Dave Karpf absolutely shreds Balaji Srinivasan’s book “The Network State” as the ravings of a rich delusional megalomaniac preening to his Silicon Valley peers who fancy themselves in Galt’s Gulch. These guys appear almost completely ignorant about the actual functions of a nation-state. If they want to declare themselves sovereign and secede from the United States, we ought to cut their sewage, water, and electric supply to give them a dose of the factual reality they so disdain.

What happens to these guys’ nerdy little crypto-enclaves when a much larger power (say, Russia…) decides to invade them and take their enormous stores of value they’ve bragged about removing from state protection? Especially after they’ve just ushered in the destruction of the post-WWII global order in which it was generally frowned upon for giant nations to gobble up their neighbors just because they could? 🤔

Moreover, what if that invader nation is simply the United States itself, once an administration comes to power that decides it is tired of dealing with its collection of ornery Confederate enclaves? Some might knuckle under peacefully, but there might also be some Waco events — except this time, with a lethal military strike justified by a president completely immune from prosecution and beyond the power of legislative or judicial oversight.

Please go away

What is stopping these guys from starting their start-up utopias right now? They are squintillionaires and could certainly buy land and start a community organized around whatever value system they want to run up the flagpole (arguably that seems to be the idea behind California Forever). Why isn’t Peter Thiel seasteading already and leaving us the fuck alone? Why does California Forever take Forever to operationalize when the entire premise of these techbro elites for decades has been that government (and specifically democracy) is too slow and they could totally build everything much faster and better if only given the chance?

Or is it because this is all unserious cosplay on the part of delusional, out-of-touch megabillionaires who in many existential ways seem incredibly bored and itching to destroy the planet just so they can “start from scratch” and do it their way? The ethos is, after all, to “move fast and break things,” as outer borough Caesar once famously etched into the foundations of the post-dot com bubble internet.

Money can’t buy you love, and it can’t buy you sovereignty. Because whoever is your protectorate today is liable to be your persecutor tomorrow, when they realize you have no recourse whatsoever and are completely at their mercy without a strong military presence — or even any military presence at all. Is there reason to think that armed overthrow of nanostates would be uncommon? Do the rich white guys believe that the white militia guys are going to give them protection, instead of extorting them blind at best?

Who will rob the robber barons

Does this century’s batch of robber barons understand what happens when they overthrow the US dollar and turn non-millionaires into peasants overnight? Have they thought through what happens once the rule of law is completely overthrown and there is no longer any incentive to honor contracts, nor any recourse if you get screwed over by someone who doesn’t? How does capitalism run under those conditions? How do they get to Mars then? How do they sell expensive VR equipment to school systems that have collapsed? How do they get new talent trained to join their businesses?

The cryptolibertarians seem oblivious of the levels of public services they consume and benefit from — especially as compared to the average person. They rely on (with few exceptions) transportation systems, electric grids, sewage management, running water, garbage, fire, and other public services both for themselves as well as all of their employees — drawing from the public coffers at an exponentially larger rate than most citizens.

They rely on good public schools to train up a foundational set of knowledge that the vast majority of children require to excel in a modern career. They rely on public grants for research and development, public health care, the postal service, umpteen tax breaks, no-bid governmental contracts, and of course the military protection and maintenance of national security carried out by our intelligence and other federal and state services. They rely on umpteen public services they seem ignorant of, and when they “move fast” are quite likely to break those things in particular.

And yet, they want to pay less in taxes than the pittance they already do. They demand the indefinite extension of the biggest tax cuts of all time — that blew a whole in the deficit and increased the national debt by over $8 trillion with a T dollars. They want to eliminate regulators and oversight bodies from the map by simply “deleting them,” in a convincing rendition of a cartoonishly evil billionaire. They want to overthrow democracy and Make America a Monarchy Again — as if we didn’t fight a bloody war to rid ourselves of a tyrant king once before.

I don’t know what the future will bring but I do think we ought to throw as much sand in the gears and exist in opposition to these self-appointed goons as much as possible. They have embarked on a grim project that could affect the lives of million if not billions of people on the planet. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to oppose this arrogance of power and reckless destruction of a carefully maintained world order that successfully ended the Cold War and avoided World War III.

These lunatics want to step on the gas and take us straight there.