The dashboard shown combines concepts from coins, companies, and countries to focus a society on growth in people, annual income, and real estate footprint. (Location 60)
That doesn’t mean each network state must grow to infinity, or that all states need accept the same kind of person, but that the community of network states as a whole is focused on building admirable societies that people want to join. (Location 63)
key concept is to go cloud first, land last — but not land never — by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world. We (Location 68)
Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. (Location 70)
Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause. (Location 77)
Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. (Location 78)
Unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized. The (Location 93)
We want to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh startup, or a clean slate. Because we want to build something new without historical constraint. (Location 101)
Now we get to the unconventional. The most obvious of the unconventional approaches – and the one most people think of when they hear the concept of “starting a new country” – occurs when an eccentric plants a flag on an offshore platform or disputed patch of dirt and declares themselves king of nothing. (Location 131)
Here is where things start to get interesting. Conceived by Patri Friedman and backed by Peter Thiel, seasteading essentially starts with the observation that cruise ships exist, and asks whether we could move from a few weeks on the water at a time to semi-permanent habitation in international waters (with frequent docking, of course). (Location 141)
Perhaps the most prestigious of the start-a-new-country paths is the idea of colonizing other planets. (Location 148)
And finally we arrive at our preferred method: the network state. Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community. We create a startup society, organize it into a network union, crowdfund the physical nodes of a network archipelago, and — in the fullness of time — eventually negotiate for diplomatic recognition to become a true network state. (Location 152)
Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves. Put another way, a network archipelago need not acquire all its territory in one place at one time. (Location 158)