Discussion

Chor Pharn discusses network theorists: Parag Khanna, Balaji Srivanasan, Benjamin Bratton, Isabella Kaminska and Di Dongsheng:

"A second constellation formed around a recurring embarrassment: every generation announces that a new network has made old sovereignty obsolete, and then discovers a court, a balance sheet, a port, a grid or a central bank sitting underneath it.

Parag Khanna taught me to see connectivity as strategic terrain. Ports, corridors, fibre, logistics, cities and finance were not decorations on the geopolitical map. They were part of the map. From Singapore, this was intuitive. We exist partly because flows cross here.

But centrality is not control. A node can be exquisitely connected and exquisitely dependent. The same cable that creates relevance creates exposure. A hub earns rents while the network is routed through it and discovers its vulnerability when the network reroutes.

Connection -> agency was the illicit arrow.

Balaji Srinivasan pushed the network argument further. Digital communities can coordinate before geography. Crypto can create monetary communities before states have categories for them. Remote work can detach valuable labour from place. Exit becomes cheaper. A network can accumulate identity, capital and organisation before it possesses territory.

This was not nonsense. The mistake was to let bargaining power become sovereignty.

The network can leave California. It still needs somewhere to land.

The sovereign has courts, police, land, electricity and the right to say no.

Benjamin Bratton made the same destabilisation more serious. The Stack was not a fantasy of escape from sovereignty but an account of sovereignty becoming layered. Earth, cloud, city, address, interface, user: computation increasingly assigns identity, routes action, structures visibility and governs access. The state is no longer the only system performing sovereign-like functions.

This aged well. It may age even better in a world of machine agents.

But Bratton's temptation is computational: if the world becomes sufficiently legible, perhaps it becomes governable. A system can model the climate and fail to decarbonise. It can model a pandemic and still have politics. A digital twin is not custody.

Legibility -> governability.

Then Izabella Kaminska enters and asks everyone to stop talking for a moment.

Who settles?

Where is the collateral? Who needs dollars? Who owns the liability? What happens when the clever new money meets a balance sheet at three in the morning?

I have always liked people who ruin a grand theory with an operational question.

Kaminska's plumbing is not a footnote to the network world. It is the reminder that abstract flows terminate somewhere. A stablecoin settles against something. A digital transaction eventually encounters law, capital, accounting, energy and a real counterparty.

But plumbing can also become its own master key. Deep incumbent liquidity does not tell us where productive capability is moving. Financial, industrial and technological power can remain unbundled for decades.

Di Dongsheng brings the same problem into Chinese grand strategy. China can manufacture at enormous scale and still operate inside financial, technological and maritime circuits whose ultimate permissions it does not own. Currency, ports, shipping, capital and energy are not secondary to sovereignty. They are circuits through which sovereignty becomes operational.

Yet Di can slide from dependence to the desire for custody. If a circuit matters, control it.

Not every dependency should be owned. Some should be diversified, insured, substituted or tolerated. Attempts to eliminate dependence can manufacture the coalition that makes dependence dangerous.

The constellation survives because nobody wins.

Khanna and Balaji are right that networks alter power.

Bratton is right that sovereignty becomes layered.

Kaminska is right that the abstract stack has plumbing.

Di is right that external circuits can constrain a physically powerful state.

And the old sovereign keeps returning, not as the only actor but as the entity that still controls many of the interfaces between layers.

This matters enormously for machine civilisation.

An agent may reason independently and still need a wallet.

A model may be open and still need a chip.

A company may be AI-native and still need a jurisdiction.

The network did not kill sovereignty.

It made sovereignty an interface problem."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/kill-your-darlings?)

Bibliography

Via ChatGPT, prompted by Michel Bauwens, inspired by Chor Pharn:

Digital network organization and state sovereignty: a quaternary bibliography:

The most productive way to compile this bibliography is to treat Chor Pharn's theses as different theories of

- how political agency is constituted,

- how collective coordination works, and

- how sovereignty might change under conditions of technological transformation.

The underlying question is not simply whether digital networks weaken or strengthen the state. It is whether the state remains the principal locus of agency, whether it can develop new capabilities, whether emerging networks are creating new forms of social and political organization, and whether AI and other technologies are changing the very machinery through which agency is exercised.

The quadrants are seen as ideal types, not mutually exclusive categories. Some authors belong in more than one quadrant, and the distinction between what a state can do and what a network can do is often precisely what makes their work interesting.

It includes foundational works, relevant books and articles, and a short explanation of what each author contributes.

1. The Given World: inherited structures and constraints

Core question: What can we change, given geography, resources, historical legacies, and the existing distribution of power?

In this quadrant, states remain embedded in material and geopolitical realities that cannot simply be redesigned. Digital networks matter, but they operate within constraints imposed by territory, energy, infrastructure, demography, military power and established institutions.

George Friedman and Peter Zeihan

Approach. Geopolitical determinists emphasize the enduring influence of geography, demographic structure, resource availability and strategic location. Zeihan, in particular, examines how the security architecture built by the United States enabled global trade and how its possible retreat could expose states to new constraints. In Pharn’s terms, the danger is treating structural pressures as destiny rather than as conditions to which political actors can respond.

Selected bibliography

- Friedman, George. The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. Doubleday, 2009. - Friedman, George. The Next Decade: What the World Will Look Like. Doubleday, 2011. - Zeihan, Peter. The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder. Twelve, 2014. - Zeihan, Peter. The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Harper Business, 2022.

Connection to networked sovereignty: Digital platforms, crypto networks and transnational communities still depend on electricity, telecommunications, logistics, legal protection and physical territory. This literature provides a necessary material counterweight to accounts that treat digital coordination as sufficient for political autonomy.

Ray Dalio

Approach. Dalio interprets world order through long cycles of debt, monetary power, internal conflict and the rise and decline of great powers. His approach is less geographically deterministic than Zeihan’s, but similarly emphasizes structural patterns that individual leaders cannot easily escape.

Selected bibliography - Dalio, Ray. Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. Avid Reader Press, 2021. - Dalio, Ray. Principles: Life and Work. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Connection to networked sovereignty: Digital currencies and financial networks may alter monetary coordination, but Dalio's framework directs attention to the underlying political authority, productive capacity, debt structures and enforcement mechanisms on which monetary systems depend.

Kishore Mahbubani

Approach. Mahbubani emphasizes the historical rebalancing of global power, especially the return of Asian societies to the center of the world economy. He challenges Western assumptions about the universality of their political and institutional models.

Selected bibliography

- Mahbubani, Kishore. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. PublicAffairs, 2008. - Mahbubani, Kishore. Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy. PublicAffairs, 2020. - Mahbubani, Kishore. The Asian 21st Century. Springer, 2022. Available online: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-6811-1

Connection to networked sovereignty: This perspective reminds us that digital sovereignty is not an abstract contest between states and networks. It is also a struggle over who sets technological standards, controls infrastructure, and shapes the international institutions governing digital systems.

Additional authors to include

- Bilahari Kausikan: Singaporean strategic realism and the importance of navigating between great powers. Useful for examining the constraints faced by small states. Start with Singapore Is Not an Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Straits Times Press, 2017). - Bilahari's fellow Singaporean diplomat George Yeo: A civilizational and geopolitical perspective on Asia, China and the changing international order. His conversations and collected writings are useful alongside conventional geopolitical literature. - C. Raja Mohan: Indian strategic autonomy and the changing balance of power in Asia. See Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012). These authors help establish the background against which networked organizations and digital infrastructures must operate: states do not begin with equal capabilities or equal freedom of action.

2. The Capability State: constructed agency, institutional learning and strategic capacity

* Core question: What can a state learn to do, and how can it develop the capacity to act?

The Capability State moves away from the idea that inherited conditions determine political outcomes. It focuses instead on institutional learning, strategic coordination, administrative competence, technological development and the construction of national capabilities.

This quadrant is especially relevant to the relationship between digital networks and sovereignty because a state can use networked technologies to increase its capacity, even when those technologies also enable independent or competing forms of organization.

Peter Ho

Approach. Ho's work on strategic foresight, complexity and public-sector innovation treats government as a learning system operating in an uncertain environment. The state must develop the ability to anticipate change, coordinate across institutional boundaries and adapt its methods.

Selected bibliography

- Ho, Peter. The Practice of Strategic Foresight in Government: The Singapore Experience. World Scientific, 2012. See also his subsequent work on complexity, foresight and public-sector transformation. - Ho, Peter. Writings and lectures on Singapore's Centre for Strategic Futures and whole-of-government foresight. Official starting point: https://www.csf.gov.sg/ Connection to networked sovereignty: The state becomes an adaptive coordination platform. Its strength depends not only on formal authority but on its ability to gather information, learn from distributed actors and turn that information into effective action.

Wang Huning

Approach. Wang's work examines political power, ideology, modernization and the capacity of institutions to sustain political order. His intellectual importance lies in the relationship between ideas, institutional design and state-led transformation, rather than in digital networks alone.

Selected bibliography

- Wang, Huning. America Against America. 1991; English translations and editions vary. - Wang, Huning. Political Life: A Philosophical Analysis (政治的人生). Original Chinese publication, 1989; bibliographic details vary by edition.

Connection to networked sovereignty: Wang's framework directs attention to the political and ideological conditions under which a state can absorb technological change without surrendering control over its governing project. It is a useful counterpoint to approaches that assume networks naturally decentralize power.

Yuen Yuen Ang

Approach. Ang studies how states build institutional capacity through experimentation, adaptation and interactions between formal and informal practices. Her work challenges the idea that successful development requires copying a single ideal institutional model.

Selected bibliography

- Ang, Yuen Yuen. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. Cornell University Press, 2016. - Ang, Yuen Yuen. China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Connection to networked sovereignty: Ang helps explain why the political consequences of digitalization depend on the institutions into which technologies are introduced. A network may strengthen state capacity, but its effects depend on how officials, firms, local authorities and citizens interact.

Mariana Mazzucato

Approach. Mazzucato argues that the state is not merely a regulator or a corrector of market failures. It can actively create markets, direct innovation and mobilize collective investment toward strategic missions.

Selected bibliography

- Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press, 2013. - Mazzucato, Mariana. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Allen Lane, 2021. - Mazzucato, Mariana. The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments and Warps Our Economies. Allen Lane, 2023, with Rosie Collington.

Connection to networked sovereignty: This is an important framework for understanding technological sovereignty as the ability to build and govern essential capabilities, rather than merely to regulate technologies developed elsewhere.

Elinor Ostrom

Approach. Ostrom demonstrates that neither centralized state control nor privatization is the only way to govern shared resources. Communities can develop durable rules and institutions for collective management, often through polycentric systems in which several centers of decision-making interact.

Selected bibliography

- Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990. - Ostrom, Elinor. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton University Press, 2005. - Ostrom, Elinor. “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” American Economic Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 641–672. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641

Connection to networked sovereignty: Ostrom offers a particularly useful bridge to peer-to-peer organization. Digital networks can support shared rule-making and distributed coordination, while states can provide legal frameworks, infrastructure and guarantees. Sovereignty need not mean that all agency is concentrated in a single center.

Additional authors to include

- Bilahari Kausikan: Read also in this quadrant, for the capacity of small states to exercise strategic agency under constraint. - Chan Heng Chee: Singaporean diplomacy, institutional adaptation and the management of international relations. - Peter Ho: Especially relevant to foresight and the institutional capacity to learn. - Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Crown Business, 2012), for the relationship between political institutions and development. - Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023), for the proposition that technological change does not automatically generate broadly shared benefits.

The central distinction in this quadrant is between possessing technology and possessing the institutional capability to use it effectively. The caution, as Pharn suggests, is that capability can become an unquestioned justification for concentrating power.

3. The World in Motion: emergence, networks and new political forms

Core question: What is coming into existence that did not previously exist?

This quadrant is the most directly relevant to the emergence of digitally networked forms of organization. It asks whether networks, platforms, infrastructure and transnational communities are producing new social realities that cannot be understood simply as extensions of existing states.

The important distinction is between networks as tools used by existing institutions and networks as new organizing structures that can themselves generate collective agency.

Manuel Castells

Approach. Castells provides one of the foundational sociological accounts of the network society. Networks become the dominant organizational form of the information age, reshaping production, communication, power and identity. Power increasingly operates through the ability to establish, program and connect networks, as well as to exclude actors from them.

Selected bibliography

- Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Volume I of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Publisher page. Wiley Online Books - Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. - Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Connection to Pharn: Castells explains how networks become constitutive of society, rather than merely connecting pre-existing actors. This makes his work essential for understanding how digital networks might produce forms of collective agency that cross or challenge territorial sovereignty.

Benjamin H. Bratton

Approach. Bratton develops a political theory of planetary-scale computation. In The Stack, he describes a layered computational megastructure comprising Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. These layers cut across traditional geopolitical boundaries and create new forms of territory, governance and political authority.

Selected bibliography

- Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016. New edition, 2026. MIT Press. MIT Press - Bratton, Benjamin H. The Terraforming. Strelka Press, 2019. - Bratton, Benjamin H. The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. Verso, 2021/2022; edition dates vary.

Connection to Pharn: Bratton is central to the question of whether digital infrastructures are becoming a new geopolitical architecture. Sovereignty is no longer exercised exclusively through territorial borders: it is also embedded in cloud infrastructure, addressing systems, interfaces, computation and the protocols through which people and machines interact.

Parag Khanna

Approach. Khanna argues that connectivity increasingly shapes the organization of the world. Transport corridors, energy grids, telecommunications, supply chains and cities create overlapping geographies that cannot be adequately described by national borders alone.

Selected bibliography - Khanna, Parag. Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization. Random House, 2016. - Khanna, Parag. Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State. Random House, 2017. - Khanna, Parag. Move: Where People Are Going for a Better Future. Scribner, 2021.

Connection to Pharn: Khanna helps shift the analysis from territory to connectivity. A state's effective power depends increasingly on its position within networks of infrastructure, capital, data and people. However, connectivity does not necessarily eliminate state sovereignty; it can also increase the strategic power of states that control critical nodes.

Balaji Srinivasan

Approach. Srinivasan proposes the Network State as a new form of political organization. A community begins with a shared online identity and social network, develops collective institutions and an economic base, acquires physical territory through coordinated settlement, and seeks diplomatic recognition.

Selected bibliography

- Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State: How to Start a New Country. 2022. Available online: https://thenetworkstate.com/. - Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State online essays and associated materials, particularly the discussions of political power, decentralization and recentralization, and the transition from nation-states to network states. https://thenetworkstate.com/

Connection to Pharn: Srinivasan presents the clearest direct challenge to conventional state sovereignty in this quadrant. The proposal is not simply to decentralize government, but to create a new political community through digitally coordinated collective action.

Its critical question is whether a community can convert online coordination into durable economic, legal and territorial capabilities, and whether recognition by existing states is necessary for its long-term survival.

The main caution is that a digitally constituted community does not automatically possess the democratic legitimacy, public accountability or coercive independence associated with a sovereign state.

Yochai Benkler

Approach. Benkler explains how networked information technologies enable commons-based peer production: people can coordinate complex productive activity without relying exclusively on firms, hierarchical management or conventional markets.

Selected bibliography

- Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. Updated editions followed. Yale University Press - Benkler, Yochai. “Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (2002): 369–446. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/coases-penguin-or-linux-and-the-nature-of-the-firm - Benkler, Yochai. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. Crown Business, 2011.

Connection to Pharn: Benkler supplies the organizational mechanism that many accounts of network sovereignty lack. Networked communities can create information, software, knowledge and other shared resources through distributed cooperation. This allows them to build capabilities outside the direct control of states and corporations.

For commons-based peer production, the relevant question is not necessarily whether a network becomes a state, but whether it can sustain autonomous productive and governance capacities while interacting with state institutions.

Kevin Kelly

Approach. Kelly examines the emergence of networked, decentralized and increasingly complex systems. His account emphasizes how technological systems develop through interactions among many components, generating patterns that cannot be fully designed from the top down.

Selected bibliography

- Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Addison-Wesley, 1994. - Kelly, Kevin. New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World. Viking, 1998. - Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. Viking, 2010.

Connection to Pharn: Kelly is useful for understanding emergence and distributed coordination, but his evolutionary account of technology should not be confused with a theory of political sovereignty. The emergence of a networked system does not determine who controls it, who benefits from it or who can hold it accountable.

Laura DeNardis

Approach. DeNardis studies the hidden technical and institutional arrangements through which Internet governance operates. Her work demonstrates that protocols, standards, infrastructure and technical control points are also sites of political power.

Selected bibliography

- DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance. Yale University Press, 2014. - DeNardis, Laura. The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch. Yale University Press, 2020. Publisher page.

Connection to Pharn: DeNardis provides an essential corrective to the idea that networks are inherently decentralized. Political power can be embedded in the technical architecture itself. States, corporations and other actors compete to shape the protocols, standards and infrastructures on which networked societies depend.

China Outside China

Approach. This label is best treated as a research theme rather than a single author. It directs attention to Chinese commercial, technological, cultural and social networks operating beyond mainland China's territorial jurisdiction.

Such networks may include diasporic communities, transnational firms, digital platforms, supply chains and communities connected through Chinese-language media. Their relationships with the Chinese state vary considerably: some are commercially independent, some are politically aligned, and others are subject to conflicting pressures.

Selected bibliography

- Ong, Aihwa, and Donald M. Nonini, eds. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. Routledge, 1997. - Keane, Michael. China's New Creative Clusters: Governance, Human Capital and Investment. Routledge, 2011. - DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance. Yale University Press, 2014. - Pohle, Julia, and Thorsten Thiel. “Digital Sovereignty.” Internet Policy Review 9, no. 4 (2020). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/digital-sovereignty

Connection to Pharn: The key issue is whether transnational networks can develop meaningful forms of economic and organizational autonomy while remaining embedded in the legal, infrastructural and political systems of multiple states. This is a more complex reality than either a state-centered or a purely decentralized model suggests.

4. The Machine World: AI agency, machine coordination and the transformation of organizations

* Core question: What happens when the machinery that perceives, learns, coordinates and acts can itself be built and scaled?

The Machine World introduces a qualitatively different possibility. Digital networks no longer merely connect human participants or enable existing institutions to operate more efficiently. AI systems can increasingly perform cognitive work, coordinate tasks, construct models of their environment and act through software tools and physical systems.

This raises a question for political theory: if organizations can be built around machine intelligence rather than human administrative hierarchies, how might this change the relationship between productive capacity, collective agency and state sovereignty?

The important qualification is that greater machine capability does not necessarily mean greater autonomy. AI systems remain dependent on computing infrastructure, energy, data, capital, legal permissions and human decisions about objectives and accountability.

Zhang Xiaoyu (张笑宇)

Approach. Zhang examines the relationship between technology, civilization and social organization. His concept of the AI-native organization starts from a fundamental distinction: an organization that adds AI to existing workflows is different from one designed from the outset around AI capabilities. In an AI-native organization, a relatively small number of humans might coordinate large numbers of AI agents performing research, programming, procurement, administration and other tasks. The organizational unit could become less dependent on headcount, conventional managerial hierarchies and the concentration of specialized human workers.

Selected bibliography

- Zhang, Xiaoyu. AI Civilization: Prehistory (AI文明史·前史). Chinese-language work; consult the original edition for full bibliographic details. - Zhang, Xiaoyu. Technology and Civilization (技术与文明). Chinese-language work. - Zhang, Xiaoyu. Commerce and Civilization (商业与文明). Chinese-language work. - Zhang, Xiaoyu. Industry and Civilization (工业与文明). Chinese-language work. - Interviews and discussions on AI-native organizations and AI sociology, including 36Kr's coverage of Zhang's work.

For a starting point in the P2P Foundation wiki, see Zhang Xiaoyu on AI-Native Organizations.

Connection to Pharn: Zhang's work is particularly important because it shifts the question from the automation of individual tasks to the possible redesign of the organization itself. If AI reduces the need for human administrative and coordination labor, organizations might become smaller, more mobile and less territorially embedded.

But the political implications remain open. AI-native organizations could become independent transnational actors, or they could become more dependent on a handful of infrastructure providers. Organizational decentralization and economic decentralization are not the same thing.

Dwarkesh Patel

Approach. Patel's interviews and essays examine frontier AI development, scaling, learning, compute, and the economic and strategic consequences of increasingly capable models. His work is useful as a source of arguments and debates emerging within the AI research ecosystem, rather than as a single comprehensive theory of the state.

Selected bibliography

- Patel, Dwarkesh. The Dwarkesh Podcast. Interviews with AI researchers, company founders and technology thinkers. https://www.dwarkesh.com/ - Patel, Dwarkesh. “The Next Big Breakthrough Is AIs Learning on the Job.” Essays and discussions on continual learning and frontier-model development. See https://www.dwarkesh.com/t/essays. - Patel, Dwarkesh. “Thoughts on AI Progress” (December 2025), alongside his other essays on AI scaling and the economics of machine intelligence. Available through the Dwarkesh website.

Connection to Pharn: Patel's work helps examine the frontier ecology of AI: the interaction among research laboratories, computing infrastructure, capital, technical talent and model capabilities. This ecology is itself an emerging organizational system with geopolitical consequences. The relevant question is whether frontier AI will strengthen the states and organizations that control its essential inputs, or whether the diffusion of increasingly capable models will allow new actors to develop significant independent capabilities.

AI-native organizations and the redesign of coordination

Approach. Research on AI-native organizations asks what happens when organizations are designed around machine intelligence rather than merely using AI to improve existing human workflows. The relevant change is not just greater productivity. It is the possible reorganization of decision rights, task allocation, institutional memory, coordination and accountability.

Selected bibliography - Shaik, Ali Sadhik. “Redefining the Operating Model: How AI-Native Organizations Differ from AI-Augmented Ones.” SSRN, 2026. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6811920. - Wang, Yinan. “Do AI-Native Biotechs Need Departments? Benchmarking Company World Models for AI-Driven Drug Development.” arXiv, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18696.

Connection to Pharn: These approaches suggest that the organizational form itself may become a variable that can be engineered. Instead of assuming that firms, agencies and bureaucracies will retain their current structure, researchers can ask what coordination architectures become possible when machine intelligence is abundant. For sovereignty, the question is whether AI-native organizations will be able to move across jurisdictions, create new productive capacities and choose among regulatory environments—or whether their dependence on centralized computing, energy and infrastructure will reinforce existing centers of power.

Benjamin H. Bratton revisited

the machine as geopolitical infrastructure

Bratton belongs in both the World in Motion and the Machine World. His work on planetary computation provides the bridge between technological infrastructure and political organization.

Additional bibliography

- Bratton, Benjamin H. The Terraforming. Strelka Press, 2019. - Bratton, Benjamin H. The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. Verso, 2021/2022. - Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016; tenth-anniversary edition, 2026. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553919/the-stack/

The key contribution is to show that machine agency does not arise in a purely virtual realm. It depends on a material and computational architecture that already has political consequences. AI-native organizations and machine systems therefore need to be analyzed together with the infrastructure that makes them possible.

Laura DeNardis revisited

the politics of machine control

DeNardis also belongs in this quadrant because increasingly autonomous systems make technical standards, interoperability, cybersecurity and control of infrastructure more consequential. Her work helps distinguish the ability to use a machine from the ability to control the conditions under which it operates. A system may perform tasks autonomously while remaining dependent on externally governed networks, cloud services and protocols.

Additional bibliography

- DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance. Yale University Press, 2014. - DeNardis, Laura. The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch. Yale University Press, 2020.

The central question is who controls the machinery through which machine agency is exercised—and whether the distribution of that control is compatible with meaningful political autonomy.

A cross-quadrant synthesis: from network society to machine sovereignty

The four quadrants become most useful when treated as complementary perspectives on the same historical problem.

The most relevant bridging literature:

For a bibliography specifically focused on the relationship between digitally networked organization and state sovereignty, I would give priority to the following works. They connect the four quadrants more directly than a general reading list on geopolitics or artificial intelligence.

1. Sovereignty and computational infrastructure

- Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016. - DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance. Yale University Press, 2014. - Pohle, Julia, and Thorsten Thiel. “Digital Sovereignty.” Internet Policy Review 9, no. 4 (2020). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/digital-sovereignty - Pohle, Julia, and Thorsten Thiel. “Centrality and Power: The Struggle over the Techno-Political Configuration of the Internet and the Global Digital Order.” Policy & Internet (2022). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.296

These works examine how political authority is exercised through networks, protocols, infrastructure and technical standards, and how states and private actors struggle to control those systems.

2. Networks as alternative forms of organization

- Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. - Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. - Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press, 1990. - Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State: How to Start a New Country. 2022. https://thenetworkstate.com/

Together, these works help distinguish networked production, polycentric governance and the more ambitious project of establishing a new sovereign political community.

3. The material and geopolitical foundations of network power

- Khanna, Parag. Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization. Random House, 2016. - Dalio, Ray. Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Avid Reader Press, 2021. - Zeihan, Peter. The End of the World Is Just the Beginning. Harper Business, 2022.

These works provide a counterweight to accounts of digital autonomy that understate the importance of physical infrastructure, energy, logistics and geopolitical power.

4. Machine agency and organizational transformation

- Zhang, Xiaoyu. AI Civilization: Prehistory (AI文明史·前史). Chinese-language work. - DeepSeek-AI. “DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning.” Nature 645 (2025): 633–638. - Bratton, Benjamin H. The Terraforming. Strelka Press, 2019. - Shaik, Ali Sadhik. “Redefining the Operating Model: How AI-Native Organizations Differ from AI-Augmented Ones.” SSRN, 2026.

These works help examine whether AI changes the organizational foundations of economic and political agency, and whether those changes strengthen existing states or create new centers of power.

Framing the research questions from a P2P/Commons perspective

First: Can networked organizations develop sovereignty-like capacities without becoming states?

Benkler and Ostrom provide ways to think about productive autonomy and distributed governance. Srinivasan advances the more ambitious claim that online communities can become new political entities. Bratton and DeNardis show why none of these forms can be understood independently of the infrastructure and governance arrangements on which they depend.

Second: Does AI decentralize organizational capacity or concentrate it?

AI-native organizations may reduce the need for large hierarchies and extensive human coordination. Yet the underlying infrastructure may remain concentrated in a small number of firms and states. The key distinction is between the decentralization of execution and the decentralization of ownership, infrastructure and decision-making power.

Third: Can states and autonomous networks become mutually enabling rather than simply competing?

Ostrom's polycentric governance and Benkler's commons-based peer production offer starting points for this question. States can supply public infrastructure, legal guarantees and coordination capacity, while commons-based networks contribute distributed knowledge, productive activity and institutional experimentation.

This third question is especially important because the future may not be a simple transition from the territorial state to a network state. It could instead involve multiple overlapping forms of sovereignty and agency: territorial states, transnational platforms, commons-based productive communities, AI-native organizations and the computational infrastructure connecting them.

The crucial analytical task is to identify which actors control the resources, protocols and decision rights that allow these forms to act—and how those arrangements are governed.

Networks and Sovereignty

Contents

Discussion

Directory

Bibliography

1. The Given World: inherited structures and constraints

George Friedman and Peter Zeihan

Ray Dalio

Kishore Mahbubani

Additional authors to include

2. The Capability State: constructed agency, institutional learning and strategic capacity

Peter Ho

Wang Huning

Yuen Yuen Ang

Mariana Mazzucato

Elinor Ostrom

Additional authors to include

3. The World in Motion: emergence, networks and new political forms

Manuel Castells

Benjamin H. Bratton

Parag Khanna

Balaji Srinivasan

Yochai Benkler

Kevin Kelly

Laura DeNardis

China Outside China

4. The Machine World: AI agency, machine coordination and the transformation of organizations

Zhang Xiaoyu (张笑宇)

Dwarkesh Patel

AI-native organizations and the redesign of coordination

Benjamin H. Bratton revisited

Laura DeNardis revisited

A cross-quadrant synthesis: from network society to machine sovereignty

1. Sovereignty and computational infrastructure

2. Networks as alternative forms of organization

3. The material and geopolitical foundations of network power

4. Machine agency and organizational transformation

Framing the research questions from a P2P/Commons perspective

Navigation menu