The Network State Quotes

“As Larry Ellison put it, “choose your competitors carefully, because you’ll become a lot like them.” This is a tech founder’s version of the Hegelian dialectic, where thesis and antithesis mix to form a synthesis.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“The short version is that if a tech company is about technological innovation first, and company culture second, a startup society is the reverse. It’s about community culture first, and technological innovation second. And while innovating on technology means forecasting the future, innovating on culture means probing the past.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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.2 And the founder’s legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them. Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated 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 benefit. 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 different collective actions.3 Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause. Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient 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. Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments 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 offline worlds. Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable 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. Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“We can synthesize these into a unified theory of cycles. The left cycle starts with a group of revolutionary leftists that then become institutional rightists. The right cycle starts with a group of determined rightists that then become decadent leftists. The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideological libertarians that end up building a bureaucratic state.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“We don’t tell fictional stories about the Kazakhstani military saving the world because it wouldn’t be realistic. And after 2021, it isn’t realistic to make stories about the US establishment saving the world either.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“and counterintuitive, even for something small. This is a good analogy for history. If the flight 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 off petabytes of data exhaust the whole way. That’s history.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by media corporations on “diversity”? Is it because those media corporations that are 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 traffic, and then doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors in the process?12 After all, if you know a bit more history, you’ll know that the New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally profited 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.13”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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, 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.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“Equipped with this framework, you can map the tech ecosystem to the political ecosystem. You can analogize tech founders to political activists, venture capitalists to political philanthropists, tech”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“internet ideologies have emerged that justify random nastiness with slogans like “civility is tone policing” or “toxicity is social defense.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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 others’ natural resources.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“So, if you want to eventually build a network state, you should instead start by saying “I’m founding a startup society.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“The advent of firearms (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.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“Keynes said “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Meaning, if you don’t know what intellectual software you’re running, you’re probably running it unconsciously”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“You hit a button on Amazon and a 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. You can do the same for the door to your coworking space office, or the door to your electric car. So, more and more of the goods people prize in the physical world are in a sense “printed” out.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“During the pandemic, every sector that had previously been socially resistant to the internet (healthcare, education, law, finance, government itself) capitulated.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“That’s the same basic thing that reformed the People’s 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 Vogel’s book is excellent on this.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“I belabor this point because it’s somewhat implicit. The capitalist-vs-communist divide of the 20th century was an official, declared economic divide. By contrast, today’s ethnonationalist-vs-ethnomasochist divide is an unofficial, undeclared cultural divide.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“Martin Luther nail his Ninety-five Theses to the Church of Wittenberg in 1517 AD as a new manifesto that spawns a whole new crop of Protestant revolutionaries.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system. It’s the ultimate triumph of the technological truth view of history, as there are now technical and financial 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.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“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 more decentralized as we move in either direction from that point.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by media corporations on “diversity”? Is it because those media corporations that are 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 traffic, and then doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors in the process?13 After all, if you know a bit more history, you’ll know that the New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally profited from slavery, blocked women from being publishers, excluded gays from the newsroom”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“Then, some reading on 20th Century history: Curtis Yarvin: Unqualified Reservations — a broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the 20th and 19th centuries. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago — what the Soviet Union was actually like. Yuri Slezkine: The House of Government — how the Soviet Union actually worked. Janet Malcom: The Journalist and the Murderer — how journalists “befriend and betray” their subjects for clicks, a book taught in journalism schools as something of a how-to manual. Antony C. Sutton: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler — how different groups of capitalists funded the communist and fascist revolutions respectively. Ashley Rindsberg: The Gray Lady Winked — how The New York Times systematically misrepresented the truth over the 20th century.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“We have idiosyncratically categorized them as “techno-economic history” and “20th century” history.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country

“Further Reading Perhaps you now agree that history has been distorted.”
― Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country