Countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete, but it tends to be the countries that want to grow.

A huge strength of the U.S. has been rule of law and the amount of case law and like the predictability of the law.

But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law who were judges and, you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things.

People who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in kind of pushing forward into the future.

What the state cares about is power.

And as tech kind of rose in power to the level of the state, then they got very, very

interested.

Can you build a new kind of country from the internet up?

Not a metaphor, not a community, but something that actually replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed.

Money, law, governance.

A few decades ago, China experimented with this idea physically, carving out special economic zones to test new rules without rewriting the entire system.

Shinsen was once a fishing village.

Today, it's a global tech hub.

Now the experiment has moved online.

Crypto, digital identity, internet native communities,

and what some call network states are trying to turn code into coordination

and coordination into legitimacy.

But there's a real tension here.

Code is deterministic.

Societies aren't.

So the question isn't whether these systems are clever.

It's whether they can actually scale and what they replace if they do.

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