Splitsville INTRODUCTION TO THE NOT-WORK STATE

The Discreetly-Graying Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Heretofore (if that’s the word we want—meaning “up until now”), we’ve talked about the US being “Splitsville” in terms of large populations. That is, if Splitsville refers to two (or more) “nations” coexisting within a single geo-political entity (which it does), those nations we’ve identified consist of millions of people: the X millions who voted for Trump last year, for example, vs. the Y millions who voted for Harris, or the 30 million plus-or-minus diehard MAGA idiots citizens vs the 30-million-ish who didn’t vote at all.

But now let’s try something different. Let’s talk about nations, not in terms of human population, but in terms of money. Like the James Webb Telescope (which, unlike us, “sees” in the infrared, disclosing views of the universe hitherto—if that’s the word we want—not visible to us), if we shift our mode of perception, we get a whole ‘nother picture of these Somewhat United States.

In that case, we can say that today the US embraces two nations: one whose hundreds of millions of occupants want to remain on the continent but make improvements to our form of government, and a handful—20? 100?—who want to remain on the continent but either remove themselves from the US, or completely obliterate our form of government and replace it with something else.

What makes them at all worth discussing in the same breath is that the members of the latter cohort possess (or are adjacent to) an amount of money that makes it feasible (they think) to plan either what could be called an internal exodus from, or the political destruction of, the nation of the former group. Yes, we’re talking about those kooky/insufferable tech-bro billionaires, whose bank accounts and egos are as big as all outdoors, who have just about had it with our stupid old so-called “liberal democracy” and are keen to either opt out of it or tear it all down.

First, the opting out. Welcome to the idea of the “network state.” This is mainly the brainstorm of tech millionaire Balaji Srinivasan, who in 2022 self-published a book called The Network State: How to Start a New Country. This gave substance to the hot-as-now idea among the tech elite of “exit”—the tantalizing prospect of like-minded communities of tech-elitists to either physically or digitally emigrate from their poky old nation-states and start their own.

(Fun Fact: We illustrate the consequences of such a thing—i.e., Peter Thiel’s abortive involvement in “seasteading,” in The Split. Spoiler alert: we call our version “seasettling.”)

You can read Srinivasan’s book, for free, here. Its layout is clean, its prose style is clear and informal and eager to please. As an overall-theory it’s not as whacked-out as Time Cube and a lot shorter and easier to grasp than The Phenomenology of Spirit. Like all such paradigm-busting, “visionary” books, it is replete with hey-yeah late-night dorm-bull-session insights, an apparent unfamiliarity with the behavior of actual human beings, and a glib reductivism that would be the envy of whoever created Readers Digest Condensed Books:

So: in the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you. Either the social network will mob you, or the cryptocurrency network won’t let you steal because you lack the private key, or (eventually) the networked AI will detect you, or all of the above.

Speaking of condensed: Conveniently, the author provides several summaries of the book within the book, of which one of the most useful is “The Network State in One Thousand Words.” It breaks down the process of starting your own country into seven stages.

1. Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater.

Fair enough. We all do this every day, on social media, in regular comment groups on blogs and Substacks, in email chat-groups, etc.

2. Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union….Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause.

Okay, but…a union (and yes, he means a union-type union), unlike a bunch of people sharing videos of dogs not wanting to take a bath, has a hierarchical directorship, which leads to elections, politicking, policy disagreements, factions, etc. And what do you mean by “common cause”? Or is it just, “to leave behind those losers in the old analog USA”?

3. Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency.

Why? Why should in-person meetups build trust offline? The most untrustworthy scam artists on Earth succeed because of their interpersonal skills in the physical world. And what, among people “working together for a common cause,” would generate an internal economy? Who would be selling what to whom? Or is this just like the drummers on Drum Forum selling each other cymbals and snares?

4. Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities.

Where to start… “Funds have been accumulated”—how? Via donations? Isn’t that what crowdfunding means? Via dues? In which case what we have is a sort of imaginary gated community (sans gate) with a Home Owners Association. And you’re going to buy (via crowdfunding) towns? Who will own and/or maintain these properties? The “union”? Isn’t that socialism—which is exactly what these libertarian “tax is theft” tech-bros are desperate to avoid?

5. Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size…

Once linked, what responsibility does one physical node have to another? Are they part of the same new country? Or are they just online pen pals? If my physical node in Galveston, Texas suffers a catastrophic flood, can I look to my linked-node countrymen in Adelaide, Australia, for help? Or is that too analog for words?

6. Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism.

No it isn’t. It’s how this network of people who belong to an online club tell each other how cool they are. Have these “physical nodes” seceded from their prior nation-state? Do they no longer pay taxes to it? If so, how do they avail themselves of roads, fire departments, sanitation systems, police services, a justice system, an education system, contract enforceability, medical care, and fucking electricity? And if they do remain part of their original nation state, and pay taxes in exchange for what we call “civilization,” how is that starting your own country?

7. Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.

“Negotiate” for what? What would other sovereign nations have to gain by recognizing this Tinkertoy ® of a “nation”? The goods and services produced in their “common cause”? And why, given the decentralized (if not utterly disembodied) nature of this “country,” would anyone want to become a citizen in it? Because they like its ethos and its policies? In that case, it’s an affinity group, like a Taylor Swift Fan Club. So as to avoid paying taxes in their previous country? Is that their common cause? (We have news for them: They’re still paying taxes in their previous country. Or, if not, they’re breaking the law in their previous country. Why? Because they’re still in their previous country.) And how do you base a cryptoeconomy on that?

Srinivasan spends a lot of pages clearing his throat about “history,” although it’s not clear how his theory-of-everything leads up to the patent absurdities outlined above. He also is weirdly convinced that the three most important “Leviathans” influencing the world today are the Chinese Communist Party, the New York Times, and Bitcoin. As you can see, he has an evangelist’s zeal for crypto.

Maybe too much so. All this starts to remind one of the familiar phenomenon of (insert name here; we have no idea what it’s called), in which people seize on the dominant new technology of their age to explain other things. So in Isaac Newton’s time, when clocks were new and all the rage, the universe was regarded as a clockwork mechanism, operating according to impersonal laws without the intervention of God. In the 1990s it was thought that the brain was like a computer—the material organ itself was the hardware, its processes—both learned and genetically inherited—the software. Now comes this guy, who thinks he can manufacture states out of the internet and the blockchain.

We’ve written about aspects of this before. For a more thorough intro to Srinivasan and network states, go here. We especially like the writer’s (Lucas Ropek) last two lines:

Srinivasan’s “Network State” manifesto appears to suffer from the fact that it was written by a guy who has been so rich for so long that he has fundamentally forgotten about the basic realities of human life. Borne aloft by the very system and “Establishment” that he decries, he seems to believe that, given enough capital, he and his cohort are capable of anything. If that’s the case, he is wrong.

They’re all that way, the billionaire bros: richer than God, intellectually brilliant, and convinced that anything they don’t know (e.g., human nature) isn’t worth knowing. Still, there are more things to say—so we’ll say them next week, when we examine the “monarchist” views of that crazy, tearful nutbar everybody (thanks to the New Yorker) is talking about, Curtis Yarvin.