On City States

Before the nation state came the city state

history of city states why did they die out? most didn’t have the scale

nationalism was originally a leftist ideology that unified the population against the royals

it became a rightist ideology that unified the population against large-scale attackers (eg German reunification prompted by Napoleon, India by the British, Chinese unification in part by the Japanese, early US unification by the British)

there are still some around, like san marino and singapore and some have proposed them as the model for what follows

but a straight city state is like straight gold bitcoin > usd > gold gold has advantages over usd, except for one thing - it’s defeated by usd

similarly, city states have some advantages over nation states but also many disadvantages

network states are like a v3 that combine aspects of

	City State	Nation State	Network State
Includes		Civilization State (India, China)
		Multinational Empire (US)
Max Population	Small	1B+	Small or 1B+
Ideology	Particularist	Universalist (US, France)	Universalist or Particularist
Administrative Efficiency	Low	Medium (Paper)	High (Blockchain)
Defense	Weak (Small, Localized)	Weak to Strong	Very Strong (Encrypted, Distributed)

the network state is not patchwork or snowcrash; there are similarities but the fundamental difference is that it assumes universalist evangalizing and is built to allow for constant (peaceful) competition over backlinks