Let’s Design A Network State — Part I: The Network State Framework

This is part I of a series of posts I am writing to outline a conception for how to actually implement a viable network state.

These articles are the result of numerous discussions and observations related to the functioning of DAOs and various crypto projects over the last few years. The goal here is to attempt to design something which can ultimately be converted into code and run successfully.

I plan to update these articles and diagrams as I go through the process of designing these structures and gather feedback, make discoveries and innovations. What I write here may not be the final version and this will require a few tries to refine!

So lets start with the most foundational primitive: The Network State Stack, pictured above.

Objectives of the Network State Stack

A successful Network State must do the following things well:

• Attract, reward, retain and mobilize talented individuals efficiently
• Be able to source ideas and package them into rulings, policies, and decisions rapidly ,efficiently and effectively with minimal politics while maximizing useful discussions
• Operate a means by which complaints and suggestions may be handled rapidly by qualified deliberation
• Recognize and reward superior levels of participation, contribution and service with meaningful rewards
• Remove troublesome individuals from the collective who fail to meet minimal standards of participation or service
• Be able to constantly re-invent the structure in the service of continuous innovation and never get stuck in a form where the structure grows corrupt, incompetent, slow, compromised or otherwise non-functional (this is a whole topic by itself)
• Provide services and negotiating power to achieve things like health insurance and possibly even forms of universal basic income for participants

Understanding the Network State Stack

The stack is designed to flow from the bottom to the top. The layers are as follows:

• Economic & Ownership Layer — Consisting of a blockchain or blockchains used to store core data primitives and smart contract as well as fundamental objects, especially the Citizenship Bond which is the basis for participation in the Network State.
• Decision & Enforcement Layer — This is the layer at which key decisions are settled and executed. The Network State Stack relies on sortition-based groups and elections to empower specific Citizens with the ability to vote and rule on specific outcomes. This layer is where these decisions are put into practice e.g. a cash grant to an individual, a tax or a fine or granting of a Citizenship or a removal of a Citizenship.
• Rules & Laws — I need to work on this section more. The general thinking is there will be some sort of precedent and caselaw which can be referred to by deliberators to save time and help speed certain rulings.
• Selection & Deliberation — This is the layer where sortition or election is used to create a panel of empowered individual or select singular individuals to be provided with special powers to rule on key questions.
• Distribution — This layer is designed to enable citizens to submit and review requests, notifications, messages, listings and proposals as well as complaints which are then packaged and fed into automatic sortition or election based structures which are empowered to make decisions
• Citizenship — This layer is build around recognizing and rewarding service, gathering Citizens into deliberative structures such as ruling bodies
• Membership — This layer is about onboarding and off-boarding of new citizens and granting them Citizenship or removing Citizenship as needed by the system

But It’s Not Decentralized

The problem and chief criticism of this design by proponents of decentralization is that the objective of the movement is to “check out” of society altogether and effectively have “nothing at stake.”

In other words: Decentralization means no one is in charge, and no one can tell me what to do. If we recreate “centralized” systems of control in the metaverse, all we are doing is repeating patterns which are known to fail in the past.

My hope with this project is to attempt to use clever design to remove known downfalls inherent in democratic systems and create a system capable of self-healing, autobalancing that does not fall into cronyism, authoritarianism, has mechanisms to control corruption and be all around better.

The end goal is MANY Network States approaching this problem in many different ways. Some will succeed, some will fail. But the ideas here are meant to lay the groundwork for true implementation and move closer to architectures capable of operating in the real world.

Summary

The network state stack outlined here is my attempt to provide a complete structure, theory and undertanding to underpin what needs to happen to form a viable network state.

This is a work in progress and I plan to return to these articles, gather feedback and update them as I learn more.