Network States and Start-up Societies
Why the "commercialization of sovereignty" is something to avoid
Lately I’ve been tracking the growing influence of Balaji Svrinivasan’s crypto-Libertarian manifesto, The Network State (2022). Last week, the book was referenced in James Pogue’s Vanity Fair article, ‘Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing for Apocalypse,’ on the brewing “civil war” taking place in Wyoming and Montana:
Wealthy and well-connected preppers and back-to-the-landers have been moving west, many of them at least tangentially involved in the edgy online realm of thought known as the dissident right. Tech executives and crypto investors are creating secretive groups to help people “exit”—a term that has taken on almost mystical significance in some circles recently—from our liberal society, tech-dominated lives, and fraying system. And there are grander plans, for whole secessionist movements using crypto and decentralized autonomous organizations to build whole mini societies, many on the model of what Balaji Srinivasan, the former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, calls a “Network State.”
An investor and former CTO at CoinBase, Svrinivasan is a junior member of that nucleus of vast wealth and influence made up of Silicon Valley power-brokers such as Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, first major investor into Facebook), Marc Andreessen (Netscape and a16z or Andreessen Horowitz), and Elon Musk. Like Thiel and Andreessen, Svirinivasan promotes the ideas found in The Sovereign Individual (1997) by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Andreessen called it, “the most thought provoking book on the unfolding nature of the 21st Century that I’ve yet read.” Thiel wrote the preface for its reissue.
According to The Sovereign Individual, information technology will inevitably lead to a fracturing of nation-states and balkanization: “We anticipate that the apparently solid power of nation-states currently devoted to mass democracy will splinter in tens of thousands of fragments into a system more reminiscent of the medieval period than the modern industrial age.” Svrinivasan’s idea for network states derive from that book’s proposals:
We expect to see something new emerge to replace politics. … Our expectation is not that politics will be reformed or improved, but that it will be antiquated and, in most respects, abandoned. By this we do not mean to say that we expect to see dictatorship, but rather entrepreneurial government —the commercialization of sovereignty.
We are, obviously, in a very dangerous and uncertain time. Personally, I believe that the danger and uncertainty is intensified by those members of the tech “power elite” who subscribe to this Libertarian ideology, pushing for the collapse of government and its replacement by corporate services.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.