> His book, The Network State (TNS), puts forth a new social contract enabled by “Web3 technology,” centered on blockchains
I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
oneplane 8 hours ago [-]
Another fun thing from that book is a fantasy on how things will be better because you can't revert things. It's essentially digital feudalism combined with populism. How could that possibly go wrong...
stephen_g 5 hours ago [-]
I couldn't believe it a few years ago when people were talking about NFTs as the 'future' of keeping track of property ownership for everything. Like, somebody stole a cryptographic key, now they can 'prove' they now own my house and I can't (code is law, right?). Or a relative died and now their crypto-currency keys are permanently inaccessible - now all their money is lost forever and nobody can inherit it, even with court order etc.!
That's just not the world most people want to live in...
zoklet-enjoyer 5 hours ago [-]
Code is not law. Law is law. Very few people argue that code is law and it has become an anti-blockchain talking point.
Multi signature wallets exist.
mullingitover 8 hours ago [-]
xkcd summed up why these ideas are dumb in two panels[1] a really long time ago. Just replace 'encrypted laptop' with 'the private key that controls your whole life.'
This is one of those ones I have the index essentially mapped to the image in my brain already, no need to click.
RajT88 8 hours ago [-]
You could as easily have led with:
Hey stupid, who is going to work in your factories?
And follow the premise from there.
ericd 8 hours ago [-]
I’m guessing they think the answer is robots? Same answer for armies.
RajT88 8 hours ago [-]
But who maintains the robots! Lol
idle_zealot 8 hours ago [-]
Other robots, duh! The real question is "why are humans even involved with this?"
cjfd 3 hours ago [-]
There is a joke that in a modern factory there is only a man and a dog. The man is only there to feed the dog and the dog is there to guard the equipment and make sure the man does not touch any of it.
ericd 5 hours ago [-]
I'm imagining something like Solaria in Asimov's The Naked Sun (part of the Robot series). The world is divided up by a tiny human population, each with a huge estate with thousands of robots serving them.
XorNot 5 hours ago [-]
Same idea comes up in The Foundation and Earth by Asimov.
i would hope we don't dismiss this the same way we dismissed project 2025 then end up surprised it was the plan all along
aqueueaqueue 7 hours ago [-]
I didn't read more. Because whether it was a critique of said web3 thing or praising it. I can't be bothered!
tomrod 7 hours ago [-]
It is a critique, and timely one at that. Worth a read.
CamperBob2 7 hours ago [-]
I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
I wish this were a laughing matter, but it's not. These people appear to be quite serious and quite capable. There's a coalition in play that includes the Project 2025 authors among others, operating at a scope that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. If this coalition holds together, they may be able to execute what many would consider a rather frightening agenda.
Despite its cheesy title, this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no ) offers an interesting perspective on Balaji Srinivasan and his place in a larger web of influence alongside people like Yarvin, Musk, and Vance. It's eye-opening. She released it back in November and promptly took a lot of flack from people calling her alarmist and conspiracy-prone, and now it's basically playing out in real time.
samplatt 4 hours ago [-]
That video crossed my path 2 days ago. As much as it';s terrifying, I can't help but be impressed by how fucking close William Gibson and Mike Pondsmith came in writing their background-lore for their respective cyberpunk universes.
The Corpos seizing power from a failing democracy, instigating war, and then declaring their own territories and power structures. From which the country, the world, never recovers.
8 hours ago [-]
hooverd 7 hours ago [-]
take these people entirely seriously right now
tomrod 7 hours ago [-]
Indeed. As improbable as their end state is, forewarned is forearmed.
__MatrixMan__ 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with this critique, but I think it fails to get at the heart of the Web3 problem, which is that blockchains use a protocol to enforce consensus, but politically speaking, a forced consensus is no consensus at all.
We do desperately need a big rethink of our incentives, by all means invite the game theorists--lets get nerdy about it--but if we then enshrine the results of that analysis into a protocol that makes it so (thus creating a network state) it's doomed to fail due to a lack of legitimacy. Whatever we build has to let people disagree, but amplify the cases where they agree so that we can find what's actionable, not what's engaging. Web 2 and 3 have failed so far to get that right. C'mon 4 we're rooting for you.
XorNot 5 hours ago [-]
I would hardly even go that far: blockchains can only enforce parameters of the blockchain. The physical world is under no obligation to respect that.
That's always been the core issue.
__MatrixMan__ 5 hours ago [-]
If we wanted to, we could "fix" that. We let fictions like money rule the real world as it is, and we could easily take it further by replacing all of our locks with ones that only open for you if the chain says they should and other such ill advised automations.
But lets not, because partition tolerance, not consistency, has the superior political implications. Blockchains are just on the wrong side of the CAP theorem. It's a place for authoritarians and willful ignorance of important truths.
XorNot 2 hours ago [-]
That's just building a new, worse legal system though, the blockchain ensures nothing. It has no additional force or protections then the current one.
ang_cire 3 hours ago [-]
Speaking as a Bay Area Startup alum tech bro...
Don't let tech bros build governments.
These guys clearly read Snowcrash and thought, "man, these corporate city-state enclaves with robot dogs sound like a great idea!"
But don't take my word for why it's bad, there's currently one tech bro proving me right in real time!
29athrowaway 8 hours ago [-]
The main flaw of The Network State is the concept of reverse diaspora.
The idea that multiple people with no shared background will magically come together and collaborate to the extent that they can form an scalable movement that results in a meatspace state that is one cohesive collaborative unit.
Whenever a group of people pool their effort and resources together, another group of opportunistic people will try to take advantage.
The Network State is inspired by cryptocurrencies, which are often affected by predatory speculative behavior. Pyramid schemes, pump and dump schemes, rug pulls, etc.
The more resources and effort are pooled together, and the more power is accrued, the higher the incentive for competitors to arise, both internal and external.
And this flaw is the aspect shared with most utopian theories that expect everyone to collaborate do not account for simple game theory. Give enough incentives and the doves turn into hawks.
Another flaw is that by having a highly sparse geographical distribution, the political representation of their members and the likelihood they will gain enough influence to take over tends to zero unless each member can attain local leadership and influence.
At most, that can get that to scale to city-states, but city-states are almost always vassal states.
Sounds like it is trying to be a non-fiction version of Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand's SciFi distopian libertarian vision).
roncesvalles 6 hours ago [-]
Anything "centered on blockchains" is grifty bullshit, no exceptions, none whatsoever.
zoklet-enjoyer 5 hours ago [-]
That is your opinion.
pessimizer 4 hours ago [-]
I assume that's why they posted it, and not someone else.
TZubiri 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah dude like totally we don't need countries dude we can just live off the cyberland
throw0101a 8 hours ago [-]
On network states, see perhaps "The bro-ligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term":
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
This article doesn't claim to have any deep insight into what a network state is or what advocates of a network state want. Its only reference to the concept is a quote from another journalist, who offers a confusing definition that "network state" means "tech authoritarianism" which in turn means "to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land".
7 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 11:00:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more
That's just not the world most people want to live in...
Multi signature wallets exist.
[2] https://xkcd.com/538/
Hey stupid, who is going to work in your factories?
And follow the premise from there.
I wish this were a laughing matter, but it's not. These people appear to be quite serious and quite capable. There's a coalition in play that includes the Project 2025 authors among others, operating at a scope that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. If this coalition holds together, they may be able to execute what many would consider a rather frightening agenda.
Despite its cheesy title, this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no ) offers an interesting perspective on Balaji Srinivasan and his place in a larger web of influence alongside people like Yarvin, Musk, and Vance. It's eye-opening. She released it back in November and promptly took a lot of flack from people calling her alarmist and conspiracy-prone, and now it's basically playing out in real time.
The Corpos seizing power from a failing democracy, instigating war, and then declaring their own territories and power structures. From which the country, the world, never recovers.
We do desperately need a big rethink of our incentives, by all means invite the game theorists--lets get nerdy about it--but if we then enshrine the results of that analysis into a protocol that makes it so (thus creating a network state) it's doomed to fail due to a lack of legitimacy. Whatever we build has to let people disagree, but amplify the cases where they agree so that we can find what's actionable, not what's engaging. Web 2 and 3 have failed so far to get that right. C'mon 4 we're rooting for you.
That's always been the core issue.
But lets not, because partition tolerance, not consistency, has the superior political implications. Blockchains are just on the wrong side of the CAP theorem. It's a place for authoritarians and willful ignorance of important truths.
Don't let tech bros build governments.
These guys clearly read Snowcrash and thought, "man, these corporate city-state enclaves with robot dogs sound like a great idea!"
But don't take my word for why it's bad, there's currently one tech bro proving me right in real time!
The idea that multiple people with no shared background will magically come together and collaborate to the extent that they can form an scalable movement that results in a meatspace state that is one cohesive collaborative unit.
Whenever a group of people pool their effort and resources together, another group of opportunistic people will try to take advantage.
The Network State is inspired by cryptocurrencies, which are often affected by predatory speculative behavior. Pyramid schemes, pump and dump schemes, rug pulls, etc.
The more resources and effort are pooled together, and the more power is accrued, the higher the incentive for competitors to arise, both internal and external.
And this flaw is the aspect shared with most utopian theories that expect everyone to collaborate do not account for simple game theory. Give enough incentives and the doves turn into hawks.
Another flaw is that by having a highly sparse geographical distribution, the political representation of their members and the likelihood they will gain enough influence to take over tends to zero unless each member can attain local leadership and influence.
At most, that can get that to scale to city-states, but city-states are almost always vassal states.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230966
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...