A New Type of State, A New Type of Book

by Justin Murphy

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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The Network State: How to Start a New Country

by Balaji Srinivasan

Independently Published, 474 pp., $9.99

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The core thesis of The Network State, the hotly anticipated opus from entrepreneur-theorist Balaji Srinivasan, is that technology now allows for a new kind of sovereign polity. In Srinivasan’s worldview, two technological achievements in particular have unfettered the historical constraints on state-building: global-scale networking and cryptocurrency. Given these watersheds, it is now possible for founders to start new sovereign countries in a fashion analogous to how founders build tech startups.

If successful, the next great statesman of the 21st century will hatch a network state:

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

As one moves into the book’s substantive chapters (2–4), one might expect each clause in the main thesis to be examined, modeled, and tested. This is not that kind of book.