Creating a fresh start is all about drawing a more-or-less arbitrary line in the sand and saying that things before this line are the past, while everything after it is the future. We can take some lessons from how new payment networks like Bitcoin have gone from a cold start in 2008 to 1 trillion in the blink of an eye to 99.9% of the world.
In his article “How to Start a New Country”, Balaji Srinivasan lays out his idea for a “digital first” approach to establishing a new country, that turns conventional wisdom about nation building completely on its head — start by building a digital network and then build the land.
New countries have been starting for as long as humans have existed. In a world where population density is increasing and governance systems can no longer handle the load of societies, new countries may start to seem like a viable option.
For many of these people, a clean slate is about so much more than just money. There is a desire to build something from nothing, to be self-sufficient and live off the land. Bitcoin has created a tool for people who believe in sound money to start seriously thinking about how to meme a country into existence. It also helps that it has created thousands of millionaires, a handful of multi-billionaires and maybe even a trillionaire sometime this decade.
There are 7 methods of creating a country, in a theory laid out by Balaji. Three of these are conventional. The first is elections, which requires existing laws to secede. There are rumblings of this already in America around Idaho and Texas.
It’s natural for one to think that elections would be the most peaceful route. And it is — most of the time. But as we saw with the past Presidential election, a country could be at the brink of a revolution, which is the second way he describes a way to create a new country. The third and most common way is war, which causes mass human suffering and resources that are inevitably paid for by future generations in the for
The need for new foundations is so urgently felt that some people are willing to go around doing ambitious things, like settling other planets (#6 on Balaji’s list of ways to start a country), or seasteading with Peter Theil (#5), just to create the equivalent of a fresh start. But there is another way to get that blank slate, according to the preferred seventh option — a “Cloud Country”.
Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community. We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country. We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.
— Balaji Srinivasan “How to Start a New Country”
The Citadel will be decentralized. In the end, it was inevitable.
In a recent podcast with Tim Ferriss, Balaji brings up the fact that we know our friends on the Internet better than the ones we share a wall with, and that people can form communities around ideas, create their own language in the form of memes, and manufacture a mythology around it.
Nationhood as we know it is already dead, so it makes sense that the first presidents of the new age be virtual, and thus sprung from the cloud. Cloud countries will have all the attributes of nation states we enjoy today (civic pride, shared identity, national infrastructure) without any of their typical vulnerabilities (Xenophobia, nationalism, physical borders).
There are no purely digital countries yet. But virtual worlds, online platforms, and other digital domains have matured sufficiently so that the core principles of territorial administration can now be applied to them. The cloud country is a thought experiment: what kind of country could we construct today, relying only on existing technology and with the goal of learning how best to apply these principles?
This is an exciting process, not just to imagine making a new country, but in doing so, to make our lives richer and more meaningful. Not everything we do has to be this audacious. But we can use the power of our minds and the technology that surrounds us to improve daily existence. As children, we asked big questions: how does the world work? What are people like? What can I be when I grow up? When did we stop asking those questions?
Virtual nation states are the next frontier of technotopia. The internet has enabled us to communicate and cooperate across all sorts of problems, and there is no reason we shouldn’t extend these capabilities to physical nation, even if it is sliced up around the globe.
We are at the earliest stages of an emergent social organism being born with this idea of a Cloud Country. Think of it as a planetary neural network, where ever more nodes (people) are coming online every month and linking up with each other in new ways: not just to exchange goods and information, but to share ideas and coordinate complex actions — like creating physical spaces where they may live under a parallel jurisdiction.
By purchasing the land at a later date, the new Cloud Country territory evolves as a crowdfunded “fractal polity” over time, with new sovereignty emerging out of previous sovereignty rather than from a single state. And the individual has more power to network with people in other communities, making it possible to better serve that community and establish networks that are outside of government control.
Then, when we have enough support, according to this theory, we petition a UN member state for autonomy. We recognize the existing de facto autonomy of certain islands in the world — Bermuda, Faraya, Hong Kong — and propose that all future autonomous regions will meet similar standards. Once a member state agrees to forward our petition, we take our social network down. We mobilize our citizenry to travel there en masse and occupy the territory. Then we wait for them to name us a new country.
What do you think it should be called?
