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Citizen Infrastructure

Network societies (not network states)

One influential story in tech says the future is the network state: gather a like-minded community online, then exit the old country to found a new one, with a hard border and “strong exit rights” — leave everyone else behind. Glen Weyl, co-author of the Plurality book, has a blunt objection: that isn’t a network at all.

What a network actually is

Section titled “What a network actually is”

In network science, a network is a web of partially permeable, partially coherent parts that connect through protocols — never one sealed-off whole, and never fully separate atoms either. Your body isn’t cells shouting “leave me alone” at each other, nor one brain micromanaging every cell; it’s organs sending complicated signals across membranes. Brains, ecosystems, economies — every system that works looks like this. So a “network state” that defines itself by exit and separation, Weyl argues, uses the word network to destroy the thing a network is. The richness, the resilience, comes from the interconnection.

A network society, by contrast, keeps the connections. Communities stay distinct and self-governing, but remain woven into the larger fabric through shared protocols — closer to how a commons or a parallel polis sits alongside the wider world rather than seceding from it.

Why the middle path is the resilient one

Section titled “Why the middle path is the resilient one”

This tracks a lesson from complexity science: durable systems sit on the edge between rigid order and pure chaos (“self-organizing criticality”). Too ordered and nothing grows; too chaotic and nothing holds. Life — and richness — happens in between. Plurality is a name for deliberately staying on that edge, rather than collapsing into either a single controlling intelligence or a scatter of disconnected enclaves.

The same point shows up in money. Drawing on the anthropologist David Graeber, Weyl notes that reducing every relationship to one universal yardstick — the dollar — is centralizing: it throws away the diversity of trust paths between people, which is exactly what makes a real network resilient (think of the supply chains that snapped in the pandemic). A network society values the diversity of the paths, not just the total flow. It’s the same instinct behind “integration, not exit”: spend a month in an intense community, then carry what you learned back home, rather than walling yourself off from the society that made you.

Sources

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