In the world of crypto and Web3, manifestos are the new pitch decks, and a former Coinbase executive has just dropped the mother of all techno-political manifestos.

The new politics of technology often come down to tech innovators challenging national systems of oversight built for a different era, or seeking to transcend those national systems altogether.

“The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, released online in draft form earlier this month, offers insights into one version of Team Tech’s endgame in these conflicts: gradual replacement of the nation-state with internet-enabled “network states” that begin in the cloud and then start butting into the real world.

The book-length text (which describes itself as “a toolbox, not a manifesto”) reads in places like a satire of Silicon Valley utopianism: “We can apply all the techniques of startup companies to startup societies,” it advises, “Financing, attracting subscribers, calculating churn, doing customer support — there’s a playbook for all of that. It’s just Society-as-a-Service, the new SaaS.”

But the impetus behind the text is real. The rapid adoption of new technologies, especially the Internet, is shaking up societies and testing the nation-state system.

After all, that system crystallized in 1648’s Treaty of Westphalia as a resolution to the 30 Years’ War, which was largely a consequence of the Reformation, whose roots in turns have often been traced to the invention of the printing press. That the advent of the Internet could set off a similar evolution in governance systems does not seem so far-fetched.

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