Overthrowing The Network State: Forming New Publics and Pluralism with Glen Weyl
In the second episode of OTNS, Primavera (@yaoeo) and I are speaking to Glen Weyl (@glenweyl), the founder of RadicalxChange and a co-author of Vitalik Buterin's article on Decentralized Society. During the discussion we spoke about Balaji's oversimplifications in the book, how TNS was not written for human beings, and Glen's alternative for a Networked Society differs. Overthrowing the Network State (OTNS) is a series in collaboration with Blockchaingov where we critique The Network S...
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Alright. So hello everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Services Podcast and this episode is part of a series that is called Overthrowing the Network State, where I've been sort of talking to a few people who have, done a bit of work in sort of like relation to some of the concepts in the the book by Ablazhi Srinivasan called The Network State. I have with me my co host, the patron saint of BlockchainGov, Primavera Di Filippi. And we're gonna be talking with Glenn Weil, who is the founder of RadicalxChange and has, sort of co authored a number of papers both academically and with Vitalik Buterin. He's a common sort of, say colleague of of Vitalik, can I say? Yeah. I think I've probably written more things with him than anyone else. I think that's fair to say. But so maybe just for those who don't know you, would you care to give just like a short introduction to yourself? And I guess maybe as well some of the things that brought you to, I guess, the things that are covered in the network state. Yeah. So, I'm kind of a recovering economist. I was a professor at the University of Chicago in that field
for a while. And then in 2016 when the global politics started to get a bit weird, I wrote a book called the, called Radical Markets, which was trying to take some bold ideas coming out of economic theory to reimagine, you know, social organization. And that book was sort of a curiosity in the mainstream, but in the Web three world, it became something of a hit via Vitalik's interest in it, which sort of was the initial probe that sucked me into the Web three black hole. And, so I've been hanging out in that world for the last few years. I founded this organization called Radical Exchange. I also work at Microsoft, which was, you know, kind of random. That was just, where I ended up because of personal reasons. But because of my involvement in the Web three space, I ended up being for a few years, an adviser to the CTO of Microsoft and designing the technical strategy that the company is taking for decentralized technology. And then I'm now back, in research, and I've launched this new thing called the decentralized social technology collaboratory, which works with a bunch of different institutions and is, I believe, the largest sort of web three adjacent research organization in the world. And then, I'm also I also am founder of something called the Plurality Institute with with Audrey Tong, and others, which is, trying to build an academic field around some of the ideas that maybe we'll talk about today. I've been really inspired by her example. So those are some of the things that I'm up to. Yeah. So I think one of the I think especially
largest or, like, most noticeable contribution, I think, is in regard to, like, the radical markets. I believe, Vitalik kind of got the idea of quadratic funding and sort of, I think, shared it with,
made it sort of a reality with with Gitcoin. That was kind of inspired by some of your Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And quadratic voting has been, you know, used in a number of places as well. It's very related to quadratic funding. But, more recently, I've been very involved in sort of new kinds of network based identity substrates, intersectional identity, etcetera. And that manifested in this, among other places in this paper, decentralized society that I wrote with, Pujol, Haver, and Vitalik.
Yeah. And so talking about networks, I'm curious to hear what were your initial thoughts on the book and the concept of a network state that Balaji puts forward.
So I think it's important to note that, I've been interacting on and off in various ways with Balaji since 2017, maybe even 2016. So I was quite familiar with his pattern of thought, and there was not a lot in the book that I wasn't already quite familiar with. So I wouldn't say my reactions have primarily been to the book, though I did have some reactions to the book specifically and how it was structured. It's been more to, you know, his his thought pattern. And, I've had some sort of interesting exchanges with him, but, I've ultimately come to feel that he represents sort of a slice on some important and compelling ideas, but that he's taken in a direction that's very dangerous and damaging. So but I think that there's also, you know, as I said, he's he's sliced on really important ideas.
Yeah. So I think there's a to to to me, like, one of the reason that we thought it would be a very good idea to invite you to this podcast is also because I think there is a interesting similarity in how, your book that has been somehow really intriguing and really, like, popularized within the web space, because of this underlying concept of, well, we do actually have the possibility of influencing the way in which are the building blocks of the market and so forth. Yeah. And then Balaji's book, which also seems to be perhaps to a lesser extent, but that seems to have some traction in the web three space. I would say to a larger extent. No. Not to a lesser extent, but yeah. Yeah. For for different reasons to heighten. I think what's interesting is, like, in the same way as, like, your book, the the the the fundamental spark of your book was, like, we can think outside of the box when we're thinking about market design. To me, it seems or maybe it's my hope is that what is actually the traction that this book is taking is not necessarily about this actual concept, the way in which Balaji describe it of the network state, but there is a spark about the fact of well, not only we can redesign market mechanisms, we also can redesign our conception of nation state and so forth. And and almost, like, it doesn't matter what the book says as much as that the book is triggering this, this thinking. So how do you see this, this traction? Do you see this because of the network state as such or because of a broader thing, thing? And what is this product? Let let let me express what you just said,
in slightly different language, that was proposed by Audrey Tong, who's person I'm writing a book with now. What she said is that there's, you know, there's very old, deep, and important idea that shows up in John Dewey is the first time that I'm aware of it, and then it many, representations over the years. Anne Marie Slaughter is a recent example. There's a book called Files that Vitalik likes. That's another example of it. And this is a very powerful idea. We can talk about it more in a minute. And, what Audrey said is that it's hard for people to grasp that idea. It's a little bit abstract for people. And just conceptually, people need to think of, like, a heroic founder, like, almost, you know, riding out on a horse, you know, with a bloody sword, slaughtering, you know, his opponents to, like, build something. And what Balaji did is he took an important idea, and he represented it in that mode. And that made it possible for people to start to have a way into that idea. Mhmm. That's the that's the optimistic, you know, interpretation. Now the pessimistic interpretation is in doing so, he has permanently tarred that idea with the blood Gotcha. That is on that sword. And that, you know, there are many ideas that never recover from that. Like, you know, you could say, oh, well, Lenin Like, you know, yeah. Like, Marxism is probably not best represented by, like, the actions of Lenin, but, like, maybe it you know, you gotta break some eggs in order to make an omelet. And I think the answer was, well, yes. And, you know, a 100,000,000 dead people later and, like, quite a lot of discrediting of socialist and communist ideas later, you can debate if whether it was worth it or not. So, like, you know, I think I think you can take both perspectives on this and you know? But, exactly because we are concerned that this idea gets tout for however who it's the way in which Balaji
is describing it. Can we try and actually, like, dig into, like, what is this underlying concept that seems to be attractive to the Webtree community and probably beyond that? That that is independent of the specific instantiation
that Balaji's proposed. So let me go back to Dewey's 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. What Dewey describes is that governments are created to deal with the fact that markets are an insufficient way to manage the interdependencies that are created by a bunch of different social phenomena. For variety of reasons, we can go into that. But, like, you know, economists would call it externalities. But to me, that's not even sufficient because, like, externalities pretends, like, 10% is being you know, is a problem, and the market's covering 90%. I don't think that the fact that a radio can't transmit video is a externality of a radio. You know? It's just like, that's not what radio is meant to do. And I don't think markets are, like, meant to actually deal with most of the issues that come from social complexity and interdependence. And so what Dewey said is governments exist to do that, but the problem is, they were never sort of drawn perfectly to cover all of those. And more importantly, as technology evolves, as new forms of interdependence arise, the patterns of interdependence become clear and different and and even more poorly match the ways in which governments are created. And so what he argues is that we need to have a process by which new publics emerge, that are not aligned to, historical geographic nation states and that these new publics are empowered to govern some scope that, is associated with the relevant issues. So, like, one of the simplest things to describe in this is environmental issues. We didn't know about the carbon cycle and whatever, when The United States was founded. But now we've it's been revealed to us that industrialism created a set of global interdependencies, and someone's gotta deal with that. And it's not really, well managed by the nation state system because it's a global set of interdependencies. Another example that's environmental is rivers. Like, we didn't quite realize how fragile rivers were in various ways. And most rivers or many rivers flow across multiple countries and small portions of those countries. So the country is just like a really poorly designed vehicle for dealing with, like, the issues that that river raises. And, so Dewey says, like, we need to have this way of bringing this into existence, but the problem is people don't even realize that they're in this web of interdependence with each other. They need to understand that before there's any possibility of them governing themselves. And so he describes the role of what he calls the expert or the social scientist as being revealing to people these patterns of independence, and then enabling them to see themselves in that social scientist as a mirror. And then once they can see themselves, the role of the social scientist disappears. So this is somewhat analogous to, on the one hand, emergent publics or like biology's network states, and the social scientist is something like a founder. And yet there's some, like, really important structural differences between the Dewey imaginary and this imaginary. And as I said, the Dewey imaginary is like this is one of the oldest, deepest ideas in social science. It's it's propagated through all sorts of scholars, recently and has been elaborated in a bunch of ways.
Yeah. So I think I think what you're saying is very important. At the same time, when I'm thinking about the way in which the resonance of that book is triggering the imagination or the excitement of the Web three community, I'm not sure if it's necessary about this, like, what what it is answering to a need. Right? And I'm not sure that it's necessarily the fact that, there is this need of greater interdependence and the further network state comes to the rescue. My feeling is that it's it's tapping into a different type of, of need that is being felt, which is, in my view at least, more about the question of existing nation states are failing us. Not only, because of the interdependence and because of, like, the need of having more global slash plural slash interconnected systems. Because they at least in in the way in which the book is is responding to this, it's really about, like, let's create something of, like, alignment. It's it's it's almost like it's almost antithetic to interconnection. It's like, we want to be around people that have a similar alignment so that collective action can happen more effectively.
Yeah. So, I mean, that that element of the book, I agree, is there. And that element, I just think, is is just basically evil. I think it's pure evil. But, like, like, I I think I think I think that it so so that's the sense in which I I think if that's what the book is tapping into, then I think it's tapping into, you know, the instincts inside of us that are sort of genocidal and, and and so forth. So so, like, yeah, it it's tapping in both into something that's deep and important and and profound, and it's tapping into our worst instincts to destroy those unlike us. You know? And, it's doing both at the same time, and so I I don't think we can view it as either, you know, good or bad. It's it's some combination. You know?
I I I agree that I think the what people are attracted to in the network state is sort of it comes from a place of being, dissatisfied, I think, just with the status quo and just, like, trying to look for something, that can propose something hypothetically better, by kind of, I think it it appeals to certain types of very low common denominators, like this idea that Bellagio has about, like, the one commandment. They know, like, find the one thing that, like, for some reason is going to bring all of the the vegans together in one country or, like, all of the anti FDA people in another country as if that's, like, a viable way to kind of organize society in a nation. But, so I think like that, you know, with without sort of any kind of alternative being proposed, I think, or any any alternative that is, like, more, that seems more feasible to people or, like, is attractive to people, I think they are getting attracted to the network state. And that's kind of, maybe part of the issue.
Well, I mean, I I think, there's something attractive about, you know, genocide cleansing, like like Simplifying, I think, is what I Reducing
creative simplification. Quantity. The
the there's an alternative, which is to build for social complexity. And and the thing that I think is so interesting about the title, The Network State, is that the network, what like, the whole concept of a network, well before social even involved social affairs was to get past the desire for simplification, to allow us to grow grasp and wrestle with complexity. So to me, the network state as described in, you know, Prima's motivation and so forth is really an attempt to build a state capable of killing networks, of eliminating them. You know? And, really, it's it's a dissatisfaction with our current state that it's unable to eliminate networks
that is sort of motivating the book. Now I know that's not how he thinks about it. No. But I think that's what's coming out of it, which is he's talking about this his use of network is not, like, distributed. Right? You just have a a state that is not all in one jurisdiction, but that is distributed enough. You need to network the it's like an internal network of this state that is this new type of state, but there's no no discussion and no mention about how these states is networked
Yeah. With auto network state. So it's it's not a large network. It's actually a I mean, it it it it's not the Internet. It's the opposite of the Internet. Right? The Internet was precisely meant to be a network of networks, whereas this is meant to be an Ethernet. It's meant to be a proprietary connection among a fixed set of machines to which in a centralized way within that cluster Yeah. Someone can be hand added at in a commercial and proprietary way. It it takes the vision of the walled garden, you know, as an alternative to the Internet and, you know, tries to reify it into
a conception of how all society should be ordered. And I think there is this kind of deceptive flavor to that because I do actually believe that white white is salient because the title is salient. Because when you hear network state, you're thinking more in the way in which you described it initially, which is, like, how do we have this interconnection and this interdependence, etcetera. But then when you actually read the content, you realize that this notion of a network is not the notion of a network that you would have assumed initially. And and yet the science is that and I think one of the thing that that we might want to dig into, like, trying to understand, okay, what is this concept that is actually interesting? I think that's much more into that direction that we should try to steer the conversation than in this distribution of an internal system that is actually logically
centralized. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I sometimes get the impression that a lot of the web Web three people that have been, I guess, identifying with the network state, I'm not sure, have actually read through the book. There where, like, it network state, I think, it gives a particular feeling, but I don't find that feeling when I when I read that book. Well, the the one thing I think that's also important to recognize about the book is that
90% of the book has, at best, a very limited amount to do with any of the discussion we've been having thus far. And then about and then and then about the last 10% of the book gestures at, but does not really even fully describe what we're talking about now, even even on Balaji's side. So it's it's a as a book as opposed to as a concept, it is it is, at best, very tangentially related to any of this discussion. But as a concept, you know, which I think is more interesting to discuss. Yeah. So so in other words, what we're we're saying is I think you have to take sort of, like, four or five steps away from the book as an as a text in order to actually get into the meat of some of the issues that we're
we're grappling with. You know? Yeah. And I think what we're trying to achieve with this podcast is exactly this. It's like the concept is generating reflection, is generating discussions, and what is it, if any, that can be taken out of this book because of the desire of people into exploring this concept even though we need to step away from the actual content of the book? Yeah. I I sometimes feel that the the impression that I get at the the larger concept is just like how do we how do you
shift the world or how do you create a world in which you would rather want to live in than the one that you feel currently exists that is dysfunctional?
Yeah. I I mean, I I think part of what's going on is kind of analogous is a good analogy in AI, which is that, you know, if you think of the discourse around AI, on the one hand, there's, like, actually neural networks. And the way that neural networks works is there's these billions of nodes. They're incredibly heterogeneous. They're all doing different nonlinear functions. They all represent these incredibly heterogeneous things. And, like, the actual structure is the same insanely pluralistic and composable thing where, like, actually, you could take a bunch of the nodes from something, wire them into something else, recombine them in all sorts of fascinating ways. They represent all of this cultural complexity. But the way that AI is imagined is couldn't be more opposite to that. It's like a black box that is this hegemonic thing that just, like, acts on us. You know? And so, like, the reality of the of the materiality of, like, what how the system works is, like, almost completely opposite, to the way it's imagined and discussed. And I think that that's very much what's going with the network state, which is that, like, you know, networks are all about, like, multi, interconnection, complexity, people being part of these different things. And yet it's it's tempting and, simplifying and, you know, attractive to not have to grapple with that. And to instead say, oh, no. No. This is just an opportunity to return to, like, the most simplistic notion of a tribe and the most simplistic notion of, like, you know, fifteenth century proto capitalism. You know what I mean? And, and and I think, like, it's our job to resist that temptation so that we actually have the chance, even putting aside anything in terms of social goals, to, like, advance the technology. Because, like, you can advance the technology if you model in a way that's completely contradictory with what's actually going on.
Yeah. And I and I think the the message that is part within the book is more a a matter of, like, disconnection. How do I disconnect from the existing nation state, and how do I disconnect my exit based approach that if I don't like what's happening, I just create my own next state and. And and that there is this very important contrast when with the network, which is quite to the opposite, at least another network, which is interconnected, interoperability. And and those are, like, things that are not discussed at all. It's like when you have multiple network states existing in a larger planet, what is the interaction that exists amongst them? What kind of interoperability? What kind of dependence and interdependence exist between states. And that's actually that's the thing that has the question that we want to see. Yeah. Absolutely.
Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the newest patrons like Jackson, which really helps since being this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access to the bonus content like q and a episodes where you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. In the last bonus episode, I analyzed applying an anti capture framework made for DAOs towards left wing organizing and the specific challenges that they face. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. One of the things I know about you is that you've done quite a bit of work around the intersection of technology and democracy. And Balaji, I think kind of what we're getting at with the network states, he it seems to me he is much much more focused on the concept of exit, in this concept of, of the network state. But I'm just curious how how you thought about, like, the way that he uses the concept of exit as opposed to because you I mean, usually there is this kind of, like, a kind of meme that I hear a lot. So you need to have voice, you need to have exit. And he seems to be kind of, I guess, over indexed in exit, I feel, when I when I read his book. Well, I mean, he he's a big sider of,
Hirschman. It's pretty clear that he's never read more than a paragraph of Hirschman, because the whole point of exit voice and loyalty is about the limits of each of these three modalities considered independent of the other and the way it fails and collapses if it's not linked to the other elements. So Hirschman is one of my favorite thinkers of all time. He's a incredibly sophisticated, thoughtful person, and and you get a very clear sense from reading his work of the way in which these things are deeply connected to each other. Like, you know, the way that an exit can be effective is through people forming a community that is collectively governed that's capable of exiting in a coordinated manner. And and that requires bridging all kinds of differences between them using voice. It's not usually inspired by a founder or even if it is a founder. The founder is most effective to the extent that the founder acts like this Dewey and mirror that allows people to then, see themselves as a community rather than just a customer of of this person. And on the other hand, like, you know, voice is most effective
if there
is the threat of, exit, the threat of some kind of social division opening, that may be very damaging if not addressed. So these things aren't separate spheres. They're intertwined in a million ways with each other, and and that's how they become meaningful and effective.
And I I would I would say, like, this is part of a lot of the discussion that we had in the last two days, but there's also this,
this We've been in a conference together, by the way. Our our audience may not, be aware of that, but it's We've been discussing this question for, like, forty eight hours. Yeah.
And one of the point that I think is extremely relevant to to this book is the distinction between politics and governance and, where politics is about recognizing that there is value in finding compromises between people that have contrasting, divergent, potentially conflictual interest. Whereas governance has multi focus on this, optimization of cybernetic modernization of, like, how do we actually get to a decision? How do we actually reach some kind of consensus to majority voting or whatnot? And and trying to kind of, like, push the politics away. And to me, like, it feels that in in the in the proposition that, Balaji offer is a must trying explicitly to eradicate politics from the picture.
Yeah. I mean and and I think, you know, even the goal of forming aligned communities has an important place within a broader understanding of politics. Like, the way that you get the opportunity to benefit from conflicts and then cooperation across diversity is by the creation of diversity. And the creation of diversity requires not just honoring diversity that already exists, but, you know, some kind of reproductive process that creates new diversity that then enters into that. And and so that's great. Doing it in a way that accords to that to every instance of that new diversity, something like sovereignty of a nation state at present would probably, you know, mean the end of human life. But, but that doesn't mean that it's not an important component of that broader system. But it it's it's when you view that as, like, the thing, and, you know, and when you view sovereignty as at that one level rather than one of many different, you know, forms of joint control that, you know, it can be self terminating.
So maybe, like, building on that, I don't think that's at all what, Balanchi necessarily want to say in the book, but but I think it's relevant perhaps to the work you're doing because so your your, your very intense in reality and all those things. So maybe one question is you can see this concept of, like, exit based governance structure and, like, monolithic system of people highly aligned with each other as kind of, like, eliminating plurality. But if you step the if you step back and you look at it in a more interconnected manner, it's like perhaps by actually creating cluster of people that are highly aligned and therefore have a higher capacity for collective action in this monolithic sense. But at the same time, if you have, like, a large plurality of different communities, which highly align interest that all have higher degrees of collective action, then instead of having this kind of plurality inside the system that might lead to compromising and, therefore, homogenization of of o h system by pushing the plurality into, like, extremely aligned individual, you you might also acquire a larger type of neutrality at the global level that then needs to interconnect and intersect. And so you're bringing the politics outside of the system by having multiple system that are highly aligned that needs to deal with politics amongst each other.
Yeah. I think that the the problem with that is that, so first of all, at some level, at some abstraction, absolutely. But the the the problem comes in giving something like nation levels, you know, sovereignty and single citizenship to participants. And Balaji is never clear about how he even imagines it. But in most of the argument he's talking about, what is that one thing that defines One commandment. And and and Tells it. That that's the problem, which is to say that his book is not really written for, as far as I can tell, members of the human race. It's, like, written for I mean, it's definitely not written for anyone who's religious. It's definitely not written for anyone who has a family because you have to leave, you know, your family behind to go to this thing or whatever. It's not written for anyone who cares about some some sort of equality or something like that. That's that's definitely not a matrix. That's okay. The parts of the picture. It's so once you start slicing these things away, you sort of get down to the sort of stereotyped Theresa May description of sort of the the nowheres. You know? The The citizens of nowhere. And and then among them, you eliminate anyone who has any sort of sympathy for the left and blah blah blah. So, like, at best, you've gotten down to, like, you know, maybe half a percent of the population of the world or something like that that isn't sort of off the bat dismissed as irrelevant to this future. But then you start thinking about those people, and even those people you realize, like, well, maybe someone really care about Bitcoin, so you could go to some sort of Bitcoin based state. But then, like, once they're in the Bitcoin based state, like, well, actually, they probably care about some other things, maybe even more than that, and they might disagree on that more than they agree on the bit. So people are just themselves sites of pluralism and conflict, between the different things that constitute them. And the people who are most the site of those things are actually precisely the set of people who are, once you've carved all these other sort of categories of incomplete human or, you know, incomplete beings, not transcendent beings away from it, those people are the ones who are most complex in that way. So, like, the if if you took, for example, the people who are, like, most into bio freedom, the fraction of them that are gonna share sort of apologies, utter disdain for concepts like bokeness is probably pretty small, and so they might get into conflicts around that. And if you took ones that are anti woke, the number of them that are gonna share enthusiasm for experiments with the human body is probably not very high. You know? And if you take, you know, people are enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies, the fraction of them that are going to, you know anyways, these things are just not all that correlated with each other. This this assumption
of this, hypothesis that because people are highly aligned, they will have tighter capacity of collective action. Actually, it breaks down to the extent that anyone that is sufficiently highly aligned on everything and therefore will not want to exit probably ends up with just having this very small cluster of people that are very aligned on very, very small things and actually no capacity to action because there is no possible interconnection with, like, two small. Yeah. And and I think that the the thing is you can get slightly larger groups with that.
But to do it, you need a comprehensive, not one commandment like ideology. You need something that becomes an overriding guide to action in almost all directions of human life, and that does exist. You know? Like, ISIS aspires to something like that. You know, the Nazi party aspired to something like that, I think. But, those aren't necessarily the kinds of network states that I think Balaji is, like, imagining.
But I think there is something maybe to say about the, the irony behind his he quotes or he he references, what's his name? Mencius Goldbug, Curtis Yarvin quite a bit who is, you know, very, has a lot of fascistic tendencies. So I think it's something that where he doesn't maybe really realize that he's,
I don't know if he realizes kind of, like, how it has a lot of these, similarities. Hard to imagine that he doesn't. I mean, he's been in this space for more than a decade, and the first 90% of the book very clearly follows an extremely well understood and well documented playbook of how you, you know, really going back to the protocols of elders of Zion and and before that, use selective, decentering misteractorizations of various historical events to reduce the immune the psychological immune system of the reader and open them to, indoctrination. So it's kind of hard it's hard to like, it it would be quite a coincidence if you were to have been in circles with people who've been engaged in a projects like that For sure. Time and would not, and would have then reinvented
that approach himself. You know? So what I wanna kinda wanna get back a little bit at this idea of, like, he's trying to kind of, I guess reduce politics or kind of get away from politics. Like one of the way things that I feel is that he's kind of removing politics by, it almost seems giving sort of all of the power to the founders like you mentioned before. So he has this quote, in the book, where he says that founders have root access to an administrative interface where law enforcement can flip digital switches as necessary to maintain or restore domestic order. So, like, to me it sounds like to me he's just completely disregarding, like like any sort of collective, governance or any sort of idea about voice, and he's just saying, like no because if you if you make a network state in which people are very aligned then the one founder, whatever he does, is going to be in the interest of everyone else because they're all highly aligned peoples. And it's almost like, you know, it's almost like a literal a literal road to serfdom, kind of like, want to recreate these kind of almost like fiefdoms of of of founders who have their each their own little network states where they have root access to, maybe your web three enabled lock on your on your house or something like that.
Yeah. You're on Very, very bizarre. About this is as critical as I am of, you know, capitalism and so forth, I I think that the problem in the book is not really even that he's modeling politics remodeling politics after capitalism, but rather that he's remodeling capitalism and politics after some very, very abstract imaginary, of what capitalism is. Because, like, tech startups I think it's tech startups. Like, everything is just used to the analogy of tech startups. Actually, that's that's my point actually is that, like, it's not actually the case that people choose one of these tech startup services to manage most of their lives. They actually choose several of them to manage different components of their lives, mix and match them in a variety of ways. If they couldn't do that, I don't think the tech ecosystem would be either functional or even remotely socially legitimate. And internal to those companies, at least the ones that succeed, and I think it's very important to recognize that while Balaji has briefly served in a couple of roles in the tech world. He's never actually served a role in a corporation at scale, you know, so that's important to to recognize. And any company that succeeds and gets to scale and that's sustainable has a variety of controls that do not allow for the unilateral exercise of authority in that way by a founder. In fact, founders of companies, even, you know, the really irresponsibly governed ones like Facebook, Meta, do not actually have root access to the administrative system. That that's actually illegal, under corporate law. There's And and the few cases Labor law helps you. Yeah. Yeah. And and the few cases where that does happen, don't always don't usually end very well. I mean, I think, the recent events with FTX are samples that more closely resemble the founder having root access and, you know, or or having romantic relationships with the only other people who do have, you know, point root access. And and that didn't turn out great for most of the people who decided to give root access to those folks. Which is actually, I think, it's also a spot in which
this whole concept, like, is the the analogy would exist in, like, why are we all using those centralized platform that we all criticize? It's also it's one concept of saying, well, don't worry because you can always exit and make your own thing. And, actually, this is also true for the Internet. You can always exit and make your own platform. Then no one no one is preventing you to do that, and yet we don't do it because it doesn't it's not that easy. And so I think this this same concept of saying, well, we are actually we are solving state correction because we are in a permissionless mechanism of network state that can pop up as you wish. It's obviously not the case in the existing model of corporate structure. Why would that become the same in a model of, like, network states? Yeah. I mean,
as I was saying, I don't think that the world that Balaji imagines is actually the world of the tech world, but we're at, I don't think we have found that to be especially competitive environment or one that offers people an especially free capacity to move or, by the way, that offers people, like, freedom of speech or alignment. Like, I don't I don't think we find in our online lives that our alignment with other people using the same tech platforms as us is higher than our alignment with other people in the same country as us. I don't I don't think that, you know, you would think of the nation state regime of the nineteen fifties that where that was the primary organizing idea versus now that people are like, yes. Now that I'm online, I feel I'm in a pool of alignment.
Yeah. I I sometimes get the feeling though that's, you know, to what you're saying earlier that if the network state sort of idea comes true anyways, I feel like people like Balaji or the extremely wealthy will likely be members of multiple network states or something like that because they would then just be able to buy. But that would be something that likely would be, probably reserved for the wealthy, I assume, in his, in his utopia.
Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing that Vitalik said about the network state was, oh, you know, the keto kosher place, I'd like to live there. And I think that's just manifestly false because Vitalik doesn't live anywhere. Right? Vitalik is the ultimate example of someone who's completely constitutionally incapable of on the basis of anything choosing a place that he wants to spend most of his time. So, like, the the perfect person for biology is also the sort of person who is least inclined to, on any basis, settle down in any manner?
Although to to the defense, I would say because the network state actually can has little instantiation in the world world, you can still be a digital nomad and always know that wherever you want to go in the world, you will always have your little parcel of your own network states that has a particular spot. And so, you know, I need to go to Asia, and I have my little neighborhood with all my aligned individual. I'll answer that. I mean, there there's a wonderful book, Terraiknota
by, or book series by Ida Palmer, which imagines a world in which that could conceivably be the case where, like, you know, you can trans basically teleport between any two spots in the unit. But absent that technology, I think it's almost literally inconceivable that that that description has any meaning to it whatsoever. Because it's it's like who manages the airports, who manages the roads, who manages the air? Like like, what is it that this thing has sovereignty
over? The airport network state handles the airports, All the people who are aligned being pro airports. People the pro road people, the pro road network state will handle the roads.
Completely privatized system of anything because there is no longer
public infrastructure of any kind at any national income. But but then but then every every network state is then completely incapable of operating or getting their people to the different places. Because if they're not aligned with the pro airplane people, then they're screwed.
If you don't have an alliance
You would have the the private air airline of every network state. No. But but if but how does it go to the airport? Like, what what if they're not aligned with the airport operators? They go to war. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Every city has says just 250 different airports. Interesting.
Like, London has But we need a lot of redundance. London has 10,
10 runways. It would now have to have, like, 350. That that would be a a large fraction of national product would be More choices. Helping airports. I actually the free market of airports.
Exercise to go because, obviously, balance sheet is not going into this, which is like the implementation details of all those concepts can actually be very interesting paradoxes.
Or like extremely
unattractive type of network space.
So I know we're running out of of time perhaps. So I just wanted to get my last question in because, yeah, you've been writing some, pieces on, sort of an alternative to network state, which you call the network society. So maybe if you want, could you provide what is what is your alternative? And how does it, I guess, provide a better understanding of what networks are than the nimbleages we've discussed? Well, to me, a network society is one
where every individual is part of a variety of different governance networks, each of which are democratically governed by the participants in them. And what I mean by democratic is actually complex, but let's put that aside for some moment. But in some notion, it it's certainly not under the exclusive control of the founder. There's some form of collective control by the members. And almost everyone will share, you know, one of those governance networks with any other person on the planet, but they may share different ones with different people. There is there is this quilt of interconnections that brings everyone together. And those communities have some alignment or common interest, but that covers, you know, one part of a person's identity. And people will no two people will have the same patterns of those participations. And that's actually what defines them as an individual. What makes you an individual is precisely that there is no one else with whom you are fully aligned, and many people, and who you're aligned along at least some element of what you value. And, you know, that's that's the network. You know, society that I imagine, it's a world of complex identities, collective solidarities, but many of them for any person, and the formation of broader coalitions from the building on those networks of relationships. And so you could think of each of those collective organizations as some abstract version of something like a network state. But the problem is that because everyone is part of multiple of them and because none of them represent those those people's primary identities, and none of them has some sort of exclusive sovereignty, it's quite opposite actually to the network's vision. That's interesting. It's like,
I guess in some ways, you could think of the state as kind of being a kind of, I don't think it was like primary identity or an identity an identity that takes up a lot of space inside of someone. But, sort of, I think, you know, there there are ways you can think of which in which that you could kind of remove that state identity, but you can still have the type of maybe, solidarities or like the type of plurality pluralism or plurality of identities that are sort of, like, enmeshed together, where you are a part of kind of, like, a collection of different types of institutions that are not necessarily just, like, a a totalizing state, if that makes sense. Yes. Yeah. I mean, so
there's certain ways in which that's kind of like some kind of anarchistic vision, not anarchistic in the let's smash everything, but rather let's proliferate more institutions to govern more things so that there becomes no single thing that we can point to as the state. Right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and helping us overthrow the network states through podcast episodes.
But if you want if you want to leave any sort of, plugs where people can follow you and where people can, keep up with your work.
Sure. There's Radical Exchange, and the Plurality Institute are two groups I founded. At Microsoft, I lead the decentralized social technology laboratory. All of those have websites, Twitter presence, etcetera. And for me personally, at clenweil, is my Twitter handle. Great. Thanks so much. Thank you.