Imagine you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership.

That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by #Balaji #Srinivasan.

Balaji – who is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar to the #cryptobros.

A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do,
tech can do better.

I watched Balaji outline his idea last autumn, at a vast conference hall on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

“We start new companies like Google;
we start new communities like Facebook;
we start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum;
❓can we start new countries?” ❓
he asked,
as he ambled on stage,
dressed in a slightly baggy grey suit and loose tie.

He looked like a middle manager in a corporate accounts department.

But Balaji is a former partner at the giant Silicon Valley venture capital firm #Andreessen #Horowitz.

He has backers with deep pockets.

“Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience.

“They exist alongside the establishment in parallel,
they’re pulling away users,
they’re gaining strength,
until they become the new thing.”

If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned,
they could replace countries too.

He calls his idea the “#network #state”: startup nations.

Here’s how it would work:

communities form
– on the internet initially
– around a set of shared interests or values.

Then they acquire land,
becoming physical “countries” with their own laws.

These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.

You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider.

The network state movement doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs.

It wants to replace governments with companies.

bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171l…

The Bitcoin bros who want to crowdfund a new country

How a group of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs plan to create "the network state."

^{Gabriel Gatehouse (BBC News)}