Institutional Alignment and Network States

Transcript

hey everybody just gonna figure out how to use this one sec all right beautiful thank you so much for inviting me so happy to be here love Montenegro and a great talk by biology as well um so I'm going to shift gears a little bit and maybe expand the Overton window about when you think about Network States and I'm also going to talk a lot about this Con concept of institutional alignment that I came up with and I wrote an article about back in December and basically I just to kind of briefly

introduce this topic it's um I was having trouble making sense of a lot of like the political rearrangement that had been happening not just in the United States but broadly across the world where people who are used to be on the left or the right um are now kind of they swapped in a lot of ways and I was trying to make sense of this and came up with a new political compass and a way of thinking about it so I'm gonna I'm gonna introduce that concept and that compass and at the end there's actually a I made with JavaScript a quiz that you can take to map yourself on this political compass and so I'll show you that QR code at the end um and then but also I'm going to relate this new way of thinking about alignment and institutions with the network State

and different approaches that we can have to willing and network State into reality so I'm super excited to get into this and um I hope you enjoy it too all right I haven't spoken at an ethereum conference before and so I just briefly will introduce myself a bit more so I'm a surgeon in New York City I do skin cancer surgery but I also spend a lot of time thinking about big societal issues and geopolitics and I write in my sub stack of course so I'd love to have you there if you're interested I'm a long time bitcoiner as well more recently I'm an ethereum enjoyer too and you know even since I was a teenager I was super interested in these different you know various

self-sovereignty movements whether it was the free state project which I signed up for when I was like 16 years old or or sea land maybe some of you know about sea land where it was like a fortified military structure off the coast of England that a family took over and tried to declare as like a as a Sovereign Nation not sure the status of that currently but I thought it was super cool at the time and I back when I was a teenager I was in the libertarian party so kind of I'm deeply steeped in all of these sovereignty movements and I think very interesting and I now that we're so Advanced digitally and with crypto I think that the network state is is the next is the next step in in this movement

um and you can follow me on on Twitter or reach out to me on social all right so this is the the political compass that everyone's familiar with where we have the economic left and the economic right versus the social scale between libertarian and authoritarian and uh you know back in 2010 2012 this made a lot of sense you know life was simpler back then and I kind of miss those days where people like on the economic left would argue with people on the economic right about things like you know whether we need to increase entitlements whether the government is responsible for health care insurance things like that and people on the social Libertarians would argue with like social authoritarians on issues

like uh I don't know cannabis legalization or gay marriage so back in the day you know back in 2010 2012 this did a really good job of sorting people into their allies and sorting them away from the adversaries and explain politics and in a way that uh made a lot of sense but it doesn't make sense anymore the reason why is because institutions I've had kind of like a crisis of confidence this has happened many different times in all over the world in many different countries it happened with covid initially in some of the poor responses that countries had to covet it happened with lockdowns it happened with denial of election results in in the U.S and other countries and so now instead of like orienting politically ourselves

by left and right like the good old days now it really is we're either for or we're against these big institutions and when I talk about big institutions I'll get more into detail with with this model that I came up with but I'm talking about big things like the United Nations and NATO and even the New York Times and Harvard are these you know net good for society or are these detrimental to society is it a mixed bag and these are the things that that Orient our politics now and so it's a lot different than what it was 10 10 20 years ago um but before we dive into that model I'm gonna spend a lot of time describing it we should first ask this question what is an institution anyway and when I when I made this model and wrote this article I thought that we all

just had a common understanding of what an institution is but it ends up that's not the case and institutions are actually quite complicated and so subsequent to my essay vitalik wrote an essays well um entitled what even is an institution he did a really good job diving deep into the different conceptual conceptualizations of Institutions he even did like some polls on his Mastodon and statistics on the polls to kind of drill down deeper and try to figure out what what characteristics of uh organization make it into an institution but I think that he'd agree that you know this is a very nebulous kind of question it's just a very hard question to answer but he did highlight this one quote by Robin Hansen

which really resonates with me and that is that you know it's a general framework for what an institution is where masses recognize Elites in those Elites oversee experts so if you think of like a democracy the masses are like the voters in the elites that they recognize I guess they vote for like politicians Senators presidents and then those Elites they appoint experts like um you know justices of the court or maybe commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration and so this General framework for institutions works for many different things even if you think about the New York Times where the masses in that case or the readers of the New York Times and they recognize the elites which are maybe the owners or

the New York Times company and then the company appoints their investigative journalists or their subject matter experts Etc so I think this is a really good framework for what makes something an institution um and then one more point I want to bring up before we dive into the model is this idea of institutional hegemines so an Institutional hegemon hegemon is like uh the most dominant power and So within institutions all the different institutional sectors there's one that's really predominant and so for example for Criminal Courts like the international criminal court has the broadest jurisdiction it's bigger than the European court of justice or the U.S Supreme Court has broader jurisdiction than like the district courts their

local courts of course and similarly I think like the New York Times is maybe one of the foremost uh printed news journalisms and so more so than the New York Post or Russia today or Bitcoin magazine I also took this from vitalik's essay and then the similarly The Who NATO these are all like the big institutional hegemons that we currently have and so I'll be asking later like are these valuable are they this is like a mixed bag or are they totally corrupt and damaging to society and that's that's kind of what a lot of just hinges on so these are the three questions that I believe determines a lot of our alignment in politics today so first institutions in general you know not the

ones that we have today but just the whole concept of Institutions do they serve Society or not um that's the first question and then today's institutions those hegemons I just went through the New York Times The Who NATO are these goods for success for society currently are they valuable and then what role does Tech play in all of this so looking back at um this model that I came up with I guess we can start first on the y-axis so this this side here so this is your support for institutions the institutional hegemons that I laid out so if you're very supportive of these you're at the top if you're you know very against Caesar at the bottom and the the x-axis is whether you

believe that institutions are good for society or or whether they're they're more self-serving whether they reinforce current Elite power structures for example and then the the Z access is um color is so it's the blue versus the red and um skipped ahead a few here sorry so the uh the the blue is more of uh Tech Skeptics traditionalists and the red is people who are tech optimists people who believe that ethereum and Bitcoin and crypto and Automation and AI are really important for society um and So based on those three x uh those three axes then you can arrive at like eight different archetypes so there's

um I guess why don't we start at the top right the institutionalist so though in an institutionalist is someone who really believes in the importance of Institutions as a concept that they serve society and really likes our current institutions like the United Nations and the CDC What Not The Who and so those obviously are institutionalists right they're very supportive of current institutions and um the those are that's like the blue circle in the top right and the red circle behind it is the same thing except for that it flips on the z-axis so that's someone actually like myself who thinks that while institutions are valuable we need to reform them with these new technologies Bitcoin crypto automation AI things like that so while I'm supportive of

Institutions and even our current institutions um reforming is is important and now if you look further down like uh in the contrarian in the sovereign individual quadrant these are people who support the idea of Institutions but they think our current institutions are basically rotten they're no good and so for the tech naive the ones that aren't super optimistic about tech Solutions these are just kind of the traditional contrarians so people who think that our current institutions are rotten and we just need to replace them with new institutions with new people and then the sovereign individual types these are people who think maybe you know our current institutions are terrible and we need to replace them instead with crypto or blockchain or Tech like AI et cetera

and so these people might argue for example that we need to replace the fed and put Bitcoin in its place and so that's kind of like the sovereign individual archetype and then there's also the the people that scored low on the x-axis so that's this side over here and these are people who don't really believe that institutions serve society and said they're more self-serving or serving of the elites and for example I'm sure there's no one in the room that kind of feels this way or probably very few of you hopefully but these are like kleptocrats or dictators and people who feel that institutions are are more for their self-preservation of power and those are those that are in power at the

top because they like those institutions and those who are not in power are at the bottom here and I think that you know that's all very complicated and it's easier just to think of actual people so I made this little graphic that that might be helpful um I can go through some of these too and if if one of you are in the room and don't like where I put you on the graph these are just guesses I can move it if you want but um looking first at like the the institutionalists on the top right you have people who used to be political adversaries like Joe Biden a Democrat and Liz Cheney a republican in the old system these people used to be adversaries and they would argue about policy differences uh on gay marriage or economics or entitlements but now

they're basically the same they're they all they say the same thing they're very supportive of of Institutions basically of NATO of the Center for Disease Control of the current power structures and then I included like my crypto Punk my depiction of myself as like maybe a tech positive version of this and there's another writer I like Noah Smith who I also kind of think of in that way where I like our institutions I think I really like the New York Times I think they do good journalism but perhaps they could be better crypto reporters or then perhaps they could use time stamping or other technological new technologies to to better serve their mission and same thing with NATO Etc and then on the bottom right of the of the chart you have the more of like

the contrarian thinkers and so the ones in the red are like the tech contrarians and the ones in the blue are are are more traditionalists and this again includes people on the on the right and the left so on the right you have like Elon Musk and Peter teal and on the left you have um Noam Chomsky and Robert Kennedy Robert F Kennedy Jr but they're they're United in their opposition to current institutional structures they're you know very skeptical of the FED of the United Nations of NATO of these big institutional hegemons and they want to the ones in the red like the tech Optimus versions they want to replace these things with technology with crypto Etc and then of course you have people that really think that institutions are more

just to serve their own self-interest right they're not they don't believe that institutions should serve Society so much as just their own preservation of power and so that's like bolsonaro or Donald Trump and then the ones that are actually in power like Putin and Xi Jinping are a little bit higher up because the institutions they support the institutions that are responsible for their power um and then of course Xi Jinping is in red here because in in China of course uses a a lot of Technology as part of like a digital panopticon to enforce stability into retain power okay so how does this all relate to the the network State well I think that

those who are most interested in the network state are going to be people maybe in the reformer category or in the sovereign individual category and um so let's go through each of those so Network States for the reformer so I kind of consider myself in this group and um the way that I see network States working for someone with a reform mindset is and a lot of other people have described this too but more of a piecemeal transition to a network state so it could start with you know the group of us in at zuzalu now and maybe a dinner club or even like token gated messaging like just kind of like a digital hangout people with aligned values and then over time perhaps we pull some funds together in a dow or

something and form a political action committee and maybe we can use that political action committee to negotiate with governments for some you know things that we care about and then over time over the course of years maybe we could see the special economic zone or an autonomous area within a country and then many years down the road if we've proven ourselves to be good citizens within a country um or just have you know generated a lot of Goodwill maybe we can even move towards some kind of sovereignty in a limited way for example um so this is like how a reformer might approach the idea of network States well while preserving what's good in institutions and in promoting uh new technologies to help them improve and

reform and there's many different ways that the the anti-institutionalists like the tech contrarians or the more traditional contrarians advocate for Network States and some of these I think are really benign well-intended things other than others of them are less so so I think like the most benign steel man version of this approach is people who think that they are just sounding the alarm on on the inevitable demise of these institutions so they think that institutions like I don't know the fed or the United Nations or NATO these are just doomed to fail no matter what there is there's no point trying to save these and by advocating Bitcoin or moving to a crypto-friendly jurisdiction et cetera

they're just trying to hand out like a life raft on the Titanic so I think that's like the most benign version of the tech contrarian approach to the network State there's some that are less benign the first is like a beach exit basically exiting to the beach while the word world burns down so and that the world burning down can be a financial crisis or like a civil war or a kinetic war and and just like preserving being selfish and preserving uh what you have uh while watching kind of society collapse so that's a bit less benign and then there's uh accelerationism too which for those of you who aren't familiar accelerationists they believe in like really leaning into the the coming Calamity so if it's a civil war they believe in you know instigating it

bringing it about sooner that way that they can get through the Calamity push through the Calamity and come out the other side and reach some kind of network spirituality or network state or Nirvana that that comes after this societal collapse and I really am uncomfortable with this idea of pushing for societal collapse and so you know very much opposed to this this way that some some tech contrarians uh feel that we should achieve Network States anyway I hope that this helped you think about these issues helped you think about maybe where you lie um in in relation to institutions think about you know are institutions important like I think or maybe you disagree and that's fine that you feel that institutions should be replaced by something else

in any case you can take the quiz using this QR code um want to thank vitalik who helped me who was a great sounding board when I was putting this together and um happy to talk more this is my my socials and my sub stack and would love to hear your feedback thanks a lot [Applause] [Music] [Applause]