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We need network societies, not network states (2024)
Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State posits a choice between reaction and stasis. A brighter future does not await through network states, but through network societies.
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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