From a Rules-Based Global Order to a Code-Based Societal Order

Discussion

Chor Pharn:

"Balaji’s story begins with a simple transposition: rules-based order → code-based order. If the twentieth century belonged to the Bretton Woods rules, the twenty-first will be governed by blockchains, DAOs, and smart contracts. The internet, he says, is the only entity with global scale comparable to China, the only system already coordinating billions of transactions a day. Its next act is to materialise itself — from URL to IRL — as pop-up cities.

Each popup is a testbed of sovereignty: Ethereum’s Zuzalu, Coinbase’s Basecamp, the AngelList Founders Café, Prospera in Honduras, Nuanu in Bali. The vocabulary is pure Silicon Valley: minimum viable community, rapid iteration, seed rounds of belonging. Even the nations that appear — Singapore, Abu Dhabi, El Salvador — are cast as friendly accelerators, regulatory incubators for the stateless entrepreneur.

Yet what unites them is less innovation than nostalgia for movement. The dream of exit. Of starting over somewhere clean, cloud-coordinated and investor-backed. The conference promised a frontier, but you could smell the co-working space air-conditioning; you could hear the hum of venture portfolios needing new metaphors."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/popups-and-pipes-how-the-network)