The Network State Starts at Home

Thoughts on Exit, network-states, and municipal entrepreneurship.

I am increasingly interested in how to leverage the Internet to coordinate labour, capital, and information towards reversing urban decline and creating truly 21st-century cities of the future.

The city is the environment in which most people in a developed country spend most of their lives, and how well a city is governed is probably the most important factor in a person’s quality of life. Most people are largely unaware of how and why their city functions the way it does. This is partly because municipal governance has taken a back foot in recent decades with the trend of political centralisation at a national level. We can see this in the increasingly decrepit state of our cities: poor public transport, inaccessible housing markets, and an increasingly repulsive aesthetic of decline. There is also greater awareness that we have been coasting on the exhausted fumes of our civilisational inheritance: the infrastructure and technology built between 1870-1970 that laid the foundations for the modern city is starting to break down, and vested interests are preventing the large-scale reforms necessary to build 21st-century infrastructure. At the same time, we are bombarded with endless content on Chinese cities with their neon-lit skyscrapers, gleaming high speed rail, efficient public services in general, and other amenities that outshine ours by leagues. We feel increasingly left behind by ‘progress’.

There is another problem: the Internet is becoming the new centralising layer above national-level government. Our generation’s identities and cultural production and consumption now primarily occurs through social media. The digital disintermediation of national government built on 20th-century ‘analogue tech stacks' may accelerate urban decline as they prove increasingly incapable of dealing with contemporary problems of governance and try to accrue even more power with diminishing returns.

Cities are neglected, and national-level action is insufficient to arrest their decline. Much of our generation is becoming increasingly resigned to decline, and some are even looking into escape.

One of the more interesting ideas that has emerged on the internet in recent years is to use digital technologies to build novel governance structures. The ‘Network-State’ is a strategy to build ‘communities in the cloud’, harness the economic potential of that community, and lobby to build new communities, cities, or even countries. Most of these projects have looked to the 'less developed’ regions of the world as potential sandboxes for development, such as in Latin America and Africa. The logic of these projects is usually that the economic clout (and arguably the cultural pull) of groups of westerners seeking ‘Exit’ from the West towards ‘new frontiers’ will convince poorer countries to welcome them in the form of regulatory concessions.

This is a naïve approach to politics. To build inherently political projects requires a command of the procedural vernacular of a particular place, and to build social capital in that place. If you fail to achieve political and economic development at home, you are probably going to get eaten alive trying to do it in an unfamiliar territory. We are familiar with the entrenched interests and regulatory barriers in our own countries, so it seems easier from afar to simply ‘exit’ and seek new frontiers. The danger of the digital disintermediation of real identities in favour of digital (i.e. global) culture and trends is that our generation is at a unique disadvantage: unlike the ‘Boomers’, we are not spending decades building up deep knowledge of ‘the way things are done’ (i.e. the procedural vernacular), or acquiring the social capital necessary to developing the coalitions of interests to achieve political objectives.

All of this makes me wonder why there are so few projects where a vision-aligned group develops their local neighbourhood, town, or city. Why are people more interested in forming loosely-bonded ‘cloud communities’ with the promise of techtopian polities as far off as Latin America, West Africa, and Asia? Most of them are/will be devoured by the dysfunction, corruption, and general incompetence of third world countries. We have in the Anglosphere the laws, markets, and social fabric more conducive to the development of high-civility societies than anywhere else on Earth. For now, we still have the technological capacity to develop 21st-century infrastructure. What if we built ‘network-states’ in our own backyard?

There is an opportunity for a new class of municipal entrepreneurs: technologically-adept political operators working on urban governance reform. These operators have a fresh approach to local government as ‘governance experimentation zones’ that enables a thousand democratic experiments in developing 21st-century municipalities. They will know how to use the internet to coordinate information, talent, and capital on a global scale and concentrate them on the development of their immediate environment. More importantly, they will also possess the social capital and procedural vernacular acumen to operate effectively. This necessitates becoming deeply embedded in their local fabric to learn what the interests are, who the interest groups are, and how to create alignment to achieve political objectives.

There are significant headwinds for local government in Britain. There is a strong push to delegate decision-making to the local level through devolution. Results will be mixed, but this is why running numerous experimentation zones is important: the best cities become a model for others to follow, and are rewarded for their good governance with more wealth, higher-earning citizens, and better public goods and spaces.

Another headwind is that we are in the early stages of a great succession failure. The older generation has hoarded all the assets and institutions while largely failing to groom the next generation for inheritance. History suggests that social and political crises are largely driven by failures of succession. But crises can also be opportunities. New institutions can be built to replace the old. New networks of power and influence can be created as old networks collapse.

The competition is not as tough as we assume it is: local governance does not attract many people of talent, and people’s expectations of local government services are already rock-bottom.

The edge here is the coordinating power of the Internet. The post-to-policy pipeline is an early example of how influential Internet-aggregated knowledge is becoming in matters of governance. What if you could apply this in other ways? You could aggregate like-minded people from across the ‘national market’ (i.e. Britain) to a local market (a neighbourhood, town, or city) to acquire voting power and carry out municipal development projects. New opportunities to create technological innovation hubs that bring more money into local government. New innovations in public goods’ and services provision. Local ‘industrial policy’ experiments. New city-corporation hybrid models where private sector wealth creation is more effectively transformed into public amenities (if there is an ‘Anglofuturism’, it will not be defined by asinine 20th-century debates about capitalism vs communism, but sees these different forms of organisations as interchangeable tools to achieve a desired end, i.e. better neighbourhoods, towns, and cities).

None of this can be achieved without social capital and procedural vernacular knowledge. Unfortunately, the Boomers are right about one thing: our generation expects greater results with less effort. One of Paul Graham’s most famous essays gives advice that is probably followed the least among technologists. Do things that don’t scale. That advice has largely gone unheeded.

When Boomers criticise us for ‘not willing to put in the work’, they are not really referring to the accumulation of material wealth and assets (even if they are in their own minds!). What they are referring to — and no one talks about — is social capital accumulation. The Boomers’ pro-social attitudes are one of their key intangible skills. They have spent decades developing deep relationships and networks, and the procedural knowledge to get things done with those relationships and networks, to defend and promote their interests. We tend to look at material assets as a measure of the older generation’s influence, but arguably social capital and procedural vernacular knowledge is just as important to achieving political aims as material capital is.

Social capital is built from the ground up. Movements capable of steering the national will do not spring out of the ground overnight. They are the product of thousands of meetings over the decades where individuals develop deep social capital with each other to ‘spend’ on political agendas. The younger generation does not intuitively understand this. Some may regard it as “unmeritocratic”, “gerontocratic”, or “corruption”. It may be any of those things or none of those things. It does not matter. What matters is that social capital exists and it is the currency of power and influence.

To do politics is to go beyond the horizon of technology and grapple with fundamental questions of who we are, why we do what we do, and how to get others to do what we want them to do. This is about influence, persuasion, and prestige. Material technologies are less important than social technologies, and acquiring the knowledge and skill to build influence, create coalitions, and achieve political agendas is not a ‘venture scale’ endeavour. Many among our generation consider it as failure if they are not immediately catapulted to national-level politics right out of university. This is why we now have ‘politicians’ instead of statesmen.

Building a real stake in the immediate world around us will require decades of investment in the form of embedding ourselves in our local fabrics. There is no great pot of money at the end of it all, just public goods that make life worth living. Thus, the source of every beautiful civic space. We can begin the long journey of developing social capital at the ground level, focusing on the immediate, local environment around us to get to grips with political nature of our society, understand what good governance is and how to deliver it, and over time gain a more clear view of our possible future(s). When the time comes, deep political expertise, social capital, and a clear vision can be brought to bear at a national level.

---