Year 2 of a 7-Year Plan: Field Notes from a Network State
My passport is expiring. My resolve is not.
404Embassy://Transmission_Log_#6
Signal_Source: Ray Svitla // svit.la
Status: Broadcasting...
1/ Customs vs. the Infinite Game
Two years ago, I set a seven-year clock on TheState.me (the original name of this blog). It felt like hard sci-fi.
Fast-forward to today: this post should have been written from a sunny Croatian balcony. Instead, I’m hunched over an airline desk in Lisbon, watching a bureaucrat stamp DENIED on my boarding pass for the third time this year. Every time, the aftermath is a few days of pure frustration, a desperate craving for cheap dopamine just to disconnect. The Infinite Game just got drop-kicked by a very finite border.
What happens when the dream of a borderless network nation crashes into the paperwork of a territorial one?
2/ The Stress Test
2.1 The View from the Inside
I’ve watched a minister from a department for innovation spend three full minutes searching for the unmute button on Zoom. That’s when you realize even the “advanced democracies” people fetishize are running on 1980s legacy code, duct-taped together by custom, grace, and caffeine.
It’s very real architectural debt. Their org charts were never meant for a world where your primary asset isn’t land but your brain – and the passport that lets that brain travel.
2.2 The Network is Real
In the last year alone: London meetups, Lisbon world cafés, Berlin civil-hacker speeches, deep-dive interviews in Dubai. I thought I was building a community around an idea; turns out I was erecting a lighthouse for a global diaspora.
People don’t show up for network state theory – they show up to find their tribe. One table: a crypto-fund CEO, a Belarusian activist, and a Turkish AI researcher comparing exit strategies over questionable beer.
2.3 The Currency of Trust
Let’s be clear: this project hasn’t made me rich. It's done the opposite.
But it’s given me a perfectly calibrated trust radar. When a long-term collaborator executes a hostile fork of a project you built from scratch, you learn to install better peoplewalls. When a stranger hosts you for free and covers catering because they believe in the mission, you realize social capital is rarer than fiat – and infinitely more liquid.
> This isn’t a venture play; it’s Proof-of-Stake for people.
3/ The Core Conflict
Selling sci-fi to people whose morning routine includes doom-scrolling war footage is a special kind of brutalist comedy. It's like delivering a quantum-physics lecture during an earthquake: everyone is hunting for a doorframe while you’re explaining superposition.
But the fire exit we’re building might save the building.
4/ The 7-Year Plan, v2.0
Was I naïve? Absolutely.
Was I wrong? Not even close.
Seven years isn’t a victory deadline; it’s an oath to outlive hype cycles, bull runs, and authoritarian spasms. Every airport **DENIED** stamp becomes a fresh user story. Every rubber-stamp bureaucrat is an unwilling QA tester for the new world.
Two years down, five to go. The game remains infinite.
Let’s play on
Stay Evolving 🐌
Ray Svitla