The Network Society Documentary is Out
Available on X and Youtube
After 10 months of traveling, writing, and producing, I’m proud to share we just released the first episode of The Network Society documentary on X and YouTube.
What is The Network?
The network is one of humanity's oldest and most powerful technologies ever “created”. It’s embedded in our DNA and is essential for human coordination and progress.
Cultures and religions are networks that connect people who share principles and moral codes through books, rituals, language, and stories. These networks enabled humanity to coordinate beyond physical spaces and build trust with distant, unfamiliar tribes.
Money is also a network that tracks the value each member contributes to society and enables us to collaborate and transact at scale with people of different races, genders, ethnicities, political ideologies, and religions.
Modern democracy is a network of Institutions that share principles around human rights, governance, and trade through international laws, treaties, and social protocols.
These social networks and institutions, though incredibly powerful and foundational to modern civilization, face numerous issues and are not well-suited for the challenges of the 21st century. Currently, they run on top of outdated technologies - paper, political parties, etc - and rely on outdated assumptions - humans highly tied to their geography, low global connectivity, etc.
However, the Internet has introduced a new type of network with powerful new properties: one that is decentralized, neutral, permissionless, and relies on computers, open protocols, code, and cryptography, rather than paper and shared stories. Thus, allowing us to update and improve society’s networks.
This technosocial network represents a new type of Institution, which in the last 30 years became the current economic infrastructure of our society and catalyzed the creation of countless disruptive innovations led by startups.
Upon this digital foundation, we’ve witnessed the rise of global digital social networks (Facebook), global transport networks (Uber), global housing networks (Airbnb), global commerce networks (marketplaces), and global media networks (podcasts, Twitter, YouTube channels).
Another layer has also emerged on top of the Internet: blockchains.
If the Internet is a communication network, blockchains are networks of trust and ownership. In just a few decades, we’ve seen the development of new types of money (cryptocurrencies), contracts (smart contracts), finance (DeFi), organizations (DAOs), identity (Worldcoin, ENS), reputation systems (soulbound tokens), assets (governance tokens), and much more.
How long can society rely on a 250-year-old, monopolistic, closed governance system? How long will we continue to make collective decisions and allocate trillions in resources by voting in incompetent politicians every four years?
I don’t think much longer.
That’s why we are witnessing the rise of the Network Society: interconnected self-governing communities that leverage digital and decentralized networks to build new governance systems and evolve through opt-in experiments in social innovation.
The documentary presents a new frontier, showcasing an alternative path to today’s polarized, zero-sum governance system. It envisions an Internet-native network society built by entrepreneurs and engineers—a society focused on transparency, inclusion, openness, agility, innovation, and truth.
I hope you enjoy it and join us on this journey to build the future of cities, institutions, and governments.
Share it with friends and family to help us spread the message.
Thanks for your support during this journey.