Beyond the Exit: 5 Surprising Takeaways from the Global “network state or network society” Plural Event ⿻
Balaji Srinivasan's vision of Network States explored and contested across 5 cities.
RadicalXChange, Hubs Network and Comms Gardening initiated Plural Events ⿻
Same topic, same day, different locations. To create a true Plural conversation with diverse viewpoints. This is a article based on the insights coming from collective knowledge of such event.
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The desire for a tabula rasa—a clean slate—is a recurring motif in human history, surging whenever our legacy institutions begin to buckle under the weight of their own obsolescence. We harbor a deep-seated fantasy of escaping the messy, compromised social contracts of the “old world” to build something purer on fresh soil. Recently, this impulse was interrogated during a synchronized “Plural Event” held across four unique cognitive hubs: Akasha Hub Barcelona, Rome’s Urbe Hub, the brainstorming cells of Berlin, and the rural sanctuary of Liminal Village in central Italy. The Initial impulse was from an article in Combinations Mag by RadicalXChange: Build Network Societies not Network States by By Divya Siddarth, Anne-Marie Slaughter, E. Glen Weyl
As we connected across our global hubs in Barcelona, Rome, Berlin, and Liminal Village, we navigated a diverse spectrum of responses to the digital revolution, framed by the evolving and often conflicting concepts of Network States and Network Societies. At one pole of this spectrum, the Network State model proposes the creation of highly aligned online communities that leverage collective action to crowdfund physical territory, eventually seeking diplomatic recognition as sovereign entities. This approach offers a clear “logic of exit,” utilizing technology and startup-inspired principles to build entirely new governance structures from the ground up.
Conversely, the Network Society model prioritizes pluralism and participatory governance, focusing on reforming and revitalizing existing social structures from within. This vision treats technology as a substrate for relational life, supporting individuals as multifaceted citizens of many overlapping communities rather than members of a single, perfectly aligned state. Between these trajectories lie experimental hubs and pop-up cities that serve as laboratories for “cosmolocalism,” grounding global digital knowledge into specific local contexts to address regional needs. Despite their differences, every point on this spectrum shares a core interest in disintermediation, the pursuit of new governance experiments, and the enhancement of both individual and collective agency.
Alessandro M, aka Crypto Nomad, representing the Rome Hub and drawing on his global studies’ background and experience at the European Decentralisation Institute, framed this as the ultimate paradigm shift. He argued that the Digital Revolution forces us into one of three political stances: Revolution (Exit), Conservation (the Status Quo), or Reform (the Network Society). For Alessandro, the “Reform” path acknowledges that tech and capital are merely means; the core must remain the human substrate.
As we move beyond the Silicon Valley manifestos, five surprising takeaways emerged, bridging the gap between high-level theory and our grounded, messy reality.
See the full presentation for Urbe Hub here
Connection is Not Community
The “Organized Aloneness” Paradox
The most poignant reflections emerged from Liminal Village, where the conversation focused on the psychological substrate of digital life. There is a profound difference between being “on the phone” and being “together.” Participants observed a recurring modern tableau: people working in luxury resorts alongside staff from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia—physically proximate but mentally partitioned by their screens.
This state of organized aloneness features high coordination but low intimacy. While technology allows for frictionless logistics, it often fails to facilitate genuine human communion.
“This is the paradox of modern network life: maximum connectivity can coexist with minimum communion.”
A true Networked Society recognizes that relationship-first building is superior to platform-first membership. Shared rituals, shared meals, and mutual attention generate a social coherence that verified digital interactions simply cannot replicate.
Read full Liminal Village convos insights here.
The “Exit” Mentality vs. the Accountability Gap
In Barcelona, thinkers like Julio (Re-Fi Barcelona) and Dan (a veteran crypto analyst) explored Balaji Srinivasan’s “logic of exit.” The narrative of the Network State suggests that when a system fails, you should be free to opt-out and create your own systems. Individuals should be sovereign and free to create the societies they want, if they see the current nation states fail to represent them and their values. Why be “trapped” in value exchange (economic) systems that do not represent you, while technology can help to unite many people across the world to unite in cyberspace and so have the power to change society to other models of living together.
Others in the room argued that “Exit” is often a euphemism for sidestepping the responsibilities inherent in the social contract. They state that true freedom is not found in an “economic free zone” but through accountability to one’s neighbors. To illustrate this gap, the discussion contrasted two disparate models:
Dubai: Frequently touted as a successful “clean slate” state, it was critiqued as a top-down, hyper-surveilled environment where “modern slavery” builds the skyscrapers for an elite that pays no taxes.
Auroville: A spiritual experiment in India with decades of history. Despite its high ideals, it suffers from a territorial clash with neighboring villages, resulting in crime and money laundering in the “natural border” of its surrounding forest—proving that no state can exist in a vacuum without a shared social contract with its neighbors.
For the full article of the Barcelona event read it here: Billionaire’s Utopia or Neocolonialism 2.0?
The Billionaire Blind Spot and “Dark Talent”
A critical gaze was turned toward the architects of these new worlds. Currently, the Network State movement is designed by a “thin layer” of society: young, wealthy, nomadic coders who view the world through a startup lens. This demographic creates a massive “blind spot” regarding the elderly, the sick, and those with local caregiving attachments. On the other side many technological breakthroughs are happening outside of regulated spaces that are controlled by huge agencies and centralized power institutions. Do we need to claim these spaces to have real agency as new groups gathered within other value systems?
The irony of this “new” movement is best captured by Balaji Srinivasan’s “Network School.” While it claims to foster a new generation of leaders, it is housed within Forest City, a $100 billion real estate project built by the Chinese developer Country Garden. This reveals the underlying hegemony: these “states” are often just old-world real estate plays amplified by digital rhetoric. As one participant noted:
“If the same players jump on board... you can be assured that you’re not really changing anything. You’re just making it on the system that we have now on steroids.”
Building Bridges, Not Just Walls
The Berlin Brainstorm
While the Network State focuses on creating new kinds of citizenship, the Berlin hub focused on pluralism at the breakpoints—using technology to bridge ideological divides within existing civic life. Led by Bastin and Matteo Tambussi at Mind Foundation. They brainstormed a toolkit for the Network Society:
Democracy Lab: An open-source AI tool that uses neutral OECD economic data to simulate the real-world trade-offs of political policies, allowing for data-driven, non-polarized voting.
Community Currencies: Local economic layers pegged to essential goods (food, utilities) to ensure social peace and stability during economic shocks.
Interactive Democracy Billboards: A three-layer system (Input Layer, AI Mediator, Smart Display) that turns bus-stop “wait time into political power.” Residents can vote on hyper-local issues like car-free streets, with the AI stripping away branding to focus on clear policy questions.
Validation Systems: Peer-review models designed to “decentralize the truth,” holding populists and “actors” accountable for misinformation by using credible local peers to verify claims.
See full Berlin brainstorm conversation here on Agora.
Culture is Not Portable
The Catalan Lesson
A vital lesson in bioregionalism came from the analysis of Catalonia and the desire of many for independence from Spain. At a recent Network State School conference in Singapore, it was suggested that Catalans could simply get land in Estonia or better, a piece of land where nobody lives, and “re-upload” their culture. The Barcelona hub rejected this as a colonial fallacy.
Culture is an emergent property of geography, climate, and history. The “Sea Culture” of Catalonia is inextricably linked to the Mediterranean and the specific mountains of the region; it cannot be exported as a software package. Furthermore, a legal system is the “evolution of millions of cases,” not something to be thrown in the bin for a fresh, code-based start. As the discussion concluded:
“Accountability is nothing else than the social contract that we have between each other... if we are kind of designing systems that completely skip responsibilities, then you have a problem.”
Conclusion: The Responsibility of the Architect
As the event drew to a close at the Akasha Hub Barcelona, the discussion was recorded by a fluffy white unicorn microphone. This whimsical object served a serious pluralistic purpose: the “Unicorn Microphone” ensured that even among heated rivals, the discussion remained civil and “low-maintenance.” It was a reminder that the quality of our discourse is just as important as the quality of our code.
The future of human coordination will likely not be a fleet of isolated “spaceships” attempting to flee the planet’s crises. Instead, it will be a constellation of hubs—locally grounded but globally connected, or “cosmolocal,” prioritizing “love and care” at the center of their design.
As we architect the next era of society, we must confront one final question: Are we building a spaceship to leave our problems behind, or are we building the tools to finally face them together?
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A vast and open collaborative knowledge base has been initiated by Comms Gardening for the subject of Network Societies. Open to add your insights here!