Balaji Srinivasan

Tech entrepreneur, investor, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country (2022). Former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. His book introduced the concept of the “network state” to a wide audience — a highly aligned online community that crowdfunds territory and eventually seeks diplomatic recognition from existing states.

The Network Nations project emerged in significant part as a critical response to Srinivasan’s vision. While acknowledging shared observations about the emergence of networked communities with nation-like characteristics, De Filippi and Beer argue that the network state model reproduces corporate and libertarian logics — top-down, founder-led, territorially-seeking, and treating sovereignty as a commercial product for those who can afford it. Network Nations, by contrast, propose commons-based, bottom-up, non-territorial functional sovereignty.

The term “Coordi-nation” — an early formulation of Network Nations — emerged directly from the reaction to Balaji’s book at Zuzalu in Montenegro.

Referenced in: Ep 1, Ep 2, Network Nations essay