load

Not sure which of the following is a greater factor of my feeling overwhelmed ( not in any sort of unpleasant way, though I feel my time is spent inefficiently ).

- inflammation + induced neural refactoring from physical conditioning

- neural refactoring from thinking about foundations of maths

- talking to idiot Malaysians about current affairs / anthropology

- doing housework and miscellaneous repairs of things

- not keeping admin tasks and durable asset management in the most pristine state at all times and regretting it

Nation-building

Nation-building : Well, the reification is basically : you need to materially control underlying infrastructure. Implying, that you need to have a military. So it's NOT so much a different type of country, but WHO gets to be king in the new countries. And the answer here is simply "well since we're richer, let's see if we can figure out how to be kings". 

It's not that complicated. 

Network State : supervenes upon the network

The first popular reference that comes to mind, is this book that was used by some professors when I was in college : Guns, Germs, and Steel - which discusses *material precursors which led to the development of some societies to dominate others. It's been compared to the Network State because these books are both about social economy, and geopolitics.

I think the main criticism that the concept of a Network State attracts, is that it supervenes ( depends ) on the underlying *material network, the means of communication, so to speak. What this means is, a network state fails if the network fails. If geostates block physical infrastructure like undersea cables, or software infrastructure like BGP and its ilk, then there's only access to the network state via guerilla access to the network. 😛