My colleague, Polina Vertex’s review of the Network State Conference in Amsterdam provides a sharp, skeptical, yet insightful look at Balaji Srinivasan’s vision and the ecosystem of "parallel societies" emerging from it. Her critique focuses on the tension between high-concept internet idealism and the gritty realities of physical governance Network State Conference ‘2023 (PDF/slides)
Nansen.ID Squad Visited Balaji's Network State | Slava Solodkiy
The Network State conference in Amsterdam (2023) was less a roadmap to new sovereign entities and more a revealing cultural artifact: a gathering where technological ambition collided with political reality. The central promise — that one could "build a country on the internet" — functioned primarily as narrative gravity, pulling together founders, investors, creators, and ideologues who share a deep dissatisfaction with existing institutions.
At the heart of the Network State vision lies a deliberate abstraction of the state. Territory, coercion, welfare provision, infrastructure maintenance, and mundane governance are treated as legacy constraints rather than foundational features. What remains is a thin, aspirational core: identity, coordination, capital, and recognition. Wi‑Fi replaces roads; community replaces citizenship; capital substitutes for legitimacy.
This abstraction is rhetorically powerful but analytically fragile. States are boring not by accident, but because they metabolize complexity: garbage collection, zoning disputes, public health, and conflict mediation. By stripping these away, the Network State becomes less a state-in-waiting and more a lifestyle brand with political aesthetics.
One of the least examined — yet most consequential — assumptions in the Network State narrative is governance by analogy. Power is justified through the metaphor of the startup: founders as CEOs, citizens as users, exit as voice. This analogy quietly dissolves democratic accountability. Leaders are not elected, recalled, or constrained; they are followed, funded, or abandoned.
While framed as efficiency, this model reintroduces a familiar historical pattern: personalized authority without institutional checks. Comparing this to startup governance does not neutralize its political implications; it merely reframes despotism in innovation-friendly language.
Where the conference became genuinely interesting was not in its sovereign ambitions, but in its parallelism. Finance, education, research, media, and biomedical coordination already operate in partially autonomous layers atop nation-states. These systems do not seek immediate replacement of the state; they seek optionality.
Parallel finance (crypto, alternative payment rails), parallel education (AI tutors, fellowships, micro-credentials), parallel research (DAO grants, open science platforms), and parallel media (creator-first, community-governed platforms) demonstrate real traction. They succeed precisely because they do not require diplomatic recognition or territorial control.
These institutions act as pressure gradients. They expose inefficiencies, create competition, and occasionally force reform within legacy systems. Their power lies not in secession, but in credible exit.
A recurring tension throughout the conference was its narrow social bandwidth. Many projects implicitly target a globally mobile, capital-rich, culturally homogeneous elite. Blue-collar labor, care work, and mass public services appear only rhetorically, if at all. The result is a politics optimized for founders, not populations.
The aesthetic layer — memes, tattoos, NFTs, retreats — reinforces this exclusivity. Culture substitutes for consent; vibes substitute for legitimacy. This is not inherently malicious, but it sharply limits scale. A system that cannot absorb difference cannot become universal.
The most productive outcome of the Network State movement may not be new states, but better questions. Parallel institutions force legacy systems to justify themselves. They accelerate experimentation and expose complacency. But sovereignty remains stubbornly physical, coercive, and collective.
Network States, as imagined, are unlikely to materialize. Parallel institutions, however, already have.