NN Ep:8 Functional Sovereignty: Can Network Nations Self-Govern Without Land?
Release Date: 12/18/2025
NN Ep:14 - Networked Diasporas: The Case of SeeDAO with Helena Rong
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Felix Beer is joined by Helena Rong, Assistant Professor at New York University Shanghai, to explore SeeDAO as a real-world case study of a proto Network Nation. They unpack how SeeDAO evolved from a Web3 startup into a translocal, diasporic community rooted in Daoist philosophy, kinship, and the pursuit of a “good life.” The conversation dives into co-presence, emergence, non-coercive governance, social ledgers, on-chain identity, and how SeeDAO blends digital infrastructure with physical...
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VDAO Ep.7 From Software to Soil: Health, Food & Building Real Resilience with Danilo Da Rosa
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the VDAO × Greenpill Anti-Fragile Network States mini-series, host Kris Miller speaks with Danilo, a software engineer who left city life behind to rebuild his health, relationship with food, and sense of resilience through permaculture, natural building, and community living in Uruguay. Danilo shares how a health crisis pushed him to rethink his lifestyle, why growing food changed everything, and how moving closer to nature reshaped his understanding of resilience. They explore food autonomy, water catchment, natural house building,...
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NN Ep:13 - Intentional Communities & New Jurisdictions with Jessy Kate Schingler
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi is joined by Jessy Kate Schingler, co-founder of the Embassy Network, to explore how intentional communities and new jurisdictions can give Network Nations real-world grounding. Jessy shares lessons from over a decade of building translocal co-living communities, explains why the Embassy Network thought of its spaces as “embassies to the future,” and how identity, culture, and entanglement emerge without formal membership rules. The conversation then turns to jurisdictional...
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NN Ep:12 From politics to protocols to protocol politics with Santiago Siri
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In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi speak with Santiago Siri, founder of Democracy Earth, DemocracyOS, and Proof of Humanity, to explore a central question of the digital age: Can we escape politics with protocols or do protocols simply create new political arenas? Santiago shares his journey from building Argentina’s internet political party Partido de la Red, to creating open-source democratic infrastructure, to running one of the most ambitious on-chain identity and governance experiments in Web3. They discuss identity as the core bottleneck of digital...
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NN Ep:11 Let a Thousand Societies Bloom with Vitalik Buterin
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer are joined by Vitalik Buterin to reflect on one of the most influential experiments in recent community-building history: Zuzalu. Vitalik shares the motivations behind Zuzalu, what actually worked (and what didn’t), and why many pop-up cities risk drifting into “long conferences” instead of becoming real communities. Together they explore kinship vs telos, culture vs mission, permanence vs mobility, governance by forking, and how zones, tribes, and regulatory...
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NN Ep:10 Burning Man: Seeding a Network Nation
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S.10 Ep.8 Hyperstitions: How Beliefs Become Reality in Networked Systems with Jake Hartnell
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Greenpill Podcast, Kevin Owocki sits down with Jake Hartnell reality engineer, builder, and the mind behind ENOVA to explore the idea of hyperstitions: beliefs and narratives that become real by spreading through networks. Jake explains how hyperstitions operate as a new coordination primitive, why technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and AGI can be seen as successful hyperstitions, and how tools like hyperstition markets blend prediction markets, incentives, and storytelling to drive collective action. They discuss ENOVA, egregores,...
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S.10 Ep.7 Prosperous Software: Rethinking Open Source Funding Through Licensing
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Greenpill Podcast, Kevin Owocki talks with Raymond Cheng software engineer, researcher, and co-founder of Open Source Observer — about the Prosperous Software Movement and why open source licensing needs to evolve. Raymond explains how today’s open source economy underfunds its own foundations, why existing licenses fail to reflect modern financial realities, and how a new class of revenue-sharing licenses could sustainably fund open source dependencies. They explore the history of free software, the limits of voluntary public...
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NN Ep:9 A New Political Landscape in the Digital Age with Nick Srnicek & Sofia Cossar
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Felix Beer is joined by Nick Srnicek (author of Platform Capitalism and Silicon Empires) and Sofia Cossar (BlockchainGov) to explore the emerging concept of Network Sovereignty. They unpack how power is shifting from nation-states to digital networks, why platforms now function like political infrastructures, and how algorithms, protocols, and platforms increasingly shape governance, speech, and economic life. The conversation examines platform empires, AI infrastructure, state power, civil society...
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VDAO Ep.6 Everyday Resilience Building Anti-Fragility in Suburbia with Gardner
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the VDAO × Greenpill Anti-Fragile Network States mini-series, host Kris Miller talks with Gardner, a tech founder exploring how local resilience and self-sovereignty can be built without going off-grid. Gardner shares his hands-on journey of transforming a suburban home into a more resilient system from rainwater harvesting and food forests to community reciprocity and mindset shifts. They discuss why resilience doesn’t mean bunkers or isolation, how small actions compound, and why investing in community, not fear, is the real...
info_outlineNew @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐
In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Primavera De Filippi speak with Morshed Mannan (European University Institute) and Neil Walker (author of Sovereignty in Transition) to explore one of the most challenging ideas in political theory today:
Functional Sovereignty.
They discuss whether sovereignty can be unbundled into separate functions like identity, finance, and dispute resolution — and what it means when digital communities begin exercising these powers without controlling land.
Together they examine historical precedents, overlapping authorities, private platform power (Amazon, Meta), self-determination, legitimacy, polycentric governance, and how decentralized infrastructure may enable network nations to achieve real autonomy.
A foundational conversation for understanding how communities can self-govern in the networked age.
🌱 greenpill.network
🌐 networknations.network
🐦 @owocki
@greenpillnet
https://x.com/MannanMorshed
Timestamps
00:00 – Cold open: “Functional sovereignty is an oxymoron.
01:34 – What is functional sovereignty?
02:18 – Introducing guests: Morchette Mannan & Neil Walker
03:48 – Traditional sovereignty vs non-territorial sovereignty
06:14 – How communities govern identity, finance & dispute systems
07:20 – Unbundling sovereignty into multiple functions
08:25 – Historical evolution of sovereignty (dynastic → modern state)
10:50 – Early cracks: EU autonomy without exclusivity
13:09 – Examples of functional sovereignty (EU, monetary union, etc.)
16:42 – Guild socialism & industrial self-governance
18:20 – Decentralized constitutionalism in Yugoslavia
19:08 – Citizens as the sovereign, not territory
20:44 – Are Big Tech platforms (Amazon/Facebook) functional sovereigns?
23:24 – Digital proximity & affinity in network communities
25:29 – Declarative vs constitutive sovereignty
27:18 – Corporate sovereignty vs democratic sovereignty
29:33 – Power vs authority: who is the real sovereign?
31:58 – Sovereignty as a discursive claim
33:48 – Why Network Nations seek functional, not declarative, sovereignty
35:50 – Self-determination vs sovereignty
37:00 – The paradox of self-constitution
39:24 – How multiple sovereigns overlap (polycentricity)
41:34 – Managing conflict in overlapping jurisdictions
43:15 – Constitutions and polycentric coordination
45:21 – Who decides who decides?
47:42 – Multi-level governance & territorial scaffolding
49:36 – Functional domains: art, science, data, digital systems
51:38 – How functional sovereignty works in practice
53:22 – Cooperatives as real examples of mutual self-governance
55:43 – Cross-border recognition & legal frameworks
58:05 – What law can and cannot do in digital governance
01:00:06 – Why Network Nations require hybrid (digital + physical) presence
01:02:29 – Decentralized infrastructure as sovereign infrastructure
01:04:08 – Can network nations coexist peacefully with states?
01:06:20 – States’ anxiety about digital communities
01:08:42 – Politics, culture & technological migration
01:10:00 – Closing