Balaji Srinivasan

So even despite the fact that the internet is the single most important force on the world, it is still underestimated because we put every transaction and communication online, but there's still layers that operate offline, like the currency, the presidency, the military.

That's all going to change.

We're going to enter what I call an internet first world.

And what I mean by internet first is a play on words.

It means at least two things.

It's both a technological idea, like, you know, you say mobile first or AI first, right?

You know, mobile first company, AI first company.

But it's also a political idea like America first or your country first.

Internet first is, in my view, the scaled alternative to both nationalism and socialism.

And if I describe my ideology, I'd say I'm internet first.

That is, say, global techno-capitalism.

And...

Millions of people are not really location first.

Like the flags over here do not actually describe what your actual social network is.

If you take your WhatsApp group chat or your Twitter followers or whatever, and you print them out on the map, it looks something like the thing below, right?

The digital diaspora is the core feature of our online existence.

The reason we don't see it is we don't have good maps of the internet.

Now, by the way, to be clear, the mapping of the physical world was actually itself a technology because a straight line on a physical map is a very unnatural thing.

You needed, you know, to establish not just a concept of latitude and longitude, you needed surveying techniques.

Later, you needed, you know, aviation and overhead flights and all the kind of stuff, GPS coordinates that we have today.