The Hacker Republic
#019 · Mountain View, California · founded by Paul Graham
“Make something people want.”
Citizenship requires shipping. Funding by demo day. Essays are how laws are debated. The polity runs on Lisp.
founders, hackers, the kind of person who writes essays for fun.
📍Mountain View, California
YC's Mountain View campus is already a soft network state. Anchor the polity right there with citizen apartments, a Lisp meeting hall, and an essay archive. Federate to citizen pop-ups in Cambridge and London.
The moral case.
The startup is the most successful new institutional form of the last 70 years. The polity built around it is overdue.
From idea to polity.
- 01Charter the YC campus as the founding node
- 02Open citizenship to YC alumni and any founder with a paying customer
- 03Charter a citizen rule: ship monthly, write quarterly
- 04Charter the polity to fund 100 founders per year via demo day
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta after 1,000 citizens
Why I sent you this link.
I have lived at Network School for over a year. I have watched the network state thesis go from a book to a real, lived experiment. I have seen Balaji put it to work, and I have seen what is missing.
The missing piece is a federation. A meta-layer that gives every distinct community a constitutional home, a shared census, an interoperable passport, an anthem, and a way to recognize each other as legitimate.
That is what Interneta is. The United States of Interneta. The optimistic meta-layer for network states.
The Hacker Republic is what I think you would build, if you decided to build one. The One Commandment is what I have inferred from your public work. The site scout, the next steps, the citizenry: all educated guesses. They are wrong wherever you say so.
If any of this lands, I would love a fifteen-minute conversation. If none of it lands, I would still love your reply telling me where I missed.