OTNS: Prophets are dangerous and Capital doesn't care about your feelings
In this episode we spoke to Wassim Alsindi, founder of MIT's blockchain journal and the 0xSalon research collective based in Trust in Berlin. During the discussion we spoke about the concepts explored in his pieces Prophet Motives & Knightwork States and Necroprimitivism Rising. Wassim makes interesting connections between, the Crusades, the zero-sum mentality of network states, and capitalism's capturing of time. Check out a previous episode to learn more about our framework for ...
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm Josh. I'm here with Pimavera, and we are continuing our overthrow of the network states with our guest right here today. I'm with him at, Trust, a, artist collective in Berlin. And we're going to be talking about, some of his work that he's been doing that's been very, closely related and aligned with a lot of the stuff that we've been doing, around the network state. But maybe to kind of start us off, Waseem, would you like to give us a quick introduction to you and your work, and, yeah, kind of the stuff that we're that you've been doing related to network states? Sure. Yeah. Thanks, Josh and Prima. It's so great to be here. So my name is Waseem, Waseem Zl Sindi. I have a background as a scholarly researcher in the physical sciences, primarily.
I founded MIT's Blockchain Journal, co co ran that, for a couple of years called CryptoEconomic Systems. I currently edit the Computational Law Report Journal at the also at the MIT Media Lab, and, founded and, administer a collective based here at Trust in Berlin called the Zero Exelon, where we, have an event series, residency program, and write, various kinds of theoretical and creative works and, parallels that have a solo practice, most mostly around philosophy of technology these days. And, I suppose what's most relevant to to this conversation is I've been working on, a project called Prophet Motives, p r o p h e t. It's a play on words. And that is specifically related to, the kind of emerging notions and discourses around network states, paying particular attention to the human characters that, might be around these kind of frontier imaginaries and the the dreams, the colonial dreams and imaginaries that accompany those as they people try to use technology to reshape the world map.
Yeah. Tess, so, like, a lot of the things that you had written in, you have a piece, called
profit motives. It's called profit motives and night work states on a zero x folklore.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So going through it, I I was resonating a lot with, with kind of what you're putting down. And then, very recently, we were at Protocolberg, which is a Yves Berlin event, and you gave a talk, kind of spanning the gamut of, like, Baudrillard to PetroMasculinity to Bitcoin to network states. Gillette, it was really, really good, and I congratulate the the organizers of the event for not having any sponsors. I think that, like, your your talk might not have been allowed if there were sponsors. But it's really, really good. I think, a lot of people received it quite well. But maybe we can actually, maybe we can go through that a little bit and then go into, yeah, how this all kind of, relates.
Sure. I mean, like, where where should we start? So the the talk, I gave at Protocol Berg, the other day, was a somewhat ham fisted attempt to squeeze thousand years of past, present, and possible futures of governance, human governance, into twenty five minutes. So you can imagine I was glossing over quite a lot of details there. But, yeah, really, I was starting with the the nature of the market, the nature of, speculation Uh-huh. And the nature of the cycles that go around those. And, yeah, thank you for pointing out that the jumping off point was was Baudrillard. It was not often that I get to wheel Baudrillard's leg to work out. Yeah. But I think it's very important, very relevant for the world that we exist in today, particularly if you're interested in, tokenized assets, blockchains, and commodities, virtual commodities. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a couple of quotes I could do now. Yeah. So this is from, Baudrillard's later work. There's one called, a book called Symbolic Exchange and Death. And, here's a quote. We now live in a world dominated by the free play of the monetary sign that is beyond reference to any reel of production or even a monetary referent in the form of a gold standard. In this world, the idea of a real value, of equities, of commodities, of houses, of anything, is meaningless as what matters instead is not value per se, but infinite speculation. This new world is marked by the emergence of a brothel of capital, not for prostitution, but for substitution and commutation. So this is actually Baudrillard leaving behind this very well worn notion of the simulacrum, as, you know, the representations of the real surpass the real in their, magnitude, leaving the real behind. We just get these kind of facsimiles that bear no reference, bear no resemblance to the, the original underlying forms. And instead, he's, building a three stage taxonomy or genealogy, leading us to this this point of of, like, symbolic exchange, moving from the raw commodity forms, like things like oil, sacks of corn, you know, basic commodities, resources. Yeah. Widgets. Yeah. Sure. To refined ones. They're acted upon by labor, processed goods, let's say, production economies. And then we end up with the symbolic forms, these post social monetary signs, the meme economies Uh-huh. The Shiba Inus and the Pepe coins of of today. Right. Right. No. Yeah. I think it's, super relevant for
the crypto world, obviously, like, crypto is filled with pure speculation with no value underlying it beyond just kind of like knowledge of the meme and like knowledge of the knowledge about the meme and like being able to, you know, navigate these, like, very, very strange kind of, information dense, type of spaces. Yeah. In in in my book, I used, I used the board actually to to talk about, like, speculation or I guess, the spectacularness of, like, of of NFTs that, like, really garnered a lot of people's attention. But I really like this. And so I think for me, what this is kind of getting at maybe in the if I remember correctly, in the in the presentation and how it connected to some of the stuff that you wrote in, Prophet Motives is kind of like the, I don't know, the the this this symbolic form also kind of projects a future for a lot of people can project kind of what their desires or, like, some other future world in which maybe probably they are better off.
And so Yeah. Or at least it provides a scaffold or, like, a a substrate with on which we can project our desires. Right. Whether we know we're doing that or not, these things seem to afford that at the very least. Yeah. So there's, I mean, there's there's speculation as far as, like, financial speculation,
which is about like a speculation about the future, but also that future has to come with a narrative of like what, how the world will potentially look and technology is like this fantastic, medium to kind of think about like, oh, all my problems will be solved because technology will will solve it. It's speculation in multiple senses of the word. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think this kind of particular features or properties of, I mean, the tech world and and speculation and how capitalism has kind of, transformed in this way allows for people to, I guess you start to get into, like, religion and, like, in cults and how people are able to, like there is a bit of a cult around, like, a spiritualism around a lot of technology things. There's, of course, like California Ideology and all these other, plenty of, books written about that. But I definitely noticed that in the crypto world. There is definitely, like, this intersection of people who are, like, digital nomads and into kind of, yes, form of spirituality that, clearly, for me, I guess, you know, with globalization happening, this deterritorialization of all these cultural norms, people are looking for something to connect with others because we no longer have these kind of cultural institutions and practices that are, like, passed down through generations of people. We live in a much more, spread out world, I guess, or like a world where we know a whole lot more people from a lot of different places. In a lot of ways, that's good. In other ways, it has kind of, like, we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so we we look for, like, these these figures, these prophets, that we can follow to
take us to, to Zion, you know. To the promised land. I would argue also the the institutions that we relied on, we saw as the the the foundations of whatever nation state societies seem to be in decline. Yeah. Like, everywhere I look, I I see that. As well. And so there's also that backdrop as well that it seems like the old world is dying, and people are looking around for for for something else to believe in. I also think that with blockchain related stuff in particular, because it is such a dehumanized, inhuman, depersonalized space, however you wanna think about it, there are no, you know, humans installed in explicit functions in these networks. And so in these kind of natively, horizontalized spaces, there is just a kind of a vacuum, an agential vacuum, and people can just walk into those Right. And put on
laurel wreaths and tunics and robes and call themselves things like Bitcoin Jesus. Right. An eternal power vacuum that is just being, yeah. Whatever the latest meme gets, like, feels in that that that vacuum, which of course also relates to the amounts of money they may have. But, yeah, do you wanna get to, I guess, so like, maybe the the profit motive, so it's a plan word, right? Profit motive as in, like, you know, capitalism being, sort of run by the profit motive or the need for profit in order for companies and, yeah, for very wealthy people to continue to exist, but then also profit as in a, a literal, like, religious profits. Like, how do those how do those come together?
I feel like, yeah, it's a obviously, a play on words. And, the reason that I've gone with this play on words as the cornerstone of of this work is because I feel that these two things seem to be intimately connected, in our market capitalism mediated reality that we exist in, today. Mhmm. And so everything see, especially in the blockchain space, everything seems to be a market or an asset or quantifiable or measurable or, there's a desire to reduce or to parameterize or to quantify, these things. And then once we've got these parameterizable, quantifiable, measurable variables Mhmm. Then speculation occurs. So there's always this, you know, market based speculation
of the You can always make a trend analysis if you have quant Yeah. Quantized. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there is an element of divination of possible futures,
with, you know, number go up, number go down. There's a a very basic and direct motive for wanting to know what's going to happen tomorrow in the marketplace. Mhmm. And so I think that's, like, the first kind of, like, conceptual jumping off point, this kind of wanting to see into the future a little bit. And that's what a prophet, p r o p h e t, promises through natures of prophecy. They're, offering wisdom or knowledge of things which are yet to pass. Mhmm. And so I think that this desire to see into the future for financial reasons can be connected to the desire to and the decay of the institutions around us, the lack of noticeable lead, like, role models in the world around us, and how they're somehow still being replaced from different spheres of life with titans of industry. That seems to be happening more and more. That the Elizabeth Holmes and the Elon Musks of this world seem to be coming. These I wouldn't even say prophetic figures quite you know, not as bluntly as that. But people are projecting all kinds of divine or extra mundane qualities onto these people. And so this part of it is the will of the people and the desire to reach the promised land of whatever, capital accumulation or or, like, meaning in life Yeah. That there's something beyond the disenchantment of the the world. But also there's something about the kind of person that wants to be a prophet or that wants to be a leader or that wants to be, you know, a guru, something like that.
Okay. Vaseem, I'm super excited about this episode. I think I've figured out what we're gonna talk about. So because you're talking about profit, and I think that, we need to also talk about self fulfilling prophecies, especially, I think, in this particular, blockchain context in which the self fulfilling prophecy becomes self fulfilling because there is enough money to actually act upon the world. And in order to actually get this money, you need to get enough traction and network effect around your token based projects. And if you manage to be a good prophet, that is like vocalizing a particular vision of the future. And And then if you get enough traction around that particular vision of the future, then you also gonna get enough of the funds that will make it possible for this prophecy to self fulfill itself, because now you have the money to actually make it happen. Right? So I think it's like, it's a it's a slightly, I guess, more sophisticated, endeavor than just being like it's not just being a prophet. It's actually being a self fulfilling prophet. And the, the reason that you are, that people do act as prophets is because essentially there is real profits, in the economic sense that if you have successful profit, you're also gonna get enough profits. And therefore, you also become a more successful profit because you can enact your prophecy. It's a cycle of prophecy and prophecy. They're p r o f p h e c y and p r
o f I c y, if that's the word.
Yeah. There's plenty of I was watching there's a little series on Netflix called how to be a cult or how to start a cult or something like that, and they talk about the one of the last ones, I think, is the Korean, one, or I mean, a lot of them, they're just like associated with like, yeah, clearly like helping people make money within their, within their cult.
So Waseem, the, the topic I want to introduce that is just a little preliminary introduction, are you acquainted with the notion of hyperstition?
Yes, of course. I co wrote the book introduction to the PhD thesis of Nikklan's wife recently. So quite quite quite immersed in the, post CCIU.
Yeah. So I think I think that's exactly what we wanna talk to you in this episode is, to which extent is the Northwell state an superstition, to which extent this type of speculation is actually manifesting itself into reality because of this superstition and to which extent is the network state is multi dimensional conceptual entity that he's expanding both into the future by by prophecies of how the world could be given a network state, but also extending itself into the past by actually claiming back territory of like what other people were doing. All of a sudden we can look at it as like, hey, look, that was a network state. But actually what this is just the it's just a pastition that he's just claiming new territories into the future and into the past. So I think that will be a very interesting little, little, hole to dig into. Do you have, like, any, feedback
on that? I like the idea of hyperstition acting through time. So as I said, I co wrote the forward to the book edition of Anna Greenspan's PhD thesis. That's called Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, and it is about capital, the desire of capital to control, manipulate, and more precisely, engineer flows of time. And so we're what we're talking about here is hyperstition acting through through time in a way. And so I would argue that capitalism has always had this intimate relationship with with time and with power. So there's a lot there's a lot there for us to discuss, I think, Prima.
Very interesting. Yeah. So let's do that if you're happy. So my, my, my, my, my initial hypothesis is that, I will say that the, the network state I think is, I think we can, we can start from the opposite that it is an air station. Maybe for the for the sake of the audience, shall we introduce the concept of hyperstation? Sure. Do you wanna go for it?
Well, I'll give a simple introduction. And then if you want to add to it more, then we can we can do that. So hyperstition is kind of one level up from a from a superstition, from a, a a belief that is maybe not rooted in logic. Maybe it's something that's, mystical or or, extra mundane, let's say. And a hyperstition is, something that, is willed into existence through, desires and the actions and the flows of of libidos, and whether those are into do with capital or whether other kinds of libidinal flows. That is the kind of manifestation of a of a hyperstition. It's come out of a school of thought called the cybernetic culture, research unit, at the CCRU, which is based at the University of Warwick in the nineteen nineties. And people know them as the accelerationists these days.
Yeah. My book was, published through repeater books. It was Mark Fisher, who was part of the CCRU as well.
Yeah. They they contain multitudes. I said hypertension maybe come out from a bit more of the reactionary side of the CCIU.
Yeah. Yeah. I recently did a, you know, interview with Nick Sernik about this as well.
So, maybe I can provide a more, succinct or a straightforward definition. Please, agree or disagree with it. So for me, like, you have the superstition, and the superstition is when you have a particular event that is happening in the present, which is somehow affecting your future. Right? If I if I break, if I break a mirror, I'm gonna have, like, seven years of bad luck, whatever. The hyperstition is kind of like the reverse in some way, meaning that it's when an event from the future is actually affecting the present, which is very different as well from the self fulfilling prophecy, which is where an event for the home an event from the future is affecting the fruit the future. Right? So the self fulfilling prophecy, the goal is I'm saying something about the future because I want this future to manifest itself. And the more I say, the more it might manifest itself. Whereas the hyperstition and this is, like, kind of, like, this is the deductive process. Whereas with, with hyperstition, you you you engage into the process of abduction. So you start from the future. And then from there, you abduct into what needs to happen in the in the present in order for this thing to actually, increase chances of manifestation. So it's kind of like you are actually instrumentalizing the future in order to modify the present. The goal of the hyperposition is to change the way in which people behave today as opposed to achieving a particular endpoint into the future. Do you agree with that?
I can I can, I won't oppose it? I wanna, continue to pick on this. I think it's a really interesting framing of it, addressing it in these, temporalities. And I sketched out a three by three matrix, and I wonder if there's something that could be developed into a schema there at some point.
Okay. Do you wanna talk about it?
What is it? I haven't I haven't finished it. We're just, we're just talking here. But, no, this idea where we're talking about, the future influencing the present or the present influencing the future or the past influencing the present. Yeah. So you can draw that.
That, we made up, but I think it's a very nice word, which is called. So is when the past is affecting the present. And this is also this is the this is all of the administration instrumentalizing the past in order to actually affect the present. So when we think about that, I really wanna go into, like, the network state topic, because I think this is a fascinating intersection of discussion. The network states as an, meaning that this is this multidimensional, a temporal entity that lives in the present, in the past, in the future, the goal of their position is to come into being. And, and in order to do that, it needs to attack on all temporal directions. So what I think is so interesting with the network state is that all of Sudan, this narrative came about. Balaji was clearly not the first one to bring the concept of the network state. We actually did some some research on, like, the like, the networks that have been used to say very different things, ever since the emergence of, like, networks and Internet and so forth. But, but somehow Balaji has had has associated it with a particular hyperstation. And all of Sudan, it has created a lot of traction. And this traction is, but, generating a lot of project today that all of Sudan, you know, logos, I think is a good example. Lots of project that we're not necessarily doing anything related to the network state, but now they are a network state project. So it's interesting to see how the presence is actually being shifted, by initiative that all of students are attaching themselves into this higher level of the network state. It's interesting also to see that those initiative are actually, somehow managing to raise funds because they are attaching themselves to the narrative of the network state and therefore increasing the chances of the network state as they are envisioning or profit, prophesizing it to come into being. And then even more interestingly, I think there is now, and I think you are talking about it with like the present states. Terry is also going back into the past and somehow claiming that something that's perhaps had absolutely nothing to do with the net oxide because the concept didn't even exist, but let's actually take it on. And let's actually prove that the network state existed already in the past by just reinterpreting through retrostition a particular behavior that was happening in in light of this new conceptual entity.
Yeah. I think the word retrostition is really powerful, in this in this sense as, like, you know, as a renarivitization or a historical, revisionism. And, we can get to the crusades and stuff later if we want to, but I did read a very interesting book recently by, Christopher Tynman called The Invention of the Crusades, that the concept of the crusade wasn't around at the time of the crusades, at least the first ones that mattered. This concept appeared at at the earliest, thirteenth century, whereas the first crusade happened at the end of the eleventh century. And all the action basically occurred in the first hundred years, but there wasn't really this idea of the crusade at the start. So the question is, did was there a crusade in the eleventh century? Were there crusades in the first 100? They weren't called that. And, so events from the past are always liable and pliable to be manipulated, renaritivized, retrostitionized by people seeking to control or or manipulate or shape flows of narratives, of thoughts, of ideas for whatever profit or profit motives that they might have. And I think it's a really, yeah, very interesting concept, very powerful concept of retrospection here.
Great. So, yeah, let's let's dig into that. Right? Do you have, like, do you have, like, a particular opinion or a general understanding of, like, the extent to which the like, that that if there is an superstition somewhere, which I think Balaji is perhaps a victim of, and I think we as coordinations, we're also a victim of. We are actually part of the same superstition. We are just manifesting this superstition in different manner. And I think this is kind of like the work that we started doing at the beginning of this podcast is like, what is this kind of, like, common denominator that is actually unifying all those things that are abiding by the same name of the network state hyperstition? And therefore, maybe we can try to delineate what is this hyperstition about, right? Because even though we constantly criticize Balaji, and I don't know if Balaji criticize us or just ignore us, but, you know, even though we are criticizing, in fact, we're actually way more aligned than than the majority of people. We're actually part of the same. So what is this? What is this thing? What is this conceptual entity that came, and that is, like, spanning across all these temporal dimensions, and that is actually motivating us to study this concept of coordination, new networks of entities, network state, and so forth?
I mean, I don't have the answer to off the top of my head, it's such an enormous, question. I wonder if we might be able to probe at some of the possible drivers for what is bringing us to these, kinds of con conversations and and and and concepts and notions. And I would also say, Prima, that it's natural for us to, not get on well with our neighbors, whether that's in a territorial or a conceptual sense. The fact that you might, as coordinations, have a lot in common with the Bellagian notion of network states, and then that makes one feel uneasy because we find some aspects of that grotesque or unpalatable or unfair or unjust. I think that's entirely natural. We've always been, suspicious of our neighbors. Mhmm. Yeah. And I do wonder if the concept of disenchantment might be a nice place for us to to start. And then we can maybe talk about things like voice and exit and, you know, why people might be looking to make new kinds of sovereignities, new, kinds of, institutions, extitutions, as a, some and some of the motivations for that might be in we could frame them in terms of withdrawals or exits or, and and, dissatisfaction with what we the situation that we inhabit in the present day.
Yeah. I think that also like in If we think about, you know, we can think about mimetic welfare, but we can also think about hyperstitional welfare. I think it's also like, as you as you mentioned that there is this kind of, like, of trust and disenchantment towards an alternative and existing, like an established, which is the national state, which is, by the way, not that old. You know? It's not something that existed forever. It is an hyperstition that has really established itself in in modern societies, and that is somehow losing a little bit of its hegemony. And therefore, maybe that is what because of the existing of national states somehow losing its, dominant position, then now there is a new opportunity for those alternative hyperstitions that maybe have always existed, but were not very vocal because they didn't have much of a chance. And now they can see this chance and so they are jumping in. Right? And and again, I think I'm wondering actually, like, my question is actually more like, let's figure it out. I don't know if the network state, promoted by biology is part of the same as the coordination that we are promoting or whether we are actually two separate aberration that are both trying to take advantage of the weakening of the existing hyperstition of nation states.
Yeah. Two, it could be two surfers riding the same wave, perhaps. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. But, Josh, you got you lifted your mic to your mouth. Do you have something to No. No. No. Go ahead. Yeah. I, so the yeah. We talked about the idea of nation states being a hyperstition and network states possibly being a competing hyperstition. So then if we're, you know, in the logics of blockchain land, I immediately start to think of a marketplace of ideologies or a marketplace for hyperstitions or some kind of competitive zero sum arena for all of these ideas to play out in some kind of collective memetic imagination. And so these are all just ideas, organizational concepts, notions that get implemented, over time, and then they, you know, some of them stick. Like, you know, we end up with nation states. We all live in a nation state now. Before we lived in empires or dukedoms, neo feudal, you know, smaller neo feudal territories. And so the way that we seem to organize our units of human government, our, you know, the units of human administration that seems to change over time. And, I guess we see these kind of cataclysmic events through history, which lead to the reorganization of the map of the world, the territories that are, it constitutes is constituted of, things like the ends of wars, peace treaties, the the collapse of empires, whether that's the Ottoman Empire, the Ro Roman Empire, whether it's the end of World War one, World War two. And we see these things reorganizing, things fracturing, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the formation of The United States. And these seem to be, you know, events which either strengthen or weaken the paradigm of nation states. And I wonder if, the consolidation of nation states into transnational blocs. So let's say let's call The United States a federation of it's a federation of states, right, that we made into a gigantic nation, which has exerted its hegemony over the world for quite some time now. The Soviet Union tried to be something like that as well, but it it ultimately crumbled or partially disintegrated. We have these kind of pseudo transnational associations like NATO, Konakath BRICS. BRICS. And some of those, like, they rise, they fall, or they, you know, they they the power, the influence they seem to have seems to shift up and down as the constituent members change or grow or or weaken. And I wonder if, we can look at these shifting sands of the organization of nations and states and the transnational assemblies and, and consolidations thereof as perhaps showing us a way where the network state concept might fit in or might become real in an organizational sense.
Yeah. For me, it seems that, I'm not, yeah, maybe I'm not sure if I'm, like, as well read on the concept of hyperstition, but from what I remember reading, if I remember correctly, is, there's a lot of thought about capital itself being a kind of hyperstition throughout history that has, like, with the advent of capitalism, it kind of like came forward, whereas before, kind of societies were doing everything they could to kind of suppress capital for a long time, and now capital has been kind of, like, unleashed. And I really like I don't know if you've ever read the work of, I mean, Marx talks about it, but Ian Wright is a is a really nice writer. He talks about, you know, Mark focusing on Marx calling capital a real god, how, religions in the past were kind of like fake gods, but capital is a real one because it it exists and it's instantiated, through, like, physical things and makes people physically move or else they die.
Mhmm. We had a day, actually, in the profit motives network states essay, which was drawing on the capitalism's transcendental time machine work, I did with some colleagues last year where I posed the question, has capitalism replaced God with quantized time? Because the efficiency and the measurement and precision of time is the one of the key drivers of capitalist productivity and the power that the wielders of capital use on the labor classes?
Sure. I can't like, to me, I think there's something to say about, like, capital being like a time machine in many ways, just, like, kind of taking, taking from the future in in in many ways, especially if you think about it in in terms of, like, the ecological crisis. It's taking a loss from the future potentially, we can argue.
So credit and expectations. So think about market and, like, values of stocks on a market or the value of coins in a marketplace. A lot of that is predicated on expected future values.
Right. So in, like, in relation to high precision being this kind of, like, temporal, you know, creation of a of a concept or of a, you know, particular, I don't know, zeitgeist, when you call it, Capital is like this great vehicle for for doing that literally in many ways. And I don't know, for me, network state is really like a the continuation of the high precision of capital, kind of like moving towards its, like, I don't know, ultimate conclusion because, I mean, you had we had nation nation states, I think, was maybe the creation, like, created from the high precision of a nation because before, for a long time, the idea of a nation was kind of like a vague one, I think, in in history. It wasn't only until, like, you know, after the World Wars or during the World Wars or a bit before maybe that, like, nations are kind of being consolidated into, like, a particular
stage for some time. Nobody had passports before World War one, pretty much. Yeah. So the idea of the nation as a kind of enclosure for its subjects didn't really seem to exist. So people could just travel wherever they wanted to travel. If you had the money, you could just travel there. Sure. So there was, like, this I think they which came out of a need for maybe, like,
a protection, I guess, and, like, increasing conflict within at least in in in Europe, and sort of, like, the increasing encroachment of maybe, like, imperialism from neighboring
states. There was this need for Loss of loss of trust. Domination? Loss of trust. Loss of trust probably as well. Yeah. And there was this kind of, situation where the bigger one fish gets, the more scared the small fish are. So if there's a big nation and there's a bunch of small feudal territories, then there's a driver for them, for their mutual defense, for their mutually assured survival to then start to consider consolidating into what we might today call a nation state Right. To avoid just being invaded, just being conquered. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, look at Switzerland or whatever. Switzerland used to be each of the cantons, or like, not the cantons themselves, but the districts of Switzerland used to be nation states in themselves, and they only became country not that long ago. Yeah.
Yeah. But so, like, for me, like, network states, because capital has this like, the the state was created as a way to kind of, like, consolidate power and protection, and therefore, it also, became a vehicle for, mediating class conflicts and therefore also, like, provided kind of, like, welfare and all these types of things that we now kind of take for granted as existing for a lot for a lot of people depending on where you are. And so but the thing is capital, of course, is this, like, infinite kind of deterritorialization as it can and reterritorialization into something else in order to, like, create new markets to, like, create more capital. It's just like a giant amoebic thing that's trying to consume everything and turn everything into capitalist markets. And, like, I don't know, to me the network state seems like a way to kind of deterritorialize the ultimate territory that we have, like, in existence right now, which provides, like, albeit, like, not wonderful protection for a lot of people depending on your status of, like, aligning with the identity of the nation or not. But it provides some for some people, enough so that, like, people want to protect it. And I think for people I mean, maybe, like, I'm more on the on the left, like, feel that it's something to be protected because it's at least what we have. I mean, in the absence of it, what what is there for the disenfranchised? Should be. Not not much. I mean, I think for some people, the idea would be, like, it would then force people to create mutual networks, but it's, like, not a guarantee. And I think many people, depending on how disenfranchised you are and how much of maybe a minority you are in your particular context, like,
you probably won't be doing well without the Yeah. All I can see is drivers towards increased inequality. And, you know, depends on your views as to whether you think that's okay or not. I personally think that's not great. And so, you know, the safety nets that we have today that nation that some nation states provide, I would hope that they would continue. And while we're talking about the functions of the the state, you know, I don't wanna bang the drum of the Crusader kingdoms too much, but the, the what later became, like, well, the the the nightly orders such as the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, they provided theological training, education, medical treatment, health care, protection of travelers, security, logistical distribution, transportation support, communication, taxes and levies, and financial instruments such as letters of credit, economics, and directed offensive capabilities military, which is most of the functions of a modern nation state if you slice it in that way.
Right. Yeah. So but, like, yeah, I think, anyways, just saying that I think for me, the network's sake is really like, an attempt to, I don't know, take, take even more out of the world by removing the very little bits of what's territorialized by Yeah. Relations. I would say it's like a matter of, I don't know if it's like capital,
as much as privatization, which I guess might be, correlated with capital. But it seems to me like at least the the the network state, proposed, is about, there is some things that are currently done by the nation state. We can actually do them through private means. We it's basically Oh. We can privatize those services. And eventually, if we manage to privatize all of those services, why not privatizing the territory as well? Right? And then the problem is that all the students, the only way that you can really protect yourself against the state is that you need to these private territories have to become public territory of a new state so that you you are fenced against whatever possible invasion of the nation state, which is also a little bit, wishful thinking perhaps. But to me, like, I I feel like the the the that Balaji is is is acting upon, it's almost the one of, like, hyper hyper liberal capitalism of, why are we using this this public sector, in order to do things that the private sector could do just as well, if not better.
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I'm reminded of the notions of special economic zones and charter cities as some kind of like halfway houses between nation states and network states. And there's a great book by Quince Lybodian called Crack Up Capitalism. Yeah. Yeah. We Which, yeah, you're familiar with, probably your readers are quite familiar with too, which is also getting at this idea of either privatization and or capitalism punching holes in the map of nation state territories to, gain, like, to gain some kind of whatever, either localized sovereignty or either some kind of relaxation of the labor laws, of the, you know, the rules of the game in that in that nation. I often think of blockchains as jurisdictionless free ports. And so to me, it's no surprise that blockchains would be an architecture that people might use to affect these kinds of zones of exception.
Yeah. I I think, I don't know if you know this, but, like, in the at at Zuzalu,
network state the network state section was paired up with charter cities. Right. Yes. And I know about Prospera and things like that. Yeah. So, yeah, I know that that was kind of their
aligned concepts for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Which to me, I feel like kind of it gives the game away a little bit Yeah. Of what ultimately they I feel like they want is just a special economic zone, then they Or a network of SECs and charter cities or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Do we want to maybe go into the crusades a bit more? And, I think one of the things that we want to talk about in this interview is kind of thinking about what is, like, after the network states. Mhmm. You know, let's say, I mean, like, I think, which is an interesting question to always ask yourself if you are trying to imagine a future is, like, I mean, I I think this is a question that sometimes I think socialists should ask themselves, like, what do you do five minutes after the revolution? You know, like,
of course, you party maybe for for the nights, but what do you do the next day? Yeah. I think that we often that's it's human nature for us to be so focused on the sort of eschatological moment, the goal of what we're trying to do, the thing that we've been driving towards, what the telos' purpose is driving us towards, that we don't think so much about. We rush in. We don't think about how to do the the thing after it, after the mutiny, after the revolution, after the the network state. And, obviously, the network state as a concept is still largely hypothetical at the moment. So we can't Mhmm. We don't have data. We don't have information. We don't have lived experiences. We don't have anthropological reports of what happens after someone makes a network state. So but what we do have is, almost a thousand years of history since the Crusader kingdoms were set up by, orders like the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar in the in The Levant, in the The Middle East, in the areas that would now be Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. And so in the late eleventh century, the pope, Urban the second, made a call for a a divine war, in some senses, to take back Christendom, to take back Jerusalem in the name of Christianity from the Bosnians. And a few years later, there were a couple of, like, weirdly peer to peer crusades that we don't talk about too much. There was this people's crusade where a couple of prophets, one was called Peter the Hermit, led a bunch of kind of rag rag clad, toothless vagabonds through Asia Minor, what we now call it Turkey, towards the Levant. They didn't get very far. But then the knights, kings and the knights showed up with chain mail and armor and siege weaponry a couple of years later. And the Arabs were fighting amongst themselves, as, you know, people tend to do in the absence of a greater enemy. And they were disorganized and unprepared. And so in the wake of the First Crusade, which was at the end of the eleventh century, several Crusader kingdoms were set up in The Levant. And collectively, we call them Outremer. There's the, County Of Edessa, Principality Of Antioch, County Of Tripoli, and the Kingdom Of Jerusalem. And, you know, one of the, heuristic notions I'm exploring is that these Crusader kingdoms were arguably, examples of prototypical network stays. I don't think we can map these things one to one, but they're kind of an interesting device with which to to explore possible resonances. And so once we've set up the kingdoms, well, that's great. Mission accomplished. But what what happens next? And so there was a series of other events in The Middle East. As you can imagine, the people that were dispossessed of their territories and their homes, weren't gonna take that lying down, and they, redoubled their efforts and gathered, united under a series of of commanders, ultimately under, the Arab the Arabized Kurd, Salah al Din, Saladin, retook the retook Jerusalem and, Tripoli, and I believe, Antioch and then Edessa. So for about a century, the Frankish primarily Frankish knights, French, French, German knights, with a few, Brits and, Italians in there as well, held those territories, and they spent another century or so trying to get them back. And I think there was something very interesting, as these the the crusades are numbered in a way. It's it's also quite interesting, where you only get a numbered crusade if a king, a European king leads it. That's an official kind of, like, whatever, you know, approved crusade. Legitimate. Yeah. Legitimized crusade. Whereas all all these other kind of adventures or sorties or expeditions or skirmishes that didn't get, officially kind of, canonized in that particular, system. But the, so the first crusade, the Franks took the lands, made the kingdoms. The second crusade was a stalemate. The third crusade was a loss. And by this point, they were out pretty much. By the end of the twelfth century, they were basically out of the Levant. They retreated to Cyprus, an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, not far from not far from, those places. The fourth crusade for me is the one of the most interesting if we're going to talk about what might come after a network state. The idea was to go to, Egypt, Alexandria, where the Ayyubid dynasty was, centered, and that's Saladin's. That's what they were gonna strike at the root. Rather than go to the promised land itself, the holy land, they would go to the home territory and take major, Mediterranean port. So the Knights Templar were charged with leading this expedition, and they commissioned the merchant state of Venice for a whole year to build ships for them so they would travel through the Mediterranean directly to Egypt, not go through the land. Go traveling over land was a disaster, so they've made it much more efficient to travel overseas. The idea was in that kind of crowdfunding Patreon model, the noble people that showed up and took the cross, that arrived in Venice, would pay off the Templars, sorry, the Venetians, to, to to, you know, to make it all possible. Not enough people came to Venice to pay the debts. So then the Templars entered the service of the Venetians. They became a mercenary army of the Venetians, and then the Venetians were calling the shots. And the Venetians are, like, I wouldn't say they were from my read of this, my primitive read of medieval history, they didn't seem very ideological at all. They were merchants. It was about money for them. They were like hyper capitalists in a merchant, mercantile sense. Interesting points where capital and maybe like, the high precision of capital and God are maybe in conflict,
have little power struggle. Well, here,
God enters the or, like, whatever. The divine army enters the service of capital. Yeah. And so they got sent first to what was called Zara, what's called Zadar now. It's a town in Croatia. And so as the fleet arrived, they were gonna loot and ransack it, take their stuff, and the and then take over the town. And so as the, fleet arrived, the inhabitants of the town painted crosses on their houses, not only to remind the arrivers arriving, armies that they were Christians, but they were indeed crusaders. And that did not stop them from trashing the place. And then even more remarkably, they went to Constantinople, which was then the seat of the the the Byzantine Empire, the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the rump state that succeeded the, they continued on the traditions of the Roman Empire with Orthodox Christianity after the breakup or the beginning of the disintegration of the Roman Empire. And they sacked Constantinople as well, killing no small number of Christians. So that is a little bit of a you know, it's not a pleasant story, but for me, there's a little portent in there about what might come after the the network state if, capital is allowed to kind of rule unfettered, if capital is given the supremacy that it it seems to, desire or be ordained for, if it takes supremacy over over God or the church or other institutions, then you get all of these kind of, like, wild, unforeseen, unintended kind of grotesque consequences.
Yeah. Capital doesn't care about your feelings or your God.
Yeah. I mean, capital is is its own It is. You know, pantheon, its own pantheon of of of gods. It doesn't care about yours. Yeah.
Yeah. So, we were we were speaking, like, beforehand that, the Crusades are an interesting example of kind of, like, you know, kind of, like, network states in that there is, I I guess there's like a, they were an aligned community of Christians who wanted to have land that they can live out their Christian fantasies in the promised land.
They didn't exactly crowdfund the territory, let's say. I mean, they, yeah, they got, they, the rest of the They crowdfunded the means to take the territory. Morcibly crowdfunded, the territory. And they did have recognized leaders. So it was all, like, noblemen from France, pretty much, that became the kings of these like, the king of Jerusalem was Baldwin the first of a Boulogne, I believe.
But, so like this, this experiment, if you want to call it that, didn't last very long and didn't really work out for a lot of the people involved. And it had a very violent kind of like, history to it. So I think for for people who are, I mean, thinking about network states, maybe something to keep in mind about, this. You know, if you wanna look for land, probably other people live in it already, if it's good land to, to live on.
Josh, this reminds me of a story that came out in the wake of the FTX, you know, fallout. Quite recently, there was a story that, Sam Bankman Fried was looking into buying the Pacific Island of Nauru just to be like a effective altruist island. And, like, there was speculation around whether he knew if anyone actually lived there or not.
I would not be surprised. But, so, yeah, so we want and there had, yeah, a lot lot of similarities with, like, the Prophet as well. We wanted to also talk about because part of this podcast is to talk about alternatives or to think about, not necessarily solutions, but, like, let's think about, maybe where it can go a bit better. Because there are some things of alignment like Pinhe River was talking about as far as, like, network states and coordinations. I mean, there are I mean, you know, in many ways, we are, conceptual neighbors, although I think that our concept is, like, radically quite different. There are, like, noticeable similarities, of course, due to we're just, like, analyzing the world as it exists today, and there some of those things are just facts. What are some like, based on your reading of history, where are the places what are the things that you think would be interesting to look at to kind of prevent the kind of violent, trajectory of things like, what happened in the Crusades?
Right. Well, I mean, there's there's one, which is, I think, quite practical. I mean, we must go back to ancient Greece for that. And this is like so I take particular umbrage in the Bellagian notion of the network state with the idea that it must be centered upon a recognized founder, the prophet, or if you like in the vernacular of my work. And I think that's dangerous because not only does does it give one person a lot of power, it also attracts certain kinds of people. You know, the kinds of people we see in leadership positions today. You know what I'm talking about. And so The people who want to have be in power are usually the ones you want to be afraid of. Yes. You should I mean, the the the the yeah. Or that should not be allowed to be in power. And so one of the ways that this was worked around in ancient Greece was using a concept called sortition, or random subsampling, you might call it today. And so there was a stone machine called a claritarian, which you would put, I believe it or not, little tokens into. And this would then do this kind of pseudo random, subsampling. And that would choose some of the polities for, like, various functions of governance. So you would fill people's assemblies from the public, and they would be in positions of power for limited periods of time, and then there would be a new round of this sortition to to select these citizen assemblies yet again. And so that is one way that you can use, and we now have ways to do this with cryptography. We don't need a stone tablet. You can just verifiably random, cryptography. Or, like, even even, you know, throw zero knowledge stuff in there, and you can prove that things are fair and not leak information out. So we actually have ways of doing this in quite quite powerful and efficient ways at scale and at distance. So sortition is one thing to avoid what I call the Bellagian trauma of the recognized founder, prophet. And the other one I'd, that came up in the reading of David Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment and the Hakim based work on pirate utopias, was around pirate governance. So in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the cities that are now the capitals of the North European, North African nations, so Azale, Rabat in Morocco, Algeria, and Algeria, and Tunis and Tunisia, to some extent, as empires around them waxed and waned, they became autonomous and, like, almost sovereign pirate republics. You know, kind of think of like a the notion of a pirate haven, but they in effect came like they were not under the Swiss Realty or under the sovereignty of some other state as a kind of a vassal. They were kind of independent. And, we have this notion of pirates as being savages or, like, barbaric, uncivilized people, but I think we can learn a lot from pirate governance. From what I've from what I've seen, it seemed to be quite fair, compared to some of the more, like, let's say, mercantile forms of governance that we might, see today, more mediated by by capital. And there's two examples that, I I picked out, which is one that I mean, we've all heard of the concept of the mutiny on the pirate ship. Mhmm. And that is because the captain is only the captain of the ship if the shipmates agree that they are the captain. If they no longer agree, the captain gets dropped off at the nearest rock, and the new captain is agreed upon. And so the this idea of the founder or the leader is not something that is kind of enshrined in some, like, constitution. It's more to do with, like, with norms, I guess, than with with laws and rules. And the other thing that I think is super interesting is about, resource, how resources are meted out, like the loot, the booty that is divided up at the end of a successful voyage. And the disparity between a pirate captain and members of their crew in terms of the share of the wealth that they would receive was something like double, two x. The captain would receive twice what an average crew member would receive. And that seems like compared to, let's say, the the owner of a merchant vessel, which would probably be, like, 10 to 15 times what the average crew member would receive. And if we look at CEOs today, they earn something between 50 and a 100 times the average worker. 300 in The US. Right. Okay. So it's getting worse. Yeah. Yeah.
No, I think, I think those are interesting. I mean, do you think that's, so it's kind of like this, I think the, a lot of the work from Balaji that I read always has this kind of like, yeah. He talks a lot about, like, technical truth and, like, this desire for, like,
I don't know, like, very Absolutism.
Yeah. Absolutism and, like, platonic idealism. And, like, I think you see this in his obsession with, like, the the founder, that there's very little malleability actually in in a lot of what he he writes about and and the conception of of the network site. And I think for some people, especially if you're into math, for some reason, is like,
it's it's it's that seems like a good idea because math is also like It's reassuring. Like, we live in a world that's so messy. There's no Sure. It's hard to tell what's up from down. So the idea if somebody comes along to you and says, hey. I have truth. You want some? Of course you want some. I mean, I mean Everybody wants some truth. The thing is like once you read once you read some epistemology, you realize there isn't truth. There's things that have truth value that approach the truth. You can't get a truth. I was a scientist in my in my younger days, and I was very idealistic in my youth. And I believed in this notion of truth and the quest for the truth. And I thought that's what scientific research was. And I got halfway through my PhD and I realized there was no When I was doing quantum physics, there is no truth in quantum physics. But also it was not the the questions in research, it's really about politics and human, you know, formations. Nobody really cares about the truth. It's about publishing the paper in the journal. It's about getting the professorship. It's about, you know, beating your rivals. Nobody cared about the truth, but, like, it it was something we would always talk about as a kind of the idealized notion of the goal of the telos, the eschatology of science. And so if people are interested in maths, then or if you've come from a computer science background or you're interested in crypto networks or something like that, the idea that we can get to a truth is very alluring and satisfying. You might think of we have this concept we've discussed in the Xeroxelon called algorithmic formalism as a counterpart to algorithmic realism. And, what I see in Berlodzie's work is this kind of extremely formalistic rigid interpretation, which I think carries a heavy resonance with, Bitcoin community ideals and Yeah. Values. 21,000,000. 21,000,000, code is law, and so on.
Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's part of his, that's part of his prophecy. Like, if you want to actually get a bunch of people following you, you need to actually have a claim, which is not which is not this kind of, like, multifaceted, everything is both true and false. You you need to actually have a strong claim in order to attract your followers. Right? Otherwise, why would they why would they follow you? Exactly. Like, then you're not actually leading to any direction. So in some ways, like, as a leader, you're kind of always having to pick one of those subjective truths and making it your own. And the more you manage to actually attract people around this truth, the more it actually becomes the truth. It's it's it's always like a
competition between multiple truth, but Yeah. The truth. Held as being the truth becomes the truth. Yeah. Well, we have many truths, I guess, in that in that sense. A constellation of truths. But no no the truth, just my truth and your truth.
We're all speaking our truths. Yeah. So then maybe, like, I think, I'm curious if I've I've just thought about this question now. Like, if you have any thoughts on, like, how can we bring about, I don't know, our our hyperstition? Do you have any thoughts on, like, how do we fight back against the hyperstition of of capital?
A big a big question, I think. It's a very big question, but, like, I always come back to and this is, like, one of the main kind of orienting themes around the the book I'm writing on these on these topics. Scarcity. Scarcity for me is, like, seems to be a massive driver of, zero sum mindsets, competitive mindsets, and these kind of absolutisms and these formalisms. Mhmm. And we know that Bitcoin created digital scarcity. We didn't really have that before. And so that is kind of its move. Like, so it's Bitcoin is just about digital scarcity, pretty much. 21,000,000. That's that's all it's about. And that but that the shadow of that logic, still is cast over almost everything in the space that's come after it. Like and I know, Josh, you do experiments that are, like, imagining different kinds of of of, logic modes of logics being implemented and instantiated. But I do wonder if, like, it's the it's the scarcity mindset in the metaphysical realm that we need to find alternatives to that to, help people imagine different kinds of futures.
That's exactly what we're doing with coordination, actually, which is, like, the in some way, like, if we're thinking about, like, how do you how do you fight against capital, it's very hard because the world society has been crafted around capital as the fundamental processes. The and and the network state indeed is a very salient alternative because it is actually perfectly in line with the, liberal capitalist, society that we live in. The the coordination is actually, trying to promote trying to actually show that the only reason that there exists scarcity is because we are living in this, liberal capitalist society. And that if we start acting in different manner, we might actually reduce scarcity because we can pull our sources and we can actually start sharing our sources and supporting one another, in ways that don't necessarily have to go through the market system, because we are part of this particular coordination. And so we are we are finding ways in order to, mutualize resources. And and and this is actually, I think, a prophecy, if it is a prophecy, that, for those that understand, I think and again, this is like is that the truth? Of course not. It's the truth only if it becomes the truth. But, but I think that's, like, that's something that is salient to at least to the people that understand that capital is, useful in this society, but might be less useful in a different society. And and if Mhmm. If you don't manage to it it it doesn't make almost any sense to say, hey. But, yeah, we can just do coordination if we also don't have the capacity to sell or to to explain and articulate the future vision of the world in which an autonomous society is possible because we started changing our behavior today. Right? And and if we if we just move forward with the same behavior, it's not unlikely that we might end up into like a network state like thing, because that's kind of the standard evolution in which things are moving like more and more privatization. So I think it's like, instead of, like, even focusing on what what is the truth and what is right and what is wrong and what is correct and what is false, I think it's more, what is a future that is sufficiently salient that will actually justify at least, a portion of people to choose to change their behavior today in order to ensure that this prophecy actually is not just a prophecy, but is actually becoming reality.
So we need to unlock the the memes of production to,
create the coordination state reality that we want to see in the world. My feeling is that it's it's about kind of recognizing the abundance we already live in. For one, I think part of the scarcity mindset, of course, yes, we are constantly, like, reaffirmed that things are scarce because we have to pay money to buy things, everything is paywalled, whatever else. But having, I guess, being able to create the social organizations that that help us, bring bring to surface the abundance that we already have, which I think includes, like, I mean, just not using capital as a way to organize with one another or to coordinate, which requires a bit of course, there's this mind shift and there's also like a need for literally changing the material conditions, I think, for for that for that to happen. Yeah. We need we need memes memes of abundance.
Yeah. Big big asks here. Big asks. But, I think Simple. Maybe they are simple, but maybe they're big. Yeah. But, it's something worth thinking about and fighting for, because the the kind of post Bitcoin, Bellagian notion of the network state is not gonna be a good life for many people.
No. Mhmm. Is there anything from Rivera that you want to touch upon? We've been a bit over an hour.
Nothing. We're good.
Yeah. Is there any any closing words? Thanks a lot for spending the time and and sharing your work and research. Yeah. My pleasure. Super, super cool to see. Yeah. I don't know. We we didn't really, like, collaborate on on anything, but ends up we're
similar similar lines. Perhaps we're also two surfers riding the same wave of the hyperstition that we haven't yet characterized. Yeah. Yeah.
The abundance hyperstition.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, like, for me, this work came out of, I've spent several years writing about Bitcoin Mhmm. And how I see, the unlimited desire of Bitcoin's proof of work for energy as an existential problem for us, life on Earth, and the scarcity mindset which pervades it and therefore kind of affects the minds of the utterance of it being a it's one of the biggest problems I see on the planet today. Mhmm. And the, so the conceptual basis of the this night work state network state work came out of the parts that didn't quite fit into that. And so as the network state kind of emerged, I realized that there was quite some resonance between the scarcity and zero sum natures and mindsets of Bitcoin and the social formations around it and then this network state stuff. So I just dropped an essay called Necro Primitivism Rising, which is about the social cult around, Bitcoin, especially the extreme end of the social cult of Bitcoin. And I think there's there's certainly a line to be drawn from the Yeah. Religious further of the Bitcoiner, which is absolutely dominated by scarcity and zero sum competition comp competitive, notions and this Bellagian network state idea. So, yeah, I mean, like, we need to find alternatives. I'm really glad you guys are working on this coordination stuff. I don't know that much about the kind of other variants of network states. Like, I met somebody from Logos the other day, and, they they watched the talk I gave at Protocol Boo, and they said it was great, but they wanted to pick holes in my critiques. And then when I said that they were part of the recognized founder part in most you know, that's my biggest critique is the fact that we need a profit at the center of this thing. The guy seemed to relax a lot. Like, the the war ended, and we were, you know, going on his podcast in a bit and stuff. So, like, I'm very interested to explore different approaches to these ideas, because I don't think, the Bellagian notion of the network state needs to be the hegemonic one. It should just be one meme competing in a marketplace of many.
Nice. Well, thanks so much. Yeah. I'll I'll link your work in the show notes so people can check it out. I highly recommend it. Thanks. And, thanks everybody for listening. Thanks, Primo. Thanks, Josh. Great to be here.
Cheers.