Blockchain, Benedict Option, and Building New Institutions
How crypto technology could help religious communities scale while staying under the radar
Balaji Srinivasan is an apostle of Silicon Valley style disruption – only he wants to disrupt the government of the United States and other countries, not just some industry.
A child of Indian immigrants to the US, Srinivasan got a Ph.D. from Stanford, founded a genetic testing company, became a partner at marquee venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, then started a bitcoin company that merged into Coinbase, where he became the company CTO.
Now living in Singapore, he remains a cryptocurrency evangelist. He sees crypto as a technology with the capability and potential to rewrite how society operates. Like many technologists, he’s disenchanted with established first world governments. Whereas the typical framework divides nations into developed and developing, he prefers to refer to the descending (developed) and ascending (developing) worlds. He might, for example, contrast on the one hand the viral photo of an old Union Pacific diesel locomotive in Los Angeles rolling along rails strewn with packages stolen from passing rail cars by gangs of looters with, on the other, pictures of sleek modern trains in China or India.
Being bearish on the American government’s ability to reform, he wants to see tech founders and others digitally “exit” to form new communities. He came to see bitcoin and other blockchain technologies as the mechanism that would allow these communities of the like-minded to create their own virtual nations using that digital technology, while maintaining a connection to the physical world. He wrote up this idea in his 2022 book The Network State: How To Start a New Country.
The basic idea of the network state is that rather than a company, a founder would create a startup society. This society would be organized around one major moral idea or innovation – one of his examples from the book is the keto diet – and a community would coalesce around it. This community would be governed digitally through a blockchain like bitcoin, which would encode its constitution, laws, decisions, and records. It would also accumulate property at scattered sites in the real world. Loyalty of the members of the startup society would get transferred to that society and away from the national governments of the countries where they are formally citizens. Eventually, this community would have sufficient people and property to convince legacy territorial governments to grant it some kind of recognition as a state. (In this, he echoes the cyberpunk literature in which multinational corporations eventually achieve sovereign status, with their property treated as extraterritorial to the nation where it is located. For example, in the Shadowrun universe).
Srinivasan defines a network state as follows:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
He sees a clear application of his network state concept to religious communities, citing Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option multiples times.
But it strikes me that the church, particularly as it evolved in the West, already provides a real life, pre-digital version of the network state.
Consider how the church maps to Srinivasan’s elements:
Social network -> tight social connections within local churches, plus bonds across geographically dispersed churches, with regular itinerant preachers and authorities shuttling between them as with the various apostolic journeys.
Moral innovation -> the gospel
Sense of national consciousness -> the Kingdom of God; one holy catholic and apostolic church; there is no Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free but all are one in Christ.
A recognized founder -> Jesus Christ
A capacity for collective action -> Innumerable examples ranging from the long-distance mutual aid collections described in the New Testament to creating hospitals and universities.
An in-person level of civility -> stress on unity in Christ and bearing one another’s burdens as in the New Testament
An archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories -> churches, monasteries, etc.
A virtual capital -> In the West, a physical capital in Rome
A measure of diplomatic recognition -> The church inherited direct governance of parts of the West from the declining Roman Empire and even held a superior position to many feudal realms for an extended period of time. Today, the Holy See, as distinct from merely Vatican City, is treated as a sovereign entity under international law.
All that is lacking are the specifically digital elements of Srinivasan’s definition: an integrated cryptocurrency, government by smart contract, and a blockchain census. However, the church has and had governance structures, the Catholic church has issued its own physical currency at times, and it clearly has enough members to cause states to recognize it.
The Christian Church, most fully in Roman Catholicism, was a network state avant la lettre. The development of this church would thus be an interesting case study to examine for those looking to create network states today. Notably, church sovereignty was much higher in the West, where there was advanced state decay, versus the East, where the Eastern Empire continued for many centuries, and other territories were taken over by Muslim invaders. This suggests that state decay, as in Srinivasan’s “descending world” is preconditional to network state sovereignty.
The church as network state developed under the oft hostile conditions of the Roman Empire. This raises the question as to whether, under the cultural conditions of the Negative World in America, the network state idea is one possible way for American Christians to respond. Srinivasan himself seems to think so, given his citing of the Benedict Option as a potential use case.
The network state is a fully developed application of what Srinivasan thinks blockchain can do. Rather than a direct attempt to create such as a structure, it is more useful to think of ways blockchain technology and elements of the network state concept could be practically applied in today’s world.
The blockchain at first glance seems to be at odds with the principles of a robust social network. High value social networks are high trust, whereas it is foundational to blockchain to be trustless. In essence, the blockchain accepts that we live in a declining trust society, representing a structure in which it is only necessary to trust math, not any particular person or party you are transacting with.
It's hard to envision a network state in the absence of a very high trust network. But if you have that, why would you need blockchain the first place?
One reason is as an institution building mechanism outside of the state. In James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, he talks about achieving legibility as the core goal of a state. For example, rather than customary and unwritten feudal land regulations, states prefer a standardized system of land rights recorded in a centralized registry. Rendering land ownership and rights legible to the state allows for easier taxation, surveillance, and control.
In the modern West, essentially all institutions are formalized, either created by the state itself – such as a corporation – or under state regulatory control. Nominally independent civil society organizations or intermediary institutions have gradually been subordinated to state control. This is true even of the family. The legibility of these organizations also subjects them to pressure from third party actors like the media.
Consider, for example, a country club like Augusta National. It is an incorporated entity with a formal membership list. This allows the club to be sued, should someone want to do so. This also subjected it to an intense pressure campaign from the New York Times and others to abandon its all-male membership policy and admit women. It’s not just the organization itself that is subject to such pressure, but its membership as well. A member might well be attacked for being a member of an organization that excludes women. If such as member was, for example, the CEO of a publicly traded corporation, this creates professional pressure as well.
This sort of formal, legible institutional structure and the vulnerabilities it creates is one reason every major institution in society was made the bend the knee to DEI-style mandates. (These vulnerabilities exist even for unincorporated associations).
One approach to reducing these vulnerabilities is to create informal structures that are less legible to the state, media, or other actors. Rather than an actual club, for example, people would remain organized simply as a group of friends. This is actually happening in the real world. Given the penalties attached to being a member of an all-male organization, groups of men are creating informal clubs, whether that be annual “guy’s weekend” retreats, Signal chat groups, or something else.
The challenge for such organizations is that they are difficult to scale beyond a very small group of people. But blockchain provides a mechanism for creating more scalable informal organizations, or startup societies in Srinivasan’s parlance. The blockchain, for example, could allow a hypothetical group of friends doing an annual retreat to replicate itself or create “franchises.” The instructions for doing so could be posted on chain. So could the programming that various groups created at their retreats. Membership would not necessarily be formally recorded but based on the possession of the correct digital key. It could enable voting by the full distributed membership on whether to adopt proposed changes to the new group formation instructions.
It could even begin to solve the problem of creating a status hierarchy separate from mainstream society. Leadership status at the local or national level could be validated by cryptographic signature. Such as capability would have been very useful for the early church, which was plagued with false apostles usurping authority. Imagine if legitimate apostolic office were recorded on chain. Or if a messenger bearing a letter from an apostle could have validated its authenticity cryptographically. This would greatly simplify validating legitimate authority and status without appeal to outside authorities.
Blockchain in this scenario becomes a way to scale without becoming a formal enterprise. The trustless blockchain layer becomes an enabling technology for high trust groups or subgroups to create institutions without formalization.
The mechanics of this would have to be carefully thought out. Blockchains do support the creation of true blockchain institutions, known as Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO. The problem here is that DAOs can be sued. They create institutional personality. The use of an actual cryptocurrency could subject someone to the regulatory apparatus of the state, which generally views issuing currency as a sovereign privilege. But the potential of blockchain in applications like this could be very useful for dissidents or others. Such blockchain institutions or networks could even, over time, organically emerge into something like Srinivasan’s network state, especially under the conditions of state decay that he envisions.
Regardless of one’s interest in seceding from the USA – something I do not wish to do – Srinivasan’s network state is an interesting and provocative idea to read about. It will stimulate your thinking and open your eyes to possibilities outside the norm. And perhaps it contains ideas and elements that you could incorporate into a different application.