TL;DR: Networks don’t just eat the state, but augment it. Governments are getting bionic by necessity.
Inside this edition:
Albania’s first ever AI minister gives an address to a really welcoming, progressive opposition
Most up-to-date version with 90% less typos at renaissancecapitalist.beehiiv.com.
Exponential growth is hard to see while you’re living in it. Harder still when you’re not paying attention. Covid taught that lesson the blunt way. And it wasn’t our first rodeo.
In the web’s Cambrian moment (1993), sites doubled in under three months. Then every five months. Blink and the number doubled again.
By ’97, engines claimed tens of millions of pages. Researchers were already whispering: a billion pages by 2000.
That scale shock nudged Google toward something closer to physics than computer science. In The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998), Brin & Page designed for tens to hundreds of millions of pages that would shoot straight for a billion.
The ethos? Model the system. Measure it. Let math surface the signal.
Now we might be watching a different exponential curve forming.
As I wrote in Networks Are Eating the State, we've entered The (Other) Thucydides Variant™: networks vs states, not state vs state. And this time, the exponential function has a namea and artificial wrinkles.
Her name is Diella.
“Hey there Diella, what’s it like in Albanian Cabinet?”
Meet Diella
Yesterday, Albania swore in the world’s first AI cabinet minister.
Diella, which translates to Sun in Albanian, lives inside the national e-Albania portal, the place citizens line up for digital paperwork: IDs, certificates, forms etc.
Launched in January 2025 as a glorified help desk, she processed 36k docs that month.
By August? 1.3 million.
Last week she was upgraded from Siri-with-manners to “Minister of Public Procurements.” Turning her from dutiful daughter to decision-maker.
Now she scores tender bids, flags irregularities, and helps decide awards and oversees a tenth of Albania’s GDP which was seemingly a corruption buffet.
If you want to see just how excited the rest of Albanian government were about her inclusion, watch this:
And while Albanian MPs banged their desks in protest, the precedent was set: code gets a Cabinet seat.
Meanwhile, in Nepal, Gen-Z ran a Discord vote and backed an interim PM (yet another first in electoral democracy).
Different edges of the same curve: networks as ballot box; code as judge.
However, it’s not easy to track these curves. Like Matthew Gray’s early attempts to measure web pages from MIT below, I’m now loudly architecting a [Democracy+] Index with a handful of obsessives (with some guidance from an early deep-learning pioneer). If you are obsessive or interested in this, can add to it, please let me know.
There’s a lot more to say about this that even those in it are sleeping on, but wanted to get this out quickly. If you’re around Soho and interested in this, lmk too.
To your exponential growth,
Daniel
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WHO IS THE RENAISSANCE CAPITALIST?
Part adventure capitalist, part librarian — Daniel Attia is a (venture) investor (and one of the first checks into the very platform this is published on) & builder who writes in the third person and backs founders reinventing reality through preemptive.
(portfolio below)
His lens comes from a random sprint through high finance, startups, tech & media, venture, hedge funds, and the arts.
He mastered capitalism's grammar at Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs before being force fed its real-life principles as the first US hire at Payapps (acquired by Autodesk for ~$500M).
Daniel would later shape tech and market perspectives as founding Head of Research at Prof G Media, contributing to works like the NYT Bestseller "Adrift: America in 100 Charts."
His favorite capitalist pastime may be steering companies away from entropy toward rationalism (often mislabeled as "shareholder activism"), partnering with hedge funds, families, and shareholders who've grown weary of watching their capital fund executive delusions.
Today, he serves on the Foundation Council at the State Library of Victoria—the world's third busiest library—while moonlighting as consigliere to founders and CEOs at pivotal crossroads.
Daniel also serves as Special Advisor to VP Capital, a HK based hedge fund.
Daniel co-founded Pew Pew NYC, a non-profit art collective for the creatively curious
(which just unveiled Call me Lola in Mexico City, the first live-in art gallery hotel experience where 70% of art sales flow directly to artists!)
Select venture investments:
beehiiv (this very platform) – Because Tyler Denk always had Big Desk Energy
SymphonyOS – beehiiv for artists (Business Insider Top 13 Creator Startups to Watch, just like beehiiv. Led seed alongside Tyler too)
Harmonic Discovery – Precision pharmacology (JP Morgan Life Sciences Award winner)
Carry – Putting tax optimization on autopilot, built by Ankur Nagpal who turned his $250M exit lessons at 32 into your tax solution
Measured – Medicine minus middlemen led by dreamer and DREAMer immigrant Monji Dolon (seed with Initialized Capital)
True3d — Building livestreaming infrastructure for 3D by Meta livestreaming veteran Daniel Habib (still can’t believe we got an investor mention alongside YC founder Paul Graham)
EatBlueprint by Jeff Tang (now merged with Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint)
Atelier – Making manufacturing magnificent again (Co-led Series A with Macquarie Capital)