This was an online talk I gave for SeeDAO, which some friends in the SeeDAO community整理成 a written version. There are a few places where the tone does not quite match my original words, but overall it is fairly accurate. I am reposting it here.
Guide
This article comes from Professor Hu Yilin’s sharing on the third day of the Ninth Node Consensus Conference of SeeDAO (December 1, 2024). Eleven years have passed since Professor Hu’s “first discussion” in 2013, and he again undertakes a profound exploration of the topic of the “disappearance of the state.” In this talk, Professor Hu combines the media philosophy and technological revolution of Bitcoin to reflect on the centralized logic of the modern state, and proposes the imaginative prospect of a decentralized social form represented by the “network city-state.” Through a comparison of the differing logics of the Industrial Revolution and the information age, he reveals how decentralized technologies shape a new political and economic order, offering philosophical and historical support from multiple dimensions for the “disappearance of the state.” To avoid distorting Professor Hu’s original intent, this article uses the first person as he did in the talk.
Link to Professor Hu’s first blog post on the disappearance of the state: https://yilinhut.net/2013/05/09/4806.html
Compiled by: SNS xiaobai
01
This year, something that can be counted as a major turning point in my life happened: I gave up my teaching position at Tsinghua University and am preparing to move to Singapore to begin a new career as the founder of an art studio. As a result, lately I have often been visited by nostalgic feelings, and just as it happened, I saw this topic about the “network city-state,” which gave me a perfect excuse to indulge that nostalgia.
The theme I want to share today is “Re-discussing the Disappearance of the State.” Why “re-discussing”? Because I had already discussed it in 2013, so today I want to discuss it again.
In 2013 I entered the crypto world, and coincidentally that was also when my doctoral dissertation proposal was underway. While writing the dissertation, I also wrote many articles about Bitcoin. Looking back now, those articles still have not gone out of date, because what I was talking about were macro-level issues, not market prices or trends. What I was mainly discussing was what kind of future Bitcoin would actually bring.
“Bitcoin: The Disappearance of the State” is one of my favorite pieces among them. Although it is not long, I think it may have been the most radical article I wrote at the time, and also the one most closely aligned with the topic of my dissertation. At that time I was working on media philosophy, trying to discuss McLuhan as a philosopher of technology and his so-called “the medium is the message.” While writing that dissertation, I thought through whether this was media philosophy, and then came to understand the meaning of Bitcoin. This convergence led me to complete my doctoral dissertation and buy Bitcoin at the same time.
Why does media philosophy have anything to do with the state? Because media philosophy is broad in scope. If you take it as McLuhan, then you naturally know that what he is saying is, in a certain sense, that everything is media. This is to view all things from the perspective of media philosophy, rather than to view media from the perspective of philosophy.
Here I want to cite some concepts from my earlier “Bitcoin: The Disappearance of the State,” as that will help my talk.
02
First of all, what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is some new form of regulation, by no means complete anarchism. Perhaps such talk is less common now, but among the early Bitcoin evangelists, the overwhelming majority were anarchists. They preached that government is unnecessary, that everything should be marketized, that the market can do everything. I do not support this extreme idea. I am somewhat sympathetic to anarchist ideas, but in fact I think we are not yet at that point. What I want to say here is not anarchism, but rather that the form of government itself will change. The form of government, including the form of social organization, is not fixed; government can also become some kind of decentralized organization. Of course, you could also say that this is anarchism too, but what I am opposing is certainly that sort of big government, or more precisely, the kind of governmental organizational model from the previous era.
What I see through Bitcoin is a new mode of regulation. Many people question whether anarchist ideas would lead to the collapse of social order, but anarchy does not mean no regulation. Anarchy certainly also requires surrendering, or rather paying, some price in order to establish a public authority structure. The issue is that these authority structures do not necessarily have to be concentrated in a single centralized state; these authority structures themselves can have different ways of aggregating. Centralization is, in a certain sense, local centralization, and I can call this nodalization here, which is inevitable. These nodes will not constitute an absolute centralizing center, nor will they be managed around the current model of a state that takes over everything.
Both I and SeeDAO champion the concept of the city-state. A city-state has no unified sovereign power, just as the Greek city-states were also some form of decentralized autonomous organization, and social order at that time did not collapse either. Some people will say that every age has its own conditions; the social environment of ancient Greece was very different from today’s. Back then it was a world of small states and sparse populations, so the city-state system could be implemented, but how could it be possible now? I can further rebut this point: although every age has its own conditions, that “age” is constantly changing. The conditions changed from the Greek city-state to the modern democratic nation-state; from the democratic nation-state to the network age, is this not again a new case of “every age has its own conditions”? Do the general conditions of the democratic nation-state, or of the Industrial Age, still apply to the network age?
What I was studying in media philosophy back then was precisely that many issues, including political structures and power relations, are mutually constitutive with communication media. What I mean here is not media determinism, but rather that they determine, support, and propel one another. For example, oral traditions, without the development of writing, could only be suitable for tribal forms and could never sustain a larger empire. The invention of printing, in a certain sense, was a prerequisite for the possibility of modern democracy, including the emergence of newspapers and journals. So the network, as a new medium, will naturally give birth to a new spatial structure, and this new spatial structure will also support a new mode of social organization.
Ever since then I have been defending this idea, and even now I still hold to it: reinterpreting Marx. This is not a reactionary statement. Just as in the Marxism-Mao Zedong Thought courses we used to study, the official view is that Marx ultimately wanted to eliminate the concept of the state. Communism is ultimately meant to bring about the withering away of the state; the state is merely a machine of violence, and this machine has its historical mission. Once that historical mission is accomplished, it should gradually disappear into history. So, Bitcoin will bring forth a new political economy institution, which we can call socialism, or socialism in the true sense: through a broad and free communal force from the bottom up, a new organization is formed.
03
Admittedly, this is a way of saying things that appeared in the article I wrote in 2013, but now I am actually not quite as bold in writing it. Still, I dare to read it again, because I think we people involved in the crypto movement ought to have some revolutionary spirit; we cannot be overly self-castrating or retreating. Otherwise, after all that effort, if you do not even dare to mention social revolution, how could you deserve to be called a trendsetter in the crypto movement?
Looking back, perhaps because eleven years have passed, some things have changed, but some things remain untouched. So my “re-discussion” begins with this first point: Bitcoin itself has not changed. Although Bitcoin has undergone many upgrades over these eleven years, at the level of basic principles it is still very conservative and meticulous, and its underlying logic remains solid.
From the very beginning, Bitcoin rejected Turing-completeness and did not need too many flashy functions, because it was the anchor and foundation of a revolution for the whole era; it only needed to accomplish the purpose of bearing value, and that was enough. In fact, I am also very gratified to see that even after eleven years, Bitcoin has not changed much. I want to emphasize this because this year there have been many claims that Bitcoin has gone bad. For example, some people think Bitcoin has been co-opted, has become a toy of Wall Street, or has become a toy in the hands of “old money,” and is no longer the Bitcoin of ordinary retail investors like us. I do not agree with these claims, because not a single line of Bitcoin’s code has been modified out of deference to the preferences of “old money,” nor has any line of code been changed to make it more ETF-friendly, let alone to please Trump. In fact, Bitcoin’s code is hardly changed at all; how could it possibly have been co-opted?
Who, exactly, has co-opted whom? Bitcoin has already forced those “old money” traditional powers to face it and compromise; this clearly represents half the success of a revolution. It is not Bitcoin that has compromised, but them. The revolutionary potential latent in Bitcoin has not been dissolved. I saw and believed in this revolutionary potential eleven years ago, and even now its underlying logic has not changed. Then we can be sure of the existence of this logic, and that it is closer to our original ideal.
04
My second point is about the changes in the crypto world. More than ten years ago, the crypto world was simply the Bitcoin world. Even though there were some other altcoins, the mainstream was still Bitcoin maximalism. Now there are richer ways to play. I have always been an Ethereum critic, mainly because I do not approve of its POS, but Ethereum’s achievements are nonetheless indelible. The smart contract model that Ethereum promoted, along with some of the ideas and technical tools of DAO, has indeed greatly expanded the organizational forms of this new kind of community, allowing us to see digital life and digital city-states in the present day become more concrete and feasible, rather than remaining merely the grand narratives of those years. This is a very important advance.
Of course, on the other hand, there are indeed many capitulators now, loudly proclaiming the idea that they come into the crypto world just to speculate on coins and make money. There were such people back then too, but now it is even more prominent. Some of them even think that we should not want decentralization. If we do not want decentralization, then blockchain loses its function, because the core of blockchain is decentralization. These are the kinds of claims we need to resist. Even if this is old rhetoric, it still needs to be said. At the truly great moments of revolution, the key things must be repeated again and again; one cannot find them tedious. Before the Industrial Revolution came the Enlightenment. Throughout the Enlightenment, different philosophers kept using different narratives to say the same thing over and over again: liberty, equality, fraternity. Even if our ears are covered with calluses from hearing it, we still have to talk about it, keep talking about it, all the way to the May Fourth Movement. As long as this idea has not been realized, it must be repeated. The forerunners of the New Culture Movement still had to repeat things that the European thinkers of the Enlightenment had said countless times, because their revolution had not yet succeeded.
The times now have also changed a great deal. During my student years, what I felt was an optimistic atmosphere in which the world was constantly progressing, becoming more positive, and getting better and better. The turning point of the great era happened right at the end of my student years. It was not only China; the whole world changed at that time. It was as if history had undergone a fault line and come to an end, and the world would no longer experience great turbulence. The global order became more and more open, free globalization was unfolding with great momentum, and suddenly the dreams of those ten years were shattered.
Everyone will notice that many original idealistic visions—for example, the many contradictions once imagined—would be dissolved by technological progress. Contradictions are not a big deal; just wait until technology slowly advances, and many contradictions will gradually be dissolved by globalization. It was just like how Americans at the time also believed that if China were brought into the WTO, if the global economy were opened up, everyone would become the same. But in fact, you will discover that Americans were naive, and that things developed differently.
What is the trend now? The trend now can, in a certain sense, be called a new anti-globalization movement, an anti-universalism. The American left and right, no matter how much they may be at odds with each other, have always been expressing anti-universalism. They do this by means of LGBT and diversity, constantly emphasizing inclusiveness and plurality. This too is a form of anti-universalism and a rejection of the old Enlightenment. Trump is isolationist; he opposes the entire original world market, world openness, and the reduction of barriers, and instead supports setting up tariffs and reviving so-called isolationism. In other words, everyone should take care of their own affairs; America should not meddle in global affairs, but should only manage America’s own affairs.
They may seem hostile to one another, but in fact they are all moving in the same broad direction, as dictated by the general trend. On this point, I am still, so to speak, a believer in Bitcoin, what others call a “Bitcoin believer.” Of course, we have seen many people, who on the internet can roughly be divided into two types. One type is speculating on coins: Bitcoin is for making money. The other type is making what they earn be Bitcoin itself; they believe Bitcoin is the real money, while the dollar is nothing but a game token (Bitcoin standard). In other words, some people use Bitcoin as a game token to make dollars, while others treat dollars as game tokens in order to hoard Bitcoin. I think that what I understand by Bitcoin belief refers to the latter kind of person. In a sense, I am even more of a believer in this. Ordinary belief is only belief in its appreciation relative to the dollar; a deeper belief is to believe that the world of the future will be a better one, a world in which Bitcoin serves as the standard and replaces the dollar and other fiat currency systems. Such a vision can, in a sense, be said to be a matter of belief. Why is it a matter of belief? Because it is a revolution. According to philosophy of science, or in Kuhn’s terms, what is a revolution? A scientific revolution is incommensurability. Each paradigm contains its own value judgments; there is no value-evaluation system that stands above all paradigms, because value judgments themselves are part of the paradigm. Old times have their old values, new times have their new values; under the evaluative system of the old times, one would feel that even money can no longer be controlled, and that this world is terrifying indeed. We believe this world is a better world. In revolutionary times, our belief has not much evidence behind it, so it is a faith; but I still adhere to this faith. At the same time, I am still, so to speak, a Bitcoin maximalist, believing that Bitcoin should account for at least 80% of the share, and insisting on the so-called Bitcoin standard. Even if one is speculating on other coins, in the end Bitcoin will still be used as the unit of account. 05 I am now somewhat more tolerant of other coins, or rather, somewhat more supportive of them. Previously, I would have thought that playing with other coins was all for making money. That was indeed the case when altcoins were rampant, but now I think that people who play with other coins also have their own spaces of meaning beyond making money—for example, community coins. Community coins are beneficial to the自治 of small communities, just as in the age of the gold standard there were small principalities, each able to have its own minting system. Many people view meme coins as a scourge, or think they are merely for making money. But I do not think so. I think they are a cyber parade, an expression of emotion from the bottom up and a statement of political views. If one is to form a forceful expression from the bottom up, then in traditional physical society one does this by means of a parade. A parade is noisy and bustling; everyone gathers together and says their own piece, and in the digital world this is a meme coin. I would even support VC coins, though they are now incomplete and may become more fully developed after liberation. It is an equity coin: what VCs invest in should be shares, and one should receive dividends by means of shares. So it should be a challenge to, a weakening of, or even a replacement for the status of the traditional stock exchange and the SEC. What has not changed is that I am still insisting on putting out my views, and joining this great movement by doing so. But my identity has changed. Beyond my original concern with media philosophy, I have also more comprehensively brought into my thinking my reflections on the crypto movement. The topic I am sharing is meant to explain why network city-states can replace the nation-state, and why I still believe in this trend. The so-called network city-state is that sort of small group of a few people and another small group of a few people, following the “a small state with few people” model; it does not need a very large machine of violence to control and coordinate things, it only needs the自治 of small communities. Why do I believe in such a trend? One important reason is that for many years I have insisted on what is called historical thinking. The meaning of studying history more lies precisely here. 06 I spent several years as a professor of history of science and technology, teaching history of science and technology for several years. History of science and technology cannot help you innovate directly, but at least it can give you a mindset, and this mindset will keep you from lightly taking anything for granted when you see something. For everything, when it first appears, it comes from nothing to something; at one point in time it was also something astonishing. It may have appeared suddenly, and then gradually become mature. All of this is change, with a beginning and an end, so everything may have a history. Take a stone, for example: at first it may have no history, but once human activity comes into being, it too begins to have a history. Once something has a history, it is no longer immutable. So, if we look at things with this kind of historical thinking, what on earth is a democratic state? The history of democratic states is very short, only a few hundred years. It is a product of modernity, maturing essentially at the same time as modernity itself, and arising alongside the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. If everyone looks at figures like Harari, one can come to know some basic humanities knowledge, such as the concept of the modern. From the collapse of the gold standard to the establishment of the fiat currency system we are now familiar with, its flourishing has only a few decades of history. It was born out of the three collapses of the gold standard caused by World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. The fiat currency system is a product of the bankruptcy of democratic states’ credibility; without the life support it provides, democratic states would have gone bankrupt long ago. So it is itself the result of the breakdown of the international order, far from being something self-evident, and even less likely to be something lasting forever. The establishment of democratic states cannot be separated from the foundations of modernity, namely the material foundations of the entire modern world and the political so-called superstructure linked to them. If the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution shaped new modes of production, ways of life, and forms of trade, thereby fostering the flourishing of this world order of democratic states, then when the environment changes again, it should also give birth to a new world order better adapted to the new environment. From cybernetics to AI today, if the revolution of the entire information age is a great revolution on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, then it will certainly also have a new logic suited to it. Why do I say that the centralized nation-state is the logic of modernity? Because of the Industrial Revolution: the underlying logic of industrialized production is centralization and standardization. Originally you had a family workshop, with one person or one family spinning a few spindles. But once there is a demand for several thousand or even tens of thousands of spindles, then in order to maximize efficiency, all workers need to be gathered together, subjected to centralized control, and standardized production—this is anti-individualization. And the underlying logic of the internet is decentralization: from the very beginning of its design, it has been thinking about how to maintain communication in the absence of a center. Differences in underlying logic will determine differences in the political landscape of the future.Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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