So, it has happened. The final, and key, chapter of The Network State has been translated. In it, Balaji explains in detail:

• What a network state is (this is Montellibero, which received diplomatic recognition from El Salvador);
• What happens if you remove one of the parts from the definition of a network state (in most cases it will break, but if you remove the point about the need for a dictatorship of the network state’s founder, it will be even better—roughly speaking, Bitcoin instead of Ethereum);
• That digitalization is penetrating everything and it is impossible to fight, and a network state is precisely a way to lead the process, instead of fighting directly against the digital gulag of centralized nation-states;
• That the startup community, if it aspires to develop, needs a high level of internal trust, and pleasant bonuses would be visible demonstrations of solidarity (for example, the MTL-fest) and the absence of public flame wars;
• That tokenomics is cool (but Balaji focuses on the community’s internal currency, although having one’s own unit of account is a secondary matter; the principle of public recording of monetary and social obligations is far more important);
• That it is extremely important to scrounge the first diplomatic recognition from anyone, even from Nauru, and then it will be easier;
• And he throws in various technological ideas for connecting offline with online, through which you can feel that the person thinks based on a paradigm of abundance of capital goods—let’s be happy for him.

If anyone hasn’t picked up the book yet, now is the time. I don’t see much point in making an audiobook out of it—there are too many external links, many of which are quite interesting to browse. For the same reason, it’s unlikely that the text will be produced in epub format—such a book should be read while online, and preferably in a browser anyway. The author promises to update the book periodically. If anyone follows the updates, please send me links to new pieces of text, and I will update the translation.

And for now—thank you all for the long wait, the channel is now officially coming out of vacation. I’ll need to scour through to see if any interesting questions from readers have accumulated, write a new article for Hedgehog, and it’s about time to finish the translations of Mac and Molinyu, for goodness’ sake.

P.S. Readers quickly generated a pdf. It’s not without flaws—internal footnotes have become external links—but overall it’s perfectly suitable for reading.

The translation of The Network State is steadily nearing completion. Chapter 5.1 (a short preamble to the fifth part of the book) and Chapter 5.2, where Balaji Srinivasan analyzes the phenomenon of the nation-state in detail: what a nation is, what a state is, how they differ, how they influence each other, what their combination represents, and much more along those lines, are ready.

From some fairly recent thoughts: various strategies of public administration are likened to various programming paradigms.

The next piece will definitely, certainly be the last, and I hope the most interesting—after all, we must finally figure out what the author proposes in a practical sense, after going on for so long and in such detail about the global situation and upcoming challenges!

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.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, and at the same time, happy end of Maslenitsa; and to those who love filming queues in fast-forward mode—happy opportunity to indulge in your favorite pastime. So many holidays in one day—isn’t that great, isn’t that panarchy!

As for me, another chapter of The Network State has been quietly translated. Balaji Srinivasan continues to discuss the trends of the near future, and if in the previous chapter he discussed socio-political trends, now he touches upon the techno-economic consequences of the digitalization and internetization of everything.

For instance, he notes that the sharp lowering of the publishing threshold increases variance: alongside traditional, polished, and weighted but uninteresting positions, a multitude of the most unusual chthonic entities crawl into the light. And besides the shaking of discourse via social networks, there is also the shaking of financial stability through countless cryptocurrencies.

Another interesting aspect discussed by the author is that the total digitalization of everything leads to digital entities becoming primary, while physical ones, in essence, materialize on demand if there is a need.

He also briefly touches upon the mystery of why we do not observe as frantic a leap in productivity in the physical world as we do in the digital world. Then, providing a whole brood of hypotheses, he suggests choosing between them independently.

In short, the chapter is quite saturated with ideas and generalizations, so I don’t see much point in summarizing it; it’s easier to just read it.

The translation of the fourth part of The Network State has begun. As expected, after finishing with the “past present,” the author has moved on to discussing the future.

In Chapter 4.1, Possible Versions of the Future, Balaji Srinivasan begins by clarifying the factors that prevent him from making precise forecasts, then provides a brief description of the envisioned future scenario, and finally estimates where his idea of network states would fit into this scenario. In doing so, he uses the disgustingly clumsy term “re-centralized center.” My ability to adapt the text during translation is limited, so I can only state that the term is terrible and difficult to understand, but nothing comes to mind yet to replace it with. What does the author even mean? As far as I can judge based on an incomplete reading, the word “center” refers to the center of the triangle he drew in the third part of the book describing a tripolar world—suggesting that our salvation lies in not falling into the extremes that accumulate at the poles. And he has yet to explain “re-centralized.” Perhaps it means that every startup community must have its own leader, otherwise it won’t take off. I would be glad to be wrong.

In Chapter 4.2, Sociopolitical Axes, the author briefly notes that to assess the future, it is not enough to look at well-known and long-established trends; it is also worth looking at those that are only just forming. As examples of sociopolitical factors that could seriously affect the future, he provides three completely diverse examples: Indians (while everyone is looking at China, India is quietly closing the gap, and in the next decade should make its presence felt quite loudly, both as a state and as a diaspora, i.e., a Network, in the author’s terminology), the confrontation between the “un-prime” and the “trans-hum” (Klaus Schwab was listed as a transhumanist), and the identity stack (there are several interesting thoughts on where identities come from, as well as a non-obvious take that one identity will inevitably be the leading and defining one).

The chapters in the fourth part of the book are not very long, so I will try to post them in groups rather than one by one, to avoid cluttering the feed.

The translation of the third part of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State has been posted. Unlike the second part, it is quite short and is dedicated to describing the current tripolar world:

• 3.1. NYT, CCP, BTC
• 3.2. The Obsolete and the Timeless
• 3.3. Bipolar America and the Tripolar World
• 3.4. Moral Power, Military Power, Monetary Power
• 3.5. Submission, Sympathy, Sovereignty
• 3.6. Conflicts and Alliances

The author argues that the world today is ruled by three ideas: the American liberal agenda, brutal and pragmatic Chinese communism, and the idea of personal sovereignty, which has found its maximum expression in Bitcoin. Additionally, he touches upon the tripolar configuration of the first half of the 20th century in the context of analyzing the primary strength of each of the current poles.

In general, while the second part dealt primarily with the past, in the third part the author has moved to the present, and further on, presumably, he will deal with the future.

I’m completely swamped at my main job right now, and it’s hard to concentrate on something truly creative during short breaks, so I’m keeping myself busy with translation; doing it in snatches is quite feasible.

Another chapter of The Network State is ready, this time much more compact than the previous one. It concludes the second part of the book, in which history is presented as a trajectory, a kind of narrative created to justify changes in the present. In this chapter, a simple rule is formulated that the author urges creators of startup communities to follow: base it on only one commandment; do not try to implement a complex ideology with many independent moral statements right away—you’ll have time to cross-pollinate ideas with allies later, but at first, it’s better to concentrate.

In principle, libertarianism is quite reducible to a Single commandment, and usually, the principle “aggressive violence is bad” serves in this capacity (I am adapting this to the author’s style). So go ahead and build libertarian startup communities, Balaji has given his permission.

I am settling my pre-New Year’s debt and posting the translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State. It is absolutely monstrous in size, but at the same time, in my opinion, quite interesting. There are plenty of fresh thoughts scattered throughout this chapter, but the key point is that leftists and rightists are not some kind of static groups, but simply the tactics of a particular community in relation to power. There is a left-wing tactic — to overthrow the existing power. And there is a right-wing one — to preserve the existing power. And the practitioners of these tactics constantly replace one another: former leftists, upon coming to power, become rightists.

The author logically does not count libertarians as either left or right, but in his opinion, they have their own cycle: from a startup to a bureaucratized corporation, and then to the departure of the most free-thinking employees to found a new startup. He provides no recipes for counter-cyclical policy in this chapter; we shall see what happens next.

The translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is ready. While the previous chapter seemed overly long to me, oversaturated with facts and undersaturated with ideas, here the balance has more or less leveled out.

The author points out that since the world will soon stop revolving around the USA, it makes sense to prepare for this in advance, starting with the dissemination of new narratives and concepts that explain the state of affairs. After which he rolls out as many as four—here they are, from left to right, in the header.

Some of them, such as the frontier thesis, were more or less familiar to me; some considerations turned out to be quite new despite their simplicity—for example, the thesis that the future, in terms of the general level of centralization, will mirror the past in the coming years.

I simply cannot find the time to translate another chapter of Eric Mack’s book, and I really should, because a small donation came in for its translation. But The Network State is an urgent order, and I’m already struggling to maintain the agreed pace. So I feel slight pangs of guilt, but I’ll have to endure them for a while longer.

The translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is ready. The translation process was very, very tedious. After all, this tradition of meticulously chewing over the material is somewhat foreign to me. There is too much factual detail and too few thoughts in the text; I would have packed such things into appendices, as that is where factual detail belongs.

One might assume the problem is that the facts here are American, and much of what is mentioned is not particularly close to us. But no, if he were to chew over Chinese or Russian material, it’s unlikely I would find it any more interesting.

In general, the summary of this chapter is fully exhausted by its title, but your tastes may differ from mine. After all, from time to time, I am also asked to tell specific historical anecdotes to support my thoughts, so I fully admit that many people need exactly such anecdotes to be convinced. There are some here.