What comes after nation states?
Technologists and artists are exploring new societal structures in the mountains of Patagonia
The world feels increasingly chaotic in 2025. We have growing global political instability, distrust in governments and large institutions, and accelerating AI that will soon make it nearly impossible to tell what is real on the internet.
Alongside this accelerating instability, small online communities are meeting up all over the world to discuss and build new models of societal structure as the nation state system of governance and control continues to fray at the seams. This month, I’m living in a small town in Patagonia as part of a society incubator called Edge City.
This movement of pop up cities is often referred to as the Network State, or as multiple network states. I particularly like this definition from the Logos “Open Source Everything” Zine, which was gifted to me by a new friend on one of my first days here in Patagonia:
"A network state is a digitally native, value-aligned community that coordinates its actions around technologies that resist outside interference, enabling it to achieve a degree of sovereignty. Unlike traditional nation states that assert power through territorial control and inherited institutions, network states emerge from decentralised digital communities. These communities typically form around shared goals, belief systems, or missions, using communication and coordination technologies to develop institutions such as legal systems, economies, and governance frameworks.”
In the last few years, the phrase “network state” has been most often attributed to Balaji Srinivasan and his book The Network State, and associated with the late 1990s cult classic book The Sovereign Individual, which predicted the rise of a nomadic digitally native class of individuals who would move away from increasingly restrictive and extractive nation states to build networked societies of their own, using cryptocurrencies that give them freedom and independence from government controlled currencies.
Rather than paying high taxes to live societies with corrupt, extractive and inefficient governments, network states would, theoretically, bring the free market model to governance, competing to attract wealthy individuals with low taxes, safe and beautiful communities, and efficient, effective government.
Many network states proponents cite Dubai as a modern example, which is why I included the word theoretically. I will happily pay California taxes (and put up with failing California infrastructure) to avoid living in Dubai, though I have met a handful of people who love living there.
The true roots of the network state concept began even earlier, with Timothy May’s 1988 Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, which predicted that technologies like public-key encryption and zero-knowledge proofs would usher in a new era of individual sovereignty (in the form of crypto anarchy) entirely independent from nation state control. In some ways, he was correct.
Nearly 40 years after the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, there are, as predicted, new models of societal structure being built using public key encryption and zero knowledge proofs. These technologies could allow us to create new systems of governance and communication that are simultaneously open, private, and secure. They might also be the only thing that saves the internet from disintegrating into a mess of AI slop and disinformation.
Zero-knowledge cryptography, a somewhat obscure branch of mathematics, makes it possible for one party to prove that a piece of information is true without revealing the information itself.
For example, at one network state adjacent experiment called Zuzalu (which was the progenitor of Edge City), residents created Zupass - a digital passport that could, using zero knowledge proofs, prove that someone was a resident of Zuzalu without revealing any other identifying information about them.
Extend this even further, and zk proofs could be used to construct new voting systems, to prove that an individual is a legal resident of a certain territory (or network state) without revealing their identity and linking it to their vote, protecting election integrity.
On social media, zk proofs could be implemented to prove that someone is a real human being using biometric data, without ever revealing that biometric data or the individual’s identity, allowing for private and anonymous posting from a single account while proving that the poster is human, not an AI bot, especially not one deployed by a rogue nation state to ragebait and radicalize you.
The need for these systems has only become abundantly clear to residents of the United States within the last decade. For most people around the world, political and economic instability have been the norm for a while. The ability to subvert repressive government control and permissionlessly build and use new economic systems, uniquely enabled by crypto networks, is a lifeline, especially in an increasingly chaotic and unstable world.
So back to my current network state outpost. It’s easy to be optimistic about these ideas while sitting next to an alpine lake in small town in Argentina with some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve ever met. Edge City is adjacent to the network state concept, but stands out independently in a few important areas.
Most network state ideology leans extremely libertarian, which can attract a crowd that is considerably more self- interested than community focused (i.e. some of the culture of Dubai). Edge City does have a significant focus on community and positive impact, most of the people I have met here so far are pro social.
Argentina is a particularly interesting place to be hosting a crypto pop up city. The country has undergone rapid inflation, with the Argentine peso devaluing from ~60 to 1 USD when I last visited in 2019, to ~1400 to 1 USD today. Most Argentine’s I’ve spoken to blame government corruption. Only a handful of them have learned how to use cryptonetworks to evade capital controls. For years, residents were restricted from purchasing more than $200 USD per month while their currency rapidly devalued. Crypto networks & US dollar pegged stablecoins allow individuals to get around capital controls and keep their savings in US dollars, or in cryptocurrency.
Despite the rapid inflation and government corruption, proposing a top down Dubai-style libertarian network state in Argentina would be naive and socially inept. Luckily, Edge City seems to have a more grass roots, positive sum approach. Give people access to the tools and the network, and let them build and create.
There is a distinct effort from the Edge City team to include locals, with significant discounts offered to LATAM residents, and programming that includes the community, like AI coding workshops and sound meditations for children who live in San Martin.
On my first day at the conference I met two local women who live driving distance from San Martin, both working in the technology industry, a lawyer and a software engineer, both interested in new forms of governance and societal structure.
The software engineer expressed desire to help educate children in different communities around the world to show them if they work hard and study, they will have abundant opportunities towards economic freedom and mobility. The lawyer is creating an online school leveraging AI to give students in every corner of the world access to expert level education.
Another Argentinian, and another trained lawyer, founded “a network of regenerative nodes connecting bioregions, communities, startups, and technologies to co-create a new model of civilization” starting with a plot of land in the middle of the country. There are people here at edge who live in similar communities all over the world. In Argentina, economic collapse caused by government corruption has been happening for years, making the need for new, sovereign societal structures much more pressing and obvious to a larger portion of the population.
Edge City feels distinctly positive sum and optimistic. The community and programming have a strong focus on healthy living, exercise, longevity, and intergenerational community living. It sounds a bit pithy, but edge seems more focused on building the new than fighting the old.
The people here are exploring what the ideal structures for human flourishing would look like, and attempting to prototype and build these structures in small communities all over the world. It is a grass roots effort to bring brilliant people together to develop and collaborate on emerging technology, regenerative agriculture, longevity, healing modalities, and cultural exchange.
For this month in Patagonia, the Edge team encouraged participants to organize into residencies and housing based on their own specific interests. I hadn’t planned to join a residency when I first signed up for this month, but through a series of serendipities (or synchronicities) I joined a house exploring Consciousness at the Edge.
Consciousness at the Edge is an immersive, interdisciplinary residency centered around the future of healing and human consciousness. Over one month, we’ll gather top technologists, researchers, and facilitators to investigate under explored modalities across sound, somatics, psychedelics, vasocomputation, breathwork, contrast therapy, and other energy emerging consciousness technologies.
This subject matter is particularly close to my heart, and I’ll be writing more about my experience, and the residency’s experiments, over the coming month. Subscribe here or follow @consciresidency on X to follow along.
To return to my original question, what comes after nation states? I am personally hopeful that the nation state system does not entirely collapse any time soon. I do think we’ll see a continuation of nomadic hubs forming globally, with small permanent enclaves emerging over time. Some Edge City participants are already talking about buying land here in San Martin.
It has taken more than 30 years from the publishing of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto for working crypto economic markets and zero-knowledge proof powered identity systems to be made manifest, but the technological advancements will continue to accelerate from here.
Such a great price!
Thank you for the positive framing —so stoked to have you at Edge City!
Great post!