Every time I meet someone interesting, I like to ask them, “What is a network state to you?”. You get words thrown around, like parallel society, virtual nation, decentralized community, and many more. But why is it so hard to define? To me, it’s clear: we have no idea what’s coming.
The early adopters of the internet would never have been able to predict TikTok or Uber. The early adopters of Bitcoin didn’t see network states coming. With thousands of people trying to predict the future, a few eventually get some things right, but it’s often up for debate if it was even accurate.
So, can we even see anything coming? I would argue that decentralization is a new and powerful concept currently getting anchored. A lot of people still cannot comprehend that coordination can be achieved without a central authority; don’t ask them what a society without a government might look like.
However, there is an easy way to visualize the obsolescence of nation-states: the unbundling of public goods. As centralization makes countries’ management harder and riskier, states are offloading a lot of the core services to private companies or foreign states. Everything related to identity, immigration, insurance, banking, or even work is slowly moving away from the state, which can only regulate it from afar. The decentralized version of these public goods will be global from day one and escape nation-state influence.
So, a good way to describe the upcoming new societies is to look at the ones disrupting public goods, creating a parallel system to the establishment. There is currently a Cambrian explosion of such projects in all industries, made up of hybrid projects tackling one sector at a time … but what happens if we put them all together? It likely is a Network State.
We are building a world where coordination doesn’t require a trusted third party; it doesn’t even need trust. It is trustless. A world where trust isn’t needed is a bit strange; there would be no banks, no marketplaces, no lawyers. You would just interact with a system, and the system can be trusted. These futuristic utopias have been explored, from cyberstates to network states, but how do we get there?
Let’s pick a few examples and explore.
A popular approach to new societies is the use of special economic zones, charter cities, or seasteading. Focusing on the framework first, founders can leverage legal engineering to optimize for a specific industry and provide innovative products with some autonomy. If such zones or cities collaborated around the world, sharing a digital infrastructure and trading physical goods, there is a path to replace standard countries while still relying on them (any location has a host country that generally guarantees security and enforcement). It is not impossible that such a zone could negotiate with the host country to eventually get full autonomy and get its seat at the table of states, but that’s irrelevant. New laws attract companies, which attract workers, which attract families … that’s how Dubai was built, but what about starting from the community first?
Many communities are being formed around blockchain; one could argue that each blockchain is an ecosystem of startups, a.k.a. a startup society, which can shape a new country eventually. But they don’t necessarily have shared values or any principles to keep people together long-term. That’s why people make DAOs, and even DAOs of DAOs. Let’s say a DAO takes care of your passport, another of your visas, and another of your insurance policies. Wouldn’t it make sense to have one organization bundling them together so you could enjoy all these services? Like a network of organizations, all decentralized. These can be thought of as tech-driven communities. But what about ideological communities?
Religions and cults represent good network societies; they just tend to get centralized and monopolized. People who share the same vision of something bigger than themselves tend to coordinate very well. It doesn’t even have to be God or aliens; culture can be enough, like how diasporas and minorities can support each other. Nature is also seen as a type of God, which a lot of people venerate in the form of agriculture, agroforestry, or permaculture.
At the crossroads of these approaches, there are the nomads, who are situationally perfect for these new societies. Remote workers tend to be a little more technical than the average worker, and the travel culture aligns them. Would they want to change the law? They have to, because nomad visas aren’t sustainable, and most countries’ applications do not work for multiple passports, multiple residencies, and global wealth management. Nomad countries will be as diverse as any country, but they could be the first decentralized country. A great testing ground for them is the popup city, temporary coliving with a goal, usually a tech-driven idea.
So to recap, what can we call the contenders for new network societies?
