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Build network societies, not network states
Balaji Srinivasan's vision of Network States has influenced Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and the "New Right" movement. However, he fails to grasp that networks are more a worldview than a technology—a view that runs contrary to the simplistic logic of exit he finds invigorating.
His inspiration, a 1997 book by British authors William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson entitled The Sovereign Individual, argues for a world in which nation-states crumble in the face of digital innovation, leaving the masses scrambling in impoverished chaos while the global elite build a real, tax-free meritocracy in cyberspace. One of us has spent much of her career documenting the emergence, along with the internet, of networked patterns of subnational, supra-national, and cross-national governance; yet there too the lack of transparency and clear standards of democratic accountability has led to charges of elitism, technocracy, and illegitimacy from the people, organizations, and states that are excluded. Or imagine tools that empower zero-overhead organizations to fund abundant public goods, not relying either purely on the state or private venture capital, but dynamically allocating from networks of philanthropists, VCs, and governments matching individual contributions based on the breadth and diversity of support.
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