Balaji on civil wars, nations and the state
2024-07-23 13:58:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Raoul Pal put out an old episode, first published August 2022, it’s an interview with Balaji Srinivasan all about Network States. The whole thing is super interesting, a mix of history, politics, technology and futurism.
One part that stood out to me was his description of the difference between a nation and the state. They take the scenic route, first looking at how the internet enabled the separation between political ideology and abscense of centralisation, but then Balaji zooms out to show the bigger arc of history. It was something that had been happening already for hundreds of years, and might even be the same fight happening again and again:
It was accelerating even before the internet. It was happening but the internet accelerated it. Because cable news preceded the internet, the repeal of the fairness doctrine, what happened by 1950 was peak centralisation, where it was like this massive centralising force over decades and centuries, mass media, mass production, telegraph, telephone, rail road. That level of centralisation, we sort of sometimes think of history as beginning in 1945, because the current era did, and people, if you ask them for the history of what happened before, they actually get pretty hazy.
They are like "Aaah Great Depression...Prohibition, then the Civil War...1776, okay" and then go back to like Christianity. They basically just don’t have any memory of that. But there are some really interesting incidents, for example in the 1600s, a really important one, the Puritans, or the ancestors of what we now call the Puritans, the Roundheads, lost a battle in what is today the United Kingdom, and they went out to the North East of America and settled there in like the early 1600s.
And in the mid 1600s, the Roundheads, and their allies beat the Cavaliers, and the Cavaliers came out to the Virginia area in 1640ish, if I remember correctly. And so what happened was two different sides in a civil war migrated out to the US, setup colonies, and 200 years later those same two groups got into another civil war.
That gives a completely different lens on like the Civil War. People say "oh it’s state trieds (?) or it’s slavery", no maybe it’s Roundheads vs Cavalier. That’s like this insane thing where this group, these cultural...these like mind virus’ or what have you, are just things that are just powerful things that just, we don’t understand them yet. It’s like we don’t fully understand human biology, we don’t fully understand human sociology. We are still at the flodgestone (?) theory there. Like the mind virus’ that mass move large groups of people, okay. And these two groups are again kind of fighting now, 150 something years later.
Interesting stuff. I’m guessing you could probably trace it back even further. From what I understand, many of the people of the UK originated from places in today’s Germany, hence they are called the Anglo-saxons. In any case Balaji then goes on to explain the difference between the nation and the state:
The nation is the people, and the state is government, and the land is a 3rd thing we can come back to. Nation has the same root as natality. Common birth. Common descent. The Japanese nation is the Japanese people and culture and language and so on and so forth as distinct from the Japanese state which is a creamy layer of administrators above them. Which could be the Japanese empire, and then in 1945-46 actually the American state above them. The state was not the people. The Japanese nation was different to the people. And then eventually they got the democratic Japan installed there.
And like somebody that lived in East Germany actually like lived under 4 different states. They were under Weinmar, then the Nazis, the the East Germans, and if they lived long enough they got to German Re-unification. [...] So when you understand the difference between the nation and the state, you can actually start decoding certain amazing things.
Like for example, the United Nations, is actually best not thought of as the United Nations. It’s actually best thought of as the Selected States. Why? Because there are 193 countries in the United Nations, but [...] if all the stateless nations, Catalonians, Basques, Kurds, Armenians, and so on and so forth, if all of them got their own states, there would be 600 or 700 countries in the United Nations.
He goes on to talk about old city states, how they have reminence of the old world in the present day, and the history of India and all sorts of interesting things. I found all this history kind of fascinating, especially as context for discussions about how we might start to organise our societies in the future. Definitely worth spending the time to listen to the entire episode.
I’m certainly intrigued by the idea of network states, but I can’t help but wonder whether it’s over complicating things. Is the Network State sort of equivalent to assembly language though? Surely most people won’t want to be bothered with it and will want to spend most of their time actually having fun or writing cool tunes or something? Won’t the existing state and government be good enough for 99% of people?
And I just have more questions...
- Is there a time when we will be forced into a networked state architecture in order to support the collective computation required for us to live?
- What is societies’ capacity now?
- What is it in a networked state architecture?
I will leave you with this story, which is most probably fictional:
A long long time ago there was a gang of cells in a bigger gang of cells that decided they were the God Cells Gang. They were constantly going on, at length, about something they kept refering to as the Body State. And they were determied to build it. They had the cell equivalent of a website, where they distributed what we would call pdfs. They even had infographics. Some believe we have actually found traces of the Gang of God Cells in our DNA. What were the God Cells like? They mostly just hung around waiting for nutrients. At least that’s what we think. Some people believe the God Cells are still out there somewhere in a secret place still sending us messages, and still twiddling their cytoplasm waiting for nutrients. Apparently they are hilarious.
Recently some researchers announced that they might have been able to contact them, communicating via a very complicated nutrient based protocol that they invented. To the researchers suprise, not only did the protocol work, buy they recieved a response which decoded to an actual HTTP url and the phrase "We have cytoplasm twiddles you can’t even imagine yet".
Oh yeah there was also included a gif of, what looked like, some weird pulsating cells, and if you looked at it for a little while, it just sort of looked like they were all having an awesome time. And if you looked at it for a bit longer the following words emerged from the chaos: "Rock on at the after party".