Balaji Srinivasan

It’s important for your future that you understand Zcash. You can’t have zero knowledge about zero knowledge. Thus, this year's Network State Conference will include a Zcash Zummit, featuring Zcash leaders Zooko Wilcox (Shielded Labs), Sean Bowe (Tachyon), Eli Ben-Sasson (StarkWare), Josh Swihart (Zodl), Josh Lee (Vizor), Dev Ojha (Zakura), Evan Forbes (Valar Group), Maxime Desalle (Winklevoss Capital), and Tom Howard (Zcash Labs). In-person attendees will even receive some free ZEC. So: come to Singapore on October 9. https://t.co/hNlTvMKvLx

Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations. (1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment. (2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where …

Democracy is the consent of the governed. In the Internet age, that means voting not just with ballot, but feet. So: if you’re one of the democratic capitalists of the Internet, vote with your feet for new communities by joining us in Singapore on Oct 9. https://t.co/DPZj3Pqmrg https://t.co/3fA7pZgBy5

Network School Kazakhstan is now officially open, with a packed crowd for the ribbon cutting, and government officials welcoming us. Kazakhstan is a high-tech country that recently ranked #1 in the International Physics Olympiads. It’s full of confident, smart, young people. And it’s now recruiting global talent from around the world. So: if you want to build a techno-optimist community in a techno-optimist country, join us at https://t.co/bOBW6x8JVs. By the way, here’s the full International Physics Olympiad ranking. Kazakhstan tied for #1 with China and India along with perennial STEM powerhouses Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan. Point: …

Kazakhstan’s time has come. Kaz/acc.

Zcash $1,000. Zcash $10,000. Zcash $100,000. https://t.co/i4VtuITkHe

It's time to decentralize Hollywood with AI. Introducing the new Network School Astana AI Film Festival, in partnership with the Republic of Kazakhstan. We're awarding $2M in prizes with entries accepted from around the world. So: submit your film now at https://t.co/6iF4Bpno03. https://t.co/zIrvEDr8aV

Network School is back. We’re up and running in the beautiful country of Kazakhstan, which combines high tech, low cost, brilliant people, a competent state, and plenty of space to build. So: if you want to build a techno-optimist society with us, apply to Network School. https://t.co/9CQhL9arpO What would the ideal techno-optimist country look like? It'd build 100k units per year in one city alone. It'd deliver a low cost of living for its people. It'd be tolerant and meritocratic, recruiting talent from around the world, while also training its own citizens to win international STEM competitions. In short: it'd be much like Singapore, …

This is Kazakhstan. https://t.co/POLxlSdUta Video by Dastan Mukhamedrakhim (bydastann). https://t.co/56s7MdlASf

A journo named @stuwoo followed me to Singapore, and then tried to pathologize my move to Singapore. Why? https://t.co/iz4flqTJ3R

I am pleased to announce that a memorandum of understanding has been signed between the Republic of Kazakhstan and Network School. Our new campus will become a haven for global techno-optimism, with expedited visas, streamlined redomiciliation, and active recruitment of talent. https://t.co/R20i8UAYoc Here's the official announcement from the Republic of Kazakhstan. https://t.co/6hfwi4D2jF https://t.co/oqL5tAjFHG

India is building startup cities. https://t.co/aJUUSXjo1j

Network School is not shutting down; that’s fake news. We received two notices. The first tells us to change the text of a sign. The second says that our coworking site, which was created by joining two adjacent units, evidently has a valid license on the left hand side but not the right hand side. We have a remedial period for both issues, and will remediate them shortly. But our members are otherwise unaffected. The article below has an incorrect headline. We have multiple buildings. For one of them we need to change the text of a sign and the status of a license. We will do this, but the headline is just wrong. The @staronline should c…

I don’t usually post DMs, but this is a rare exception as I actually asked him before doing so and he consented. Danial is a local Malaysian. Several months ago he asked “Would be cool if you could repost our current portfolio of projects as well, under KD Labs 👀”. I invited him to the Network School campus, as I do many Malaysian builders. He also said he wanted to build a virtual campus for Malaysians, a similar vision to me regarding a network state. Of course, I support him in that vision! And of course it shows that the concept of the network state, like the concept of cryptocurrency, has broad appeal across nationalities. Looking f…

Should the global tech community continue investing in Malaysia? Given recent events, I raise this question respectfully for the consideration of Prime Minister Yang Amat Berhormat Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim (@anwaribrahim), for the people of Malaysia, and for our friends in the Malaysian tech community. The answer will be of interest to anyone in global tech that’s considering building, investing, or expanding in Malaysia, including executives at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, founders of tech unicorns like Coinbase and Solana, and investors at the world’s largest venture capital funds like a16z and Polychain. As context, I am the…

The purpose of Network School is to demonstrate that anyone can peacefully start new communities from the Internet. Our vision of the good is a society that's tolerant and meritocratic, affordable and ambitious, high-tech yet extremely offline. https://t.co/Q9WbHsouza James is from Great Britain. We have many Brits at Network School, and indeed many from the global Anglosphere (including the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). All working together to build positive-sum, in-person communities. https://t.co/lwNyNhpzlU https://t.co/YQko03TMrM Network School members hail from 100+ countries. By assembling in person and building a startup s…

(1) Most countries do not actually have a military. Instead, most countries outsource their security to the US (most common), to Russia (like Belarus), or to China (like North Korea, partially). Iran is unusual in that they're going it largely alone. They're also unusual in that they actually appear to be winning. And if Iran does manage to drive the US out of not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but the entire Middle East, they'll have unfortunately undermined the idea that America can or will provide any security guarantees at all. (2) So, with the withdrawal of the American Empire, every country is going to need a new military. Some countries…

@romanhelmetguy > “All actual physical territory will be controlled by whoever wins the USA vs China Cold War.” Also, I disagree with this, because Chinese empires aren’t like Western ones. (1) Western empires have a lifecycle of invading everyone, conquering, converting them to their ideology, printing a lot of money and causing a lot of ethnic strife, and then collapsing. That’s Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, Britain, and now America. (2) China is the opposite. They just want others to pay tribute to them, via the tributary system. Otherwise, they don’t want to invade the world, because they would become less Han Chinese in doing…

Far left: we need to tear down the system Center left: we need a system Center right: we need positive-sum games Far right: we need to win zero-sum games

PRINT OUT THE INTERNET Ok. Let me make it extremely concrete. Where did this giant sprawling datacenter come from? It was printed out from the Internet. Specifically, Zuck used the Internet to gather men, make money, organize materials, purchase territory, and shape it to advance Meta's goals. The principal such goal is, ultimately, the replication of Meta itself. This datacenter makes money in the cloud, which enables Zuck to purchase more land, which he repeats all over the earth. Think of it as viral growth, but in the physical world. Now extend that beyond Meta, towards any Internet tribe...such as your following. After all, where wa…

We don’t see it, but we see it every day. The aesthetic of the era is code. https://t.co/akGQmOIFy2

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Last century had the centralizing technology of mass media and mass production. But this century is driven by the decentralizing technology of the smartphone and the Internet. So, while last century saw a centralized left and centralized right shooting it out for Europe, this century may witness an anarcho-communist left and anarcho-nationalist right battling it out in America. (And indeed, we already see this on the Internet every day, with pockets manifesting in the real world.) So: while I agree that the mood is anti-state, that in itself is no panacea. Rather than left and right tyranny, we could…

Interestingly, those backups weren't just within European monasteries. Key Roman manuscripts only survived because the Eastern Roman Empire didn't collapse. The Byzantines and the later Islamic world thus enabled the Renaissance. In modern parlance, a decentralized backup preserved Euclid, Ptolemy, and Galen till they could be re-read and appreciated one thousand years later, by a group of Europeans ready to emerge from the Dark Ages. "...as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest …

@_InThisTogether By the way @_InThisTogether, I just saw this post of yours on voluntary democracy. My immediate reaction: the idea of sortition-but-for-juries is quite interesting as it solves one of the core issues with sortition-as-election. Specifically: even if a single random draw is bad, because there are N jury trials (as opposed to just one election), your sortition-for-juries process could be argued to result in actually representative government. I haven’t gotten through your full series yet but these ideas around voluntarism and new political forms are exactly the type of thing I’d like to see trialed in a new opt-in startup so…

China is opening up internally. For generations, the hukou system meant the average Chinese national couldn’t freely emigrate within China. Like being geolocked to New York and being unable to relocate to Texas. China did this in part for social control, and in part to prevent huge floods of people from moving to big Chinese cities for jobs before the infrastructure was available. But now development in China is so broad-based, and the infrastructure so reliable, that they are gradually opening the borders *within* China by letting everyone move around. The Soviets also had a system of internal passports. But the new Chinese system is les…

The digital divide has reversed. Digital is cheap, ubiquitous, often fake. Physical is the premium product now. All this goes in cycles. Digital was rare, valuable, non-obvious, and difficult for a long time. Now we’ve won so hard that the physical complements are becoming more valuable. We have plenty of once-scarce jelly, and now it’s time to make peanut butter again. But to answer the question directly: algorithms create value (try running the modern world without quicksort or pagerank). Think about billion-person networks, social media, cryptocurrency itself…in many ways we live in an Internet First world, particularly in the English-sp…

Future books will be written monk-mode, by hand, completely offline, in digital monasteries purpose-built for focus.

I’m very sympathetic to Prof Tabarrok’s point of view. And of course he’s right that AI hyperdeflates costs in many areas, from code to math to biomedicine to robotics. However…AI is also breaking as many markets as it creates. It’s flooding sales, marketing, recruiting, email, social media, identity verification, education, and countless other verticals with an onslaught of increasingly convincing scams, spam, and slop. Essentially, just like cryptocurrency and social media, AI accelerates digital tribalism. Within the trusted tribe, you can indeed share code and context to accelerate progress. But outside the trusted tribe, every message …

Look, if you don’t like the ending of any movie, you can soon just export the file, put it into one of the increasingly high quality open weights video models, and do whatever remix you like. We aren’t all the way there, but we’ll be there soon. Prompts will promptly disrupt Hollywood.

The Singularity is Here. Yet also, Nothing Ever Happens. Somehow these two beliefs coincide at the same time, in the same social groups, on the same platform, and even within the same person. My view is that technological change is disrupting the political system, but that the system was doing its best to hang on regardless, and has lasted longer than anyone might have expected, yet is indeed fated to experience a singular happening (and indeed already has). The singularity is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That is: the singularity is usually modeled in time, but we can model it in space. Conceptually, the change starts at one po…