A summary of Balaji’s models of history: macrohistory / microhistory + a model for thinking about what’s next: Balaji, his book, and the 1729 Community as a Kalman Filter for The Network State

TLDR:

• The book is about the trajectory of history resulting in the current moment: a collision of two Leviathans: “The State” and “The Network”

• Along with the collisions of the Leviathans, macrohistory and microhistory are also colliding, as is political power and technical truth

• The blockchain, crypto, etc. enables the ledger of record, improving humanity’s collective microhistory, and providing a tool to fight political power with technical truth

• So given the collisions at play, what role does the 1729 Community play? What can we do? Let’s think of ourselves as The Kalman Filter for the Network State.

  

So Balaji’s book has come out, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it so far. Thing is, I’m not that far, probably not even halfway, but I’ve learned some really interesting concepts. The first I want to talk about is this idea of microhistory and macrohistory, and the way I interpret what Balaji is trying to do. A lot depends on understanding these models of histories and how they’re related - it’s probably my favorite concept in the book so far so I’m going to dig in. The 2nd thing I’ll dive into is this idea or model for how to think about the book, the 1729 Community, and what to do next / where to go from here. This model is helping me, so I’m hoping it can help others. It’s far from perfect but it’s a fun way to think about our work. Let’s begin!

The book is about the trajectory of history resulting in the current moment: a collision of two Leviathans: “The State” and “The Network”

Balaji starts off with a bang talking about the importance of history (and then describing two types of history: macrohistory and microhistory) - the idea being that fundamentally, to understand the trajectory of history and follow it, and to convince others to follow it, it’s imperative to understand history well. In fact, a lot of his book is history, ironic given that he would probably describe himself as a technologist/engineer/mathematician - nonetheless he does a good job explaining why history is so important.

At a high level, we’re living in an era where two Leviathans are colliding, one being “The State” (nations, governments as we know them, etc.) and the other being “The Network”. The idea of “The Leviathan'' comes from Thomas Hobbes, a political theorist from the 17th century, who thought about religion and states as these large looming Leviathans of sorts, in that they held great deals of power over people, and held a monopoly on violence. The Network State book posits a new Leviathan in the form of “The Network'', and “The Network State” is taken to be the result of the collision of these two Leviathans. It’s not hard to see how The Network has grown so powerful - we have Facebook that has over a billion users, Twitter that has over 300 million - both have more people by far than most countries in the world; technology has been able to group together people and dictate their behavior in a way that really only things like religion and states have been able to do in the past - it’s quite amazing.

Of the Leviathans that are colliding right now, one is old (The State) and the other is new (The Network). And acutely aware of this, Balaji’s book is aimed at resolving these two Leviathans. How will this be achieved? It’s achieved by having The State submit to The Network so that it can be merged into something brand new. So the book aims to do a lot! And this is why it’s not just a book, in fact Balaji has come out and said that the book isn’t final, chapters will be added, the book may be converted into a bookapp - as well, he’s said that he thinks of the book as a blueprint or toolbox of sorts. I think of Balaji’s book as both a manifesto that exerts political power, as well as a program (i.e. a technology, a software) that creates technical truth. It both makes a moral argument against the old Leviathan that is The State, and arms the new Leviathan, The Network, with the tools it needs to realize its full potential and build a better future. Exciting stuff!

Given that the book is both a moral argument for why The Network State makes sense, and why it’s a natural progression of history (which is why he spends so much time on history), and given the amount of time spent talking about how to technically implement a Network State, mostly in the chapter “On Network States”, you can think of the book as part “why” and part “how”. Part moral argument, part technical implementation.

Along with the collisions of the Leviathans, macrohistory and microhistory are also colliding, as is political power and technical truth

The beautiful thing that connects these concepts together is the continuum of microhistory and macrohistory. What is microhistory? It’s simply the type of “history” (i.e. recorded data) that is extremely reliable, verifiable, concrete and reproducible. For example, a log file spit out from a drone is microhistory. And what about macrohistory? It’s the history of human beings on this planet, recorded in an often subjective way (often by the winners of history), and often written in order to keep the winners in power. These aren’t definitive definitions, but the examples should suffice. 

Balaji talks about microhistory and macrohistory being on a continuum, in the sense that the more granular you get, the more frequently you record data, or log user behavior on the Internet, or collect data of any sort whether from humans or machines, you’re adding to the microhistory of a system - i.e. you’re capturing the data that can be thought of as more reliable, verifiable, concrete, more quantitative, timestamped, etc. - if you play the edits of a microhistory back you can have a complete record of the events that took place. This is pretty easy to imagine in the case of a drone that is run by software that is logging the value of every variable as the program is executed to run the drone. Microhistory systems are predictable, and they’re proliferating across all different industries, with wearables and smartwatches that allow us to collect better data about ourselves and our health, to weather data that lets us predict to the minute what’s going to happen next - not all of this is a strict microhistory in Balaji’s definition of the term, but like he states, it’s a continuum, and with all the data that is collected by software and Internet platforms and machines, this microhistory is getting better and better.

Microhistory is what enables us to take back political power using technical truth. For some good definitions of political power/truth vs. technical truth see this excellent tweet. One of the main draws of The Network State, at least conceptually, is that we can use microhistory and its natural extension, the ledger of record, in order to run our societies. Imagine the ledger of record as every tweet, every crypto transaction, every publicly verifiable event in history living on a transparent and immutable blockchain. No more do we use raw political power to make decisions based on arbitrary reasons, but we can run our societies by understanding our past well, down to individual assertions and aggregate metrics, understanding the data points that drive our societies, and making decisions that predict and optimize for the greater good.

The blockchain, crypto, etc. enables the ledger of record, improving humanity’s collective microhistory, and providing a tool to fight political power with technical truth

You may now see why things like the blockchain and bitcoin and ethereum are all aligned with The Network State, they give us a way to get a microhistory of the economy, or a microhistory of the execution of a software program; you can also understand why Balaji was so keen on an inflation dashboard that used a reliable and decentralized way to gather inflation data and measure the true value of inflation; the same can be said of his startup society dashboard where he aims to track Network States in progress, and maybe in the future, track things like number of citizens, GDP, and other microhistory that will ideally come directly from the on-chain ledger of record.

What’s the ultimate goal here? Pretty simple, to make sure that the new Leviathan, armed with a better understanding of technology, using technical truth instead of political power, wins the battle - and allows humanity to progress in a positive way. The funny thing is that Balaji has been adamant about the importance of narrative, of history, and of winning the moral argument for The Network State, because the traditional state and institutions, the establishment as he calls it, preserves power in these ways. That means the goal is to A.) convince people of The Network State on moral and historical grounds B.) give people the tools and technologies (he also invests in aligned technologies / startups) that will allow people to build these things.

Ok, so know you know (if you haven’t already) what the big idea of The Network State is and its place in the current political climate (i.e. the fact that The Network and The State are colliding), and also why microhistory, and the corresponding ledger of record, is so key to making this a reality. His book is both a manifesto, and a technology, both why and how, both a moral argument (against political power) and technical implementation (that will enable technical truth).

So given the collisions at play, what role does the 1729 Community play? What can we do? Let’s think of ourselves as The Kalman Filter for the Network State.

How then can we think about the work to be done? Let’s talk about the Kalman Filter - which is an analogy that I absolutely love, and imo, if you can understand what the Kalman Filter is, you can understand how the 1729 Community, and the associated projects that Balaji spends his time working on, or investing in, all contribute to the Filter and gets us closer to realizing The Network State.

Here’s the passage explaining the Kalman Filter from his book:

“the Kalman filter , which was used for steering the spaceship used in the moon landing . You can see the full technical details here , but roughly speaking the Kalman filter uses past measurements x[t−1],x[t−2],x[t−3] to inform the estimate of a system’s current state x[t], the action that should be taken u[t], and the corresponding prediction of the future state x[t+1] should that action be taken. For example, it uses past velocity, direction headings, fuel levels, and the like to recommend how a space shuttle should be steered at the current timestep. Crucially, if the microhistory  is not accurate enough, if the confidence intervals around each measurement are too wide, or if (say) the velocity estimate is wrong altogether, then the Kalman Filter does not work and Apollo  doesn’t happen.”

Just replace moon landing with The Network State. Building a Network State requires us to use past measurements (aka history - macro and micro) to understand things like trajectory when it comes to both global politics, and things like technology, and figure out where to go next. If we are able to create a good enough Kalman filter, then we will create Network States, and if we don’t, then we may fall short.

But it’s this Filter that is absolutely key. No wonder then, Balaji spends so much time thinking and writing about history, because as crude as our past measurements are, they are useful for understanding how to get to The Network State. The interesting thing, is that part of the velocity involved with The Network State is patently not related to microhistory, and never can be, because it depends on human desire, human volition, and just getting animate beings to change their beliefs (their layer 0) and believe that Network States are the future. This is why the moral argument is so key. But honestly, it’s not that different from the first Apple computer or the first iPhone or whatever, marketing was needed to capture a subset of people that believed that this was the future, in the same way that moral arguments need to capture a subset of people that believe that Network States are the future. I see why it’s important, and as far as the Kalman Filter goes, understanding what kinds of moral arguments people are attracted to will be a key part in the process (i.e. good marketing analytics) - at the same time, we may one day reach a point where joining a Network State will be as obvious as owning a smartphone.

But once you think about our work in this way, and buy into the idea of the Kalman Filter, you can think of the book as part of it, you can think of the inflation dashboard, and Balaji’s investments, and the 1729 Community itself as all part of it - we’re acting as this one big organism/machine that is the Kalman Filter for The Network State. The Network State is our moon, and we are creating the human and technical infrastructure to increase microhistory + technical truth, adjust trajectory, and safely get to our moon.

The natural next question is, how do we improve the Kalman Filter? How do we measure its improvement, and what outcomes do we measure it against? As a Filter, do we need better microhistory, or more real time data, or do we need to rewire/rewrite the algorithm and optimize for the data we already have? These are good questions, and future pieces will take aim at thinking about how the 1729 Community can be a better Kalman Filter for the Network State.