Network Nations

= "translocal communities united by shared identity, purpose, and values that govern their own affairs across borders without any territorial claims". [1]

URL = https://networknations.network/

Definition

1. Network Nations Network:

“A network of geographically unbound but interconnected local units. This structure allows for communities that are both locally rooted and globally connected, enabling them to act collectively as a larger, interwoven whole without being confined to a single territory.”

(https://networknations.network/)

2. Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera De Filippi:

"Network Nations are defined by their pursuit of sovereignty over three dimensions: space (digital infrastructure), population (voluntary citizenship), and institutions (polycentric governance)." [2]

3. Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera De Filippi:

= "globally distributed communities united by shared identity and purpose that seek to achieve “functional sovereignty”: the capacity to govern their own affairs, manage shared resources, and steward their own culture without making territorial claims." [3]

Description

Network Nations Workshop:

"“Network Nations” are:

(1) interdependent political communities

(2) united by shared aspirations, values and culture

(3) leveraging networked technologies

(4) to govern themselves, mutualise resources and engage in collective action,

(5) in a sovereign manner (i.e. independent layer alongside existing jurisdictions)

Network Nations aim to provide an institutional framework for emergent political communities of kinship to govern and coordinate themselves through networked technologies, creating new layers of sovereignty that subsist beyond the reach of nation states and private corporations. By acknowledging, and at times even furthering, their interdependencies — with one another, and other political actors — Network Nations can contribute to more effectively tackling global governance challenges that require global coordination.

Indeed, by reintroducing a sense of belonging to communities that people genuinely want to "live for," Network Nations strive to rebuild trust among individuals and provide hope that they and their communities have a meaningful voice and role in the political arena."

(private Google doc, October 2024)

What Network Nations Are; What They Are Not

Network Nations:

" What Network Nations Are Network Nations are translocal political communities whose members cultivate a shared identity and build institutions to govern aspects of their collective life and act together across borders through networked infrastructures. Many networks connect people. Many communities create belonging. A Network Nation begins to emerge when a distributed community can turn that belonging into durable collective agency across places.

The “nation” part signals a form of belonging that goes beyond ordinary organizational membership. Members come to understand themselves as part of an enduring “we,” with mutual obligations, shared continuity, and a stake in a common future. This membership can remain plural and overlapping: belonging to a Network Nation need not replace citizenship in a territorial state or participation in other communities. Nationhood here describes a distributed community of kinship, not a claim to ethnic homogeneity or territorial exclusivity.

The “network” part describes how that community is organized. Network Nations are translocal rather than placeless. Rather than being anchored to a single place, they emerge through interlinked nodes of people and places across different localities, using digital networks to sustain relationships across distance. What emerges is a network spanning physical and digital spaces, held together not simply by where its members live, but by what they share and do together.

At their core, Network Nations are sustained by trust relationships rather than physical proximity. Digital networks are good at multiplying ties, but the quality of those ties helps determine what a community can actually do together. Members need to be able to rely on one another, make credible commitments, and sustain cooperation beyond a single interaction. Trust is therefore not simply a byproduct of participation, but an explicit design goal: it has to be cultivated through shared norms, protocols and governance frameworks that make commitments credible. The aim is to combine the reach of a network with the relational depth of a community.

Network Nations have a dual purpose: Internally, they exist to hold the collective together. They cultivate belonging, align expectations, maintain shared norms, pool resources, distribute responsibilities, and sustain trust among participants who may not share a common geography. Externally, they exist to act in the world. They pursue common projects, produce shared goods, represent interests, and engage with external actors such as states, markets, or other communities. The two reinforce one another. Internal coherence enables collective action; acting together can, in turn, deepen commitment, trust and a sense of shared purpose.

What turns such a community into a political form is self-governance. A Network Nation begins to emerge when shared belonging acquires durable institutional form: when members can make decisions, establish rules, steward resources, resolve conflicts, maintain institutions, and coordinate action over time.

Because Network Nations organize across distance, digital infrastructure becomes part of how the community itself operates. The systems through which members communicate, decide, and coordinate shape who can participate, how authority is exercised, and what the community can do together. This is why many Network Nations seek some degree of self-infrastructuring: greater control or stewardship over the systems they depend on, so that their capacity for self-governance is not entirely subject to rules set elsewhere.

Together, this produces the defining capacity of a Network Nation: collective agency. Many networks communicate. Many communities create belonging. Network Nations combine belonging with the ability to act together in a sustained and organized way. They need not govern every aspect of their members’ lives or control a territory. What matters is that the community can govern meaningful parts of its collective life.

Put simply, a Network Nation combines nation-like belonging with networked organization to form durable collective agency. It is a political community that can remain distributed across space while developing the institutional scaffolding needed to govern and act together.

Network Nations are therefore best understood as an additional layer of political coordination, not a replacement for the nation-state. Their relationship with existing jurisdictions may be complementary, overlapping, or sometimes conflictual. In this sense, they are both modest and radical: modest because they need not claim exclusive territorial sovereignty and radical because they extend the possibilities of collective self-determination beyond a single territorial container.

< "What Network Nations Are Not. " >

The boundaries of the concept matter because many forms of networked organization in the realm of Networked Sovereignty share some features of a Network Nation without combining them all.

A Network Nation is not simply an online community. Digital networks can create large and highly engaged publics, but connection and shared interest alone do not amount to political community. A Network Nation requires a more durable sense of collective belonging and the capacity to organize and act together over time.

Nor is it simply a governance system or technical architecture. DAOs, protocols, voting systems, and other digital tools can help communities make decisions or manage resources, but governance machinery does not by itself create a shared political “we.” Technology can support a Network Nation; it cannot substitute for community.

A Network Nation is also not simply a startup society. Entrepreneurial projects can experiment with new forms of coordination and governance, but a political community is not equivalent to a venture, product, or customer base. The distinction becomes especially important when founders or investors retain effective control while participants remain primarily users of the system.

Network Nations are also not placeless digital societies. Their organization may span jurisdictions, but their members remain embedded in place-based communities. Translocality means connecting across localities rather than escaping geography altogether.

Nor are Network Nations nationalist projects. Their claims to collective self-determination need not require exclusive territorial sovereignty or singular political membership. Nationhood can remain distributed across places and overlap with other political identities. This does not make Network Nations immune to exclusion, hierarchy, or claims of superiority. Those remain political risks that should be taken seriously.

Most importantly, self-governance does not imply statehood. Network Nations may govern meaningful parts of collective life without claiming exclusive authority over a territory. They may own land, establish physical hubs, or negotiate forms of autonomy, but becoming a sovereign territorial state is not what defines them.

This helps clarify their relationship to the Network State. In Balaji Srinivasan’s model, an online community begins as a “startup society”, develops collective capacity, acquires a network of physical territories, and ultimately seeks diplomatic recognition as a state-like entity within the existing international order. The model deliberately borrows from entrepreneurship logic: a community is founded, led by a CEO-like figure, scaled through successive stages, and sells sovereignty as a service to its members.

Network Nations follow a different trajectory. They do not treat territorial expansion or recognized statehood as the necessary culmination of networked political community. They may own land, establish physical hubs, or negotiate forms of autonomy, but translocal self-governance can remain the political form itself. The distinction between Network States and Network Nations is therefore about more than territory: one model is oriented toward top-down founding and scaling a new state; the other toward expanding the bottom-up capacity of communities to govern themselves across jurisdictions."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/network-nations-a-primer?)

Difference with the Network States concept

NetworkNations.network:

"The Network State is a similar concept by Balaji Srinivasan. The Network State and Network Nation definitely share some similarities. The main differences are that Network Nations don't have a need for territorial claims, physical infrastructure and other needs that emerge from building territory based ecosystems. The Network Nations are aterritorial, allowing for sovereign communities to organize and self-govern in as a nation building endeavor one abstraction layer above territorial jurisdictions."

(https://networknations.network/)

Comparison Table: Network Nations vs Network States

Contrasting Network States and Network Nations

Dimension	Network States	Network Nations
Core definition	A coordinated online community that seeks territorial control and formal sovereignty through a start-up logic, aiming to exit the current system.	A community-rooted, commons-driven civic fabric that builds functional sovereignty through culture, cooperation, and shared stewardship.
Sovereignty model	Territorial sovereignty	Functional sovereignty
Governance orientation	Top-down, investor-driven (start-up society)	Bottom-up, community-driven
Path to legitimacy	Exit-based (raise capital, acquire land, secede, negotiate recognition)	Practice-based (legitimacy through care, participation, and belonging)
Membership structure	Market-based (participants aligned through investment)	Stake-based (members as co-creators and stewards)
Organizing logic	Market logic (CEO or founder as leader)	Commons logic (collective stewardship)
Economic dynamics	Competition and extraction	Cooperation and mutual care
Institutional form	Corporate machine	Civic imagination

Source: https://networknations.network/

Characteristics

Characteristics 1

Networknations.network:

“Network nations are

Interdependent translocal communities

These are geographically distributed yet highly aligned groups that coordinate across digital and physical spaces. Rather than being anchored to a single place, they emerge through interlinked nodes of people and places across different localities, bound by a shared sense of kinship. This structure empowers locally rooted yet globally connected communities to act collectively as part of a broader, interwoven whole.

Sharing a collective identity, culture and aspiration

A form of distributed nationhood is cultivated, defined not by geographic proximity, but by relational closeness. This collective identity emerges through sustained interaction, mutual recognition, and shared cultural practices. Unlike traditional nations tied to inherited citizenship, cohesion here is derived from active, voluntary participation, offering an alternative model of nation-building.

Leveraging Networked Technologies

Decentralised technologies—from blockchain protocols to peer-to-peer platforms—provide the foundation for scalable and autonomous self-governance. This technological stack enables communities to manage their own affairs while resisting censorship and minimizing dependence on external authorities. They are not merely digital communities but technopolitical formations whose sovereignty is tied to their control over their own tools.

Mutualizing Resources

Resilient communities are created by pooling and sharing resources across a distributed network, enabling each node to access capabilities far beyond what it could achieve individually. This commons-based approach operates on reciprocity and mutual aid, creating a positive feedback loop that strengthens the entire network and ensures resilience against shocks.

Exercising Self-Governance

Self-governance is the capacity to define, implement, and adapt the rules of collective life without relying on external authority. Governance systems are built from the bottom up, distributing decision-making across the network. Legitimacy arises not from a centralized mandate but from active participation, mutual accountability, and the continual renegotiation of shared rules.

Engaging in Collective Action

Political agency emerges from the coordinated alignment of autonomous nodes around a common agenda, rather than from centralized authority. This networked coherence enables the community to influence broader systems, shape public discourse, and address global challenges, demonstrating a form of political influence traditionally reserved for major state and market institutions.

As a Common Political Entity

Shared norms and infrastructures transform loose coalitions into distributed polities, empowering value-aligned groups to construct a common identity without territorial borders. Belonging emerges from mutual coordination, not fixed geography. By decoupling citizenship from location, new spaces for political agency open up, offering alternative pathways for collective action on a global scale.

To operate with Functional Sovereignty

The aspiration is to achieve functional sovereignty—the capacity to govern essential domains of community life with a high degree of autonomy. This sovereignty is not rooted in territory, but in the ability to set rules, manage resources, and coordinate internally. Instead of replacing nation-states, these entities work alongside them, reimagining sovereignty as operational autonomy.

(https://networknations.network/)

Characteristics 2

From the Network Nations Alliance:

NEITHER LOCAL
NOR GLOBAL
BUT TRANSLOCAL

A network of geographically unbound but interconnected local units. This structure allows for communities that are both locally rooted and globally connected, enabling them to act collectively as a larger, interwoven whole without being confined to a single territory.

NEITHER CENTRALIZED
NOR DECENTRALISED
BUT POLYCENTRIC

A system with multiple centers of decision-making that have mutual influence over one another. Unlike a top-down centralized model or a fully flat decentralized one, polycentricity allows for nested, overlapping, and autonomous governance bodies to coexist and coordinate.

NEITHER SUPREMACY
NOR SUBORDINATION
BUT FUNCTIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

The capacity for a community to self-organise and govern its own affairs independent of external interference. This form of sovereignty is not based on territorial control, but on the functional ability to manage its own systems and resources, empowering civil society.

NEITHER STATE
NOR MARKET
BUT COMMONS

An economic and governance model based on the mutualisation of resources. Instead of resources being controlled exclusively by the public sector (State) or private sector (Market), they are collectively owned and managed by a community, including the governance infrastructure itself.

NEITHER DEPENDENT
NOR INDEPENDENT
BUT INTERDEPENDENT

A state of 'entanglement' that creates a shared future through incentive alignment. By creating high exit costs and shared stakes, this model fosters deep collaboration over pure independence, which helps mitigate free-riding and the tragedy of the commons.

NEITHER EXIT-BASED
NOR VOICE-BASED
BUT STAKE-BASED

A governance model where influence is tied to one's stake in the community. This moves beyond the traditional dichotomy of 'exit' (leaving) or 'voice' (protesting). Having a tangible stake—economic, social, or reputational—incentivizes constructive participation.

NEITHER POLITICAL
NOR APOLITICAL
BUT METAPOLITICAL

Operating on a level that shapes the conditions for future politics. The agenda is to empower civil society with more agency for self-governance while acknowledging planetary interdependencies, creating new (geo)political actors through commons-based stewardship.

NEITHER INSIDERS
NOR OUTSIDERS
BUT BEYONDERS

Transcending the dichotomy of working within the system or fighting it from the outside. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Beyonders focus on building new models that make the existing reality obsolete, creating alternative systems that operate on different principles.

NEITHER TECHNO-UTOPIAN
NOR TECHNO-DYSTOPIAN
BUT TECHNO-REALISTS

Adopting a pragmatic and balanced view of technology. This approach avoids both blind optimism and paralyzing fear, focusing instead on thoughtfully designing and deploying tools to serve community values, acknowledging both their potential and their limitations.

NEITHER DESCRIPTIVE
NOR PRESCRIPTIVE
BUT EMERGENT

A process-based approach to solving complex problems like the 'polycrisis.' Rather than prescribing a rigid solution, this focuses on creating an interconnected, adaptive system from which novel solutions can emerge through the interactions of its empowered members."

(https://networknations.network/)

Characteristics 3: Indispensible Requirements for Functional Sovereignty

Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera De Filippi:

"In this context, meta jurisdictions can serve as a “diplomatic interface” or “legal API” between the digital and physical realms. This allows for greater institutional interoperability.

Polycentric Resilience Through Modular Architecture

A Network Nation may govern itself via a DAO, but it cannot buy land, defend intellectual property, or hire employees in that form. A Meta jurisdiction functions as a translation layer. It bundles legal wrappers (e.g., a foundation in one jurisdiction, a purpose trust in another) to give the Network Nation “legal standing”. This allows the community to act in a unified political manner in the physical world without subjecting its internal governance to the whims of a single state.

As such, meta jurisdictions create polycentric resilience for Network Nations. Reliance on a single jurisdiction (e.g., incorporating solely in the Cayman Islands) introduces a single point of failure.

A Meta jurisdiction is architected to be modular. If one host jurisdiction becomes hostile, the legal “nodes” can be swapped or migrated without dissolving the Network Nation itself. This mirrors the technical resilience of the underlying networks."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/meta-jurisdictions)

Functional Recognition

"Finally, Network Nations do not need diplomatic recognition in the UN sense; they need functional recognition: the ability to hold property and enforce contracts. Meta jurisdictions achieve this by leveraging private law (contract and trust law) to create binding commitments that courts in traditional jurisdictions will respect. This allows the Network Nation to bypass the need for political revolution and instead build parallel institutions that are legally legible."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/meta-jurisdictions)

Characteristics 4

Network Nations:

"How Network Nations Work If collective agency is what distinguishes a Network Nation, the next question is how that capacity is built and sustained. We propose three initial mechanisms: functional sovereignty, commons governance, and entanglement. They address three different problems of distributed community self-governance: gaining autonomy over important parts of collective life, building and stewarding resources in common, and creating commitments strong enough to endure over time.

I. Functional Sovereignty

Functional sovereignty is the capacity of a community to exercise meaningful autonomy over a particular domain of collective life without claiming sovereignty over a territory as a whole. The relevant domains will differ between communities. A Network Nation might seek greater autonomy for its members in areas such as economic exchange, education, care, digital life, housing, or ecological stewardship.

Frank Pasquale uses functional sovereignty to describe how powerful companies increasingly exercise governance-like authority over functions on which people depend. Network Nations invert this diagnosis. The question becomes whether communities themselves can gain meaningful authority over the systems and functions that shape their lives. Functional sovereignty from below is therefore built function by function.

This changes what sovereignty means in practice. Rather than beginning with formal legal recognition, it begins with what a community can actually do for itself. Functional sovereignty develops when a community can reliably organize and sustain an important function without remaining entirely dependent on states, firms, or platforms. Sovereignty, in this sense, is enacted through governing capacity rather than simply declared through legal status.

It is also necessarily partial. A Network Nation may become highly autonomous in one domain while remaining dependent in many others, and its members remain embedded in territorial legal orders. Functional sovereignty is therefore not an all-or-nothing bundle of powers. It can be built, combined, and evaluated domain by domain according to what a community can reliably govern and sustain over time.

II. Commons Governance

A commons combines something held or produced in common, a community with a stake in it, and institutions and practices through which it is governed. Commons governance therefore goes beyond simply sharing a resource. It describes the process through which a community collectively produces, maintains, and stewards something on which it depends.

Michel Bauwens and the broader commons tradition develop commoning as a distinct mode of social organization alongside market exchange and state provision. Rather than resources being organized primarily through private ownership or administered by public institutions, communities themselves become active producers and stewards of shared value. The important shift is from shared access to shared stewardship.

For Network Nations, this provides a material basis for collective self-governance. Knowledge, funds, land, cultural resources, digital infrastructure, or systems of care can become commons when members take responsibility for sustaining them together. Members are therefore not merely users of the systems on which their community depends. They become co-stewards of the foundations of their collective life.

This principle can extend beyond individual resources. A Network Nation can increasingly constitute parts of its own institutional environment as a commons: infrastructures, institutions, and shared capacities that members collectively build, govern, and adapt. In this sense, commoning is not simply something a Network Nation does. It can become part of how the community reproduces itself as a political community on a material level.

III. Entanglement

Entanglement is the deliberate creation of interdependencies that give members a shared stake in one another’s success. Networks make it easy to connect and often easy to leave. That flexibility can be useful, but it can also make cooperation fragile when members have little invested in the future of the collective.

Drawing on Primavera De Filippi’s work on entanglement, the idea is to create relationships in which individual and collective outcomes become more closely aligned. Common resources, shared risks, mutual commitments, and other reciprocal practices can make the success of each node more dependent on the success of the whole network. When members depend on things they maintain together, cooperation becomes more than a matter of goodwill. They have a concrete stake in keeping the collective functioning.

For Network Nations, this offers a way to cultivate shared fate across distance. Territorial communities often inherit many forms of interdependence through place-bound social ties. Translocal communities have to create more of these connections intentionally. Entanglement asks how people living in different places can become meaningfully invested in one another’s futures.

The aim is not to maximize dependence. Too little entanglement can leave a community fragile. Too much can make leaving prohibitively costly, give disproportionate power to those who control shared resources, or turn mutual obligations into social pressure. The challenge is commitment without coercion: creating enough mutual stake to sustain cooperation while preserving meaningful possibilities for exit and dissent."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/network-nations-a-primer?)

Governance

Felix Beer et al. :

"A Network Nation is built on three sovereign foundations:

Networked Space: Not sovereign territory, but self-sovereign infrastructure, made from a combination of community-run hardware and open protocols that resists capture and external intervention.

Networked Population: Voluntary citizenship, where members join based on affinity or values and retain the right of exit at any time.

Networked Institutions: Polycentric governance systems leveraging Web3 technology to enable decision-making that is transparent, participatory, and scalable."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/network-nations-from-theory-to-practice)

Technology

Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera De Filippi:

"While Web3 technologies provide the technical substrate for their sovereign infrastructure (e.g., multisig treasuries, decentralized identity), they are not as such recognized by the institutional world."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/meta-jurisdictions)

Discussion

Why Network Nations Matter

Network Nations:

"Network Nations matter because they expand the institutional repertoire available to communities. Much of collective life is still organized through three familiar forms: state, market, and nonprofit institutions. Network Nations add another possibility: communities can use networks to build institutions of their own and govern parts of their collective life across borders.

There are good reasons communities might want to do this. They often depend on institutions and infrastructures over which they have little control, or whose boundaries do not match the community itself. A digital community may rely on a platform whose rules it cannot shape. A diaspora may lack institutions for organizing funding, education, or cultural life across countries. A bioregional network may need systems for ecological knowledge or resource stewardship that no single jurisdiction provides. Network Nations allow communities to bring selected functions under greater collective control.

For civil society, this opens a wider institutional design space. Communities can move beyond familiar strategies of voice and exit to become institutional builders in their own right. Rather than only trying to influence the institutions they depend on or withdrawing when those institutions no longer serve their needs, Network Nations add another option: institutional authorship. Communities can build durable institutions of their own and take responsibility for governing selected parts of their collective life. Networks become not only tools for connection and mobilization, but infrastructures for collective self-determination.

The specific politics of a Network Nation remain open, but its architecture is not neutral. Network Nations privilege particular modalities and properties of community self-governance: more distributed authority, greater community stewardship, and more autonomy over the systems a community depends on. Their politics can differ widely, but the institutional direction is clear: shifting more capacity to shape collective life into the hands of communities themselves.

This does not make Network Nations automatically democratic or emancipatory. Communities can still concentrate power, exclude others, reproduce inequality, or make participation and exit difficult. Institutional authorship creates political possibility, not political virtue. What matters is that communities gain greater agency not only within institutions designed by others, but over the design and governance of institutions themselves.

In this sense, Network Nations offer civil society a new political vehicle: one through which shared identity and purpose can be translated into durable forms of collective self-government beyond territorial boundaries."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/network-nations-a-primer?)

More information

* Article: Network Nations. Reclaiming Sovereignty in the Digital Age. By Primavera de Filippi & Felix Beer.

URL = https://networknations.network/essay/

“With the advent of digital technology, the wheel has turned again. The internet has shattered geographic constraints, and enabled new forms of coordination that transcend national borders. People organize across jurisdictions, cultures, and time zones, not as a result of physical proximity, but because of shared affinities. In this context, sovereignty—once tightly coupled with territorial control—is increasingly being reframed through the logic of digital networks (Castells, 2004).

This shift has sparked new claims to authority in the digital realm. States are attempting to assert control over the digital space through surveillance and the regulation of information flows. Corporations govern billions of users via platform rules and algorithmic systems. Perhaps most interestingly for the purpose of this essay, newly emerging online communities are aspiring for new forms of network sovereignty, experimenting with self-governance, shared ownership, and collective agency both in the physical and digital space.

In this essay, we first introduce the three classical dimensions of sovereignty — space, population, and institutions — and explain how digital networks are reshaping them (Section 2).

We then investigate how three types of actors—platforms, states, and networked communities—are competing to assert authority in the digital realm (Section 3).

Finally, we present the concept of Network Nations (Section 4) as translocal communities united by shared identity, purpose, and values that govern their own affairs across borders without any territorial claims.

Our goal with this essay is not to prescribe what network sovereignty should be, but what it’s becoming—and how we may design better systems in its wake.”

* Books:

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker. Basic Books, 2025. 384 pages.

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Riverhead Books, 2024. 336 pages.

Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman. Stanford University Press, 2024. 326 pages.