<nettime> Report: The Network State conference @Taets, Zaandam (30 Oct 2023)

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I wrote this report about The Network State conference for the INC:

https://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2023/10/31/report-the-network-state-conference-taets-zaandam-30-oct-2023/


here is the full text:


Yesterday, I attended The Network State conference
https://balajis.com/p/network-state-conference . You can watch the entire day
here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-GfuIFkB_Y .

The idea of ‘the network state’ was coined by entrepreneur and investor Bilaji
Srinivasen. His self-published book of the same name defines the idea like this:
“A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of
national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action,
an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual
government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded
physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a
large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure
of diplomatic recognition.” (Srinivasen 2022, 9)

That is a whole bunch of ideas clumped together that I’m not going to outline in
depth here. If you want to learn more, the book is available here
https://book.thenetworkstate.com/tns.pdf . Suffice to say, it is taking certain
corners of the blockchain community by storm, so much so that Vitalik Buterin –
founder of Ethereum – wrote a long blog post
https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html about his thoughts on
the concept. Buterin is excited about the idea, but also already points to some
important issues regarding wealth inequality and the effects of ‘exitocracy’ on
wider society. But where it really gets interesting is in the efforts of Joshua
Dávila, a.k.a. The Blockchain Socialist, and Primavera de Filippi, director of
the ERC Blockchaingov research project, who have taken it upon themselves to
develop more thorough criticism in their podcast series Overthrowing The Network
State
https://theblockchainsocialist.com/category/podcast/overthrowing-the-network-state/
.

Enough background. Here are some of my quick thoughts after the conference,
which really was just a long series of business pitches without reflections or
discussions.


Reviving the virtual community through libertarian exit

I got a strong sense that Howard Rheingold’s 1993 vision of a virtual utopia got
an upgrade to the blockchain-age, but not for the better if you ask me. There
was something friendly and makeshift about Rheingold’s original vision back in
the 90s. It imagined a group of oddball virtual friends “exchange pleasantries
and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange
knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall
in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art
and a lot if idle talk”, in short, live life in all its messiness together
online (Rheingold 1993, 4). Over the years, Rheingold’s vision has been
thoroughly critiqued, especially with regards to his utopian idea of the
separation between the virtual and IRL, which the algorithmic discriminations of
social media, insurance premiums, and predictive policing through contemporary
digital systems prove belongs to the realm of dreams.

At the conference, I stopped counting the amount of times I heard a version of a
rehash of the global village / virtual community / homesteading. Instead of the
separation between IRL and cyberspace, The Network State (TNS) realises that
people still have to live somewhere physically, and incorporates this into its
strategy by accumulating all manner of tropical island and beach resorts. A
quick look at my notes reminds me of TNS properties and zones in: Roatán
(Honduras), Puerto Rico, Norman’s Cay (The Bahamas), Costa Rica, Palau, and
special economic zones in Nigeria and Senegal. Especially Roatán was a favorite
of many pitchers.

The idea is that these companies / DAOs acquire these beautiful and cheap
locations to set up co-living / co-working properties that host digital nomads
who can beat the loneliness that often accompanies this increasingly popular
lifestyle by finding likeminded individuals in these membership-only resorts.
The price of such memberships remained vague during the conference. Going by the
luxury finishes and general exclusive vibe of the architectural renderings, I’m
guessing it’s mostly ‘a particular kind of person’ that will be to find their
way into the community: Western and wealthy.

Often these visions fall under the header of ‘charter cities’ in which a new
city is developed with the financial help of non-local initiatives and granted a
special jurisdiction in order to boost economic development, usually in Global
South countries. Dubai is a famous older example. The legislation in these
special economic zones usually favour international mobility for the tech sector
and low taxation policies. TNS-based developments add to this the establishment
of blockchain-based passports handed out to those who invest enough money. (I
saw many pictures of shiny credit card-like blockchain IDs in the pitches).
Indeed, ‘citizenship by investment’ was a recurring theme. Another term I don’t
want to forget is “sovereignty stack”, by which a speaker meant that you should
think strategically about which passports you own, where your companies are
based, etc, as if it is a bunch of professional tools you just buy (which is of
course only a reality for a small and wealthy minority). ‘The city as a
start-up’ was also mentioned repeatedly, and I got the sense of a place in which
property rights govern everything. Glaringly missing here of course are any
discussions of the wealth inequality that Buterin already pointed to in his blog
post a year ago. TNS that is envisioned here is populated by – if I’m going by
the many pictures and renderings – wealthy, mostly white, Westerners. Oh and if
I have to go by the gender balance on stage and in the audience, it will also be
overwhelmingly male.

As they build their businesses in the Global South, they will likely push out
the people that are local to the places they occupy through land acquisitions
and rising prices. This all can be understood as ‘blockchain colonialism,’ a
phenomenon that researchers like Jillian Crandall, Pete Howson, and Olivier
Jutel have worked to exposed in recent years. If you want to read more about
this, see for example: Blockchain and the ‘chains of empire’
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2019.1673989 , Climate crises and
crypto-colonialism http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2020.00022 , Blockchain
imperialism in the Pacific
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951720985249 . Also read about
the idea of a ‘libertarian exit’ from society to a free market utopia in
Adventure Capitalism https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1242 by
Raymond Craib.


Escaping the FDA for longevity research

Another theme that is worth noting was mentioned in the programme as ‘Parallel
Biomedicine’, but really was about longevity. For those that are not familiar,
longevity is code for life-extension and ultimately immortality, and many
self-organised research institutes are popping up to battle the ‘pandemic of the
fatal disease of aging’. It is a fringe idea that has connections with
cryogenics and extropianism, and that raises important ethical questions, e.g.
about the inequality of who will have access to these technologies and the
general morality of longevity as an aim. Recently, blockchain proponents are
increasingly visible in longevity discourse. Balaji’s Twitter / X bio
https://twitter.com/balajis for example reads “Immutable money, infinite
frontier, eternal life. #Bitcoin,” while Buterin tweeted
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1244658432973643778?s=20 that “Aging is a
humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as WW2 every two years and even
before killing debilitates people and burdens social systems and families. Let’s
end it” and founded Zuzalu https://www.vitadao.com/zuzalu , a pop-up longevity
city.

The reason why TNS and longevity are such a good match is that the special
jurisdictions that the start-up cities and digital nomad paradises make use of
often feature medical regulations that are much more lax than in the USA or the
EU. Using the freedoms of these localities, longevity research can bypass the
slow FDA processes to get medical approval and move ahead outside of their
purview. Besides Zuzalu, other examples of TNS longevity projects that were
mentioned are Vitalia https://www.vitalia.city/ and VitaDAO
https://www.vitadao.com/ .


Friends and family

Finally, a comment about some of the major names on the programme. The whole day
seemed to consist of (friends-of-)friends-of-Balaji and it seemed to all be
about creating an in-crowd of likeminded globally dispersed people to exit
society with together. However, some of the bigger names were surprisingly
disappointing in their contributions. Vitalik Buterin (prerecorded video
contribution) seemed to just want to share that he had a nice jog and a good
party with some internet friends at Zuzalu in Montenegro. Tyler and Cameron
Winklevoss (prerecorded video) basically just said they don’t like regulation
because it cost so much money to have a sufficiently capable legal department.
And Glenn Greenwald, who presented in person, started discussing his work for
the NSA leaks in 2013, before unequivocally pitching the value of Rumble (and
his own show on it) – a video platform that “is immune to cancel culture”
https://corp.rumble.com/ and (although it features stricter content regulation
policies than other alternative social media platforms) has connections to the
(far-)right radical free speech and conspiracy communities, for example through
its partnership with Truth Social
https://www.reuters.com/technology/truth-social-join-rumbles-advertising-platform-2022-08-23/
and the preference of individuals like Russell Brand and Andrew Tate
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/what-is-rumble-the-video-sharing-platform-immune-to-cancel-culture
for the platform.

In conclusion, a day of free market utopianism, blockchain colonialism,
life-extension, and libertarian exits. Projects on the programme list
influential people like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel among their funders, and
should be seen as anything but niche or inconsequential. Exposing the ideologies
that form the foundations of TNS is fundamental. I look forward to hear more
from Joshua Dávila soon, as he will participate at MoneyLab #13
https://www.neme.org/projects/moneylab13 in Cyprus (3-4 November 2023), and I
hope it is the beginning of much more work in this direction.


References

Srinivasen, Bilaji. 2022 The Network State. (self-published).
https://book.thenetworkstate.com/tns.pdf

Rheingold, H. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic
Frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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