The Real World of Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State


Joel Garrod, St. Francis Xavier University

The Network State is angel investor Balaji Srinivasan’s (2022) recent attempt to transcend the nation-state form by suggesting an alternative version grounded in blockchain technology. Defined as a “highly online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world” (p. 9), the network state utilizes a blockchain-mediated system of cryptocurrency and smart contracts that is intended to eventually take over all existing functions of legacy nation-states. According to Srinivasan, by using cryptographic protocols, the network state is also able to ensure that a subscribers choice to leave or enter a network state is free and uncoerced. Through the deconstruction and reconstruction of the establishment’s history in one specific area (what he refers to as the ‘One Commandment’), Srinivasan believes that these purely digital network unions will increasingly attract subscribers, transitioning into network archipelagoes that put their subscribers capital to work to secure physical spaces for their operations. Like Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and the others that flirt with dark academia, Srinivasan is averse to critical scholarship, or ‘wokeness,’ defined in the book as “a theory of history and ethics that’s built on thousands of papers, on generations of academic humanists, on Foucault and Derrida and the like, on deconstruction and critical race theory and so on” (p. 182). We need not belabour the point that many of the schools of thought that authors typically lump together as wokeness are more likely to be at odds with one another than constituting a single, cohesive worldview. What is more important is that by treating these authors as producers of a “mostly evil doctrine, a sophisticated evil promoted in the name of good” (p. 182), we lose their valuable insights; in particular, the various forces leading to our current conjuncture, and what sorts of transformations they’re likely to engender. In this paper, my goal is to bring some of this material back in, and explore what network states look like when examined under the light of empirical critical social science. If, as David Harvey (2015) suggests, we want to “construct an alternative monetary system, which is actually much more democratic and much more socially constructed,” it is important to engage with popular interpretations of blockchain technology in order to explore how these ideas might actually work in the real world. As Ursala M. Franklin notes, technology, like democracy, includes ideas and practices; it includes, narratives, myth, and particular ideas about reality; and like democracy, technology changes our social and individual relationships. Against the idea that technology is apolitical, Franklin argued that it has a considerable impact on issues of justice, fairness, and equality. Utilizing Peter Fitting’s typology of right-wing utopias, and following H. G. Wells suggestion that the creation and criticism of utopias is the distinctive method of sociology, I argue that Srinivasan’s mistaken understanding of: (1) class and capitalism; (2) the origins and workings of the state; and (3) the myth of the frontier, make network states less a viable plan for a future society, and more a reflection of right-wing utopian thinking in an era of neoliberal crisis.

This paper will be presented at the following session: