From The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan and Lex Fridman Prodcast #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA
In one informal sentence:
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
When we think of a nation state, we immediately think of the lands, but when we think of a network state, we should instantly think of the minds.
What if you could alter your real life experience in a similar way you can customize your Discord profile or hop between servers? Profile being your pseudonymous passport and servers being start up countries founded as easily as companies are founded in Estonia. Can this pseudonymity, radical free-market democracy and freedom work?
Provides a solution to how useless social media and news currently are. Heat vs work: are we just generating noise or are we producing work? Are the news we read relevant and actionable? Current social media is very isolated, discourages collective action.
It can also help with belonging and finding one’s community. More so when a network state acquires land and members start meeting/living regularly in their shards across the world. Again similarly to Discord servers. (Importance of community related to Outliers - extended families, better health outcomes and Why sex, food, and shelter aren’t enough for Homo Sapiens)
What of crime and murder? Balaji argues that most of killing is done by states, not individuals. Removal of surveillance would also remove the tools to remove undesired individuals.
This could also fix science as it is today, where science is required to be auditable and verifiable, with data available and results computable and importable to subsequent papers. This would not mean papers get cited and used from the merits of tenure and prestige, but actual useful science.
Sort of back to the future style of thinking about where civilization might go next. Started as hunter-gatherer travelers, are now mostly in densely populated cities, but are moving towards digital nomad style of living.
For the modern day human, Balaji recommends getting proficient in full stack engineering and full stack creator with an optional touch of influencer skills:
- Engineering in this case: computer science and statistics, because more or less all domains are coalescing towards computer science (like biochemistry is no longer just biochemistry, but we require computers to run machines, computers to analyze the results from the machine, computers to write papers about results etc) because all domains have stats and algorithms at their base. Can you provide value to your domain? Is that value accessible, programmable, importable, reproducible?
- Creator in this case: mostly digital, with social media direction. Can you express your ideas and thoughts?
- Influencer: build a 1M following, not just amass 1M dollars, in other words: build your own voice. Can you align people with your vision? Do people trust you and do you trust people?