In the Court of the Crimson Network State

Cat's foot iron claw / Neuro-surgeons scream for more / At paranoia's poison door / Twenty first century schizoid man. - Balaji Srinivasan

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. - King Crimson

Many storied works of political philosophy are f-ing bonkers. Plato’s Republic argues that the state control breeding and undergird its authority with copious lying. Hobbes’ Leviathan sandwiches its claims about sovereignty between lengthy disquisitions on springs, human nature and the Bible. Writers cannot just confine themselves to such things as a simple analysis of proportional representation as a voting system. They have to go big. Reflections on politics are both a temptation and an intoxicant.

The resulting texts remind me of prog rock. “Progressive” rock was a genre of rock music that emerged in the late 60s as certain musicians who started in pop music got ambitious. They wanted their music to get the respect shown to music played by orchestras in dinner suits. They fused rock with the harmonic explorations of jazz and the instrumental complexity of the classical canon. Much of it is now, mercifully, forgotten. It turns that more is not always better. “Progressive” as in the sense of a cancer or a neurological disease.

I am not going to argue what is the most prog album ever made* but King Crimson’s In The Court of the Crimson King is pretty gosh darn prog. Possibly the first prog record. Ur-Prog If you will. Its mix of lush orchestration, formal experimentation, and the lyrical tussle of the whimsical and ominous (Crimson Kings, Moonchildren, 21st Century Schizoid Men) makes in prime prog. Its ambition outshines its delivery but it’s not as terrible as some of its offspring.

A normal human activity like music or politics can be over-investigated and reformed in the image of the creator’s all-enveloping worldview. The resulting sprawl is at once compelling and cautionary. Therefore to call Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State (TNS) insane is not necessarily to denigrate it, simply to situate it in a long history of political discourse that demonstrate various levels of unhinging. Balaji Srinivasan, or BS as we will refer to him, is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist beloved of Silicon Valley and TNS is a broad exploration of his philosophy, an engineer’s frolic through the fields of political economy.

Some things are clear:

• BS does not like journalists. Esp. if they work for the New York Times. The book has 118 references to “New York Times” or “NYT” - none of them complementary. They are apparently corrupt, manipulative, and they “can’t do basic math”. He also doesn’t like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

• BS does like the blockchain and bitcoin. Whoever Satoshi actually was is far less important that what he made. For BS, Satoshi is some superior combination of Jesus, Newton, and George Washington.

• BS is a fan of history. But he sees the record of history as being too political and he would rather make it more technological. Essentially he wants to put everything on a blockchain to make it real history.

The first four chapters of the book are score settling with extensive footnotes, like an Uber driver with an unlimited Kindle account ranting at you about China and NYT and woke and Bitcoin and…

It’s all exhausting

It’s not until the fifth and final chapter that everything starts to come into focus. Ultimately his solution to the predicament of politics is to dissolve it into technology. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he wants countries to be more like startups - though not in the sense of having a foosball table in the parliamentary cafeteria. His definition of a network state contains:

1. a social network

2. a moral innovation

3. a sense of national consciousness

4. a recognized founder

5. a capacity for collective action

6. an in-person level of civility

7. an integrated cryptocurrency

8. an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories

9. a consensual government limited by a social smart contract

10. a virtual capital

11. an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate

    footprint

12. attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

Individuals can be members of more than one state. You can have states built around the moral innovation / social network of keto diets or being partially offline or taking non-FDA approved medications. Nations can be defined by clustering equations.

For all the words and references and claims, there is something missing from this book: Any sense of political engagement beyond Twitter sh*tposting. The book itself is a 262-page tweet. TNS is an extreme example of what Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyism” - except that rather than treating politics as a spectator sport (altho there is a bit of that), BS treats it like an engineering problem. He has now designed his network state - he even has some equations and algorithms to back it up. He has built a politics in his mancave where it can sit proudly on his wall. Of course, the major difference between politics and masturbation is that you can’t do politics on your own. It is, by its very nature, a non-solo activity (soloing is optional - which is good news for Robert Fripp I suppose).

There is so little at stake here. So much time and effort and thought yielding so little. It turns that more is not always better. What BS offers us is a Prog Politics (but not necessarily a “progressive” one).

I remain sceptical of BS’s network state as described in this book. We have definitely seen like-minded individuals using the internet to find each other, organize, and recruit newbies. Undoubtedly we will see more of this. There is a far more engaging book buried in here that draws on the lived experience of politics though the lens of the digital. But it is also much less ambitious and far more concerned with building bridges than settling scores.

I am less persuaded than BS of the deterritorializing power of bitcoin and the blockchain. Sam Bankman-Fried is very much under house arrest in his parents’ home not on some SeaSteading hideaway**. TNS may be seen as a high water mark of Blockchain-as-Ideology - before the complaints about lack of regulation for FTX and SVB. Where is this capacity for collective action eh?

Humans are more than crypto wallets and Twitter accounts and ideas. We are are bodies. In quarantined Shanghai tower blocks, in Ukrainian trenches, in schools and offices and homes and hospices. On the streets and between the sheets. Try as we might, we cannot eliminate our bodies from politics. My country and my home and my body are vulnerable to floods and fires and wars. The Body Politic is a nation of bodies not just of thoughts.

As for Balaji Srinivasan, he has just bet $1m that bitcoin will be worth $1m by June 17. Given his likely net worth, this feels like another low-stakes provocation. Put something meaningful on the line.

*It’s Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSound obviously.

**Unless he has dressed up a luckless double, his own Meyrick Edward Clifton James, in cargo shorts, trainers, and a sweat-stained T-shirt to take the heat for him.