The Network State in Context

On the essential contrast between the post-universalist Civilization States, Networked Sovereignty, and the Archipelago of Regenerative Projects

“ the Network State is no longer an aspiration. It is an active, instantiated movement, a new geopolitical layer in a world where old layers are visibly fraying.” (Parallel Citizens)

Towards a Type-1 Civilization

(The first part of this article is a recap of the P2P/Commons vision and analysis; part two goes into the logic of non-territorial nation-building, and ‘what is missing’ in the Network State vision..)

Part One: A Recap of the P2P/Commons Analysis and Vision

When I started this Substack newsletter in October 2023, I decided to dedicate it to the concept of the Fourth Civilization.

The inspiration came from my decision in 2020, during the year of the outbreak of Covid, to study macro-historians in a systematic way, and in particular from the scheme of civilizational evolution outlined by Arnold Toynbee in The Study of History.

Let me give some overview of the main findings of my inquiry, as a priori context.

To recap:

• The first phase of civilization consists of the agriculture-based, temple-managed, militarized civilizations in Mesopotamia, but before the great changes that would take place during the Axial Age.

• The second phase started with these Axial Age reforms, i.e. after the creation of the ethical world religions which try to bind power to higher religious logic and the common good of the system as a whole;

• The third phase starts with the changes that took place first in Europe in the 16th century: the emergence of nation-states, where industrialization develops a new societal model that would essentially spread over the whole world.

So why speak about a ‘Fourth Civilization’ ?

Because, in our opinion and based on substantial research, the industrial model of civilization, as it functions today, is not compatible with the continued long-term existence of the biosphere.

Of course, this does not mean that humanity needs to live without industry, but rather that an exclusively extractive model, based on the infinite growth of capital, is not compatible with the necessary regeneration of natural resources.

As Adam Frank has put it:

“Earth evolved …

• From the emergence of an immature biosphere, which is not in equilibrium

• After the Great Oxygenation, a mature biosphere is created, the so-called Gaia system, identified by Lynn Margulis

• This allows for the emergence of human culture, characterized by the development of an immature technosphere initially damaging the biosphere

• Hence the need for a mature technosphere to become compatible with a balanced and long lasting biosphere.”

The big debate in that context is between forces that flatly deny these natural limits, and, within the camp that recognizes these planetary limits, the debates concern the level of material wealth or material abundance that can be maintained within those limits. This division is now part of our geopolitical reality, dividing Electro States vs Petro States.

The P2P Foundation and myself, are, on the one hand,

1. agnostic about the precise level of scarcity/abundance that can be reached within those limits, i.e. we are not ‘per se’ degrowthers, but simply stating that the human economy must recognize those limits

2. But what we are specific on is the stated belief that mutualization is the key to maintaining the highest possible level of human welfare.

Hence our proposals for a cosmo-local world order, in which substantial matter/energy relocalization is matched to global collaborative infrastructures for global mutual coordination, and substantial levels of mutualization regarding local physical resources. We have reported that broadly, the relocalization of our economy, following a principle of the ‘subsidiarity of material production’, could save two-thirds of matter/energy expenditure, and that mutualization could save up to 95%, in certain cases, of energy expenditures. John Thackara calls this, ‘Factor 20 Reduction’.

In this integrative ‘transcend and include’ model, the market and state forms of coordination do not disappear, but they are held in check by a level of meta-governance and regulation that must operate at the planetary level.

Thus, I have also written a history of global regulation which shows:

• The participatory nature of indigenous regulation through the respect for the spiritual ownership of natural resources

• The respect of Empire for the commons’ institutions which maintain a balance between humanity and nature

• How capitalism destroys the commons and tasks the nation-state with the regulation of the extraction-oriented market instead

• How this equilibrium is destroyed when the transnationalization of global capital destroys the regulatory capacity of the nation-state.

It is in this context that we have also identified a Pulsation of the Commons that operates throughout human history. In the up-cycles of societies and civilizations, the market-state institutions strengthen, and the commons weaken, while in the down-cycles, the opposite occurs: to the degree that market and state institutions fail to satisfy human needs, the local populations reverted to their commons-centric practices. In Dark Ages, when market-state institutions practically disappear, the commons institutions, such as the productive monasteries of the European Dark Ages, become nearly hegemonic, and central to the recovery of the blighted lands.

During the spiral development of human civilization, which combines

1. a regular accumulation of knowledge, the size of cities, etc. … as well as

2. cyclic up and downs, and, Finally,

3. chaotic bifurcations that lead from one model of society to another.

Through these phase changes, the commons always exist, but take on different forms. Thus the physical commons of indigenous and traditional societies, become the social commons of industrial society, the digital commons of networked society, finally evolving to the emerging ‘phygital’ commons that will be central in the next civilizational phase.

Concerning the particular transition at hand in the present inter-civilizational moment,, I have argued that what is needed at this stage is neither a global self-regulated market, as market forces are notoriously bad at self-regulation, given their focus on capital and profit accumulation, and that the dangers of a world government may outweigh its benefits.

Hence the call for a new type of commons-centric but cosmo-local regulation.

We have also offered a geopolitical framing, heavily inspired by the conclusions of Michael Hudson’s historical trilogy on the evolution of finance from the Neolithic to today.

He contrasts,

• An Eastern Eurasian model that is harmony-oriented, marked by Empire, and oriented around the central role of the state as regulator of market forces

• A Western Eurasian model, based on the recognition of conflict, and with a focus on the centrality of the market

However, I argue that one of the characteristics of this civilizational interstitial period is the emergence of a new realm, i.e. the development of non-territorial communities based on the new capacities that were created through digital networking. This cosmo-political non-territorial level has existed before, linked to the capacity of the transportation and communication networks, but has now reached a fundamentally higher level of ‘phygital’ development, through the technological capacity for real-time coordination of human activities at global scale.

The implication of this is that, if civilization was a territorial arrangement, based on the production of surplus by farmers to feed specialized castes in the cities; then the post-geographic nature of digitally networked communities challenges the very civilizational model itself.

Thus, the ‘Fourth Civilization’ thesis, may also be considered as a kind of Post-Civilizational model, which needs to solve three priorities:

• A new compact between humanity and nature, which recognizes the mutual interdependence of the relationship and thus re-equilibrates the balance between extraction and regeneration

• A new global compact regarding human solidarity so that the high level of tensions between nations and within nations can be kept between bonds. In other words, an extension of the social-democratic compact between workers (the value-creating class), and the managerial classes (the organizers of value) to the whole planet

• New forms of planetary global governance that allow for the coordination of value exchange, and the finding of common solutions for trans-local, planetary-scale challenges.

Therefore, the Fourth Civilization is also the First ‘Planetary’ Civilization.

Chor Pharn, a futurist based in Singapore, calls it a ‘Type-1 Civilization’:

“Type One. Not an empire, but a planetary coordination; not a flag, but a way to hold all the energy of a world without burning the world.” [1]

He adds: < A civilisation earns the right to dispatch only when it can do so without depletion. >

We are thus in a civilizational intercycle between the industrial-cognitive form of civilization which is still not able to live in long-term balance with its biosphere, and a new type of civilization which should be.

Constructing a Geopolitical Capacity for Planetary Coordination: East vs West vs Digital

How are the different geopolitical models facing these challenges ?

China is at the leading edge for the Eastern Eurasian model and has developed an alternative for the Western model.

When Ji Ping acceded to power in 2013, he initiated a number of important adjustments:

The political priorities became both Common Prosperity and Ecological Civilization, i.e. a blend of ‘extraction’ in the service of income growth for the population as a whole, but also a conscious strategy to face the “metabolic challenges’ of a world in overshoot. Officials are now judged based on their capacity to advance these two goals ‘at the same time’. The model combines intense extractive activity to continue to build out a material industrial base, with advanced economic AND civic infrastructures for mobility and communication, and to extend it to the rest of the world. For example through the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, which connects the whole of Eurasia into a China-led supply chain, and can be projected globally through shipping.

The paradox of the Chinese model is that it combines very high levels of extraction, i.e. matter/energy use, but at the same time, invests everything it can into its ‘metabolic’ transition, for example through massive investment into renewables, for which it has become a world leader.

Here is a quote from Chor Pharn resuming the extraordinary achievements of the Chinese model in the renewable transition:

“”An electrostate is a country whose power rests on surplus electrons and compute. Instead of living off scarcity rents — coal seams, oil wells, or gas pipelines — it manufactures abundance: solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, and FLOPs. It exports that abundance as electricity, synthetic fuels, and digital infrastructure. China is the world’s first electrostate. In 2023 it added more solar capacity than the U.S. has built in its entire history. It now controls over 70% of global battery production.

It is building nuclear capacity faster than any other country. Ultra-high-voltage transmission lines criss-cross the continent, carrying electricity thousands of kilometres. Its AI labs and data centres are sited where renewable baseload is abundant.”

Its model extends abroad as it allows the poorer countries to effect their own transitions towards renewable energy. As the world is bi-globalizing between the West and the Rest, splitting supply-chains, financial flows and compute infrastructure, it is the Chinese stack which is being taken up by many of the BRICS countries, spurred by the Western sanctions regime.

China has also undertaken a massive cultural turn, away from (neo)liberalism and its woke outgrowths, by instituting a post-Westphalian turn towards the model of a civilization state, just as Russia and India have done as well. Bruno Macaes, who attended the Network State conference, says of this: “the search for universal values is over, that all of us must accept that we speak only for ourselves and our societies.“

China has of course a unique model, in which the ‘neo-Mandarins’ of the Communist Party have instituted a ‘Confucian-Industrial Synthesis’, i.e. a ‘socialist planned market economy’, which is aa unique blend of state-planning supported by Proudhounian collective property, fiercely dynamic capitalist markets supported by a Proudhonion banking system, and the advanced use of Big Data cybernetics.

I have argued that China has become the first Biophysical Civilization, thinking in metabolic terms, i.e. matter/energy flows, and no longer in terms of financial terms. Chor Pharn explains how China is becoming an Electro State, cleaning up its environment, while the West is reverting to a Petro State model, which will deteriorate its ecology even further in the next decades. While I am not claiming that the China model will succeed at fully solving the metabolic crisis ushered in by the capitalist transformation of our world, it is at the very least seriously tackling the problem. Comparatively speaking, it is definitely ‘ahead’.

Russia, while it remains a Petro State, has nevertheless done a remarkable cultural and economic transformation of its own, becoming not only food sovereign in 2014, substantially re-industrializing, and building an alternative financial infrastructure, aligned with China and other BRICS countries. It was fully prepared when the waves of Western sanctions hit their economy. India and the Middle Eastern countries have been re-aligning with the new power bloc as well.

In conclusion, the nation-state, especially in its ‘East Eurasian’ form, is not only far from death, but it is in ascendancy, and has built an extraordinary integrated physical and digital infrastructure, that is at present more able than the West to become a successful ‘Type-1 Civilzation’, i.e. a civilization which is able to keep a balance between extraction and regeneration, focused on the maintenance of both social and ecological equilibria. It is too early to say whether this format will be successful, but the strategic intent is clear, and the means are invested to reach the goal.

However, we would argue that the implicit planetary implication of this model is simply the maintenance of a inter-state system of negotiation and coordination, but ‘simply’ reorganized to be liberated from Western hegemony. Countries like China and Russia are actually in favour of the maintenance of Westphalian nation-state system, minus its universalist ambitions. While this will undoubtedly give a boost to the ‘national’ development of many countries in the Global South, it does not solve the fundamental problem of globally extractive inter-market and inter-state competition. In the longer term, we believe that this model will be insufficient to solve the problems of planetary coordination.

In the meantime, Western democracy is in a more serious crisis, with ever stronger levels of online censorship (30 people are arrested every single day in the UK for thoughtcrimes, surpassing Russia in the amount of political prisoners, as verified by both ChatGPT and DeepSeek); an abandonment of access to cheap energy in Europe which has strong de-industrializing effects; lawfare to prevent a change of the guard through elections, and together with substantial war expenditures, serious losses in income levels and a slow but steady dismantling of welfare systems; this configuration also causes a stalling if not retreat on the efforts towards ecological transformation. In the next decade, different countries in Europe are poised for a change in political regime, as the populist parties gain more and more traction. We do not believe the current efforts at lawfare and speech suppression will be able to stem that tide.

While these emerging alternative parties cater for the political and policy priorities of large swaths of the European population, particularly regarding issues of migration and the desire for a cultural defense of the values of the majority populations, their economic policies are most often neoliberal and they seem particularly motivated to undo environmental and regulatory protections. The West does have a saving grace however, and these are the highly educated, networked populations with a capacity for independent civic action. Europe has a very dense infrastructure of cities that are interconnected by rail (and road), and access to a substantial amount of abandoned farmland. Hundreds if not thousands of villages are awaiting revitalization (cfr the Repoblacion efforts at reruralization in Spain for example, or the tenfold increase in the number of ecovillages in France, in just one decade).

At the P2P Foundation, we have proposed the thesis that civil society has become productive through the emergence of commons-based peer production communities, i.e. through digitally self-organized trans-local communities. Think of the very rapid growth of open source knowledge, code, and design, as well as the fast expansion of rural and urban commons,. In our estimation, there has been on average, a tenfold increase of these alternatives every decade since the beginning of the system crisis of 2008.

In my analysis, the crisis of the Western market-centric and now rentier-based model of Techno-Feudalism, is structural, and has become a problem for structurally addressing the ‘common good’ which it is increasingly unable to do. In the state-centric systems discussed above, however distorted we may consider their processes because of the authoritarian aspects of some of these systems, longer term strategic planning takes a central role, and market players can be disciplined in the context of these longer term considerations; in the West, the transnationalization of capital has more seriously weakened the capacities of nation-states, and the supranational but democratically unrepresentative structure of the European Union has further weakened the adaptability of European countries. Thomas Fazi has an interesting synthetic report on the catastrophic results of the EU for European welfare and adaptability. The welfare state model, which represented a compact with the labor movement after WWII, and represented a model of state-regulation of the market in a context of social equity, has been undermined, without a replacement for the ‘common good’ intent that it represented. Transnational private interests have become too powerful and are setting the agenda. The latest developments have shown an increasing geopolitical weakness on the European side, with strong signs of vassalization to the U.S., which itself has experienced a strong loss of prestige. It’s hard to see any positive proposition for a new world order that would come out of the Western side of the world, at least in the current moment.

It is in this context, that we could see the emergence of the Network State movement in the West, as an exit strategy of the more dynamic elements of Western Civilization. It is a way to hedge the collapse of the nation-state system of the West, often confused with the death of this form in the whole planet.

In our opinion, the Network State movement is an exit movement of a part of the Western elites, the elites of code and capital, which are hedging the failure of the Western nation-states through trans-local hedging. Bitcoin is a hedge against the failure of fiat currencies, the blockchain allows for translocal coordination and value transfers, while digital nomadism allows for the geographical hedging. As Chor Pharn has argued, the Network State movement is an expression of the panic of Silicon Valley. Think of it as the spirit of Silicon Valley exporting itself non-territorially. The reality of the global crisis and in particular of the crisis of the West. means the movement cannot be easily dismissed. It’s not a ‘flash in the pan’ or a flimsy libertarian dream. It is backed by serious capital, expertise, and enthusiasm.

The core NS movement, which followed the publication of the Network State book by Balaji Srivanasan is a huge attractor and a real transnational social movement. It’s strategy to use crowdfunded crypto capital to purchase territories which can negotiate new forms of sovereignty, is getting substantial traction, it is not a mere libertarian fantasy.

Here are some reviews of the conference that recently took place in Singapore, on October 3, 2025, the third gathering of this movement:

For a full review see https://x.com/AnalogueUSB/status/1975910996196864315

And here is an additional assessment by Timour Kosters of the Edge City network:

Reflections from the Network State Conference

This quote shows the enthusiasm and the maturation of the Network State ecosystem, by the authors of Parallel Citizen:

“This was less a conference and more a massive staging area for parallel systems, proving that the Network State is no longer an aspiration. It is an active, instantiated movement, a new geopolitical layer in a world where old layers are visibly fraying. The essential takeaway from the entire week: The primary geopolitical question has shifted from, “What is the future of my country?” to the more fundamental, personal inquiry: What community would I join, and where does that community build its node?”

• Parallel Citizen, https://x.com/AnalogueUSB/status/1975910996196864315

The NS movement is connected to thousands more network nations projects movements, globally interconnected peer production networks, cosmo-localized urban and rural commons, five trillion in floating crypto capital, and 50 million ‘proper’ digital nomads. It has access to advanced coordination technologies being developed by powerful global digital software networks such as that of Ethereum, but also many currently smaller initiatives that may one day become big, such as Nunet,io, a global platform for planetary accessible computing outside of the commercial cloud; Web5 technologies which blend Web2 participation and Web3 privacy protections which are currently helping rural hubs and DAO’s in China, and much, much more.

Thus the third player, in this broader sense, is here to stay as well. It is also politically pluralistic, combining left and right, upwingers and downwingers, local and global, regens and degens, and so much more. It’s a Pluralistic Commonwealth all of its own. And it has combined physical, phygital, and digital instantiations.

It represents the construction of the contemporary Cosmo-Polis, the new layer of civilization that will blend with the older geographic layer but is also somewhat a competitor to it, since there are competing claims for sovereignty. Think of the medieval conflict between the non-territorial Church, an earlier constellation of network states that became very successful, and the land-based sovereigns. The latter won, but this was an entirely different era in terms of technological capacities.

Notice that whereas China integrates the digital in an expanded vision of its civilization state, as part of a network of a global network of nation-states that it may perhaps hegemonically influence; by contrast, the new Cosmo-Local Networks have to start from the digital to the physical. But they both need a blend of the physical and the digital, of the territorial and the non-territorial. And this may be the major weakness of the libertarian-tinged Network State movement in its purest manifestations: a belief that territory can be purchased, that sovereignty can be negotiated in exchange for money, that money always equals access to what is needed to survive and thrive.

We must insist: the Network State and other manifestations of Cosmo-Localization need real community, i.e. solidarity and sacrifice, technological and infrastructural stacks, but most of all: a more direct access to matter and energy.

If it remains purely an exit strategy for privileged sectors of a declining West, it will be eventually seen as parasitic (it already is). Thus the central argument of cosmo-localism is that the digital network sovereign aspirants must imperatively connect to the distributed network of regenerative projects. Local projects can benefit from new types of crowdsourced global funding, as capital for the commons, and the translocal digital nomads need anchoring in physicalized distributed networks that have access to food, energy, and the vital needs of human life.

How do we get there though ?

Is there a Third Way beyond the ‘West vs the Rest’ ? Towards a Stack for Network Sovereignty

Our main argument is that at least three major world-historical infrastructural projects are happening at once:

• The Chinese path is essentially based on the territorial management of matter, energy and human flows, blending access to raw materials, an intensive digital infrastructuring of production, communication and transportation, robot-enabled manufacturing, integrated payment systems, and systems of digital control of the population. It seems to function like a seamless blend of markets, state coordinated planning through the use of Big Data cybernetics, and it can be exported and replicated at least in part to the ‘Rest’ of the world..

• Especially in the West, but also in the Global South, the combination of being in a downward spiral, subjected to intense rent-based extraction and with a high awareness of the ecological and ‘thermodynamic’ problems facing the world, there has been a localist revolution. A neo-rural exodus is matched to an explosion of initiatives in more healthy and local food production, while the cities are in the midst of an equally important revitalization of the urban commons. While the number of ecovillages have risen tenfold just in France the last decade, other studies showed a tenfold increase in urban commons in the decade following the crisis of 2008. These trends have accelerated post-Covid. But, all these projects are underfunded, often remain local and small, and at present reach a minority of the population.

• A globally networked digital infrastructure has been built, not just by the big oligarchic platforms, but also by the new world of pro-blockchain forces. This is a very broad community, of which the Network State is but one small part.This ecosystem has access to major technological solutions, is connected to a technical cadre of digital nomads and coders. It has started to build a community culture that connects digital nomads globally, and it is in this sphere that a desire for networked forms of sovereignty has been growing.

My proposal to the Network State Conference on October 3 has been simple: we need to blend the world of Infrastructure 2, the Regenerative Localizers, and the world of Infrastructure 3, the globally networked digitally nomadic world of coders and capital.

In World 2, Bioregionalism is becoming the joint understanding on what needs to be done to enhance local power and influence. Bioregionalism represents the horizontal solidarity mechanisms of all people doing different things but in the same region. The good news is that there are already various Bioregional Funding Facilities to help the relocalized build their infrastructures of local coordination.

In World 3, the premises have been built for global coordination of human labor, i.e. code production in particular, and for the flow of capital outside of the full control of market and state institutions. But what is missing is the link with the physical world, with the flows of matter and energy.

In this context, Cosmo-Localism represents the vertical coordination and solidarity between people who are doing the same thing, ‘all over the planet’. Thus, for example, permaculturists have access to joint protocols of cooperation, to education and certification, but also crucially to capital.

Thus we need a Cosmo-Local Funding Facility to assist local commons-centric communities to build out their local commons infrastructure, but also to interconnect their learnings at planetary scale. What I am imagining at this time, based on the work done by the Mattereum project of Vinay Gupta, are new forms of fractal ownership, that all distributed and crypto-based crowdfunding of capital for the commons, based on agreements and returns that are compatible with the commons-centric logic of the (cosmo-)local projects. With Austin-Wade Smith, I’m also imagining a combination of Cosmo-Local Planetary Guilds, uniting the travelling experts that know the network infrastructure and can transmit experiences from one node to another, and the Bioregional Guilds, whose members are locally rooted producers.

In order to have the dream of ‘networked sovereignty’, local commons-centric communities must have ‘value sovereignty’, and cosmo-locally, they must have forms of ‘technological’ sovereignty, i.e. access to a Networked Sovereign Stack of basic technologies.

The digital conditions for sovereignty require access and control of one’s own distributed technological ‘Stack’. Let’s call that LAYER 3 of the Integrated Cosmo-Local Stack.

This has been described by Benjamin Bratton in a book with the same title:

The book described the planetary-scale computational architecture that organizes our contemporary world. Bratton frames them as a layered megastructure, composed of interacting levels of control, interface, and sovereignty.

The six canonical layers of the stack are:

1. Earth – The physical substrate: land, minerals, atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere.
   

2. Cloud – Global computational infrastructure: data centers, satellite networks, cloud platforms.
   

3. City – Urban infrastructures and logistical environments that shape human activity.
   

4. Address – Protocols that locate and identify entities (IP addresses, GPS, biometrics).
   

5. Interface – Surfaces of interaction between human users and computational systems (screens, sensors, UIs).
   

6. User – Human and non-human agents (people, bots, AIs) acting within the stack.
   
   

Civilizational states like China are consciously building out such frames in an integrated ‘national’ framework, but also ready to export them as a rival ‘core-periphery’ system.

Aspirational network sovereigns can only think in the same way, but from a different direction, not from the physical ground up, but from the digital cloud ‘down’. By doing that, they will encounter the needs of the regenerative localizers, which are looking ‘up’ to interconnect at a translocal level.

This LAYER 3 TECHNOLOGICAL STACK can only function with and for a human community that has its own stack of non-technological capacities. Let’s call this LAYER 2, the “Human Stack’.

The “Human Stack” is a layered structure of basic social and cognitive capacities that enable collective organization. Instead of technological protocols, this stack consists of evolutionarily and culturally accumulated capacities:

1. Biological substrate – Human bodies, health, senses, and ecological embedding.
   

2. Affective layer – Emotions, empathy, trust, social bonding mechanisms.
   

3. Cognitive layer – Language, reasoning, symbolic thought, memory.
   

4. Social structure layer – Kinship systems, norms, roles, institutions.
   

5. Communicative/mediatic layer – Speech, writing, printing, digital media.
   

6. Cultural–normative layer – Values, cosmologies, shared imaginaries.
   
   

This stack forms the human substrate upon which political and technological stacks operate. Without these capacities — especially affective and communicative ones — no sovereignty or platform can function.

LAYER 2, THE HUMAN STACK in turn cannot function without its matter/energy basis, and the inter-dependent relationship with the rest of Life and Matter. Let’s call this basic layer, LAYER 1, the Matter–Energy–Infrastructure Stack”, which represents the material metabolism of societies. It can be seen as the deep substrate upon which both human and sovereign stacks are built:

1. Planetary energy flows – Solar radiation, geophysical cycles.
   

2. Resource extraction – Mining, agriculture, forestry, fossil fuels.
   

3. Transformation & logistics – Manufacturing, refining, transport systems.
   

4. Built environment – Buildings, cities, grids, transportation networks.
   

5. Operational infrastructure – Maintenance, regulation, standards, supply chains.
   

6. Waste and feedback loops – Emissions, pollution, recycling, ecological limits.
   
   

This layer is the actual material base of the planetary system — it provides the energy and matter that sustain both the digital stack and the human stack. It’s also the layer where planetary limits and ecological crises emerge most clearly.

Nation-states have the geographic basis, and the inter-national state system, to organize access to resources that can build out these three levels of the stack.

Network nations, network communities with a desire for some form of non-territorial sovereignty, cannot achieve their aims without a similar vision of integrated access.

So as nation-states continue to build out their geographically managed system, so networked communities can work out a parallel non-geographic ‘stack’, as the very condition for their sovereignty.

Now all this may suggest some rivalry, but ultimately, the two levels of human coordination, must be blended, and find accommodation to each other. This is what happened historically, whenever commons-based ‘instruments of expansion’, such as the monastics of the different Axial religions, adapted to the societal systems of which they were a part. Just as priests and warriors accommodate each other, so will civilizational and network sovereigns.

As a reminder, the Christian monastic communities, the vital agent in the revitalization of the European Dark Ages, had access to land, food, people, both on a local basis, and trans-locally, as the cosmo-local organization of the Christian Church.

If, as I believe, we are in a serious thermo-dynamic crisis, in which access to resources will become unstable and uncertain, then people with an exit strategy need to think through the conditions of their success more thoroughly. And if they look at history, they will see that the key to success was the forging of ‘jurisdictional alliances’. In our context this means an alliance between the digital translocal world of Web3, with its aspirations of network sovereignty, and the productive capacity of the regenerative localists. All the same, this should be done with the agreement of the territorial sovereigns. There is plenty of mutual benefit in organizing for complementarity.

In conclusion:

The aim is the construction of an Archipelago of Regenerative Projects, cosmo-locally organized, with both the horizontal social power and solidarity of interconnected bioregional actors AND the vertical social power and solidarity of Cosmo-Localism. Both must strive to be appropriately supported by the territorial sovereigns of the present and the future.