Most Important Concepts:

Action Points:

Chapter Recap:

1 - Quickstart:

• A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

• Unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized.

2 - History as trajectory

• History is an applied subject, and you can’t start a new society without it.

Microhistory and Macrohistory

• The invention of the blockchain introduced a way to log history in a way that cannot be changed.
  • The old saying of ”History is written by the winner” could be obsolete, if historical events start being logged on-chain.

Political power and technological truth

• Every nation tells a history that favors the state itself.
• If war is politics by other means, then politics is war by other means.

God, State, and Network

• First there was God, then the State, and now the Network is the next leviathan.

People of God, people of the State, people of the Network

If the news is fake, imagine history

Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, Future is our oast

• The frontier provided an exit-valve for young ambitious men to establish themselves. When that path closed, they had to become union organizers, revolutionaries, or demagogues of some kind.