Ep 1: Building Trust at Scale — A Primer
Guests: Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer Series: Network Nations on GreenPill Podcast Listen: Spotify
Launching the Network Nations series — defining what Network Nations are, how they differ from Network States, and how translocal communities leverage technology and bottom-up governance to organize beyond borders.
Transcript
[00:00] So what is really at the core of 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 and what we prescriptively would like to happen. The question is like, where do they even meet and connect?
[00:24] And a lot of the stuff is obviously happening right now on social media platforms. Let’s take X, 1 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 platform moderators and owners, aka Elon Musk, are skewing the algorithm, right? Who is getting shadow banned and who is not?
[00:49] Like what is being shown in your feed and what is not? All these questions really are very decisive in the end of the day when it comes to organizing on a global scale, right? Hello everyone and welcome to the new season of the Greenpeel podcast, which is focusing on network nations. Network nations are those new network community that we are both observing and trying to
[01:19] theorize, which is essentially looking at how the network technology has enabled the emergence of new groups, new social groups that share a particular culture, that have like 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
[01:50] action in order to have a particular impact in society. And so what we are focusing within this whole new episode is both describing the emergence of this network, but also trying to prescribe the specific recipes that could facilitate the evolution of this network into what we design as network nation. So I’m Primavera De Filippi, I’m a researcher at Harvard and at the CNRS.
[02:18] And then our co-host is Felix Bir. As a Meteor, super stoked to be here. Also researcher at Harvard and a researcher at Blockchain.gov. This episode, this season is also part of a larger research project, which is called Blockchain.gov, which is a European-funded project which is specifically focused on distributed governance at the local, institutional, and global level. And this track on network nation is basically informed by, On the 1 hand, this
[02:46] observation that network technology are facilitating the emergence of those new network structure and social groups that have some characterization that could be compared to existing nations, but at the same time, observing that this observation has also been tapped into by other actors, 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 focus on
[03:21] 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 mutualization and so forth in order to actually provide an alternative version of how can those network communities actually organize themselves on the global level. So in this podcast, we’ll be very much about this question.
[03:51] So how can we create this new institutional wrapper, 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 some of the questions that we will be diving into in the coming episodes are, how can we reimagine communities in general in a network age?
[04:16] 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?
[04:40] And this podcast basically will be structured in 2 different formats, which are alternating. 1 of them, we call the Deep Dive, is like a format that invites Ford leaders and thinkers like Audrey Tang, Michelle Bounds or Sarah Horowitz to join us and discuss specific concepts that we want to integrate into the theory of network nations like commoning, like mutualism, like sovereignty. And then on the other side, we have the community
[05:09] spotlight format, which is an invitation to existing communities who we believe have certain features and characteristics that are very adjacent or similar to what we are trying to describe with our network nation theory. So here we will invite some people from CDAO, Burning Man, PopUp City Leaders, and also the region network itself. The first episode we are bringing to you today is basically the introduction to our
[05:38] thinking about network nations. Our thinking is still nascent and emergent. So these are all ideas which are work in progress. We hope to also develop our thinking for this podcast and want to also invite all of you as listeners to join us and refine these ideas. In the end of the episode, we will give away some information on how you
[05:59] can actually join us in collaborating around these kinds of ideas. 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, which is like a very well-known concept, of course, which has certain similar features, but is in many ways actually quite different to
[06:21] what we are trying to build. And lastly, we want to also outline what kind of movement we are currently trying to work on and develop because with the help of some collaborators, we’re currently building a community platform, which will also offer a lot of you guys the opportunity to get involved with our thinking. So to get us basically started with this episode, I would like to invite you
[06:45] basically, Primavera, to share a bit about the origin story of Network Nations. It is a concept which has been floating around in different forms over the last 3 years or 4 years. So there was some tinkering and thinking behind the scenes. 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 how this thinking evolved
[07:09] in the first place. Yeah, basically the idea came in a very organic and decentralized manner. But basically, we had been unknowingly preparing the ground for those ideas because as a little group of researchers and beyond and practitioners, we have been already exploring intentional communities and like collective living and also like networking amongst those different intentional communities. We started already theorizing the governance within the groups and amongst the groups and like
[07:46] all the rhizomatic 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 exist outside of existing institution and kind of like interweave amongst different social groups. We had so 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
[08:15] about how those things actually scale up and how Web3 technology or decentralized technology more generally facilitate those new forms 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, a high expectation from this book and perhaps a little bit of broken expectation when we actually had the
[08:41] 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 resonant with the way in which we had been envisioning those ideas. And so this kind of like launched this whole movement, I guess. At the time, we didn’t call it Network Nation yet, but we were already working
[09:04] on like trying to find a name for it. And like the first name that was somehow instantiated was the name Coordination. And as Zuzaloo started, we got invited by the organizer of Zuzaloo to actually talk about this alternative to the network state, which is the coordination. And so we had a fast gathering where we invited like 15 people and then we somehow aggregated together with the people that were local already to
[09:32] Zuzaloo in order to try and theorize. And the theory, of course, 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 together with Edge City. We have done also a lot of academic conferences at the UI, at the University
[10:00] of Paris. And then recently we also had this gathering at Emerge Lakefront, where we also tried to bring about many practitioners with the idea that it’s not enough to just conceptualize those ideas, but we also need to be practical and we also need to somehow try to create a movement which is embedding thinkers and scholars that are kind of conceptualizing the theory, but also practitioners that can experiment and implement this theory
[10:31] 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 nation. Right. Yeah. So I mean, I came, I think I joined this kind of initiative maybe 1 or 2 years after you guys started thinking about it. But it’s interesting that although I didn’t have touching points with
[10:57] you guys before, I knew a lot of other communities who had similar ideas around how to organize, you know, collective action for networks, 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 which kind of like converges around similar ideas. And I think like part of this entire initiative we’re
[11:21] 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 create networked governance for civil society together. But yeah, having said that, I think it’s maybe the right moment to talk about the concept itself, network nations. So what is this idea actually and how would you define it, Piyu? Yeah, so we came up with a preliminary definition,
[11:48] which is quite dense and can be unpacked. The definition is essentially, first and foremost, the characterization of what constitutes the nation part of a networked 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 basically referring to the fact that it is about distributed communities which are geographically located at many different
[12:26] places, but somehow interconnected, right? And so as opposed to like globalization, where you just have like something that 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. And so those, those translocal community are somehow recognizing themselves as having commonalities.
[13:02] And those commonalities are a commonality of culture, a commonality potentially of values, of some kind of affinity, because of those interactions with 1 another, or also because they just somehow managed to build a similar culture and therefore they want to interconnect. And it is this particular sense of common culture that leads to the emergence of this new collective identity that people recognize themselves as being part of.
[13:36] 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 have a future in common. 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
[14:05] a group of people that are enjoying similar interests 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 emerged out of that. And so when we’re talking about the network nation, the most important thing is this concept of translocality. And when we talk about translocality, we’re also talking
[14:30] about network of networks, right, Or networks of communities. So it’s not just individual that are recognizing each other as being part of the 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 for a network nation to emerge. Right.
[15:00] And I think so, so these kind of nations 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 bioregional movement, you have a lot of place-based communities around the world, right? Translocals, so you have some maybe in Europe, others in America, yet others are in Asia, and they all share a similar culture, right?
[15:24] They’re all trying to aspire for 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 and institutional format, you could say, to really coordinate on a global scale. So I think the question we are trying to pose with network nation is how can we interweave these existing value-aligned communities into a
[15:55] networked 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 network nations, we kind of draw a kind of, we, or we kind of like focus on 2 different levels of purpose, which they are striving towards. So there is in a way like an internal dimension
[16:18] of these network nations, which is really focused on a lot of the stuff P just outlined, right? Like creating a sense of shared culture, creating kind of a community of kinship 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.
[16:44] 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 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
[17:06] of bioregionalism, this would be kind of like a global network of bioregions, which has coordination, governance, 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 than any of these single units could by themselves. And 1 important element on those internal and external purposes is that, of course, both
[17:34] of them are needed, but also to distinguish between a standard online community. So if we take like bio-regionalism versus, for instance, a distributed global community of environmental activists. It’s very different, where you have something where the external purpose comes 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
[18:07] community of people to pursue a particular collective action, which is more of a traditional political actor of like a community getting together to act, 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
[18:41] 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 the second case that we can talk of a network nation as opposed to just a standard activist community of the like, even though of course there is no such thing as a network nation that just has 1, that just has an internal purpose without collective action, or
[19:06] that just have collective action without an internal purpose. But in terms of prioritization, the goal, the external goal, is usually the means to the end of actually the desire of a community to foster itself and therefore 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 what a network
[19:36] 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, if we think about social networks 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
[19:58] these ties between the nodes and the network. It’s really about scale. But then communities on the other end, the ones we know usually, they’re very good in actually creating reciprocity, trust, and so on, on a small scale, right? Like if we think about intentional communities, for instance, they are great in, you know, integrating members into like a shared kind of culture, into a shared kind of set
[20:19] of principles, but they often have difficulties to scale this on a larger level. So what the Network Nation kind of proposes is to build a bridge between these 2 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 this entire exploration, I guess, or this entire concept is the question of how can
[20:46] we create relationships which are strong at scale basically. And I think our hypothesis is that actually scaling trust-rich relationships enables us collectively to have more impact in the world. Because not only often about the quantity of 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
[21:16] 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 I guess what networked nations are really trying to do is creating these relationships, these trustful relationships at a scale where they can actually make an impact on a global level. 1 of the important components of all of this thinking and movement
[21:43] 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 1 hand we’re observing things emerging and we’re trying to understand what’s happening, which is like observing how does network community are coming into being and organizing themselves. But also, because everything is a proto-network nation so far, we also want
[22:09] to kind of create a vision, a destination, which is the full network nation construction. And then we have this kind of prescriptive recipes of like, well, if you want to move from where you stand into a natural 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.
[22:38] 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 2 communities that are quite close to this work and also are interested themselves into walking down the path into becoming more of a network nation. The first 1 is Burning Man. So Burning Man is a very interesting example, case study, because they did very good.
[23:07] They excelled at 1 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
[23:36] and also a desire of mutualization and so forth. So 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 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 an exemplification
[24:09] that this culture is so strong is the fact that people actually name themselves as an identity to be a Barna. Like people that actually feel that they really belong to this community, they actually start assigning themselves the collective identity of a burner. And over time, because now it’s been many, many years that this community is building, there is more tangible desire of actually moving further towards this virtualization, towards this collective
[24:39] 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 degree of collective governance that can happen at the level of the network itself, rather than just focusing on those individual nodes. Right. Another example to further illustrate this is 1 which is very familiar I guess to most of the listeners of the Greenpearl podcast.
[25:06] It’s the region movement itself. I think it’s like an excellent example actually to illustrate some of these dimensions because regions have a very strong shared identity. They want to bring about a similar to the bioregional movement ecological change in the world. And they want to do this through means and ends of the web-free technological space, I would say. So on the 1 hand side, they have a very strong
[25:31] external purpose to come back to the terminology we introduced before 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 kind of modes of being together in these kind of communities, which creates a very strong kind of sense of shared identity.
[25:58] And I think it’s very visible. I think the Green Pill Podcast is actually an excellent example in itself of this, because a community around these ideas and aspirations to bring about change is creating this space where they’re inviting their peers to speak. And you can really sense, when you listen to Greenpill Podcast series, that there’s a shared vernacular emerging from these common projects. So in this way, the region movement brings
[26:25] together these 2 dimensions of internal and external purpose in an interesting way. And interestingly, actually, I think region DAO is calling itself now a coordination, which was the preceding formulation or conception of the network nation, because they realized themselves actually that this is what they wanna build. They wanna build like a strong network of all these different kind of regenerative web-free communities around the world, some working maybe in Asia,
[26:52] as I said before, some others in Europe, others in America, in a structure where they can coordinate their actions. And I think what’s interesting, all of a sudden, when you have all these resources bundled up in this kind of like networked institution of like the region DAO, 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
[27:16] push for more systemic change because maybe some communities want to focus actually on financial aspects of regeneration. Other ones want to build coordination and dial 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 move the needle on the question of
[27:45] the economic transition towards more planetary well-being. And I think those 2 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 kingship and solidarity and the common cultural identity. But maybe it’s not so advanced on the tooling and on the actual mutualization or
[28:14] collectivization, commoning, etc. Whereas like the region started from the collective coordination and commoning and collectively dealing with resources and is slowly evolving into this more identity and nationhood that also emerged 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. And I think this is something we see again and again, especially in the web-free
[28:41] space, right? Where we have very sophisticated tooling. There’s a lot of Daos, there’s a lot of, you know, like, technological innovations on how to coordinate in better ways, but often they really lack the substance of a shared, strong identity and culture to really turn them into a political entity. So I feel there is a lot the web free community. And I think actually the regions are already a prime example of like
[29:03] expanding that vision, but like a lot of these web-free initiatives can really I think also draw and learn from other more culturally oriented or socially oriented movements and vice versa. Which brings us to the important question of like, why are we talking about nations as opposed to just communities? Which is an interesting and contestous question, because of course, the concept of nation is quite loaded with a lot of connotations.
[29:36] Some of those connotations are extremely positive and some of them are more negative. 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. And so in some way, like what we’re trying to do, and this is of course an open debate, is to find this world and kind of like extract it
[30:03] from the connotation of the nation-state. Because oftentimes when we talk about nation, we actually mean nation-state and therefore more of the state than the nation. Whereas the nation, if we manage to disentangle it from the state, has actually a very different connotation and meaning. And essentially, this also relates to, of course, the contrast, compare and contrast with the network state, which is what we’re actually focusing on is
[30:33] 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 a sudden, even if you meet someone that is, that also recognize as part of the same collective identity and never had any interaction with, neither directly nor indirectly, all of a sudden you
[31:07] do have this sense of kinship because you recognize the same culture, the same system into this other person. And all of a sudden you know that you’re part of the same thing, right? And so 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.
[31:34] 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 communities 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
[32:01] institution of the state into those new forms of nation that are actually very different because they are not territorially bound, as opposed to exploring a completely different or a slightly modified institutional scaffolding which perhaps is more accommodating to the networked structure of those nations, which are not emergent from this kind of geographical proximity, but rather emerge because of digital proximity, because of network proximity, and it’s because there is all those repeated
[32:37] interaction 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 communications, because of those new technologies, it becomes actually possible. We interact probably more often with people from digital means than from physical means. And so those new cultures are emerging, new types of nation, if we
[33:08] like, or at least proto-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 communities. Right. And I think this is also 1 of the key distinctions which are important
[33:32] 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 do you want to
[33:54] create for these 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, which is also basically reflected in their theory. So just maybe to draw the bridge here for those who are not familiar with this entire discourse, the network state was popularized as I think we also spoke about
[34:22] initially in the beginning of the episode by Balaji Srinivasan with his book, The Network State. And the idea here really is to create a network community in a way, which is seeded by an entrepreneur, it’s like a startup society, but which seeks, and this is really important, like territorial enclaves, basically. So they wanna buy land in specific locations around the world in like a networked way. So some land in America, some
[34:50] 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 terms of the nation state, right? Because the nation state is a territorially bound unit enclosing people in a specific geography on the planet and regulating and governing it through
[35:17] centralized institutions, which are also part of that territory, right? And in a certain way, the network state as proposed by Balaji also tries to mimic this, right? So it is territorially bounded. It tries to govern in specific spaces. And I feel this is very different to our conception of how we are thinking about a network nations, right? Because, and maybe you want to take the ball here,
[35:44] the way we are thinking about this is very non-territorial. Yeah, so basically, like I would say, like 1 of the most important components of the network nation is, of course, that when you get this type of nation, this feeling of a nation, there is obviously a desire of sovereignty, there is an aspiration for sovereignty. The distinction though is that the sovereignty can be in different manners, right?
[36:11] And so when we think about the nation state and the state in particular, 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 that is linked to the territory, but it’s more like
[36:37] the sovereignty of actually managing your own affairs. Right. And of course, in the context of a network nation, 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 way in which you’re mutualizing collective resources and potentially also engaging in collective action. In some way, like, we are actually talking about these particular domains, which if
[37:08] we somehow, like, if we stop taking this absolute approach to sovereignty, where sovereignty needs to cover everything, 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 sovereignty of the state. And this is, for instance, if a community decided to
[37:34] create its own identity system, or to create actually its own currency, or to create a particular system of like, notarization or voting or decision making. So all those things that can obviously be done on an additional layer of sovereignty. And so when we talk about functional sovereignty, and we will go much more in depth over specific episodes to dig into this, But we’re basically disentangling the sovereignty of
[38:05] the state, which is the territorial sovereignty, from what can actually be achieved by a community, by a networked translocal community, and what are the values, means by which this functional sovereignty can be achieved in order to actually enable them to manage their own affair, 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
[38:34] which they reside, but they also can engage into particular communities which have their own functional sovereignty into a very specific domain, which is no longer subject to intervention by the territorial sovereign of the state. Yeah, so maybe just make this a little bit more concrete. There is, for instance, 1 of our collaborators, CEDAW as well, which is like an emerging network nation, we will claim as well, in and around China.
[39:05] So it’s 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 stipends to people based on needs and so on, which is still not challenging per
[39:29] se, like the Chinese state, but it’s existing alongside it for communities who don’t feel that they are culturally represented by China and other countries around the world. So they’re creating basically an additional layer on top of an existing nation state, which allows all of a sudden communities which don’t feel really represented by the international order to realize their kind of vision of how to live together alongside it.
[39:57] So I think to come back maybe also to the comparison with the network state, I think like interesting and if we 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 way to talk about sovereignty, which is a very focused on the individual, right? I think like the major kind of book everyone is referring to in that
[40:20] 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, to realize their vision of how they want to live in the world. So the network side is really trying to sell often sovereignty more as a product or as a service to people who can afford it.
[40:45] 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 they’re 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
[41:05] restrained to those people who can afford it. And sovereignty in this way is like sold almost as a commercial good to people, as I said, who can afford it. And obviously, like, the risk here is that we are privatizing political agency in a specific way. 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
[41:32] good, but it’s actually a collective good. It’s something which is generated by a community for a community, which basically means that sovereignty is not granted because we are creating a gated community and then we try to create like a regulatory zone, which is probably exclusive to many people, but it’s really more about like strengthening the relationships within a community so they can collectively become more powerful. And in this way, they can
[42:02] actually, as a community 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, Primavera, 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
[42:25] there is like a lot of way in which we can draw a distinction between the way in which we conceptualize the network nation and the way in which we conceptualize or Balaji conceptualized the network state. I think 1 is, of course, this kind of like corporate approach versus commoning. 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
[42:56] in actually addressing many of those global challenges. The market is focusing on profit maximization, which obviously leads to particular collateral effect. The state is focusing on its own territory, 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 way, which is the commons, which is using like using the intention
[43:30] 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 profit maximization approach. 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?
[44:00] And 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 in order to declare sovereignty, which obviously creates 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 sovereignty. So you can coexist alongside the sovereignty of the state and create
[44:36] your own sovereign layer, which doesn’t require you to exit, but rather to find ways to interweave and perhaps complement something that the state is not providing or add additional potential solution that can be chosen from. But there is not this exit-based approach to the system. Yeah, I think that 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
[45:06] 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. It’s a top down approach. It mimics a lot in a worrying sense, I think, what also Curtis Yabin is talking about, right, the CEO dictatorship, what is being much talked about now in regards also of the Trump administration and like politics, like the
[45:31] right-wing politics, I guess, in general, where they’re headed. 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 Network Nations try to do, and we spoke about it a lot already, but maybe to summarize, it’s like from a bottom-up perspective, we want to take existing
[45:54] communities. So it’s not about founding a new start-up society. It’s about realizing that there is a web of value-aligned existing communities around the world, for instance, the bioregions, who are in need of stronger vertical integration and horizontal collaboration. So the network nation is not trying to fund and see something new, but it’s trying to integrate what is here and tries to give it a more coherent framework
[46:23] to coordinate itself. So it’s really about like interweaving communities from the bottom up. And then I guess the place in which the 2 are actually quite aligned is actually Web3 and blockchains, which is, I guess, the common factor between network nation and network states. And the reason that we think it’s very important is because of this concept of sovereignty, which is if we want to create additional layer of sovereignty, if
[46:55] we want to like, you know, vertically build new sovereign structures, there is a need of creating government structures or creating like the administration of this network nation that is not enclosed or that is not subject to a particular territorial sovereign. So 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 a particular
[47:33] country, then the sovereign has the power to intervene, to interfere, potentially even to shut down, because the operator of that server is bound by the regulation of the country. And so where Web3 technology, and of course, it’s not just blockchain, it’s an old type of peer-to-peer and decentralized technology, becomes extremely relevant is because they actually operate in this translocal manner as well, where they are not dependent or they are not subject
[48:04] to the sovereignty of any single actor. And therefore, they enable those additional layers of sovereignty for specific like issuance of currency, for identification, 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, we just mean something that is not subject to any 1 single sovereign.
[48:32] There is 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 Web3 is actually a mean to the end of aspiring for sovereignty in a context in which we cannot rely on territorial sovereignty. Absolutely. And it’s not only territorial sovereignty, but also where we cannot rely
[48:59] on big tech, right? Because like a lot of communities 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. That’s why I jumped just on in before. And these social media platforms are, of course, far from value neutral, right? Let’s take X, 1 of the most dominant ones,
[49:20] 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 platform moderators and owners, aka Elon Musk, are skewing the algorithm, right? Who is getting shadowbanned and who is not? Like what is being shown in your feed and what is not? All these questions really are very decisive in the end
[49:44] of the day when it comes to organizing on a global scale, right? So a lot of these existing social media platforms are value biased 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 that it’s not only about creating independence from nation states, which might
[50:07] be in specific locations, very important, but it’s also creating independence of the existing big tech infrastructure and allowing more value aligned, the creation of more value aligned governance framework, communication frameworks, where people actually can coordinate 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, what is our political goal when we are trying to theorize and potentially
[50:45] 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, because of course it’s just a, it’s a vessel that can be used for many political reasons. However, the vessel itself has its own metapolitical agenda. And 1 of those is, of course, empowering civil society.
[51:13] Because today, when we look at the way in which negotiation, discussion, like the global governance agenda is mostly managed by nation states or multinational corporations doing their necessary lobbying. And there is actually little room for civil society to express itself without passing via the vessel of the state. But of course, that means that all the way in which civil society is expressed is through this territorially bound system.
[51:46] Whereas, as we notice the translocality 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 state-based community. So 1 of the important metapolitical agenda is empowering civil society and giving it voice in the international setting.
[52:18] And the other 1 is also as a part of like the process, which is by doing this, of course, this is not the solution, but this is 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. The solution to those global challenges is not being found, mostly because of the bias of the existing actor in the international
[52:47] agenda, which is either multinational cooperation with a profit maximization agenda, or states with their own territorial bound interest. And our hope is that by connecting together all those communities that actually 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 been explored so far because of those biases.
[53:17] Yes, and I think like what’s really interesting about this movement is actually also that we have a very practical case to develop these theories around, which is the Alliance itself. Because the Alliance is as well a network nation, and in fact, has been created from the outset as a prototypical network nation. So this is also important and interesting context to set.
[53:41] I think with this episode we’re trying to theorize and envision network nations in general, right? As a political idea, as a political entity, and so on. But what we are also working on and what we have been building alongside many collaborators over the last 2 to 3 years is the Network Nations Alliance, which is itself a network nation. So it’s an attempt to weave different communities
[54:06] together and collectively build a prototypical network nation structure. And part of this initiative is also the creation of a platform for people to join. So you can think of it as a web platform where members of the Alliance, meaning people who are excited about this vision and who want to get involved from a community building perspective, from an organizational perspective, from a conceptual perspective, can actually join and collectively work
[54:30] on developing both the ideas of Network Nations but also the institutional structure of the Network Nations Alliance itself. And this will include features like governance, decision-making, working groups, and eventually also economic elements. So we’re really trying to build this in a prefigurative way where the Alliance itself becomes a living lab for what a network nation could be.
[54:58] And so in the spirit of this, we would love for you all as listeners to join us. We will share the links in the description below. You can find us at networknations.network. You can also join our community through our different channels. We have a Discord, we have a Telegram, and obviously we’re also on social media platforms. But yeah, we’re really excited about this journey. This is going to be a 15-episode season where we’re going to be diving deep into all these concepts
[55:27] with amazing guests and communities. And we hope that you will join us along the way. So stay tuned for the next episodes and let us know what you think. We’re really interested in hearing your thoughts, your feedback, and your ideas. So with that said, thank you all for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode. Bye bye. Thank you so much.
Key Themes
- Definition and characteristics of Network Nations as translocal communities with shared identity and aspiration for collective futures
- Contrast between Network Nations (commons-based, bottom-up) and Network States (corporate, top-down, territorial)
- Functional sovereignty as an alternative to territorial sovereignty
- Role of Web3 and decentralized infrastructure in enabling sovereign coordination
- Metapolitical agenda of empowering civil society in global governance
- Case studies: Burning Man (strong nationhood, developing coordination) and Regen movement (strong coordination, developing identity)
- The Network Nations Alliance as a living prototype