I am a technologist and believed for the longest time that the Valley elite had some insight that I lacked, some special brilliance that meant they understood things I did not and that their claims were therefore credible.
I no longer believe this.
The truth is that they are like the average students of an elite private university: Convinced of their own brilliance, entitled, and... not very good.
My fault was being so credulous that I took their incessant talking about their own genius at face value, when it was really just a huge warning sign.
We are now in a kind of cultural war of attrition. We have to engage this nonsense at some level as long as what the cryptolibertarians are doing is having real-world consequences.
So, sadly, somebody intelligent and informed and thoughtful has to read this stuff. I'm glad it did not have to be me and thank you for your sacrifice.
Elon Musk has literally failed his way up. It's amazing. He co-founded a company, irritated the adults in the room so badly that they paid him to go away, then he used his windfall to co-found a bigger company, back to step 1. I've never seen anything like it.
Your concerns above are not wrong. The tech Barons want network states like China has. Social credit score states. That is coming. If we sit here and do nothing we will be like the American Indians when the settlers came here. Behind on technology.
Balaji isn’t advocating for that. He is pointing out that Network States are coming, and that the people should make our own with our own rules. Right now. Before the digital prisons they The Corruptors want to build stop us.
I went to Network State camp in Texas this year. It reminded of the founders of this country were meeting 200 years ago. Not tech barons, but rather tech anarchists libertarians, and individualism free market thinkers.
Network states are coming. We can make them decentralized, transparent, and for good (like America was), or we can let the bad guys make them to control us.
We will not be able to stop them from coming.
Your fear is over CENTRALIZED network states. Which also should be your fear over centralized states in general.
Decentralized States (both network and nation) are good. We can make decentralized network states right now with our own rules. And no one can stop us.
If we don’t, the settlers will take out the Indians because of technology.
Network states are powerful tools. Just like collective intelligence is, electricity, nuclear, flight, gunpowder, language, and the internet are.
Our fight cannot stop technology, but we can decentralize it and use it for good.
Have you read the book The Starfish and the Spider?
You only understand half of the possibilities here. There are good possibilities too. We must decentralize and organize before it is too late.
We write about the difference between centralized and decentralized systems often and if you do not understand the last hand on the bat theory of systems, please try to so we can further this conversation in a more meaningful manner. Here is a link to an article where we flesh it out:
Elon is centralized and not transparent. Balaji advocates for decentralized and transparent.
We don’t have a choice. Network States are coming. We only have a choice over what kinds we make: centralized and corrupted or decentralized and working for the people.
That’s funny because the internet backbones or DNS, to name a few, your whole digi-fantasy rests on are pretty centralized for one, and cannot be bitcoined away to glory, for two. Infrastructure, another “boring” thing nations do…
I'm currently reading Jonathan Taplin's THE END OF REALITY, which focuses on the visions (such as they are) of Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, and Thiel. They're Tech Bros too. They have plenty in common with Srinivasan, but maybe the biggest thing they have in common is that *they're all men.* XY-chromosome people. And like so many XY-chromosome people they have no idea what, or rather *who*, generally holds communities and whole societies together. Let you in on a secret, guys: it's the XX-chromosome people. Women.
I'm reminded of the classic SF story "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), by the late James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon. Fifty years later it seems some men still aren't seeing very well.
Most sci-fi is hella dystopian; most of what gets published is written by men; hence the reason we are in this pickle with these man-boys, with their thumb-in-ass reasonings about the future of humankind... they cannot begin to conceive of a better world than this headlong dash into [decentralized] fascist oblivion. It just does not fucking compute in their puerile cave-brains.
Shouldn’t we congratulate them that they graduated from playing Legos to playing Risk in real life (some even sire a bunch of smart kids to usher the desired future..) Is hubris an XY monopoly??
I'm guessing he's going to have a new book out before long focusing on AI and the Blockchain. I spent my career in the software world. I met many intelligent techies with suspect social skills, little wisdom, and a firm conviction they knew it all and everyone else was an idiot. I could see them working for Doge. I met a smaller group of folks who saw themselves as "entrepreneurs", a term vocalized in a shuddering reverent voice. Those dudes, and they were all dudes, were a class by themselves. I saw a comment once about a Hollywood producer being an ego in search of a room big enough to hold it. That would apply to these guys by and large. I bet the Professor is right, they read Rand and "know" they are Makers and the rest of us are Subjects. :-)
The Network State really lowered my respect for Balaji. A respect that started as a mixture of a source of creative insight but also outright narcissistic excess. The Network State completely flipped the knob for me on the latter. Any "creative insight" from him I have since popped in my mental Pizzagate folder.
I even somewhat tepidly mocked him over his premises on The Network State on his Substack at the time, joking in a comment that the government of land and hard goods -- e.g., California -- isn't real but just a physical service to all of us living in the cloud.
He started continually nudging my comment online to draw attention and follow up with him. It was a weird behavior, having him effectively recreate the Facebook poke on me for 4-5 iterations. But considering the typical peeps on the Internet, it was more cute than belligerent and sociopathic.
And that's when I learned that he just started started his "The Network School" university in Singapore in an effort to help legitimize his childish idea that land no longer matters. I really believe he thought he could convince me that he wasn't registering as a delusional Silicon Valley exec with bird feathers glued to his arms yelling, "Look! I can fly!" before jumping off the roof of his house.
And don't get me started on his blue vs red revolution fever dream...
As I commented on yet another Substack, desire for a life decoupled from responsibility will naturally lead one to Balaji Srinivasan's Network State and Ross Ulbricht's MurderNet.
Quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer's On Stupidity versus Malice: "There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid."
Note that he is right to assume a society in the end is based on 'shared convictions'. Stop — as a society — believing in the importance of a rule of law, or the importance of protecting the weak, etc., and it disappears. Existing nation/state or not.
I'm also guessing this guy has read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age decades ago and that misremembered remnants are still haunting his mind. Stephenson actually had a documented interaction with Musk and it's possible Musk's obsession with the 'multi-planetary species' may be anchored in Stephenson's "Seveneves" where humanity is forced to evacuate earth.
Holy shit, SevenEves was my thought exactly—not because what they're doing aligns with Stephenson's plot, more for the childishly arrogant betrayal of the president, and her subsequent scheming to sow dissent, ultimately f*ing up the grand (albeit wildly long-shot) plan. His attention to political maneuvering pissed me off so much at first, until I realized, hey—lots of leaders are sociopaths...and most people just can't get along to save their lives (literally).
You might gather from my nom de plume, that I am a fan of the anime and manga series.
These themes are reminiscent of the themes found in the original anime movie and TV series, but as a farce, rather than a medium for discussing society and probably the nature of Japanese society..
What all these coddled, unaccountable, blinkered tech bros have in common is they either reject, don’t understand, or have never heard of the concept of “The Social Contract.” They’ve all benefited from whatever social contract existed in whatever society they made their fortunes. They’ve climbed the ladder and now pull it up after themselves stating ladders are both unfair and probably never even existed. Their lives are narcissistic fantasies. And we all pay the price.
Out tech overlords really are, much like Trump (maybe inspired by him?) trying as hard as they can to tell us exactly what they are. Previous billionaires felt some twinge of nobliss oblige, but these guys are not even bothering anymore. Crypto, unlike VR and Web 3.0, is the Next Big Thing that refuses to die. If any 1 thing brings about the inevitable economic crisis sooner than later, it will be the idiotic Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. That would be a payday than not even a multi-billionaire can afford to turn his nose up at, and it would make a lot of billionaires-on-paper "real" billionaires.
I didn't realize just how incredibly ridiculous the Tech Barons and Balaji are. Reading your post made me think of Gaiman's American Gods, especially Technical Boy, and the incredible skill it takes to imagine and build a believable possible world. Sounds like Balaji offers little more than regressive, reactionary, unimaginative, familiar authoritarianism spoken up with silicon valley boy accent.
David I want you to know that this piece made me go read the first 40 pages of the PDF of Network State and within that short time frame I became so irate and full of cortisol I became worried for my own physical health. Thank you for reminding me what it means to be alive by bringing me so close to my own death.
How do these people differ from the ones who declare they don't have to pay taxes because they declared an independent state? I mean, except for having so much money people take them seriously instead of leaving them to the mercy of the IRS. I don't think this even rises to the level of Ayn Rand.
Also, thank you for reading and critiquing this so we don't have to. We need to know about these people -- witness the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) kiddies running amok. But I lack the strength.
The main difference is indeed just access to capital and the levers of power. Sovereign Citizens (to my knowledge at least) tend to be militia-types. They can set up their own backwoods communities, but they can't, like, try to buy the San Francisco government and/or the entirety of Solano County.
I am a technologist and believed for the longest time that the Valley elite had some insight that I lacked, some special brilliance that meant they understood things I did not and that their claims were therefore credible.
I no longer believe this.
The truth is that they are like the average students of an elite private university: Convinced of their own brilliance, entitled, and... not very good.
My fault was being so credulous that I took their incessant talking about their own genius at face value, when it was really just a huge warning sign.
We are now in a kind of cultural war of attrition. We have to engage this nonsense at some level as long as what the cryptolibertarians are doing is having real-world consequences.
So, sadly, somebody intelligent and informed and thoughtful has to read this stuff. I'm glad it did not have to be me and thank you for your sacrifice.
Elon Musk has literally failed his way up. It's amazing. He co-founded a company, irritated the adults in the room so badly that they paid him to go away, then he used his windfall to co-found a bigger company, back to step 1. I've never seen anything like it.
Your concerns above are not wrong. The tech Barons want network states like China has. Social credit score states. That is coming. If we sit here and do nothing we will be like the American Indians when the settlers came here. Behind on technology.
Balaji isn’t advocating for that. He is pointing out that Network States are coming, and that the people should make our own with our own rules. Right now. Before the digital prisons they The Corruptors want to build stop us.
I went to Network State camp in Texas this year. It reminded of the founders of this country were meeting 200 years ago. Not tech barons, but rather tech anarchists libertarians, and individualism free market thinkers.
Network states are coming. We can make them decentralized, transparent, and for good (like America was), or we can let the bad guys make them to control us.
We will not be able to stop them from coming.
Your fear is over CENTRALIZED network states. Which also should be your fear over centralized states in general.
Decentralized States (both network and nation) are good. We can make decentralized network states right now with our own rules. And no one can stop us.
If we don’t, the settlers will take out the Indians because of technology.
Network states are powerful tools. Just like collective intelligence is, electricity, nuclear, flight, gunpowder, language, and the internet are.
Our fight cannot stop technology, but we can decentralize it and use it for good.
Have you read the book The Starfish and the Spider?
You only understand half of the possibilities here. There are good possibilities too. We must decentralize and organize before it is too late.
We write about the difference between centralized and decentralized systems often and if you do not understand the last hand on the bat theory of systems, please try to so we can further this conversation in a more meaningful manner. Here is a link to an article where we flesh it out:
https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/decentralize-everything-in-1776-america?r=7oa9d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Elon is centralized and not transparent. Balaji advocates for decentralized and transparent.
We don’t have a choice. Network States are coming. We only have a choice over what kinds we make: centralized and corrupted or decentralized and working for the people.
Best
Josh Ketry
That’s funny because the internet backbones or DNS, to name a few, your whole digi-fantasy rests on are pretty centralized for one, and cannot be bitcoined away to glory, for two. Infrastructure, another “boring” thing nations do…
I'm currently reading Jonathan Taplin's THE END OF REALITY, which focuses on the visions (such as they are) of Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, and Thiel. They're Tech Bros too. They have plenty in common with Srinivasan, but maybe the biggest thing they have in common is that *they're all men.* XY-chromosome people. And like so many XY-chromosome people they have no idea what, or rather *who*, generally holds communities and whole societies together. Let you in on a secret, guys: it's the XX-chromosome people. Women.
I'm reminded of the classic SF story "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), by the late James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon. Fifty years later it seems some men still aren't seeing very well.
Most sci-fi is hella dystopian; most of what gets published is written by men; hence the reason we are in this pickle with these man-boys, with their thumb-in-ass reasonings about the future of humankind... they cannot begin to conceive of a better world than this headlong dash into [decentralized] fascist oblivion. It just does not fucking compute in their puerile cave-brains.
You've piqued my interest in reading that story!
Shouldn’t we congratulate them that they graduated from playing Legos to playing Risk in real life (some even sire a bunch of smart kids to usher the desired future..) Is hubris an XY monopoly??
I'm guessing he's going to have a new book out before long focusing on AI and the Blockchain. I spent my career in the software world. I met many intelligent techies with suspect social skills, little wisdom, and a firm conviction they knew it all and everyone else was an idiot. I could see them working for Doge. I met a smaller group of folks who saw themselves as "entrepreneurs", a term vocalized in a shuddering reverent voice. Those dudes, and they were all dudes, were a class by themselves. I saw a comment once about a Hollywood producer being an ego in search of a room big enough to hold it. That would apply to these guys by and large. I bet the Professor is right, they read Rand and "know" they are Makers and the rest of us are Subjects. :-)
These guys make me so, so very tired.
We ought to take them seriously; we ought to laugh in their faces.
The perfect semicolon!
Pretty much my assessment when I read it in 2022.
The Network State really lowered my respect for Balaji. A respect that started as a mixture of a source of creative insight but also outright narcissistic excess. The Network State completely flipped the knob for me on the latter. Any "creative insight" from him I have since popped in my mental Pizzagate folder.
I even somewhat tepidly mocked him over his premises on The Network State on his Substack at the time, joking in a comment that the government of land and hard goods -- e.g., California -- isn't real but just a physical service to all of us living in the cloud.
He started continually nudging my comment online to draw attention and follow up with him. It was a weird behavior, having him effectively recreate the Facebook poke on me for 4-5 iterations. But considering the typical peeps on the Internet, it was more cute than belligerent and sociopathic.
And that's when I learned that he just started started his "The Network School" university in Singapore in an effort to help legitimize his childish idea that land no longer matters. I really believe he thought he could convince me that he wasn't registering as a delusional Silicon Valley exec with bird feathers glued to his arms yelling, "Look! I can fly!" before jumping off the roof of his house.
And don't get me started on his blue vs red revolution fever dream...
As I commented on yet another Substack, desire for a life decoupled from responsibility will naturally lead one to Balaji Srinivasan's Network State and Ross Ulbricht's MurderNet.
Quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer's On Stupidity versus Malice: "There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid."
Note that he is right to assume a society in the end is based on 'shared convictions'. Stop — as a society — believing in the importance of a rule of law, or the importance of protecting the weak, etc., and it disappears. Existing nation/state or not.
If this is what micro dosing does, count me the fuck out.
It might actually be the ketamine...
I'm also guessing this guy has read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age decades ago and that misremembered remnants are still haunting his mind. Stephenson actually had a documented interaction with Musk and it's possible Musk's obsession with the 'multi-planetary species' may be anchored in Stephenson's "Seveneves" where humanity is forced to evacuate earth.
The poison of delusion.
Also see Max Barry's _Jennifer Government_ for a slightly more playful approach
Holy shit, SevenEves was my thought exactly—not because what they're doing aligns with Stephenson's plot, more for the childishly arrogant betrayal of the president, and her subsequent scheming to sow dissent, ultimately f*ing up the grand (albeit wildly long-shot) plan. His attention to political maneuvering pissed me off so much at first, until I realized, hey—lots of leaders are sociopaths...and most people just can't get along to save their lives (literally).
Dave 1000%. You say it better than I did — this book has note aged well, and it’s crazy ppl like Musk, Sacks, Andreesen, Calacanis etc think Balaji is a genius. https://open.substack.com/pub/theconnector/p/the-siren-song-of-bitcoin-libertarianism?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
You might gather from my nom de plume, that I am a fan of the anime and manga series.
These themes are reminiscent of the themes found in the original anime movie and TV series, but as a farce, rather than a medium for discussing society and probably the nature of Japanese society..
Do yourself a favor and read Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by Jason Pargin if you haven't already.
Oh nice, adding it to the list. I read I'm Starting to Worry about This Black Box of Doom a few months ago, that was great!
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits is the better of the two in my opinion.
What all these coddled, unaccountable, blinkered tech bros have in common is they either reject, don’t understand, or have never heard of the concept of “The Social Contract.” They’ve all benefited from whatever social contract existed in whatever society they made their fortunes. They’ve climbed the ladder and now pull it up after themselves stating ladders are both unfair and probably never even existed. Their lives are narcissistic fantasies. And we all pay the price.
Out tech overlords really are, much like Trump (maybe inspired by him?) trying as hard as they can to tell us exactly what they are. Previous billionaires felt some twinge of nobliss oblige, but these guys are not even bothering anymore. Crypto, unlike VR and Web 3.0, is the Next Big Thing that refuses to die. If any 1 thing brings about the inevitable economic crisis sooner than later, it will be the idiotic Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. That would be a payday than not even a multi-billionaire can afford to turn his nose up at, and it would make a lot of billionaires-on-paper "real" billionaires.
I didn't realize just how incredibly ridiculous the Tech Barons and Balaji are. Reading your post made me think of Gaiman's American Gods, especially Technical Boy, and the incredible skill it takes to imagine and build a believable possible world. Sounds like Balaji offers little more than regressive, reactionary, unimaginative, familiar authoritarianism spoken up with silicon valley boy accent.
David I want you to know that this piece made me go read the first 40 pages of the PDF of Network State and within that short time frame I became so irate and full of cortisol I became worried for my own physical health. Thank you for reminding me what it means to be alive by bringing me so close to my own death.
How do these people differ from the ones who declare they don't have to pay taxes because they declared an independent state? I mean, except for having so much money people take them seriously instead of leaving them to the mercy of the IRS. I don't think this even rises to the level of Ayn Rand.
Also, thank you for reading and critiquing this so we don't have to. We need to know about these people -- witness the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) kiddies running amok. But I lack the strength.
The main difference is indeed just access to capital and the levers of power. Sovereign Citizens (to my knowledge at least) tend to be militia-types. They can set up their own backwoods communities, but they can't, like, try to buy the San Francisco government and/or the entirety of Solano County.