The internet as we know it is cooked. It's filled with bots overloaded with malicious software, built on suboptimal architecture, and primarily serves as a farm for human attention. This seems to be unfixable in our current setup and it also appears to be the primary source of noise that has led to the a shredding of our social fabric. As Mchulan says "the medium is the message" and the current medium of human thought, communication, and change is a feed trough filled with algorithmically optimized content slop to nudge you into making the most profitable consumer choices. This is terrible and also completely necessary. Any new society should have a new public square because ultimately the quality of public discussion ends up determining the quality of that society. Given that we are here to make *Network* States this should obviously be done on a new social network. But a sovereign one. The only thing that comes close to this currently on the market is self hosting an Urbit. I personally have design gripes with the current structure of Azimuth, and a complete distaste for the founder of the project. But it is currently the only thing that comes remotely close to what is needed. Urbit is a lot of things but for our purposes urbit is an OS, ID system, and network. On it each individual has a single name equivalent to a IP address, this name interacts with PKI making everything sent on the network E2E. The network is setup such that packets are sent P2P. On the urbit OS apps can be thought of as data protocols which allow for setting up whole new dev paradigms wherein everything is self hosted so that people can have their social internet cake and eat it to. We can have nice things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Discord, and Notion without it being something that we pay for with our society, our money, our psychology .. if we chose to step up and take responsibility for the tech ourselves. Urbit is a toy right now and is not currently ready to handle what we need of it. In a weird way that's a good thing. See right now in my opinion urbit is setup in such a way that isn't great for most people. Due to both the founder's political takes and the practical realities of funding something like this, urbit's ID system is set up in a very profit driven way that inherently misaligns the incentives of the project. If urbit was ready for primetime than the draw would most likely be to strong to fix this and we'd end up in quite an unfortunate world. But given that urbit is still being worked on there is a window of opportunity here to fix these issues before moving forward.