Network States

HARD CLOUDS

We didn’t have hard state borders in the premodern era. Maps weren’t advanced, passports weren’t issued, travel was infrequent. Dividing the land up into disjoint nation states was very much a new idea.

I think we are currently in a similarly fuzzy era of network borders. Maps of the cloud aren’t advanced, digital passports are inchoate, transit between networks is still largely frictionless. But China and crypto are changing that.

That is: the Great Firewall and the Bitcoin Blockchain take network borders *seriously.* In totally different ways, Xi and Satoshi treat Internet defense as central to their community’s continued existence.

So they built hard clouds.

Meanwhile, the legacy nation state was built *before* the cloud. And ideas developed back then don’t necessarily work today in the same way. Eg: if hostile foreigners have free speech on your trusted network, if they can send any bits they want, they may script your drones or take your coins.

So cloud borders will harden.

Hard Clouds, Soft Land?

Do you think that while the borders in the cloud get strengthened, the lines in the physical world will become more flexible, reflecting those of the cloud? For example, communities acquiring, selling or merging land from other startups in a more dynamic way.