Dave Karpf wrote about the Silicon Valley Edgelords’ plan for world domination and it’s important: Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network State is a blueprint of sorts. It is the wild fever-dream of Silicon Valley’s libertarian investor-class. It imagines a near future in which online communities use the blockchain to opt out of government and form their own competing “network states.” It’s essentially just Galt’s Gulch, plus blockchain. If you want to know what the Tech Barons are attempting to replace democracy with, then it is important to take Srinivasan seriously. But Balaji is not a serious person. The book is manifestly ridiculous. It is a blueprint drawn in crayon. Balaji’s ideas are stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright. Imagine if Creed Bratton, from The Office, was a multibillionaire and he composed a manifesto, to which his even richer pals remarked “[Creed] has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.” That’s the lesson I drew last week, while reading this pitiful excuse for a book (you can read the 135-post bluesky reaction thread here): The tech barons do have a blueprint. But they have not thought any of their plans through. We ought to take them seriously; we ought to laugh in their faces. I would laugh if it didn’t make me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head — forever. But they are ridiculous: (1) Start…