Scythia: notes toward a network state

This is a personal note, not a Solon feature. I'm writing it here because Solon is where groups write down their rules. An idea I've had for a while is to try that with a whole state.

The Scythians, briefly

The Scythians were nomads who lived on the steppe north of the Black Sea from roughly the 7th to the 3rd century BC. They were horsemen and herders. They had kings, tribes and a strict social order, but no cities to speak of and no fixed border. Most of what we know about them comes from Herodotus, who wrote about them at length in the fourth book of his Histories, and from the gold and the burial mounds they left behind.

My favourite story about them comes from that book. When the Persian king Darius invaded, around 513 BC, the Scythians refused to fight a pitched battle. They kept retreating across the steppe. Darius sent a message asking why they would not stand and fight. In Herodotus's account, the Scythian king Idanthyrsus replied that they had no towns and no farmland to defend, so there was nothing that made them want to fight. The only thing that would make them fight was if the Persians found and touched their ancestors' tombs.

What the Scythians had in place of territory was a people. A state that cannot be captured by taking its land is an odd idea in 2026. It is also exactly the idea behind what people now call a network state: a community that forms online around shared values, organises itself, and only later, if at all, acquires land.

Why not the old steppe

Rebuilding Scythia where it once was is not realistic. The steppe is now divided among existing states, some of them at war. None of them would allow a new polity on their land, and there's no good reason they should. A network state that starts by claiming someone else's territory has already lost the argument.

What could work instead

• Start as a network. Members first, land later. Write the rules, hold the decisions and keep the record before there is a single acre. That part is what Solon already does for any group: proposals, votes, versioned rules, and an append-only record anyone can verify.
• Land by agreement, not by claim. If it ever needs ground, buy or lease it where a willing host allows it. Argentina is one example I keep coming back to: large areas of land, and a government that has been rethinking its rules. What a foreigner may buy there, and how much, is set by law, and those rules have changed recently. That is exactly the kind of question Solon should answer from the source, not from memory.
• More than one place. A nomadic people did not need one territory. A modern Scythia could be a network of places under one set of rules, with members free to move between them.
• Leaving is a right. Every member can leave and take their record with them. On Solon, leaving with your record is on the roadmap for every group. For a state it matters even more.

Questions I don't have answers to

• How did the Scythians actually govern themselves, as far as the sources allow us to say? What did the kings decide, what did the tribes decide, and what were the councils for?
• Which parts carry over to a group of people who meet online, and which parts are romance?
• What legal routes to land actually exist: buying privately, a charter city, a special economic zone, or an autonomy agreement with a host state? Where has each been tried?
• How does a state work when it has no single territory? Who settles a dispute between members who live in two different countries?

What happens next

Nothing yet. This goes on the list of things to explore, next to states through time, which would let Solon set the Scythians, the Icelandic Commonwealth and today's states side by side. If it becomes something I want to build, it will go on the roadmap and be built in public like everything else.

— Cato

First published on solon.orangecat.ch.