Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state.
The Network State: How To Start a New Country
Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new c…
Imperial State Capitalism
A new geopolitics is shaping the development of AI and the energy transition.
Our Networks
Conference about the past, present, and future of building our own network infrastructures.
The Case for Open Sovereignty in a Fragmenting Internet
Once, the Internet promised to dissolve borders. It was humanity’s great experiment in connection — a place where ideas, innovation, and communities could move freely, unburdened by geography or...
EU-AI | Igor L.
The geopolitical landscape is shifting from physical borders to digital infrastructure. Here is a factual breakdown of how a $500 billion investment in "Sovereign AI" is changing global power dynamics. The Shift: From Land to "Substrate" Historically, a nation’s power was defined by its territory and legal systems (the Westphalian model). Today, power is increasingly tied to the compute substrate—the physical hardware and energy required to run AI. 1. Infrastructural Enclosure The "Sovereign Compute Coalition" (SCC) represents a massive consolidation of power. Major private entities are acquiring the three pillars of modern national strength: * Hardware: High-end AI chips (e.g., Nvidia). * Energy: The massive power grids needed to fuel them. * Data Centers: The physical "brains" of the digital economy. 2. The Rise of Technocracy As private companies own these essential tools, governments may find themselves in a position where they effectively "rent" their ability to govern. This moves decision-making power away from elected officials and toward those who control AI infrastructure. 3. Europe’s Strategic Response Europe is launching several initiatives to avoid becoming a "client state" of foreign tech providers. The strategy focuses on four main channels: * 8ra Initiative: Building a decentralized, multi-provider cloud-edge architecture to ensure data remains under European control and interoperable across borders. * ReArm Europe: A strategic defense package (presented in March 2025) aimed at boosting industrial competitiveness and reducing strategic dependencies in technology and defense. * Sovereign LLMs: Developing domestic models, such as Mistral, that are designed to align with European data privacy standards and cultural values. * Energy & Procurement: Using public procurement and new regulatory frameworks to create demand for homegrown, sustainable energy-efficient compute solutions. The goal of these moves is #DigitalSovereignty : the ability for a region to control its own digital destiny without relying exclusively on transnational monopolies. Data tells the real story. Are you following it? Follow #datanomics
Community Networks: Critical Infrastructure For Rural Connectivity In India
As India goes digital-first, millions remain offline. Locally run networks show how connectivity can be built where markets fall short.
Minimum Viable Infrastructure
Minimum Viable Infrastructure Innovation often emerges not solely from brilliant ideas but from the infrastructure readiness that makes those ideas viable. Consider the progression of mobile consumer internet applications over the past two decades: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Their lau...
All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology
A WIRED timeline shows how dozens of governments, companies, and other organizations across Europe are moving, or planning to shift, away from US Big Tech.
Data centers have a political problem — and Big Tech wants to fix it
A growth engine for the economy is becoming a political albatross. Can messaging change that?
Eaten by the Internet
This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
Replication Data for: Public Infrastructure and Economic Development: Evidence from Postal Systems
While postal systems have been central to statebuilding efforts around the globe, their contributions to development are largely unclear. We argue that the post office affected economic development in both the short and long terms. To test our argument, we combine original data on the cross-national distribution of postal systems from 1875 to 2007 with granular county-level data in the U.S. from 1850 to 2000. In both country- and county-level analyses, we show that the spread of postal systems affected economic outcomes and persisted over the long term. The results are robust across dependent variables, model specifications, and estimation strategies. We provide additional evidence that suggests these effects were generated by reducing transaction costs and strengthening social capital. Our findings highlight the role of public infrastructure in promoting economic growth, documenting a channel through which state institutions precede growth, and suggest that statebuilding efforts have longstanding effects on relevant communities.
The Enshittification of American Power
First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech.
"I think thinking about it in terms of new institutions is really a useful way to think about it. It's funny for me as a VC, because I think a lot of this stuff will and even goes for us to say should be illegible to venture capital in a lot of ways." - @eclecticcapital.bsky.social
The Economics of Sovereign Media: A Roadmap for AT Protocol | ATmosphereConf VODs
atmosphereconf-vods.wisp.place09.06.2026 - release 1 of 3 Sovereign social infrastructure, one layer at a time. We’re now mirroring the did:plc directory - where identities live - on European infrastructure: plc.eurosky.network Decentralisation means not depending on a single directory.
