Tech's territorial ambitions

Could networked states of communities consisting of people with common interests replace the 21st-century nation states?

Civil society activists often complain about gated communities (GCs). GC residents insulate themselves, and set up infrastructure and facilities far exceeding those of surrounding neighbourhoods. This may include gyms, swimming pools, tennis courts, squash courts, etc., in addition to 24x7 security, water, power and internet. The contrasts are stunning in places like Gurugram, where it is common to see buffaloes milked on a dirt track outside the gates of a GC with layout transplanted straight from Florida.

GCs have low voter turnouts. Once you have installed your own power, water and security, you don’t need to interface much with local administrations.  If your income comes from working, often remotely, in multinational corporations (MNCs), you can disengage to an extent from national politics.

Take it one logical step further: Why not secede and become a citizen of a decentralised state? This is the premise explored by tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan in his book The Network State.  It is an interesting thought experiment.

In his words, “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.” It’s also a “community for people interested in mathematics, cryptocurrencies, seasteading (living permanently on ships outside territorial waters), transhumanism (enhancing human capacities by using technology), space travel, life extension, and initially-crazy-seeming-but-technologically-feasible ideas … like network states themselves.”

Mr Balaji, who’s in his mid-40s, is a second-generation immigrant with a Phd from Stanford, and a career in tech investing. He was the chief technology officer of the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He had early stage involvement in many well-known tech companies, with a heavy focus on health tech and above all, cryptocurrency. He continues to be an angel investor. Like many in this industry, he appears to have libertarian sympathies.

There are multiple communities consisting of people with common interests, such as listed above. They are concentrated around tech hubs like Bengaluru, Gurugram, Vashi, Silicon Valley, Dublin, and Houston, among others. Wherever they are, the typical “citizens of a network state” stand out as a high-income, cosmopolitan minority distinct from the “non-tech locals”.

Mr Balaji doesn’t use the description “Gated Community”. I’ve used that as shorthand because very often, these people live in GCs. They have often used their own resources and knowhow to build better infrastructure and a higher quality of life for themselves. They tend to flock together, and are creators and early adopters of technology. These communities are also totally networked, and many know each other due to belonging to the same professional and social networks.

You could easily find a few million such like-minded people scattered across Linkedin and Facebook.  Indeed by the standards of large social networking platforms, these folks aren’t even a particularly large community.

Put those scattered enclaves together and you have a decentralised network state. This network state could easily number a few millions or more, assuming that a lot of people working in high tech would be interested in becoming citizens. This is a significant demographic by the standards of nation states. Around 20 per cent of UN members have less than 1 million citizens, and more than half the world’s nations have less than 10 million citizens.

Mr Balaji points out that the internet allows us to seamlessly network enclaves scattered across the world, connecting a thousand apartments in Delhi with a hundred houses in Cupertino, and coordinating everything as necessary through the cloud. Since the citizens are all high-income, smart people, they could crowdfund shared resources. Mr Balaji suggests the network state could be launched as a startup — he uses the analogy of a Live Action Real Player Game (LARP). As this LARP scales, it may gain enough leverage to win diplomatic recognition from existing nation states (perhaps through the route of dual citizenship, or some other concept).

Could this be one route by which the 21st-century nation state evolves, moving from its current mix of hard authoritarianism and theocracies plus various flavours of democracy to become sets of decentralised enclaves bonded by commonality of interests?  The devil would be in the details, of course. But it could lead to a combination of dystopias and utopias sitting cheek by jowl.