Anti-Protocols and Network State Proposal

The recent war in Middle East has been a great revelation at many levels. This is the primary meaning of the term “apocalypse” by the way. Just like when Adam and Eve shared the fruit of knowledge and fell from the Garden of Eden: eating the forbidden fruit revealed their nudity to them. One could make a strong case that the age of the internet is similar. Everything became known by everyone instantly. You are just a mouse click away from knowledge - or at least it appears to be so. We are now one year in chat-GPT era: it looks like you are now one prompt away from wisdom… Quite apocalyptic times no? We are living the times of constant revelations.

There have been many discussions on the reaction of Israel: proprotionality, international law, war crimes etc. Those conversations are most of the time very strange and sound like they start from a weird premise that “right makes might”. It is another instance of an upside down inversion that our era is found of. It is deeply linked to another seemlingly unrelated subject, the Network State, and this is what I am going to explore further in this post.

Pax Romana

Laws are just ideas if they are not backed by raw force. Might makes right and not the other way around. This is not a chicken or the egg controversy. The only way to have a decent power is first to have power, then to make it such that it behaves decently. You can spend pages of theory and history, but reality is much more simple. Pax romana looks like this:

The so called international order only makes sense because there is an actual cop to enforce the rules. It turns out that the USA can still project enough power for this order, say post WWII and cold-war, to remain stable. The USA sent two carrier strike groups to deter other states and military groups to enter the war between Israel and Hamas. Up to now it worked: the last speech of Nasrallah -leader of the Hezbollah- was clear which paradoxically means that it was made of the usual half cries/half threats mixture. But the situation is clear and everyone knows who has the bigger stick in town. Meanwhile Stepanakert was ethnically cleansed from Armenian presence at the end of September/beginning of October 23 because 1- no one gives a shit 2- Azerbaijan has clearly demonstrated on the battlefield that Armenia can’t militarily compete. The real rules of war are the ones of the winners not of the whiners. It has barely anything to do with ethics.

This is my main concern with relation to the network state proposition. I am completely sold to the idea that our current institutions are unfit for a digital society. I have written many posts about this subject. But the idea that you can simply put everything inside a blockchain denotes a total ignorance of the primality of force in human condition.

Code Requires a Machine

The famous article “Code is Law” is much more subtle than its title suggests. It tackles with the question of who/what will be the regulator of the cyberspace?

But no thought is more dangerous to the future of liberty in cyberspace than this faith in freedom guaranteed by the code. For the code is not fixed. The architecture of cyberspace is not given. Unregulability is a function of code, but the code can change. Other architectures can be layered onto the basic TCP/IP protocols, and these other architectures can make behavior on the Net fundamentally regulable. Commerce is building these other architectures; the government can help; the two together can transform the character of the Net. They can and they are.

The article was written in 2000. It contains very deep observations and remarks. Yet there is an untold story across the article: how do the virtual and the real world interact with one another? It is not by chance. This is an exceptionally difficult question. This is nothing less than what the doctrine of Trinity is trying to tackle with. It is not like the brightest minds of the last millennia have tried to address this issue.

There is a misconception at the heart of this paper. The author explicitly refers as TCP/IP as “the code of the internet”. I do get the idea but it is not correct. A protocol is not a program. It is a set of standards around which people agree. There is no real rule making your computer follow the TCP/IP. It is not like a program that has to be written following a precise syntax to work. You can follow the protocol for 10 minutes than decide to switch and use a proprietary protocol for the next 10 minutes. The same thing apply to Bitcoin. You can follow the rules for 10 months and then change your behavior (try to cheat). There is no material way to force you to follow the protocol. People follow the protocols because they gain something from adhering to them. This is the beauty of the system but it has a flip side: by construction you have no control over agents that don’t cooperate. This is where might, physical might, can’t be delegated nor emulated. To continue the metaphor: you need a machine to run a program. Your CPU doesn’t have to cooperate to run a program. It is built to this end. In other words protocols work until everyone agrees on them. A network state, whatever that means, is just a protocol. The question is: what do you do when cooperation falls apart ? Nation states have a solution: they send you a carrier strike group and you will cooperate or else.

Incentives are not enough

Coincidence or not the Israel-Hamas war is accompanied by strong pushes by nation state institutions to control the virtual space further. Both in the US and the European Union there is a display of might by the good old deep state administrations. Their propositions are legitimately worrisome and will be the subject of future posts. One thing is clear though: they are much more credible than any solution that I have heard about regarding the establishment of a “network state”. Mainly because they are backed by force and not just by protocols. They are not just regulatory apparatus producing texts: there is the IRS and a police force ready to enforce the regulations.

Right now the Stalin remark applies: “Network State: How many divisions ?”. First things first. If you want to establish a state you have to be able to produce raw force which is something that is as anti-protocol as it could be. How could this manist itself is not clear. The network state has to provide tangible goals not just ideas. It may sound stupid but a flag, an identifiable piece of land, an anthem are the material tools used by nation states. An equivalent has to be found for a network state. It could be different but at the end of the day, there has to be a solution to intervene when at 3 am there are troubles in the neighborhood. And by that I mean armed people ready to use their weapons to impose will. Short of that the network state will remain a client of the US army and the IRS.

Many people are digital nomads. There is a reality behind this phenomenon. Parts of it are well captured in this post on X. People with a high income migrate to places and change the economical environment. Basically it becomes a two tier society: upper society (digital nomads) and under society (Uber delivery jobs). By nature upper tier is made of foreigners and lower tier made of locals. The upper tier is thinking about the network state, the lower tier has hard time surviving. This is neither sustainable on the long run nor even stable on the short run. One tier is as virtual as it can be while the other one is pushed down to the material aspects of life. There is a lack of harmony striking. The return to the mean is a strong force and we can expect surprising events in the next years.