Network States Must Suppress the Crypto Cult

Why Balaji Srinivasan's Dream Is DOA

Gene: Hello, I’m Gene. I’m glad to be part of our startup community. Let’s build something great to replace the dying West. What’s your name?

Autistic Crypto Cultist: Oh. We're doing intros. Okay. I guess... well, I don’t really do “about me” in the usual way, because, frankly, the self is a floating abstraction that has no meaning apart from the systems it's embedded in. You don’t understand a node by looking at it in isolation. You understand it by examining the network.

So. The network. Right. Crypto.

Let me be clear: cryptocurrency is not a “topic of interest.” It’s not a quirky hobby like collecting typewriters or homebrewing kombucha. It’s a paradigm shift—a civilizational software update being rolled out in slow motion, met with everything from frothing hysteria to smug derision by those who have no conceptual framework for what is actually happening.

What is actually happening is this: we are replacing the social contract with a technical one. We are discarding permissioned systems—banks, nation-states, credentialism—and replacing them with verifiable mathematics. We are re-architecting the substrate of civilization on a new basis: transparency over secrecy, code over charisma, consensus over coercion.

And I don’t mean that in some shallow “everything’s on the blockchain!” sense. I mean we are conducting, in real time, a mass exodus from systems that rely on the arbitrary judgment of human middlemen, and entering into systems that enforce rules with algorithmic indifference. There is no appeals court on the blockchain. There is only the contract you signed, the key you hold, and the ledger that remembers.

Now, when people think of crypto, they think of price charts, scams, laser eyes, and idiot millionaires. That’s fine. They thought the internet was a fax machine with a cocaine addiction, too. But what they don’t see—what most refuse to even try to see—is the philosophical transformation underneath. Crypto is not a technological curiosity. It is a moral realignment. It is the reassertion of objective reality in a world increasingly defined by narrative warfare and monetary manipulation.

Let me put it plainly: fiat is fake. The U.S. dollar is a hallucination enforced by guns and inertia. It is a spreadsheet updated by clerks in glass towers who have zero skin in the game. When they print $7 trillion in a fiscal quarter, they dilute your time, your labor, your future—and you thank them for it. You call it stimulus. You call it policy. But it’s theft. Slow-motion, technocratic theft wrapped in the language of Keynesian lunacy.

Bitcoin—yes, I said it—is not perfect, but it’s real. The rules are public. The supply is finite. The ledger is open. No chairperson of the Federal Reserve can debase it by whim. No unelected committee can decide what you’re allowed to buy with it. It is permissionless, borderless, and—above all—sovereign.

And then there’s Ethereum. A cathedral of computation. A global settlement layer for agreements with no need for trust. I’ve seen people scoff at the gas fees like children upset that gravity makes things fall. Yes, it costs money to publish to the most secure decentralized world computer in history. No, your meme coin does not deserve subsidized throughput. If you want free transactions, go use PayPal—until they freeze your account for saying something wrong.

DeFi is finance without rent-seeking parasites. DAOs are corporations without HR departments or coffee rooms. NFTs—despite their present degeneracy—are the primitive prototypes of a digital ownership model that will outlive your bank. And yet people call it all a fad, a Ponzi scheme, a bubble. As if the dollar isn’t backed by IOUs and the promise of infinite war.

You want to talk bubbles? The entire Western economy is a bubble. A grotesque carnival of debt-fueled consumption floating on the fumes of a dying reserve currency. Crypto isn’t the bubble. Crypto is the needle.

I haven’t even mentioned stablecoins, which are already quietly doing to the SWIFT system what email did to the postal service. Or zero-knowledge proofs, which will soon allow you to prove anything to anyone without revealing a single detail about how you know it. Or Layer 2 rollups, which are compressing thousands of transactions into single batches, like economic black holes increasing throughput without compromising decentralization.

And don’t get me started on the metaverse. Not the Zuckerberg one. The real one. The one being built peer-to-peer, asset by asset, on chain-native primitives that will outlast every VC-funded sandbox and every press release written in Menlo Park.

So yes, I suppose you could say I’m “into crypto.”

I don’t really go outside much.

Anyway.

You can go next.

Gene: …Still waiting on that name.

I. The Cult That Built the Wallet

The promise was always freedom. Bitcoin would free us from central banks. Ethereum would free us from the lawyers. DAOs would free us from management. But in the pursuit of financial sovereignty, a strange congregation formed—one that mistook paranoia for intelligence and autistic intensity for virtue. These were not communities in any natural sense. They were code-driven cults orbiting around charismatic founders, half-baked ideologies, and vapor-thin dreams of stateless utopia.

To walk into a crypto Discord is to encounter a war camp of wizards, many of whom talk like they’ve been off their meds for weeks. Conversations spiral into numerology, market conspiracies, or AI godhood. There are no grandmothers, no children, no festivals—just digital bags, vapor gains, and the looming threat of betrayal. The emotional tone swings between manic evangelism and existential despair. All relationships are transactional. All trust is provisional.

The demographic reality is worse. According to a 2022 survey by Pew Research, crypto users skew male, young, and single, with disproportionately high interest in libertarian ideology and speculative finance (Vogels, 2022). It’s a population selected for dissociation, not governance. A healthy polity needs craftsmen, singers, parents, and priests. Crypto has engineers and gamblers. That’s not a civilization—it’s a liquidity pool.

This is the foundational flaw. Balaji’s network state inherits this culture wholesale. It doesn’t fix the crypto problem—it crowns it. And no sane woman, no dignified elder, no person with a soul attuned to beauty, wants to build a country with these people.

II. The Network State as Crypto’s Cathedral

In The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan lays out a precise, visionary architecture: a digital-first community, bound by shared values, verified on-chain, and eventually granted diplomatic recognition (Srinivasan, 2022). It’s ambitious. It’s technically coherent. And it’s already obsolete—not because the tech is bad, but because the soul of the project is missing.

Srinivasan assumes that ideology and finance are enough. That belief in exit, protocols, and sovereignty will unite people into a durable civilization. That a nation can be summoned by spreadsheets, consensus, and GitHub commits. But belief alone is not enough. The founding myths of a real nation require blood and memory. The blockchain cannot remember your grandmother’s hands or bury your dead with dignity.

Crypto’s problem is not its ambition. It’s that its ambition is one-dimensional. Srinivasan’s vision is structurally a cathedral but emotionally a server room. It wants to be Rome but resembles a helpdesk. And without art, without myth, without the rhythmic continuity of beauty, a state built on consensus mechanisms alone is little more than a digital HOA—efficient, volatile, and soul-dead.

By modeling the network state on the values and patterns of the crypto movement, Srinivasan inadvertently ensures its irrelevance. The values that animate crypto—paranoia, speed, and self-custody—are the values of a bunker, not a home. His cathedral has no saints, no stained glass, no hymns. It is empty space waiting for ghosts.

III. The Schizoid Trap

A polity selects for the people who are drawn to it. If the network state is framed as a haven for crypto believers, it will attract crypto’s worst: the doctrinaire, the disembodied, the erratic. Not criminals, but something stranger—men who fear women, who treat conversation like a denial-of-service attack, who think the world is a badly-designed protocol they were born to patch. These are not outliers. They are the median.

The problem isn’t merely personality. It’s epistemology. Many of these people exist in a permanent war with consensus reality. They reject institutions, doubt journalism, loathe tradition, and speak in jargon designed to filter out normies. Their minds are crystal networks of private schema, wired to reject contradiction and broadcast signal only to those already converted. In another age, they might have wandered into the desert and started new calendars. Now they LARP as technocratic kings while hiding from sunlight in windowless apartments.

Sociologically, the syndrome resembles what psychiatrist Theodore Millon once described as the schizotypal personality: eccentric, anxious, abstract to the point of disconnection, yet convinced they are uniquely in touch with truth (Millon, 2011). These are not people you build a country with. They are people you meet in countries and keep far from the reins.

The tragedy is that they often mean well. But they cannot rule. And if the network state becomes a haven for the ungovernable, it will never become a government.

IV. Money Cannot Love You Back

A nation is not built on code. It is built on memory, sacrifice, and the quiet interweaving of lives across generations. Crypto offers none of this. It offers freedom, perhaps—but sterile freedom. The freedom of rootless capital. The freedom to flee, not to belong.

In every crypto community I’ve observed, intimacy is a liability. Vulnerability is mocked. Commitment is negotiable. Everything can be staked, everything can be dumped. The mood is transactional, and the aesthetic is barren. A DAO cannot host a wedding. A whitepaper does not console the dying. You can’t raise children in an economy of exit.

This emotional poverty is the fatal wound. A state requires inheritance—both biological and cultural. It needs stories passed from grandmother to granddaughter, needs monuments that outlast the market cycle. It needs weddings, funerals, and old men drinking under trees. It needs forgiveness. Crypto culture knows none of this. It is brilliant, yes. But it is also frozen. It is a machine that can count everything except what matters.

This is why Srinivasan’s dream is stalling. You cannot bootstrap a nation through DeFi protocols and ideological purity. The people who gravitate toward that vision are precisely those least equipped to plant gardens, teach children, or die for symbols. Without the soft, slow rituals that root a people in place and time, the network state becomes a network asylum.

A society that worships freedom will never raise free men. It will only raise exiles.

V. The Aesthetic Alternative

While crypto has stagnated into abstraction, aesthetic subcultures have quietly done what nations do: they have formed shared myths, rituals, and dress codes. Goths mourn the modern world with lace and eyeliner. Cottagecore girls bake bread in defiance of nihilism. Vaporwave drips nostalgia into digital decay. These movements don’t argue their values—they wear them.

Unlike crypto, these cultures make room for contradiction. A goth can believe in God or not. A cottagecore woman can quote Nietzsche or Tolkien. What matters is the mood, the symbolic order, the sense of place. These are pre-political nations—soft homelands scattered across the internet. They offer belonging without bureaucracy, reverence without rhetoric.

And crucially, they attract people who know how to live. The goth scene includes musicians, artists, dancers, lovers. Cottagecore is full of mothers, gardeners, homemakers. These are not schizoid abstractionists—they are sensuous, embodied, committed. They know how to throw parties. They know how to mourn. Their worldview is stitched into curtains, tattoos, and tea rituals.

A network state tethered to one of these aesthetic cores could begin to feel real. It could acquire dignity. Not because it solves an economic problem, but because it expresses a vision of the good life that people want to inhabit. One doesn’t become a citizen of Cottagecore Republic because of its GDP forecast. One moves there for the beauty, and stays for the feast days.

And unlike whitepapers, beauty doesn’t crash when the market turns red.

VI. What Crypto Still Gets Right

Crypto’s technical accomplishments are real. It solved problems the state had no incentive to fix: remittance friction, censorship risk, and inflation theft. For people in failing nations or under regimes that weaponize their currencies, crypto has been lifeblood. It rebuilt trust where banks had burned it. The blockchain is not the enemy. It is the mistake of making it the foundation, rather than the framework.

Used quietly, crypto is powerful. Bitcoin can function as the silent economic backbone of a dissident polity. Smart contracts can automate internal governance without lawyers or bureaucrats. Tokens can fund shared projects without asking permission. None of this requires maximalism. None of this requires the cult.

What crypto got right was exit. What it got wrong was community. A network state can keep the tools while discarding the sermon. Protocols are useful when they are not worshiped. The challenge is to embed them into a lived reality where their utility enhances culture without replacing it.

The best technology disappears. No one worships the plumbing in a cathedral. It is enough that it works. When crypto is used this way—backgrounded, silent, trusted—it becomes civilizational. Not as flag or gospel, but as aqueduct. And no one moves to Rome for the aqueducts.

Crypto’s value endures when it leaves the spotlight. Let it serve beauty, not dictate it.

VII. Beauty Before Blocks

If crypto gave us the tools, then beauty must give us the reason. No one dies for bandwidth. But men will die for a chapel, for a uniform, for a flag that reminds them of their mother’s face. A polity begins in the aesthetic, not in the ledger. Form precedes function. The great mistake of the crypto-driven network state is that it attempts to reverse this: building systems before symbols, economies before myths.

Aesthetic subcultures succeed where crypto fails because they already answer the question of how to live. They encode a vision of order. Whether it's the solemn grandeur of the goth or the pastoral gentleness of the cottagecore girl, these subcultures possess an emotional language. Their rituals are coherent. Their aesthetics are binding. They do not need to be explained, only lived.

A functioning network state must follow their lead. Begin with banners, not blockchains. Begin with festivals, not forks. Once people belong—once they sing the same songs, wear the same symbols, plant the same flowers—then the crypto infrastructure can operate beneath the surface like roots under a sacred grove.

This is not about marketing. It is about ontology. A beautiful life precedes and gives birth to political form. Blockchain, if it remains subordinate to that life, becomes a blessing. If it tries to lead, it becomes a curse.

First the face paint. Then the protocol.

VIII. Toward a Real Polity

A network state must begin with a people. Not a user base, not a liquidity pool, not a Telegram channel—but a people, bound by symbols, rituals, and a shared sense of the sacred. Crypto cannot furnish this. It can secure it, finance it, automate it—but it cannot summon it. The dream of the crypto-native polity dies in its own sterility. No one wants to live in a spreadsheet republic run by pseudonymous monks of market efficiency.

What rises in its place must be rooted in beauty. Begin with the aesthetic—because the aesthetic is where culture breathes before it speaks. Build from subcultures that already live like nations: those with dress codes, festivals, taboos, and memories. Anchor the network state to these. Let the goths govern the night and the cottagecore girls govern the garden. Build the blockchain to serve them, quietly and well.

This does not mean abandoning crypto. It means dethroning it. Crypto must become what writing was to the early Church: a silent scribe, a tool of transmission, never the source of truth. When it fades from view, it will finally succeed. When it disappears into the ritual, it will endure.

A real polity is not optimized. It is remembered. Its citizens know what their symbols mean, even if they never explain them. The state that lasts is the one that sings before it speaks.

And the next network state that attains permanence will wear eyeliner, drink tea, and forget its private keys.

References

Millon, T. (2011). Disorders of personality: Introducing a DSM/ICD spectrum from normal to abnormal (3rd ed.). Wiley.

Srinivasan, B. (2022). The Network State: How to Start a New Country. Retrieved from

https://thenetworkstate.com

Vogels, E. A. (2022, August 23). 16% of Americans say they have ever invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency