Popups are the new startups

Network State Conference 2025 was a smash hit. Thousands of attendees, millions of followers, and billions of dollars heard about starting new societies from the Internet. We had the CEO of Binance and the CEO of Coinbase , the founder of Ethereum and the Solana Foundation , the government of Singapore and the government of the UAE , all talking about startup cities, tech hubs, and in-person communities. Watch this to see the sheer size of the crowd: All talks are now available for free here , and you’ll see a full recap at the bottom of this post. But before I cover what our speakers covered, I want to explain why we organized the Network State Conference in the first place…and why we think it’s so important to move from digital communities to physical societies. From Digital to Physical The old world is fading, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of popups. Yes, that’s a joking paraphrase 1 of Gramsci. Yet it’s also serious. Because the old postwar world is fading rapidly, as you can see from every headline on political chaos , military pullback , and monetary collapse . At the same time, the new world struggles to be born, because it’s not yet obvious what comes next. One answer, half 2 the answer at least, is that the successor to the rules-based order of America is the code-based order of the Internet. The rationale is that (a) the Internet is the only thing with global economic scale comparable to China and has also (b) given birth to an entirely new digital legal system that already de facto manages ~99% of global communications and transactions…yet is (c) still somehow largely invisible 3 in the discourse despite its ubiquity. That invisibility of the Internet is why so many struggle to see the code-based order as the successor to the rules-based order. The typical riposte is that the Internet just isn’t even a place 4 …so how could it possibly succeed the physical part of the old world? The riposte to that riposte is to note that…