I recently listened to a fascinating interview between Rick Rubin and internet pioneer Ian Rogers on Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton. During this three-hour conversation, Rogers talked about tribalism on the internet and brought up a term that was new to me: The Network state.

He briefly explained the theories of author/entrepreneur/investor, Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote the book The Network State: How to Start a New Country.

“If we were alive in 1500, the final arbiter of truth would be God. After Nietzsche and The French Revolution, it became the state. It’s not ‘thoughts and prayers.’ It’s ‘someone should make a law.’ And now, the final arbiter is the network … We’re already in a place where we care more about what our network neighbors think of us than our physical neighbors.”

Ian Rogers, Ledger CXO, Tetragrammaton Interview

A Network state is a big topic – but something about the idea of network neighbors got me thinking.

The concept of “network neighbors” is very familiar. We have all these digital connections with people through social media. And we form relationships with others online based on our interests and points of view. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What hit home for me, however, was the reality that we care more about what our network neighbors think of us than the people in the communities where we actually live. Not only do social media and the internet give us instant gratification, but it also gives us instant validation.

Someone sees me. Someone is impressed by me. Someone agrees with me. If you post something you’re excited about and none of your friends and followers reacts, that’s a pretty big ego blow.

I’m ashamed to admit this… I know where random LinkedIn connections went on vacation even though we’ve never met in real life. But I don’t even know the names of all my next-door neighbors. Something about that just isn’t right.

In the meantime, I work remotely for an international tech company. My teammates are not only located all over the U.S., but they are also in Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the UK. That’s just a small sample of the places where people across the entire company are living. Besides neighbors, many of us now have mainly “network colleagues and coworkers” too.

Geographical lines and distance are starting to matter less and less. It’s so easy to find people who share your worldview. You don’t even have to look for them any more. The algorithms do that for us.

Rogers and Rubin talked about the possibility of a future world that reorganizes itself based on the tribes we connect with the strongest. They used a community of surfers as an example. It would be easy to agree on a leader because everyone’s primary concern is the same – the surfing life.

Maybe. But even wave-obsessed surfers are more complicated human beings than that.

In the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself. A lawyer asked him to explain. “Who is my neighbor?” That’s when Jesus tells the parable of The Good Samaritan.

Samaritans and Jews lived together in the same country – but hated each other. Not unlike the current situation in the Middle East, and not unlike the state of things in the U.S. either. The point of the parable is that anyone you cross paths with is your neighbor, not just the people you relate to and agree with.

Image credit: Photo by Yannik Mika on Unsplash
Image credit: Photo by James Douglas on Unsplash