OTNS: Prophets are dangerous and Capital doesn't care about your feelings

In this episode we spoke to Wassim Alsindi, founder of MIT's blockchain journal and the 0xSalon  research collective based in Trust in Berlin. During the discussion we spoke about the concepts explored in his pieces Prophet Motives & Knightwork States and
Necroprimitivism Rising. Wassim makes interesting connections between, the Crusades, the zero-sum mentality of network states, and capitalism's capturing of time.

Check out a previous episode to learn more about our framework for out network state alternative,  coordi-nations.

JOIN THE BLOCKCHAINGOV DISCORD SERVER HERE IF YOU WANT TO TAKE PART IN THE CONTINUED OVERTHROW AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE RISE OF COORDI-NATIONS.

Overthrowing the Network State (OTNS) is a series in collaboration with Blockchaingov where we critique The Network State  by Balaji Srinivasan while also pulling out the salvageable parts and concepts in discussion with a variety of guests. You can find the first episode of OTNS where we give our initial criticisms and  alternatives here.

Blockchaingov is a 5-year long, transdisciplinary research effort aimed at restoring trust in institutions at the community and global levels, by promoting better on chain and off chain distributed governance practices. Throughout the series, each discussion will include me and a member of Blockchaingov with either a new guest each episode or a discussion between us to tackle various topics from the book.

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Hi everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist podcast. I'm Josh, I'm here with Pimavera and we are continuing our overthrow of the network states with our guest right here today. I'm with him yet Trust, an artist collective in Berlin, and we're going to be talking about some of his work that he's been doing. That's been very closely related and aligned with a lot of the stuff that we've been doing around the network states. But maybe, to kind of start us off, waseem, would you like to give us a quick introduction to you and your work and, yeah, kind of the stuff that you've been doing related to network states.

Speaker 2: 0:47

Sure, yeah, thanks, josh and Pima, it's great to be here. So my name is Waseem Waseem Zalcendi. I have a background as a scholarly researcher in the physical sciences. Primarily I founded MIT's blockchain journal, co-rounded that for a couple of years called Crypto Economic Systems. I currently edit the computational law report journal, also at the MIT Media Lab, and founded and administer a collective based here at Trust in Berlin called the Zero Exalon, where we have an event series residency program and write various kinds of theoretical and creative works. And parallel to that, I have a solo practice mostly around philosophy of technology. These days and I suppose what's most relevant to this conversation is I've been working on a project called Profit Motives, p-r-o-p-h-e -T. It's a play on words and that is specifically related to the kind of emerging notions and discourses around network states, paying particular attention to the human characters that might be around these kind of frontier imaginaries and the dreams, colonial dreams and imaginaries that accompany those, as they people try to use technology to reshape the world map.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Yeah, so, like a lot of the things that you had written in, you have a piece called Profit Motives.

Speaker 2: 2:20

It's called Profit Motives and Night Work States on Zero Ex Folklore.

Speaker 1: 2:24

Right, yeah, yeah. So, going through it, I was resonating a lot with kind of what you're putting down. And then very recently we were at Protocolburg, which is an ETH Berlin event, and you gave a talk kind of spanning the gamut of like Bodeyard to Petro, masculinity to Bitcoin to Network States. Jalat was really, really good and I congratulate the organizers of the event for not having any sponsors. I think that, like, your talk might not have been allowed if there were sponsors, but it was really really good. I think a lot of people have received it quite well. But maybe we can actually, maybe we can go through that a little bit and then go into, yeah, how this all kind of relates.

Speaker 2: 3:10

Sure, I mean like, where should we start? So the talk I gave at Protocolburg and the other day was a somewhat hand-fisted attempt to squeeze 1000 years of past, present and possible futures of governance human governance, into 25 minutes, so you can imagine I was glossing over quite a lot of details there. But yeah, really I was starting with the nature of the market, the nature of speculation and the nature of the cycles that go around those. And yeah, thank you for pointing out that the jumping off point was Bodeyard. It's not often that I get to wheel Bodeyard's later work out and I think it's very important, very relevant for the world that we exist in today, particularly if you're interested in tokenized assets, blockchains and commodities, virtual commodities. I've got a couple of quotes I could read them now.

Speaker 2: 4:10

So this is from Bodeyard's later work. There's one called a book called Symbolic Exchange and Death, and here's a quote. We now live in a world dominated by the free play of the monetary sign that is beyond reference to any real of production, or even a monetary referent in the form of a gold standard. In this world, the idea of a real value of equities, of commodities, of houses, of anything is meaningless, as what matters instead it's not value per se, but infinite speculation. This new world is marked by the emergence of a brothel of capital, not for prostitution but for substitution and commutation.

Speaker 2: 4:50

So this is actually Bodeyard, leaving behind this very well worn notion of the simulacrum. As you know, the representations of the real surpassed the real in their magnitude. Leaving the real behind, we just get these kind of facsimiles that bear no reference, bear no resemblance to the original underlying forms, and instead he's building a three stage taxonomy or genealogy, leading us to this point of like symbolic exchange, moving from the raw commodity forms, like things like oil, sacks of corn, basic commodities, resources, widgets, sure To refined ones they're acted upon by labor process goods, let's say production economies, and then we end up with the symbolic forms, these post social monetary signs the meme economies, the Shiba Inus and the Pepe coins of today, right, right.

Speaker 1: 5:50

No, I think it's super relevant for the crypto world.

Speaker 1: 5:54

Obviously, like crypto is filled with pure speculation with no value underlying it beyond just kind of like knowledge of the meme and like knowledge of the knowledge about the meme and like being able to, you know, navigate these like very, very strange kind of a information dense type of spaces.

Speaker 1: 6:15

In my book I used I used the board actually to talk about like speculation or is the spectacularness of like of NFTs that like really garnered a lot of people's attention. But I really like this and so I think for me what this is kind of getting at maybe in the if I remember correctly in the presentation and how I connected to some of the stuff that you wrote in profit motives is kind of like the I don't know the deep this, this symbolic form, also kind of projects a future for a lot of people can project kind of what their desires or like some other future world in which maybe probably they are better off, and so at least it provides a scaffold like a substrate with on which we can project our desires, whether we know we're doing that or not, these things seem to afford that, at the least.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Yeah, so there's I mean there's there's speculation as far as like financial speculation, which is about like a speculation about the future, but also that future has to come with a narrative of like what, how the world will potentially look. And technology is like this fantastic medium to kind of think about, like, oh, all my problems will be solved because technology will will solve it.

Speaker 2: 7:32

It's speculation in multiple senses of the word.

Speaker 1: 7:35

Yeah, and so I think this kind of particular features or properties of I mean, the tech world and speculation and how capitalism has kind of a transformed in this way, allows for people to, I guess you start to get into like religion and like in cults and how people are able to like there is a bit of a cult around, like a spiritualism around a lot of technology thing.

Speaker 1: 7:58

There's, of course, like California ideology and all these other, plenty of books written about that, but I definitely set in the crypto world. There is definitely like this intersection of people who are like digital nomads and into kind of a form of spirituality. That's clearly for me, I guess, you know, with globalization happening, this de territorialization of all these cultural norms, people are looking for something to connect with others because we no longer have these kind of cultural institutions and practices that are like passed down through generations of people. We live in a much more spread out world, I guess, or like a world where we know a whole lot more people from a lot of different places and a lot of ways. That's good and other ways it has kind of like we don't know what to do with ourselves and so we look for like these, these figures, these profits that we can follow to take us to Zion, you know which is a promised land.

Speaker 2: 8:54

I would argue also, the institutions that we relied on, we saw as the the foundations of whatever nation state. Societies seem to be in decline, like everywhere I look, I see that as well, and so there's also that backdrop as well. That seems like the old world is dying and people are looking around for, for, for something else to believe in. I also think that, with blockchain related stuff in particular, because it is such a dehumanized, inhuman, de personalized space, however you want to think about it, there are no, you know, humans installed in explicit functions in these networks, and so in these kind of natively the horizontalized spaces, there is just a kind of a vacuum and a gentle vacuum, and people can just walk into those right and put on Laurel wreaths and tunics and robes and call themselves things like Bitcoin Jesus right, an eternal power vacuum that is just being a yeah, whatever the latest meme gets like, feels in that, that vacuum, which of course, also relates to the amount of money they may have.

Speaker 1: 9:56

But, yeah, do you want to get to? I guess so. Like maybe the the profit motive. So there's a plan, word, right, profit motive, as in, like you know, capitalism being sort of run by the profit motive, or the need for profit in order for companies and, yeah, for very wealthy people to continue to exist. But then also profit as in a literal, like religious profits, like how do those, how do those come together?

Speaker 2: 10:25

I feel like yeah is a obviously a play on words, and the reason that I've gone with this plan words as the cornerstone of this work is because I feel that these two things seem to be intimately connected. In our market, capitalism, mediated reality that we exist in today, and so everything, especially in the blockchain space, everything seems to be a market or an asset, or quantum, quantitizable or measurable, or there's a desire to reduce or to parameterize or to quantify these things, and then, once we've got these parameterizable, quantifiable, measurable variables, then speculation occurs. So there's always this, you know, market based speculation.

Speaker 1: 11:14

You can always make a trend analysis if you have quantize.

Speaker 2: 11:17

Yeah, yeah. And so there is an element of divination of possible futures with you know, number go up, number go down. There's a very basic and direct motive for wanting to know what's going to happen tomorrow in the market place. And so I think that's like the first kind of like conceptual jumping off point, this kind of wanting to see into the future a little bit, and that's what a profit PROPHET promises. Through natures of prophecy, they're offering wisdom or knowledge of things which are yet to pass.

Speaker 2: 11:56

And so I think that this desire to see into the future for financial reasons, can be connected to the desire to and the decay of the institutions around us, the lack of noticeable lead like role models in the world around us, and how they're somehow started being replaced, from different spheres of life, with titans of industry. That seems to be happening more and more, that the Elizabeth Holmes and the Elon Musk's of this world seem to be becoming these I wouldn't even say prophetic figures, quite you know, not as bluntly as that but people are projecting all kinds of divine or extra mundane qualities onto these people, and so this part of it is the will of the people and the desire to reach the promised land of whatever capital accumulation or meaning in life. There's something beyond the disengagement of the world, but also there's something about the kind of person that wants to be a prophet or that wants to be a leader or that wants to be a guru, something like that.

Speaker 3: 13:10

Okay, vassim, I'm super excited about this episode.

Speaker 3: 13:13

I think I figured out what we're gonna talk about.

Speaker 3: 13:18

So, because you talk about prophets and I think that we need to also talk about self-fulfilling prophecies, especially, I think, in this particular blockchain context, in which the self-fulfilling prophecy becomes self-fulfilling because there is enough money to actually act upon the world.

Speaker 3: 13:43

And in order to actually get this money, you need to get enough traction and network effect around your token-based projects. And if you manage to be a good prophet, that is like vocalizing a particular vision of the future and then if you get enough traction around that particular vision of the future, then you're also going to get enough of the funds that will make it possible for this prophecy to self-fulfill itself, because now you have the money to actually make it happen. So I think it's slightly, I guess, more sophisticated endeavor than just being like it's not just being a prophet, it's actually being a self-fulfilling prophet, and the reason that people do act as prophets is because, essentially, there is real profits in the economic sense that if you are a successful prophet, you're also going to get enough profits and therefore, you also become a more successful prophet because you can enact your prophecy.

Speaker 2: 14:49

It's a cycle of prophecy and prophecy there, pr F P H C Y and PR F I C Y, if that's the word.

Speaker 1: 14:58

Yeah, there's plenty of. I was watching there's a little series on Netflix called how to be a Cult or how to Start a Cult, or something like that, and they talk about the one of the last ones, I think, is the Korean one. I mean a lot of them. They're just like associated with like yeah, clearly like helping people make money within their cult.

Speaker 3: 15:17

So Waseem the topic I want to introduce. That is just a little preliminary introduction. Are you acquainted with the notion of hyperstition?

Speaker 2: 15:28

Yes, of course I co-wrote the book introduction to the PhD thesis of Nikolai's wife recently, so I'm quite immersed in the post-CCRU.

Speaker 3: 15:43

So I think that's exactly what we want to talk during this episode is to which extent is the North Pole State an hyperstition, to which extent this type of speculation is actually manifesting itself into reality because of this hyperstition, and to which extent is the network state, this multi-dimensional conceptual entity that is expanding, but into the future, by prophecies of how the world could be given a network state, but also extending itself into the past by actually claiming back territory of like what other people were doing, all of a sudden we can look at it as like hey look, that was a network state, but actually it's just the hyperstition that is just claiming new territories into the future and into the past. So I think that will be a very interesting little hole to dig into. Do you have, like, any preliminary feedback on that?

Speaker 2: 16:43

I like the idea of hyperstition acting through time, so, as I said, I co-wrote the forward to the book edition of Anna Greenspan's PhD thesis. That's called Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, and it is about capital, the desire of capital to control, manipulate and, more precisely, engineer flows of time, and so what we're talking about here is hyperstition acting through time, in a way, and so I would argue that capitalism has always had this intimate relationship with time and with power. So there's a lot there for us to discuss. I think Prima Very interesting.

Speaker 3: 17:21

Yeah, so let's do that if you're happy. So my initial hypothesis is that I would say that the network state I think we can start from the position that it is an hyperstition. Maybe, for the sake of the audience, shall we introduce the concept of hyperstition.

Speaker 2: 17:43

Sure.

Speaker 3: 17:44

Do you want to go for it?

Speaker 2: 17:46

Well, I'll give a simple introduction and then if you want to add to it more, then we can do that. So hyperstition is kind of one level up from a superstition, from a belief that is maybe not rooted in logic, maybe it's something that's mystical or extra mundane, let's say, and hyperstition is something that is willed to existence through desires and actions and the flows of libidos, and whether those are to do with capital or whether there are other kinds of libidinal flows, and that is the kind of manifestation of a hyperstition. It's come out of a school of thought called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, the CCRU, which was based at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, and people know them as the Accelerationists these days.

Speaker 1: 18:44

Yeah, my book was published through Repeater Books with Mark Fisher, who was part of the CCRU as well.

Speaker 2: 18:50

Yeah, they contain multitudes. I said hyperstition maybe came out from a bit more of the reactionary side of the CCRU.

Speaker 1: 18:57

Sure yeah, I recently did an interview with Nick Sernick about this as well.

Speaker 3: 19:02

So maybe I can provide a more straightforward definition. Please agree or disagree with it. So for me, you have the superstition, and the superstition is when you have a particular event that is happening in the present which is somehow affecting your future. If I break a mirror, I'm going to have seven years of bad luck, whatever.

Speaker 3: 19:33

The hyperstition is kind of like the reverse in some way, meaning that it's when an event from the future is actually affecting the present, which is very different as well from the Self-fulfilling prophecy, which is where an event from the future is affecting the future. So the Self-fulfilling prophecy, the goal is I'm saying something about the future, because I want this future to manifest itself, and the more I say it, the more it might manifest itself. Whereas the hyperstition and this is the deductive process, whereas with hyperstition you engage into the process of abduction, so you start from the future and then from there you abduct into what needs to happen in the present in order for this thing to actually increase chances of manifestation. So it's kind of like you are actually instrumentalizing the future in order to modify the present. The goal of the hyperstition is to change the way in which people behave today, as opposed to achieving a particular endpoint into the future. Do you agree with that?

Speaker 2: 20:43

I won't oppose it. I want to continue to pick on this. I think it's a really interesting framing of it, addressing it in these temporalities, and I sketched out a three by three matrix and I wonder if there's something that could be developed into a schema there at some point.

Speaker 3: 21:04

Okay, do you want to talk about it?

Speaker 1: 21:06

What is it?

Speaker 2: 21:08

I haven't finished it, we're just talking here, but not this idea where we're talking about the future influencing the present or the present influencing the future or the past influencing the present.

Speaker 3: 21:20

There's another word that we made up, but I think it's a very nice word which is called retrospection. So retrospection is when the past is affecting the present, and this is always the hyperstition instrumentalizing the past in order to actually affect the present. So when we think about I really want to go into the network state topic because I think this is a fascinating intersection of discussion the network state has an hyperstition, meaning that this is this multi-dimensional, atemporal entity that lives in the present, in the past, in the future. The goal of the hyperstition is to come into being, and in order to do that, it needs to attack on all temporal directions. So what I think is really interesting with the network state is that all of a sudden this narrative came about.

Speaker 3: 22:10

Balaji was clearly not the first one to bring the concept of the network state. We actually did some research and the network states have been used to say very different things ever since the emergence of networks and internet and so forth, but somehow Balaji has brought as associated with a particular hyperstation and all of Sudan. It has created a lot of traction, and this traction is about generating a lot of project. Today, that all of Sudan logos, I think, is a good example, a lot of projects that were not necessarily doing anything related to the network state, but now they are a network state project. So it's interesting to see how the present is actually being shifted by initiative that all of Sudan are attaching themselves into this higher level hyperstation of the network state.

Speaker 3: 23:03

It's interesting also to see that those initiatives are actually somehow managing to raise funds because they are attaching themselves to the narrative of the network state and therefore increasing the chances of the network state, as they are envisioning or prophesizing it, to come into being. And then, even more interestingly, I think there is now and I think you were talking about it with, like the Crescent States, there is also going back into the past and somehow claiming that something that perhaps had absolutely nothing to do with the network state, because the concept didn't even exist. But let's actually take it on and let's actually prove that the network state existed already in the past by just reinterpreting, through retrospection, a particular behavior that was happening in light of this new conceptual entity.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Yeah, I think the word retrospection is really powerful in this sense as, like you know, as a re-naravatization or a historical revisionism, and we can get to the Crusades and stuff later if we want to.

Speaker 2: 24:07

But I did read a very interesting book recently by Christopher Tiemann, called the Invention of the Crusades, that the concept of the Crusade wasn't around at the time of the Crusades, at least the first ones that mattered. This concept appeared at the earliest, the 13th century, whereas the first Crusade happened at the end of the 11th century and all the action basically occurred in the first 100 years. But there wasn't really this idea of the Crusade at the start. So the question is was there a Crusade in the 11th century? Were there Crusades in the first 100 years? They weren't called that and so events from the past are always liable and pliable to be manipulated, to re-narativized, retro-stitianized by people seeking to control or manipulate or shape flows of narratives, of thoughts, of ideas, for whatever profit or profit motives that they might have. And I think it's a really, yeah, very interesting concept, very powerful concept of retrosdiction here.

Speaker 3: 25:12

Great, so let's dig into that.

Speaker 3: 25:16

Do you have a level of a particular opinion or a general understanding of the extent to which the like that, if there is an hyperstition somewhere which I think Balaji is perhaps a victim of and I think we, as coordinations we're also a victim of, we are actually part of the same hyperstition.

Speaker 3: 25:38

We are just manifesting this hyperstition in a different manner, and I think this is kind of like the work that we started doing at the beginning of this podcast is like what is this kind of like common denominator that is actually unifying all those things that are abiding by the same name of the network state, hyperstition, and therefore maybe we can try to delineate what is this hyperstition about? Right, because, Evento, we constantly criticize Balaji and I don't know if Balaji criticizes us or just ignores us, but you know, evento, we're criticizing. In fact, we're actually way more allied than the majority of people. We're actually part of the same hyperstition. So what is this hyperstition? What is this thing? What is this conceptual entity that came and that is like spanning across all these temporal dimensions and that is actually motivating us to study this concept of coordination, new networks of varieties, network state and so forth.

Speaker 2: 26:46

I mean, I don't have the answer off the top of my head to such an enormous question.

Speaker 2: 26:51

I wonder if we might be able to probe at some of the possible drivers for what is bringing us to these kinds of conversations and concepts and notions. And I would also say, prima, that it's natural for us to not get unwell with our neighbors, whether that's in a territorial or conceptual sense, the fact that you might, as coordinations, have a lot in common with the Balaji notion of network states, and then that makes one feel uneasy because we find some aspects of that grotesque or unpalatable or unfair or unjust. I think that's entirely natural. We've always been suspicious of our neighbors and I do wonder if the concept of disenchantment might be a nice place for us to start. And then we can maybe talk about things like voice and exit and why people might be looking to make new kinds of sovereignities, new kinds of institutions, extitutions, and some of the motivations for that might be. We could frame them in terms of withdrawals or exits or dissatisfaction with what we have, the situation that we inhabit in the present day.

Speaker 3: 28:10

Yeah, I think that also like in, if we think about, you know, we can think about memetic warfare, but we can also think about hyperstitial warfare.

Speaker 3: 28:20

I think it's also like, as you mentioned, that there is this kind of like erosion of trust and disenchantment towards an alternative and existing, like an established hyperstition, which is the nation state, which is, by the way, not that old, you know, it's not something that existed forever.

Speaker 3: 28:42

It is an hyperstition that has really established itself in modern societies and that is somehow losing a little bit of its hegemony and therefore, maybe that is what because of the existing hyperstition of nation states somehow losing its dominant position, then now there is a new opportunity for those alternative hyperstitions that maybe have always existed but were not very vocal because they didn't have much of a chance, and now they can see this chance and so they are jumping in right. And again, I think I'm wondering actually, like my question is actually more like, let's figure it out I don't know if the network state promoted by biology is part of the same hyperstition as the coordination that we are promoting, or whether we are actually two separate hyperstitions that are both trying to take advantage of the weakening of the existing hyperstition of nation states.

Speaker 2: 29:41

Yeah two, it could be two surfers riding the same wave perhaps.

Speaker 3: 29:45

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 29:49

Yeah, super interesting. Josh, you lifted your mic to your mouth. Do you have something to?

Speaker 1: 29:54

No, no, no, no great.

Speaker 2: 29:55

Yeah, I am. So, yeah, we talked about the idea of nation states being a hyperstition and network states possibly being a competing hyperstition. So then, if we're in the logics of blockchain land, I immediately start to think of a marketplace of ideologies or a marketplace for hyperstitions, or some kind of competitive, zero-sum arena for all of these ideas to play out in some kind of collective memetic imagination. So these are all just ideas, organizational concepts, notions that get implemented over time, and then they you know some of them stick like we end up with nation states. We all live in a nation state now.

Speaker 2: 30:37

Before we lived in empires or dukedoms near feudal you know, smaller, near feudal territories, and so the way that we seem to organize our units of human government, our, you know, the units of human administration, that seems to change over time.

Speaker 2: 31:00

And I guess we see these kind of cataclysmic events through history which lead to the reorganization of the map of the world and the territories that it constitutes is constituted of things like the ends of wars, peace treaties, the collapse of empires, whether that's the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire, whether it's the end of World War I and World War II and we see these things reorganizing things, fracturing, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the formation of the United States and these seem to be, you know, events which either strengthen or weaken the paradigm of nation states.

Speaker 2: 31:39

And I wonder if the consolidation of nation states into transnational blocks so let's say let's call the United States a federation of it's a federation of states right that we made into a gigantic nation which has exerted its hegemony over the world for quite some time now. The Soviet Union tried to be something like that as well, but it ultimately crumbled or partially disintegrated. We have these kind of pseudo transnational associations like NATO, conocat, brics and some of those, like the rise, they fall, or the power and the influence they seem to have seems to shift up and down as the constituent members change or grow or weaken. I wonder if we can look at these shifting sands of the Organization of Nations and States and their transnational assemblies and consolidations thereof as perhaps showing us a way where the network state concept might fit in or might become real in an organizational sense.

Speaker 1: 32:48

For me. It seems that I'm not sure if I'm as well read on the concept of hyperstition, but from what I remember reading, if I remember correctly, there's a lot of thought about capital itself being a kind of hyperstition. Throughout history that has, with the advent of capitalism it kind of came forward, whereas before societies were doing everything they could to suppress capital for a long time and now capital has been unleashed. I don't know if you've ever read the work of, I mean, marx talks about it, but Ian Wright is a really nice writer. He talks about focusing on Marx calling capital a real god, how religions in the past were fake gods. But capital is a real one because it exists and it's instantiated through physical things and makes people physically move or else they die.

Speaker 2: 33:44

We had a bit actually in the profit motives network states essay which was drawing on the capitalism's transcendental time machine. Work I did with some colleagues last year where I posed a question has capitalism replaced God with quantized time? Because the efficiency and the measurement and precision of time is one of the key drivers of capitalist productivity and the power that the wielders of capital use on the labor classes.

Speaker 1: 34:10

To me. I think there's something to say about capital being a time machine in many ways, just kind of taking from the future. In many ways, especially if you think about it in terms of the ecological crisis, it's taking a lot from the future, potentially.

Speaker 2: 34:26

We can argue Also credit and expectations. So think about the market and values of stocks on the market or the value of coins in a marketplace. A lot of that is predicated on expected future values.

Speaker 1: 34:39

In relation to hyperstation being this kind of temporal creation of a concept or of a particular zeitgeist. Capital is this great vehicle for doing that literally. In many ways, for me, network state is really the continuation of the hyperstation of capital, kind of like moving towards its ultimate conclusion, because I mean, we had nation states. I think was maybe created from the hyperstation of a nation, because before, for a long time the idea of a nation was kind of like a vague one. I think in history it wasn't only until after the world wars or during the world wars a bit before maybe, that like nations are kind of being consolidated into a particular state for some kind of Nobody had passports before World War One, pretty much, so the idea of the nation as a kind of enclosure for its subjects didn't really seem to exist.

Speaker 2: 35:36

People could just travel wherever they wanted to travel. If you had the money, you could just travel there.

Speaker 1: 35:42

Which came out of a need for maybe like protection. I guess, in increasing conflict within at least in Europe, and sort of like the increasing encroachment of maybe like imperialism from neighboring states, there was this need for loss of trust. A loss of trust, a loss of trust, probably as well.

Speaker 2: 36:02

Yeah, and there was this kind of situation where the bigger one fish gets, the more scared the small fish are. So if there's a big nation and there's a bunch of small feudal territories, then there's a driver for them, for their mutual defense, for their mutually assured survival, or to then start to consider consolidating into what we might today call a nation state, to avoid just being invaded, just being conquered.

Speaker 1: 36:34

Sure sure, yeah, I mean look at Switzerland, or whatever.

Speaker 2: 36:37

Switzerland used to be each of the cantons well, not the cantons themselves, but the districts of Switzerland used to be nation states in themselves, and they're only being country not that long ago.

Speaker 1: 36:47

So like for me, like network states, because capital has this like the state was created as a way to kind of like consolidate power and protection and therefore it also became a vehicle for mediating class conflict and therefore also like provided kind of like welfare and all these types of things that we now kind of take for granted as existing for a lot of people, depending on where you are and so.

Speaker 1: 37:13

But the thing is capital, of course, is this like infinite kind of de-territorialization as it can and re-territorialization into something else in order to like create new markets, to like create more capital? It's just like a giant amoebic thing that's trying to consume everything and turn everything into capitalist markets and, like I don't know, to me the network state seems like a way to kind of de-territorialize the ultimate territory that we have like in existence right now, which provides like albeit like not wonderful protection for a lot of people, depending on your status of like aligning with the identity of the nation or not, but it provides some for some people enough so that like people want to protect it and I think for people I mean maybe like more on the left like feel that it's something to be protected because it's at least what we have.

Speaker 2: 38:09

I mean, in the absence of it, what is there for the disenfranchised?

Speaker 1: 38:14

Yeah, not much, I mean. I think for some people the idea would be like it would then force people to create mutual networks, but it's like not a guarantee and I think many people depending on how disenfranchised you are and how much of maybe a minority you are in your particular context like you probably won't be doing well without a yeah all.

Speaker 2: 38:34

I can see, is drivers towards increased inequality. And, you know, depends on your views as to whether you think that's okay or not. I personally think that's not great. And so you know, the safety nets that we have today, that nations, that some nation states provide. I would hope that they would continue. And while we're talking about the functions of the state, you know I don't want to bang the drama of the Crusader kingdoms too much, but the, what later became like the nightly orders, such as the night's temple, the night's hospital, the night's hospital. They provided theological training, education, medical treatment, healthcare, protection of travelers, security, logistical distribution, transportation support, communication, taxes and levies, and financial instruments such as ledgers of credit, economics and directive, offensive capabilities, military, which is most of the functions of a modern nation state, if you slice it in that way. Right.

Speaker 1: 39:36

Yeah, so, but like, yeah, I think. Anyways, just saying that I think for me the network's sake is really like an attempt to, I don't know, take, take even more out of the world by removing the very little bit of what's territorialized by.

Speaker 3: 39:54

Yeah, it's like a matter of I don't know if it's like capital as much as privatization, which I guess might be correlated with capital, but it seems to me like at least the, the, the network state proposed through Balaji is about.

Speaker 3: 40:16

There is some things that are currently done by the nation state. We can actually do them through private means. We it's basically we can privatize those services and eventually, if we manage to privatize all of those services, why not privatizing the territory as well? Right, and then the problem is that all the students, the only way that you can really protect yourself against the state is that you need to. These private territories have to become public territory of a new state so that you, you are fenced against whatever possible invasion of the nation state, which is also a little bit wishful thinking, perhaps, but to me, like, I feel like the, the, the superstition that Balaji is, is is acting upon, it's almost the one of like hyper, hyper liberal capitalism, of why are we using this, this public sector, in order to do things that the private sector could do just as well, if not better?

Speaker 1: 41:56

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Speaker 2: 42:40

I'm reminded of the notions of special economic zones and charter cities as some kind of like you know halfway houses between nation states and network states, and there's a great book by Quince Labolian called Crack Up Capitalism. Yeah, yeah, we yeah, you're familiar with probably your readers are quite familiar with too which is also getting at this idea of either privatization and or capitalism punching holes in the map of nation state territories to gain some kind of whatever, either localized sovereignty or that some kind of relaxation of the labor laws of the you know the rules of the game in that nation. I often think of blockchains as jurisdictionless free ports, and so to me it's no surprise that blockchains would be an architecture that people might use to affect these kinds of zones of exception.

Speaker 1: 43:35

Yeah, I think I don't know if you know this, but like in the at Zuzalu network state, the network state section was paired up with charter cities.

Speaker 2: 43:44

Right, yes, and I know about Prospera and things like that.

Speaker 1: 43:46

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:46

So yeah, I know that that was kind of their aligned concepts for sure.

Speaker 1: 43:50

Yeah, which to me I feel like kind of it gives the game away a little bit of what ultimately I feel like they want is just a special economic zone than they do network of SCZs and charter cities or something.

Speaker 2: 44:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 44:07

Do we want to maybe go into the crusades a bit more, and I think one of the things that we want to talk about in this interview is kind of thinking about what is like after the network state. You know, let's say, I mean, like I think which is an interesting question to always ask yourself if you are trying to imagine a future is like. I mean, I think this is a question that sometimes I think socialists should ask themselves like what do you do five minutes after the revolution? You know, like, of course, you party, maybe for the nights, but what do you do the next day?

Speaker 2: 44:38

Yeah, I think that we often that's human nature for us to be so focused on the sort of eschatological moment. The goal of what we're trying to do, the thing that we've been driving towards, what the TOS is purpose is driving us towards that we don't think so much about, we rush in, we don't think about how to do the thing after it, after the mutiny, after the revolution, after the network state, and obviously the network state as a concept is still largely hypothetical at the moment. So we can't, we don't have data, we don't have information, we don't have lived experiences to have anthropological reports of what happens after someone makes a network state. So but what we do have is almost a thousand years of history since the Crusader kingdoms were set up by orders, like the Knights Hospital and Knights Templar in the Levant, in the Middle East, in the areas that would now be Turkey, syria, lebanon, jordan and Israel, and so in the late 11th century, the Pope Urban II made a call for a divine war, in some senses, to take back Christendom, to take back Jerusalem in the name of Christianity from the Muslims. And a few years later there were a couple of like weirdly peer-to-peer crusades that we don't talk about too much. There was this people's crusade, where a couple of prophets one was called Peter the Hermit, which led a bunch of kind of rag clad, toothless vagabonds through Asia Minor what we now call it Turkey towards the Levant, and they didn't get very far. But then the Knights Kings and the Knights showed up with chain mail and armor and siege weaponry a couple of years later, and the Arabs were fighting amongst themselves, as people tend to do, in the absence of a greater enemy, and they were disorganized and unprepared.

Speaker 2: 46:26

And so, in the wake of the first crusade, which was at the end of the 11th century, several Crusader kingdoms were set up in the Levant, and collectively we call them Autremers. There's the County of Edessa, principality of Antioch, county of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and one of the heuristic notions I'm exploring is that these crusader kingdoms were arguably examples of prototypical network states. I don't think we can map these things one to one, but there are kind of an interesting device with which to explore possible resonances. And so, once we've set up the kingdoms, well, that's great mission accomplished. But what happens next? And so there was a series of other events in the Middle East, as you can imagine, the people that were dispossessed of their territories and their homes weren't going to take that lying down and they redoubled their efforts, gathered, united, under a series of commanders, ultimately, under the Arab-ized Kurd, salah al-Din Saladin retook Jerusalem and Tripoli and, I believe, antioch and then Edessa. So for about a century the primarily Frankish knights, french German knights, with a few Brits and Italians in there as well, held those territories and they spent another century or so trying to get them back.

Speaker 2: 47:57

I think there was something very interesting, as these the Crusades are numbered in a way that's also quite interesting where you only get a numbered Crusader for king. A European king leads it. That's an official kind of like whatever approved crusade, they're legitimated, they're legitimized crusade, whereas all these other kind of adventures or sorties or expeditions or skirmishes that didn't get officially kind of canonized in that particular system. So the first crusade the Franks took the lands, made the kingdoms. The second crusade was a stalemate. The third crusade was a loss and by this point they were out pretty much by the end of the 12th century they were basically out of the Levant. They retreated to Cyprus, an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, not far from those places.

Speaker 2: 48:47

The fourth crusade for me is one of the most interesting for going to talk about what might come after a network state. The idea was to go to Egypt, alexandria, where the Ayyubid dynasty was centered, that's Saladin's. So they were going to strike at the root. Rather than go to the Promised Land itself, the Holy Land, they would go to the home territory and take major Mediterranean port. So the Knights Templar were charged with leading this expedition and they commissioned the merchant state of Venice for a whole year to build ships for them, so they would travel through the Mediterranean directly to Egypt, not go through the land. Traveling over land was a disaster, so they made it much more efficient to travel overseas.

Speaker 2: 49:29

The idea was in the crowdfunding Patreon model. The noble people that showed up and took the cross that arrived in Venice would pay off the Templars, so the Venetians. To make it all possible. Not enough people came to Venice to pay the debts. The Templars entered the service of the Venetians. They became a mercenary army of the Venetians and then the Venetians were calling the shots. And the Venetians are I wouldn't say they were. From my read of this, my primitive read of medieval history, they didn't seem very ideological at all. They were merchants.

Speaker 1: 50:03

It was about money for them they were like hypercapitalists in a merchant mercantile sense Is it interesting points where capital, and maybe like the hyperstition of capital and God, or maybe in conflict, have a little power struggle.

Speaker 2: 50:16

Well, here God enters, or whatever the divine army enters, the service of capital. And so they got sent first to what's called Zara, what's called Zadah now it's a town in Croatia and so, as the fleet arrived, they were going to loot and ransack it, take their stuff and then take over the town. And so, as the fleet arrived, the inhabitants of the town painted crosses on their houses, not only to remind the arrivals arriving at armies that they were Christians, but they were indeed crusaders. And that did not stop them from trashing the place. And then, even more remarkably, they went to Constantinople, which was then the seat of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the rump state that succeeded.

Speaker 2: 51:04

They continued on the traditions of the Roman Empire, with Orthodox Christianity after the breakup or the beginning of the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and they sacked Constantinople as well, killing no small number of Christians. And so that is a little bit of a. You know it's not a pleasant story, but for me there's a little portent in there about what might come after the network state, if capital is allowed to kind of rule unfettered, if capital is given the supremacy that it seems to desire or be ordained for, and if it takes supremacy over God or the church or other institutions, then you get all of these kind of like wild, unforeseen, unintended, kind of grotesque consequences.

Speaker 1: 51:51

Capital doesn't care about your feelings or your God.

Speaker 2: 51:54

Yeah, I mean, capital is its own pantheon, its own pantheon of gods. It doesn't care about yours.

Speaker 1: 52:01

Yeah, yeah, so we were speaking beforehand that the crusades are an interesting example of kind of like, you know, kind of like network states in that there is, I guess there is like they were an aligned community of Christians who wanted to have land that they can live out their Christian fantasies in the Promised Land.

Speaker 2: 52:26

They didn't exactly crowdfund the territory.

Speaker 1: 52:29

let's say I mean they, yeah, they they.

Speaker 2: 52:33

The crowdfunded, the means to take the territory Forcibly crowdfunded. They did have recognized leaders, so it was all like no woman from France. Pretty much they became the kings of these, like the king of Jerusalem was bought when the first of a Boloin, I believe. Hmm.

Speaker 1: 52:49

But so like this, this experiment, if you want to call that didn't last very long and didn't really work out for a lot of the people involved and had a very violent kind of like history to it. So I think for for people who are, I mean, thinking about network states, maybe something to keep in mind about this that you know, if you want to look for land, probably other people live in it already.

Speaker 2: 53:14

If it's good land to live on, Josh, this reminds me of a story that came out in the wake of the FTX you know fallout but quite recently there was a story that Saint-Bankman-Fried was looking into buying the Pacific Island of Nauru, just to be like an effective altruist island, and like the speculation around whether he knew if anyone actually lived there or not.

Speaker 1: 53:37

I would not be surprised. But so we want and there had a lot of similarities with, like, the profit as well we wanted to also talk about, because part of this podcast to talk about alternatives or to think about not necessarily solutions, but like let's think about maybe where it can go a bit better, because there are some things of alignment, like Pimavera was talking about, as far as, like, network states and coordination. I mean there are. I mean, you know, in many ways we are conceptual neighbors, although I think that our concept is like radically quite different. There are like noticeable similarities, of course, due to we're just like analyzing the world as it exists today, and some of those things are just facts. What are some like based on your reading of history? Where are the places? What are the things that you think would be interesting to look at to kind of prevent the kind of violent trajectory of things like what happened in the Crusades?

Speaker 2: 54:37

Right? Well, I mean, there's one which is, I think, quite practical, and we must go back to Ancient Greece for that, and this is like. So I take particular umbrage in the Bellagian notion of the network state, with the idea that it must be centered upon a recognized founder, the profit, or, if you like, in the vernacular, of my work. And I think that's dangerous, because not only does it give one person a lot of power, it also attracts certain kinds of people. You know the kinds of people we see in leadership positions today. You know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1: 55:10

And so people who want to be in power are usually the ones you want to be afraid of.

Speaker 2: 55:13

Yes, you should. I mean the, the, the, yeah, all that should not be allowed to be in power. And so one of the ways that this was worked around in Ancient Greece was using a concept called sortition, or random, some sub sampling, you might call it today. And so there was a stone machine called a claritarian, which you would put, I believe or not, little tokens into, and this would then do this kind of pseudo random, um sub sampling, and that would choose some of the polities for, like, various functions of governance. So you would fill people's assemblies from the public and they would be in positions of power for limited periods of time, and then there would be a new round of this sortition to to select these citizen assemblies yet again. And so that is one way that you can use, and we now have ways to do this with cryptography, but we don't need a stone tablet.

Speaker 2: 56:03

You can still do it Verifiably random yeah or they even even you know throw zero knowledge stuff in there and you can prove that things are fair and not leak information now. So we actually have ways of doing this in quite quite powerful and efficient ways at scale and at distance. So sortition is one thing to avoid what I call the Bellagian trauma of the recognized founder, probably and the other one that came up in the reading of David Graber's pirate enlightenment and the Hakeem-based work on pirate utopias was around pirate governance. So in the 16th and 17th centuries, the cities that are now the capitals of the North African nations, so Zal'e Rabat in Morocco, algiers in Algeria and Tunis in Tunisia. To some extent, as empires around them waxed and waned, they became autonomous and like almost sovereign pirate republics you know kind of think of, like a notion of a pirate haven. But they in effect became like they were not under the suzerainty or under the sovereignty of some other state, as a kind of a vassal. They were kind of independent and we have this notion of pirates as being savages or barbaric, uncivilized people. But I think we can learn a lot from pirate governance from what I've seen. It seemed to be quite fair compared to some of the more like, let's say, mercantile forms of governance that we might see today and more mediated by capital.

Speaker 2: 57:30

And there's two examples that I picked out, which is one that I mean we've all heard of the concept of the mutiny on the pirate ship, and that is because the captain is only the captain of the ship if the shipmates agree that they are the captain.

Speaker 2: 57:46

If they no longer agree, the captain gets dropped off with the nearest rock and the new captain is agreed upon, and so this idea of the founder or the leader is not something that is kind of enshrined in some constitution. It's more to do with norms, I guess, than with laws and rules. And the other thing that I think is super interesting is about resource, how resources are meted out, like the loot, the booty that is divided up at the end of a successful voyage, and the disparity between a pirate captain and members of their crew in terms of the share of the wealth that they would receive was something like double two X. The captain would receive twice what an average crew member would receive, and that seems like, compared to, let's say, the owner of a merchant vessel, which would probably be like 10 to 15 times what the average crew member would receive, and if we look at CEOs today, they earn something between 50 and 100 times the average worker 300 in the US. Right, okay, so it's getting worse. Yeah, yeah, no.

Speaker 1: 58:50

I think those are interesting. I mean, do you think that's so? It's kind of like this I think A lot of the work from Bellagie that I read always has this kind of like yeah, he talks a lot about like technical truth and like this desire for like, like very absolutism.

Speaker 1: 59:10

Yeah, absolutism and like platonic idealism and like I think you see this in his obsession with like the founder that there is very little malleability actually in a lot of what he writes about and the conception of the network state and I think for some people especially if you're into math for some reason is like it's it that seems like a good idea, because math is also like it's reassuring Like we live in a world that's so messy.

Speaker 2: 59:39

There's no, it's hard to tell what's up from down. So the idea of somebody comes along to you and says hey, I have truth, you want some. Of course you want some, I mean. I mean the thing is like once you read some epistemology you realize there isn't truth. There's things that have truth, value, that approach truth. You can't get a truth.

Speaker 2: 59:55

I was a scientist when I was in my younger days and I was very idealistic in my youth and I believed in this notion of truth and a quest for the truth and I thought that's what scientific research was. And I got halfway through my PhD and I realized there was no when I was doing quantum physics. There is no truth in quantum physics. But also it was not the questions in research. It's really about politics and human, you know, formations.

Speaker 2: 1:00:20

Nobody really cares about the truth. It's about publishing the paper in the journal, it's about getting the professorship, it's about, you know, beating your rivals. Nobody cared about the truth, but like it was something we always talk about as a kind of the idealized notion of the goal of the T-Loss, the scatology of science, and so if people are interested in maths, then if you've come from a computer science background or you're interested in crypto networks or something like that, the idea that we can get to a truth is very alluring and satisfying we might think of. We have this concept we've discussed in the X-Salon, called algorithmic formalism, as a counterpart to algorithmic realism, and what I see in Bellagio's work is this kind of extremely formalistic, rigid interpretation, which I think carries the heavy resonance with Bitcoin, community ideals and values 21 million 21 million code is law, and so on.

Speaker 2: 1:01:14

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:01:14

But I think that's part of his, that's part of his prophecy. Like, if you want to actually get a bunch of people following you, you need to actually have a claim which is not, which is not this kind of like multifaceted everything is but true and false. You need to actually have a strong claim in order to attract your followers, right?

Speaker 2: 1:01:39

Otherwise why would they? Why would they follow you?

Speaker 3: 1:01:42

Exactly Like you're not actually leading to any direction. So in some ways, like as a leader, you're kind of always having to pick one of those subjective truths and making it your own, and the more you manage to actually attract people around these truths, the more it actually becomes the truth. It's always like a competition between multiple truths, but your truth as being the truth becomes the truth.

Speaker 2: 1:02:11

We have many truths, I guess in that, in that sense, a constellation of truths, but no, no, the truth, just my truth and your truth.

Speaker 1: 1:02:19

We're all speaking our truths here. So then maybe, like I think I'm curious if I've just thought about this question Now, like if you have any thoughts on, like how can we bring about, I don't know, our, our hyperstition? Do you have any thoughts on, like, how do we fight back against the hyperstition of, of capital? A big question.

Speaker 2: 1:02:45

It's a very big question but, like I always come back to answers, like one of the main kind of orienting themes around the book I'm writing on these, on these topics Scarcity. Scarcity for me is like seems to be a massive driver of zero sum mindsets, competitive mindsets and these kind of absolutisms and these formalisms. And we know that Bitcoin created digital scarcity we didn't really have that before and so that is kind of its move, like so it's. Bitcoin is just about digital scarcity pretty much 21 million, that's, that's all it's about and that but that the shadow of that logic still is cast over almost everything in the space that's come after it. And no, I know, josh, you do experiments that like imagining different kinds of modes of logic being implemented and instantiated, but I do wonder if, like it's the, it's the scarcity mindset in the metaphysical realm that we need to find alternatives to that to help people imagine different kinds of futures.

Speaker 3: 1:03:54

But what we're doing with coordination, actually, which is like the, in some way, like, if we're thinking about, like, how do you, how do you fight against capital? It's very hard, because the whole society has been crafted around capital as the fundamental resources, the and the network state indeed, is a very salient alternative because it is actually perfectly in line with the liberal capitalist society that we live in. The coordination is actually trying to promote, trying to actually show that the only reason that there exists scarcity is because we are living in this liberal capitalist society and that if we start acting in different manner, we might reduce scarcity, because we can pull resources and we can actually start sharing resources and supporting one another in ways that don't necessarily have to go through the market system, because we are part of this particular coordination and so we are, we are finding ways in order to mutualize resources and and and this is actually, I think, a prophecy, if it is a prophecy that, for those that understand, I think and again this is like is that the truth? Of course not. It's the true only if it becomes the truth. But but I think that's like, that's something that is salient to, at least to the people that understand that capital is useful in this society but might be less useful in a different society. And if you don't manage to, it doesn't make almost any sense to say hey, but yeah, we can just do coordination If we also don't have the capacity to sell or to to explain and articulate the future vision of the world in which an alternative society is possible.

Speaker 3: 1:05:52

Because we started changing our behavior today, right, and and if we, if we just move forward with the same behavior, it's not unlikely that we might end up into like a network state like thing, because that's kind of the standard evolution in which things are moving, like more and more privatization. So I think it's like, instead of like even focusing on what is the truth and what is right and what is wrong and what is correct and what is false, I think it's more what is a future that is sufficiently salient that will actually justify at least a portion of people to choose to change their behavior today, in order to ensure that this prophecy actually is not just a prophecy but is actually becoming reality.

Speaker 2: 1:06:45

So we need to unlock the, the memes of production to create the coordination state reality that we want to see in the world.

Speaker 1: 1:06:53

My feeling is that it's about kind of recognizing the abundance we already live in, as for one, I think, part of the scarcity mindset, of course, yes, we are constantly like reaffirmed that things are scarce because we have to pay money to buy things. Everything is pay walled, whatever else, but having, I guess, being able to create the social organizations that help us bring to surface the abundance that we already have, which I think, includes, like I mean just not using capital as a way to organize with one another or to coordinate, which requires a bit of course. There's this mind shift and there's also, like a need for literally changing the material conditions. I think for that to happen, yeah, we need memes of abundance.

Speaker 2: 1:07:45

Yeah, big, big asks here. Big asks, simple. Maybe they are simple, but maybe they're big. It's something worth thinking about and fighting for, because the kind of post-Bitcoin Bellagio notion of the network state is not going to be a good life for many people.

Speaker 1: 1:08:08

No, is there anything, primavera, that you want to touch upon? We've been a bit over an hour.

Speaker 3: 1:08:18

Nothing very good.

Speaker 1: 1:08:20

Yeah. Is there any closing words? Thanks a lot for spending the time and sharing your work and research. Yeah, my pleasure. Super cool to see. Yeah, I don't know, we didn't really like collaborate on anything but end up with similar lines.

Speaker 2: 1:08:38

Perhaps we're also to surface riding the same way for the hyperstation that we haven't yet characterized.

Speaker 1: 1:08:43

Yeah, yeah, the abundance hyperstation.

Speaker 2: 1:08:47

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like for me this work came out of, I spent several years writing about Bitcoin and how I see the unlimited desire of Bitcoin's proof of work for energy as an existential problem for us life on earth, and the scarcity mindset which pervades it and therefore kind of affects the minds of the adherents of it. It's one of the biggest problems I see on the planet today. So the conceptual basis of this network state work came out of the parts that didn't quite fit into that and so as the network state kind of emerged, I realized that there was quite some resonance between the scarcity and zero sum natures and mindsets of Bitcoin and the social formations around it and then this network state stuff. So I just dropped an essay called Necroprimitivism Rising, which is about the social cult around Bitcoin, especially the extreme end of the social cult of Bitcoin, and I think there's certainly a line to be drawn from the religious further of the Bitcoin, which is absolutely dominated by scarcity and zero sum competition and competitive notions and this Bellagian network state idea. So yeah, I mean like we need to find alternatives. I'm really glad you guys are working on this coordination stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:10:03

I don't know that much about the kind of other variants of network states. Like I met somebody from Logos the other day and they watched the talk I gave a protocol book and they said it was great. But they wanted to pick holes in my critiques and then when I said that they were about the recognized founder part and most you know that's my biggest critique is the fact that we need a profit at the center of this thing, the guy seemed to relax a lot, like the war ended and we were going on his podcast and a bit and stuff. So like I'm very interested to explore different approaches to these ideas Because I don't think the Bellagian notion of the network state and needs to be the hegemonic one. It should just be one meme competing in a marketplace of many.

Speaker 1: 1:10:49

Nice Well, thanks so much. Yeah, I'll link your work in the show notes so people can check it out. I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2: 1:10:55

Thanks and thanks everybody for listening. Thanks, primo, thanks Josh, great to be here.