The Network State: How To Start a New Country
Balaji Srinivasan lays out his framework for what he calls a network state, an online community with a moral innovation, a plan, a founder, and enough coordinated members to eventually acquire physical territory and diplomatic recognition. He starts by revisiting the history of nation formation, from the American founding to postwar independence movements, and argues that the internet has changed what kinds of political communities are possible in the same way it changed what kinds of businesses were possible. The book moves between history, cryptography, statistics on institutional decline, and concrete steps for founders, including how to build a census, a treasury, and a diplomatic strategy. It is provocative and reference-heavy, and it has become a touchstone for a specific strand of tech-adjacent political thinking, admired by some as a serious framework for exit-driven reform and criticized by others as underestimating the friction of physical politics.
What you might want to know about The Network State: How To Start a New Country
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Balaji Srinivasan's manifesto for building new countries as online communities that eventually crystallize into physical territories with diplomatic recognition.
The book is his own, and Srinivasan treats it as the fullest written statement of the framework he has been developing across essays and talks. He points readers there when they want a single reference for the network state idea.
Both. The framing is manifesto-style, but the book includes concrete operational chapters on census, treasury, diplomacy, and the specific milestones a network state has to hit.
The Network State: How To Start a New Country was written by Balaji Srinivasan, published in 2022 by Self-published.
The Network State: How To Start a New Country is 476 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Network State: How To Start a New Country takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Network State: How To Start a New Country is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.