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We need network societies, not network states (2024)
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago> His book, The Network State (TNS), puts forth a new social contract enabled by “Web3 technology,” centered on blockchains I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
- oneplane 2y agoAnother fun thing from that book is a fantasy on how things will be better because you can't revert things. It's essentially digital feudalism combined with populism. How could that possibly go wrong...
- mullingitover 2y agoxkcd summed up why these ideas are dumb in two panels[1] a really long time ago. Just replace 'encrypted laptop' with 'the private key that controls your whole life.' [2] https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- kridsdale3 2y agoThis is one of those ones I have the index essentially mapped to the image in my brain already, no need to click.
- ta1243 2y ago> a really long time ago. 2009. Why do I think that Spiderman has just schooled me on my age.
- AlchemistCamp 2y agoAnd yet, the brute with the $5 wrench still hasn't gotten Satoshi's bitcoins. There's a lot to be said for pseudonyminity.
- stephen_g 2y agoI couldn't believe it a few years ago when people were talking about NFTs as the 'future' of keeping track of property ownership for everything. Like, somebody stole a cryptographic key, now they can 'prove' they now own my house and I can't (code is law, right?). Or a relative died and now their crypto-currency keys are permanently inaccessible - now all their money is lost forever and nobody can inherit it, even with court order etc.! That's just not the world most people want to live in...
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoCode is not law. Law is law. Very few people argue that code is law and it has become an anti-blockchain talking point. Multi signature wallets exist.
- mschuster91 2y ago> Multi signature wallets exist. Well... with a traditional bank, everyone knows that in a pinch you can just show up at any branch of your bank, present a government issued ID card and get your money. That doesn't need an user manual or any technical knowledge. Setting up multi-sig wallets and actually working disaster protection however? That needs a looot of knowledge.
- egberts1 2y agoUmmmm, more like MULTI-WALLET, because ... anti-tracking or tracking, depending on your authoritarian stance.
- kentm 2y ago> Code is not law. Law is law. Very few people argue that code is law and it has become an anti-blockchain talking point. I made this exact argument in discussions with "blockchain" proponents, in discussions of why "code as law" was not good, and got near-universal, vehement disagreement. I suspect that you underestimate how many people argue it.
- RajT88 2y agoYou could as easily have led with: Hey stupid, who is going to work in your factories? And follow the premise from there.
- ericd 2y agoI’m guessing they think the answer is robots? Same answer for armies.
- RajT88 2y agoBut who maintains the robots! Lol
- idle_zealot 2y agoOther robots, duh! The real question is "why are humans even involved with this?"
- ericd 2y agoI'm imagining something like Solaria in Asimov's The Naked Sun (part of the Robot series). The world is divided up by a tiny human population, each with a huge estate with thousands of robots serving them.
- XorNot 2y agoSame idea comes up in The Foundation and Earth by Asimov.
- cjfd 2y agoThere is a joke that in a modern factory there is only a man and a dog. The man is only there to feed the dog and the dog is there to guard the equipment and make sure the man does not touch any of it.
- airstrike 2y agoIt's a job for Brion Brand, the mightiest weighlifter in the galaxy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1549867.Planet_of_No_Return https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1549867.Planet_of_No_Ret...
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- CamperBob2 2y agoI love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more I wish this were a laughing matter, but it's not. These people appear to be quite serious and quite capable. There's a coalition in play that includes the Project 2025 authors among others, operating at a scope that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. If this coalition holds together, they may be able to execute what many would consider a rather frightening agenda. Despite its cheesy title, this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no ) offers an interesting perspective on Balaji Srinivasan and his place in a larger web of influence alongside people like Yarvin, Musk, and Vance. It's eye-opening. She released it back in November and promptly took a lot of flack from people calling her alarmist and conspiracy-prone, and now it's basically playing out in real time.
- samplatt 2y agoThat video crossed my path 2 days ago. As much as it';s terrifying, I can't help but be impressed by how fucking close William Gibson and Mike Pondsmith came in writing their background-lore for their respective cyberpunk universes. The Corpos seizing power from a failing democracy, instigating war, and then declaring their own territories and power structures. From which the country, the world, never recovers.
- aldous 2y ago[dead]
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoI didn't read more. Because whether it was a critique of said web3 thing or praising it. I can't be bothered!
- hooverd 2y agotake these people entirely seriously right now
- frontalier 2y agoi would hope we don't dismiss this the same way we dismissed project 2025 then end up surprised it was the plan all along
- dustingetz 2y agothe book is quite interesting, one idea was - how many hours do we spend online per day? i spend, like, 15 hours plugged in - PC, iphone, TV/games. i’m plugged in when i’m driving, when i’m out jogging, i’m plugged in right now as i wake up drinking coffee in bed, I have more internet friends than IRL and they are more important, my business/financial relationships are entirely digital, as is most of my relationship with the state. So, why are governments organized by geography? How long until we free ourselves entirely from this constraint?
- teitoklien 2y agoWe can’t , physical violence is still localized and geography based. A States core authority and existence is formed by having a monopoly on violence across a region, not services provided.
- dustingetz 2y agocan't what? civilization is organized hierarchically, alliance union country state county city township neighborhood street family individual. Layers get added on top as civilization progresses in order to make trade more efficient. A concrete issue today is getting startup stock options to cross international lines in a remote-first world. There is sufficient demand for a solution that solutions will emerge on a timescale of, idk decades for sure. There were not global alliances 400 years ago and 400 years from now there will probably be interstellar. Fudge N to match your best guess as to rate of progress.
- ljm 2y agoMaybe I'm a simple person, but what you and other people who subscribe to this idea think seems to just be another brand of libertarianism. And libertarianism (by the US definition) is basically just edge-lord politics: if something isn't personally important to me then why does a government need to provide it? In this world free of geography, who exactly is responsible for keep all of the geographically constrained plumbing in operation while you recline at your desk and enjoy the digital porcelain? And would a board of corporate overlords owning your patch of land really serve you better than a council of local representatives?
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- throw0101a 2y agoOn network states, see perhaps "The bro-ligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term": > All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work. > The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said. […] > The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.” * https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration-broligarchs-musk-zuckerberg-bezos-thiel https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoThis article doesn't claim to have any deep insight into what a network state is or what advocates of a network state want. Its only reference to the concept is a quote from another journalist, who offers a confusing definition that "network state" means "tech authoritarianism" which in turn means "to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land".
- 29athrowaway 2y agoThe main flaw of The Network State is the concept of reverse diaspora. The idea that multiple people with no shared background will magically come together and collaborate to the extent that they can form an scalable movement that results in a meatspace state that is one cohesive collaborative unit. Whenever a group of people pool their effort and resources together, another group of opportunistic people will try to take advantage. The Network State is inspired by cryptocurrencies, which are often affected by predatory speculative behavior. Pyramid schemes, pump and dump schemes, rug pulls, etc. The more resources and effort are pooled together, and the more power is accrued, the higher the incentive for competitors to arise, both internal and external. And this flaw is the aspect shared with most utopian theories that expect everyone to collaborate do not account for simple game theory. Give enough incentives and the doves turn into hawks. Another flaw is that by having a highly sparse geographical distribution, the political representation of their members and the likelihood they will gain enough influence to take over tends to zero unless each member can attain local leadership and influence. At most, that can get that to scale to city-states, but city-states are almost always vassal states.
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- ChrisArchitect 2y ago(2024) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230966
- TZubiri 2y agoYeah dude like totally we don't need countries dude we can just live off the cyberland
- roncesvalles 2y agoAnything "centered on blockchains" is grifty bullshit, no exceptions, none whatsoever.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoThat is your opinion.
- pessimizer 2y agoI assume that's why they posted it, and not someone else.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI agree with this critique, but I think it fails to get at the heart of the Web3 problem, which is that blockchains use a protocol to enforce consensus, but politically speaking, a forced consensus is no consensus at all. We do desperately need a big rethink of our incentives, by all means invite the game theorists--lets get nerdy about it--but if we then enshrine the results of that analysis into a protocol that makes it so (thus creating a network state) it's doomed to fail due to a lack of legitimacy. Whatever we build has to let people disagree, but amplify the cases where they agree so that we can find what's actionable, not what's engaging. Web 2 and 3 have failed so far to get that right. C'mon 4 we're rooting for you.
- XorNot 2y agoI would hardly even go that far: blockchains can only enforce parameters of the blockchain. The physical world is under no obligation to respect that. That's always been the core issue.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIf we wanted to, we could "fix" that. We let fictions like money rule the real world as it is, and we could easily take it further by replacing all of our locks with ones that only open for you if the chain says they should and other such ill advised automations. But lets not, because partition tolerance, not consistency, has the superior political implications. Blockchains are just on the wrong side of the CAP theorem. It's a place for authoritarians and willful ignorance of important truths.
- XorNot 2y agoThat's just building a new, worse legal system though, the blockchain ensures nothing. It has no additional force or protections then the current one.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWell I'm proposing that we not do that, but just to play devil's advocate, one protection it would have is that a large unruly mob couldn't gather at one building in particular and prevent the business of government from proceeding--like they did on Jan 6.
- robocat 2y agoSounds like it is trying to be a non-fiction version of Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand's SciFi distopian libertarian vision).
- ang_cire 2y agoSpeaking as a Bay Area Startup alum tech bro... Don't let tech bros build governments. These guys clearly read Snowcrash and thought, "man, these corporate city-state enclaves with robot dogs sound like a great idea!" But don't take my word for why it's bad, there's currently one tech bro proving me right in real time!
- egberts1 2y agoWe need a lot lower latency than UK's 15-minute Smart City model. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city
- abc123abc123 2y agoBuzzword bingo with pinches of weasel words. Nothing to see here. Next!
- nickdothutton 2y ago> We don’t need to choose between reaction and stasis. This person has never met anyone in government or the civil service. I don't really like to dunk on someone trying to be positive, but we have had every liberal reform and here we are.