For the better part of a decade, tech investor Balaji Srinivasan has been calling for Silicon Valley to “secede” from the rest of the United States. The free-market tech guru doesn’t just want space from regulators and government officials; he literally wants the industry’s coders and bigwigs to split off and crowdfund their own separate country.
Over the years, Srinivasan has articulated his own political philosophy, which he calls “the network state” movement—an anarcho-capitalist school of thought that envisions the creation of privately run “countries” that are governed by decentralized corporations rather than governments.
Last year, Srinivasan announced the launch of a new school where interested tech denizens could learn how to take part in the Network State movement. The school, which was announced on his blog, was styled as a place where the founder’s followers could go to learn about the tenets of his philosophy, which is, admittedly, pretty weird. Even weirder was the school’s announced location: a $100 billion city in Malaysia that was partially developed by the Chinese government as part of its “Belt and Road” initiative before being abandoned due to political turmoil between China and the local government. “Forest City,” located in Johor, is now considered a “ghost” metropolis, filled with uninhabited high-rises and other urban superstructures that no one is using. Well, no one except Srinivasan’s Network Staters, that is.
Bloomberg reports that the Wake Forest school is officially open for business, and class is in session. What does a typical day in Forest City look like? Apparently, it’s not all that different from a typical day in Silicon Valley. The report describes participants’ daily experience as a combination of coding, fitness, fine dining, and long seminars where they get to listen to some rich guy talk—all things they could have enjoyed from the comfort of San Francisco:
Nearly 400 students, many of them entrepreneurs, have so far made the journey to Forest City to study everything from coding to unconventional theories on statehood. They’re building crypto projects, fine-tuning their physiques and testing whether a shared ideology — rather than just shared territory — can bind a community. The price starts at $1,500 per month, including lodging and food, for those who opt for a shared room.
Despite the less than remarkable offerings on display here, participants seem excited (one participant told Bloomberg it was great to be “surrounded by other awesome builders”) and, despite what would seem to be obvious and insurmountable obstacles to the movement’s success (building a new country is incredibly hard—if not impossible), the Network State continues to gain steam. Its proselytizers continue to amass funding and political support, and some members of the community even say they would like to use Greenland—the Danish territory that the Trump administration is currently trying to buy—as a testbed for the movement’s viability. Others are busy fighting for territory in the Balkans, or attempting other, less practical endeavors—like planting a flag on an asteroid. At the same time, the “Freedom Cities” movement (which is backed by many of the same people involved in Srinivasan’s movement) continues to enjoy a sizable lobby with the ear of the Trump administration.
With the new school, Srinivasan is obviously creating a hub from which his ideology can be incubated and then mass-produced. To get any movement off the ground, you obviously need disciples to spread the word.
At the same time, while the Network State is enjoying some momentum, many of its projects have struggled or stalled. Prospera, a new city off the coast of Honduras that had been thought of as a promising test case for the movement, continues to be entwined in a nasty legal battle with the Honduran government over its very existence. It seems plausible that this—a pitched struggle with existing powers—may be the real future of the Network State movement, less the giddy hyper-capitalist idealism its founder espouses.
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