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When you look at how fraternal organizations with chapters are organized, from masons to motorcycle clubs, in aggregate they are pretty much the same. You could

When you look at how fraternal organizations with chapters are organized, from masons to motorcycle clubs, in aggregate they are pretty much the same. You could easily extend it to include the parish model of churches. A federation of small, rules and competence based hierarchies, who recognize one another and their implementation of the rules in a process called "concordance." They're distinct from the affinity and cell structure of movements because they have charters, rules, and consistency. It's not unlike a franchise model, or the hybrid franchise/state model in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, which featured Greater Hong Kong as a franchise model. What sounds different in this is these "new" network states are electronic. If you have control of any resource though, one could trivially create their own crypto token so that to buy the resource, you have to buy the token to transact in it. It's really just like buying a call option on the underlying commodity. A cartel could conceivably launch a narcodollar where the only way to buy narcotics would be by using it, and you would buy narcodollars with other currencies. The relationship between the demand for the tokens and the availability of the underlying would float. Anyone selling narcotics for anything other than narcodollars would be embargoed and sanctioned by a cartel, etc. Might be interesting if the same could be done with a variation of agile story points in an organization, or even transferrable between FOSS projects to make determinations of what developer/user preferences for the tool is, with the underlying tokenized resource being contributor time. Someone may want to buy some clout with a FOSS project, and might bid for their story tokens in another currency. A contract on whether a given patch had a vulnerability in it could use the tokens as a bounty for a lockup period for anyone who wanted to win it, etc. While I'm not quite sure, I think this is what DAO's were supposed to be, and the catastrophic failure mode of crypto has a kind of Hindenburg effect, where all anybody knows about airships is their failure mode is an inferno plumeting from the sky. Perhaps I'm missing what's distinct and net new about this Network State, but I suspect its success will depend on the resource it can tokenize.

gfodor 5y ago
I think your analysis is largely correct. Fundamentally, the idea of a network state is a relatively inductive synthesis of the plausible emergent dynamics of several new technologies. Specifically, crypto and VR/AR seem to be important pillars given the degree they will allow you to "shim" and inductively hill climb many of the moving parts of a country-scale society before the country needs to go physical. (For example, a fully modelled 3D world citizens are already de facto living in, as well as a robust, well developed economy among them and external trade partners.) It's really hard (for me) to predict what the terminal stable state looks like. Trying to predict for example just the current tokenization going on in crypto at the time of the Bitcoin genesis block would have been extremely difficult. (Not to mention DeFi and other downstream financial implications.)

gfodor 5y ago

I think your analysis is largely correct. Fundamentally, the idea of a network state is a relatively inductive synthesis of the plausible emergent dynamics of several new technologies. Specifically, crypto and VR/AR seem to be important pillars given the degree they will allow you to "shim" and inductively hill climb many of the moving parts of a country-scale society before the country needs to go physical. (For example, a fully modelled 3D world citizens are already de facto living in, as well as a robust, well developed economy among them and external trade partners.) It's really hard (for me) to predict what the terminal stable state looks like. Trying to predict for example just the current tokenization going on in crypto at the time of the Bitcoin genesis block would have been extremely difficult. (Not to mention DeFi and other downstream financial implications.)