The motivation for writing this essay is to provide more context to the vision behind City/Sync. The details of why and how are too complex to capture in a single essay, and in many ways, these essays have been my way of thinking out loud and discovering what it is I truly want to build. Over time, I hopefully will have left behind a patchwork of writings that, when pieced together, begin to reveal the shape of something larger.

This essay, however, is my first real attempt to give that work a clear frame of reference and to help those who are curious to see it in perspective. It’s also, in part, a response to my first interview about the project with @8ctopuso, for which I’m deeply grateful. That conversation gave me the chance to articulate ideas I’ve carried for a long time, even if I stumbled most of the way. The truth is, I’m a far better writer than I am a speaker.

At its core, the message I’ve struggled most to communicate is actually quite simple: governments are simply, a technology. My hope is that this essay helps make that idea clear and shows how and why City/Sync might become something more than just a thought experiment, but a pathway toward reimagining how we govern ourselves.

To think of governments as technology requires us to strip away the illusion that they are eternal or natural. They are neither. Governments are systems of governance that emerged when humans encountered new scales of collective life that could not be managed with existing technologies. At their foundation, governments are simply tools of coordination. 

If we trace this logic backward in time, you’ll realize that governments are actually a very recent development in the context of human existence.

For many thousands of years, our ancestors lived in small family units as hunter-gatherers. These groups were self-regulating in ways that would make the modern idea of “government” unnecessary. Things like securing food or offering communal childcare were not political ideals, but survival strategies. Cooperation was enforced by proximity and reputation. If everyone in the group knows you, it stands that the social cost of being selfish would be too high. Gossip and ritual acted as governance technologies long before constitutions and police.

But once humans began to settle into villages, everything changed. The agricultural revolution introduced a variable that nomadic life never had the benefit of enjoying.  It was surplus. Grain, once harvested, could be stored. Animals were domesticated and bred. Land itself became a resource.  It was no longer a vast and open territory.  It was parceled and claimed.

But surplus also had its problems. Unlike immediate consumption, it created inequalities. Who decides how much of the grain is kept? How much is shared? How much is traded? Who defends it from neighboring villages? Who arbitrates when one family claims more than its fair share of water?

This was the first governance revolution. Group bonds were no longer suitable to organize settled communities effectively. The new problems (things like resource management, dispute resolution, defense) required completely new governance structures. Councils run by Chiefs and Elders emerged out of necessity rather than by some type of ideology or cultural practice. Power consolidated because hierarchy was the simplest way to make decisions at a larger scale. Rules began to emerge, and they were often expressed as customs or sacred rituals and served as a method to create more predictable expectations among villagers.

This moment also marks the birth of inequality in a recognizable form. Surplus meant that some families, by luck or by power, accumulated more than others. Governance was partly a way to manage disputes over inequality, and partly a way to justify it. A common practice among Priests was to leverage their pious legitimacy in these early days to provide cosmological explanations for these inequalities (Alice was blessed by the gods, Bob was not) and it served as a method to deter conflict. This is all just to say that governance and legitimacy have been intertwined from the very beginning. The innovation of surplus created a new set of problems that required mitigation through new governance technologies.

In a way, the village is one of the great societal breakthroughs of human history. It is not simply a matter of more people living together, but also the appearance of organized roles and codified norms that allowed a community larger than the family unit to persist across generations. Governance was inseparable from the invention of agriculture. We could not fully manage surplus without rules, and we could not abide by rules without some conception of authority.

One of the most overlooked aspects of this transition is that governance was not only about power, but about trust. Surplus required storage, and storage required confidence that it wouldn’t be stolen or unfairly distributed. Governance is a storage technology for the fundamental primitive of trust. Villagers deposited their trust in the authority of Chiefs and in the fairness of rituals and in the memory of Councils. That trust allowed them to act in ways that small family units simply couldn’t. As a result, they were able to perform more complex activities such as building irrigation systems, defending their granaries, organizing harvest festivals, and so on.

When governments work, they do precisely this…they make cooperation at scale possible by holding trust in reserve. When they fail, the trust collapses and the surplus becomes a source of conflict rather than stability.

While the village solved the immediate governance problems of surplus and property, it also created the conditions for something even larger to emerge. The city became the next step in the evolution of organizational scaling.  Once humans discovered that concentrated populations could be sustained through agriculture, the surplus not only fed more people but it enabled specialization. For the first time, individuals could survive without producing food themselves. This single development (the division of labor) reshaped governance as significantly as agriculture did.  

People in the city could become potters, priests, merchants, soldiers, etc. Society began to fracture into interdependent roles. Dependence itself became a governance problem. It required coordination across domains that no single family or group network could dream of managing. 

The emergence of specialized roles created both opportunities and tensions within society. Priests claimed authority by mediating between the individual and God but also served local power structures. The merchants increased access to material goods but controlled allocations by limiting the diversity of offerings. The soldiers threatened outsiders and protected insiders by wielding organized violence. Governance was the process of managing these competing roles. 

In many early cities, cooperation offered synergies between roles as well.  For example, religion provided a unifying framework where rulers justified taxation and law as divine mandate, and simultaneously priests institutionalized legal codes into religious rituals that created cohesion among the members of the city.

Merchants also introduced something equally transformative during this time.  They created markets as a governance technology. Prices, contracts, trade networks, and supply lines reduced the need for direct command by providing impersonal systems of coordination. Markets externalized trust. They created a system where strangers could interact predictably without group bonds. Governance increasingly became the art of balancing the logics of ritual and exchange.

Specialization sets the foundation for Politics

The invention of the division of labor and the resulting societal specializations allowed for the concentration of roles to reinforce power through expertise and informational asymmetry. Within the city, new identities emerged that carried both authority and influence, each pulling the community toward different priorities. Priests, merchants, soldiers, and scribes did more than simply perform their functions…they became actors in the first political dramas.

Priests claimed authority through the divine, offering legitimacy by linking the city to the gods. Their role served more than just a religious pursuit, it served a political one.  They blessed rulers, sanctified laws, and deemed dissent as ungodly. Merchants brought wealth and external connections, turning trade into leverage. Their interests demanded stability for markets and the protection of their contracts. Soldiers provided the means to defend borders, protect caravans, and when necessary, enforce authority within the city. Scribes held the keys to knowledge, and exclusively held the power to record laws and inscribe history in ways that could enshrine power or challenge it.

Each of these roles carried its own form of power. Together they created a dynamic balance that no single leader could ignore. In this interplay we began to see the foundations of a new governance technology…political systems. When rulers emerged, they did not rule in isolation.  They depended on priests to justify them, on merchants to finance them, on soldiers to protect them, and on scribes to remember them. The city became a theater in which politics was invented.  It was a contest between roles, where alliances were created and broken, and where institutions slowly solidified around the negotiation of competing powers.

Politics became the negotiation of roles, interests, powers, and authority inside a shared civic space. The city’s innovation was to turn specialized roles into political actors, and their interaction into the architecture upon which formal governments would eventually be built.

The village may have been governed through custom and small councils, but they lacked the administrative capacity for the degree of complexity required for massive undertakings through collective action.

The city solved this by inventing something more durable.  It upgraded their system of customs through the governance technology of recorded memory.

Writing did not emerge as poetry or literature. Its earliest application was for the use of accounting. The cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia were actually just lists…quantities of grain, numbers of livestock, tallies of workers, etc. They served as a tool for governance. Writing became the extended memory beyond the human brain and the oral tradition. It allowed debts and rules to persist across time and across individuals.

This was an extraordinary step in governance technologies. In a village, disputes might have been resolved by recalling what the Elders remembered. In a city, memory could be externalized and standardized. Rules could be written, and agreements could be etched into clay. Governance became legible not only to those present but to anyone who could read the record. Writing established the foundations of bureaucracy.

The earliest form of bureaucracy was simply the systematic storage and retrieval of commitments. It was governance of information rather than people. A city could keep track of resources, manage trade, enforce agreements, and maintain continuity despite changes in leadership. The durability of writing transformed governance from a fragile oral tradition into an institutional process that could survive through generations.

Shortly after writing, came law. Oral custom had always governed human behavior, but once inscribed, it took on a different character. A written law is more than advice or precedent, but a fixed standard that extends memory. The Code of Ur-Nammu, the Code of Hammurabi, and similar early legal documents were codifications of existing norms. Their significance is in their externalization, as disputes no longer depended solely on who remembered what, but on a text that stood above individuals.

Law was the first externalized governance operating system. It abstracted authority away from the Chief or Elder and vested it into the text itself. Governance became impersonal and extremely neutral. Anyone could appeal to the written law and not just to the memory of those in power. The city was able to scale these foundational governance technologies into effective forms of coordination.

But, why did cities emerge at all? What was the driving force to aggregate these effectively run villages into something more?  The answer is the efficiency of concentration. Walls provided better defense, temples provided religious legitimacy and social cohesion, markets facilitated a higher velocity of trade, and proximity allowed cultural and technological exchange. But none of these advantages would have been sustainable without governance technologies to manage that density. The city, more than the village, was a test of whether human beings could live together in numbers that exceeded small group networks.

The governance technologies that made cities possible are layered on top of all previous governance advancements. Writing provided the external memory of commitments.  Law stabilized and externalized cultural norms.  Specialization allowed for roles to coordinate through bureaucracy and institutional religion legitimized power by being able to scale myths. 

Together, these created a platform that allowed for larger populations and more complex forms of collective action. Cities became centers of culture and commerce precisely because they solved the coordination problem at scale.

It’s important to note that the city was never going to be the end form, even if some within cities may have thought so. Its very success produced new complexities. Trade connected cities to one another, and as a result, it created networks of exchange that surpassed the control of any single area of authority. Armies soon became professionalized, requiring permanent funding and administration. Walls defended against raids but could not prevent organized warfare.

What is crucial at this stage is to recognize the pattern that keeps repeating when analyzing organizational scaling and the governance structures that emerge due to them:

First, there is innovation that acts as a catalyst for growth which leads to new scales of organization.  The innovation of agriculture created surplus leading to growth, and as a result we scaled from nomadic groups to villages.  The innovation of walls for defense, and markets for trade created efficiencies leading to prosperity, and as a result we scaled from villages to cities.

Second, larger organizational scales create new problems of complexity.  Surplus generated disputes, inequality, vulnerability.  Efficiency created conflicts of interest and local dependencies.  

Third, Governance technologies were created to handle complexity and provide stability for new innovations.  The creation of roles, hierarchy, legitimacy.  The division of labor, writing, laws.  

Once complexity is controlled, stability allows for innovation which then pushes us again to create larger scales of human organization.

This three-step loop is the focus of the evolution I’m talking about. It explains why governments look the way they do, and why they change when they do. Each new scale of human organization produces new complexities that cannot be managed by the existing system of governance. Each time, we respond by creating a new system of governance with new governance technologies added to the stack. Innovation, Scaling, Complexity, Governance, Innovation, Scaling, Complexity, Governance…ad nauseum.

So, we shouldn’t view the village simply as a small-scale city. We should view it as the first iteration of an upgrade path that humans will follow again and again. 

But before we continue this march through evolution, it is important to see that the city established the essential technologies of governance we still recognize today…bureaucracy, law, legitimacy, markets. Every subsequent technology of governance has been built on this template, expanding its scale while grappling with the frictions it creates

The Birth of Governments and the Death of City-States

The city was more than a concentration of people, it was a concentration of functions.  Economic trade, cultural rituals, defense, record-keeping, etc. were all knitted together into a single social organism. However, specialization alone cannot sustain order. For a city to thrive, these functions had to be coordinated and continuously managed. Out of this necessity we witnessed the birth of the first governance systems that determined who could settle disputes, make decisions, and determined how collective action was achieved. 

It’s very important to distinguish governance systems from political systems. Governance is the grammar of order and describes the rules, procedures, functions, and customs that make cooperation possible. Political systems are the institutions that speak that grammar aloud.  They are the councils, kingships, priesthoods, and bureaucracies. Governance defines how decisions are made while politics defines who gets to make them. The emergence of this layered relationship where we have governance as the foundation, and politics as the expression, marked a shift in human organization. For the first time, decision-making was formalized into rules that could outlive any single ruler or generation. Cities, in effect, had invented something enduring in the form of government.  Governments were a synthesis of governance and politics capable of coordinating entire populations.

This synthesis gave birth to the city-state, a structure that transformed cities from dense clusters of human activity into sovereign systems of rule. City-states were more than just population centers, they were self-contained worlds of governance.  They became the laboratories of political innovation that managed agriculture, trade, taxation, defense, and law under unified civic and religious authority. They represented the first true “operating systems” of organized society, where governance was both local and complete.

City-states appeared across the ancient world because they offered a resilient and adaptable model. In Greece, Athens experimented with democracy, giving citizens direct participation in decisions, while Sparta, which was very close by, engineered a disciplined military oligarchy that subordinated nearly every aspect of life to collective survival. Centuries later, during the Renaissance, Florence and Venice flourished as mercantile republics, demonstrating that wealth and trade could sustain sovereignty just as effectively as conquest.

Each of these systems represented a different arrangement of the same components allowing for different models of authority, economy, religion, and law to be developed.  But the city-state’s real innovation was not ideological. It was structural. The city-state integrated governance and politics into a single coherent system. It could codify law, manage resources, and project authority outward, enabling coordination across entire territories. 

But, this is also what made the City-State so fragile. The same sovereignty that gave city-states autonomy made cooperation between them difficult. Surrounded by rivals, they often turned their ingenuity toward warfare rather than collaboration. The Greek city-states, for instance, spent centuries locked in cycles of alliance and conflict, and their brilliance and innovation was often consumed by rivalry.

But the political technologies they pioneered during this period remained a staple in the evolution of governance.  They laid the conceptual foundation for the next great step-up in organizational scale, which was the empire. 

While the city-state proved that governance and politics could be unified within a single urban boundary, the empire extended that synthesis outward, binding multiple cities and cultures under a common framework of authority and infrastructure.

In this way, the invention of governments and the age of city-states marked the end of one chapter in humanity’s story of coordination and the beginning of another. The city had taught us how to govern ourselves. The empire would teach us how to govern others.

**Fun Note

For those who love history, and this subject, it’s important to note that there were two distinct tracks of governance and administrative development that occurred during these early periods.  The progression from Village to City to City-State to Empire was the path for most of what we would call “Western Development”.  It was largely based on implementing political and governance diversity.  However, the “Eastern Development” track skipped the formation of large Cities and City-States.  China for example, went from villages to Empire fairly rapidly, partly due to the complexity of its vast geographies and partly due to its own application of patrimonial governance.  While the west focused on experimentation of governance types within the city scale, the East focused on scaling the methods of governance through the development of administrative coherence.

The experiments within city-states allowed for the scaling of specific governance technologies (standardization, cultural symbolism, authority structures, inter-city diplomacy) and empires emerged by utilizing these technologies to stitch together disparate cities through administrative bureaucracy and military power. But this scale of organization also ran into brand new complexities. The empire fell victim to overextension and to the logistical limits of managing diversity. Empires were unable to create cohesion without constant military domination. Their stability was very similar to that of the city-state. This form of governance struggled to find an equilibrium because it was unable to handle the vast differences among different populations within its territory. As a result, it experimented just as the city-state did until a new set of innovations emerged in the form of mass communication.

The printing press, the spread of literacy, and eventually newspapers and books created a new set of realities for cities.  A farmer in a village could never meet a merchant in the city, and yet they could both read the same language, hear of the same events, and imagine themselves as members of the same collective. Communication scaled belonging.  This technological leap was not just a bureaucratic innovation, but a conceptual advancement that would set the foundation of the nation-state.  It allowed us to fuse governance with culture, binding the state's political authority to a shared story.  While empires had to rely on military domination, the nation-state relied on narrative.

Our education on the history of the nation-state is often taken as a given. We inherit it without question, as though it were the natural endpoint of our organizational evolution. I remember my school textbooks always treated its arrival as inevitable.  As if history marched forward purposefully, depositing us at the present arrangement of flags and borders. But the nation-state is not the end state of some natural process. It is a specific scale of human organization forged in conflict and commerce. Like every form of government before it, it is both a tool and a constraint. 

The key to the nation-state’s success was its ability to turn identity into infrastructure. Governments could now harness both compliance and commitment. Citizens would fight, pay taxes, and sacrifice not just out of fear of punishment, but because they believed in a shared destiny. The efficiency of this cannot be overstated…when people identify themselves with the state, governance is no longer an external imposition but an internal obligation.

Identity stabilizes diversity. Many languages collapsed into standardized tongues. Many local customs gave way to national rituals. A thousand fragmented jurisdictions unified under a single law, and enforced by the consensus of the governed. The state’s legitimacy didn’t need to rely exclusively on kings, gods, or some type of bureaucratic coercion. It relied on the idea of the nation itself. And so, the modern state emerged alongside a form of governance that was able to scale through structure and self-conception. 

With identity established, the nation-state built the tools of permanence. Borders hardened, census systems categorized populations, and bureaucracies institutionalized the administration of collective life. Schools taught national languages and histories. Armies were professionalized into permanent institutions. Taxes became normalized and law became codified.

The power of this architecture was its self-reinforcing loop. Bureaucracies created predictability. Predictability fostered trust. Trust sustained legitimacy. The state became more than a governing apparatus. It was a stable platform on which modern economies could grow. Industrialization, mass production, material provision, and trade all relied on a level of order that only the nation-state could provide. And so, governance became not just about survival or order, but about the possibility of prosperity.

Embedded in this architecture are the very limits we now confront. The nation-state was designed for an industrial world of physical goods, territorial borders, and homogenous cultures. Its assumptions struggle against the realities of the 21st century. Economies are global. Governance is local. Communication is universal. Politics are bounded by geography. Problems like climate change, cyber warfare, pandemics, and financial crises spill across borders, but our political technologies remain confined to the logic of the nation.

The great strength of the nation-state was its ability to bind people through identity.  Now it has  become its greatest weakness. National identity was the tool of cohesion, but it now produces only exclusion and fragmentation. In a hyperconnected world, the insistence on recognizing borders and homogeneity is at odds with the complexity of global interdependence. The state as an invention is now revealed to be contingent.

As stated before, governance evolves when existing forms of governance fail to resolve emergent complexities due to the evolution of organizational scaling. Family units gave way to networked groups when survival demanded cooperation beyond the family. Villages became cities when agriculture demanded coordination beyond households. Empires emerged when cities required order across territories. Nation-states established themselves when empires collapsed under diversity they could not contain.

Today, the same pattern reappears. The nation-state is confronted with challenges it cannot resolve. The gap between its design and our reality continues to expand. The question is not whether this form will endure forever, but what form might come next.

If the nation-state was the pinnacle of governance, then the digital revolution represents both its undoing and its successor. We are living through a moment where the very substrate of political order is being rewritten. What roads and printing presses did for the nation-state, fiber optic cables and distributed ledgers are to whatever comes next. The question is whether we will recognize these as the raw materials of a new political and governance architecture, or whether we will continue attempting to patch old technologies beyond their limits.

The first blow to the nation-state’s monopoly on coordination came with the internet. For the first time in history, human interaction at scale could transcend geography. Communities began forming around interests, professions, ideologies, and identities rather than physical proximity. Online forums, social networks, collaborative platforms, and digital economies all created spaces where belonging was no longer determined by territory.

This transformation strikes at the heart of the nation-state’s legitimacy. Nation-states were designed around the premise that physical borders defined communities. And in some ways that remains true, but in a world where collaboration and commerce operate on global networks, borders feel increasingly arbitrary. What does citizenship mean when one’s closest collaborators may live continents away? What does sovereignty mean when an individual can hold assets, reputations, identities, and jobs that exist entirely outside the purview of our immediate governments?

Networks excel at scale, but they do not automatically produce governance. Early internet communities demonstrated both the potential and the problems of borderless organization. Open-source projects showed how thousands of contributors across the globe could collaborate without a central authority. Wikipedia demonstrated that collective knowledge could be curated without traditional institutions. But, they also revealed the fragility of governance without structure.

What became clear is that coordination requires more than connectivity. It requires mechanisms of trust and shared accountability. The internet destabilized the old forms, but it did not offer ready made replacements. We were left with networks that can mobilize collective energy, but we are left without the durable architectures needed to channel that energy productively. We have the ability to connect billions, but we are unable to govern them, and this remains the core problem of our digital disruption. 

This lack of governance infrastructure has created a power vacuum.  In this void, the platforms emerged. Facebook, Google, X, and others have become the pseudo governments of the digital realm. They set the rules, they enforce the norms, and they shape the flows of information for billions of people. With no elections, no constitutions, and no meaningful accountability, these corporations function as private sovereignties.

The platform era presents a unique problem. While the internet dissolved the old borders of the nation-state, it recreated new borders around centralized corporate fiefdoms. The platform is a 21st-century technology resurrecting some of the same pathologies of the empire.  They are highly focused on obtaining centralized control and are extremely fragile when faced with a diversity of rules, thought, philosophies, etc. and it serves as a warning to the possibilities and dangers of new organizational technologies that fail to take governance into account.

The deeper innovation is arriving quietly, and almost invisibly, in the form of blockchains. At first glance, Bitcoin seemed like just a viral monetary experiment.  It’s a digital asset with no central issuer. But its real innovation was political. It demonstrated that strangers across the globe could reach consensus without a central authority. It showed that rules could be enforced not by trust in institutions, but by trust in code.

Blockchains represent the first true governance technology of the digital age. They provide transparency, immutability, predictability, and distributed enforcement. They allow communities to define rules collectively and to embed those rules in protocols that operate without bias or discretion. The internet gave us communication without borders, and blockchains provide us governance without masters. Together, they create the possibility of a post nation-state architecture that is decentralized and voluntary by default.

But how do we get there?  Digital technologies have already transformed society, but political systems remain locked in industrial-age forms. The result is a growing misalignment. States attempt to regulate decentralized networks with tools designed for borders and centralized corporations. Digital communities struggle to navigate global challenges because they are constrained by jurisdictional regulatory patchworks. Citizens increasingly live dual lives.  One under the laws of their passport, and another under the protocols of their digital communities.

This separation cannot hold forever. Either states adapt to the logics of networks, or networks evolve into parallel governance systems powerful enough to rival states (wink). The friction between these two trajectories defines our political movement. 

When people say governments are outdated, what they mean is that they are technologies designed for a world that no longer exists.

If every major step-up in governance emerged from a crisis of scale and complexity, then the digital age presents the next stage. The question is not whether the nation-state will persist, but whether it will remain sufficient. Just as empires once seemed permanent, and just as city-states once seemed inevitable, the nation-state too will give way to a form more suited to the realities of our time.

The digital era offers hints about these forms.  The experiments in DAOs, digital cooperatives, international networks, and other blockchain-based communities are showing a lot of promise. Given, these are all early experiments, and often fragile, but they reveal a viable trajectory. Governance will move from territory to network. Full Stop. 

The architecture of the next political order is not yet built, but its materials are already in our hands.  It's just a matter if we have the will and courage to design and implement it.

Every stage of human organization has, at its core, been a negotiation between scale and coherence. Families, groups, villages, cities, empires, nation-states…each emerged to resolve the contradictions of their time. Today, the contradictions have shifted again. Our societies are planetary in scope, digital in structure, and interdependent in economics and ecology. The horizon of governance exists in building forms that reflect the new realities of coordination.

The nation-state is anchored in borders.  These are simple lines drawn on maps, defended by armies, and legitimized by a shared cultural belief. But in a world where digital networks define our identities and economies, borders kinda lose their primacy. Governance no longer needs to be tied to geography. It can be tied to voluntary association.

Imagine governance as a service, where it is a system that is chosen rather than inherited. Communities could form around shared values or goals, offering systems of rule-making and collective resource management. Authority would be polycentric, and not monopolistic.  Decision-making could be distributed across many overlapping circles rather than concentrated in a single sovereign.

Polycentric governance is not a utopian fantasy, because it already exists (at least in fragments). The European Union operates as a macro layer above states. International organizations manage issues like aviation and climate protocols. Corporations regulate billions of digital interactions daily. Blockchain communities operate decentralized treasuries and decision-making systems. What is missing is coherence through a framework that integrates these overlapping nodes into a functional order.

The lesson from past transitions is clear…governance evolves by layering new forms on top of old ones until they become indispensable. The family did not vanish within the city, and the village didn’t disappear within the empire. Each remained, but nested within larger architectures. The post-nation order will likely follow the same pattern, where networks and digital polities are layered over, under, and around states, until they render the state’s monopoly obsolete.

One early vision of this shift is the “network state.” Instead of being defined by territory, a network state is defined by its community, coordinated digitally and perhaps one day negotiating for physical territory. More important than the specifics of any one proposal is the trajectory it reflects. The movement from governance as territorial dominance to governance as networked association.

These network polities may begin as niche communities such as DAO-based cooperatives, digital-first cities, or professional guilds. But, over time, as they accumulate resources and reputation, they could become parallel sources of legitimacy. Just as medieval guilds once rivaled monarchs in influence or corporations today rival governments in power. Digital polities do have the potential to become primary containers for human coordination. 

With that being said, I do have serious critiques of the Network State concept as proposed by Balaji Srinivasan, though I recognize it as a viable trajectory for the future of governance. My main concern is that network states, as currently envisioned, largely overlook the realities of shared geography. Citizens do not live in digital isolation. They inhabit physical spaces with others who may belong to different “networks.” Without robust local coordination mechanisms to mediate these overlaps, network states risk creating new forms of conflict and fragmentation rather than cohesion and governance.

Additionally, the network state model tends to conflate digital sovereignty with social legitimacy.  It is naive imo to assume that coordination online automatically translates into legitimacy offline. Doing so underestimates the role of material infrastructure and civic institutions that bind communities together. It also limits the framing of citizenship as a matter of opt-in association, which risks privileging those with mobility and wealth leaving behind the very populations governance is meant to serve.

A useful metaphor is to imagine governance as a stack, like a technological protocol. At the base are physical needs such as food, security, and infrastructure which still rely on territorial governance. Above that, however, layers can be digital.  We can have reputation systems, resource allocation mechanisms, collective decision-making, identity verification each serving multiple governance functions. Each layer can be modular, allowing individuals and communities to opt into the governance modules that suit their needs.

This modularity resolves one of the nation-state’s core limitations which is its insistence on uniformity. In the nation-state model, citizens must all live under the same rules, even if their needs diverge. In a governance stack, communities can customize their modules, while still interoperating with others through shared protocols. 

Ironically, I believe the post-nation world may revive one of the oldest organizational forms in the scale of the city. As engines of economics and innovation, cities already outstrip many states in significance. Cities are flexible, pragmatic, and directly connected to their citizens' daily lives. In a digital order, cities can serve as physical anchors for governance stacks, hosting local infrastructure while connecting seamlessly to global digital polities.

The city as a node in a planetary network offers a more adaptable model than the state as monopolist of territory. A city can participate in multiple overlapping governance frameworks  whether that be regional, global, or digital, and all without requiring exclusivity. In this sense, the 21st century may be less the age of the nation-state than the return of the city as the primary unit of governance innovation.

If history teaches anything, it is that governance evolves through crisis. Families did not scale to empires by choice. They scaled under the pressure of survival. Nation-states did not emerge because empires decided to retire. They emerged because empires collapsed. Similarly, the next form of governance will not emerge from theoretical preference but from necessity.

Climate change, global inequality, digital disinformation, and technological risks will stress the nation-state beyond its capacity. When states prove unable to resolve planetary challenges, citizens will turn to alternative forms of coordination. What today looks like silly experiments, such as the efforts within DAOs, blockchain governance, international cooperatives, and similar organizational structures may in hindsight be the prototypes of post-nation institutions.

The purpose of speculating about governance beyond the nation-state is to encourage the expansion of our political imaginations and not to predict a single destination. The question shouldn’t be, which model will replace the state, but how we can design systems capable of adapting to complexity rather than hardening into fragility? The future of governance is unlikely to be uniform. It will likely be messy, hybrid, and experimental. But it will be built on principles that respond to the realities of a networked, interdependent planet. 

Just as the nation-state was once unthinkable, so too are the forms that will succeed it. Yet they are already emerging in fragments.  To recognize governance as technology is to understand that no form is final. Governments and the nation-state are not the end of history, but one chapter in an ongoing story of human coordination. The next chapter is being written now in the protocols of networks and the imaginations of those who refuse to accept that governance must remain bound to the past.

If there is one throughline to the entire story of governance, it is that humans build systems to solve problems of coordination, and when those systems falter under new complexities, we build again. 

To see governments as technologies is to strip them of their mystique. They are simply tools. They are powerful tools, but tools nonetheless.  They were constructed by humans, for humans, and in response to human problems. Like all tools, they can be hijacked, corrupted, and outgrown. And like all tools, they can be redesigned.

Polycentric: multiple overlapping centers of authority, rather than monopolistic sovereignty.

Modular: governance as a stack of interoperable systems, allowing diversity rather than suppressing it.

Transparent: rules encoded and visible, not hidden in bureaucratic opacity.

Voluntary Participation: membership chosen, not inherited, with the freedom to exit as well as the power to voice.

Networked Belonging: identity formed through communities of values and practice, not merely geography.

These principles serve potential trajectories. They describe the direction of evolution, not its final form.

If we are to embrace governance as technology, we must reclaim our political imagination. Too often, politics is treated as management and concerned with maintaining what exists and repairing the machinery of the state as if it were the only possible vehicle. But history tells us otherwise. 

The nation-state solved the problems of industrial society, but it cannot solve the problems of planetary networks. The next architecture will not be perfect, and it will not arrive all at once. It will be a messy, layered, and dangerous system. But it will emerge, because it must. Coordination is the essence of survival, and humans have never failed to reinvent it when pressed to the edge.

Every step-up in complexity from the family unit to the nation state has required some degree of evolution in trust, communication, and new ways of organizing.  Sometimes it took a crisis, sometimes a new invention, but always, humans have found a way to build bigger circles and work together in new forms.

City/Sync seeks to start building new governance technologies on top of our old ones, and to reclaim the City as the focal point of our governance evolution. Come help us build something fun and new!