To avoid bothering readers with news about every single sneeze, I present a large chunk of the translation of The Network State all at once.
Chapter 4.4. The Foreseeable Future: here the author simply had some fun with a couple of interesting technical predictions. They have a rather indirect relationship to the theme of the book.
Chapter 4.5. American Anarchy, Chinese Control, and International Centrism. A monstrously large text where the author mostly, of course, writes about the USA, analyzing step by step exactly how the degree of confrontation between supporters of the establishment and supporters of decentralization will increase in the States, and reports that this, generally speaking, is not funny or romantic at all (to be honest, while reading, it seemed to me that the author created a straw man out of Bitcoin maximalists, and they by no means propagate societies of total distrust, but who knows what kind of freaks actually hang out in these Americas of theirs). The alternative in the form of the Chinese recipe for a digital gulag obviously does not entice him either. As usual, he hopes that foreign countries will help him, and primarily bets on Israel and India. However, in his view, this is merely a base for building many startup communities, some of which will grow to the high status of network states.
Chapter 4.6. Conditions for Victory and Unexpected Endings. Here the author considers alternative scenarios where one of the extreme poles wins, rather than the coveted centrism.
Chapter 4.7. Toward a Recentralized Center. And here Balaji Srinivasan only has to emphasize once more that institutions are not scary, centralization is normal, you just shouldn’t obsess over the fact that the old things don’t work, and it would be more correct to actually launch a market process for building new institutions.
I will try not to take too long with the translation of the final, fifth part of the book, which presumably contains the recipes for what the author proposes to do.
