Ep. 09 The Network State (1)

What does it look like when the crypto-class imagines its ideal future? Reed and I have been finding out, by reading the manifesto of Balaji Srinivasan, CTO of Coinbase and partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In his 2022 manifesto, The Network State, Srinivasan advocates for replacing the nation-state with crowdfunded, cloud-first communities. In this episode, we look at Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State and its vision of a political future that will take shape in the cloud. Srinivasan rejects the foundations of the nation-state (shared language, inherited culture, historical path dependency, contiguous territory) as hopelessly captured by bad (i.e. woke) ideas. In their place he imagines political identities that coalesce around chosen principles (like the Keto diet!), written onto the blockchain and assembled in the cloud, offering an exit from inherited models of national belonging. In the first of two episodes, we examine his idiosyncratic reading of history, which both explains why he thinks existing political models have failed and supplies his case for the network state as a superior mode of political organization. We also grapple with the bigger question of why people who have done spectacularly well under the existing order are embracing a radical politics of grievance against it. Get in touch with us by email at [email protected], or follow us on Rolf’s substack “Under the Aqueduct” or at Reed’s Bluesky. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com