(2024-05-20) We Need Network Societies Not Network States

Divya Siddarth, Glen Weyl, and Anne-Marie Slaughter: We need network societies, not network states. Balaji Srinivasan aspires to be the John Locke of the Digital Age. His book, The Network State (TNS), puts forth a new social contract enabled by “Web3 technology,” centered on blockchains.

In a sentence, he defines the network state (NS) as a startup country—“a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

The future looks like Evan McKenzie’s “privatopias”, an archipelago of gated communities run on private provision ruled by the wealthy few, bleeding public infrastructure dry as collective capacity erodes for the unfortunate many.

Srinivasan’s gospel is one of exitocracy: an ideology centered around the idea of exiting or “taking one’s business elsewhere”. (exit, voice, and loyalty)

Many agree that their current political-economic systems are not working for them and have little trust in their ability to effect change within those systems through democratic processes. Moreover, the nation-state is an awkward vehicle for solving many of our problems, which cut across and within nations, like the Internet or AI, climate change and the spread of diseases to be contained and cured.

TNS models necessary experimentation in the form and function of what John Dewey called “new publics”, and rightly holds that emerging technology can and should empower such social imagination, just as the development of the printing press opened the door to imagining and realizing the mass democracies of the 19th century.

This makes it particularly ironic that Srinivasan’s solution is so backwards-looking. Exit is a necessary right, but it requires something to exit to.

He imagines states composed of a tight knit community committed to a single, sharp “one commandment” (e.g. strict dietary rules), ruled by a founder-king and enforced by a blockchain-enforced contract to monitor adherence to both.

But the power of networks is found in embracing and organizing the complexity of our shared lives, not in these impoverished constraints towards homogeneity and hierarchy.

Paired with technological advances across blockchain and artificial intelligence, a true embrace of networks could help build a future of abundant public goods, coordination, and collective intelligence that can erode our reliance on the rigid administrative bureaucracies that have largely survived little changed from the era of ink and paper. (network enlightenment)

The One-Commandment State

Srinivasan concedes that, like billion-dollar companies, network states should and will not emerge fully-formed. Instead he lays out a network state lifecycle, beginning with an active online community that might then transition to a network union that would engage in collective actions.

TNS sees the central social problems of our time as state surveillance, rigid financial institutions, malign and manipulative media, and overregulation of technological progress. Srinivasan is convinced that blockchains can overcome all of these problems.

One Commandment is their ideological core. The Commandment is the sociopolitical equivalent of the kind of “brand promise” that might attract users to a startup: a single, core ‘moral innovation’ that will draw citizens to a startup network state.

These single Commandments aim to be organizing principles for communities and eventually new constitutions, distinguishing network states from mere social networks.

the ruler could, in theory, seize any user/citizen’s assets to punish or prevent actions that violate the Commandment, as the ruler interprets it.

Srinivasan hopes to leave behind a great many evils that he attributes to the 51% democracy he seeks to escape... the New York Times, which he identifies as “controlling the [American] state,” leaps off the page. He sees the Times as one of three defining world powers, along with Bitcoin/crypto and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Yet, he seems to have even less patience for the values of small c conservatives... values such as national patriotism, religion, economic solidarity and family ties are dismissed as hardly worthy of consideration. After all, any of these countervailing forces might prevent full-throated support of the One Commandment.

To whom is this vision targeted?

at most 1% of the world population

Yet even this small slice of “citizens of nowhere” as Theresa May labeled them, a class from which readers of both TNS and this magazine are mostly drawn, seems a very odd candidate for membership in network states. How many would prioritize their desire for a “keto kosher” lifestyle over, for example, their attachment to workplaces, their interest in public art, their preference for a tropical climate, etc?

Historical experience suggests that an ideology that could inspire the devotion necessary to create a network state would be much deeper seated and/or totalizing

Perhaps the closest example of an independence movement focused around an abstract One Commandment was the US Confederacy and its attachment to a particular (pre-digital) form of property (slavery), though this example is unlikely to recommend network states to most reformers.

Srinivasan’s fundamental misunderstanding of the networks he pays homage to. He writes, “Every doctrine has its Leviathan, that prime mover who hovers above all. For a religion, it is God. For a political movement, it is the State. And for a cryptocurrency, it is the Network.” Yet networks were not originally and are not primarily a technology; instead they are a way of seeing the world that technologies can be built to mimic, a way of seeing the world that is precisely contrary to the simplistic reductionism Srinivasan finds so invigorating and clarifying.

Quantum physics replaced the simple billiard balls of classical mechanics with complex partially entangled patterns of particles. Ecology and systems biology enriched simplistic theories of “survival of the fittest” by highlighting the network of symbiotic relationships and ecosystem services that determine the success of ever higher levels of life. Modern neuroscience, and the work in artificial intelligence that builds off it, replaced traditional accounts based on logical deduction with “connectionism”, where intelligence emerges from networks of simple but adaptable interactions of neurons.

Perhaps most profoundly, social thinkers like Georg Simmel and John Dewey harnessed networks to understand the defining features of urban and technological modernity.

Simmel argued that individuality emerges from social complexity, as tribal societies with overlapping social circles (work, religion, family etc.) give way to individuals who form the unique intersection of the social worlds they inhabit.

Dewey argued that the patterns of commerce and sociality created by novel technologies (e.g. radio and the automobile) would require the creation of “new publics” that could democratically govern these activities in ways that nation states were poorly aligned to do.

In many ways, the original vision for the internet proposed by JCR Licklider, a psychologist who acted as the program officer for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was to build technology capable of mimicking these complex interactional patterns.

Yet as early as 1979 when the TCP/IP protocol was just beginning to emerge, Licklider saw that these communications protocols would achieve only a small part of the potential of the “network society” he envisioned, because they lacked support for fundamental functions of trust, identity and sharing of scarce resources.

Absent such support embedded in fundamental protocols, Licklider projected, the transformative potential of networks for social organization would be captured and ultimately impeded by unaccountable and often monopolistic (monopoly) corporate interests.

One of us has spent much of her career documenting the emergence, along with the internet, of networked patterns of subnational, supra-national and cross-national governance; yet there too the lack of transparency and clear standards of democratic accountability has led to charges of elitism, technocracy, and illegitimacy from the people, organizations, and states that are excluded. (Network Governance)

Many of our biggest problems are in the world of atoms, not in the world of bits. We need more housing, more effective education systems, more resilient supply chains, electoral systems that effectively represent far more diverse societies, and better pathways to comfortable, meaningful, and sustainable lives across the globe. Exit may be tempting. But it’s not the way to build.

Instead, imagine empowering groups within and across countries to address the pressing problems they face, build legitimacy and win public support to force their many governments to the table to grapple with their creative solutions.

If there is success to be found here, it is in rewiring economic incentives and growing new networks to layer over the old. This might look like advances in privacy and cryptography that can enable different forms of information sharing, machine learning, and auditing. Or economic and political mechanisms, including new auctions and voting rules, that can better express the actual value of a good or service, beyond the crude mechanism of price. (RedPlenty)

The experiments that have been run by the Collective Intelligence Project, the Plurality Institute, and countless others show that this future is possible.

Where he seeks to recruit “citizens of nowhere” to anchor themselves to a new singular identity, we see everyone as being, in different ways, citizens of many communities (e.g. nations, employers, religions) and seek to build systems that can represent these intersectional affiliations to enable accountability previous social systems only empowered for simplistic, singular identities

we see no conflict between increasingly empowering local (in terms of interests, and not just geography) communities to manage their own affairs and coordinating increasingly globally to address challenges like climate change and pandemics

For the true adherents of a network society, there is no “right scale” of governance; everything is part of a pattern of intersecting, diverse and partially cooperative systems. (fractal)