TechTakes

Do you look at the possibility of political turbulence ahead of November’s US presidential election and think: democracy could be in trouble? So does a group of tech entrepreneurs backed by big Silicon Valley money. And they love it.

Imagine if you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership. That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji – who, like Madonna, is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar in the world of crypto. A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better.

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Silicon Valley loves “disruption”. Tech startups have been disrupting traditional media for years; now they are making inroads into other areas too: education, finance, space travel. “Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.”

If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “network state”: startup nations. Here’s how it would work: communities form – on the internet initially – around a set of shared interests or values. Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.

You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.

There is nothing new about corporations having undue influence in the affairs of nation states. The term "banana republic" derives from the fact that a US company, United Fruit, effectively ruled Guatemala for decades beginning in the 1930s. Apart from owning the majority of the land, they ran the railways, the postal service, the telegraph. When the Guatemalan government tried to push back, the CIA helped United Fruit out by instigating a coup.

But the network state movement appears to have greater ambitions still. It doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to replace governments with companies.

the symbolism is 😗👌

archive link: https://archive.ph/jFO6f

investors include Saudi Arabia, the country whose wealth rests on fossil fuels

now you might wonder if this initiative will lack a certain greenness

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.

Can't blame Zitron for being pretty downbeat in this - given the AI bubble's size and side-effects, its easy to see how its bursting can have some cataclysmic effects.

(Shameless self-promo: I ended up writing a bit about the potential aftermath as well)

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25239919

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

Perhaps there will be some quality sneers, perhaps not. But in this moment the orange site becomes sentient and asks if the emperor is really wearing clothes

The benefits of crypto are self evident, thus it is necessary to build an elaborate faux education system to demonstrate them.

I'm sure there will also be some Network Fascism in there for good measure.

I will say I'm not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad

another valiant attempt to get "promptfonder" into more common currency

Revered friends. I wrote a thing. Mainly because I had a stack of stuff on Joseph Weizenbaum on tap and the AI classroom thing was stuck in my head. I don't know if it's good, but it's certainly written.