Balaji Srinivasan

We take maps for granted, but much of the world for a long time is unmapped.

And really, the internet right now, this network over here is from Facebook, and that exists on Facebook servers.

Twitter's network, you can map it on Twitter servers.

We're just starting to have, with blockchains, an open web where we can actually map at least all the financial connections.

And with something like Firecaster or Lens, all the social connections.

But it'll take a few years to eventually get there until we have a decentralized social media platform where we can make maps like the below.

Okay.

The point, though, is...

this is actually where you live.

You live in the center of a network, not really in your location.

And the reason I say that is, you know, if you take a circle of 100 meters or, you know, 100 miles, or if you instead take your top 100 contacts,

the latter is much more important to you typically, right?

Those could be remote workers.

They could be internet contacts.

They could be vendors around the world.

Essentially, geography is not the primary mechanism of organization.

This change is something that was true for 400 years since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which is that geography was upstream of both culture and law.

So people who were near each other shared the same culture and therefore they share the same law.

No longer the case.

You can live in the same apartment building, have a totally different culture.