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.

Where does the digital Yuan fit into the hard network perspective? Clearly there is value to them in being able to monitor and control that network, and also it gains value as it adds more users. Do they shut out foreigners, or try to bring them in?