The Network State

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. (Location 44)

The installation of these moral premises is a zero-sum game. There’s only room for so many moral lessons in one society, because a brain’s capacity for moral computation is limited. So you get a totally different society if 99% of people allocate their limited moral memory to principles like “hard work good, meritocracy good, envy bad, charity good” than if 99% of people have internalized nostrums like “socialism good, civility bad, law enforcement bad, looting good.”10 You can try to imagine a scenario where these two sets of moral values aren’t in direct conflict, but empirically those with the first set of moral values will favor an entrepreneurial society and those with the second set of values will not. (Location 284)

History is how you develop compelling media. (Location 291)

History is the true value of cryptocurrency. (Location 294)

Note: lindy

History tells you who’s in charge. Why did Orwell say that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past? Because (Location 297)

mark of this talk, where he notes that early America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose. (Location 366)

So: the scale is huge, the timeframe is long, and the measurements aren’t just noisy but intentionally corrupted. (Location 474)

history is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. (Location 476)

Those are the two extremes: political truths that you can change by rewriting the software in people’s brains, and technical truths that exist independent of that. (Location 912)