Balaji is famous for lots of things. One that's less well-known, but imo one of his most visionary takes, is the idea of the network state which lays out a description of how the state may evolve -- or is evolving, right now. This has been discussed a few times on SN, here is one of the more recent times. To me, this is the natural successor to the Sovereign Individual for the modern age.
Balaji had a tweet the other day about how the internet is the next America that I thought was interesting. He talks about how the colonists thought about themselves as English for a long time, but then eventually "migrated out" of England, mentally. They stopped thinking of themselves as English when the foundation of their lives shifted to America. Now, according to Balaji, the foundation of people's lives is the internet, and he's riffing on what that implies.
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I've been noodling on a similar idea for a while. Specifically, imagining all the networks I'm part of simultaneously. Inhabiting so many identities at once strikes me as a particular modern experience. This is relevant to SN, too -- I've once again crept up to spending a pretty egregious amount of time here, talking to people, digging into ideas, arguing. It's mostly extremely affirming. I feel, in many cases, that these are real relationships; more real, in some ways, than those with people I'm close to geographically.
People talk about how the internet destroys distance. That's not really right, but it does introduce a new distance metric, or actually, it introduces multiple of them that simultaneously structure our lives.
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Anyway, I'm trying to figure out how far this can really go.
It's so easy to talk about online life as a pathology. I've done it myself recently. You can get apocalyptic about it. But I wonder: what does online life look like, in its best realization? Do you, dear reader, think you're anywhere close to that? I'm certainly not. I don't even try that hard -- I mostly get worse and worse until I go off the rails and my job suffers and my meatspace life suffers, and then I get ascetic and disappear for a while -- binge and purge, basically.
And then I do it all again, my own personal halving cycle. What a stupid way to live.
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The other relevant piece is what this means for btc. Balaji has some interesting stuff to say about the role cryptocurrency plays in the network state, which I won't pick up for now. Most of you will hate it, I expect, although I don't, because I think the default discussion is quite unsophisticated about money's role in social coordination, and how it operates on many levels simultaneously, as discussed above. Money has always been how a group organizes itself; and there are more overlapping groups now than ever. Thinking that money is nothing more than Metcalfe's law misses the point.
You don't have to agree, though. We can let the data tell the story. The truth will come out.
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But that aside, btc is its best self when operating entirely online. It's grounded in physical reality through mining, but other than that it's a construct of total abstraction, and every time we sully it by bringing it to earth we suffer for it -- KYC, government interference, privacy loss, all of it. The thought of the net being its own place, not just as a metaphor, but as an actual locus for the lion's share of human interaction, makes you wonder how btc projects into that reality. Digital money that instantiates scarcity, serving to intermediate transactions for abstract non-rivalrous goods.
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I increasingly think this is the way btc finds escape velocity. It's a pain in the ass to sell coffee for btc, especially if the state doesn't want you to, because ultimately that coffee grounds out in the physical world: you need to buy beans, electricity, you need to pay your rent. Each link in that supply chain is an attack surface.
But software, or membership, or attendance, or music, or art, or other aspects of digital culture, or other stuff with no or minimal marginal cost -- abstract money can chase abstract goods, and nobody can stop it. And given the increasing importance of abstract goods in the concrete economy, this seems very interesting. This seems like the road that will get us there.
This is the real circular economy. Or the spherical economy, rather; the hyper-spherical economy.
That's my suspicion, anyway.