The Network State Conference (Part I)

The year is 2029.

After incubating and iterating on emerging technologies like AI, cryptocurrency, and nomad passports, one particular country has started to gain international attention.

But this country is unique. There are no borders. The military is outsourced. The citizens consider themselves subscribers. The economy runs on blockchain. 

Its national anthem: there’s a better way to live together on this pale blue dot. 

This is the vision of The Network State, a movement led by Balaji, former CTO of Coinbase. The basic idea is that new societies can start online and eventually manifest as physical cities after reaching a critical mass of citizens.

As far-reaching as it may sound on the surface, The Network State Conference that happened in Amsterdam on October 30, 2023 proved that this movement is well underway. From healthcare to real estate, finance to education, media and even government, the new-age soldiers in the trenches of this silent revolution gathered from around the world to demonstrate how this vision is quickly becoming a reality. 

In Part I of this post, we’ll explore some of the group initiatives that are fundamentally reshaping how we think about cities in the 21st century.1  

In Part 2, we’ll reveal the undercurrents of innovation that are flipping traditional institutions upside down.  

Adults are not born, they are grown. Similarly, network states are not born but scale up through several phases of growth.2 

The embryo of a network state is birthed from a singular event, a series of blog posts, and sometimes a simple tweet. The infant grows in the womb of Discord Servers and in-person meetups. And as they approach puberty, these mid-sized communities begin to feel “as cozy as a small town, as lively as a university campus.”

Adolescence comes not as an accumulation of new hair but instead as an accumulation of funds in a collective treasury. Instead of a growth spurt and voice change, they experience user growth and governance changes. 

Many of these communities are still in their formative years, like a teenager navigating high school. New ones will inevitably be born. And yet, there are several mature organizations that have graduated and are already onto their “adulting” phase of life. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the communities and leaders who aren’t only talking about the future but are actively building it. 

After experimenting with community incubators and “unconferences” of a few dozen people, Jason Benn of Neighborhood SF built an AI tool for social matchmaking: “a repeatable machine that creates communities that are very well curated and densely connected.” 

Jason’s efforts have spawned businesses and products (including GPT), and later turned into a 1-square-mile innovation hub in the heart of San Francisco with 150 cohabitating residents.

Even without advanced algorithms, communities can emulsify from something as simple as a tweet.3

Fractal started with an online manifesto and eventually turned into a creator community of hundreds that now spans 10+ properties across Brooklyn, New York. The founders, Andrew and Priya, have since launched an improvised college where students of life come together to teach and learn from each other. 

While some of these communities plant a flag in one specific location, others congregate in a more fleeting fashion. What Burning Man is for a week in the desert is now being emulated over a longer time horizon and varied geographies. 

Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has propagated Zuzalu to experiment with pop-up cities ranging from two weeks to two months, comprising a temporary population of hundreds. 

Mindvalley, for example, hosts 21-day pop-up universities in different cities every year. And before Kift disbanded, they were running seasonal “campervan caravans,” collectively traversing the Western US over the course of a few months.    

A community by the name of VitaDAO, whose passion revolves around longevity, has attracted hundreds of scientists and technologists that all subscribe to the idea of “making death optional.” In January 2024, they’ll host their first multi-month city experiment, Vitalia, in Roatán.

Although these initiatives may be at the scale of neighborhood or small town, their experiential research is spearheading a new understanding of social dynamics in the context of networked communities. And success leaves breadcrumbs, all of which are being documented, shared, and fine-tuned as a blueprint for optimal collaboration.

As these digital communities grow up and their physical footprint spreads, they become a network of interconnected neighborhoods with thousands of location-independent “residents.” At this scale, living and working together is less of a money problem and more of a coordination problem. 

Zach Anderson spent much of his professional life exploring this problem of coordination, seeking to understand how peer networks can collaborate effectively. His experience led him to discover the 3 main elements that groups need to thrive in a decentralized environment: appreciation, reward, and information flow.

He then set out to build a tool called Coordinape that delivers these things at scale.

The goal is to create the optimal plug-and-play platform that can be used by any decentralized community to improve the way they collaborate. And it works! In fact, it’s proven to be so effective that even traditional organizations have started using it in-house for their own employees.   

It’s not just the means of congregation that’s changing, nor the collaboration that happens thereafter. We’re also changing the physical infrastructure and means of production.

Once the people have assembled, they want to build something. 

Cabin is the perfect example...

Their community started building their own property from the ground up as soon as they had enough members. And because they couldn’t build as fast as their community is growing, they started outsourcing their network of residential assets through partnerships. As a citizen of Cabin, you not only get access to all their partner Cabins, you can also list your own property to host other members of the community.

Nomad took that playbook and added a few pages.

Instead of paying rent for a single apartment unit, your monthly Nomad subscription will grant you flexible living across their entire network of properties. Stay in Amsterdam for a week, then Portugal for two, then Bali for a month.4 If and when you do find a location you like, they’ll help you buy and build a custom home from scratch.

Cover takes it a step further to deliver personalized living at scale using a software-driven approach to modular construction.

Imagine a custom-built home that meets your every need, printed and delivered to a location of your choice, and assembled like a box of legos in under a week.

Now imagine you host a dinner party with 10 friends and 3 of them love your place so much that they want to move in with you (not weird at all).

Cover will turn your 1-bedroom studio unit into a 4-bedroom single family residence. You and your new roommates continue hosting weekly dinner parties, attracting more and more people to the point where you have explain to them why you’re not a cult.

The scope and scale of your original unit adapts to meet the demand of your loyal disciples fellow neighbors until you have an entire apartment complex with hundreds of residents. Watch the visualization below:

Instead of bank funding, we’re crowdfunding. Instead of cookie-cutter homes in a static location, we’re building personalized homes in adaptive communities. Instead of master-planning from the top-down, we’re scaling thoughtfully from the bottom-up.5

These are the trailblazers carving a path for dynamic development and agile living.

In the Lean Startup, author Eric Ries says, “a startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

A startup society is The Network State in the making.

Balaji expands on this parallel in his book: 

“If a startup begins by identifying an economic problem in today’s market and presenting a technologically-informed solution to that problem in the form of a new company, a startup society begins by identifying a moral issue in today’s culture and presenting a historically-informed solution to that issue in the form of a new society.

The toddlers and teenagers we’ve been looking at, whether a handful of members or thousands, are all iterating on the productization of cities. They’re finding new ways to build, to share, to regulate. They keep what works and toss what doesn’t. And once they’ve validated their product, they amplify it. 

The true rite of passage for these startup societies is diplomatic recognition. They must be able to come to the table with enough buying power to negotiate with established countries. 

Instead of blowing candles at a Sweet 16, their initiation is triggered by signed agreements with big governments and breaking ground on new developments. Instead of being able to drink alcohol or rent a car, their new privileges are sovereignty, autonomy, and freedom of innovation. 

There are few such adults who have already entered their early 20s’.

• The Seasteading Institute is building floating cites.

• Culdesac has opened it’s car-free neighborhood.

• Praxis is aiming for a coastal metropolis in the Mediterranean.

• Prospera is spearheading a development off the coast of Honduras.

This list is by no means exhaustive but it should give you a more tangible idea of what more developed communities look like.6

From subreddits and tweets to groups of friends with shared ideals. From living and working together to sharing money and homes.

Science fiction is becoming science fact. 

We’re on an evolutionary journey from URL to IRL—from blog posts to group discussions to local events and thriving communities to legitimate city-states recognized by the United Nations.

The future is here whether you like it or not. Brick by brick, byte by byte, a new paradigm is seeping into reality. The Network State is not a matter of if, but when.

And the time is now. 

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. But Rome didn’t have the internet and a global task force of passionate innovators. What took hundreds of years for them to build an empire will only take us a few. 

Ready or not, here we come!