Electro State

Examples

China as the First Electrostate

Chor Pharn:

1.

"An electrostate is a country whose power rests on surplus electrons and compute. Instead of living off scarcity rents — coal seams, oil wells, or gas pipelines — it manufactures abundance: solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, and FLOPs. It exports that abundance as electricity, synthetic fuels, and digital infrastructure.

China is the world’s first electrostate.

In 2023 it added more solar capacity than the U.S. has built in its entire history.

It now controls over 70% of global battery production.

It is building nuclear capacity faster than any other country.

Ultra-high-voltage transmission lines criss-cross the continent, carrying electricity thousands of kilometres.

Its AI labs and data centres are sited where renewable baseload is abundant.

This surplus gives China gravity.

In Southeast Asia, Huawei builds most of the 5G networks, State Grid wires HVDC lines across Laos and Thailand, Chinese firms finance solar parks. Even when governments hedge politically, their infrastructure defaults to Chinese kit.

In Central Asia, Belt and Road projects link Kazakh and Uzbek renewables into western China, with Chinese EPCs and financing.

In Japan, political distance persists, but batteries, solar panels, and rare earths still tie Japanese industries to Chinese supply chains.

India resists, but remains reliant on imported oil and coal. Its digital services and UPI system make it visible, but not sovereign in electrons or compute."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/electro-vs-petro-two-dangerous-decades)

2.

"Balaji imagines “1000 startup societies.”

China has built one giant one, modular at every level—from national grid to district fab.

Its digital platforms—WeChat, Alipay, JD Logistics—already function as civic operating systems, synchronising daily life across billions of transactions.

Its local governments iterate like startups: Hefei co-investing in EV batteries, Suzhou refining urban AI, Changshaexperimenting with youth retention through public goods.

But the difference is not scale; it’s directionality.

Balaji’s world moves from code to land.

China’s moves from land to code.

The electrostate began by wiring the material base, and only later virtualised the command stack.

Where the Network State needs to raise capital, the electrostate raises capacity: power, data, and competence."

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

Singapore as Corridor State

Chor Pharn:

"Singapore features in both narratives, but plays opposite roles.

At Balaji’s conference, it’s the friendly landlord—a pragmatic government renting out legitimacy to crypto founders.

In your canon, it’s the corridor operator—a metabolic node binding Gulf energy, Asian compute, and Western capital.

Singapore’s JTC, which Balaji name-drops for its $40 billion portfolio, isn’t a speculative startup. It’s a state-run developer of industrial land, effectively the world’s most successful civic venture fund.

It is already doing what the Network State dreams of: translating global networks into physical territory. It just does it through zoning laws, not tokenomics."

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

The Gulf and India as Hybrid Blocks

Chor Pharn:

"The Gulf states—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia—are prototypes of what you call metabolic abundance married to narrative scarcity.

They are petrostates turning electro, building corridors of legitimacy through energy diversification, AI infrastructure, and sovereign wealth.

India’s story, too, has split from Balaji’s Californian arc. Its “UPI stack” is a genuine network state—but one rooted in public infrastructure, not private DAOs. The phrase India Stack means APIs, not anarcho-capitalism. It’s a reminder that digital governance can be collective without being libertarian.

Together, these examples show that the code-based order is already here—just not in the places Balaji expects, nor under the ideology he champions."

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