Succeeding Nation States 🏴☠️
Network States
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
- The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan
Building a Network State
The sequence of steps involved in the creation of a Network State are as follows:
- Network Union
A network union is an online community aligned over a common interest with a capacity for collective action. These are typically organized in a social tree structure, to enforce a structure in governance. The network union engages in collective action on behalf of its members.
- Network archipelago
A network union that begins acquiring and networking properties in the physical world. The physical interaction is key for building trust.
- Network State
A network archipelago that gains diplomatic recognition from at least one legacy state. The diplomatic recognition is key for attaining sovereignty.
Why build a "New World"?
One of the approaches is to set up a New Nation State that bring back emotional development into the foundation of our society. This was the approach taken by visionaries like Sri Aurobindo-Mirra Alfassa (Auroville) and Rajneesh (OSHO Oregon City). These unfortunately could not scale beyond their regions and often got into conflicts with Nation States. Due to their commune-like nature, they could not get sovereign recognition and evolve into full-fledged Nation States.
Another approach is to establish Global Societies in existing nation states and enforce new ways of living within these societies. This is the approach taken by most religious organizations or alternative living movements around the world. Some successful examples include the Theosophical Society (Madame Blavatsky - Colonel Olcott), Art of Living (Sri Sri Ravishankar), etc. These have sustained but utilize economic systems and culture of Nation States they reside in. This prevents them from providing an alternative foundation for our civilization and solving problems inherent to their respective Nation States.
For New Gaia State to function independently and scale globally without friction from the existing order of Nation States it is important for them to disconnect from Nation States at both economic and decision-making levels.
Network States use blockchain technology to construct independent economic systems without reliance on any of the existing Nation States. This allows any collective to evolve into a parallel society without creating conflicts with the existing establishment.
Network States and DAOs
While Network States have shown an additional way to organize the global order, they fail to answer questions around “how can we govern ourselves?”.
Existing Systems Inefficiencies
- Regionality
Most systems that we use for governance were designed in an era before the internet (or communications technologies in general). In the pre-internet era, collective decision-making required individuals to be present together in a single location to engage in debate and discussions. This made any democratic decision-making very inefficient. The advent of the internet enables individuals to get into discussions irrespective of their geographical location.
- Representative Democracies Are Slow
Democracy is supposed to be a form of governance that is “By the People, for the People”. However, as the population of a democracy increases it becomes very difficult to coordinate among them and hence “Representative Democracies” are born. The mass populace elects a small group of people to represent them and make decisions on their behalf. These elected representatives however need to continuously appease their voter base to stay in power. Therefore, in practice, a lot of time goes into appeasement than constructive governance. Modern Technologies like AI and Blockchain are now ripe to enable aspects of “Direct Democracy” where people can directly participate in decision-making without the need for any representatives. “Representative Democracy” can be limited to decisions that need expert consensus. This combination of Direct and Representative is what we call “Liquid Democracy”.
- Colonial Law Was Never Built to Scale
Our world is still run by colonial legal and judiciary systems that carry vast amounts of inertia. These systems were never built to serve the mass populace due to their excessively centralized and bureaucratic nature. Making new laws/policies and implementing them is very inefficient and time-consuming in these systems. This also makes any reform unlikely due to the large gap between ideation and manifestation. Web3 through the use of Smart Contracts offers a good antidote to this legislative inertia. It also opens up the possibility of a reliable Decentralized Judiciary that can offer an alternative to today’s clunky justice system.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
A Decentralized Autonomous organization or DAO is a collectively-owned, blockchain-governed organization working towards a shared mission.
DAOs allow us to work with like-minded folks around the globe without trusting a benevolent leader to manage the funds or operations. There is no CEO who can spend funds on a whim or CFO who can manipulate the books. Instead, blockchain-based rules baked into the code define how the organization works and how funds are spent.
DAOs offer an internet-native approach to governing communities. This organizational model promises to replace deadlocked and corrupt governments. DAOs enable a “liquid democracy” — an optimal blend of representative democracy and direct democracy that can be applied at scale. No longer will citizens need to place trust in a an elected representative politician to represent their best interests or have to worry about popular legislation being blocked from a vote; instead, the DAO’s code automatically enacts the majority view of its members.
subDAOs
A subDAO is an approach to addressing the operational challenge of delegating responsibility within a DAO — without sacrificing decentralization. SubDAOs have an independent foundation and ownership structure but use their parent DAO as an economic and ideological base. Any Tokenomics in subDAOs ties back to their parent DAO’s Tokens.
Forks
The NGC by design will open-source the majority of its technology infrastructure. This might inspire several project ‘forks’ around the globe for a variety of use cases, some of which might involve the creation of Network States. While the NGC is not going to be directly involved in these fork projects, we recognize and encourage them in building a new global order that brings prosperity to all of us, in addition to us.