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I would love a Networked State discussion. I read Zeihan through a Balaji lens. You might have a better chance of getting Balaji to join, though time zones are brutal when he's in Singapore.

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Bit late to the party, but per my generational framing I am less concerned with convincing the wokes than with the people who will become wokes for lack of better alternatives. This is a problem not just of the moment, but a generation into the future.

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Re Network State, AnomalyUK wrote a good post this month (https://blog.anomalyuk.party/2022/07/cars-or-police/) on the virtual nation of car owners:

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“[P]eople with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.

I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed. [...] The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door. [...] [T]here is massive demand for housing in [car-centric suburbia] form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.

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Anomaly's post highlights how Network State avoids discussing hard issues and focuses on such exciting but relatively unimportant stuff as SSO for network-government services, blockchains, and branding. In Balaj's own words, "it’s an open question as to how to deal with crime in a network state"! Indeed. I might add that so is dealing with predation from outside criminals and with competition and coercion from nation-states. For example, schools are a very important issue, but whereas USA allows home schooling, many European countries don't, and there isn't much a network state going to be able to do about it, it will simply have to advise members to move out of Germany.

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+1 for Network State discussion

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founding

I would be very interested in doing a zoom discussion on Balaji’s book. Both for many of the items you’ve excerpted here over the last week, and his very pro-crypto viewpoint. His thinking on these topics is usually very coherent even if he may turn out to be wrong in some of the details.

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Greer reaching back to the past for continuity with mob dynamics speaks well to a better diagnosis of the present than complaints about new technology. This seems to be the Martin Gurri world of the present, the mob plus the new tech. There is an aspect that may be missing that you have been talking towards a lot lately with talk of personality disorders and psychology. This is where I would like to think Haidt as a psychologist is trying to speak towards. Christopher Lasch died before social media and his work The Culture of Narcissism, despite being laid atop an outdated bed of Freudian Psychoanalysis, still seems highly relevant here. What is social media in all its forms, but an incentive for more narcissism. The performative image cultivation and dopamine hits from validation from outside oneself are an incentive for more narcissistic behavior from everyone, even if we are not actually creating more narcissists.

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‘They may argue that poor Black children cannot escape the influence of their environment, but they teach their own kids that they are the guarantors of their own fate.’

I wonder.

Because the parents of Black children slavishly (I know) vote Democrat and those Black children will grow up to do the same, whereas the parents of White children wisely vote Republican (go DeSantis) and those White children will grow up to do likewise?

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