I liked this book -- Balaji has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the intersection of geopolitics, technology, and human governance. He puts I liked this book -- Balaji has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the intersection of geopolitics, technology, and human governance. He puts forward a compelling argument in favor of network states, which I approached with a healthy dose of skepticism when starting to read the book. In essence, he notes the divergence of American culture into binational groups, the rise of viable cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) that are truly sovereign (aka encrypted and outside the jurisdiction of government seizures), and the rise of strong social networks that are no longer limited by geography.
I liked the structure of the book a lot (available for free, and intended to be Web-first on thenetworkstate.com, and with plenty of links to click on). It felt like I was reading a well-cited, thoughtful, right (economically) libertarian essay that aimed to cover a lot of ground. The reason I'm giving this 4 stars is because I felt that the finer points of actually implementing a network state weren't discussed in-depth. No threat models against network states discussed, which is a bit incredible (what if Internet access was completely curtailed for instance? What backups would the denizens of a network state have to introduce redundancy in how they communicate with each other?)
Overall, enjoyable read and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a glimpse of what the future of opt-in governance and virtual economies may look like (Balaji has been a fairly accurate forecaster before re: COVID, Bitcoin, India, etc.).
Fairly long, and exploring the links presented (which you should) makes it even longer. Took me 4 -5 days. ...more