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I love the idea of the network state and want to see it tried. Lots of thoughts occur to me, though.

For example, the Union, and the virtual country that would eventually spring therefrom, is entirely tech-dependent. The infrastructure of an entire virtual nation is thus vulnerable to hackers, malign governments, creepy billionaire weirdo ideologues in Davos, and massive solar flares/EMPs. That makes me nervous.

Also, it is a complicated concept. Its original adherents would likely be highly intelligent (and mostly younger) people. There is a huge swath of people who might be turned off by its complexity and its extremely online nature and want something simpler and more IRL. That is not a critique so much as an observation that in a polycentric/panarchic voluntary order, more than one kind of polity is likely to arise.

I think the idea of more IRL bears amplification. Part of our problem is the replacement of close, personal, real-world associations with a centralized state, an atomized populace, and an online culture that creates social anomie, unhappiness, and alienation. A high-tech virtual country seems to be a pathway out of that only if it has a high likelihood of resulting, in the end, in something real-world and down to Earth.

Finally, I wonder about Pareto distribution effects here. I only have a layman's simple understanding of this topic (the kind one gets from listening to hours of Jordan Peterson), but it seems to me that just like in so many other areas of human life, back-linking and similar clout systems will eventually produce runaway concentrations of clout as the biggest get bigger. That is just a fact of life, I suppose, but I think it is worth noting. Sometimes I think that D. Friedman/Rothbard/Hoppe/the Tannehills/et al may be closer to the mark by suggesting an anarchocapitalist model where classic market forces are used to maximize efficiency and consent. (Naturally the market is just as susceptible to Pareto distribution issues, so there's that to consider.)

Anyway, thank you for the interesting article and for affording me the opportunity to think out loud in your comment thread!

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