Verbatim Interview: Suji Yan on Generation Net Nation

Hardboiled Guinea ft. Suji, Weiren S02E02
grandpa of internet nation

Keywords: Colonial North America, Cyberspace, Cyber ​​Nation, Sun Yat-sen, United States, East India Company, History, Game Theory

This article is a verbatim draft of the recording file after GPT3.5 retouching and manual revision. Welcome to read.

Podcast Listen Click Here

Participants:

1. Suji Yan: Founder of Mask Network, digital country immigrant.

2. Liu Weiren: Freelance translator, translated "The Trap of Rhetoric" and "Northern Europe is Not a Myth".

3. Zhang Baocheng: Volume DAO contributor, art critic, Ph.D. in political science.

4. Soybean paste: Decentralized autonomous independent researcher, currently serving in the public sector.

Self introduction

Bean paste: Hello everyone, we are Nanbao Gini. There is no Taiwan call today, because today is a new season, and I don't know what will happen next. It is a great honor to invite two very interesting friends today. They are all supporters of violent theory and like to talk about this kind of non-mainstream theory. They are Suji and Uygur. Including the two of us, there are four people in total. Let's briefly introduce ourselves first.

Suji Yan: Hello everyone, my name is Suji. This is the first time I came to the show of refried beans, but I have participated in other shows. The main job is to make a web3 project called Mask Network, which has its own token. I have also worked as a reporter and AI-related work before. I dropped out of American University to start a business and entered Web3, and I made many friends from different backgrounds. Last year and the year before last, I have been to more than 20 countries in total. I have now entered this state of digital nomad, and I often gossip. This is my story and background. I am still evolving.

Bean paste: Thank you. In fact, my deepest impression on Suji was not during the Mask Network period, but before Maskbook. Suji has published a number of very radical articles that have left a deep impression on me. Now the change-dimensional person introduces himself.

Liu Weiren: Hello everyone, I am from Uygur, and I like to say some radical things, so I am often called a nuisance. My main source of income comes from translation work, and I especially like to translate books related to democratic governance and political and economic systems. I don't know much about web3, and this is also my first time participating in the Nanbao Kenny program. I got acquainted with Baocheng and Doudan around the end of last year, and I began to realize that the development of new technologies may have an impact on the existing political and economic system, which may bring about more integrated, negotiated and open changes. So I discuss and explore these issues with them.

Bean paste: I am very grateful to Uighur for his translation work. He has translated many texts from the English world and social sciences and political theories, especially those related to science and technology, into the traditional Chinese market. Recently he mainly shared some theories related to cooperation and solidarity. Okay, now it's Baocheng's turn, would you like to introduce yourself briefly? Although we've said it several times.

Bosung: No problem, I'm Bosung. At present, he is mainly engaged in art criticism and performance art criticism, and also involves some phenomena related to encrypted art. My undergraduate major is not in this area at all. As Dou Mai often says, I have a Ph.D. in political science. When I was in college, I read some Eastern and Western books, but at that time I didn’t find the true ideological affiliation. After the master's class, I began to study Marxism seriously, from the original works of Marx and Engels, to the Marxist scholars in the late 1960s and 1990s, involving the relevant discourses of the past 100 years. This constructs the way I see the world. Of course, later I also studied the relevance of these theories in the specific context of Taiwan. Did such a tradition exist in early Taiwan? This is another question. But because I read a lot of the same category, it may be somewhat restrictive for me, but also because of this, infinite possibilities can be developed from the same principles, and even seemingly irrelevant and even contradictory points of view can be attributed to the same in principle. This is my simple self-introduction. This time we're the second episode of the second season of Hard Borgini.

Bean paste: Thank you Baocheng. As Baocheng said, our program upholds the spirit of super difficulty, combining difficult theory and radical discussion. In short, we don't care about the audience. Everyone is welcome to join our discussion. Of course, we may have many omissions or mistakes, please feel free to correct me. Now it's my turn. My name is soybean paste, soybean paste. I've been researching decentralized autonomy for several years, exploring how organizations can use digital tools to create real collaboration, both in digital and physical spaces. During this process, there may be many disputes, conflicts, negotiations and compromises. I've been watching the role web3 tools play in this. Is it a native environment, or is it possible to create purely virtual realms? This is an issue that I have been researching and observing, and I am a part of. One of the main motivations for recording Nanbao Kenny with Baocheng before is that many theories are being developed overseas. Different people have different contexts, but they can be connected with theories related to the past and the real world. This is the so-called mutual struggle . It's for this purpose that the Difficult Pokémon show exists.

Sun Yat-sen and Over the Counter (OTC)

Refried beans: So let’s start with Suji today. Before I start, I would like to mention a little bit. Suji talked about the concept of the network country. This concept was first proposed by Balaji. He was the chief technology officer before Coinbase. He believed that network tools can create a virtual country. He did not create this concept alone. Many organizations, especially those related to Internet liberals, have also proposed similar concepts. On the other hand, there are also objections, and the concept of a cooperative state or virtual community is proposed, which we can explore further later. Now let's listen to Suji's violent comments. The Xingzhonghui and the Republic of China were also mentioned before, so let's start here.

Suji Yan: In fact, about half a year ago or even earlier, I published an article titled "Sun Yat-sen and Web3.0" in Singapore's "Zaobao Group". I was very surprised to find that it hardly changed a single word, except for a few rhetorical changes. I don’t know if you have been to some places where Chinese people gather, because there are many Chinese people in many places. Every time I want to eat Chinese food, I go to those places. I went to Singapore because there happened to be many conferences related to web3 and cryptocurrency at that time. Singapore is a little crazier than Hong Kong in this regard, and there have been more capital flows in recent years. I don't really like going to these kinds of conferences, but it's 2021, and I've been there before in 2019, and it was for work. Some friends and I were there to explore some interesting places, including the Nanyang Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.

This place was actually the office of the Tongmenghui. Local wealthy businessmen later donated money to repair it. The Singapore government also renovated it and turned it into a museum. ARATS and SEF are also planting trees there. I go there for fun because I think it's more fun than going to crypto events. However, I didn't expect to witness some of Sun Wen's OTC tools there. Once inside, I saw a statue of Sun Yat-sen and many photos of him. This is common in museums, nothing special. Then I continued to walk in. The first thing I saw was Sun Yat-sen’s deeds in Singapore. He was refused entry by the Singzhou government for some reasons. Singapore was a British colony at that time. He was going to rescue his revolutionary benefactor, namely Friends of the Japanese Black Dragon Association. It was rumored that he spent money to save people, so he was arrested by the British and banned from entering the country for 5 years. We continued to walk, and later found that he had a crime tool, which was an advanced printer purchased from Germany, which could print many receipts at one time. Further back, I discovered his Revolutionary Bonds. I think this is very interesting, but I didn't expect to meet a coin issuer here.

Later, I told this story to my friends who went with me. After the visit, I searched online, including Chinese, English and other small languages, such as Japanese, but I found that almost no one mentioned that Sun Wen was the first large-scale Chinese community leader who issues cryptocurrency. It's an interesting thing, but no one seems to be paying attention. Perhaps most of the people who go to Nanyang Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall are older Chinese or foreigners, and they will not have such associations. So, I decided to write an article. At that time, the editors of Zaobao Group just hoped to have some such editorial articles, echoing Singapore's digital currency legislation. I picked this topic and they thought it was fun to write about, so it was published. Unexpectedly, after it was published, it aroused a lot of comments on Facebook, and many people left messages expressing interest in it.

I didn't mention his crime tools on a whim, but I was just interested in the history of the Xingzhong Society and Sun Wen. I think the digital world is moving from feudalism to modern society, or postmodern society. There are many historical coincidences in this. In the English context, I also tell some stories related to the United States, but I rarely mention it. But I'm surprised that even after a year or two, not many people are actually writing about it. So after I met Doudou in Tokyo, we decided to publish this violent theory in its entirety, and invite more professionals to criticize together, or just listen in. This is the root of the topic we are going to talk about today, which is how to build your own country by building your own community. But this problem is very complicated. It seems that there are no good examples. We can only look for it from history.

Bean paste: Thank you very much Suji. In the context of Taiwan, the image of Sun Yat-sen is very complicated. Some people regard him as a successor, while others think that his ideas should be abandoned. There is also a photo of Sun Yat-sen hanging in the place where I work now. I believe you have seen it in the classroom since childhood. However, in addition to Sun Yat-sen's role as OTC or cryptocurrency, in the theory of radical market, some of his remarks are also quoted, such as the equalization of land rights and the return of price increases to the public. Although I am young, the Three Principles of the People are no longer tested in the referee exam. I don’t know if the Three Principles of the People have been tested in Baocheng and the university entrance exam. However, in the theory of the radical market, the equalization of land rights and the return of prices to the public are actually equivalent to the Harberger tax system, which is used to correct market failures or some kind of correction of the free market. Of course, there were no corresponding tools in the past, but in the current era, smart contracts may be relatively able to realize these ideas at that time, and these are very new things. Let's talk about this first, Liu Weiren, do you have anything you want to discuss? Been playing XDDD.

Liu Weiren: No, I just kept laughing. Let's continue to listen to Suji talk about how to build your own community or country, it's so interesting.

Refried beans: ok, ok. Then let's see if Baocheng has anything to say. Suji has just explained the cause and effect very clearly, whether it is the United States or China, as well as Sun Wen's experience in Nanyang. Do you have any ideas?

Zhang Baocheng: Because of the emergence of Web3 and its differences from traditional economic, financial activities, and cultural governance tools, I know that everyone is looking for more ideological resources, and will definitely look for cases in historical transition periods, whether it is the feudal era turning to capitalism , the era of modernization, or China's transformation in the early 20th century. There is also the transformation of the United States after the Civil War. Some say that the United States really established capitalism after the abolition of slavery, not when they became independent in the 18th century. Historical theories and sources from these transitional periods can be used to observe conditions today. So, I don't think it's surprising, it's just that we need to think about how we choose and interpret content in these transitional times, and that's a question. In addition, of course, we need to further explore Sun Yat-sen from our own context. Relatively speaking, China also had the so-called "Republic of China fever" in the past, about ten years ago. Many Chinese people came to Taiwan to buy cultural relics and books from the Republic of China period, and Sun Yat-sen was one of the targets. This once formed a trend and context in China. However, in the Web3 era, suddenly someone is talking about Sun Yat-sen again, which surprises me. After I read Suji's article, I also posted on my Facebook, writing some brief thoughts. Finally, I want to share some observations of my own before handing the time back to Suji. Indeed, Sun Yat-sen's idea of ​​equalizing land rights and increasing prices to the public is indeed the same as Doudan said, and can be associated with a radical market. But as far as I know, before he died, he hoped that someone could help China. He wrote directly to the German Social Democratic Party, hoping that they would come to assist China in the revolution. He already didn't quite believe in Russia, and hoped to seek enlightenment from the European socialist tradition. He wanted to cross from the East to the West. Later, Chiang Kai-shek betrayed the Kuomintang as a whole. This is a supplement. Let's talk about this first.

Bean paste: Let's go back to Suji then. In fact, I just read the period of the Republic of China after the death of Sun Yat-sen from Enclave Bookstore a while ago, which mainly tells the story of Wang Jingwei. Recently, there has been a reassessment of the Wang Jingwei regime in Taiwan. Our side may call it the Wang Puppet regime, but some people have suggested that Wang Jingwei's line is actually Sun Yat-sen's orthodoxy. Of course, this is a very minority point of view, and of course Wang Jingwei also has his own dilemma and political theory. In Baocheng's words, it is a fox. Perhaps there is not a necessary theory for learning from others, but it is closer than Sun Yat-sen. However, I am very curious. You just mentioned Sun Yat-sen’s stuff. Along the way, you thought about how it is related to the network state. I think it may be more appropriate to translate network state into network state or network autonomy state. Of course, no one currently translates this way, and I would like to hear your thoughts on this theory, and how it compares to Balaji or other related practice concepts.

From the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace to the Cyber ​​Nation

Suji Yan: When I was in junior high school, I read an article, which was translated by Peking University. Later, I read the original English text of this article, which was an article from 1996. So every time I talk about "network state" in public, I will definitely mention the founder of this EFF, he is the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Electronic Frontier Foundation), named John Perry. Barlow (John Perry Barlow). He is actually not an engineer, but a literati, a bit like a traditional Chinese literati, who is good at various knowledge, including literature and art. He wrote a very famous manifesto called A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. This manifesto was very famous in the hippie circles in California, of course, it was a thing in that era. If you ask a person in California now, probably very few people know what this manifesto is talking about.

But I saw it when I was very young, and later read it in English in its original form, and found it to be remarkable. In this manifesto, Barlow cites many famous leftist manifestos in history, but does not specify how to practice them. He just appealed that cyberspace is an independent and sovereign domain. As for whether this separate sovereign domain will produce a government, he did not specify. The original words in the manifesto are that we are creating a civilization of the mind, and you are disgusting giants. The translation of this manifesto is excellent, and I later found out that there are many fans all over the world. Let me explain what EFF does. EFF was established in 1996, when I was just born. In this period of 1996, Barlow was just a relatively crazy literati. He was at Davos, and he was involved in the hippie community movement that was burgeoning on the US Internet at the time. At that time, many people set up forums on the Internet, which were usually used to curse people, curse the world, and sometimes curse some government when they had a little thought. Barlow encountered a lot of people around them when they were being harassed by federal agencies, primarily the FBI, the Secret Service, and various departments like the Department of Defense (DoD). Some of his friends in California must be very well off. Just like Sun Wen sold his cousin’s cattle when he rebelled, and when Huang Xing rebelled, his family had 3,000 mu of land, but they were all messed up. Of course they are not happy, just like now I want to find a lawyer to sue you Same.

After the establishment of EFF in the late 90s, they raised their own funds and participated in many important cases, sometimes they served as legal aid teams, and sometimes they were plaintiffs, usually against various powerful departments of the US government. They have achieved a series of results, such as encryption technologies that everyone knows, such as end-to-end encryption, PKI and strong cryptography used by companies, etc. These are one of the results of EFF's efforts in those years. After the end of the Cold War, cryptography has been regarded as a military weapon, jointly regulated by the Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce. However, this perception was changed by the early 2000's with a number of important cases, including a professor at my school whose case was known as Bernstein v. United States. Although the case was eventually dismissed, even if it was dismissed it became a case because the United States follows case law. Generally, if you file a lawsuit against the government and it is dismissed, it means the government has backed down and they will try to change the law so that you don't win again. After I first learned about EFF and read this article, I started to pay attention to the philosophy behind them and what happened to them in the future.

I remember it was before 2010, it should have been during the Olympic Games, because I was born in 1996, so it should have been the Beijing Olympic Games at that time, I was about 12 years old, and I had already started reading all kinds of messy things. In the next two years, a lot of important things happened, like Julian Assange and the founder of WikiLeaks, who is still in prison, who used to release many American documents, It also includes documents from other powerful countries, but more from the United States. And things like Prism and Edward Snowden, and Julian Paul Assange wrote a book, and given that he might be arrested soon, The book is actually a collection of conversations, chatting like we are now. The book talks about hacker culture, online freedom and the future relationship with the Internet, this book is very interesting. You may find that there is no traditional Chinese version, only simplified Chinese version, I suspect this is because Assange was regarded as an anti-American vanguard at the time, so only simplified Chinese version was released, and the translation is quite good.

For these events to occur, I should still be small. I finished watching all these things when I was about eighteen or seventeen. Of course, there are references to Bitcoin in the book, as well as a lot of past leftist ideas, including the idea that he might be a little anarchist. There are some very interesting words among them. I have selected some thought-provoking golden sentences for everyone to think for themselves. For example, "the universe believes in encryption, which is easy to decrypt and difficult to decrypt", and "no matter how much power you have, if you are in front of someone who is unwilling to give you the private key, this power is useless." He also goes into a lot of detail about communications vs. listening, and what he means is that listening to communications is like stopping a tank in the middle of a room conversation with your friends, because the U.S. government or any other government actually thinks that cryptography It is a kind of munitions. So in terms of cryptography, they put up a lot of obstacles, like putting two tanks. I was struck by a point in the book where he argued that the Internet's platonic origins were tainted by its material origins.

I was very young, in my teens, but I went to the original text and tried to understand what he was saying. And some of his public speeches also shocked me, because we usually think of blue sky and white clouds, wide grass fields and blue hillsides as representing the beauty of nature. And he seems to be the first well-known person I can remember to say that the internet has a platonic quality or origin, but a physical origin that would taint it instead. This is the first time I have heard such a statement, and this sentence is also very short, so it has a great change, or impetus, in my thinking. Because in the past, I may have been thinking about whether to return to tradition, like Confucianism, and I may think that we should return to a certain era, and Confucius has been thinking about this issue. But after I read this book, and after another year or two of thinking about it, I started to think that retro may be wrong, we should see the good things of the past, and the future is the right direction. If the Internet he said is Platonic and has such a space, then such a country is what he called the utopia, as depicted in Plato's book "Utopia".

Of course, at that time I had not yet formed a systematic theory. Later, because of the mention of "network state" , whether it is translated into network state, national network or network automaton, I am quite familiar with the author, because Balaji is also our consultant and shareholder. At the time, he had just come out of Coinbase, had become famous, and it was interesting that he was living in Singapore. I often communicate with him, and he also provides me with something to think about. Of course, I disagree with him in many ways, and even disagree with some of his views, because he is a typical Californian with a very good Stanford education. He also let me read it before it was released, so it was expected that the book would be such a hit, but it also surprised me because I thought it might only enter the top ten bestsellers in the New York Times, but it didn't happen It has been on Amazon's bestseller list for a long time, and it has become famous in the global cultural circle at once, and it has gone beyond the scope of the technology circle. Of course, a lot of people criticized him, but I think he was criticized because he became famous and everyone was calling him names. To sum up the reasons, I don't think he has anything particularly novel in his hands, but he is the first author who dared to use "network state" as a title, and because he is rich, he has made a lot of money in Bitcoin and Coinbase stock , so it seems that there is no rush to sell books. You know, books like Radical Markets are usually reviewed in the traditional way, but he tweeted it directly, and even the original text was available online, and there were a lot of community translations. Therefore, I think this is also a reason. Everyone scolds him and has a goal, thinking that he is just a capitalist's wild imagination, which is very interesting.

Then when his book came out, I thought about the shock when I first read Assange's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" and "Cypherpunk". I was a teenager at the time, but I already had a very firm belief that, whether or not what he said was true, the path was the right one. To give a popular example, I think cyberspace is like the New World of North America. Of course, many bad things happened in the New World, such as the enslavement of African-Americans and Natives, the introduction of infectious diseases, etc. But if you compare it with the old continent, you will find that the old continent has various cultures, traditions and arts from Asia to Europe, and it seems to have everything. However, they are missing a lot, they are like a pollution source, and the New World may be a solution. Therefore, I will make such comparisons, sometimes citing the stories of Sun Wen, Washington and others. Here's my thought process.

Since I am engaged in the Web3 and encrypted digital industry myself, I have worked in more than 20 countries in the past two years, and I already feel that I should already be a person with a national visa and a green card. But when I think about it carefully, it seems that my needs cannot be met in those countries, and the definition of citizen or resident does not seem to ask me to vote or let me participate in anything. And when I handed them the money, they said they don't accept cryptocurrencies, which is really funny. However, every time I perform some operation on Ethereum, I need to pay transaction fees, which makes me feel unbelievable. I already feel that there are many people around me who have entered this era, and they will also combine many examples. I think Bosung should be more understanding and can provide more historical examples. This is my thinking along the way, and I have published a lot of explosive opinions. Unfortunately, many people didn't take my words seriously. The first sentence was that I said that I want to build a country, and the police uncle teaches you to be a man. It's usually like this, so it's very interesting.

From Colonial History to America's Nation-Building Movement to Cyber ​​Nation

Liu Weiren: This thing is really interesting. Just like when I first introduced myself, I said I was a nasty person, so let’s talk about the nasty words. I want to ask Suji some questions, which are often asked when I contact the online community. For example, the "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" just mentioned is very idealistic, and it also touches on the issue of power invasion by various countries. Now we list these questions one by one.

The first question is, assuming we want to gain new freedoms, political or social formations in cyberspace, how to prevent the invasion of the state? Although encryption is easy to decrypt, power always wants to fill the space it may encounter. In cyberspace, we need to consider electricity, manpower and servers, and countries often intervene in various ways, such as the United States with FBI and CIA in the way of cryptocurrency and exchanges, because they can't handle your cyberspace , but they can catch people. This is a matter of state invasion.

Another question I'm interested in is, in a place without a state, are we going to get into a money supremacy situation? As far as I know, power in the world is usually contested by two executors. "The Narrow Corridor of Liberty" says that one is the state and the other is the society. What society creates is a social pressure, while the risk that the state brings is the arbitrary oppression of centralized power. Freedom is possible only in between. At the same time, everyone should know that neoliberalism will lead to various inequality problems. If a place becomes a money-first world, people may enjoy less freedom than if they were oppressed by the state. So, how to prevent these intrusions, whether it is an autonomous community, a network state, or cyberspace? This is the second question.

The third question is, assuming we solve the problem of state invasion and neoliberalism, and people are no longer repressed, how to arbitrate? For example, in a DAO or cyberspace, different people have different opinions on the establishment of a thing or whether a transaction violates rights and interests. Or someone proposes a new public welfare or environmental protection plan, but is it worth everyone's investment? How do we resolve these contentious situations? Do we need to discuss this in depth?

Suji Yan: I think this topic is very important, and it may take half an hour to discuss, because there are many issues, so I have a very clever way to summarize. I'll use the example of the New World because that's the concept most immediately associates with most educated people, which is the relationship of the North American colonies and the 13 North American colonies to the British Empire. The British Empire is very powerful and has everything, while the 13 states in North America don't even have their own army, only some militias. Even Washington, the founding father of the country, learned his military knowledge in the British army. He served as an officer in the British army. Later, because the colonies did not give him good rewards, he left the British army and returned to his hometown. There were 500 black slaves in the manor. . Later, when 13 states needed him, he was called up. Why do I give this example? Because every time I make some explosive comments, the first sentence of most people is "uncle policeman wants to teach you to be a man", what should I do if I ask you to be a man? There is actually no way to answer this question. I will do whatever you say. If you want me to give money, I will give money, there is no way.

But now there are already people like Satoshi Nakamoto who cannot be found, or even if they are found, everyone thinks he is not fake. Satoshi Nakamoto has created a modern myth just like Batman. Now that we have entered the post-modern society, this mythical age may not be popular, but we can give another example. I feel that the online world is being invaded by countries or capitals in a way that is very similar to the colonial era, through many Indian companies. East india companies like dutch east india company, british east india company, pretty much all the great powers and european powers have these companies and they usually do the colonization of india and grow weird stuff and sell it to big The Qing Dynasty made a profit from it, and then used the money to buy tea, shipped it to North America or other places that needed tea, and sold it at a high price. There is no difference between Facebook and Tencent. Facebook is like the American East India Company, and Tencent is like the Chinese West India Company. They are essentially the same.

Strictly speaking, the East India Company is not a state-owned enterprise of the British royal family or the British Empire. It is a complex hybrid state, which was not fully controlled until later through parliamentary legislation. Empress in the title means nothing to them, if you are the top of the East India Company in India, you have a considerable amount of power. That's the nature of this game. So the current situation is that we can see that the world's powerful countries, after the industrial and information revolution (i.e. after WWII and after the 90s), those countries with economic and cultural strength will not necessarily colonize cyberspace , but the size of their territory is different. Strictly speaking, only Britain and France carried out colonial activities in North America. Among them, Britain was more powerful, while France was in colder places, such as Canada and Louisiana. Mainly the British, and of course the Dutch, New York was originally built by the Dutch and called New Amsterdam, and Wall Street was originally a wall, which was later demolished by the British, so it became New York. That's why.

When it comes to the history of Web 2.0, it is actually not that long ago, about seven or eight years ago. For a while, many communication companies and chat software started by Chinese, such as WeChat, were very successful in Southeast Asia. After this, there was a rivalry between Facebook, who bought the whole of India for $19 billion, and Line, which was bought by Korean and Japanese conglomerates and swallowed up Thailand and other countries. As much as we fight for colonies, places like India are very reminiscent of colonization, Cyber ​​India has also become a super lucrative place, colonized by the American East India Company. Basically, this is how I see it.

If you look at it with this model, the answers to many questions become intuitive. Of course, these answers are not immediately applicable to the real world and may sometimes be wrong. For example, you just asked what to do if there are no guns or cannons. The correct answer is that the enemy makes them for us, that is, the enemy provides weapons, and we will rob other people's resources. Just now I mentioned George Washington. His father and grandfather were both subjects of the British Empire. If you are a top rich second generation with 500 black slaves and a huge estate at home, there is no need for you to be a soldier. You will definitely say that you are a boy who likes military life very much and has a certain military talent, which is very powerful, that is to say, you can be a governor in case you go to gilt. Of course, everyone's situation is different, but if you look at the development of American cinema, you will find that there is a category of films that obviously has a deep British connection. They learned a lot about surveillance, like Edward Snowden, where he learned the details of the mass surveillance program, absolutely funded by the US government. His purpose is for him to learn this knowledge. Of course he is not the top rich second generation, and he has no conditions for rebellion.

In that era, the economy was not large enough. When we look back at the thirteen states that seceded from the British Empire and became independent, it doesn't matter how much those states accounted for in the overall empire's trading system, whether in terms of nominal gross domestic product (GDP), real GDP, or other statistical measures , including the import and export of silver and precious metals, etc. They are more like a major offshore country than just a port trading company. Today, we can use this concept to evaluate the broadcast space. For example, we can see how many stocks in the US stock market have a market value of more than $100 billion or $1 trillion. Similarly, we can observe how many Chinese-funded companies listed overseas are related to Sai Space, and may even include water sellers. Right? Because the people who were in the tea trade, they were probably contractors for the East India Company, so they made money because they were operating in the colonies, you'll find there's actually quite a large percentage. However, their percentage of GDP is still not large enough, which is a typical situation. Maybe their valuation is high, or they have a lot of transaction volume (GMV).

But if we use Internet terminology, there are not many of them who are truly ethnically conscious, most of them are users, as long as you give me a red envelope of 5 yuan, I will come, or if you give me 10 yuan, I will leave. But, think about it, if you consider yourself a New Yorker, you're a proud New Yorker, and someone offers you $100, you're not going to move to Miami easily. You will definitely demand higher pay, not just because of the amount of money, but because it involves cultural identity and a sense of place. However, today we see the concept of "maxi", because when I first bought bitcoin, it was after ether in 2015 or 2016, and I noticed the word "maxi". It's neither good nor bad, but it feels like a frenzy. Some will tell you it's bad and it's a lie, some will tell you it's good and even savior it. It's interesting. In fact, it no longer worships a specific god, but worships an abstract thing, which contains elements of nationalism and religion. I often tell everyone, don't just look at how many users Ethereum has, but look at how many citizens or nationals it has. Just like Singapore, if you ask Singaporeans and Malaysians if they are the same, they will definitely get angry. In fact, they are almost the same in terms of culture and blood, maybe their English is better.

But if you ask them, which space are you from, are you a citizen of this space? They'll say I'm only here for the $5 deal and they won't count themselves in. But if you go back to before the independence of the thirteen states in North America, you ask a person, are you an American? Their first reaction would be, no such thing, are you North American? yes. And are you from the British Empire? My grandpa might be, but I'm not. We seem to have nothing to do with the British Empire. Then you ask him, are you from New York? Or are you from London? Such questions may arouse their strong local consciousness. This kind of awareness began to emerge, because I had previously advised refried beans to travel to Montenegro, which is a very small country, but they have many people who support the local Zuzala, and they have this awareness.

This situation develops to the second stage, which is stalemate . If we study independent history, different historians may have different opinions, but I think it can be simplified to a stalemate and then a war. During the period of stalemate, economic issues became the main controversy. They thought that you actually wanted to evade taxes and wanted to evade taxes by speculating on coins and NFT. If you are their mother country, or say you are a powerful imperialist colonial country, not a dictator, you will definitely find a way to squeeze the middle class, but you can't squeeze the bottom, because if you squeeze the bottom, they may be with Indians People form alliances, which can lead to trouble. Likewise you can't squeeze the top because if you squeeze Washington they really only have 500 niggers right? My grandfather has several brothers in the British House of Lords, which is very troublesome. So they would use economic means, take taxes from the colonies, which we learn about in the history books, like tea. There are actually a lot of different means and different colonial companies.

Looking at it now, it seems that in the Internet or cyber world, extracting transaction fees and data is the easiest way, just like NFT. But you absolutely cannot extract the richest people. For example, if you have a billion-dollar hedge fund and then suddenly tell you that you are going to pay taxes, he will never pay taxes. Throughout the ages, we have always heard that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) caught insider trading, but almost never heard of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) caught venture capitalists' money, because they are very smart and already overseas Many layers of tax shelter. And those gentlemen in your Congress also evade taxes, so I am like them, they taught me how to evade taxes, and you can't catch the people below, because those people don't know what to buy or sell, you can only catch the middle link.

After catching the middle one, you will find some interesting things, such as I started raising an electronic pet today, such as NFT Punk. Let's say it has artificial intelligence and becomes very smart ten years later, or I raise a CryptoKitties cat and then 80 years later I die leaving a lot of wealth and assets and some offspring too. And the cat has become very precious and will not die. And then I'll train it all the time, make it really smart, and pass it on to my grandson. At this time, the US government or the Chinese government suddenly appeared and said that you must pay taxes. If you're upper class, they might be afraid to ask you to pay taxes, but if you're middle class, you might be annoyed, why is my heirloom cat paying taxes?

This is the same reasoning. If you look at the mentality of the colonized or colonized people in the thirteen states in North America, they think that this is the generation of their grandfathers who went to India to buy tea, went to China to buy opium, and then came to North America. Now You come to collect the tax, according to this, the British can't shit without tea, so they are very angry. Actually, it's okay if you don't drink tea, but it's a very fragile state of mind where it feels like your whole middle-class life is falling apart. So they began to resist, which is actually like the Apple tax, because the tax is not collected by the British royal family, but is passed on to the people of the thirteen states through various means. Instead of asking the queen directly, at that time, they will break out the War of Independence. As for whether there will be a war, it is difficult to say.

I can't predict so far into the future right now, but I'm inclined to think that each reformation will be less bloody and more civilized as a result of human history. We'll learn from history, at least hopefully. So I think the revolution will be relatively more peaceful at that time, probably in our grandchildren's time, maybe even earlier, because for me, I feel like Washington's grandpa. Washington left a lot of money and had a lot of connections in various countries, but strictly speaking, his descendants no longer consider themselves to have anything to do with the British Empire, only to gild money when they need it. If you are told that you have to pay taxes on your ancestral tea or ancestral things, it will definitely cause controversy, and this may be the fuse.

So basically I just answered the question raised by the Uighurs. Of course, I can’t say the specific answer. Just like the police uncle at the police station taught you what to do, I can’t predict the future situation. But when you have 5,000 acres of land and 5,000 head of cattle, you are like Sun Yat-sen or Huang Xing, you think about other things. The middle or working class of that era would have thought of other things too. This is my answer, and I think it is the answer that is most in line with everyone's understanding. I don't know what Baocheng has in mind, the Uyghur people may have posted a lot of emoticons and got a lot of compliments.

The web2 platform is the UK, the CEX is the US, and the DAO is Haiti?

Zhang Baocheng: I understand that Uighurs may still have many problems. However, I would like to add something to the topic of the colonization of North America. Before Britain colonized North America, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were already colonizing North America. Spain and Portugal also carried out a lot of colonization activities in the East Indies (that is, modern India) at that time, and the way they colonized North America, Suji may also know. Basically, it is to transport a large amount of silver produced in North America back to Europe, and then all the silver is used for war funds, that is, for the war between Spain and Portugal. At least before the 15th and 16th centuries, a method called political capital expansion was popular in Europe, that is, wars, competition for the right to inherit the throne, and so on. Spain and Portugal have been squeezing North America for quite some time. Due to the small area and dense population of the Netherlands in Europe, they could not compete with the great empires such as Spain and Portugal, so they tried to find other ways. In addition to the Dutch East India Company, they also established the West India Company and slowly broke through Spain. and Portugal's monopoly on North America.

However, in order to eventually colonize the blank land of North America, your own base in Europe must also be strong enough. The Netherlands later lost wars with France and Great Britain, and eventually lost the confidence to invest North American capital in European commercial operations. At that time, the Netherlands can be said to have made a great revolution against Spain and Portugal. They realized that the resources extracted from afar must be put into commercial operation in Europe, so as to achieve sustainable development. So their logic is completely different from that of Spain and Portugal. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, often won wars against France and the Netherlands because of the unity of its aristocrats, so they gained a more stable and longer-term extraction power in America. So what I'm trying to say is that while cyberspace and Web3 may be compared to a blank colony in North America, I actually think the metaphor is closer to cyberspace as a whole than just Web3. Now we can compare Google and Facebook to Britain, because we know that Britain became the "empire on which the sun never sets" by colonizing North America, and in the opinion of some historians, they ushered in a new era.

In fact, one of the important points in global capitalism is that before large companies such as Google and Facebook start to colonize North America or colonize cyberspace, we can explore some companies that are trying to use cyberspace to expand their territory. These enterprises may, like Spain and Portugal, fail to grasp the characteristics of cyberspace and eventually fail. In this metaphor, I think the United States (referring to the historical United States) is more like the current centralized cryptocurrency exchange than the ideal network country. So, if we want to find a metaphor that can be rebellious in the Web3 era, I think the most suitable country is the first country to get rid of colonial rule, and this country is very unpopular, which is Haiti.

In history, Haiti was the first country to get rid of colonies. They became independent in 1791. Why in 1791? Because the United States was getting stronger and stronger at that time, and fought many wars with Britain, but it also coincided with the chaotic period after the French Revolution. After the French Revolution in 1789, the feudal dynasty fell, which affected Britain and the United States, and they had to help France solve the problem. At that time, the first wave of colonial countries in history to break away from imperial rule emerged, and Haiti was one of them. From then until the 1960s, Algeria was still colonized by France, not to mention Taiwan, and until the 1940s, by Japan. But at the end of the 18th century, Haiti ushered in the first wave of getting rid of colonization, which was completely different from the rising United States and Britain at that time.

Therefore, if we summarize all this into a historical metaphor of the transformation of the Web3 era, I would think that the big companies we see now, such as Google and Facebook, are similar to the UK at that time, while centralized exchanges have adopted many of the monopoly of the Web2 era And the concept of capital concentration, similar to the United States. If you want to make a real comparison, the future state of the Internet and some small countries may be more similar to Haiti located in the southeast of the North American continent. They broke the contradiction between the Web2 era or the old empire and achieved independence. This also explains why the places where the Web3 community is active are usually not in the big empires, but in some peripheral areas, such as Montenegro and Singapore, and even Taiwan may play an important role in it. Taiwan is located on the periphery of a continental country. This is my current discourse.

From the market to the public sphere, how is cyber community identity born?

Liu Weiren: The question you raised is very interesting. When we discuss identity in North America, the book points out that people may not consider themselves British, but they may consider themselves New Yorkers. What I'm curious about is, people like Baocheng and you, do you think the future of online communities is closer to a market or a country? Or to put it more broadly, like Baocheng just mentioned, it is more like a smaller autonomous dominion. The situation is not quite the same because we are loyal to one market center or one country. We can say that we need 7-11 to live, or we need logistics to buy food, which is a case of being loyal to the market. Assuming that the online community we use is related to things related to currency, information, job hunting or finding recognition, if it is a market-oriented situation, when another market appears, we will quickly move to that market. And, probably like now, people over the age of 25 or 30, will feel the gap between generations, each generation has its own favorite market. There can be a break from market to market. In this case, there may be some gaps in New Yorkers' identification. However, if it is the case of another community or country, it may not be exactly the same. If it is a country, a self-governing territory, or some remote rural areas like Taiwan, although these areas belong to a certain county or city in name, they are actually self-sufficient. Relatively speaking, people from rural areas will not leave suddenly. Even if they can drift north to the capital, they will not disappear immediately. For those who are able to stay there, their rural identity carries over to the next generation.

We seem to be able to ask, assuming a remote or rural place, such as Montenegro, Singapore, or Taiwan, if it can gain a recognition, how will its network develop? Will it be closer to dominion or backcountry status, or just a market? Will it become people over 35 years old using Facebook today, and then being eliminated by Instagram, Xiaohongshu, etc.? Because if we are eliminated, we may return to the situation of the centralized exchange just mentioned, another centralized exchange person, even if he wants to avoid the country's taxes, he will eventually form an alliance with another country, and the result may be It is we who are swallowed by the state again. What is your opinion on this issue?

Suji Yan: I think the 13 North American states existed as a confederation when they first became independent. In this case, we will not emphasize whether the people in these 13 places speak French or English, and the language relationship will not be closer to the colonial mother country, but more inclined to establish an intimate relationship with each other. For example, for some French-Americans, they may feel closer to French culture than people from these 13 states. In the battle of Yorktown, the British army was actually helped by the French and American forces, and the French provided military and financial support. Therefore, the mentality of many people is not very single, but there are some contradictions. This contradiction also exists in the context of the web3 era. Most people do not abandon their national identity in the country of their birth for ideological reasons, unless there are some complicated reasons.

For example, in Japan, the tax on cryptocurrency transactions is as high as 40%, which may prompt some people to give up the idea of ​​​​living in the country, stop playing, and die without paying inheritance tax, but they can still find other ways to solve this problem. Such a situation makes them more like being in a Nanyang state. Strictly speaking, people in Nanyang, including North Korea, were ruled by the Ming Dynasty for a long time, but from the perspective of later historians, this has little to do with their current situation. The reason why they feel that they are Nanyang people is only out of the need for self-identification. Therefore, those of the Nanyang Chinese who retain the traditional customs of Chinese culture may tell you that they have such traditions, but these traditions are not practiced anymore, even in Taiwan. Not to mention that in the newly established urban communities inside China, few people know about these traditions.

When you share some content on the Internet, everyone may be surprised to find that Chinese people have engaged in such activities in the past, and it turns out that Chinese people have retained such cultural traditions. I think the formation of this relationship needs to be understood by reading history books. In the past, when we moved from Facebook to Instagram or other platforms, it was more based on the translation of offline network. We may be proud of being an alumnus of a certain school, for example if you are a Harvard alumnus over 35 years old, you may still use Facebook; if you are a party friend in your 20s, you may prefer to use Instagram or other platforms. However, if no one told you that in the future our school will be called Facebook University, or that there is no community called FB City, then you may not actively transfer. This is actually a different concept, similar to the difference between the new city and the old city. Young people may think that the old city is too crowded, the environment is not good, and the distribution of wealth is unfair, so they develop a satellite city next to it. In the migration of the Internet, we see this situation more and more.

However, if we strictly look at Web 3.0, regardless of the application of Ethereum or earlier, everyone is playing with some very mysterious concepts. You need to buy a pass, you need to have a certain level of card, you need to donate, and then what happens, and then the immigration fund you invest in can be scammed and run away, which is actually very similar to the previous situation. The example we have seen is that Palau issued a digital resident card (RNS.ID). I have not applied for it myself, but many of my friends have it. I borrowed it to observe it. The quality is very poor, just like an experiment in college It's like the cheap card that the office sends you, and the content on it is no longer clear. But this turned out to be your digital identity certificate given to you by a sovereign state. So, I think now that we're getting into this transformation phase, if you ask about New York City or New Amsterdam, which was later renamed New York, how it came to be, of course it started with commerce. There are a lot of English speakers, Dutch people, French people making money here. Here is like a natural market, like a natural deep-water port, where a lot of information is exchanged. If you are sitting here doing business, and someone suddenly tells you that the major shareholder of the search engine has changed, or that the Whatsapp platform has changed, you may not care anymore. It is just a name change, such as from New Amsterdam to New York.

And then all of a sudden someone tells you that this place is independent, which is amazing, and now we can elect a governor and a mayor. At this time, you may find it a little interesting, and you can participate in some things, no matter whether the election is real or fake, and then there will be some game situations. While we don't care today whether these elections for the DAO are real, the first reaction might be that I can have elections. Before that, the only thing we could participate in was maybe choose moderators on the forum, pick a Reddit moderator, and now tell you that you can elect members of the governance committee, which sounds very advanced, although it may not be practical. But the next step might be to go further to another stage, so I don't think the two are in conflict.

Although we are in the market today, these elements can actually be recognized by the market. When we look at some examples in the history of Web3, we will consider the price, such as brand premium, and we will also worry about whether the Binance blockchain technology is centralized, which is almost centralized anyway. Just like the British built a trading city next to them after they lost the colonial war, if you were from those 13 states, you wouldn't ask me if I had to pay taxes there. This is a very complicated game process, and I think it is almost here now. Because we pay more attention to these news, our first reaction after seeing Apple’s press conference was that the “Apple tax” might be imposed, and we saw that Facebook wanted to cooperate with the FBI. As for Chinese-funded companies, it goes without saying. Basically you can imagine what problems there will be, this image will gradually become an image similar to ethnicity and national identity, but I hope that in the online world, there will be no nationalism, which may be a more advanced concept. He's already making that transition.

As for the question asked by the Uighurs, it is the situation in Haiti. In fact, I also think that in North America today, web2 has already been completed, and the ownership of each state has been determined. So it is more important to return to the state of North America, including Haiti. In fact, no one in the frontier suddenly left when several great empires were engaged in war or conflict. Strictly speaking, the French never cared about American freedom and democracy, they just supported the Americans in order to fight against the British.

In fact, I also discussed this point of view with Doudou. One of the founders of the United States, Benjamin. Franklin. Everyone must have learned from him, because he is a scientist who is famous for "obtaining civil rights from tyrants and lightning from heaven". He was one of the few good-looking, long-haired, knowledgeable men among the founding fathers, and he was also regarded as a friend of women, which is a story to look up. During independence, he also traveled to France, received aid, and met King Louis of France. He asked for reinforcements from France, we don't actually know how that turned out, but did he care? I think he definitely doesn't care. If I were the French ruling class and now you told me to go to war with the British, great, give you money, give you aid, it's a proxy war.

So now you ask the British Prime Minister to talk about Web3, and Hong Kong, France, the United States and Japan have also talked about it. But if you really ask these senior officials, do they believe it? They probably laughed it off. But really, their mentality is that Americans don't play anymore, then we have an opportunity to pull a little bit of money over, and that's what's happening now. So I think it is still very similar to the influence of that era on us.

Web2 platform profit and user resistance problem, platform cooperation is the solution?

Bean paste: To supplement Suji’s content, Liu Weiren’s question just now is actually a question of whether the online community is more like a market or a country. I think what we are discussing is a process of community formation. This community may be derived from the evolution of technological tools that bring people closer, like globalization, but people can believe in common values. The trust generated by this value may become a kind of belief and eventually form a community. The process is still in the early stages, so what Suji just mentioned, we may not be the founders of those countries, like Washington felled the cherry tree. Maybe we're more like those who build estates.

There is a great piece of news this week that just responds to what Liu Weiren just mentioned, and that is Reddit, a cool platform where people share new things, there are many nerds, and there are also various interest lovers spontaneous community. Much like Taiwan's PTT, it's just a forum made up of words. And in the events of this week, Reddit officials decided they wanted to make money, so they took back access to the API and moved to a fee-based model. Most of the content, of course, is no longer produced by the official itself, but contributed by users, especially the forum content is mostly created by users themselves. Every forum has a strong community culture, and those community cultures are not consistent. Since the API was closed and converted to paid, these sub-forums began to protest and strike. They closed these forums and no longer opened them to the outside world, forming a closed environment that prevents the outside world from entering. This is a way of resisting platform operations. These things happened this week. In many communities, 70% to 90% of the forums should be closed. The entire protest movement is very famous internationally.

This is quite consistent with the culture of the online community that Liu Weiren just mentioned. These communities are actually resisting the market, and the market as a source of profit is inconsistent with the values ​​​​of the community. The platform, as a need for survival and profit, runs counter to the community culture. Communities can migrate, as described in the book just mentioned, between different digital platforms, which involves swings between values, community, and profit-making needs. This is an issue Suji has been emphasizing. I would like to add some final points. I personally think that when discussing digital communities, digital countries, or network autonomous entities, they can all be regarded as extensions of technology. Not sure if it is "guns, germs, and steel." In North America or the New World, many people actually view it from the perspective of technological evolution. The emergence of nautical technology and the industrial age led to the emergence of this new continent. At the beginning, it was dominated by colonial culture and market orientation. The development of resources was also improved due to technological progress. This was not due to the increase in earth resources, but due to technological progress and development.

Advances in technology have made the exchange of resources more efficient. A technology like nuclear power generation is not due to the increase of natural resources, but because of the evolution of technology, which allows us to have more energy. Cyberspace transforms the interaction between people into a new resource. Regardless of whether it is possible to directly transform the large amount of training required by AI or the information itself into knowledge and wealth, people began to adapt to this kind of resources that were not originally resources and make them available. Thoughts have slowly adapted to this change, and people's collaborative culture, market models, and even the concept of community have changed accordingly.

This is different from the democratic imagination of geo-countries. Even Nordic social democracy still has boundaries, and the Uighurs have been mentioning it. But for this emerging, borderless virtual community, it is not so adaptable in our generation. However, in the future, more and more people may think that the online community is where they belong. I asked Feng Tang the same question back in April, namely whether virtual communities need physical spaces to foster trust and build solidarity and cooperation. She agreed with this point, thinking that because at this stage, people still need to eat in face-to-face, the revolution is to treat guests to dinner , and trust can only be built after face-to-face interaction with each other. In the future, closer solidarity will emerge in virtual spaces. I think these are the values ​​of our generation and probably not the values ​​of the next or the next generation because the whole world is changing all the time and the thought process of the next generation will shape the landscape of a new civilization. This is the process of my inference, I use the evolution of technology to influence the mind, let the mind adapt, and finally lead to the civilized landscape. Of course, this may also include whether the new political system or new civilization that Baocheng just mentioned occurred from the frontier, or whether the Uighurs think through the state of interaction. This is the part I want to add, now I want to throw the ball back to the Vivian and see if he responds.

Liu Weiren: I thought of something yesterday, and we happened to discuss this issue online. Since when? Probably from the 90s or 2000s. With the development of the Internet, globalization, and the rise of neoliberalism, more and more problems have emerged in the governance of modern countries. More and more people are dissatisfied with national governance, and the scope of influence that the state can exert is also increasing. more limited. There are of course many reasons for this, including administrative and judicial constraints, such as the frequency of elections (every two or three years), which varies from country to country. Taking Taiwan as an example, will elections every two years make people more willing to accept rule, or make people more suspicious of rule? The current situation seems to favor the latter, which exists in all countries. Of course, there are also methods by which regimes use Internet tools to manipulate or undermine democracy.

I want to respond to what you just mentioned, the question you asked Tang Feng in April. Personally, I believe that the cyber state may become a complementary or embedded state of the existing national system, because it has certain self-regulation and consensus mechanisms, which are difficult for the current government to achieve. One also wonders if it is reasonable for the state to tax or regulate it now, if it has not contributed anything in cyberspace? Is it bewildering that people have started discussing online, started working together to solve problems, only to end up being disempowered by the state? Especially people in the online community should be very sensitive. Maybe, if you don’t directly confront the existing system, one approach you just mentioned is whether it is possible for the public sector, the private sector, or the public sector and the online community to discuss a certain method, whether it is a public chain or a common To provide a window for the country, government or regulations to seek help and ask questions when there is a problem, but most of the management powers, rights and obligations, as well as community consensus, are still maintained by the people and the online community . This may be a way to save the situation from going straight to revolution.

In fact, often power goes back to the people, which can be a practice, which is interesting. Because as the refried beans just mentioned, we may tend to favor an ideal state of northern Europe, but the reality of northern Europe is not the case. However, Baocheng may know this more or less, that is, corporatism. Corporatism exists in the state's governmental norms, sometimes even enshrined in law. These norms do not necessarily delineate criminal behavior, some may be about the skill standards such as Class A and Class B technicians. The formulation of these standards is not necessarily formulated by government officials, but is often discussed and formulated by trade unions, industry associations or some civil society groups. Under such circumstances, the government may only serve as a platform for meetings, providing a space for everyone to have meetings, but it is only the chairman and does not deal with the agenda of the meeting, allowing everyone to negotiate on their own. Perhaps, the subsequent development of the network state may be similar to this model, allowing community users and formulated norms to align with each other. But in terms of public opinion or political structure, it still looks like a modern country without directly changing the system.

Bean paste: Thank you, the Uighurs. What the Uighurs mentioned is not the route of the Balaji network country at all. Instead, it sounds like the Coordi-nation proposed by Harvard University law professor De Fillipi , which is a cooperative network. However, we should not have time to discuss this topic in depth today. I think we can ask Suji and Baocheng to summarize the discussion just a little bit, not sure if we will have a next time, but I think this discussion is very interesting, maybe we can continue to discuss it. But let’s stop here for today, let’s start with Baocheng first, then change to Suji, and finally tell the Wei people one or two more conclusions, all of which can be added. Let's start with Baocheng first.

Conclusion: Trends of thought change with the times

Zhang Baocheng: I think no matter what the exact concept of this network is, the situation of cross-border and global interoperability will basically become stronger and stronger. After the Cold War, there was a school of international relations theory called "ultra-globalism," which advocated high-intensity globalization. This school of thought has its pedigree in international relations theory. However, I myself prefer a more pragmatic view, less focused on the digital technology field. As much as we talk about our identities and our online identities, we ultimately have to eat and live our lives. We return to a basis of comparative materialism. Although many food and daily necessities are already multinational products, we are still a group of people gathered in a physical space to enjoy things from abroad. This makes me think that the contradiction between the fact that people must gather and live in the same geographical space and the increasingly developed cross-border and global networks in the future will become bigger and bigger. The contradiction between geo-space and non-geo cyberspace is increasingly aggravated by capitalism. I think some of the technologies we are discussing now, whether it is blockchain or other technologies, may penetrate into basic industries, but before I came into contact with blockchain, I was always confused about how technologists view basic industries such as agriculture and industry. I think these things often happen in real time and space, which may be contradicted to a certain extent with digital technology. I will stop here first, there will be a lot of developments later, let Suji sum it up, thank you.

Suji Yan: Yes, I have actually said a lot. I think the most important thing is to keep everyone from getting confused. Because there are many young people around my age, or younger than us, who feel at a loss about the future and feel that they cannot see any guidance. The theories we've come up with aren't quite right, but hopefully give people a way to think about new things in their lives without getting confused. When artificial intelligence comes along, don't bother wondering if this represents slaves to the digital continent. In this case, we should be open to many things, not accepting them, but recognizing that they may disappear within our lifetime, so that we become the last generation to endure this unreasonable status quo . However, the two generations behind us, let us be the grandfather of the founding father. So, what I want to tell you is that this requires patience. This is not a revolution that can be easily completed in a day, a month, a year, or even a generation. If it's such a big subject, I think it will require the dedication of many people and a long time. And if you can make a contribution, the society will give you back, whether it is external social feedback or the cooperation of traditional society, I believe you will benefit. Thanks.

Bean paste: Thank you. I would also like to add one or two words, that is, this week, the aviation bomber, that is, the criminal professor Kaczynski passed away, and died in prison. He wrote a dissertation of over 30,000 words titled "Industrial Society Is Its Future". I like this paper very much, although I certainly disagree with the global anti-technology action he proposed at the end, because I think the impact of technology on human beings may be more long-term than imagined. However, I very much agree with a sentence he mentioned in the middle, and I think this sentence is very suitable for today's discussion, that is, modern people have an identity crisis, and the reason is that people do not have to fight to survive now. So now there are many alternative activities, whether it is sports, games, entertainment or power struggles, these activities are all new things derived from industrial society. These people are pursuing something that has nothing to do with survival, so the resources they spend are all extra, but they may spend more to satisfy these activities. I think this is a turning point, that is, people are looking for new alternative activities in the virtual culture and digital community. I don't think alternative activities will go away, especially in today's society. If this alternative activity crosses national boundaries and overcomes differences, it may form a new economic state, which may be very similar to the imagination of the grandfather of the nation mentioned by Suji. So this kind of identity in the network country and the identity crisis mentioned by Kaczynski, as well as the future digital community, I think can be combined to make a summary. This is what I want to add here. Finally, do you have one or two sentences you want to say?

Liu Weiren: OK. Shall I follow what Doudou just said? I don’t know if the listeners have watched "Sword Art Online", or maybe the earlier "Ghost in the Shell". Maybe, as Dou Mai said, we may be grandpas from the era of "Sword Art Online". In that era, there may really be a network or a virtual world, because people's real activities at that time may be in the digital age and digital space. in progress. Maybe it hasn't been that long, maybe it's something that can be achieved in a few decades. Will the whole of international relations make sense by then? I'm not so sure that international politics or finance, or domestic politics and finance should be very different from now. Whether you agree with the importance of the country today or not, you must change accordingly by then.

Dried Beans: We spent nearly two hours today discussing the future of networks, national networks, community networks, etc., especially the interplay between them. I think the summary we just made is very exciting. I wonder if there will be another discussion? We'll wrap up the episode first and then discuss it further with you. If you have any issues that you want to discuss, each of us is open, and you are welcome to raise them directly. Whether it's Suji, me, Baocheng or the Uighurs, we are all very happy to discuss these topics that few people talk about. Well, that's all for today's discussion. Thank you all for listening, bye! thank you all.