The Networked City-State

The Elon-Peter magnificent failure

Jun 23, 2025

It is a Wednesday, and I sit in my usual place contemplating the two windows in front of me. One built by hp and the other looking out over a desert wash. The view in the hp window¹ is a phantasmagoria of chaos, up and down, extraordinary beneficence, and mindless cruelty, courage and cowardness, Truth and lies. Looking at the World solely, or even primarily, through this window leads through distraction and delusion, to despair and destruction; the four “Ds” of the Apocalypse.

The reason this window is so toxic is that it is almost always about compare and contrast. Coming up short in the “compare and contrast” often leads to frustration, anger, and/or feeling of betrayal. Coming out ahead generates self-satisfaction, feelings of superiority, and worthiness. There is a whole industry created to keep a viewer bouncing between frustration and anger or satisfaction and superiority.^2,3 The bouncing is exhausting and the viewer ends up mental mush ready to believe and respond to whatever, whenever, and however it appears in the window. What appears in the window is on purpose.

What appears in the window is leaching the glue out of our institutions.⁴ We are losing the nation state. We are moving into a feudal system of network city states⁵, dispersed geographically, fed a digital pablum controlled by remote tech-kings, beyond the reach of any peasant influence or control.⁶ The sales pitch, when mentioned at all, is Ayn Rand, libertarian individualism on steroids, and Ketamine. It is real. It is on the horizon, and the chaos in DC is all about building the foundations. “This network state coup isn't happening in secret. It's unfolding right in front of our eyes while our democratic institutions remain paralyzed in fear and/or denial.”⁷ It is convenient and easy to call this fascism, but incorrect. It is tech-bros gone wild.

As an example of the point, Senator Lee (R-Utah) has put 3 million acres of public land up for sale in the Big Bad Bill.^8,9 He put out a video claiming he was doing so to alleviate the housing shortage. Really? Very remote land, no roads, hospitals, electricity, jobs, schools, or food, and it is for housing?

Who is going to buy this land? The clientele is limited. It will be the same folks secretly spending $800 million in California to build a new, semi-independent utopia city. These are the people trying to build a future of networked cities dependent on remnants of the nation-state for defense and infrastructure but operating according to their whims and desires.

End-stage capitalism requires the privatization of the commons and the reduction of the population to penury, and that is where Senator Lee wants to go. Senator Lee knows exactly what he is doing. He is supporting the creation of a metastatic cancer in the warp and woof of this nation.

It is likely to get ugly, and once the land is sold, there is no going back. The land will be sold to the highest bidder but there will be a very limited number of bidders, perhaps a single consortium. The Nation, the people, and the World will all be much less stable, less resilient, less productive, and more impoverished when Elon-Peter, et al, gain control over half of some states’ and 27% of the Nation’s real estate.¹⁰ Of course, these numbers are the extreme. The tech bros probably won’t buy swamps, or Hanford. They’ll leave those to the rest of us.

Much of history has been lived in city-states; Carthage, Athens, Sparta, Florence, Venice, and today, Monaco and Singapore. The new network city-states are different in terms of sheer volume of their needs.

-Energy requirements: The new form will require massive energy sources. What will they use for exchange? It won’t be dollars or Euros. Most likely crypto in one form or another, and that uses energy like there were no tomorrows. What will they produce? That’s up in the air, but they don’t dream of wheat and carrots. They all dream of something that can be shipped digitally. Everything they want to do sucks huge energy costs. Can they get it from solar and/ or wind? Possibly, but that brings up another issue.

-Material requirements: Let’s say Senator Lee makes it possible to build a city somewhere in Utah. Where do the materials for the solar arrays come from? I am not sure what would be available inside the city boundaries, but it isn’t copper, or aluminum. There aren’t that many trees for housing. Concrete? Wonderful, but consider the energy costs and where do the trucks come from? And who makes the bread to eat? It is unlikely that any city state in the present U.S. will be able to feed itself the standard American diet solely from its own land. A city in Utah will be massively importing food and material. And no matter how techie they are, the scavengers will need oil for at least a while. Where do they get it, which brings up another issue.

-Transportation: The first question is who pays? Who builds and maintains the infrastructure connections between the city-states? Both Elon and Peter have beaucoup bucks, but building a road takes mega-beaucoup bucks, even with forceful land condemnation. In the “wilderness” between the cities, who maintains the connections? And if Elon and Peter don’t want to stay home all the time, how do they travel? We all know there is a whole lot of infrastructure needed for safe travel by land, air or sea. Who pays and who provides?

-Knowledge: How do city states provide the support for the kinds of research and development required to survive near chaotic contexts of disease, climate, the PFAS ilk, environmental decay, and the unknown? How will they know what’s on the horizon?

-And finally, transportation, energy, material and knowledge requirements will all require “foreign relations” between city-states. It seems unlikely that once the city-states are developing, that the nation-state will continue willing, or indeed able, to provide support, protection, or defense. Cities will become isolated in what for them will be a sociocultural wilderness.

Then what happens? There will always be those in the wilderness ready to serve, for a price, but it will not be at the scale needed nor as organized and coordinated across large expanses. With the material and energy demands as high as they are going to be, it is unlikely the cities will play well together. Competition, expansion, and conflict will end up with consolidation and eventually a new mini-nation state. On a global scale, the functional equivalent of these networked city-states are the war-lords operating in various parts of the world. The prognosis for an individual war-lord or an individual city-state is not good,

How can I write these predictions with any degree of certainty? I can because as I look out the window over the desert wash, it becomes apparent that almost every part of the network city-state flies in the face of at least three rules Mother Nature has been trying to teach us.

The first rule, is that any terrestrial organism¹¹, just by living, fouls the nest so that it can no longer remain. The cybernetic axiom is that any product of any system is toxic to that system. For most of human history, we solved this issue by constantly moving on, or by living where we could dump the waste into a nearby body of moving water. These days a place like Seattle sends a at least one mile-long, daily train to a valley in Oregon. New York has stopped the barges out to sea but still has hundreds of sewers dumping raw waste into nearby waters. Arizona is working on incorporating “recycled” water in the domestic systems. It is hugely expensive. Recycling is never 100%. The reason these examples are important is the question of how do the city states handle the replacement costs, and why in an era of increasing shortage and chaos would anybody in the “wilderness” be a willing, long-term supplier?

The second rule is that energy is always the primary concern and expensive. You and I need to eat. The only primary source of carbs that can be grown city-scale in backyard gardens is potatoes. Sure, hydroponics and intensive vertical farming is the “techie” answer, but that doesn’t really work for corn, wheat, rice, or beans. Those require acres and farmers and/or time. Will the farmers own the land? Will they be modern share croppers? The Elon-Peter theory of governance is anti-democratic. Will the city-state boundary serve the same function as Turner’s frontier, or will it be a fortified barrier? If the city-state is dependent on outside sources for primary carbs, they are in a bad way.

The third rule is that diversity is stability. Do we really think that Elon, Peter, and the trumps et al will play nicely? They each suffer the Billionaire disease^12,13. It will not be as constrained as most sibling rivalries. Mother Nature loves the odd-ball. If you are perfectly suited and adapted for today, you are doomed in a world of constant change. IBM was a juggernaut. It had world dominance. It was all male, all white, all narrow ties, white shirts, and blue suits. What have you heard about IBM recently? Any city too tightly focused will suffer and be absorbed by another. Any city under the Elon-Peter et al aegis is doomed. They have neither the intelligence nor the vision to handle DEI.

There are probably any number of other rules the networked-cities break. It is abundantly clear that the age of the city-state has passed. Nation-states did not occur just by happenstance. They served various life blood needs more efficiently and effectively. The cities will fail but they are in the process of dissolving the glue that held the nation state together. I have no idea what will be left at the end of the next decade. I hope for the best. It might be better. Some of that glue was pretty rancid. We have an opportunity to glue together a better future. A future not tethered to end stage capitalism and oligarchy.

Write, call, don’t shut up and don’t give up

1) It should be clear that hp is not in any way responsible for the view through the hp window, but I need to say it because a near and dear friend helped build it.

2) https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-rights-top-25-journalists/

3) https://www.newsweek.com/2021/07/09/20-most-influential-trump-supporters-survive-social-medias-capitol-riot-crackdown-1606525.html