You’re echoing Martin Gurri here. I finished his book and loved it, but I think he’s wrong about networks being unable to create. Bitcoin (pause for the audience to roll its eyes) is a great example of how networks can enable people to say “yes” to a vision of the future. Humans have never collaborated at the scale of bitcoin without some hierarchy.

As for what this future enables, I imagine that projects like the EU, US and China likely to fail, but their constituent states are operating at sca…

Networks can certainly create virtual or digital communities. But where they stop short is making things work in the physical world. Bitcoin is great and all, but figuring out how and when to pave the access road to your communal property is a whole different bar (and most real problems we face are those).

It's the 'I'm super popular on FB but nobody shows up to my parties' problem, but at bigger scale.

My guess is people will use it to pay for private security / local police / functional local governments.

The world is full of intelligent people, but you can only have so many high status elites, by defintion. What happens if each state has opportunities with comparable scope / status as working in Washington now? I think this is an entirely feasible future.

As a hack, yes, I imagine they will.

That also sounds like Somalia.