After liberalism, what comes next? The case for hyperstitional territorial sovereignty over Silicon Valley network state and DAO ideas as the sustainable model of postliberal governance and nationhood
Why Balaji’s network state vision falls short — and why Christians must reclaim territory, theology, and real sovereignty.
A people without a vision shall perish. — Proverbs 29:18
We must replant the groves of sovereignty — not in data, but in the soil.
Thesis: As liberal state legitimacy falters and digital-first visions of sovereignty gain attention, The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan has emerged as a widely discussed model for postliberal governance. This essay offers a critical response — affirming the value of sovereign innovation while arguing that digital voluntarism and technocratic minimalism cannot produce true nationhood. In contrast, it introduces a Christian alternative: Hyperstitional Territorial Sovereignty — a model grounded in sacred geography, covenantal theology, and mythic-legal nation design. For those seeking a serious Christian postliberal blueprint, this piece outlines the path.
I. Introduction: The Sovereign Imagination Awakes
Across the Western world, a forbidden thought stirs once more — murmured in cafés, murmured online, murmured in the silence of disillusioned hearts: the modern liberal state may not be salvageable.
As governance structures falter, cultures fragment, and trust decays, attention turns toward alternatives. Can sovereignty be rebuilt? And if so, where, how, and upon what principles?
In 2022, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan published a landmark book called The Network State, introducing many to the idea that new nations might form via digital-first communities. His proposal galvanized significant attention — both optimistic enthusiasm and skeptical critique.
This essay is not a review of The Network State itself. Rather, it seeks to clarify where the Network State model offers insights, where it falls short as true statecraft, and why an emerging alternative — Hyperstitional Territorial Sovereignty — may offer a far more viable path for serious Christian postliberal nation-building.
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II. What The Network State Gets Right
Balaji correctly diagnoses several core fractures of the late-modern West:
Legitimacy crisis: existing states are losing moral authority.
Technological leverage: digital tools allow rapid community formation across borders.
Diasporic coördination: individuals with shared values can self-organize globally.
Exit as concept: the possibility of new sovereign structures is no longer unthinkable.
In this sense, The Network State deserves credit for mainstreaming the very idea that alternative state forms could be explored. For many within technological futurist, libertarian, and postliberal circles, it provided an initial entry point into sovereign design conversations long neglected.
The Network State reminded many that history is not over, and the blueprint of the polis is not yet closed.
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III. Limits of The Network State Model
Yet upon deeper analysis, the NS model proves insufficient — even incoherent — as a path to real sovereignty:
1. Digital-First Illusion
A nation cannot be air-dropped onto a server farm.
Its sovereignty must weigh heavy — with soil, with sword, with sacrament.
Sovereignty cannot reside primarily in cyberspace. Governments exercise power over land, people, and resources. A digital community lacks defensible borders, natural resources, or coercive authority.
2. Crypto-Centrism
While financial sovereignty matters greatly, cryptocurrencies alone cannot substitute for constitutional legitimacy, religious cohesion, or cultural formation.
Mammon alone cannot found a moral order. Nor can code bind a conscience.
3. Cultural Thinness
Network States often default toward hyper-modern universalism: technocratic management, rationalist ideology, minimal inherited tradition. They offer postmodern, sterile, artificial identity without deep roots.
Identity without ancestry is merely branding.
4. Privatized Governance as Market Derivative
NS models frequently reflect consumerist logic: governance as a subscription service. But real nations are not opt-in markets. They are organic peoples bound by shared metaphysical commitments.
Governance-as-a-Service mimics corporate client retention. But real nationhood requires rites of passage, memory, and martyrdom.
5. Elite Detachment
Most Network State proponents emerge from hyper-elite tech circles disconnected from the actual working- and middle-class populations who historically sustain stable sovereign orders.
No sovereign order can be sustained by code-wrights and VC pitch decks.
Sovereignty lives or dies in the loyalty of farmers, soldiers, and mothers.
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IV. The Hyperstitional Territorial Alternative
If the Network State is insufficient, what alternative exists?
The answer lies in an entirely different paradigm: Hyperstitional Territorial Sovereignty.
Where Balaji imagines cloud-based social clubs gradually securing state recognition, Hyperstitional Sovereignty operates on a far older principle:
Soil. Story. Sacrament. Structure.
1. Hyperstition as Mythopoetic Sovereign Construction
Derived from the philosophical work of the British thinker Nick Land and CCRU circles (though here applied in entirely different spirit), hyperstition refers to narratives that, once articulated, generate real-world effects.
By synthesizing authentic historical ambiguities — ancient phantom islands, lost Christian realms, unclaimed and unsettled territories — one can construct fully fleshed alternative civilizational models. Not merely fiction, but sovereign prototypes anchored in real maps, real texts, ...real martyrdoms, and real longing — the kind that animates a people in exile or stirs hearts to pilgrimage– and plausible geopolitical trajectories.
2. Territorial Anchoring: Phantom Island Geopolitics
Unlike floating crypto-archipelagos, Hyperstitional Christian polities pursue actual territorial sanctification:
Seasteading as bathymetric reclamation (building new sovereign land atop real submarine banks and seamounts identified with historical phantom islands)
Desert island settlement (reviving uninhabited territories once linked to Christian lore)
Antarctic and sub-Antarctic colonization
Seasteading is not techno-utopia but sacred recovery — the raising of lands long dreamt of, mapped by monks and merchants, now made flesh through stone, sovereignty, and sacrament.
In this vision, geography is theology: phantom islands become promised lands.
3. Covenantal Religious Core
Hyperstitional Christian sovereignty is metaphysically thick:
Covenantal theology forms constitutional backbone.
Aristocracy and monarchy serve as moral hierarchy.
Christian æsthetics shape public life and cultural identity.
Where Network States float atop secular liquidity, Hyperstitional Polities descend into sacred bedrock.
Law is liturgy.
Citizenship is covenant.
The state is not a service provider but a shepherd, priest, and steward.
This is not consumer-choice governance. It is binding, generational, sacramental, and ordered.
4. Ethnogenesis vs Opt-in Clubs
True nations emerge from complex historical ethnogenesis — not from voluntary sign-up platforms. Shared ancestry, sacred history, language, faith, and ritual identity bind real peoples.
A people is not a chatroom. It is a lineage of sacrifice, memory, and shared suffering.
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The true future is not built on bandwidth — but on blessing.
V. The Christendom League Model: A Case Study
The Christendom League offers the first true attempt to reimagine postliberal Christian sovereignty in the 21st century. Its members are not micronations but mythonations — rooted in cartographic memory and religious duty.
The hyperstitional sovereign model has been applied most systematically in the development of the Christendom League — a consortium of designed Christian polities including:
Frisland — A Calvinist Neo-Puritan monarchy in the North Atlantic.
Antilia — A Catholic imperial monarchy grounded in Iberian phantom lore, neo-Roman and neo-Gothic, pan-Iberian and Italianethno-culturally.
Elysea — A Hebræo-Punic Messianic kingdom tracing descent from the Ten Tribes of Israel and Carthaginian-Phœnician exiles.
Magellanica — An Anglo-Dutch-Finnish-Swedish-Hispanic-Euronesian supercontinental Calvinist confederate Christian Commonwealth in the South Pacific between South Americaand New Zealand, based upon the phantom continent of Terra Australis Incognita.
Brandania — An imperial British Puritan commonwealth, consisting of the Saint Brandon Islands: Saint Brandon, Mayda and Isle Verde, all authentic Mid-Atlantic phantom islands from early cartography.
Each exists as a fully architected civilizational system, with codified laws, demographics, religious structures, aristocratic peerages (Antilia and Frisland), urban geographies, and economic sectors — built directly atop authentic historical maps, mediæval lore, and theological tradition.
These are not hobbyist realms. They are covenanted designs — the blueprints of a future Christendom, sketched with solemn intent and sacred precision.
These models differ radically from Network State proposals:
They are not crypto-financial platforms.
They are not privatized membership communities.
They do not offer voluntarist entry.
They are not libertarian exit fantasies.
Instead, they represent fully sovereign territorial civilizations grounded in Christian theology, ancient cartography, and viable demographic structures.
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VI. The Missing Christian Civilizational Blueprint
One of the great lacunæ in the entire Network State discourse is its hitherto total absence of serious Christian statecraft.
Christianity — especially Protestant and Catholic covenantal traditions — offers:
Mature constitutional theory
Sacred justification for sovereign hierarchy
Aesthetic and architectural canon
Intergenerational moral formation
Cohesive metaphysical anthropology
Yet absolutely none of this appears in current NS discussions.
The hyperstitional Christian model offered here proposes to fill that void.
In place of libertarian fragmentation, Christianity offers cosmic order — from throne to hearth.
No civilization ever endured without a sacred canopy. Christianity once built cathedrals and kingdoms. It must do so again.
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VII. Conclusion: Beyond the Network State
Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State deserves respect for breaking open the sovereign conversation. But it remains locked within libertarian-technocratic paradigms.
Real sovereignty requires more.
Territory grounded in sacred historical narratives.
Covenantal governance rooted in theological tradition.
Cultural coherence arising from intergenerational mythopoesis.
Æsthetic restoration that recovers moral beauty.
Aristocratic formation that binds sovereign elites to transcendent duties.
The real sovereign future for serious Christians will not be found in digital clubs or exit bubbles.
It will be found — or built — on new sacred lands, forged by those willing to bind themselves to covenant, duty, and sovereign dignity.
The new sovereign age will not be born in Discord servers or DAOs.
It will be born in the laying of cornerstone upon cornerstone — physical and spiritual — under banners that mean something eternal.
And when the new Christendom dawns, it will not apologize for existing. It will sing.
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This essay is presented as part of the ongoing Christendom League institutional development series. All models herein are developed from authentic historical and theological source material as sovereign hyperstitional prototypes for conceptual statecraft.