Introduction

Chapter 2

Preamble

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This book is for the founders, finders, and funders of startup societies.

First, it’s a blueprint for how the people of the cloud can finally take land, by founding online communities that crowdfund physical territories. It explains how competitive government benefits the average citizen, by expanding practical democratic choice over your own life and allowing you to find neighbors of like mind. Moreover, it even includes slide decks and spreadsheets for turning theory into practice, through the fundable business model of society-as-a-service.

Next, it details why the fall of the State and the rise of the Network are the underlying phenomena enabling us to start not just new companies and currencies, but new cities and even countries. And it shows how the Internet has invisibly shattered and remade the world, putting distant people together and tearing places apart, breaking the assumptions that underpin the nation state and building the foundations for its successor: the network state.

These are bold claims! If you want to quickly skim to see how they’re substantiated, here are one image, one sentence, one thousand word, one essay, and one slide deck summaries of The Network State. If you have an hour, there’s an outline of the whole manuscript as a series of brief assertions linked to sections that support those assertions. And of course, for the full experience, you can read it one page at a time.

Speaking of pages, every section of this book is online and shareable as an individual web page. For example, the URL to this section is thenetworkstate.com/preamble. This allows you to link directly¹ to any part for discussion. Moreover, unlike the typical book that’s frozen in time, think of this as a dynamic bookapp that gets continuously updated at thenetworkstate.com.

When reading it, think of this work as a toolbox, not a manifesto. You don’t need to agree with all of it to get something out of it. I’ve structured it in modular form for that reason. You’re currently reading the Introduction, summarizing the concept of the network state. After that the book is factored into three parts: what is a network state (Foundations), how would you actually go about building one (Implementation), and why would anyone want a new country (Motivation)? Then the final chapter (Additions) contains everything that didn’t fit into the main text, including zillions of footnotes.

Please note: while parts of this work sound textbook-ish, the idea of starting a new country from the cloud is anything but boring. I’ve found that it stirs great emotions in people — usually positive, but occasionally negative — because a work like this is unavoidably political.² After all, Satoshi Nakamoto wouldn’t have set out to build Bitcoin if he wasn’t deeply dissatisfied with the Federal Reserve. In the same way, you just wouldn’t be interested³ in the next political system — the network state — if you weren’t deeply dissatisfied with the existing political system in some way, with the existing states.

However, just like Bitcoin could be interpreted by some as total financial revolution and by others as simply financial innovation, so too can the network state serve as blueprint for a completely new technopolitical system and as a safe roadmap for reform of what we already have. Indeed, it’s meant to do that. So, I want you to triangulate off the network state, in the Clintonian sense! Go ahead and Hegel this book. Have it serve as the antithesis to your thesis, and form your own synthesis.⁴ There’s enough flexibility in the idea of the network state that you can customize it to make it your own.

But what exactly is a network state?