Rebecca Brown, University of Oxford
Parents frequently lie to their children. “No, you can’t have any chocolate – it’s all gone,” when there’s a jumbo bar of Dairy Milk in the cupboard. “No, you can’t have my phone to watch YouTube – the battery’s flat,” when it’s at a solid 65%.
A ‘network state’ is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralised. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place.
In June 2022 Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, published an ebook entitled The Network State: How To Start a New Country. It is the latest in a flurry of utopian visions by self-styled digital visionaries, crypto believers and web 3.0 evangelists who are lining up to declare the death of the traditional concept of countries and nationhood.