Balaji Srinivasan

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…

Hard work is good Fake hard work is not good But fake hard work is better than antiwork And antiwork is the de facto alternative

Many believe that (a) baby boomers were bad and (b) we badly need another baby boom. Another fun observation: In America, the baby boomers are considered the selfish generation, part of a population boom. But in China, the little emperors are considered the narcissistic generation, part of a population crash. https://t.co/1dNWj3qm0Y https://t.co/BeQ4kfhwXl

Every AI agent ultimately has a human principal. It’s possible technology changes this. But right now, AI agents aren’t truly autonomous. They are built for the prompt, bots on a leash. Amplified intelligence as wholly distinct from truly artificial intelligence. The much-cited METR study doesn’t change that. Read the critique linked below; it notes that there METR shows a sigmoid on the messiest tasks. Even anecdotally…agentic workflows absolutely do help, and time horizons have been lengthening since Claude Cowork. But it’s just not the panacea it’s made out to be. Human prompting and verification remains the bottleneck, because digital …

The provably secret ballot. The crypto coalition. The onchain vote.

The right kind of ambition is to compete against yourself. To be the best version of yourself.

The US federal budget is $7 trillion. There are 535 in the Senate and Congress. They collectively allocate that money. Specifically: 7000/535 = 13 billion per official. Which means AOC is a political billionaire. She allocates far more than any market billionaire. Indeed she allocates ten billion liquid, per year. A market billionaire has one billion, illiquid, per life. So: AOC spends 10-100X what a market billionaire has. It's not even close. She's right about one thing, though. AOC didn't earn the tens of billions she spends. The state taxed that money, by force.

Personal emigration is going vertical. So is corporate redomiciliation. https://t.co/mRneu0nGHE Original graphic from @amuse. Data from @LeaveDelaware. https://t.co/3l74fIhXX3

On the new Monitoring the Situation stream with @eriktorenberg and @theojaffee.

Seasteading is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

If you’re in the Singapore/Malaysia area, we have a Replit Agent 4 hackathon tomorrow at Network School. There will be a tutorial, a little remote guest appearance by my friend @amasad, and a hackathon. Here’s the event link: https://t.co/s0JM5sLVSO https://t.co/CT4isyxUIT

Network School is growing. Come visit us at https://t.co/yrwniI2Q61. https://t.co/NGRl0SnUlt

This may be what happens. America pulls out and stops wasting its blood and treasure in the Middle East. Then dozens of nations form a diplomatic (not military) coalition to reopen the Strait on acceptable terms. With the war over, it’ll be difficult for Iran to charge exorbitant fees to so many neutral nations of Europe and Asia. But regardless, the result will be that everyone just pays for their own security.

BUILD THE SWITCH Ok. I see the “just flip the switch” thing a lot now from the right. But while I’m sympathetic to the desire for law and order, and agree that is a direction worth pursuing, there’s an illusion that should be addressed. Leftists think you can get money without working for it. Just flip the switch on the money printer. Just flip the switch to tax the rich. But in reality, resources are scarce. Rightists often similarly think you can get political power without working for it. Just flip the switch to throw the criminals in jail. But in reality, votes (or political supporters in general) are scarce just like resources are. …

I agree with all this. However, we do have an issue that we’ll need to address with cryptography and AI. While legacy media was on the back foot from 2022-2025, thanks to Elon uncensoring X and permitting basic truths to be voiced…the combination of AI fakery and ideological filter bubbles has recently allowed the journos to regain some ground. Some outlets have pulled back on extreme wokeness to start reporting facts, particularly on the war, that users are citing because their presence at a legacy outlet’s URL indicates implicitly that they aren’t AI. In other words, AI is, in part, subsidizing legacy written news media at the expense o…

Bukele is the greatest American president of the 21st century. So far, Nayib Bukele is on track to be the Lee Kuan Yew of Latin America. The Simon Bolivar of the new century. He focused on building up his own country. He embraced hard money and cut off hard drugs. He did imprison criminals, but did so with the minimum necessary force. He persuaded first, and compelled only when absolutely necessary. Like Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele turned his country into a bonafide showcase for a global audience. Bukele built a domestic coalition in his native Spanish and an international coalition in fluent English. He balanced El Salvadoran nationalism with d…

AI is a shortcut. So it’s useful. But it’s lazy. So it speeds execution. But it hides complexity. So you want to use it. But definitely not overuse it. So the user of AI often loves it. But the reader of AI often hates it.

This is the wrong way of thinking about it. By this logic, a school shooter is "powerful" because they can kill an entire school. Real power is the power to build, to maintain stability and prosperity. It's not the power to destroy. Anyone can kill. Anyone can bomb, destabilize, spread chaos, set fires, create anarchy. Unfortunately, that's relatively easy. The old America could build, not just kill. That's the America I admire. Btw: this isn't meant to be a dunk on @phl43, as I know what he meant. He's saying the (inherited) logistics infrastructure of the US is so impressive that it can seemingly wage endless wars overseas without any …

It's a global energy crisis. But India is far better positioned than it was in 2020. https://t.co/P8A9RIuuPz Graphic from @zerodhamarkets. https://t.co/XVQhve09dr

How does Elon do it? This is the first book that studies that. It summarizes how he operates. Some is of course intrinsic to Elon. But some might be learned. By you, if you read this. Check it out: https://t.co/u9MR80sWtJ https://t.co/sLtx5WvwjI

Libertarianism in theory requires Lee Kuan Yew in practice. Order and borders are prerequisites for liberty and prosperity. Tolerance and internationalism enables trade and capitalism. Pragmatism about the scope of the state minimizes the scope of the state.

Most new vehicles in Singapore are now electric. The EV flippening is here. https://t.co/cCWPruVtTS Original from @leRaffl.