A ‘network state’ is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralised. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place.
In June 2022 Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, published an ebook entitled The Network State: How To Start a New Country. It is the latest in a flurry of utopian visions by self-styled digital visionaries, crypto believers and web 3.0 evangelists who are lining up to declare the death of the traditional concept of countries and nationhood.
In one case, a new ‘virtual’ country is already in development. “The nation state is outdated – it’s based on 19th-century thinking, and we aim to upend all of that,” Lauren Razavi tells me over Zoom from a bustling co-working space.
Razavi is the executive director of Plumia, a self-proclaimed ‘moonshot mission’ to build an internet country for digital nomads. Born in…
