Just wanted to pop onto the blog to share an article published on WIRED yesterday – I think it touches on several themes we’ve discussed so far.
https://www.wired.com/story/balaji-srinivasan-ditch-chaos-country-cloud/
I was not familiar with Balaji Srinivasan’s work worldview prior to reading this, but the piece provided a fascinating (and at times, unnerving) intro and commentary. I was particularly interested in themes linking the digital to evolving conceptions of physical spatiality, established geographies, and political entities. I’ve copied a few passages that I thought were particularly thought-provoking.
“So what does Srinivasan’s future look like now? Sort of like a world gradually re-created in the image of Reddit. You’ll start out—you probably already have—by spending more and more of your time communing with like-minded people around the planet, forming your own virtual tribe. Maybe you all want to ban guns; maybe you all want your aging parents to be able to try experimental therapies for Alzheimer’s; maybe you all want abortion to be politically off the table, one way or the other. Soon you may find that your friends on the infinite frontier matter more to you than the nameless, sometimes menacing hominids who co-occupy your meat space. You’ll become part of what Srinivasan calls a “sovereign collective” or a “network union.” E pluribus unum, a new bundle born of the great unbundling.”
“Eventually, whether it’s under duress or in a state of fervor, you and your tribe may move toward founding yourselves a country—not a nation-state but a network state. You’ll code a social smart contract, the terms of which will guarantee law, order, and whatever freedoms matter to you. If you like, you can crowdfund social goods, like child care or cyber defense. You can make it possible to interact with your fellow citizens from behind the safety of a pseudonym, maybe with your social reputation stored in the form of karma points on a blockchain. You could make firearm ownership a capital offense, or you could issue every toddler a Glock. When the collective gets strong enough, you might crowdfund a constellation of territories—a “networked archipelago.” At some point, you’ll achieve diplomatic recognition from other states.”
“You see the future, right? You want to have a kid, so you go enroll in a network state with Nordic-style social benefits in its territories. You want to Crispr human gametes, so you move your lab to a locality without bioethics panels. You want to live in a sugarless society, so you join a state called Keto Kosher. The life you live is constrained only by the people you choose to associate with. And those people, because they have self-bundled with you, will be more eager to reach a political consensus you like than the nameless hominids ever were. If they can’t, you—or they—will simply seek another network state.”
If anyone wants to read the article but hits a paywall, let me know! I have a PDF.
This is both fascinating and terrifying. And not far off from the imaginaries of Sci-Fi in the 1990s.
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