Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

The Geopolitics of Abundance

The End of Resource Wars

For 5,000 years, geopolitics has operated on one brutally simple equation: Land = Wealth.

The Nile wasn’t just a river—it was a food factory. Whoever controlled the delta controlled the surplus, and whoever controlled the surplus built pyramids and armies. The Persian Gulf wasn’t just warm saltwater—it was a fuel tank. Whoever controlled the pipelines controlled the petrodollar, and whoever controlled the petrodollar dictated terms to everyone else. From Mesopotamia’s irrigation canals to Iraq’s oil fields, the story hasn’t changed: secure the resource, secure the power.

This logic has launched a million wars. It justified Lebensraum. It motivated the Scramble for Africa. It explains why American aircraft carriers patrol the Strait of Hormuz while China builds artificial islands in the South China Sea. Every line on every map is, ultimately, a line drawn around something valuable that cannot be made—only taken.

In an Unscarcity world, this logic doesn’t just weaken. It collapses.

The Solar Desalination Pivot: How Israel Became a Water Exporter

Let’s start with water—the resource wars were supposed to be fought over in the 21st century.

In 2024, the global average cost of utility-scale solar electricity stood at $0.043 per kilowatt-hour, according to IRENA. In the sunniest regions—Saudi Arabia, India, Chile—it dropped as low as $0.013/kWh. That’s not “cheap.” That’s approaching free. Solar is now 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives. And it’s still falling.

This changes everything about water.

Old Math: Desalination requires enormous energy. Energy costs money. Therefore, freshwater from the sea is expensive. Therefore, nations must fight over rivers.

New Math: Energy from the sun is nearly free. Desalination energy requirements have dropped 85% since the 1970s—from 20 kWh per cubic meter to around 3 kWh today. Therefore, freshwater from the sea costs $0.41-$1.00 per cubic meter. Therefore, building a desalination plant is cheaper than invading a neighbor.

Israel figured this out first. Once one of the most water-stressed nations on Earth—a country that fought wars partly over the Golan Heights’ aquifers—Israel now generates a surplus of drinking water. Today, 86% of Israel’s potable water comes from desalination. The Sorek B plant produces 670,000 cubic meters daily at record-low costs. In 2021, Israel exported 191 million tons of water—mostly to Jordan.

Read that again. A desert country surrounded by enemies is now selling water.

The “Water Wars” predicted between India and Pakistan over the Indus, between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Nile, between Turkey and Syria over the Euphrates—they’re not inevitable. They’re economically irrational. Every major conflict flashpoint sits within solar-desalination range of a coastline. The math isn’t “we must take their river.” The math is “we should build a solar plant.”

This doesn’t mean tensions disappear overnight. Politics isn’t rational. But the structural incentive for resource conflict is eroding beneath our feet. You can no longer build an empire on monopolizing water, because water isn’t scarce anymore—sunlight and seawater are the two most abundant things on Earth.

The Fusion Peace: When Energy Becomes Local Manufacturing

Solar changes the water equation. Fusion changes everything else.

If you still think fusion is “always 30 years away,” you haven’t been paying attention.

Helion Energy completed its seventh-generation prototype, Polaris, in late 2024 and began operations. In July 2025, they broke ground on Orion—a planned 50-megawatt commercial fusion plant in Washington State, contracted to sell power to Microsoft data centers by 2028. Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects SPARC, their tokamak in Massachusetts, to begin plasma operations in late 2025 or 2026 and achieve net energy gain (Q>1) by 2027. Google has already signed a 200-megawatt power purchase agreement for CFS’s follow-on ARC project, planned for Virginia in the early 2030s.

Are these timelines aggressive? Yes. Will there be delays? Almost certainly. But the trajectory is unmistakable: commercial fusion isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s engineering.

And when fusion arrives—even on the conservative timeline of 2045-2055—the link between territory and energy is severed forever.

You don’t need to conquer an oil field. You don’t need to protect a pipeline. You don’t need to secure shipping lanes through contested straits. You just need a reactor. Energy becomes a local manufacturing issue, not a global supply chain vulnerability.

Think about what this means for the power dynamics that have shaped modernity:

Saudi Arabia’s leverage evaporates. When your economy depends on selling something that fusion makes obsolete, your geopolitical influence expires with your reserves.
Russia’s pipeline diplomacy ends. Europe’s Faustian bargain—cheap gas for dependence—becomes a historical footnote.
Resource-curse nations get a reset. Countries that were blessed (cursed?) with oil suddenly have to find real value to offer the world.

The geopolitical map wasn’t drawn around ideology. It was drawn around geology. Change the geology (or rather, make it irrelevant), and the map redraws itself.

The Rise of the Network State: Nations as Startups

Here’s where it gets interesting. If you don’t need land for resources, what holds a nation together?

This is the question Balaji Srinivasan asked in The Network State (2022), and he’s not just asking anymore—he’s building.

The Network State thesis is audaciously simple: a country is just a network of people who share a jurisdiction. For 400 years, that network was defined by geography—the Peace of Westphalia (1648) gave us the template of bordered territories with sovereign governments. But geography was always a proxy for something else: shared resources, defensible terrain, ethnic clustering.

Strip away resource scarcity, and geography becomes just… where you happen to be standing.

Srinivasan proposes a new model:

The Logic of Reverse Secession

Start Online. Build a community of millions aligned by values, not accidents of birth. “The Green Commons.” “The Bitcoin Maximalist Republic.” “The AI Safety Collective.”
Build an Economy. Use cryptocurrency and smart contracts to enable internal trade. Create wealth before creating territory.
Crowdfund Physical Space. Don’t conquer land—buy it. Acquire parcels in existing nations, creating “nodes” of your network state scattered across the world.
Negotiate Diplomatic Recognition. Use economic leverage (jobs, tax revenue, investment) to gain sovereignty treaties. Start with small recognitions; build to full statehood.

This isn’t theory anymore. In September 2024, Srinivasan launched The Network School—a three-month residential program on a private island near Singapore (acquired with Bitcoin), enrolling 150 students to study startup founding, AI, and decentralized governance. The 2025 Network State Conference featured speakers from the governments of Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and El Salvador, plus Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, and Andrew Huberman. Over 8,000 people registered.

Meanwhile, Próspera—the libertarian charter city on Roatán, Honduras—continues operating despite the Honduran government’s attempts to shut it down. Honduras’s Supreme Court declared ZEDEs unconstitutional in September 2024, but Próspera claims protection under international treaties through 2064. The zone has attracted over 200 businesses, $150 million in investment, and backing from Thiel, Andreessen, and Srinivasan himself. In February 2025, it hosted a “crypto cities summit.” The dispute may cost Honduras $10.7 billion in international arbitration—roughly a third of the country’s GDP.

The Westphalian state isn’t being overthrown. It’s being disrupted, the way taxis were disrupted by Uber. You can fight it (Honduras), embrace it (Singapore, Dubai), or pretend it isn’t happening (most Western governments). But you can’t stop people from building alternatives when the technology makes alternatives possible.

The “One Commandment” Society

Traditional nations are accidents of birth. You don’t choose to be American or French or Nigerian—you’re born into it, stuck with neighbors whose values you may despise, bound by laws you never voted for, governed by institutions older than anyone alive.

Network States are communities of choice. And that changes everything about how they can organize.

High Alignment. When everyone opted in to a community’s core mission, you don’t need endless democratic compromises between factions that fundamentally disagree. Srinivasan calls this the “One Commandment”—a single moral purpose that defines membership. Disagree with the commandment? You’re in the wrong network state.

Low Friction. Laws become smart contracts. Disputes resolve through algorithmic arbitration (The Oracle in the Unscarcity framework). Bureaucracy compresses from months to milliseconds. Próspera already runs on a common-law system with arbitration-first dispute resolution and 1% business taxes.

Exit Rights. Here’s the killer feature. In a traditional nation, leaving is catastrophically expensive—immigration lawyers, visa lotteries, cultural dislocation, abandoning everything you’ve built. In a Network State, you exit by unsubscribing. Digital migration. Your reputation and economic relationships travel with you (think Civic Standing in Unscarcity’s PNPS system).

This creates competitive pressure that geographic nations never face. If your Network State misgoverns, members leave—instantly, cheaply, publicly. Bad governance hemorrhages population in real-time. The “passport” becomes a subscription service: “Join us—we have the best healthcare algorithm.”

The Global South Leapfrog

Here’s the prediction that will age either brilliantly or terribly: the Global South won’t nation-build the way Europe did. They’ll leapfrog directly to Network States.

We’ve seen this pattern before.

In 2007, Kenya launched M-Pesa—mobile money for a population that mostly lacked bank accounts. The West laughed: “How quaint, they’re banking by text message because they don’t have real banks.” But Kenya didn’t need real banks. They skipped the branch-banking era entirely and jumped straight to mobile payments. Today, M-Pesa moves more money annually than many central banks.

Wanjiku Mwangi, the character from Chapter 8 of Unscarcity, lived this leap. She was 17 when M-Pesa launched. She watched her grandmother’s generation conduct all business in cash, and then—within a decade—her entire community was exchanging money through phones. No bank accounts. No credit history. Just a SIM card and trust.

Network States offer the same leapfrog opportunity for governance.

The Institutional Void as Feature. Weak central governments in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America aren’t just problems—they’re opportunities. Where there’s no entrenched bureaucracy, there’s nothing to resist new models. Where the existing state already fails to provide services, network alternatives face no competition.

The Talent Magnet. Charter cities and Network State nodes will compete for residents. The zones that offer the best combination of physical safety, legal clarity, economic opportunity, and governance quality will attract human capital that currently flees to London, Dubai, or Austin. Capital follows talent. A virtuous cycle begins.

The Demographics. The median age in Nigeria is 18. In Uganda, it’s 16. These populations are digital natives who’ve never known a world without smartphones and social networks. They’re not nostalgic for the Westphalian order—they inherited it like a building code from the 1800s, barely relevant to how they actually live.

The Map of 2050

So what does the world look like when resource wars end and network organization matures?

Not like a Risk board—200 solid colors, each representing a territorial nation-state with a capital city and a flag.

More like a pointillist painting—thousands of sovereign nodes, some geographic (a charter city in Honduras, a sea-stead off Thailand, an autonomous zone in a Nigerian megacity), some digital (a Bitcoin republic, a DAO with legal personhood, a research commons spanning 50 countries). Connected by the internet. Trading in abundance. Overlapping in complex, jurisdictional polytopes.

The Westphalian nation-state isn’t disappearing. It’s becoming one option among many—and probably not the best one for most purposes. Like landlines. They still exist. Your grandmother might have one. But nobody’s betting civilization on them.

The Catch: We’re in the Danger Zone

There’s a dark version of this future too.

The transition from resource-scarcity geopolitics to abundance geopolitics isn’t automatic. It’s a window—and the window is exactly the period between when old power structures recognize their obsolescence and when new abundance technologies mature.

Fusion isn’t online yet. Solar desalination is scaling but not universal. Network States are experiments, not established alternatives. Between now and 2050, existing powers have enormous incentive to lock in their advantages before the game changes.

Petrostate regimes might escalate conflicts while oil still matters.
Great powers might weaponize supply chains for the materials abundance technologies require (lithium, rare earths, advanced chips).
Existing governments might crush charter city experiments before they prove alternatives viable (see: Honduras vs. Próspera).

This is why the EXIT Protocol and Civic Service—the transition mechanisms in the Unscarcity framework—matter so much. They’re not utopian dreams. They’re bridges across the danger zone. Tools for legacy elites to participate in the new order rather than fight it. Tools for ordinary people to build alternatives before the window closes.

The question isn’t whether abundance geopolitics is coming. It is. The physics is clear. The economics is clear. The only question is whether we navigate the transition competently—or whether we fight bloody rearguard actions over resources that will be worthless in a generation.

The Bottom Line

For five millennia, the fundamental question of geopolitics was: Who controls the resource?

In the Unscarcity world, the question becomes: Who organizes the best network?

The Nile Delta didn’t matter because of its location—it mattered because it could grow food when other places couldn’t. When fusion reactors make energy local and desalination makes water cheap, the delta is just… pretty real estate.

The Network State isn’t just a tech-bro fantasy. It’s the natural organizational form for a world where geography no longer determines wealth. Communities of choice. Exit rights. Competitive governance. Smart-contract law.

The Westphalian Nation-State was the landline of geopolitics: revolutionary when it launched, essential infrastructure for 400 years, and now—obviously, inevitably—being disrupted.

The Network State is the iPhone.

And like the iPhone, it won’t win by defeating the old system in battle. It’ll win because people prefer it. Because it’s better. Because when you can choose your jurisdiction the way you choose your phone plan, why wouldn’t you?

The map is rewriting itself. The only question is whether you’ll help draw it.

Sources:

"The Geopolitics of Abundance: Network States and the End of Resource Wars"