When I was a student at Berkeley a few years ago, I attended a lecture by Balaji Srinivasan, prolific angel investor and former CTO at Coinbase and GP at a16z, on a concept he’d been musing about lately, a new evolution of collective power: the network state. He claimed to be a prophet with visions of a digitally-native, globally distributed society organized around shared values and capable of collective action. The idea that online groups could manufacture their own collective histories or alternative facts seemed absurd. But I was wrong. And looking at the world today, it’s clear that network states are already here.
The Vatican is perhaps the most obvious historical example. The Catholic Church is one of the longest-running, most resilient institutions in human history. It has a vast, interconnected network of followers, medical centers, churches and nonprofits spanning the entire planet (including the outgoing US President), a centralized leadership structure with a single authoritative figure, and diplomatic recognition from over 180 nation-states. It even has its own bank. The only thing it lacks is a native cryptocurrency, but given its ability to mobilize billions of dollars across borders in an instant, does it even need one?
New Paradigms in the Soft Power of Information
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are, in many ways, the twin architects of a new kind of digitally-enabled power. Neither of them govern a nation-state in the traditional sense proto-monarchies the command networks of influence that rival the power of governments. Their movements are global, highly financialized, and capable of rapid, large-scale coordination.
Trump’s network is built on decades of media saturation. He’s the American tabloid-industrial complex, even when he has no cash in the bank. He has jumped from real estate to reality TV to social media and now into direct platform ownership with Truth Social. He was in Home Alone 2! The American people have had every chance to form an opinion on him, and after the interregnum, he has consolidated his control of information by having OpenAI, TikTok, Meta, Google, and major networks to bend the knee. Now that he has his own cryptocurrency and mixed asset fund, the Trump economy is starting to evolve into a global engine overlapping with but stretching beyond the US government.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, is the closest thing we have to a techno-monarch. He doesn’t rule a country, but he effectively governs a sprawling global empire that is a state in all but name. SpaceX has effectively privatized NASA; Tesla drivers are everywhere in the Bay Area, and the company (like SolarCity before it) gets tons of government subsidies; its subsidary, Starlink, has penned deals with Apple to expand their hegemony, and they are even influencing wars; and he obviously owns Twitter. And like Trump, Musk doesn’t finance everything himself—his empire is backed by a tangled web of international banks, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional investors who understand that his influence extends far beyond his balance sheet.
Both of these figures operate within the intellectual framework of the Dark Enlightenment, an ideology associated with thinkers like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. This school of thought rejects traditional democratic governance in favor of centralized, technocratic control. And in many ways, Trump and Musk’s network states are proto-monarchies—one built on mass media spectacle, the other on technological dominance.
The Next Network State? Effective Altruism’s Growing Influence
If Musk and Trump represent networked economies built on wealth and influence, Effective Altruism (EA) is an attempt to build one based on ideology and grantmaking. Many have called it a "secular religion of the elites”.
EA is no longer just a philosophy—it’s an economic force. With billions in funding from organizations like Open Philanthropy, the movement directs capital toward AI alignment, biosecurity, and long-termist projects that have no immediate return on investment. I don’t hold an opinion one way or the other, but it seems EA has influence spanning academia, policy circles, and global governance discussions.
But what makes EA’s network state weaker than those of Trump or Musk is its lack of a true economic engine. EA is incredibly well-funded, but it lacks a circular, self-sustained economy. Truth Social’s SPAC, Tesla’s retail-heavy shareholder base, the monetization of X—these aren’t just companies; they’re financialized belief systems. EA, on the other hand, operates more like a traditional church—well-funded, globally distributed, and capable of influencing policy, but fundamentally reliant on the goodwill of wealthy patrons.
The real question isn't whether network states will emerge, but which model will prevail: the personality-driven empires of Trump and Musk, or new forms of collective organization we haven't yet imagined? Traditional nation-states may not even realize what's happening until their authority has already been quietly usurped by these new networks of power.