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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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Aug 2 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
I write about this exact phenomenon in The Network State.

At scale, a startup becomes a bureaucracy. The CEO must ensure that all are replaceable, because otherwise one departure could kill a company. However, this leads to alienation. And then decline. thenetworkstate.com/left-is-the-ne…
Without picking on this guy at all — seems like a perfectly reasonable person — this attitude is why Google* hasn’t shipped innovative products in years.

* Their AI work is still amazing, but that’s research. Publishing isn’t as easily blocked by the rest of the org.
To compare and contrast the Google with “heros” to the one without them…

2001 Google: Paul Buchheit codes the antecedent of Gmail in one day. time.com/43263/gmail-10…

2022 Google: the big announcement is a new Gmail theme. workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/06/update…
Early Google was perhaps the greatest all star team ever assembled in tech. They had Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Urs Holzle, Marissa Mayer, Craig Silverstein, and many more. They hit a $23B IPO with $961M in revenue on just a single VC round of $25M.
Btw, it is true that you shouldn’t need heroism for maintenance. But you do need it for innovation.

Without heroism, without someone who can punch above their weight, the bigger company always wins.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jul 31
No, VCs couldn't have "just funded nuclear", because regulations like ALARA increased the price of nuclear until it had no advantage over other sources.

The graph below is 100% the fault of the US establishment. They nuked nuclear.
rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-fl… Image
Here's @rootsofprogress with more on ALARA.
I've thought about how to fix this, and my conclusion is: tracking polls.

To change the law, you need moral consensus. You measure that consensus with tracking polls. And you shift that consensus with rational + emotional arguments in a variety of media.
Image
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jul 16
It’s true that Bitcoin, like gold, is valuable because it has no leaders.

But that doesn’t mean leadership itself isn’t valuable. After all, every founder is in a sense “self-appointed.” Some then prove themselves to be genuinely meritorious leaders that others choose to follow.
The key question is whether one is against *this* order or *all* orders.

Against this order? Against inflation, invasion, surveillance, censorship? I agree.

Against all orders? Then I disagree. In principle there are legitimate orders. The question is how to define legitimacy.
Opposing bad leadership is good, opposing all leadership is bad. That’s the difference between libertarianism and crypto-anarchy.

Similarly, opposing bad measures of merit is good, but opposing all measures of merit is bad. That’s the difference between liberalism and wokeness.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jul 13
A review of The Network State in a Catalonian outlet.

I mention Catalonia and similar groups in the book as examples of stateless nations. The network state may be a path for such groups to peacefully attain a state of their own. @vpartal is open to it:
www-vilaweb-cat.translate.goog/noticies/un-es… Image
There are hundreds of stateless nations out there, and we may now have a third way for them. Rather than remain without territory indefinitely, or win a grinding zero-sum conflict for land, they could digitally organize to build their own distributed network state.
The idea of a "nation state" is clarified by the concept of the "stateless nation." These are groups of people with a shared history and culture, like the Catalonian nation, who lack a sovereign state of their own.

More on this here:
thenetworkstate.com/on-nation-stat…
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jul 10
The Network State is out.

It’s a new book on how to start a new country. And you can read it online at thenetworkstate.com
What is a network state? Briefly, it’s a new kind of online community that crowdfunds land around the world, networks it together, and eventually attains diplomatic recognition.

Here’s what it looks like to go from a 1-person startup society to a million-person network state.
The Network State is available in three formats.

Read it on your phone right now:
thenetworkstate.com

Download a PDF:
book.thenetworkstate.com/tns.pdf

Or get it on Amazon if you want the full Kindle experience:
amazon.com/dp/B09VPKZR3G
Read 9 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Mar 21
Open source everything but the token.
That’s a totally different model than the closed servers of web2. And the modern updating of @mojombo’s classic.

tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/ope…
People forget how ideologically anti-corporate the original free software movement was. As distinct from open source (which is also valuable), it sought to constrain corporate power by unionizing all free software developers into something that could beat Microsoft, via copyleft.
Read 8 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Mar 20
Digital power is not really soft power. Being deplatformed, seeing all your money frozen — this is much more than mere influence.

Neither is it traditional hard power. It’s invisible, intangible. And it can be used against 100M people without leaving a bruise.
Perhaps a four part classification instead:

- analog soft power: culture, influence
- analog hard power: bombs, bullets
- digital soft power: ranking, recommendation
- digital hard power: deplatforming, freezing, seizing

Soft power is probabilistic, hard power is deterministic.
What recent events make clear to all is that digital technology, like nuclear enrichment, is very much dual use.

There is a legitimate, important peacetime use. And then there is a second use as a weapon of war.
Read 8 tweets

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