It is always a delight when I get the opportunity to see that one of the most, well known left wing philosophers, out there, Slavoj Zizek, writes about a topic that I also often talk about and this case it is network states and so if you don't know who Slavoj Zizek is self described communist philosopher you if if you know who he is you know kind of what he's about

Blah blah blah. I don't always agree with everything that he says, but he's a very interesting thinker nonetheless. And so back in March, he had published a piece on his substack called network states. No. Thanks. And it was unfortunately, I'm not a a paid subscriber of his Substack, so I never had to read the whole thing. I read a bit of it, and I've been thinking about writing about it, but it kinda didn't make sense for me to write about or, sorry, talk about it. If I didn't get the whole thing, I just kinda forgot. And so recently, I saw that some people created a document where they took, his writing and posted it on file verse and shared it with a bunch of people. And so I think, you know, if she's found out about this I don't think he'd be that mad honestly I'm sure he'd have some like contrarian interesting thing to say about, his work being stolen and then posted on the web for anyone to read But it reminded me again that I wanted to actually take a read to read this piece. And so I thought now was a good chance to do that now that it's freely available. And so I thought I'd do is kind of go through some of the bits that he writes. I'm gonna go through the whole thing because it's, you know, unless he's gonna read it to you, but I thought I would highlight some of the ones I thought were the most interesting, and then we could talk a little bit about that. He though the piece overall is fairly interesting. He kind of relates, network states to the current the current, Trump regime. I think this was back in March. So some things have changed slightly, but more or less, I think, still relevant to ask. Maybe let's, let's just go through some of the stuff that I've highlighted. It definitely recommends reading it. The whole thing. I'll put a link in the description. I'm sure I'm sure slab. I will not get mad at me if you're doing that, but yeah, so let's kind of like go in chronological order some of the things that I highlighted that that would be interesting to talk about. So in the piece, he immediately makes the connection between network states and Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin, in case you don't already, dark enlightenment philosopher, kind of the the father of the alt right, is kind of presumed to have a lot of very close connections with Elon Musk, with several tech CEOs, Peter Thiel, Mark Angiesen. A lot of them are fans of Curtis Yarvin's writing. Curtis Yarvin was most known for his blog called Unreserved Qualifications or something like that. He wrote under the pseudonym Nancis Moldbug and essentially it was a lot of pro eugenics, pro authoritarian type of right wing writing to kind of summarize it quickly. And also to kind of help summarize it, I think this, like, little piece where he says or he's talking about Curtis Yarvin, and he says it describing it's, you know, the executive unencumbered by liberal democratic procedures cruel efficiently, much like the CEO monarch. Yarvin admires Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market oriented authoritarianism in the city state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime it is The U. S. Soft on crime dominated by economic and democratic delusions so I think what's interesting to know is that she actually knows courtesy urban and knows about that work maybe it's not so surprising but that is interesting he immediately makes a connection yarvin has always been an advocate of states being controlled by a ceo monarch or for safe to be run like companies and for the person who runs the company the ceo to effectively be a monarch king he believes in more executive power given to fewer people if not one person as the ideal form of government this is also mirrored in a lot of network state writing in case you guys haven't seen all of my podcast episodes and what I've been doing in my investigations about the network state, that this is also something that is reflected in the network state book written by Balaji Srinivasan. But so let's continue. So today, Trump himself already functions as a big corporation CEO in his negotiations to end the Ukraine war. Ukraine is expected to pay $500,000,000,000 for help providing The US with free access to minerals and other natural resources, while Russia will pay nothing for its devastation of Ukraine. And so this is, I mean, an interesting point to make that already our states are being run kinda like, corporations. I mean, if you're, in The US or even keeping up with things happening in The US, whenever, Trump was kind of demanding that in order to get more aid from The US, Ukraine needed to give The US much more access to its minerals and resources. So it's basically like a very transactional nature in kind of the dealings it was having with other states transactional in also a business sense, like overt, like we need to profit off of this if you want us to help you. And so this already kind of gives, you know a little bit of a taste of what yarvin's you know dark enlightened alt right utopia would kind of look like we already kind of live in it and so yarvin you know kind of advocating for this stuff for me is like kind of it's kind of silly because much of what they advocate for are already part of, like, kind of the biggest problems with how states are run and issues with corruption and so forth. It's this transactional nature that they that they people at Trump are so explicit in in expecting and not to say that this is specific to even Republicans or whatever. I mean, this is this is a part of geopolitics. I think it's just kind of like the brazen nature in which Trump does this. And, you know, this is all rooted in a world system that is dominated by capitalism. So in many ways, Trump is just kind of advocating on behalf of The US capitalist class in a way. And so after that, he kinda jumps from Trumpism, explains a little bit about Balaji's book. So Balaji Sundarvassan's book, The Network State, How to Start a New Country, proposes an even more radical solution, not to change an existing state like many libertarians often do, but to start a new state. We start new companies like Google. We start new communities like Facebook. We start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Can we start new countries? Is a quote from from Balaji. The book challenges traditional notions of nation states proposing a future where online communities can crowdfund territory and transform into sovereign entities, so called network states. And so, yeah, it kinda I think, to me what's really interesting is that you know Zizek is making a connection that already made you know several years ago since starting I mean this basically the I mean even hey more or less the publishing of the network state book I was making these connections with with Curtis Yarvin and his work and these are the enlightenment part of it you could have made or I made in that point because there's already a known connection between Balaji and Curtis Yarvin I mean they're already recorded accounts of them having email exchanges or being part of large email groups or chains where they kind of go at each other a little bit, but are agreeing on a lot of the same principles because a lot of the, yeah kind of people in the tech vc world in The United States were in these big groups with Curtis Yarvin somehow is writing on you know advocating for a ceo dictatorship Somehow, I wonder why, was very popular with tech CEOs. And so, yeah, let's I like this. Next goes kind of there's an interesting point that he made. So he says the idea of a network state is Platonism and its purest. No reference to tradition is needed. We first digitally imagine a state and then apply the idea to an actual territory. Incidentally, not unlike the communist attempts to create a new man. So he, of course, is being, a little bit, you know, controversial by making these comparisons as kind of communist, thinkers around the new man. But what I specifically wanted to focus on is what he calls the the Platonism of the network state, which is kind of a, the exact kind of thing that I was pointing at in my piece for Outland magazine a couple of years ago. So right here, Fork Your Society, I want out that I wrote in 2023, where I said the Sir Austin has proposed a revolution in a former statecraft, but it's limited by metaphors of software development. So by Platonism, what he's talking about is an idealism about how kind of states ought to be, but rooted in a kind of digital utopia. It's kind of like his focus. He talks about digital utopianism more so. Whereas for me, I made the connection more specifically to tech startups that the entire idea around network states was and is rooted in how someone starts a tech startup. You kind of, you know, you you you you focus on scaling up. Right? You, like, start small with the intention of scaling up. Then and includes a lot of, like, investment language. So the book itself, I mean it's unsurprising because Balaji is a I mean entrepreneur a VC venture capitalist a big investor so he takes like the things that he knows and where he made his money at and just tries to apply that on a on statecraft which is really silly because, like, it at the same time, it comes with a Platonism, of course, like what Jizhik is saying with, like, the way that the digital world works. So that kind of talks about, you know, forking the code base of The United States, which is, like, kind of a trying to make a, you know, the metaphor of of forking code in software, which works in software. Great because you can make a limitless amount of of codes just text right but in the case of land land is extremely material right you can't simply copy and paste land and so what it ends up putting network states or the easy comparison to make for network states is essentially neocolonialism. It's saying that, like, they try to take things that are, I get by using models rooted in such a capitalistic logic, they are, I mean unironically like reverting back to like very colonial tropes about how people view and use land and yeah the book is very scant on details on how you deal with other states whenever you're trying to claim land because last I checked the vast majority of the earth is already claimed but anyways if we keep going another thing I highlighted is in this paragraph near the end where he says what strikes the eye is how far this project is from the standard rightist popular stance on which fascism relies. Emphasis on blood and soil or remaining faithful to one's own specific way of life grounded in traditional values. Are we then nonetheless dealing with marginal utopian attempts? Unfortunately, no. The project of digital elites to break countries into small territories run by tech corporations already has predecessors. From the sixteenth century Dutch East India Company, which functioned as a state in today's Indonesia up to up to today's special economic zones not to mention Trump whose projects concerning Greenland and Gaza move in the same direction apropos Gaza Trump used a precise term The US will take over and own Gaza neither a colony says there would be no native population as Gaza would be empty nor a new US state but a true network state. Trump plans to take over empty territory and reboot it from zero. So yeah Zizek is just making these connections already that much of the rhetoric and even reality to be honest of much of what network syncs have been able to achieve is neocolonial in in nature. It is the it is like the it's like foreign capital coming into a place which ends up having anti democratic effects of the people who actually live in it. In the case with Gaza, I mean, this is just, like, with an assumption of kind of, like, you know, absolute genocide and ethnic cleansing. In the case of of of Trump, what's also interesting is that Balaji does compare network states to tech Zionism. That is something that he legitimately has said before. He says he's looking for a tech Zionism. So, yeah, neocolonial. And then at the very end of the piece, he says, this is the implacable dark side of network states and one of the numerous arguments that Carlo Rovelli was right when he wrote that there will have to be a global federation of states the only choice is is whether it will emerge before or after a nuclear war so yeah I mean this is kind of like a a more bleak potentially bleak I mean I think you can look at it in many ways kind of statement that and I tend to agree with it that there it's kind of like a fantasy to think that we could have each our own sovereign little space where we don't talk to each other except via trade and don't have to, you know, worry about what others are doing in in those faraway lands. The world is already globalized. Technology has already connected the world at such a rate so far beyond than what we ever expected that sort of some type of global governance is necessary. And of course, already happens with the United Nations and you could consider the world economic forum the world bank like these are these things already happen largely at a kind of global technocratic capitalist level and from a particular class of people And so I think, at least for me, what it means is, like, I mean, I'm I'm inspired a lot by the writings from Albert Einstein Albert Einstein, socialist, well known socialist, where he does write about the need essentially for a global government to me it feels like that's kind of potentially necessary in some way not in this in the sense of like one world states that commands everything for everyone but in the sense of the need for coordinated governance to put forth certain humanistic ideals about how we interact with one another which again is already the case it already happens what I'm interested in is how do we do that from a place where we are advocating for the rights of working class people and that the governance is spread out amongst more players and entities and people so that we don't trample on each other's civil rights and like economic socio economic rights so yeah this is like a super big treat again this was published on file verse so if you go to fileverse.io I highly recommend it if you're looking for a Google Drive alternative especially it is a decentralized alternative to Google Drive. If you're ever working on documents and you are worried about the potential censorship of states, then I recommend Fire Verse. So definitely check it out. Maybe occasionally you could, share some of Zizek's, writing if you have a paid subscription and and wanna pass it on to me. But, yeah, there you go. I hope that was interesting. I just wanted to kind of give it a look and and share it with others.