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. 😛