United Nodes of Memerica: Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State

Ever wonder why dictators can destroy countries for decades, ruining the lives of tens or even hundreds of millions of people, and yet year after year retain power and continue their corrupt and incompetent reign? Before the internet, there was an information problem-- it was hard to even know what was really going on when a totalitarian dictator controlled all the media. In the USSR there was even an word for prohibited information that was furtively passed along an underground/analog internet: samizdat. Before social media, there was also a coordination problem-- how do you form networks of like-minded folks who might organize to form a political force of opposition that might foment change. Before bitcoin, there was a censorship-resistant money problem-- how do you fund an opposition to incentivize and reward protest, political action, campaigning, legal defense. You couldn't use the authoritarian regime's fiat bank rails-- they'd just close your accounts and seize your funds. Now that everyone can judge what's true about a regime, can organize to change it, and can fund that change without fear of censorship, why are so many citizens still trapped within the borders of nation states that extract economic juice from their citizens and the nation's resources to pay security forces to maintain power? What's been missing is a new idea of how to leverage the metaverse (internet memes and money) to create new meatverse communities that have equal standing with the nation-states. That's what the prolific and polymath Balaji Srinivasan provides in his new work the Network State-- a decentralized alternative to nation states for cloud-first, land-second, nation-state parity third communities. Learn all about it here: https://twitter.com/balajis/stat... Highly recommend everyone give it a read. The future of humanity is localism and freedom powered by decentralized, reliably scarce money (i.e. BTC) and the memes that inspire us to form communities that we care enough to contribute to and defend. What does this have to do with Startups and Products and Founders? Everything! Every startup is a meme and every startup requires a community to support it and help it level up. After building fintech startups for the past 10 years, I've come to understand that the two M's in Community stand for memes and money. My latest project https://slyk.io/ makes it easy for founders to level up at every stage of their startup journey-- from idea, to mvp, to nfx, to vc, to DAO. Idea to DAO is the future of digital products spread and built and used by play-to-learn/earn/own coin-powered communities. There's a Slyk Scout already working on a Slyk-based template for network states that productizes Balaji's idea. What do you think?