy, which is exactly
the problem the network state solves. Next, here are a few things that will be helpful to network states, but are not essential
for their construction:
1.Land becomes elastic. As Will Rogers once said, ābuy land, they aināt making
any more of it.ā Or are they? Seasteaders and the artiļ¬cial islands built in
Dubai show that land supply is perhaps more elastic than we think. We also
know you can build cruise ships. So itās possible that we could start reopening
the frontier physically as well, not just digitally. This isnāt incompatible with
Georgism, which argues that the inelastic supply of land means there should be
only one tax, a land tax; it just means the supply is not perfectly inelastic. If
you combine the two concepts, if more value creation goes online and away from
the physical world, you get the idea of being able to (a) print more land, and
(b) partially commoditize existing nation states as providers of land and natural
resources. 2.Telepresence changes the nature of immigration . The next step after simply
projecting in an AR avatar is to dial up a robot on the other side of the world and 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 259
start walking around. This should in theory be feasible by combining (a) Boston
Dynamicsā legged robots, (b) DoubleRoboticsā telepresent iPads on wheels, (c) an
Oculus Quest headset, and (d) an omnidirectional treadmill. That combination
of devices could furnish immersive control of a humanoid robot anywhere on the
globe. 3.Bits reopen innovation in atoms. Innovation in areas like biomedicine, robotics,
and energy is not upstream of the network state, itās downstream of it. The
network state solves the problem posed by Thiel, Cowen, and J Storrs Hall. Weāre using bits to reopen innovation in atoms, because innovation in atoms has
been blocked by regulations, which are in turn created by the US establishment
and exported all over the world through harmonization. The network state uses
digital technology to gain suļ¬cient consent in the cloud to build a community,
crowdfund territory, and eventually gain recognition as a sovereign polity. Once
we do so, we can return innovation to the physical world. The nation state was enabled by maps of the world, tools to communicate laws, and
the guns to enforce them. The network state is enabled by the creation of a new world
(the internet), the software to code and c
Cryptocurrency has made progressives more libertarian and libertarians more progressive, showing how network states could similarly bridge ideological divides.
Diplomatic recognition is essential for network states to achieve legitimacy, similar to how exchange listing is crucial for cryptocurrency adoption.
Network state founders need to focus on winning recognition rather than isolation, as the goal is world recognition, not domination.
New jurisdictions are needed for transformative technologies like life extension that require different risk-tolerance levels and clear consent from participants.
ssives more libertarian and libertarians more
progressive. Progressives discovered that you can build stateless money. Libertari-
ans discovered that you then need to rebuild something much like a state: identity,
reputation, anti-fraud, custody, trust, community, and the like. We think network states will have a similar dynamic. If they work, theyāll show pro-
gressives a diļ¬erent path to political innovation ā rather than grinding through a 250 CHAPTER 5. FROM NATION STATES TO NETWORK STATES
thankless legacy system, they can use their organizing skills to help start a new one. But libertarian founders of network unions will similarly need to take a page from the
progressive playbook. While libertarians are drawn to network states for the same
reason theyāre interested in competitive government, seasteading, and micronations,
libertarian literature underemphasizes the necessity of diplomatic recognition. Diplomatic recognition is as essential to a network state as exchange listing and wallet
support is to a cryptocurrency. There are technical aspects to money, but it is also an
inherently social phenomenon. Contrast this to an airplane, which will ļ¬y regardless
of what anyone thinks. Similarly, whileanetworkunioncanget startedwithoneperson, andevenbuylandand
become a network archipelago, to cross the chasm it needs a plan for gaining diplomatic
recognition ā to go from āunpopular but feasibleā to āpopular and important.ā
Lack of recognition limits sovereignty. In a sense, diplomatic recognition is a partial,
non-binding, but still meaningful commitment from a legacy state to respect the inter-
nal sovereignty of the new network state, to admit it to the family of nations, to open
up a number of diļ¬erent avenues for trade and institutional innovation. Getting there means the founders of a network union that wants to become a network
state canāt be misanthropic, or even isolationist in mentality. A live and let live men-
tality wonāt be enough; youāll need to recruit people who win and help win. Because
unlike an empire, the end goal of a network state is not world domination; itās world
recognition. 5.3.9 Why Would we Found a Network State? But why? Why do we need the ability to found a network state? Why canāt we reform
one of the perfectly good countries on the planet? First, these countries are notperfectly good. Just as it was easier to start a new digital
currency than to reform the Fed, it may be easier to start a new country than to reform
yours. Second, we want new countries for the same reason we want blank sheets of paper,
fresh plots of land, or new startups: to begin anew without baggage from the old. And third, for certain kinds of technologies ā particularly transformative biotech like
life extension ā we need new jurisdictions with fundamentally diļ¬erent levels of risk-
tolerance, and clear-eyed consent by all who opt in. Thereās something in it for both engineers and activists, for both the technological
innovator and the political progressive. Network States for the Technological Innovator
Why should technologists care about politics? 5.3. ON NETWORK STATES 251
ā¢The scientiļ¬c innovation . Fred Ehrsam wrote that peaceful innovation in gover-
nance is more important for innovation than we realize. After all, the Catholic
Church burned proponents of heliocentrism at the stake; it wouldnāt have in-
vented space shuttles. And the Soviet Union banned photocopiers; it wouldnāt
have allowed the internet. Today, we see that San Francisco is banning everything
from scooters to straws, but what we donāt see is what didnāt even make it out
of the garage. ā¢The physical world . The state controls the physical world. With suļ¬cient con-
sent, any law can be changed, and any regulation can be sunset, or reinvented. This is how ābitsā unlock innovation in āatomsā: we form opt-in communities
online to unlock innovation oļ¬ine. ā¢The economics . Money isnāt everything, but itās crucial to making something
sustainable. we know that