The frightened girl, her puppy and the network state

Hurricane Helene, the biggest U.S. disaster since the new developments in artificial intelligence, is becoming the first in which artificial disaster competes openly with natural disaster for the public’s attention.

One of the most touching images of Helene’s devastation is that of a frightened little girl on a boat in a life jacket, holding her flood-soaked puppy. It’s an image that strikes an instant chord of sympathy with those stricken by Helene. In some people it also summons a note of anger at the government’s slow response to the flooding, even though in this image the girl and her puppy are being rowed to safety.

The problem — at least for some people — is that this isn’t a photograph of a girl who’s actually gone through a flood with her puppy. It’s the product of AI software that can whip up a pitiful-looking picture for you as fast as you can say FEMA. Like the image of a resolute-looking Donald Trump wading through the floodwaters with a relief worker, it’s a fake.

It’s no accident that the scared girl and her puppy are floating past the national consciousness at the same time some very serious money is being invested in the concept of the “network state.”

The concept was outlined in a 2022 book by Balaji Srinivasan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who argues that the traditional nation state has seen its day, and will be replaced by network states which originate online among the like-minded and high-minded, eventually taking over existing cities or creating brand new ones that will be run in a much more efficient, savvy way, like a cool new startup. Unsurprisingly, this concept is very popular among the same high-tech billionaires who are promoting cryptocurrency and Trump in this year’s presidential campaign.

Already, several network-state projects are being talked up, including Praxis, which has the announced goal of founding a new city based on cryptocurrency somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Prospera, based on an island in Honduras, that bastion of economic stability.

Trump’s proposal to build up to 10 “Freedom Cities” on federal lands borrows heavily from the network state playbook. “Freedom,” in this case, would mean freedom from the regulations other cities operate under.

The idea of “crowdfunding territory” gets bandied about a lot in network state discussions, with the underlying assumption that the crowd includes billionaires. Srinivasan envisions these projects coalescing into an “archipelago” of cities with an integrated cryptocurrency and enough global clout to win some sort of diplomatic recognition, just as Bitcoin has become a recognized currency.

What happens when a hurricane hits a network state? What happens if high winds and flooding knock out the network? These are details which don’t seem to have drawn as much attention as the fundraising for projects with chill-sounding names.

Network states, like cryptocurrencies, are based on the idea that if a certain critical mass of people believes in something, it can be conjured into existence as easily as an AI-generated photograph. It’s an old idea, really, with a digital twist.

Getting all your friends online to agree to stop a hurricane will not, however, stop the hurricane. Nor are hurricanes selective. They don’t target one particular chat group or another or act to promote one party’s chances or another’s. There is nothing in the least bit artificial about them.

That’s the problem with the utopian schemes currently being espoused by a lot of Silicon Valley billionaires. They trace much too smoothly over the challenges that real governments are confronted with. For all their sweeping ambitions, they have strikingly little to say about the challenges of a changing climate, looming deficits or ethnic and racial conflict. Those are old, landline problems.

The nation has only slowly begun to come to grips with the enormity of this storm, the deadliest since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Its size and unlikely location have created challenges for relief efforts, and considerable personal pain and loss which is very real. We really don’t need more artificial versions.