Daily Balajisms - Society as a Service

Startup societies for moral innovations

Startups create technological innovations, and thus better and more scalable products or services. Tesla has proven electric cars can be faster, safer and cheaper, thus beating competition on many dimensions.

It is much easier to create software businesses than hardware ones, because the iteration cycles are just much shorter and capital needs much smaller. Startups require a single-minded focus and long workdays of grinding hard work.

Balaji sees startup societies as the first step towards network states. They can be started by anyone with a laptop. The startup society founder aims to create a community and sells memberships, not a product or a service. The founder doesn’t produce technical innovation, but focuses on one moral innovation. Or what Balaji calls The One Commandment.

A key attribute of startups is a relentless narrow focus on one product or service. Similarly, startup society needs to be focused on one moral innovation.

The moral innovation needs to be phrased as simply and succinctly as possible, like “sugar bad” in case of a Keto Kosher startup society. And to stand out, it needs to be distinct from the mainstream society mores of the day.

Balaji explains that many startup societies can be incompatible, but they can still cooperate. For example, Carnivore society and Vegan society are clearly incompatible, but they can be both opposed to the “fiat” food pyramid. A Culdesac society, that aims to create streets without cars, seems incompatible with Van Life society – but they can find some middle ground – cars in the cities are bad, but living in a car outside cities is good.  

 There can be startup societies dedicated to reviving old religions and practices, or CrossFit-like societies. Or strange societies like Formalwear society, where everyone dresses well, and which aims to combine the aesthetics of formal clothes with comfort of casual clothes, producing a better v3 version (v3 is a Balajism for Hegelian synthesis).

Balaji explains his main motive for the network state idea – to advance longevity by escaping the global harmonization that he sees as the biggest impediment to progress. He says, without joking, that it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA. 

Balaji lists 24 startup societies on The Network State webpage. He wants to see thousands of startup societies bloom, with hundreds of network unions (capable of regular collective action online) and tens of network archipelagos (with crowdfunded real estate and IRL communities), so a diplomatically recognized network state can emerge within ten or so years.

Anyone with a laptop can start a startup society. To reach the network union stage, they need to build a highly aligned community capable of collective action – an ideal example is that all 100 members of a network union collaborate online on a project for 100 days in a row, each day people spend certain minutes on a project, or contribute some financial amount instead of their time.   

Balaji says, that startup societies are the new SaaS – Society as a Service. Creating communities instead of products. And investors can use established SaaS metrics to measure their performance. Balaji also shows how to practically assess highly-aligned communities by their level of engagement in collective actions.