NN Ep:9 A New Political Landscape in the Digital Age with Nick Srnicek & Sofia Cossar

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the network nations miniseries on the green pill podcast. I'm Felix Bear and together with Primava de Filipe I'm your co-host for the coming episodes. Across the world new kinds of civic communities are beginning to take shape. Communities that use decentralized technologies to govern themselves, stewardship resources and act together across borders. We call them network nations. And in this series, we want to explore network nations as a new design space for civic society in the digital age. Our goal is to chart an alternative pathway from the network state, one where technology serves civil society and not the other way around. Instead of reproducing today's power imbalances in network societies, we're asking what if network

societies were built from the bottom up as shared comments rather than from the top down as ventures. What if they treated members as co-creators rather than customers? And what if they cultivated a sense of sovereignty as a collective good for the many rather than a private asset owned by the few? Each episodes brings together thinkers, builders, and organizers who are exploring this new frontier of community self-governance, helping us to imagine how civil society can reclaim political agency in the age of networks. To dive deeper, visit our website, networknations.networks, networks um where you'll find our manifesto and many ways to connect with our communities. In this episode, we want to discuss the emerging concept of network sovereignty,

a concept that explores how power is shifting from nation states to the digital networks that increasingly organize our contemporary life. Think about how much of your daily life runs through digital networks. How you communicate with your friends, do your job, organize events, follow the news, or even make sense of what's happening in the world. All of this runs through digital infrastructures of connectivity. And these networks often feel like neutral tools, but in fact, they're not just connecting us, they're shaping us. They're influencing what we see, who gets attention, which voices are amplified, and which actions are easy or hard to take. In other words, networks are becoming increasingly the new substrate of governance in our societies. While in the 20th century sovereignty was largely a territorial

term which meant um states exercised authority over land and its populations, in the 21st century sovereign power is increasingly. It emerges from the design and the control and indeed also the ownership of digital infrastructures. In this way platforms are starting to resemble virtual territories. protocols function like rule setting institutions and algorithms are increasingly um functioning as sort of policies. This is what we mean by network sovereignty. A shift from nation states to digital infrastructures as the medium of political power. And if Marshall McLuhan famously put it um the medium is the message then those who control the medium of course increasingly also

control the message. And indeed what we are observing in our contemporary world is a shift in the geopolitics. Governments, corporations, and civil societies are increasingly trying to control or reclaim this new digital territory of networks. The central question then is no longer whether or how networks are governing our societies. They already do in many instances, but the question increasingly becomes who controls these networks and in which interests are they being designed. To help us make sense of the shift, we are joined today by Nick Sinishek and Sophia Kosar. Nick um is a political theorist and a senior lecturer in digital economy at the King's College in London. His work on platform capitalism has been central to the understanding of um how economic and

political power concentrates in network systems and his most recent book silicon empires examines the political economy of AI. Sophia Kosa is a close collaborator of mine and a researcher at blockchain gv where she studies governance law and institutional design in decentralized systems. Her work mainly focuses on how network communities and blockchain communities indeed experiment with new forms of collective decision- making ownerships and membership regimes. Sophia and I are also um running a research program on network sovereignty and are currently writing an academic article which was kind of the backbone for this conversation. Together, we'll unpack what sovereignty means in our network age and what it would take to reclaim

networks as infrastructures for democratic self-determination rather than control. Thanks for tuning in. >> Hi Sophia. Hi Nick. Welcome to the show. >> Hello. Thank you. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to have you. So today we will discuss the concept of network sovereignty and more specifically the question of how networks as entities become political actors maybe in their own right. There's a lot of interesting I think threats we can draw on. Nick has been working on the question of platform capitalism for a long time. Sophia and I are currently co-writing a paper on the

idea of network sovereignty. So these are some of the ideas we want to unpack together. But before we jump into yeah political questions, we want to first zoom in and ask the more general question of what it actually means to live in a network age these days. I think we all are people who are extremely online at this point. So lots of our life runs through apps. Um we are always surrounded by smart uh devices, live in smart homes, live in smart cities. So our lives are currently veryworked which kind of begs the question to which extent it is still conceivable to live outside of networks.

So what does it really mean to live in the network age and what is the implication for us as citizens? Um Nick, do you want to grab the first question? >> Yeah, sure. Um so I mean from my sort of perspective I've been focused a lot on platforms in my research and um platforms as this business model uh that's been taken up by a number of different companies around the world and increasingly the largest companies in the world all being sort of platform business uh models and I think one of the key things about them is that they they end up becoming quite pervasive in whatever sector that they're involved in uh because of this drive of network effects they end up sort of dominating ating their particular markets and industries. Um, and you end up with a

sort of quite centralized platform. And then there's been sort of research from people like John Christopher Plantine who's talked about, you know, platforms as infrastructures as well. And I think this is a really important way to look at platforms is not just as a sort of not just as a business model, not just as a sort of intermediary between different groups, but also as something which underpins core elements of our social lives, political lives, economic lives. I don't think there was necessarily any sort of intention for these things to become infrastructures when they first sort of developed. But the way in which they have grown means that they have taken on this infrastructural capacity. And by this I sort of mean that they are there's an asymmetry that lots of people are

relying upon a few key providers of this stuff but also there's a sort of hidden element of it um and almost in a sort of hidegarian way you know we don't see the tool until it breaks and you know Amazon web services breaks and suddenly everybody realizes oh yeah how much of our life is dependent upon this infrastructure um these are key elements of infrastructures and I think that platforms have taken this on and have have sort of moved from you know sector to sector in the economy but also you know different spheres of our lives are becoming populated by these these core digital infrastructures as well >> right yeah and I think um increasingly it's it's not just like tools we're

using these days right we're um going on a web browser surfing the web but we are really almost in like this uh this condition where networks are ubiquitous right like they are surrounding us in everyday life and they are really shaping also the way how we think and interact with each other on a very profound level and I think especially in the age of AI now um that the one fifth of every of the entire population of this planet is using chat on a daily basis and a lot of other AI service is like our thinking and understanding of the world is very shaped um through these these tools and it makes them just very pervasive and uh if you want to riff a bit maybe there was a report I think by co- matter um

which was called network realism I think which was kind of like a play on uh Mark Fcher's work of course of like a capitalist realism this kind of I think like leads to the question is there still an outside to the network or are we just like is our condition really um to live in inside of these structures uh at this point um Sophia do you want to jump on that >> yeah I think that's a very interesting question maybe taking a more philosophical approach to it. I would say that the outside exists perhaps in theory. Um but we we do often romanticize the outside like there's a renaissance of movements proposing that we build an off-grid cabin or that we take more digital

Sabbaths. Uh but I don't see them as actual exits. There may be partial outsides. Even if you, you know, even if you want to build an off-grid cabin that requires a solar panel, you still depend on transnational supply chains that for the most part are dominated by uh big tech platforms. And so I think that the the situation today even more after obviously the information and digital revolutions is that u it's very hard to create actual spaces of disconnection. The only thing that is at our disposal is to modulate participation in this enshment of of different networks that have different degrees of centralization of decision making power. That would be

my take on it. >> So if the network is kind of the the environment or the water we swimming in then the question of course becomes like who is operating these environments and to which ends are they kind of like designed. We live of course in a day and age where platforms are becoming very omnipresent and very powerful. Amazon, X, Meta, Alphabet um are integrating and dominating a lot of the services which are very core to our societies right like let's just think of X who is becoming very powerful in shaping the public sphere and of course then by proxy their decisions on how to design specific algorithms or protocols in these kind of social media environments really have a profound impact on how

discourse is being shaped and how we are engaging um around topics um as citizens as well. Uh Nick, you wrote um a book called uh platform capitalism and are currently in the process of publishing a new p a book called Silicon Empires. What's your take on uh the role of platforms and how they're positioning themselves as like these new very powerful political entities? >> Yeah, it's um it's complicated. Um >> so when I wrote Platform Capitalism back in 2016. It was published in 2015 is when it uh was written the core of it.

Um it was it was sort of peak unification between the tech sector and the political sector within the United States. Uh it was you know Obama cozying up completely to Silicon Valley. uh loads of you know Silicon Valley executives going to the White House and White House you know employees going towards tech companies and you know this whole sort of revolving door going on and more importantly there was this core sort of interest um that was shared by Washington and Silicon Valley. You know whatever Google and Amazon and Facebook wanted to do around the rest of the world was also good for American power and for American interests as a whole.

So there was this real sort of convergence of like these corporate interests and seeking after profit fundamentally but also the political geopolitical interests of the American state at the time. And so in platform capitalism I don't talk a lot about the state because in many ways they weren't an important actor at that point in time. Uh it was it was a facilitator of the profit oriented goals of these these political uh sorry corporate companies. Um I think that's changed today though. I think that it's a much more complicated situation today. And this emerges most notably with Trump in 2016, but also Biden continued it and Trump 2.0 is continuing it as well, where there's a much more of a focus on

geopolitical elements. Um, and here you start to see a tension, I think, between what tech companies want and what the the the, you know, the political the state wants. big tech would be happy to have the neoliberal world, the globalized world, a free free trade in goods, services, data as well. Um, but that's not what's on the cards anymore. The state wants something quite different. The state wants um economic security. It wants to make sure supply chains are controlled by them and allies. They want to make sure that technology is not getting into the hands of China and other countries that they see as foes.

So there's there's a real I think divergence here that is relatively novel like it's the past 10 years that there's been this real split between Silicon Valley and Washington interests uh in America. So I think that you know if at one point in time there was this point where platforms could sort of just simply take up these sort of political roles quite easily. increasingly they're having to fight against the state in order to sort of get what they actually want. Um having to make deals with Trump but also make deals with Biden, make deals with the EU, uh make deals with Gulf states that they may not may or may not want to. Um there's a lot more I think there's there's less sort of clear power

centrality to um to these big platform companies today, which is interesting in its own right. And yeah, maybe we can talk about some more of that later on, >> right? But I think also on the flip side of course like these countries have to negotiate with platforms right um which is also an interesting observation because to certain extent they managed over the last um decades to basically unbundle specific um governance services which were traditionally associated with nation states or legacy institutions under the rule of nation states like the media sphere um and the gatekeepers of newspapers of course or um also identity management which is moving on platforms and on on digital service more and more. Then you have of course

like financial economic infrastructures and so on. And over the last especially I think since um corona there was like a a move towards very much integrating a lot of these services in these vertical structures of platforms which makes them of course very powerful because they're not only monopolizing one specific market anymore but they're integrating a lot of different services into these kind of vertical stacks which gives them kind of like more comprehensive I think powers all of a sudden and yeah so so to so to a certain extent I'm also interested in exploring a bit the question can we observe kind of a move from um platforms as more kind of like market shaping entities to somewhat of

like state or empire like um you know like figures or or entities of Europe. >> Yeah, I think that's a fascinated question. we um Felix and I and Primar too perhaps we have a tendency to use the lens of of of of policy or the state to analyze how new sovereign entities behave and so I will try to do the same here. The way I look at it is that these platforms more and more um perform certain governance functions that before were in the hands of of nation states. And for example, we can see it with um rulemaking, right? Like these platforms set up usually terms of service or content policies that basically the fact

define what is permissible, what is permissible speech, what is permissible behavior. uh we have it with for example YouTube community guidelines or Apple app stores we guidelines also like these platforms perform things such as adjudication right they operate private dispute resolution systems and the problem with it is that most times this happens without transparency or recourse we have the case of meta they have these oversight board reviews we also have the case of eggs or Tik Tok where this is done more on a case by case basis but we also see for example them performing taxation if you would call it in that way. So these platforms do extract some sort of rents from the economic activity

that you conduct in them and that is basically a mandatory fee for the users uh of participation on them. We have examples on you know Apple's 30% app store commission or the Amazon seller fees and you know finally they do also do enforcement and that is something that is super interesting because whereas states usually do enforcement after you violate a rule for example what platforms do is basically design the space of agency a priority before you actually can take an action. So, um, perhaps it's not that they forbid people from taking certain actions, but that they simply delete a button that allows

you to do the the same thing. And so, this it may sound a little bit abstract, but all what I'm trying to say is that in their operations, in the services and in the goods that they provide, they do take away from the governance functions that states usually perform. And also that is amplified by the fact that states more and more rely on these platforms themselves. Um so we have you know examples uh from I think in the UK uh it is well known that they use Amazon AWS services for storing some of the data and so forth and so on. So I think that's that's the the lens through which I see that happening today.

>> Yeah. Yeah and I think what's interesting about this is it's not only like digital services which are being integrated in these eggs but of course increasingly also like physical infrastructures that we think of AI and Nick I'm very interested to hear your opinion on this but then we see these supply chains and of data centers of uh of you know places where data is being processed up to the services which are at the front of course being used uh by citizens and users around the world. Um yeah, how would how would you describe this? But you also touched a bit on the limitations of course like this is not absolute power that platforms are wielding but it is in this complex way layered of course with um with the with the with the powers and the sovereign

sovereignty of of nation states as well. >> Yeah, I guess the way I sort of see it is um so there's definitely an expansion of these platforms into traditional fields of of where the state operated. Um I think education is one of the most obvious ones particularly after um the corona virus lockdown. You know everybody suddenly moving to virtual education um and that sort of continued on afterwards as well. There's been studies which have shown that you know the the sort of uptake of cloud um infrastructure use by universities and other educational institutions it went up pretty massively as a result of the epidemic. So there's more and more dependency in that. there's more and

more dependency I think in healthcare as well although this is still I think a somewhat novel area for platforms to get into. Um and then the big one which isn't talked about nearly enough I don't think is is the the field of the military the field of national security uh an increasing reliance uh on on these platforms for the provision of you know secure environments for storing data and you know other other sorts of things. So there there is there is that sort of dependency on of the state on these platforms. Um and it's interesting because sometimes you'll actually see I I've seen military officials in the US for instance come out and explicitly say this dependency on big tech companies is a threat to our national security precisely because the entrance interests

of these two groups um don't converge. Um now America though is in a relatively unique situation. And I think a lot of what we end up talking about in terms of dependency on these platforms is in fact you know European countries and the rest of the world being dependent upon American platforms because America I think fundamentally has the capacity if it wants to to regulate these things and and sort of orient these platforms in the directions that it wants. Um I think you know partly what I think explains u uh Mark Zuckerberg's like complete personality change over the past year or so is a genuine fear that like Trump might throw him in jail. You know Trump has said he wants to throw him in jail.

So there is you know there is the capacity of the US state to change these things. other countries do have to worry about that dependency much more especially with the sort of you know the the the the way in which um a lot of this infrastructure has been increasingly overtly weaponized that capacity for weaponization has been there for a long long period of time but Europe for understandable reasons believe that it would never be operationalized you know the US would never weaponize that infrastructure against them um that's changed and I think that's completely changed the rules of the game there's much more focus now on this dependency um you know dependency of the government, dependency of financial institutions, all of these sorts of things. So yeah, that's sort of the way I see it. I think there's a there's a

complex series of interests involved here that aren't always neatly aligned, >> right? So there's this emerging landscape of different actors who are basically competing um over power and influence over network infrastructures. And now we positioned the um nation states which are either trying to regulate or build their own kind of stacks to a certain extent like we see also these examples in Russia and China where they're creating walled gardens um with somewhat independent infrastructures to have more sovereign power over these kind of systems. Um and we have of course the platforms. Um but then there's of course a third dimension here as well which is civil society. And I wonder what the role of um citizens

and communities is in shaping and uh and governing these infrastructures at the moment at least. Sophia. >> Yeah. Um I think like building on what Nick was saying, I do see that nowadays there is a there is a clear struggle between three types of actors that are trying to you know regain control of let's call it the stack or the network infrastructures and the network platforms. And so as we said before you know we have states trying to research some sort of um legal authority over digital infrastructure and platforms and they have two ways of doing that. They try to regulate it maybe by passing laws are trying to constrain how private tech companies operate and they also are

trying to u exercise direct control by developing state on you know platforms and infrastructures. So that's one side of the equation. Then we do have again steel corporations big tech that are trying to always trying to expand their infrastructural ownership and they can do it because of the vertical integration that uh I think Nick mentioned before and also network effects that work in their benefit but um the way the way they operate this infrastructure is we could say primarily extractivist so it's it's basically oriented towards creating you know data capture and dependencies so that you and continuously increase growth and control. And there's a third sector we

could call it civil society and that can be as wide as including you know cooperatives or um NOS's activist movements open source communities or you know decentralized autonomous organizations and what they're trying to do is to create contribute to a commonbased infrastructure and that means is in one way or another moving the needle towards having um infrastructure and and and platforms that are collectively owned and are selforganized. And so to your question on what can civil society do or how that plays out, I think I I will be very interested to hear what Nick thinks. But I think there are basically three

strategies that are at the hands of civil society to regain control in in in this tension. I think number one would be pushing for a greater oversight of existing infrastructures that are privately owned. And so um we see that for example now with data centers. I am Argentinian and I don't know if you saw the news but Sam Alan announced that they're moving or they want to open a data center here in Patagonia and uh we have examples in Amsterdam and and in Chile of communities coming into the or demanding to be taken into consideration um to you know have a say in how these data centers are operated and the environmental consequences and so forth.

So that's strategy one. I think the the second strategy is civil society participated in mechanisms that embed plurality and accountability into what we call like the code or the architecture. So an example will be the plurality institute with pusha Oliver and Glen Wild and Audrey Tang. uh that's an example of of people that I consider civil society trying to build mechanisms that allow us to control these infrastructures and make them uh more inclusive and participatory. And then obviously the third one is that civil society develops its own infrastructure.

Um that would be the hardest of them all but I don't think it's naive to think that that is possible because it has been done uh before. We have for example I think the name of it is wifi.net net uh in Catalonia or in Spain is a sort of a collectively owned internet. Um it's pretty huge. So it can be done and yeah I think that that's a space of the horizon of agency for for civil society and the tensions of today. >> You want to react to this Nick or >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I I would agree with all of that. I think there's all really good um points about what what civil society can do. Uh, and I think that's sort of that first one as well, the, you know, the efforts by Chilean

activists in particular, but also as you say in other places in in Holland and I think in Ireland as well, they may be pushing back. Um, and here in the UK, there's sort of an incipient movement um to push back against, you know, the imposition of data centers in a local region. uh along with all the the the the environmental costs that are incurred by it and the energy costs and the you know the water resources that are required in return for what is not much. You know data centers don't create jobs. Um they they often have massive tax breaks associated with them. So it's not like the state is getting tax back or anything like that. Um the return for you know for a local region is is very

very minimal I think. Um so I think yeah pushing back against that is a really useful step um in in one level. I think as well there's also efforts to and I'll talk about AI in particular because that's what I've been focused on so lately but develop AI in different sorts of ways and this is where the open source movement I think has a lot to add to it. Um the open source movement is you know in AI is most closely associated with two companies with Meta and with Deepseek and you know those Deepseek is not a massive company but it's not a small company either. Um Meta is obviously a massive company so there's no real alternative there to that sort of big

tech if you're just you know using Llama's open source stuff but there are alternatives. There's you know this Allen Institute. Um there's a variety of sort of more uh university based approaches around the world that are also building open source AI in different ways. I think one of the real challenges for the open source movement in in AI is so much of it is trying to trying to copy what open AI is doing effectively and trying to compete at this level that requires billions of dollars to compete, tens of billions, hundreds of billions. Um and it's just it's impossible. the open source community is never going to be able to compete at that sort of level. Where they can compete though is in sort of

charting out alternative pathways for AI development. the the transformer architecture which is at the heart of chat GPT and generative AI as we know it today is you know it's it's great for many many reasons which is why it's been adopted so widely but it's not the only way to do machine learning and before the transformer architecture there were alternative ways and even today there are alternative ways being developed about you know if we want something like artificial general intelligence that might lead to a world of plenty LLMs, the transformer architecture is probably not going to get us there. We need to be thinking about these alternatives and I think open source and universities and you know alternative

institutions that are not just these big tech companies. They can be the ones sort of charting out these different paths that are much more cost-effective and much cheaper to do. So I think there's there's there's a lot of room for for opportunity there. Um and then I think the third one is the the application of this stuff, the application of AI. And here I would just mention you the workers movement um whether it's in the form of trade unions uh you know wildcat strikes whatever the workers movement has I think a big role to play in how AI is actually applied so you know is it going to be used just to increase the surveillance of workers is it going to be used to replace their jobs without giving them anything in return all of these sorts of questions I

think are are absolutely essential and trade unions need to be thinking about it are thinking about it. Uh but it needs to be a growing priority for them about how they can shape the the application of AI, >> right? Um and I I think we want to unpack this a little bit more because um of course the umbrella for this series is this concept of network nations that Primava um I and a lot of um other people are trying to shape at the moment which is this idea of like what can civic um networks do in terms of like building uh these kind of infrastructures um and designing uh more democratically oriented applications as well. But I think before we want to zoom into that topic, I would love to um come

back to the question of like the political landscape we're operating in. So um you're both describing that to a certain extent the the struggle for democracy is kind of like moving upstream from um you know like the day-to-day politics into the level kind of of protocols into the level of the design of the infrastructures of the network and Sophia and I have been working on this idea and concept of network sovereignty which is trying to basically describe um the contours of this new emerging political landscape which is moving moving beyond the idea of territorial sovereignty which is this traditional idea around nation states that um sovereign power. So political authority is very much associated with

the control over land over a specific um population over jurisdiction with geographic boundaries um and having basically like a legal apparatus of the state to enforce laws and so on. Now we have this new landscape right which we call network sovereignty. Um which is the idea that um a lot of political activity is happening on networks which then leads to the question of how are the infrastructures designed who is ruling them what are what is legitimating this rule basically and how can we basically describe this kind of new network architecture of power. Um Sophia, maybe you want to um add to this

a little bit and help us unpack uh the concept and present the concept that we have been working on and then we can maybe look actually at how power is playing out in this new political arena. >> Yeah, sure. I think that um it's very important for us to say that we're not the the first ones at all or the only ones have talked about these concepts. There is a wealth of academic work on you know network power and network societies. So I think what Felix Bava and I try to brought to the bring to the table sorry is a it's a new lexicon to understand how sovereign network entities behave nowadays and so that means that we have to unpack some concepts the first one is obviously the

concept of network I think it's important to distinguish that when you talk about a network it can be as we said before it can be an infrastructure be it physical or digital but it can also be a socopolitical entity uh at the core any network obviously comprises a series of nodes and edges right that regulate flows of of information and value. So if we now talk about socopolitical entities that areworked some of them are not only just groups they are sovereign entities themselves and so we decided to point to some of the features that that these entities have. So obviously the first one is it has to be um a collection like a

distributed constituency of nodes that are um not in one place and uh obviously this entity needs to have the capacity to formulate and to enforce its own governance rules. But the important aspects is it needs to do it with significant degree of operational autonomy from external authorities. And one of the ways that they do so is by controlling or by to having a substantial control over the infrastructure that allows the entity to exist in the first place. And so the point being is that network soies have existed since the beginning of time. But what we see is that with the emergence of new technologies, particularly

digital ones, there is there are new network sovereignties that are very specific in in their scale and in their nature and their reach. But uh comparatively to how states work, what we propose is that there are three changes that are happening at the same time. And those changes happen at the level of people, space, and governance. So if you think about the nation state, the people is basically like a more or less stable or identifiable group of um citizens and residents that share either a legal status or the fact that they are living in the same physical territory.

But when you talk about a network sovereign and I will give examples later so it's a bit more clear. the the people is basically as we said it's this distributed membership where you belong because you voluntarily decide to participate because you adhere to the rules of the system and you know I mean we have exceptions but usually when you're a citizen of a country you cannot be a citizen of another country um however in a network sovereign you can actually completely belong to multiple networks at the same time and that's actually almost always the case then the second change is in terms of space. So the nation state operates on a particularly on a physical space. It's a delimited territory and that's actually

one of the core uh prerequisites for the entity to be sovereign that you know what your borders are and you police them. But the network sovereign doesn't have necessarily a physical territory. What it has is a topology. It's basically a collection of relationships between nodes. Um and the third the third difference is that if the nation state or the sovereign state governs through a hierarchy and a bureaucracy and the backing of the law and the monopoly of the use of force in the sovereign network the governance is imprinted in the code is imprinted in the architecture itself. So as I said before that means that the behavior starts to be regulated preemptively

um by you know designing this space of possibilities and then at the end of the day whether that is centralized or decentralized greatly depends on who controls the infrastructure right who controls the servers who determines the standards and who designs the protocols so um just to close it because I don't want to be uh take too long on this but the bomb being is we argue network servers has have existed since the beginning of times. We have for example the Assyrian mer network. We have the Sphartic Jewish diaspora. We have the Knights Templar that we have you know mapped out to have these characteristics to be you know operational relatively autonomous. But we have now these emergence of new network sovereigns and

roughly you know we have ones that are we call platform empires like big tech companies and and the actors around them. Then we also have you know efforts from nation states to extend their you know influence into the digital world. But we also have network communities for example one of them being bitcoin. And so um it is through this new lexicon that we're trying to unveil and compare how this how the roles that they play in today's world and how they compare to more historical formations. Does that um resonate with some of the ideas you've been working with also, Nick? Um what's your impression of this kind of proposal?

>> Yeah. No, it absolutely does resonate. Um I think that's changed again over the past five years really is is that resurgence of sort of active state efforts at least if not you know in fact sort of concrete actions to to control these network sovereigns as well uh to shape what they're doing. Um so I think there's there's the two elements. one is that that sort of resurgence of the state as its own political force, its own sovereign force um that's willing to you know impinge upon the sovereignty of these networks in in various ways. Look for instance at all the efforts around so-called free speech um with the Trump

administration moderating uh social media nowadays. That's a very good example. You know, content moderation is no longer just up to these social media platforms. It's increasingly, you know, Trump says he wants something, that's what happens. the EU says, you know, this is going to how we're going to moderate these things. So that there's a sort of response there. It doesn't negate network sovereignty, but I think it adds in this extra force. The other thing is that I think there is within the tech world itself and I particularly the big tech world. I think networks are primarily the preserve of platforms, not solely but primarily associated with platforms because platforms are sort of um you know networks with a giant hub in the middle

basically. Um so there there's that element but I think platforms are actually a bit in relative decline in terms of power um both in the US and in China. Uh and I think this is a sort of curious turn over the past few years. You can see it in the fact that where's the money going right now is going to data centers. You know, it's not going to building up new platforms or social media networks. It's going towards training an AI model. Uh the production of this this product which can then be, you know, rented out to people through an API.

On top of that, you can also look at China. So, China famously had its tech crackdown in uh was it 2021? um cracked down on Alibaba, on 10 cent, on a bunch of other different companies as well and really reigned them in and said like what you're doing you can no longer do. And I I I I think that this is actually sort of a mistake when we call it the tech crackdown because if you look at the companies that were affected, it was platforms. The sort of hard tech companies like Huawei, like the lithography companies in in in China, like you know, battery companies and the the car industry in China, they weren't affected by this crackdown. They're all tech companies in various ways, but they weren't sort of rolled into this crackdown. It was the

platform companies which were pulled back and the state reasserting its control over these network sovereigns if you want to put it that way. Um so I think again that there is this this sort of yeah multiple again multiple sort of competing um centers of power which um I think the network sovereignty idea really gets at what happened over like the 2010s in particular. Um but I wonder if there's not other sovereigns sort of reasserting themselves today. I don't know what you think.

>> Yes, absolutely. And I think the interesting thing is that this is like not a not a a map of like mutually exclusive entities but they are in an interesting way layered right. So we see how the sovereign uh influence or the the political influence of networks and of big tech of course is kind of like stacked with the with the power of nation states and there is some points where these are actually complimentary and mutually reinforcing and other points where there's contention but we're moving a little bit away and I think that it sounds like this is kind of a common observation from this world where power used to be at least largely be monopolized. or or um at least centralized in the nation state system

um globally and now we're moving into a landscape where we have different entities which have kind of qua at least sovereign functions in society and which are as I said like layered and and kind of like almost like in this multipolar in a certain way. Um so it it's somewhat resembling we're going back to something where we had also in more medieval times right where we had the church and like the state and you know local sovereigns and so on like all imshed in this kind of structure where you had like difficult different political authorities basically who um you know like were competing um um over and collaborating over constructing you know um power relations in society. So I

think like one take another take away from this is so that also the design of networks is highly political of course and there the stakes are getting higher and higher to um have influence over the design of these networks and I think something what we want to discuss maybe now is what civil society can do in terms of building their own networks. Uh and so we described a little bit already like what are the options that civil society has and of course some of them pertain to um paths of resistance, others to you know like using the tools of the nation state in terms of regulation of of of existing platforms.

But a third path which is the most difficult one as Sophia also said um but also potentially a promising one is um developing their own stacks at least in specific domains. There's like a huge challenge of course because the cost and the resources needed for instance to emulate like the stacks needed for AI so large that it's um to a certain extent seems unrealistic for civil society to build something which could compete on that level. But I wonder what the spaces are. Uh and I think the web free community for what it's worth at least um has attempted to build uh in specific domains infrastructures which can create options for citizens at least um to fall

back to um and to you know maybe evade you know the rule of specific platforms or also the partially nation states when needed. to a large extent of course or to some extent in the web3 community these ideas are very much ruled by um libertarian ideals some sometimes even right-wing ideals and the question would be in a way like what is the opportunity to use some of these methodologies and some of these kind of like tools which um these communities but also the open source community for instance have developed over the past decades um and how can we use this to build political leverage and agency for civil society.

Uh Sophia, you work a lot on um web 3 with web free communities also. So maybe you have some ideas uh that can help us unpack it a little. >> Yes, I I was I was listening to you carefully and um and thinking about an answer and how to go about it. I think I I'm actually very curious on Nick's opinion on this and I think that maybe my area of expertise is that diagnosing problems more than uh proposing solutions. So um I'm more of a critic than than anything else. But I do think there's something important to talk about before we go down that road and about web 3 is that I I I've been part of the if you if you want the web3

ecosystem since 2016 and 17 and what I see in there is there's a wider rate of political affiliations as you say like you have you know uh the cyber punk movement you have a solar punk movement a lunar punk movement a VCU movement you know all coming together bitcoin maximalists all coming together with different assumptions and that also translates into the political realities that uh that communities propose. Um we can see it if we want to take a a minute to talk about it like we can see it for example with what happened with the network state from Balagi and with experiments that derive from it. And so personally when I read the network state

I I basically agreed with the diagnosis that they had made about you know the the state becoming as sovereign you know becoming like territorially rigid and bureaucratically slow in like a new world where you have digital technologies mediated most of life but then I was very quite disappointed at the the political proposal that they put together um for two reasons. So one of them being um it it was a little bit repetitive of what we already had and it was a little bit problematic. So basically you know for those that haven't read the book um borrows from the market and borrows from the state to propose this new

society. So basically the network state is a bit of a venture property. It's like privately funded. Um it's like a startup society that's built through capital accumulation and token is insurance selective membership but it also seeks to be um state itself. So it wants to candon physical territory and gain diplomatic recognition from existing nation states. And the second part that I think is a bit problematic is that for Bajagi there is a huge emphasis on exit. And that goes with what Fedix was talking about this huge libertarian influence in the web3 ecosystem. So uh the main political course of action is the capacity to leave any existing political system and

be and build sorry new ones from scratch. But then he says very little about how governance takes place once that exit is achieved. Um although we can sort of gather from from the figure of the CEO leader that he talks about that he's in favor of introducing hierarchy and centralization. And so with all this very long um narrative what I'm trying to say is web free does provide opportunities for building this intermediated infrastructure. Um but what that infrastructure takes us to is undecided. It obviously has to be uh influenced by specific political lens and uh I do hope that we're going into a

more you know solar punk and common direction but I don't have the solution to it. So um I give it to Nick. >> I'm going to disappoint because I don't have the solution either. >> Um I mean I will say on on the notion of exit I always I always thought that you know the real issue is not exit but entrance. you know, that's the the major political issue in so many countries at the moment. So, yeah, exit's fine and everything, but who's actually, >> you know, I would love if entrance wasn't an issue, but it it is in so many places, so that needs to be considered, too. Um, on web 3, I I always found it probably more than most of my sort of Marxist colleagues. I I found it more

interesting and more pollatable than than most. Partly because I think there's there was there's sort of a few different elements as you were saying, different communities involved in in web 3. And the one that got all the attention of course was the the financial hypsters, the the scamsters, the you know, the people just looking to make a quick buck off of it. Um for, you know, in some cases because they were the ones running the scams and in other cases because they were simply, you know, this was like buying a lottery ticket for them. you know, hop on the latest token and hope that it skyrockets and um and whatnot. Um but that's sort of what got all the attention. But behind the scenes, if you really delved into the communities, of course, you saw there are lots of people with really decent political goals of

decentralization, of moving away from big tech, of trying to build an alternative infrastructure. And I thought there was always something there that was, you know, worth holding on to um from a Marxist perspective and and and you know, trying to say, well, Bitcoin's not the answer, but like there's something to um web 3 into blockchain uh in general. I don't know what's come of that because I haven't followed the scene all that much over the past couple of years. um you know collapse of NFTTS and things like that has meant that um yeah it seems like a lot of it has sort of disappeared but I'm sure that there are people doing fantastic work at the moment and I hope that something comes out of it you know in the coming decade that like provides an alternative to the

infrastructure as we has it as we have it now I will say though there's one um one warning element for the for the web 3 sort of scene that I always thought was important is that if you look at web 2.0 web 2.0 do was seen as this massive decentralization away from these these portals that you got to the internet through. It was seen as like decentralizing power to to users and giving them all sorts of new um sway. You know, this is Yok Bankler talking about peer production and the commons and all of this sort of stuff at that time. Um and then it all disappeared. It got wrapped up into platforms. And I think that that that tendency towards centralization is always there. And it it's not just a matter of like building

a decentralized infrastructure and then hoping that people come to it. Decentralized infrastructures have to offer proper real convenient alternatives to a centralized world. Uh and I think the sort of convenience of a lot of centralized platforms is what drew people away from like you know the technical difficulties of getting involved in in in a decentralized world. So there's there's that sort of element and I think you saw it as well in like you know the the crypto scene um certain exchanges becoming central you know despite the fact that fundamentally these things are all decentralized everybody would turn to these quite centralized exchanges to do their their transactions and and keep their wallets and things. Um so there was already that

centralization pressure there. Um, in terms of proper alternatives, I I I mean, one thing I always find quite interesting is is some sort of cooperative platform. Um, I think there's a lot of value and potential in cooperative platforms in part because they're the technical hurdles are not immense and the financial hurdles are not all that immense either. You know, you can build an alternative to Uber. It has been done relatively cheaply, relatively easily. Um and then you can have it run in in a way which is you know owned by um say a municipal government or something like that and thinking about values beyond

just profit. So things like congestion and traffic pollution all sorts of other different things you might want to consider. So yeah there's there's I think there's a lot of value in cooperative platforms. Um, but they do need I think they need both protection by the state from big tech because so many of these cooperatives that sort of flourished for a little while were demolished by Uber, you know, undercut by them. Um, and they couldn't they simply couldn't survive. Uh, they also need not just that protection from the state but also the support from the state for investment and scaling and development and all these sorts of things. So I think it is possible but I I haven't seen the political will from the state side of things to actually

support a proper alternative here. >> Right. Yeah. I think and then that's interesting because that leads us kind of to the question of what what's the adequate politics uh that we should push for that there are a lot of nent I think experiments which would be worth you know um at least trying to scale platform cooperivism is one of them of course but there's also interesting initiatives in open source communities. there's some experimentation of how commoning can be supported by digital tools etc. But often it's a lack of u resources and then scaling pathways um which require also then political support I guess on the nation state level as you say in order to create regulatory frameworks for them in order to create you know like um access and

entry to to larger um markets and also like offer basically accessibility or like create basically um help them grow so they can actually become infrastructure to society at large. uh you wrote in um I think 2016 um quite an influential book at least it influenced my journey to a certain extent which was called reinventing the future which tried to sketch out this pathway um of um of a progressive politics which is embracing actually technology and the design specifically and building of technology rather than just critiquing it. I think to this day um it's a bit of a malaz at least in progressive communities that a lot of energy is

leveled or like channeled towards critique but there's not a lot of like initiatives which focus on building alternatives and then trying to think around these questions of how to resource them and so on. Uh at the same time I think what's interesting as well is that we can observe um across the political spectrum um from Ezra Klein's abundance to you know Alexander KPS the technological republic there's like a um growing recently a growing interest in how to use the state in order to build public interest tech and then it's to be defined what is the public interest right different political can of different opinions here but I'm just I'm just wondering like how you look at this like because these are in a way like

also you know um accelerationists kind of politics um what is the state of affair here and how can we how do we have to think about you know building a movement around these questions >> yeah yeah um so I will say there's like there's a sort of accelerationist movement within the AI world at the moment um but it's the most sort of brutally reductive idea of accelerationism which is just like make things go faster um accelerate the de development of technology ology what for? Who really knows? Um there's not really any clear sense of it. Um when Alex Williams and I wrote inventing the future and accelerationist manifesto that the idea was drawing upon D to do

work that capitalism as a social system um was as every other previous social system has been you know the sort of liberation of potential forces from that underpinned humanity as we know it. But then it was a reconstraining of them. So like it liberated us from the feudal era. But then it reconstrained things in terms of you know the pursuit of profit competition at a systemic level uh and and wage labor most fundamentally you know that the demand that you have to go out and work this many hours at the behest of somebody else in order to receive an income to survive. It's a it's a fundamental constriction on our freedoms. So for Alex and I the the the project of accelerationism was always

about unbinding these elements of capitalism and trying to find a sort of order beyond capitalism. Um and our focus was on wage labor. So trying to reduce the amount of wage labor that's required for humans for humanity to do through the use of automation through you know social movements around a shorter working week and all sorts of things. So the the drive for you know technological development for us was never just this sort of like faster at all cost sort of mentality. It was the push for technological development fundamentally in order to support the liberation of humanity from work and any other sort of technology was not in line with that. And today I mean we see sort of I think lip service to that from like

the AI labs and things like that. Sam Alman will talk about it and Dario Amadeay will talk about it and I've seen Jamie Diamond, the CEO of uh JP Morgan talk about, you know, in the future we'll have a three-day working week or 4 day working week. Um they pay lip service to all these things, but there there's never really any actual action towards it sort of thing. So I I I think that there is a lot of bottomup let's say appetite for this sort of political project. Um you could look at like the lying flat movement in China. You could look at the sort of um quiet quitting movement after corona virus. You can look generally at Gen Z's approach to work today and sort of ways in which you

know both Gen Z and even the millennial culture sort of reject work as an identity. Um work is something which is necessary you have to do but it's not fundamental to your life. It's not who you are. So I think that there is a lot of bottom-up appetite for more and more free time, more and more freedom. Um but for me the real challenge is always you know issues of power. Who has power? What are the hurdles to getting power? Um and how do we you know both both strategically pick our way through but also then think about t what tactics we need to successfully achieve these sort of political goals. And I think it's somewhat disperate at the moment in terms of the organization of this movement. It's it's more

uh more spontaneous than organized I'd say. >> Right. Yeah. And it comes back also to a question of where where people are organizing even right because a lot of these uh like they depend again on platforms to a certain extent and then the question becomes like to what extent can you you know um organize resistance while engaging with the very platforms we're trying to resist which is kind of um a complex topic to navigate. Um we're coming to an end with this episode. Um just maybe looking ahead to the future. Um what are projects that currently excite you in terms of like building alternative network infrastructures? Um maybe you can share one or two with um our listeners before we're closing the

episodes. So yeah, >> me okay uh can I share can I share the name of researchers? I think that that's more okay. So I will take the opportunity to give some shoutouts. Um I would recommend everyone to follow the work of Thai American Martian man on data centers and um maybe cooperative approaches to ownership of data centers that should be coming up soon. Obviously also Nathan Schneider and everything he has produced with exit to community is very valuable for this question as well.

Um I'm currently at Edge City Patagonia in Argentina. I do think that uh this uh community brings together a lot of like-minded people who want to see and produce a better future. So recommend anyone who who wants to visit to do so. Um and I think that's it on my side. >> Over to you, Nick. >> Yeah, it's um it's it's difficult. Um I I will say so researchers I find um interesting in this area at the moment.

I think Karen H's book Empire of AI is a really great introduction to the AI world right now and at the end it offers a number of I think really good suggestions for where we might take things. Um it's not fully substantiated or anything but I think it's a really good basis. I think of Morzovv has done some really interesting work on what like an alternative vision of AI might look like and the Boston Review Cecilia Reichap Argentinian um has also done some excellent work on digital sovereignty and what this might mean around the global south and things like that too. Um, and then I think in terms of questions, I think there's a couple of interesting ones. You know, the data center one as as Sophia mentioned is is a really interesting one, but also open source. So, how does open source AI sort

of function um in a world where it's dominated by companies like Meta? Uh, and then another one which I think is somewhat underrecognized amongst the critical space but is sort of being pushed a lot by the AI industry is AI agents. Um I think there's a lot of potential progressive and liberating potential within AI agents um to do economic work but also for political purposes as well um in terms of sort of delegating and distributing um democratic initiatives and things like that. Um, so I think there's a lot of research that could be done around AI agents to really push them in interesting, politically useful and liberating directions rather than just like here's

an AI agent that makes people money. Cool. Thanks for the leads. I think these are all very interesting questions. Some of them we will touch in future episodes. Sophia Nick, thanks for coming on the show today and sharing uh with us. It was super exciting and interesting for me at least. Um, I hope for all listeners too. And yeah, uh we will um tune in for the next episode focused on commoning. Stay tuned.