New section created mid-2023.

Quote

1.

"Nation-states organize affective memories into a vibe-based territorial logic, 

metropolises organize declarative memories into capability based physical network supernodes that are dense population centers 

cosmopolises organize procedural memories into widely diffused infrastructures."

2.

"More than one distinctive cosmopolis may emerge in response to a technological stimulus, and the set of cosmopolises may not be either mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive in relation to either the planet or the political world. A cosmopolis is not a planetarity. It is a smaller unit of analysis, and a legibly embodied geographic reality in a way a planetarity is not. We can sketch out cosmopolises on maps. ... new technologies induce new normals through protocolization of what is initially a weird and scary sort of monstrousness irrupting across a frontier. Beyond that frontier lies a new kind of territory, a new kind of “soil” on which societies can be built. Protocols are the engines of what I called manufactured normalcy a decade ago, and cosmopolises correspond loosely to what I called Manufactured Normalcy Fields.

- Venkatesh Rao [1]

3.

"Balaji’s conference exists because, in much of the West, governance has stopped learning.

Infrastructure ages, bureaucracies calcify, housing stagnates, education ossifies. The startup city becomes a mirage of renewal in a civilisation that has forgotten how to iterate.

This is what my earlier essay, When Institutions Learn and When They Don’t, made palpable: systems collapse not from stupidity, but from metabolic fatigue—when the feedback loops between energy, information, and legitimacy break down.

The Network State conference was a crowd of exhausted optimists trying to reverse that fatigue with code alone. In their own way, they are the Californian cousins of (upcoming post) surplus humans—people displaced by the speed of their own inventions."

- Chor Pharn [2]

Chor Pharn's interpretation of the Network State movement

A fascinating interpretation of the 'Network State' movement:

How the institutional failure in the United States converts into globally reproducible code.

"The managerial republic, in disintegrating, has become a kind of medium—its debris are tools. The process is easiest to see in the frontier sectors where governance and enterprise blur. Start-ups organise not as firms but as temporary coordination machines: a small group raises capital through narrative, scales through software, and dissolves once imitation has replaced advantage. The life cycle resembles cultural diffusion more than industrial production. Every failure leaves behind reusable code—legal templates, funding mechanisms, technical standards, even rituals of belonging. These fragments spread far faster than any formal policy. They become the grammar of modern behaviour.

Balaji Srinivasan’s idea of the network state mistook this phenomenon for a political blueprint. He was right that the digital sphere was becoming a laboratory for governance; wrong that it would produce coherent new states. What he described as “exit” was in fact replication: a society shedding its institutions but not its logic. The start-up constitution, the DAO charter, the influencer city—none of them sustain sovereignty, yet together they distribute the American premise that coordination should be voluntary, modular, and monetised. The network state is not a destination but the transmission phase of a civilisation exporting its code.

Crypto is the most visible carrier. For all its speculative excess, it has restored a nineteenth-century idea to contemporary life: that individuals can create their own monetary and legal infrastructure if the state withdraws. Each collapse—FTX, Terra, Celsius—destroys wealth but strengthens the protocol layer that survives it. Stablecoins and tokenised deposits now settle trillions in transactions. They are the unintentional continuation of Alexander Hamilton’s financial system by other means: private credit instruments circulating in public space, guaranteed only by network consensus. Their adoption abroad, from Singapore to Lagos, signals that the dollar’s authority has become modular. The world no longer needs Washington to issue its unit of account; it can assemble a dollar from code.

Open-source governance functions in a similar way. The practices that once made Silicon Valley an industrial district—transparent repositories, permissionless contribution, shared infrastructure—have migrated into policy, science, and even religion. Movements as different as citizen science, AI research collectives, and online spiritual communities use the same coordination pattern: distributed labour, common protocol, shared narrative. These structures travel effortlessly because they ask little of law and much of imitation. They are not replacements for government; they are the reflexes of a culture that has forgotten what central authority feels like. This, then, is the logic of decay as transmission. The American state has lost coherence, but its fragments replicate themselves in code, finance, and media. Each new experiment—whether a DAO, an AI collective, or a start-up city—embodies the instinct that order can emerge from voluntary association if the right incentives are written. That instinct has become that civilisation’s true export. Even adversaries absorb it, because to operate in the global economy now means to internalise its grammar of risk, openness, and iteration. What looks like collapse from within is diffusion from without; the republic’s ruins function as seeds."

- Chor Pharn [3]

Key Concepts

• Cosmopolis
• Network Nations
• Network State
• Phyles ; Neo-Venetianist Networks
• Post-National Professional Elite Formation‎
• Sphere Sovereignty

Key Resources

Articles

• Post-National Professional Elite Formation‎
  • Neomedieval Invisible Colleges of the Present and Future Digital Age
  • Decline of the Nation-State in an Era of Shared Transnational Values‎‎

Books

* Book: Farewell to Westphalia. Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance. By Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow.