From Heaven to the Cloud: Investigating Religious Utopian Legacies in the Digital Vision of Network States

This thesis explores the concept of the network state, a digital-first community model proposed by Balaji Srinivasan, through a comparative analysis with historical religious utopias. It hypothesises that network states, while technologically novel, inherit structural and ideological features from religious utopian communities. Drawing on scholarship and case studies such as Próspera and CityDAO, projects which share features with network states, the study examines how these experiments mirror earlier religious utopias like the Shakers, Mormons or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Using rational reconstruction and theories from Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Ernst Bloch, the thesis assesses authority, truth claims, group structures, and collective identities in both domains. It finds that while network states replace sacred cosmology with algorithmic governance, they reconfigure enduring dynamics found in earlier religious utopias, such as charismatic, centralised authority or redemptive visions of social transformation. The thesis concludes that network states are not radical departures, but technological iterations of enduring utopian impulses. Though they trade prophets for protocols, they continue to grapple with age-old issues of legitimacy, community, and power.