Join us for an informal meetup to discuss the ideas presented by Balaji Srinivasan in his book "The Network State". Balaji is not attending this event.
Light food and drinks will be served; this is a complimentary event for approved guests only.
No plus ones; each person much register individually. Registration status will be checked at the door.
Important: if you want to be accepted to the event, please familiarize yourself with the concepts presented in the book. Balaji has prepared one sentence, one image, one thousand word, and one essay summaries.
The one sentence summary is reproduced below.
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.
Here’s a more complex definition 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 national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government 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, that’s a mouthful! It’s lengthy because there are many internet phenomena that share some but not all of the properties of a network state. For example, neither Bitcoin nor Facebook nor a DAO is a network state, because each lacks certain qualities – like diplomatic recognition – which are core to anything we’d think of as the next version of the nation state.
