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. 😛

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2026 July 26

Conjecture : Balajian network states are analytically trivial. 

The network state is simply a landless NGO seeking to be acknowledged as an ontological equal by GOs with both land and guns.

Once land is acquired, a network state is simply a traditional state. It's not clear how it would be easily recognised as otherwise by traditional states. 

For example, all traditional states could declare themselves network states and nothing would change. As soon as geospatial claims are made, it then becomes resolved the old fashioned way with a gun.