Notes on Old Religion for New Network Sovereigns

By Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder

The first installment of the Network State Meetup in my town occurred one early evening at a long, high table in the back of a burger-and-beer place. About a dozen people, all male-presenting, attended.  I sat at a far end of the table, catching as much as I could of the conversation about how the ongoing advances in blockchain technology might enable new cultures of belonging, new modalities of governance, and new economic primitives. The talk exhibited a divided loyalty to Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State (2022), which participants generally admired but seemed anxious not to treat as some kind of scripture, because such dogmatic adherence to any single authority would be the opposite of the point. And yet, as any web browser or email client knows, a protocol’s usefulness lies in the extent to which it is universally and literally accepted by those who seek to participate in it.

As I tried to hear each turn in the discussion, and its possible answers to the question of what this group might actually do together, a sense of deja vu crept up on me. The future they were describing was already my past and present. As they imagined transnational organizations with shared commitments, which possess land and rights in multiple territorial jurisdictions, and which operate through autonomous governance and economic arrangements, the sci-fi bled into so-what. It just sounded like religion.

I am a Roman Catholic with paternal Jewish heritage, and I grew up with significant exposure to a Hindu community anchored in South India, on the other side of the world from where my family lived. In each of these community lifeworlds, I experienced different but related forms of networked sovereignty that have grown from centuries of persecution, empire, diaspora, inquisition, dominance, and decline. That evening at the high table, so much of what my religious traditions have done for centuries was under discussion as new-and-nonexistent.

I do not doubt that blockchain technologies, which I have ambivalently immersed myself in for a decade now, present possibilities for networked life that foregoing institutional infrastructures could not offer. I also recognize that there can be strategic benefits to emphasizing the newness of an idea over its oldness, especially in the context of cultures that lionize innovation above preservation (Schneider 2023). But surely the project of sovereign community-making across networks can benefit from lessons that come from earlier iterations that attempted to enact quite similar ambitions.

In what follows, I reflect on both my religious experience and the study of religion—my first academic field, long before my current position in media studies. These notes build on Primavera De Filippi’s eloquent call for re- flection on network sovereignties that initiated this symposium, as well as Michel Bauwens’s macrohistorical observations about religions as instructive precursors to the impulses behind such notions as network sovereignties and network states. Whereas Bauwens presents the relevance of religion in primarily historical terms, I will offer some stray reflections here on the project of network sovereignty in light of living religious institutions, par- ticularly with the purpose of contributing to the construction of network sovereignties that are actually worth having.

I have already written and spoken publicly on my dismay about some core aspects of Srinivasan’s network state thesis (Schneider 2022; Davila and De Filippi 2023). Srinivasan, for example, not only assumes but asserts the paternalistic assumption that anything good comes from the solitary mind of a single, domineering founder. Although the book suggests that the mechanism for financing a network state is through crowdfunding, presumably in the mold of a 2017-style initial coin offering (ICO), this strikes me as a populist smokescreen for a kind of entrepreneurship well suited for elite capture. Srinivasan, himself a venture capitalist, should know well that wealthy “whales” have dominated ICO crowdfunding (Guo, Wang, and Sakurai 2021); legacy firms like his former employer, Andreessen Horowitz, have thereby become dominant in many leading blockchain projects. The upshot of his framework, it seems to me, is the same monarchist politics, on the model of the tech CEO, proposed by entrepreneur and blogger Curtis Yarvin (Tait 2019). That’s a future I would go to the barricades to prevent.

My dismay, however, comes from a place of longing. The reigning form of metagovernance (Torfing 2022), the Westphalian nation state that asserts monopoly over land and violence, is an order I regard as abhorrent and overdue for abolition. As I read The Network State, there were many yeses embedded in my no. My most recent book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life (Schneider 2024), ends with a plea for what Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard calls “non-exclusive sovereignties” (G. Coulthard and Hern 2022)—forms of belonging that do not claim monopolies over us or the common inheritance of land. According to Catholic tradition, land is among those things (along with all the other things) subject to the “universal destination of goods” (Spieker 2005); although private property is a necessary arrangement in the world of the Fall, it must be practiced with a recognition that everything is ultimately God’s gift to everyone.

In contrast to Srinivasan’s network state, I welcome De Filippi’s more expansive concept of network sovereignties, especially if such sovereignties can be established in ways more democratic, more liberating, and more just than either religious institutions or libertarian fantasies have tended to be. I also appreciate Vitalik Buterin’s contention in this symposium that internet technologies, and blockchains in particular, introduce potentially transformative techniques for enabling trans-territorial coordination, far beyond what fore- going religious formations have achieved. Yet the acceleration of anything heightens risk as well as opportunities. Undertaking such risk obligates our attention to lessons with possible relevance.

The religious traditions I have inhabited first established their most basic protocols and institutions before the Westphalian order, though all have since adapted to it. Christianity arguably—if Gibbon is to be believed— conquered and demolished the mighty Roman Empire, then provided the framework for many centuries of quite decentralized and diverse forms of governance in Western Europe, from Charlemagne’s conquests to the aristocratic republics of Italian city-states. Post-Westphalian Catholics have embraced anti-nationalist ultramontanism, nationalist fascism, republican- ism, social democracy, and anarchism. Along the way, we wound up with a weird city-state in the middle of Italy and a network of holdings that probably makes the Church the world’s largest landholder (Owen 2021). Judaism traces its roots to an ancient form of monotheistic, blood-and-soil theocracy. It came into being as a distinct religious identity (Boyarin 2006) through the experience of fragile, often catastrophic diaspora that continued to pro- claim, in each year’s Seder, “next year in Jerusalem.” The breakdown of European colonialism then enabled the formation of an ethno-nationalist “Jewish State,” which remains in tension with the fact that the majority of the world’s Jews still live elsewhere. Meanwhile, the very idea of Hinduism was a construct of British colonialism (Pennington 2005), a convenient categorization for the brilliant diversity of religious practice the colonizers sought to manage in South Asia. My mother became a devotee of a particular guru, Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvanamali, only later to realize that doing so would involve participating in communities that identified as Hindu. Many of her fellow devotees in the Indian diaspora of the United States now support the regime of Narendra Modi, who has turned Hinduism into the governing political ideology of the Indian nation state, replacing the multicultural secularism that preceded him.

The neighborhood around the United Nations in New York City includes not just the offices of various nation states but also those of religious institutions that engage in consistent diplomacy at the parliament of nations. Some have lovely chapels there. All have lobbyists. In the world of nation states, religions have learned to make themselves legible.

The modern concept of religion itself is a construct of the Westphalian com- promise: cuius regio, eius religio. It was a solution to the bloody wars of the Reformation, and it established religious identity as coincident with political identity. Colonialism then imposed a taxonomy of “world religions” over its domains, as a parallel classification system mostly subservient to the nation state (Masuzawa 2005). Religions that preceded Westphalia, with non-Westphalian protocols embedded in them, have nevertheless accommo- dated themselves to the present metagovernmental order.

To what extent will network sovereignties, too, have to accommodate the metagovernance of nation states? Srinivasan’s network state holds this tension. While the network state is distinct from nation states, diplomatic recognition is one of the goals that Srinivasan calls network states to aspire toward—they must be recognized to flourish. This stands in contrast, for instance, to Glen Coulthard’s (2014) refusal of “the colonial politics of recognition” as the basis for Indigenous sovereignty. What is lost in the expectation that network sovereignties should achieve nation-state recognition in order to exist?

That is the paradox of sovereignty. On some level sovereignty must be self-recognizing, self-affirming. But it is inconsequential unless other orders bend to recognize its reality. In that respect I appreciate De Filippi et al.’s COALA framework for the legal recognition of DAOs (COALA 2021)—yes, it asks recognition of nation states, but that recognition is permissionless and automatic. It is a diplomatic protocol between two distinct orders of meaning.

One of several moments I will never forget from my time as a graduate stu- dent in religious studies was our visit to the American Religions Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara library. It was donated in 1985 by a professor there, J. Gordon Melton, who collected it while producing his Encyclopedia of American Religions. And, my goodness. He contacted ev- ery religious organization in the United States he could find and asked them to send him their literature. The result is astonishing—shelf after shelf of pamphlets, scriptures, periodicals, and analyses, mostly on communities you have never heard of, many now already defunct. Browsing that collection taught me awe for the religious fecundity of the human species, which is so often hidden behind the attention-dominating big-name religions.

What I long for most from network sovereignties is the unlocking of this kind of creativity. I long for exploration and experimentation with new kinds of polities. If we can create our sovereignty on networks, maybe we can do so in wildly different ways than we have been allowed to do before.

The political scientist Federica Carugati and I have started a project we call “governance archaeology,” which catalogs largely pre-modern governance practices from around the world (Carugati and Schneider 2023). We were inspired by works that demonstrated how forms of collective governance are far more widespread and diverse in the history of human experience than Western culture has tended to imagine (Graeber and Wengrow 2021; Stasavage 2020). The Ethereum Foundation gave us our first major grant because people building blockchains have started recognizing, with each round of mishaps, how much they have to learn about historical governance designs. The possibilities people see as available to adopt always depend on the historical precedents they regard as legitimate and relevant. Carugati and I, along with our growing circle of collaborators, are trying to expand that palette of precedents.

These days, it is common to assume that innovation is a good thing. Politicians claim to be promoting it, and students are taught to claim they are practicing it (even if they are not).  That hasn’t always been the case—perhaps not for most of human history. The Islamic concept of bidʿah, the Arabic word for innovation, has largely been regarded as a thing to avoid (Soufan 2019). A saying of the Prophet Muhammad goes, “Beware of matters newly begun, for every matter newly begun is innovation, every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in hell” (Keller 1995). Of course, Islam still permits new things, especially when people ground feats of change in reinterpretations of tradition. But it’s true that every innovation comes with risks. Perhaps more cultures should assert this kind of “precautionary principle” (Stirling 2017), erring on the side of caution.

Catholic tradition has been famously anxious about doctrinal innovations, too, from the second-century Against Heresies of Irenaeus to the Spanish Inquisition to today’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. But within the Church’s system of metagovernance there are also infrastructures to enable innovation, including innovation in governance. For instance, the formation and reform of religious orders within the Church provides a containment protocol for religious entrepreneurship. New practices and social organizations can take hold as long as they adopt certain forms and cleave to certain non-negotiables. In the context of ecclesial corruption in twelfth-century Eu- rope, the Franciscan and Dominican orders appeared, emphasizing poverty and humility. To secure their right to function and preach, their governing rules had to receive papal approval. The result was a new “form of life,” as Claire and Francis of Assisi put it, but one within and protected by the protocols of the existing Church (Agamben 2013). These small-scale innovations, over time, can make their way to altering the system as a whole; the current pope, for instance, took his name from Francis of Assisi—the first to do so, eight hundred years after Francis’s innovations.

Through accumulated innovations like these, the Catholic infrastructure offers diverse modalities of being. My experience as a Catholic began with visiting Trappist monks, who live in silence and prayer under the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict (Schneider 2013). When it became clear that my life would proceed outside a cloister, I found a dual calling between the sixteenth- century Jesuit order—my academic self—and the twentieth-century Catholic Worker movement—what I aspire to be in the streets. When I can, I return for visits to Benedictine monasteries, because part of me remains in that lifeworld.

Protocols are rigid, difficult-to-alter infrastructures. They need to be to function. But they can provide for innovation within their sovereignties at smaller scales, along with mechanisms for altering the metagovernance of the system as a whole. Catholics call this subsidiarity (Hasinoff and Schneider 2022).

It would seem that monasteries have a lot in common with the secular institutions that often fall under the classification of “intentional communities.” I have been drawn to both over the years (Schneider 2014). Yet it is hard not to notice that at least some monasteries and monastic orders have survived centuries, enduring periods of ascent and decline, of war and innovstion. The intentional communities seem to come and go far more frequently. Perhaps this is fine; death is a part of life, and cycles of constitution and compost may be right for these communities. Survival itself is not always a virtue, except I for one have been thankful for the survival of the monastic communities I have had the chance to inherit from across the centuries.

Why do they survive? There are a few reasons, I think. One is the matter of transcendent belief, which I will return to later. But first I want to focus on the matter of obedience. This is not necessarily a comforting topic for the libertarian and liberatory imaginations that tend to animate the quest for network sovereignties.

Obedience is not all that happens at the monasteries I am familiar with. When I was a teenager, I was permitted to join the monks of Holy Cross Abbey along the Shenandoah River for two weeks as a guest (Schneider 2013). I lived not in the guest house but in a cell alongside the monks; with them I ate meals and chanted in the choir. But the one part of their life that I was not permitted to join occurred just after Sunday’s eucharist: Chapter. Chapter is the space for community self-governance outlined in the Rule of Saint Benedict, when the monks gathered to discuss their collective affairs. Here they can share their opinions and, when the time comes, elect the abbot who leads them. My favorite part of Claire of Assisi’s rule for her sisters is how, against the recommendation of the pope, she insisted that women need this space to self-govern as well, “for the Lord often reveals what is best to the lesser [among us]” (Armstrong and Brady 1982, 216).

I love this democratic thread in Christian monastic tradition, which traces its roots to the Book of Acts in the Bible; the early disciples elected their leaders when the community grew too complex for consensus. But monastic democracy also involves a vow, generally, of obedience. In particular, this is obedience to the abbess or abbot, who is to be regarded as the presence of Christ in the community. Obedience is not just a social measure, it is a reflection of the monastic call to self-emptying, to lay down one’s will to that of God. This obedience is a more pervasive and dominant part of Christian monasticism than the democracy (de Vogue 1978). And I think it is essential to the basic coherence of monastic tradition, as well as to its survival.

To be clear, I am not attributing monastic resilience to obedience alone, but more to its admixture with the occasional corrective of democracy. Every act of democracy occurs with the recognition that it has only a limited range of motion; there must always be some expectation of obedience. Even if in very different proportions, any sovereign community must find its proper balance. The balance will differ depending on its purpose.

Consider, for instance, the university, which emerged between religious and political institutions in pre-modern China, Fez, Bologna, and Paris (Schneider 2019). The transnational, semi-sovereign network of the academic guild is a less totalizing protocol than the Rule of Saint Benedict. Professors are famously allergic to both democracy and obedience with regard to what they study and teach. Yet there are certain respects in which the guild is quite rigid, particularly peer review and professional advancement. Becoming an academic has at times reminded me of monastic obedience in its expectations to subjugate one’s will to superiors and fellow faculty with humility and patience. We do this not as a spiritual act of self-negation so much as, at least for me, out of respect for the fact that academic institutions have survived far longer than most everything else, and have accomplished quite a lot; to protect its sovereignty against the ever-encroaching market and state, its protocols require some fealty. Some sort of obedience seems necessary for any durable collective sovereignty.

There is an elephant in the room here, which I have so far only alluded to: belief. Probably what makes many aspiring network sovereigns reluctant to identify with their religious precursors is that they do not believe that they believe in whatever supernatural, transcendental something you’re supposed to believe in to be actually religious.

Particularly since the Reformation, but before that as well, Western culture has stressed belief as the defining characteristic of religion—more, say, than ritual, identity, politics, ecology, or other components of religious life that have been more or less significant in other cultural contexts (Asad 2011). Evangelical Christianity stresses belief as the binary bit that determines whether one’s soul is saved, on or off, yes or no, 1 or 0. This sensibility so infuses the culture of post-Puritan societies like the United States that we forget it is there. Belief draws such a stark line among us that we may wonder if people who believe differently are somehow another species (Friedman 2001).

As I indicated earlier, I suspect that a shared and well-defined set of notional commitments has helped earlier network sovereignties like monastic orders function and survive. Shared beliefs provide a framework for consensus in a community and reduce the likely terrain of conflict. (Plenty still remains.) A shared belief would seem to make it easier for diverse people to adopt a common protocol and thus a common network. Transcendent belief can do this especially well, since transcendence implies a claim to be particularly important.

Take it from a once-satisfied atheist: Religion-style belief is not so strange, hard, or remote as it may seem, and if you don’t think you have it for yourself, almost certainly you are doing something much like it instead. My graduate advisor Ann Taves (2009) defined religious belief and experience as simply a relationship to “special things.” What do you regard as special—like, really special?

Benedict Anderson (1983) observed how the “imagined communities” of nation states depend on belief in the reality of bonds among fellow citizens who mostly do not actually know each other or have much in common. More recently, Finn Brunton (2024) has described the “millennial creep” in blockchain communities; as their financial promises start to seem increasingly far-fetched, participants entertain ever more fanciful expectations for a deus ex machina. In the absence of organized religious commitments—of belief, practice, politics, and all else—the human propensity for and inventiveness in supernatural matters in no way disappears. People waste no time finding conspiracies or wacky health fads, intense fandoms or foreign religions repackaged for modern convenience.

Membership in formal religious institutions is in steep decline (Inglehart 2021); perhaps sovereign networks can offer some of the structure and community ties that those institutions once provided. But don’t be surprised when an attempted departure from the religious results in its return. Sovereignty, as philosophers of the subject have increasingly realized, is a form of theology (Agamben 1998).

Not long before his death, I had the chance to interview the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah (Schneider 2011). He had just written his final mono- graph, Religion in Human Evolution, an intricate interweaving of biological and social history. I used as the title of the interview a phrase he repeats throughout the book like a mantra: “Nothing is ever lost.” The old is embedded in the new. Innovation is a kind of archaeology. The shaping of religion and other forms of culture is also the shaping of biology. He told me, “We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution.”

Religions have brought down empires before. Networks have reshaped the world before. Sovereign networks native to the internet could someday cause the Westphalian order of metagovernance to unravel. But what would they replace it with? What kinds of evolutionary paths do network sovereignties lead into?

The last time I was in Mexico, I missed my flight home because it was the day before the Feast of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. The bus from Puebla to Mexico City was slower than usual because thousands of people were riding on rickety bikes or walking in matching shirts the same route we drove—up a mountain pass, then down. They were making their pilgrimage to Tepeyac, a hill on the city’s outskirts where a brown-skinned Mary is said to have left an image of herself in the sixteenth century. As I worried about my plans, the older woman seated next to me gave me some of the tortillas she had made for her relatives. I thought of how there were many people back home at my church—up north, across the border—who were also preparing for the feast, making tortillas and sharing them.

Nichole M. Flores (2021) describes this networked devotion to the miraculous image as an exercise in the “aesthetics of solidarity.” The pilgrimage over the mountains to Tepeyac shares a common network with a theater in my home state of Colorado, where Flores opens her book, that retells the story of the apparition. The Guadeloupe altar at my church connects people with their families far away, across the border made of wire, weapons, and walls. Whether or not those families can talk on WhatsApp or send each other cryptocurrency, they have this pre-digital network, which is sovereign in its refusal to honor the border that attempts to divide it. The networked devotion erodes the border’s power over people. The devotion started before that border was there, and I hope it will continue long after the border is gone.

Network sovereignties could take the form of private startup-state monopolies, or they could practice the aesthetics and ethics of solidarity. They could become laboratories of democracy or petty fiefdoms whose only accountability, if any, is the option to exit.  Religious histories teach that networked sovereignty is very much possible—but also that the fact of being networked is no guarantee it will be something we want in the world. How we craft that sovereignty is how we craft nothing less than our own evolution.

May we give the reigning order a good death.

 

 

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