Insights from "The Network State" Part I
Insights from "The Network State" Part I
Former Coinbase CTO and a16z Partner Balaji Srinivasan published a manifesto for how to create new “startup societies” in a new book called “The Network State”.
This one quote summarises much of the problems of government overregulation to me that I talk a lot about on my “Stranded Technologies Podcast”:
"Our entire antiquated process of adversarially writing high-stakes laws on paper at the last minute, deploying them in production to hundreds of millions of people without any testing, and then getting them interpreted in unpredictable ways by regulators and solicitors will be seen as a bizarre relic of an older time."
This contains so much important information:
- Adversarial: laws and regulations are written in a zero-sum competition. You win or you lose.
- High-stakes: these laws and regulations have an outsized impact. Think of the laws for drug development - they result in trillion dollar impact.
- Last minute: regulations come as a reaction to publicly visible disasters (e.g. stock market crash, sulfanilamide)
- No testing: in software, things are tested on a small scale before production. Ain't no such thing in legislation. Bugs are there forever.
- Interpretation: laws aren't like computer code. Language is (sometimes deliberately) ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways.
- Predictability: regulations promise stability. They often do the opposite, because of the interpretation problem.
- On-paper: on-paper isn't scalable or machine-readable. Compare that to on-chain transactions with a clear logical sequence (e.g. smart contracts).
The alternative to bad regulation is not zero regulation. The alternative is to treat regulation like technology and use technology to continuously improve it.
In Balaji's words:
"How does a network state create and enforce laws? Digitally. It’s Locke’s justification of the state as the protector of private property, in the form of a digital registry. And it’s Lessig’s code-is-law, but on-chain."
More thoughts on the book will follow.
I love this part of interpretation... isn't it the one of the biggest problems we have now with the Supreme Court in the US? If everything, or most, will be solved by digital solutions I don't know yet because we have too many examples where privacy was sold once the "price was right". Now, can we balance transparency, profits, privacy? I'm eager to see.