Full Recap: The Network State Conference

After allowing some time to digest, here are 50 observations from the 41 speakers in Amsterdam

Nov 22, 2023

Last month was the first ever Network State conference. In this weird corner of the internet where I study novel (and sometimes weird) ways of living, it was a momentous occasion. The event attracted hundreds of builders, more than 1,200 live attendees, and 30,000 online viewers.

The full event is free to watch below, but it’s eight hours long. For those who prefer the SparkNotes, keep reading.

Balaji’s opening remarks

Balaji Srinivasan, author of The Network State, opened the conference to minimum frills and laid out a barebones agenda for the day. Attendees appreciated how much content was packed into such a tight schedule. I want all conferences I go to in the future to have this same structure.

In his opening 12 minutes, Balaji spends time asking a framing question: “Are new countries even possible?”

He wisely shies away from providing a direct answer, but does introduce the idea of “parallel establishments” as a response to that question. In this framework, he theorizes that new societies and institutions can exist in parallel to legacy versions until they eventually pull away all the “users” and become the new thing.
This idea of parallel establishments (composed of parallel societies and parallel institutions) is a useful organizing principle that helps structure the rest of the event.

Parallel societies

Cabin is clearly a leader in the network cities/state space - we were the first speaker slated after Balaji’s opening remarks and we had strong brand recognition among the attendees at the event.

Shoutout to my colleague, Grin, for breezing through Cabin’s history and tech stack. He represented us well and you can read his reflections from the event on our new Forum.
The Neighborhood SF is funded by grants for three years! I had no idea - but am inspired to try to find something similar in Los Angeles. If I learn which grants Jason’s team uses in SF and how they landed them, I’ll be sure to share those findings here.
Jason Benn plainly states a problem I’ve long noticed for the last three years:
“Great people are hard to coordinate."
To address this problem, Jason applied matching algorithms from the solved stable roommates problem to help create many highly-aligned groups from a dataset of unconference attendees that he organized. One of these matched groups then got along so smoothly that they later formed a themed coliving house. I’ve long written about the need to have a governing community intention - Jason’s approach is exciting because his matching algorithm can mass sort folks interested in coliving by the niche community intentions that best speak to each individual.
Regardless of the wide variance in approach, so many of the projects at this conference are trying to solve the same core problem of loneliness. NOMAD’s founder Zach Milburn cited loneliness as the number one complaint among nomadic remote work community to begin his talk. At least eight other speakers could easily point to loneliness as a partial motivator for why their project exists.
In several past projects, one metric that I’ve joked about informally tracking is marriages created through an experience. Praxis (only a few years old) has already created several!
Praxis’ desired speed (10,000 residents moved in to their project by 2026) is ambitious, bordering on unrealistic. This timeline is difficult, especially since they haven’t broken ground on a development (or even chosen a final site), but there is a path for them. The way in which they’ll meet their timeline is by choosing a site that already has significant development that they can build on (rather than starting from scratch) and gaining financial commitments from prospective residents now through amazing incentives, focused community-building, and good marketing. Those incentives will need to be tied to their Steel Visa program, which includes tax advantages. I’ll let you know - my interview for the program is next week.
Regardless of if Praxis meets its timeline, their community first, demand-based financing allows them to unlock capital from larger institutions like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. Demonstrating capital commitments from your community opens up bigger buckets of cash. Very clever.
I love Culdesac, but I wish Ryan’s talk had shared more of the vision beyond the Arizona development (which felt like an ad), I’m curious about Culdesac’s growth strategy and expansion plans beyond Tempe - their car-free ethos is undoubtedly what earned them an invite to this niche conference in the first place and what differentiates them from other large developers. I’d like to know how they scale what they do. To be fair, the fact that they didn’t share more probably means they can’t yet, so don’t hold it against them.
At least four other speakers mentioned working with Próspera 👀 and its number of hubs are growing. They are now on mainland Honduras (in addition to Roatán) and are doing a better job communicating the advantages and protections of their governance platform. They’re clearly benefitting from a partnerships-oriented approach and were well-respected on stage. One line from Erick’s talk especially resonated:
“We want to help online communities become on-land communities”

The word “network” is prevalent in so many of these visions. What changes is the scale. Balaji dreams of a network state. Cabin launched a network city. Fractal built a network village, and is building a network university next. Regardless of the size, what stays consistent in network language is coordinating online to meet up in-person.
I really enjoyed Fractal’s presentation (and just recorded a pod with cofounder Priya Rose that drops soon). One of my favorite lines came from Andrew, who, perhaps in a moment of throwing shade, said:
“We’re not delusional - community organizers have to incrementally slouch towards utopia like everybody else.”
Priya and Andrew claim there’s no secret sauce to building towards fairytale utopia, but their civic bootcamp, third space, and campus of 36 residents that serves as a Schelling point for 400 people is a damn good start. I also love their longterm vision of pairing an urban neighborhood with a countryside estate. Seems like the best parts of Cabin and Radish in one. Wishing them all the luck in the world.
Another favorite line from Fractal:
“Building a neighborhood is a coordination problem, not a money problem”
I’ve seen a lot of co-created projects over the years, but Vibecamp seems to have been the largest “physical manifestation of online connections” with 400 people in their first year and 700 people this past year. I appreciate the open-source playbook of vibecamp inspiring more [Me]Camps, where [Me] = the name of whoever is organizing the camp in their local community.
Cover’s ambition is much broader than just selling the pre-fab houses that they build. They see their pre-fab units as life-size lego blocks for pre-fab cities. They’re taking a Tesla approach to first capture high-end customers before moving to mass market. I love the lego comparison because Covers won’t have to be static buildings - you can rearrange them as needed.
Their secret sauce, should they continue to grow and succeed, will be that they have created a modular system of real estate in which building code compliance is done at the system level, removing need for code approvals for each building (They claim this is already happening in CA).
Ryan Rzepecki is building a video game called “YIMBY-NIMBY War,” which is objectively hilarious and drew one some of the loudest applause of the day. Ryan remains one of my all-time favorite podcast guests. He’s an eloquent leader in urban planning and design, and consistently reinforces my enthusiasm for well-integrated greenspaces and bottom-up development every time I hear him speak. Thrilled to follow what happens with the 32 hectare farm he’s developing in Puerto Rico.
Shervin Pishevar’s personal story about smuggling Starlinks into his home country of Iran was one of the most powerful moments of the day, and helped reinforce the “why” that fuels so many of these projects.
There’s general strong appetite beyond Próspera for new city projects that have favorable Western timezones and proximity to US. Shervin, Mark Lutter, and more are pushing for more experiments on this front.
Casa Orascom prompted me to do the most googling of all the speakers - it was the project I knew the least about when the day started. They describe themselves as an impact-driven town developer and have built 45k homes built so far, mostly by rehabilitating slums. Stefan Zingerle used his time well and had a strong CTA for the 200 hectare project they’re developing outside of Dakar, Senegal.
Yalor had a memorable quote while recounting the spicy history of Metacartel:
“DAOs are meant to die. Gut the chili so we can fund next generation of businesses.”
Great to see Zach Anderson on stage sharing about Coordinape, which is a useful tool for expressing appreciation and acknowledgement of people’s contributions to a project. I encourage communities seeking better methods of allocating rewards to check it out.
I’m bullish on Plumia/SafetyWing for developing products native for nomads. They have the appropriate long time horizon by building for 2027, 2028, and beyond. This time horizon, combined with patient execution bodes well for selling to a growing customer segment.
SafetyWing/Plumia’s product strategy to develop two separate business lines that eventually merge makes a lot of sense if you accept their CEO’s assertion that
“Citizenship infrastructure of the nation state is obsolete.”
Their travel insurance product (SafetyWing) can serve nomads now while they coordinate the logistics of a Border Pass (Plumia) to improve visa logistics for nomads in the future.

Cofounder Sondre Rasch believes that this moment in time is analogous to the 1600s. When nation states became more prominent, city state tasks and responsibilities were eventually reallocated to the nation state level. SafetyWing/Plumia are building under the assumption that some activities and infrastructure that are currently the purview of the nation state will move upwards to the global layer, where services can be more efficiently allocated.

Lindsey Elkin’s talk resonated. Folks like the ones at this conference are rewriting the nomad story. We’re no longer all broke and hostel hopping - we’re building companies while we travel the world. Nomads are now a customer segment with money to spend.
Where are Kindred, Kommu, Levelsio, and the many others who belong at this conference?
Patri Friedman, a vet of the startup cities space, does a good job using the language of companies to evaluate the performance of governments. Examples include saying that US “customer service is terrible” and that seasteads “franchise a country’s sovereignty” to a vessel.

Parallel institutions

This broader section felt political in a way I try to avoid being in this newsletter. But when we’re discussing media, finance, infrastructure, and healthcare institutions, politics are somewhat inevitable. The lineup of speakers in this section strongly reflect Balaji’s own political “Gray Tribe” leanings and help to support the theses he lays out in his book and in other public forums.
This was my first time seeing Glenn Greenwald’s face since the Snowden doc came out a lifetime ago. Greenwald shares the story of the normalization of the Patriot Act and reminds folks of the invasive power that the NSA still has. He contrasts what folks hoped the internet could be with what it is now:
“Citizens around the world could organize and speak to each other without depending on a centralized state or authority and yet the exact opposite is true.”
Governments can still cut off media platforms at the IP level. The way Glenn sees it, true open internet requires full decentralization.
Nuseir Yassin of Nas Daily brought the energy after the three preceding talks bemoaned the state of our media institutions. He has strong confidence is that a network state will start on social media, which is similar to a claim of mine last quarter:
Attention flows from social media to closed community platforms, which is where large amounts of money are more likely to be raised.
Curious to see which network state project can best replicate the “Come for the tool, stay for the network” dynamic that Dan Romero references while quoting Chris Dixon. What tool can network state projects provide that attract users en masse?
Synthesis is incredible. Makes me want to have a kid ASAP just to watch them progress through Synthesis 😂. Their demos of games teaching problem solving show how fun and exciting the design space for new education systems is. I appreciate Chrisman Frank’s emphasis that education is all about values, noting that
Our civilizations are downstream of our education.
Across the board, the video presentations just don’t hit as hard as the on-stage presenters. The editing obvious and distracting in contrast to the genuine passion of those there in-person. Appreciate that Balaji’s team tried cutting for brevity, but it undermined the authenticity of the speakers’ messages.
Whereas Synthesis tackles early childhood education, Tyler Cowen (Emergent Ventures) and Michael Gibson (1517 Fund, Thiel Fellowship) showcased the success of their unorthodox secondary education programs. As a prospective future parent, my instinct is to still send my kids to school but to augment their education with every kind of extracurricular education program I can. Especially Synthesis.
Expect to see more alliances proposed between crypto and AI organizations entities. Beff Jezos (not a typo) proposes that an open-source AI project will need a network state to protect its servers and cloud computing power. In the wake of the OpenAI drama and the ensuing calls for more open-source AI, this might actually be the strongest reason I’ve ever heard for an internet-native country.
Security is an issue I hadn’t yet deeply considered for network states. Speaker Spencer MacDonald assumes I’m not alone - most startup cities/network states probably have not gone deep enough here. Techies are familiar with good digital hygiene and cybersecurity, but not with the security of land. MacDonald advises that we protect vulnerabilities with cryptography/drones as the first line of defense and a campus police-like force for added physical security.
Medical tourism to aspiring network states is fully underway. More and more folks (including rejuvenation guru Bryan Johnson) are traveling to Próspera for gene therapies and specialty medical treatments. This is the best example I have seen of Próspera leveraging its special regulatory framework to attract new folks.
“Making death optional” is the most ambitious moral innovation of any network state project (or any project), and I applaud it. Niklas Anzinger and Laurence Ion end their joint talk about the upcoming Vitalia project with the powerful call to “join or die.” I’m both excited and nervous. I love the ambition, but am painfully aware of the limitations of my own technical biology knowledge. How can laypeople evaluate the risks of new treatments in the absence of reputable regulatory bodies? Regardless, I’m excited to see the group that Niklas & co. bring to Vitalia.
Both Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana) and the Winklevoss twins (Gemini) spoke with extreme confidence about the inevitability of the ascension of an alternative financial system. Obviously, it is in their interest to do so, but it’s been awhile since I’ve witnessed such confidence in crypto, especially in this bear market.
Was reminded today that 1 in 4 homes bought in the US during 2022 were purchased by big institutions. Hedge funds continue to “get rich quietly.”
Codie Sanchez is my favorite new follow and was a great speaker. She has an obvious passion for helping out people who might be left behind and urged the audience to bring blue collar workers into the network state movement.

With this newsletter, I hope to discuss exciting developments in the space in simple terms, especially since the average American reads at a 6th grade reading level. She reminds us that:
If people don’t understand something, they’ll tear it down.” and

All of the jargon Codie’s parents identified with The Network State project

Another great point from Codie:
”Winners will be those who bring BIG ideas with the HARD workers. Do we want to look smart or do we want to win?”
It’s impossible to have watched this conference through twice and not buy into some of the macro points Balaji hopes you take away. One that I’m convinced of is that globalization is accelerating, not slowing down. The rise of BRICS creates an interesting argument that gold may return as the hegemonic asset (compared to the US dollar). Forget crypto - the rest of the world is already building their own parallel financial systems to the one that the US has been stewarding for decades.

Balaji’s closing remarks

Really impressed by the structure and agenda that Balaji put together. It felt well-rounded. We learned about over a dozen network state projects making legitimate progress, and then dove into the security, media, education, and financial implications of building such projects. All of that in less than eight hours, with minimal fluff.
Balaji’s exit poll was well-designed to include “Scissor Statements” which are intentionally polarizing questions. His intent here is to understand where the center of mass of the network state community is, such that the movement (which he does acknowledge as inherently political) can keep building where there is consensus.
We’re still pretty early. The second Network State conference will be even bigger. And there’s a movie coming. As the many projects highlighted today make progress and adopt language with less jargon, we’ll start to get a proper understanding of just how much hunger there is for new kinds of countries.
More than anything, I’m left feeling curious. Nothing like this has ever really been tried. It’s exciting to be on the forefront of something novel for humanity. We should all maintain some healthy skepticism, but I’m glad that we’re experimenting with how we live and am thrilled to be able to play a small part in it.
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