Network Nations Ep:1- Building Trust at Scale — A New Season with Primavera & Felix Beer

Transcript

So what is really at the core of um this entire exploration I guess or this entire concept is the question of how can we create relationships which are strong at scale. Basically >> we are kind of like playing in this like fine line between like what we are observing happens [music] and what we prescriptively would like to happen. The question is like where do they even meet and connect right and a lot of the stuff is obviously happening right now on social media platforms let's take X one of the most dominant ones at least in the web free community how people connect on X and what kind of messages are proliferated and amplified and so on really depends on how the the platform moderators and owners aka Elon Musk are

skewing the algorithm right how who is getting shadowbanned and who is not like what is being shown in your feed and what is But all these questions really are very decisive in the end of the day um when it comes to organizing on a global scale. Right. Hello everyone and welcome to the new season of the green pill podcast which is focusing on network nations. Network nation are uh those new network community that uh we are both observing and trying to theorize uh which is essentially looking at how the network technology have enabled the emergence of new groups, new social groups that uh

share a particular culture that have like a a strong sense of belonging and kinship and therefore can be regarded to some extent as a new form of political actors to the extent that they have an aspiration for self-determination, to the extent that they have a desire of mutualization of resources but also collective action in order to have a particular impact in society. And so what we are what we are focusing within this world uh new episode is about describing the emergence of those network but also trying to prescribe the specific recipes that could facilitate the evolution of those network into what

we design as network. So I'm prim. I'm a researcher at Harvard and at the CNS and then our co-host is Felix Beer >> as a media. Super stoked to be here also researcher at Harvard and uh researcher blockchain g. This episode, this season is also part of like larger research project which is called blockchain gov which is a European funed project which is specifically focused on distributed governance at the local institutional and global level and the this track on network is basically informed by on the one hand this observation that uh uh network technology are facilitating the emergence of those new network structure and social groups that have some

characterization that could be compared to existing nation. But at the same time observing that this this observation has also been tapped into by other actors. uh for instance like all the network state community which is kind of like trying to respond to this potential in a slightly different manner than what we're trying to um to focus on in the sense that it's more of this corporate or libertarian approach to governance. Whereas we're trying to focus more on how can we utilize like the tools that we have learned from the commons and from like mutualization and and so forth

in order to actually provide an alternative version of how can those network community actually organize themsel on the global level. >> So in this uh podcast will be very much about this question. So how can we create this new institutional rapper if you will for these network communities which we call network nations and how can we build this in a way that it really empowers civil society around the globe in a bottom up participatory and equitable way. So uh some of the questions that we will be uh diving into in the coming episodes are how can we reimagine communities in general in the network age? What becomes possible when communities connect for shared purpose rather than geographies and borders in

this world? How can social groups build trust and act collectively at a global scale? And how can decentralized technologies actually help them in doing that? And finally, how can these network nations that we're trying to describe here maybe help to bring about a more resilient and democratic future for all of humanity? And um this podcast basically will be structured in two different formats which are alternating. Uh one of them uh we call the deep dive is like a format that invites for legal leaders and thinkers like or tang Michelle bounds or Sarah Horowits to join us and discuss specific concepts that we want to integrate into the theory of network nations like commoning

like mutualism like sovereignty. Um and then on the other side we have uh the community spotlight format which is an invitation to existing communities um who we believe have certain features and characteristics that are very adjacent or um similar to what we're trying to describe with our network nation theory. So here we will invite um some people from seed burning man um pop-up city leaders and also the region network itself. The first episode we are bringing to you today is basically the introduction to our thinking about network nations. Our thinking is still nent and emergent. So these are all ideas which are work in progress. Um we

hope to also develop our thinking through this podcast and want to also invite all of you as listeners to join us um and and and refine these ideas. In the end of the episode we will give away some information on how you can actually join us in collaborating around these kind of ideas. Um but yeah so the first episode wants to basically outline what a network nation is from our perspective why we believe it matters how it is also importantly different to the network state which is often compared or which is like a very well-known concept of course which is has certain similar features but is in many ways actually quite different to what we are trying to build uh and large and lastly we want to also outline um what kind of movement we are currently trying to work on and develop because uh with the help of uh

some collaborators. We're currently building a community platform which will also offer a lot of you guys uh the opportunity to get involved uh with our thinking. So to get us basically started with this episode, I would like to invite you basically Premova to share a bit about the origin story of network nations. Um it is a concept which has been floating around in different forms over the last three years um or four years. So there was some tinkering and thinking behind the scenes. Um but before we go into the actual theory and the concept and the definition of what a network nation is, I think it's interesting to understand like how this thinking evolved in the first place.

>> Yeah, basically the idea came in a very organic and uh decentralized manner. Uh but basically we had been unknowingly preparing the ground for uh um for those ideas. uh because as a as a little group of researcher and beyond and practitioners uh we have been already exploring intentional communities and like collective living and also like networking amongst those different intentional communities. we started already theorizing uh the governance within the groups and amongst the groups and like all the rimatic networks that come out of it. And then also from an academic level we started this world

track of institutional theory which was particularly looking at like how social dynamics exists outside of existing institution and kind of like interweave amongst different social groups. We also together with scholars we had been working on the concept of cloud community and blockchain based virtual nation and all these things like trying to look about how those things actually scale up uh and how web three technology or decentralized technology more generally facilitate uh those new form of global and distributed coordinations.

And then I guess what was actually the strong catalyst was the publication by Balaji of the book the network state which was a highly expected high expectation from this book and perhaps a little bit of broken expectation when we actually read the book because somehow those are all ideas that we had been resonating with but somehow the way in which it was articulated in the book was not very re resonant with uh the way in which we had been envisioning those ideas. So this kind of like launched this world movement I guess at the time it it we didn't call it network nation yet but uh we were already working on like trying to find a name for it and like the first name that uh was somehow

instantiated was the name coordination and uh as Zuzaloo started we got invited uh by the organizer of Zuzaloo to actually talk about this alternative to the network state uh which is the coordination and so we had a first gap ing where we invited like 15 people and then we somehow uh aggregated together with the people that were local already to Zuzalu in order to try and theorize and and the theory of course it was always inspired from what we could see already what we could see emerging because everything is very prototypical and then following Zuzaloo we continued as a group to continue the research to continue the conceptualization we have done a lot of events uh together with

HCT we have done also a lot of academic conferences at the UI at uh at the University of Paris and then recently we also had this um gathering at emerge lakefront where we uh also try to bring about many practitioners with the idea that it's not enough to just conceptualize those ideas but uh we also need to be practical and we also need to somehow try to create a movement which is embedding adding thinker and scholars that are kind of conceptualizing the theory but also practitioner that can experiment and implement this theory and also provide this kind of like constant feedback loop between the practitioner

and the theorist and the scholars in order to advance together into moving into something that can be instantiated as an actual network. >> Right. Yeah. So I mean I came uh I think um I joined this kind of initiative maybe one or two years after you guys started thinking about it but it's interesting that um although I didn't have touching points with um you guys before I had I knew a lot of other communities who had similar ideas around how to organize you know um collective action for networks um how to rethink basically governance beyond the nation state and so on. So it seems to be like an idea which is very latent in a lot of bubbles at the moment and um which kind of like converges around similar ideas

and I think like part of this entire initiative we're trying to draft here is to create kind of the shelling point of weaving all these different kind of communities and their ideas around how to createorked governance for civil society together. But yeah, having said that, I think it's maybe the right moment to talk about the concept itself uh network nations. So what is this idea actually and um how would you define it P? >> Yeah, so we came up with a preliminary definition which is quite dense and can be unpacked. The definition is essentially first and foremost the the characterization of what constitute the nation part of a network nation which is

a network of translocal communities which are united by a collective identity a shared culture and an aspiration for a common future. Right? And so the translocality is basic basically referring to the fact that it is about distributed communities which are geographically located at many different places but somehow interconnected, right? And so as opposed to like globalization where you just have like something that replicate replicates everywhere, translocality really talks into the fact that you maintain the specificity of the local nodes and yet all those local nodes are

interconnected into a larger mesh which somehow also empower them to because of those interactions. Um and so those those translocal community are somehow recognizing themsel as having commonalities and those commonalities are a commonality of culture uh a commonality potentially of values or some kind of affinity because of those interaction with one another or also because they just somehow managed to build a similar culture and therefore they want to interconnect.

Um and it is this particular sense of uh common culture that leads to the emergence of this new uh collective identity that people recognize themsel as being part of. And therefore once you recognize that you're part of the same culture and the same collective identity there is also this sense of kinship solidarity and also a desire of fostering each other because we want to we want to have a future in common right and this is what somehow define at the level of like the network nation where when does an online community is not just an online community anymore. It's

not just a group of people that are enjoying similar interest or are just enjoying to chat with each other, but there is really a cultural shift and the most important part of the cultural shift is the collective identity that emerge out of that. And so when we're talking about the network nation, the most important thing is this concept of translocality and and when we talk about translocality, we're also talking about network of networks, right? Or networks of communities. So it's not just individual that are recognizing each other as being part of this distributed network but it's like local communities which are translocal because they connect with other community around the

globe and this is what creates this mesh of network of networks that initiate at least create the prototype uh for a network nation to emerge >> right and I think so so these kind of nations uh kind of are emergent. They are partially existing already, right? Let's maybe make this a bit more concrete. So if you think for instance about the bio-reional movement you have a lot of placebased communities around the world, right? Translocal. So you have some maybe in Europe, others in America, um yet others are in Asia and they all share a similar culture, right?

They're all trying to aspire for um regenerative principles to bring about like an ecological change in society. So they are hypothetically very much adjacent and aligned in terms of their values yet they don't have really a container an institutional format you could say to really coordinate on a global scale. So I think the question we're trying to pose with network nation is how can we interweave these existing value aligned communities into anworked governance framework that allows them to coordinate not only on the local scale but also on the global scale together and in this way they can really leverage their collective impact. Right? So when

we talk about uh network nations we kind of draw a kind of we or we kind of like focus on two different levels of purpose which they're striving towards. So there is in a way like a internal dimension of these network nations which is really focused on a lot of the stuff Pete just outlined right like creating a sense of shared culture um creating um kind of a a community of kinship um and all these things which really strengthen trust within a network. Right? This is like the internal dimension is really about like creating a network which is aligned in terms of their culture and which has very strong connections between the nodes. Then there's an external purpose on top of that which is oriented towards the world. So these networks which are

very coherent and trust rich they want to act on the world. So they need basically governance frameworks uh and instruments which allow them to coordinate in a way that they can actually achieve collectively impact right so that would be in the if you tie it back to the example of bio regionalism this would be kind of like a global network of bio regions which has coordination governance uh toolings and infrastructures which allow them to really coordinate their efforts in a way that they can collectively achieve much more in terms of bringing about like a regenerative change then any of these single units could um by themselves >> and and uh one important element on on those internal and external purpose is

that of course both of them are needed but also um to distinguish between uh standard uh online community. So if we take like bio- regionalism versus for instance a a distributed uh global community of environmental activist it's very different uh where you have something where the external purpose come first which is there is a goal and a community emerge in order to serve that goal but the community is kind of the means to the end where you need a community of people to pursue a particular collective action which is marvel of a traditional political actor uh of like a community getting together

to act. Um as opposed to a network nation where the intrinsic purpose is actually the community itself is like creating things that foster that community and then the collective action is actually in order to foster the community. And so in this case, collective action, the goal is the goal to act outside of the community is the mean in order to actually foster and reinforce and actually help the community thrive as a community. And that's in this second case that we can talk of a network nation as opposed to just a standard uh activist community of the like. to of course there is no such

thing as a network nation that just has one that just has an internal purpose without collective action or that just have collective action with an internal purpose. In terms of prioritization, the the the goal, the external goal is usually the means to the end of actually the the desire of a community to foster itself and their park to engage into this mutualization of resources and solidarity systems in order to actually help and actually together proceed towards this shared future. >> Right? I think another way to put this is also that um what a network nation is is in the end a network of a lot of different communities and if we think about networks per se we often think

about scale of connections right so networks uh if we think about social networks or or activist movements they're really trying to connect a lot of dots across the world but often what they lack is a very strong sense of kinship of trust and of like the strength basically of these ties between the nodes in the network it's really about scale but Then communities on the other end uh the ones we know usually they're very good in actually creating reciprocity trust and so on on a small scale though right like if we think about intentional communities for instance they are great in you know integrating membersh like a shared kind of culture into a shared kind of set of principles but they often have difficulties to scale this um at a on a larger level. So what the network nation

kind of proposes is to build a bridge between these two uh dimensions to connect the scale of a network with the trust richness of a community and create a network of communities. So what is really at the core of um this entire exploration I guess or this entire concept is the question of how can we create relationships which are strong at scale basically and I think our hypothesis is that actually scaling trust rich relationships and enables us collectively to have more impact in the world. um because not only often about the quantity of um relationships which allow you basically to govern in good ways. There's a lot of research which

shows that if you create trust rich environments that people are willing to take greater risks together that people are more flexible and adaptive when it comes to solving challenges and that they're also more resilient because people can obviously rely better on each other and there is a stronger sense of solidarity. So um I guess what network nations are really trying to do is creating like these um you know relationships these trustful relationships at a scale where they can actually make a impact on a global level. >> One of the important uh component of uh all of these uh thinking and movement is that we are kind of like playing in this like fine line between like what we are observing happens and what we prescriptively would like to happen.

Meaning that on the one hand we're observing things emerging and we're trying to understand what's happening which is like observing how those network community are coming into being and organizing themselves but also because everything is a proto network nation so far. Um we also want to kind of create a vision, a destination which is the full network nation um construction and then we have this kind of prescriptive recipes of like well if you want to move from where you stand into an actual network nation here is ways to do it but also constantly observing how communities evolve also following those guidelines and then helping refine the concept together in this kind of participatory approach. Um

and so we've been working together with a bunch of communities as a way of exemplification in order to illustrate this concept. We have like two communities that uh are quite close to to this work and also are interested themselves into um walking down the path into becoming more of a network nation. Uh the first one uh is Burning Man. Uh so Berniman is a very interesting example case study because they did very good. They excelled at one part of the network nation which is the sense of nationhood which is actually creating translocal communities with a lot of different regional events, regional communities that all share the same culture, the

same principle, the same affinity of a particular future that we are trying to construct. everyone with their own local specificity while also of course understanding that together it makes more sense and together you have more impact and also a desire of mutualization and so forth. So the the Burning Man community is actually a very archetypical example of what a translocal community of network of networks of network of communities look like. With this um with this dimension of like there is increasingly a desire within the Burning Man organization and community of actually going farther.

It's like because this culture has become so strong and what makes this this uh an an exemplification that this culture is so strong is the fact that people actually name themselves as an identity to be a barer like people that actually feel that they really belong to this community they actually start assigning themselves the the the collective identity of a burner. Um and over times because now it's been many many years that the this community is building there is more tangible desire of actually moving further towards this mutualization towards this collective action, collective governance that goes beyond just individual events organizing themselves and just interconnecting but

really like increasing the degree of entanglement and increasing the the degree of collective governance that can happen at the level of the network itself. itself rather than just focusing on those individual nodes. >> Right? Another example uh to further illustrate this is one which is very familiar I guess to most of the listeners of the Greenpill podcast. It's the region movement itself. I think it's like an excellent example actually to illustrate some of these dimensions because regions um have a very strong shared identity. They want to bring about similar to the bio regional movement ecological change in the world and they want to do this through means and ends of the web 3 um technological space I would say um so on the one hand

side they have a very strong external purpose to come back to the terminology we introduced before um because they have a mission to bring about ecological change via web free technologies in the world but at the same time they're also cultivating along this journey actually a set of cultural rituals like a language um kind of modes of being together in these kind of communities which creates a very strong kind of sense of shared identity and I think it's very visible. I think the Greenpill podcast is actually an excellent example in itself of this because a community around these you know ideas and and aspirations to bring about change is creating this space where they're

inviting you know like their peers to speak and like you can really sense like when you listen to Greenpill podcast series um that there's like a shared vernacular kind of emerging from these um you know common projects. So in this way the region movement brings together these two dimensions of internal external purpose in an interesting way. And interestingly actually I think region DAO um is calling itself now um a coordination which was the preceding formulation or conception of the network nation because they realized themselves actually that this is what they want to build. They want to build like a strong network of all these different kind of regenerative web free communities around the world. some working maybe in Asia as

I said before some others in Europe others in America in a structure where they can coordinate this their their actions and I think what's interesting all all of a sudden when you have all these resources bundled up in this kind of likeworked institution of like the the region now you can start thinking about like how to actually allocate resources time efforts much more efficiently and how you can coordinate across the world to actually push for more systemic change because maybe some communities want to focus is actually on financial aspects of regeneration. Other ones want to build coordination and dowo tooling and so on and so forth. And by bringing in more and more communities with different expertises, different resources, different projects, you're really starting to build like a more

cohesive and powerful entity which then together taken together can actually hopefully uh move the needle on the question of um yeah the economic transition towards uh more planetary well-being. And I think those two examples are very interesting because they are starting almost from opposite direction but ending up on the same space where Burning Man is very advanced at the level of like the nationness the nationhood and like the sense of kinship and solidarity and the common culture and identity but maybe is not so advanced on the tooling and on the actual mutualization or collectivization commoning etc. Whereas like the region

started from the collective coordination and commoning and like collectively dealing with resources and is slowly evolving into this like more identity and nationhood that also emerge out of it >> right. Yeah. So I think this is also a great potential for this movement in general the cross-pollination between these initiatives. uh and I think this is something we see again and again especially in web free space right where we have very sophisticated tooling there's a lot of dows there's a lot of you know like technological innovations on how to coordinate in better ways but of they really lack the substance of a shared strong identity and culture to really turn them into a political entity so I think there's a lot the web 3 community and I think actually the

regions are already a prime example of like expanding that vision but like a lot of these web 3 initiatives can really I I think also draw and learn from other more culturally oriented or socially oriented uh movements and vice versa. >> Which brings us uh to the important question of like uh why are we talking about nations as opposed to just communities. Um which is an interesting and contestious questions because of course the concept of nation is quite loaded with a lot of connotation. Some of the notation are extremely positive and some of them are more negative. And uh and basically the problem is that

nation is now very associated with the issue with nationalism which is itself mostly linked with the concept of the state right and so in some way like what we're trying to do and this is of course an open debate is to find this word and kind of like extract it from the connotation of the nation state. uh because oftentimes when we talk about nation we actually mean nation states and therefore more of the state than the nation whereas the nation if we me manage to disentangle it from the state has actually a very different connotation and meaning um and essentially this also relate to of course the the contrast uh compare and

contrast with the network state which is what we're actually focusing on is the emergence of a particular sense of community and population and a sense of belonging which has this kind of like similar characteristic as the nation which is the fact that because of this cultural sense of community then all of student even if you meet someone that is that also recognized as part of the same collective identity and never had any interaction with neither directly nor indirectly All of a sudden you do have this sense of kinship because you recognize the

same culture, the same the same system into this into this other person and all of a sudden you know that you're you're part of the same thing, right? And so this is this is like the nation side. And of course nation generally because they want to organize themselves because they want to govern then they create an institutional structure which is the state. And what we're actually exploring here and the reason that we want to maintain the terminology of the nation is because we can see that those online communities are not just online communities that need a coordination system. They are actually community with this communal sense of shared identity, belonging, kinship and so forth which is

much closer to a nation than to an online community. And therefore, do we actually want to replicate the institution of the state into those new forms of national that are actually very different because they are not territorially bound as opposed to exploring a completely different or slightly modified institutional scaffolding which perhaps is more accommodating to theor structure of this nation which are not emergent from these kind of geographical proximity but rather emerge because of digital proximity, because of network proximity.

And it's because there is all those repeated interaction uh ongoing over years and years that then culture somehow emerged. And while it was very complex before to actually create such a cultural artifact without being in geographical proximity because of those network uh communication because of th those new technologies it becomes actually possible. We interact probably more often with people from digital means than from physical means. Um and so those new cultures are emerging. Uh new types of nation if we like or at least proton nation are emerging. And then what we want to explore because we want to disentangle the nation from the state is what can we

replace the state with if we're actually not talking about geographically bound and territorial type of nation but rather those translocal and digitally bound type of uh communities >> right and I think this is also one of the key distinctions which are important probably to draw here between the network state because I feel like there's a shared analysis in a way of the emergence of these digital nations, right? Like these communities as P just outlined who are meeting and convening online and there's this emergent sense of like culture and identity and so on.

But then the question becomes like what kind of institutional container um do you want to create for these um communities in order to really realize themselves as a political entity, right? And like the network state here proposes obviously the state as it is implied with the name as well. um which is uh also basically um reflected in their theory. So just maybe to draw the bridge here um that the for those who are not familiar with this entire discourse um the network state was really like popularized as I think we also spoke about initially in the beginning of the episode by by larajiasan with his book the network state and the idea here really is to create a network um community in a way which is seeded by

an entrepreneur is like a startup society but which seeks and this is really important like territorial enclaves basically. So they want to buy land in specific uh locations around the world in like aworked way. So some land in America, some land in China, some land in Europe and interweave this with a shared like digital infrastructure in order to create you know like political leverage on a global scale. So it's really trying to mimic in many ways what the state is also in in terms of the nation state, right? Because the nation state is a territorially bound unit enclosing people in a specific geography uh on the planet and regulating and governing it to through a centralized

institutions which are also part of that territory right and the in a certain way the network state as proposed by um Balaji also tries to mimic this right so it is territorially bounded it tries to govern in specific spaces and um I feel this is very different to our conception of how we're thinking about a network nations, right? Uh because and maybe P you want to take the ball here. It is the way we are thinking about this is very non- territorial. >> Yeah. So basically like I would say like one of the most important component of uh the network nation is of course that when you get this type of nation this feeling of a nation um there is

obviously a desire of sovereignty there is an aspiration for sovereignty. Um the distinction to is that the sovereignty can be in different manners, right? And so when we think about the nation state and the state in particular, uh the state is inherently territorially bound and therefore it has this kind of exclusive territorial sovereignty over the land that the state is controlling. What we're talking about when we're talking about network nation is also about sovereignty but a different type of sovereignty which is not this type of sovereignty uh that is linked to the territory but it's more like the sovereignty of actually managing your own affairs right and of course in the

context of a network it means that you want to have a particular degree of autonomy in the way in which you're managing in the way in which you're coordinating in the man in the way in which you're mutualizing ing collective resources and potentially also engaging in collect um in collective action. In some way like we are actually talking about these uh these particular domains which if we somehow like if we stop taking these absolute approach to sovereignty where sovereignty needs to cover everything uh and we actually functionalize it and so of course the nation state has a very important territorial sovereignty but doesn't need to have sovereignty over everything and there are domains that can actually be

still sovereign without necessarily impinging upon the territorial the sovereignty of the state and this is for instance if a community decided to create its own identity system or to create actually its own currency or to create a particular system of like notoriization or voting or decision making. So all those things that can obviously be done on on a on an additional layer of sovereignty. And so when we talk about functional sovereignty and we will go much more in depth over uh specific episodes to to dig into this but we're basically um disentangling the sovereignty of the state which is the territorial sovereignty from what can actually be

achieved by a community by aworked translocal community and what are the various means by which these this functional sovereignty can be achieved in order to actually enable them to manage their own while of course not necessarily escaping because people are still resident in a particular territory and so they are still subject to the territorial sovereignty of the state in which they resided but they also can engage into particular communities which have their own functional sovereignity into a very specific domain uh which is no longer subject to intervention by the territorial sovereign of the state.

>> Yeah. So maybe to make this a little bit more concrete um there is for instance one of our collaborators is CDA as well which is like um an emerging network nations we will claim as well in in and around the China. So it is is creating within actually China and around the world a web free platform for people of the Chinese diaspora to convene and meet in digital spaces and they're offering for instance community retreats for these people. they have some sort of like even a social welfare system right where they're offering uh stipens to people based on needs and so on which is though not challenging per se like the Chinese state but it it's existing alongside it for communities who don't

feel that they are culturally represented by um China and other countries around the world so they're creating basically an additional layer on top of existing nation state which allows all of a sudden communities which don't feel really represented by the national international order to um you know realize their kind of vision of how to live together um alongside it. So I think like to come back maybe also the comparison uh to the comparison with the network state. I think like a interesting and if distinction if we talk about sovereignty is also like how we approach this question of sovereignty and I think the network state has a specific um way to talk about sovereignty which is a a very focused on the individual right I think like the

the major kind of book everyone is referring to in that space is the sovereign individual. So it's really about how to create like governance frameworks or like you know like territorial enclaves gated communities which are empowering a select few people of very wealthy people of course um to realize their vision of how they want to live in the world. Uh so the network state is really trying to sell often sovereignty more as a product or as a service to people who can afford it. So there's like a guy coming in or like I mean most often it is a guy let's be frank a tech bro but um that's coming in an entrepreneur let's say and tries to seed a startup society in some part of the world or across the world and tries to create like these gated communities

for people for instance who want to experiment with longevity technology but often like the access is very much restrained to those people who can afford it and sovereignty in this way is like sold almost as a commercial good to yeah to to to people as I said who can afford it and obviously like the the risk here is that we are privatizing um political agency in a specific way. Uh in opposition to this I think how we are thinking about it on the network nation end is that sovereignty is not a product it's not a commercial good but it's actually a collective good. something which is generated by a community for a community which basically means that um sovereignty is not granted because we

are creating a gated community and then we try to create like a regulatory zone um which is probably exclusive to many people but it's really more about like strengthening the relationships within a community so they they can collectively become more powerful and in this way they can actually as a communities start realizing their own vision of the world across different locations on this planet. So it's really much more relational and common centric right like we're trying to really cultivate this idea of like sovereignty as a commons and maybe you want to riff a bit more on this since you've been involved with the commons movement for quite some time.

Yeah, basically I mean I think there is like a lot of way in which we can uh draw a distinction between the way in which we conceptualize the network and the way in which we conceptualize or biology conceptualize the network state. Um I think one is of course this kind of like corporate approach versus commoning. Um our vision is more like it's not about like in fact our observation is that the state and the market seems to not succeed in actually addressing many of those global challenges. The market is focusing on on profit maximization uh which obviously leads to particular collateral effect.

the state is focusing on its own territory uh which also has difficulty internalizing the externalities both positive and negative and then what we're trying to explore with the with the network nation is this kind of third third way uh which is the commons which is using like using the intention of the state which is like collective welfare and so forth but also through the tools of communities and like from the grassroot and bottom up approach as opposed to in a um in a profit maximization approach. uh another very important distinction I think is really and this relates also to the question of

sovereignty is the question of like to which extent do we need to exit a system in order to create a new system and uh the network state because the network state is actually claiming a need for territorial exclusive sovereignty by creating a new state it's inherently requiring to exit existing states you in order to declare sovereignty which obviously create plurality but also competition within this plural system. The way in which we're envisioning instead the network nation is more about creating overlapping layers of of sovereignty. So you you can coexist

alongside the sovereignty of the state and create your own sovereign layer which doesn't require you to exit uh but rather to find ways to interweave and uh perhaps complement something that the state is not providing or add additional uh potential solution can be that can be choose from but but there is not this exitbased approach to the system. Yeah, I think they just I guess because it's also a pertinent thing to talk about right now. So the vision as we see it at least of the network state is often really a vision of like seeding a community or network more as a tool to realize the vision of a certain founder.

Um it's a top- down approach. It mimics a lot in a waring sense I think what also Curtis Yavin is talking about right the CEO dictatorship. um what is being much talked about now and regard also of the Trump administration and like politics uh like the right-wing politics I guess in general where they're headed. Um so this idea really of having like a very powerful individual who is organizing society like a company I think a lot of this is reflected in the network state and I think on the opposing end what the network nations try to do and we spoke about a lot already but maybe to summarize is like that from a bottom up perspective we want to take existing communities so it's not about founding a new start of society it's about realizing that there

is a web of value aligned existing communities around the world for instance the bio regions who are in need of stronger vertical integration and horizontal collaboration. So the network nation is not trying to fund and seed something new but it's trying to integrate what is here and tries to give it a more coherent framework to coordinate itself. So it's really about like interweaving communities from the bottom up. And then I guess the place in which the two are actually quite aligned um is actually web three and blockchains uh which is I guess the the common factor between network national network

states and the reason that we think it's very important is um because of this concept of sovereignty which is if we want to create additional layer of sovereignty if we want to like you know uh vertically build uh new sovereign structures. There is a need of uh um creating government structures or creating like the administration of this network nation that is not uh enclosed or that is not subject to a particular territorial sovereign. So if if a network nation were to coordinate itself within a traditional server infrastructure which is somehow like

server based or like there is a particular server somewhere in in a particular country then the sovereign has the power to intervene to interfere potentially even to shut down uh because the operator of that server is bound by the regulation of the country and so where web3 technology ology and of course it's not just blockchain, it's all type of peer-to-peer and decentralized technology becomes extremely relevant is because they actually operate in this translocal manner as well where uh they are not dependent or they are not subject to the sovereignty of any single actor and therefore they enable those additional layer of sovereignty uh for specific

like issuance of currency for identification purpose like all those things that a network nation needs to create, they can do so without claiming territorial sovereignty because they can rely on a sovereign infrastructure. And when we say sovereign infrastructure, it just means something that is not subject to any one single sovereign. There's no single point of failure. There is a distributed network and therefore it's really difficult to shut them shut it down or even just to manipulate or control the operation of this infrastructure. And so that's where web three is actually a mean to the end of aspiring for sovereignty in a context in which we cannot rely on territorial

sovereignty. >> Absolutely. Um and it's not only only territorial sovereignty but also where we cannot rely on big tech right because like a lot of uh communities um are trying like the question is like where do they even meet and connect right and a lot of the stuff is obviously happening right now on social media platforms. Uh that's why I jumped just jumped in before and these social media platforms are of course far from value neutral right let's take X one of the most dominant ones at least in the web free community how people connect on X and what kind of messages are proliferated and amplified and so on really depends on how the the platform moderators and owners aka Elon Musk are skewing the algorithm right how who is

getting shadowbanned and who is not like what is being shown in your feed and what is But all these questions really are very decisive in the end of the day um when it comes to organizing on a global scale. Right? So a lot of these existing social media platforms are um value biased in in some way and often against in a way which is kind of in opposition to at least the ideas and values of a lot of progressive communities. So I think like it's not only about creating independence from nation states which might be in specific locations very important but it's also creating independence of the existing big tech infrastructure in allowing more value aligned the creation of more value aligned governance framework

communication frameworks where people actually can you know coordinate uh in ways that are supportive to their community needs and goals. >> Yeah. And perhaps more generally if we focus on what is the general agenda uh what is our uh what is our political goal uh when we're trying to theorize and potentially instantiate a network nation. It doesn't really have a political stance in and of itself of saying that this is a tool for a particular political party or political side. uh because of course it's just a it's a vessel that can be used for many

political reason. However, the the vessel itself has its own metapolitical agenda and one of those is of course empowering civil society. uh because today when we when we look at the way in which negotiation discussion like uh the the global governance agenda is mostly managed by nation states or multinational corporation doing their necessary lobbying and there's actually little room for civil society to express itself without passing via the the vessel of the state. uh but of course that means that all all the way in which civil society is expressed is through this territorially bound system whereas

as we notice the translocality of uh of those communities then there is obviously a different voice that will emerge if those civil society communities were able to coordinate and actually have a voice as a political entity in the international agenda as a translocal community as opposed to as a as a state based community. So one of the important metapolitical agenda is empowering civil society and giving it voice in the international setting and the other one is also as a part of like it's the process which is by doing this of course this is not the solution but this is this is a a particular process that perhaps could lead to finding a

better solution for all those global challenges that require global coordination and that are failing this is the solution to those global challenges. It's not being found mostly because of the bias of the existing actor in the international agenda which is either multi multinational corporation with a profit maximization agenda or states with their own territorial bound uh interest. And our hope is that by connecting together all those communities that actually have a have an aspiration for a shared future and have a particular sense of kinship then we might be able to through the different process we might be able to identify new solutions that have not yet

been voiced. uh but that take into account the all the externalities all the global aspect of things while maintaining this focus on civil society as opposed to market or states. >> Yeah. And I think what we also want to draw attention to is the fact that there is this new emerging political landscape which is focused on the question we started this episode with how to give shape to these kind of network communities. And at the moment there is a few select actors who are very powerful very whose voices are very much amplified in that space but who have a very specific of course political agenda as well right the network state a lot of these experiments from the libertarian

spectrum like prosperous charter studies seasteading like a lot of the experimentation which is going on around the idea of how to use network tools to create new forms of like collective governance are very much coded with values um which at least we find to a certain extent sometimes problematic and in general I think just this entire landscape of politics should be expanded. So this is just an invitation also to recognize this as a new political design space and to invite into the discussion more and more diverse voices as well to kind of discuss how these new emerging political forms which are not purely speculative right we see these things actually

taking shape in the real world right there's these experiments like prospera like praxus and so on who are working on these kind of things already um so it's about recognizing this and I think diversifying ing the perspectives on how these things should and could take shape. And we of course have our own political biases and uh and sensibilities and maybe um preferences. But it is in a way also an open invitation to just like broaden the conversation around this. And our um I guess like um attempt now to do to contribute to this um effort is to build a movement around this idea of network nations. Um so as we said in the beginning there has been some thinking

and tinkering behind the scenes over the last three four years around this notion of like hey what is a network nation how could it take shape and so on very much focus on theory though so I think now we believe the time is ripe to put this concept although it is still nent or although it is still working in progress into practice and we want to invite more people to join the conversation we are trying to have around this new institutional container for network societies Um and for this purpose we are currently building a container together with um a couple of collaborators. Shout out here by the way to um Patricia Benjamin, Stefan Paul and many others who are helping us at the moment to actually build a community platform and our idea

is to create um an alliance a community platform to discuss these ideas around network nations to bring in communities who already working with certain elements of this idea. Right? We mentioned a couple of case studies earlier in this episode like Burning Man regen CD there's many more communities who are already tinkering with specific elements of network nations um and bring them together in one place exchange learnings develop best practices and push forward this kind of idea of bringing these new entities into existence.

Yeah. So P maybe you have a good overview actually of um a lot of the adjacent movements I would say that exist in that space and which go probably beyond even only the web three space. Maybe you can give us a little perspective on how we want to what kind of movements we want to actually weave together in this container. >> Yeah, basically we definitely want to go beyond the web three. The web tree is a wonderful place for governance experimentation and we hope that we can involve a lot of community but it like the the network nation goes way beyond that. Uh we have of course a lot of intentional communities that uh we have already like identified as being potentially like um akin to one another and uh interested in like exploring

further. uh we have like of course like a lot of like you know uh well the bio region is and all these things so it's really not something that needs to be digital first uh even though digital and web3 technology are the tools potentially that can help at least achieve this sovereignty but there's a lot of community that are local first uh that can be interconnected so it's really like an open call for uh everyone first of all that resonate with those ideas uh and everyone that perhaps has a sense that there might be other community out there that have that have a similar culture and let's discover

them. So I think for us this is also what has happened is like as we start communicating about these we also encounter more people that are sharing uh those same ideas. So, it's really like a way of like throwing throwing uh seeds in the air uh and seeing where they land. But basically, anyone interested in uh this type of uh uh translocal governance with uh uh community of kinship, we want to learn from you and uh and we hope that you are interested in also learning from uh the discussion that we're having. We have written a lot of stuff but we also

realized that uh we want to move out of these like more academic settings and so as as part of creating a movement we are uh we launched uh this website networknations.network where you can collect all the information uh about uh the work that we have done and that we are doing. Uh we also are setting up uh community meetings every month for people that wants to discuss and like have a have a synchronous uh interaction with one another. And then we have a telegram channel where basically we hope to gather a maximum number of people to to discuss and to debate and uh to provide new use cases that perhaps we haven't

thought about. So this is all again very emergent. We are hoping to be able to identify more more things that we can analyze and describe, but we're also very eager to engage with people that are interested in moving forwards into this axis of network nation and co-create together these recipes because of course this is uh this is a work that we cannot just theorize and needs to be done together with the practitioners >> and and I guess like you know like I think also this kind of modeling of future governance systems can never be only informed by theory. So this is like an emerging process and it's definitely at a point now where the theory needs to be informed also by practice. So it's

really about creating this virtual cycle between tinkering with newer things with new governance approaches with new community designs learning from that experience building new theories which then again can hopefully inform and propel these exper experiments. So yeah we are trying to create also like a starting point with this podcast. As we said initially, we're inviting not only Ford leaders and thinkers, but also community builders to actually have a bit of this virtual cycle also going on in this podcast. We would love for you to join future episodes as well. And if you want to actually get involved to also roll up your sleeves, head to our website. I'm going to say it again, network nations.network.

donations with us. Um, and yeah, find out about the community call and join us uh in building the next generation of network institutions. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. See you soon.