The opposite of Network State Nostalgia: * Rebecca Grace Rachamy on the enshittification of network state (school) society gracerebeccarachmany836224.s…? "Have you noticed that Balaji’s speech has moved from that of one of the most insightful commentators on the state of technology to the speech of a politically-motivated real estate agent? It’s a function of the fact that the Network School locations are, in fact, real estate arbitrage projects, touted as “Society as a Service”. The “society” you get is a fully vanilla society. The residents barely get to decide their own decor. Everything comes blandly furnished. The co-working space, the cafe, the gym—nothing was created by the residents. Oh, and did anyone mention that even the long-term residents were routinely shuffled from room to room when the Network School was overbooked, or someone “more important” came in? If you were at NS for a longer period of time, you found out that you didn’t have the right to any particular room or apartment. You could be relocated to another room any time the team decided they needed to do so. Anything that was created by the residents ended up being deemed an “L2”, which is a kind of business that was a layer on top of the foundational NS layer. The NS cafe, the kombucha sellers, the bicycle rental, the maker space, the yoga studio: each of these was a mini-business which residents were launching as businesses that could potentially fund their long-term residency. Some of these businesses ended up being taken over by Network School. I’m not sure how exactly this functioned, but it seemed that over time, the more successful ventures melded into NS. So maybe your dream of having a long-term business might not have been founded on the best contractual arrangement. There are good reasons why the arrangement at NS is still a good deal. $1500 per month for all-inclusive accommodations, meals, gym, fast internet, cleaning, the whole works—that’s not bad. Several startups put their HQ in NS, because they could bring together multi-national teams for a year or two, with no distractions, at a fairly low price, with no operational overhead. The problem comes when you feel zero responsibility to the residents of your project."

MAATTR explains, and this is key to P2P Theory: "Replication, not scale. substack.com/@naturalcapital… Scale makes one thing bigger. What the world needs is thousands of per cent, which no enlargement delivers. Only replication of a proven unit does, and only if the unit is small enough to be reproduced by people who are not the founders."