Is The Internet The Successor to America | Balaji Srinivasan | Keris & Silicon EP02

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

The end of the American Empire is gonna result in a lot of chaos, and we're gonna need frameworks for peacefully creating new communities. After Rome ended, Christianity endured. And after America ends, I think the internet will endure. Lenin has a saying, You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. What happened was we got successful enough in tech that Google and Facebook revenue all went vertical, and newspaper revenue crashed. So we took over the classified business, the advertising business, and so strongholds of the Democrats, the internet disrupted.

That is what made them mad. Tech is the newest of new money.

My father came from a dirt floor in India. Very few of the tech zillionaires have inherited wealth.

So on the one side, you have the land, and let's call that civilization state, the past. And on their hand, clearly we have AI, we have crypto, we have drones, we have robotics. It's both the land and the cloud. I've always admired innovation of the new world, but I always wondered, is there a way to doing that without colonialism? You know, people will say, oh, you're a tech bro, but like, I am for the tech dad and the tech mom and the tech kids and the tech couples. We're going to be announcing the Network School Replet Global Merit Scholarship. They come to Network School to take an in-person test, and if they do well, then we get them a tech job. Do I intend to offend anybody? Absolutely not. In Malaysia, I intend to abide by all Malaysian rules, all Malaysian regulations. I'm one of the very earliest people to invest in the Arab world. I was attacked for doing that by people who were saying, oh my god, they're all primitive and whatnot.

Shahril (1:26)

Today's conversation is with Balaji Srinivasan. He's a Stanford PhD, former CTO of Coinbase, former GP and recent Horowitz, and the author of The Network State, a book that argues in all seriousness that the nation state is being gradually superseded by digitally native communities backed by crypto. He's not just theorizing though. He's building a prototype in Johor, Malaysia, which happens to be my country. I wanted to talk to him principally because he sits at the intersection of everything this show cares about. Technology, sovereign power, capital, and the question of who gets to redesign the rules. But I wanted to speak to him also because as someone with strong opinions, who dares to articulate a vision of the future quite radically different from today, he divides opinion. There are things he says that I find sharp, there are things he says and thinks that I find problematic. He's no stranger to controversy, whether in the US or in Southeast Asia, recently being the subject of a text online after a Malaysian minister visited the Network School in Forasiti, Johor. For some, he is bringing the future to a sleepy town in Southern Malaysia, funding and mentoring local founders, and we should be happy to have a serious member of the Silicon Valley tech class in our backyard. But for others, he is exactly the example of the detached tech bro elite, who has designs on the world that we should be wary of.

I went into this conversation with curiosity, and I left it with a deeper appreciation of how people are never just one thing, just like tech isn't one thing. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I did having it.

Balaji Srinivasan, welcome to Keris & Silicon.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:10)

Thanks for having me.

Shahril (3:11)

What's this thesis on the Network State? Give us a two-minute version, please.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:15)

Sure, I can even give you the one-sentence version if you go to thenetworkstate.com.

But briefly, there's kind of four ways of thinking about Network State. The first is, every immigrant wants a new country. That's almost the definition of what an immigrant is. Immigrant is in a country, they're seeking another one of the 193 states in the world. If you go and study abroad, you're looking for a new country. If you're emigrating for work, you're seeking a new country. If you wanted 194th or 195th, the billions of people around the world that want better states, that's one way of thinking about Network State. It's like, can we get new countries? But also new cities, new communities, new this and new that. Basically, we see how much benefit there was in starting new companies. That's where all the economic growth comes from. New currencies have reformed banks. Can we do things with new cities and new communities and so on?

Second point is that Network State is in large part a response to the decline of the West and the failed states of the West as opposed to the functional states of the East. So Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, these states are actually all on the rise. And so governance here basically works. Voice within the system basically works. So part of why I'm here is to learn from the fact that Malaysia, Singapore, China, they can build new cities and take some of that learning back to the West, okay? So the East, in the civilization states, governance basically is working on balance upward. In the West, it's not. And so we need alternatives, okay? That's the second reason. The third thing is at a global level, American empire is ending and the successors are China and the internet. China takes over the military manufacturing might from the Republicans, internet takes over the media and money from the Democrats. And so just like when the British Empire ended, the French Empire ended, the Soviet Empire ended, all kinds of new states arose, many peacefully actually, right? Not always, not always violently, like the Soviet Empire mostly broke down peacefully, at least in the immediate aftermath.