A tropical rain had landed in Singapore, breaking the swelter of October’s first days. It was a period of anticipation and planning that, for me, had involved shipping off a packet of disarming-sounding emails and text messages to my sources, attempting to gain access to Balaji Srinivasan’s corporate home base. Srinivasan is the author of The Network State, a manifesto explaining how tech titans can start new countries; now he’s the presiding chief of a movement to make that vision a reality. The base was a school he’d built on an island over the border in Malaysia: an academy for “dark talent” and “frontiersmen,” as his announcement put it, with the ultimate goal of “bootstrapping a startup society capable of bootstrapping other startup societies.” He called it the Network School, or NS for short.
“Don’t think it’s gonna fly this time,” said James over Telegram, meaning me getting into the Network School. “Sorry mate but it’s outside my control.”
James Poulter—who is known online as James of Ârc—is a tall ex-corporate accountant, with shoulder-length blond hair and a posh London accent; he often dresses like Russell Brand in his god era LARPing as a tech founder. I met him a few months earlier in Austin, where he was hosting a conference focused on “Freedom Cities,” special economic zones proposed for development by the Trump administration on “unused” federal land. James is something of a network-state socialite, now leading a cohort of young “builders” inside the Network School, so I thought he might be in a position to convince Srinivasan to offer me access. But when we spoke about it a few months earlier, he explained that when it came to the school, Balaji was unlikely to trust an outside journalist. (In his book, Srinivasan compares journalists to the “Stasi.”) “Check in in a few months,” he said, “closer to the event.” But as I landed in Singapore, I learned the answer was still no.
“The event” was a global summit for the network-state movement, hosted annually by Srinivasan since 2023. Whereas the Network School was shrouded in mystery, the Network State Conference was ostentatiously public, with no formal approval process for tickets and a livestream posted on X and YouTube.
The event page said that over eight thousand people would be attending, including a coterie of celebrity speakers like Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum; Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase; and Andrew Huberman, the daddy-core longevity influencer. On the announcement page, baubles of the speakers’ faces were connected like nodes in a computer network underneath a list of the network-state ecosystem’s accomplishments: “billion dollar funds,” “billion dollar companies,” “billion dollar coins,” “million follower creators,” “public intellectuals” and “startup societies.”
Though I’d been writing about the network-state movement for the past few years, I’d yet to visit the flagship conference—for no other reason than Singapore is far from home in New York, and the talks can be streamed online. But with Donald Trump back in the White House and tech barons copping contracts for everything from space travel to defense, suddenly the stakes of a tech conference claiming to represent Silicon Valley’s vision for the future of nationhood seemed higher than ever before.
In the months leading up to the conference, network states, which had long seemed like an elaborate pipe dream, had emerged as a kind of tertiary MAGA priority. Trump had gestured toward a takeover of Greenland; shortly thereafter, the founder of a network state called Praxis announced his company’s interest in building a “crypto-city” there. Próspera, a charter city backed by Peter Thiel, had been facing a legal battle with the Honduran government. In Honduras’s next election, the Trump administration supported a right-wing candidate—seemingly to protect the future of the zone, and thus Thiel’s investment. Network-state insiders were drafting Freedom Cities proposals and flying in chartered jets to Mar-a-Lago. “We’re hoping to have legislation drafted by the end of the year,” Próspera’s head of growth told me when we met in Austin. He didn’t think there was any doubt that Freedom Cities would happen.
As the public face of Silicon Valley secessionism, Srinivasan’s Network State Conference seemed like a prime window into the techno-capitalist frontier. I fantasized that if I made the eighteen-hour trek to Singapore, Balaji would see how seriously I took his movement and, like a reluctant Gatsby finding his Nick Carraway, usher me into the school.
I came armed with the information that had so far trickled out through gossip networks and the news. The school was on a man-made island about an hour from Singapore called Forest City, a partly finished urban-development project born out of a joint partnership between Chinese and Malaysian firms. Like a private-equity coffee franchise setting up shop next to the local favorite, the developers planned to spend $100 billion USD over twenty years to build a Chinese “city of the future” to compete with Singapore. Originally meant to attract a population of seven hundred thousand, the project stalled within the first few years—at first due to China’s tightening restrictions on investments outside the mainland, then throughout COVID. By 2025, with close to five billion dollars already spent on apartment towers and McMansions, only ten thousand people had actually moved there—a little over one percent of the initial target.
In a bid to save the project, the developers teamed up with the Malaysian government to rebrand Forest City as a “special financial zone,” dropping the corporate tax rate to 5 percent and allowing family offices to operate tax-free. Srinivasan moved 128 resident students into one of its complexes that same month, in September 2024. Explaining his rationale in a blog post, Srinivasan wrote that the Network School was designed to “empower the dark talent of the world”—people who “admire Western values,” “recognize that Asia is in ascendance” and think “the next world order is more properly centered around the Internet.” Early reports suggested morning coding sessions and afternoon sermons on topics like the Meiji Restoration, the late-nineteenth-century effort to imperialize Japan. “Many Network Schoolers will attend with the intent of eventually starting their own societies,” Srinivasan had written when announcing the program. “We intend to fund the best.”
But initial reviews were mixed. Just as gushing testimony began pouring out from the first two-month cohort, accompanied by lifestyle-inspo and health-food pics, rumors began to spread of a serious problem with mold (an unsurprising consequence, perhaps, of moving into an abandoned hotel in an equatorial rainforest). Some alleged that, instead of fixing the problem and moving on, Srinivasan forced his students to sign NDAs. Dissenters were booted from the program. Multiple students left of their own accord. Everyone remaining was asked to “leave as friends” or “double opt in,” meaning they would volunteer for Srinivasan’s new development firm. (Srinivasan did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Despite the rumors, hundreds of students continued to trek into the jungle after the first cohort, suggesting that for Srinivasan’s army of “dark talent,” the allure of the school was strong enough to overcome any worries about comfort. I heard from multiple applicants who hadn’t been accepted that there was a backlog of thousands still hoping to get in—most of them crypto workers and digital nomads in search of opportunity. Describing his selection criteria in a 2024 blog post, Srinivasan wrote: “The more respect you have for legacy institutions, and the more respect they have for you, the less suitable you’ll be.” Because ultimately, he said, he was building the Network School for a “young version of myself.”
I wanted to meet these young Balajis; to walk among them in the inner sanctum. Presumably they were coming, just like I was, to get a glimpse of Balaji’s promised future.
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Marina Bay Sands is a 57-story megalith on the shore of Singapore’s inner harbor, a location so conspicuous that its three looming towers, connected by a giant sky bridge, are almost always visible from wherever you stand in the downtown core. It was opened in 2010 with a development cost nearing six billion dollars, making it the single most expensive hotel and casino ever built. Funding for the Sands came primarily from Las Vegas casino baron Sheldon Adelson—a man known in the United States as a Republican Party kingmaker, Trump’s largest donor in 2016 and the primary funder of Birthright, a program offering free trips for young Jews to Israel.
The complex was developed as part of the Singapore government’s plan, circa 2004, to build “integrated resorts” to attract tourism. MBS, as it’s known colloquially (no relation to the Saudi Crown Prince), has a five-star hotel with 1,850 rooms, an art-and-science museum plus shopping centers and a nightclub. It is also home to the Sands Expo & Convention Center, with a maximum capacity of 45,000 people. That’s where the Network State Conference was to be held.
I entered an auditorium that was packed with thousands of slipcovered chairs, almost all of them occupied. Onstage, Srinivasan sat down for a “fireside chat” with Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX. In 2022, Hayes and several BitMEX executives were convicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act; three years later BitMEX was fined a hundred million dollars for the same reason. In 2025, Hayes received a federal pardon from Trump, and so did the exchange—the first ever pardon granted to a corporation.
“Arthur, you had a quote a few years ago,” Srinivasan began. “‘Get your Bitcoin and get out.’ Why don’t you elaborate on that?”
Hayes explained that his attitude came from observing the false promises of the traditional financial system: “I listen to what the politicians say all around the world, and usually it’s a similar thing of ‘We’re gonna build more bombs. We’ll give you free health care. Everyone’s gonna have a job. It’s all gonna be great.’ And you never hear anything about raising taxes,” he added. “So how are they gonna do it? They’re just gonna print a fuck ton of money … until it explodes in our face.” So the point, he said, was to “take this fiat, however you can earn it, convert it to Bitcoin or gold or great equities, and then exit stage left.”
“Get to a country like Singapore, or get to a country like Dubai,” Srinivasan interjected.
It was a mantra that he had been reproducing in various forms for over a decade—on Twitter, in his book, during podcast interviews and presentations. It was a philosophy that said: get out of America, stop trusting legacy institutions, go to a place like Singapore, trust cryptography instead. The future of power, according to Srinivasan’s worldview, was divided along three axes, each corresponding to its own ideological principle: NYT, or the American establishment; CCP, or the centralized Chinese state; and BTC, or the global internet, which he defined as “the international ideology of Bitcoin and web3.” These are the only “coalitions” with the scale and talent to survive the “all-out digital struggle that has already commenced,” he wrote. Srinivasan’s “network state” was BTC on a mission for self-determination; techno-capital attempting to break free.
But something had changed from his original pitch. Back before the techlash, Srinivasan’s vision for network states had been decidedly digital-first, the logical endpoint of a world where two people can meet on Match.com and make a life together, as he wrote in Wired in 2013. “There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year.” And if those trends continue, “we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries materialize out of thin air.”
Here at the conference the focus was different. It was the network state as a physical, discrete unit: a vessel through which techno-capital could remake the geopolitical map. Onstage in a Substack t-shirt, the blogger Noah Smith likened the concept of the network state to a “new Hanseatic League.” From the twelfth through the fifteenth century, the German Hansa ruled the Baltic Sea, using their control of salt and fishing rights to build a network of cities, connected through trade alliances, that spread across borders. The network-state movement could do something similar, he suggested, creating “a modern-day network of network cities” that would function like a unified trade bloc.
According to this model, digital nomads were the market and network states were the service providers. Out in the lobby, people explained confidently—and incorrectly—that there are over forty million digital nomads in the world, so all that was needed was to build the right living spaces and the nomads would come. A hostel owner explained he was opening a network-state “node” in Belize. Another spoke about buying land in Panama. “The network state is the new crypto,” an NS student said matter-of-factly. “The network state is the new globalization,” he continued, trying again: a counterforce to an increasingly balkanized world.
I was reminded of a factoid I’d seen a couple months before, when the market valuation of crypto briefly reached an all-time high of $4 trillion: that if crypto were a country, it would have the world’s sixth largest GDP. It was a misleading statistic, to be sure; market cap and GDP are not the same. But the investment volume was significant and the money (at least theoretically) was real. This was a “country” with 36 billionaires and 241,700 millionaires, as a report making the rounds in crypto stated. Srinivasan was positioning himself as the architect of this society for the nouveau riche, a society preparing for epochal change.
A Substacker named Tomas Pueyo gave an overview of the mechanics of this coming transformation in a lecture titled “The End of Nation States?” According to Pueyo, societies tend to organize themselves around the most efficient means of wielding violence and power. Nowhere was this more evident than in the development of the nation-state. First the printing press broke the Church’s monopoly on information. Then, the heavy plow and horseshoe increased crop yields, speeding up urbanization and making it easier for officials to collect taxes. The gunpowder revolution created an arms race until only the richest fiefdoms could fight wars. The economic result was centralization and the political result was the nation-state. And now, about five hundred years later, he said, a similar process was happening in reverse. “All these technologies that used to make the state a bigger force now make it weaker”—from the internet to cryptocurrencies and even the rise of English as a lingua franca.
In The Network State, Srinivasan offers up a similar theory. History isn’t a linear progression, he argues. It’s more like a helix—a corkscrew—winding upward through a series of revolutions shaped by the real driver of history: technology. Change occurs during times of “unbundling” and “rebundling” or centralization and decentralization. The CD gets unbundled into the MP3, which gets rebundled into the Spotify playlist. “That’s the cycle that happens in computing,” he told Wired in 2022. “And I think it’s also happening here with nations and with states.” Either you’re whipped forward and upward on the corkscrew, or eventually you collapse. Either way, technology is destiny.
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A few aisles ahead of me, I noticed Travis Bresa, who I’d met on a reporting trip to Próspera, the Honduran charter city. When we first met, Travis was an anthropology student at Oxford writing a thesis on transhumanism; now he was a banker at HSBC. He asked if I’d applied for the Network School “Open Day” departing from Singapore the next day. I hadn’t, so he sent over a link to the application and I started working through it. Eventually, though, I got stuck when it asked for my “profession.”
I thought back to a comment Patri Friedman had made at a lunch he hosted the previous day. The grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, Patri is best known in this world as the guy who “started seasteading”—a 2010s precursor to the network-state model that involved floating tech islands in international waters. Now he runs a Thiel-backed VC firm called Pronomos Capital that has invested in all the major network-state projects, from Próspera to Praxis. Because of his high profile, I thought Friedman might be able to convince Srinivasan to grant me access to the school. He had agreed to forward an email I’d written to Srinivasan, but there was still no response. I wondered out loud whether I should call myself a writer instead of a journalist. “I mean, you’re a journalist he doesn’t know, and it’s Balaji,” he said. “What do you expect?”
I entered “writer” and hit submit.
Travis and I descended to a lower level of the building where a large terrace overlooked the bay. The three looming towers of MBS stood suspended overhead, the palms of the sky bridge junglescape visible along the platform’s edge.
The architect for MBS was Moshe Safdie—great-uncle to the American filmmakers—who once described the design brief from the Singapore government as building a “microcosm” of the city-state. Admirers use the term to reflect the building’s iconic shape and topographic features, but critics have understood the microcosm metaphor differently. MBS is featured on the cover of a 2019 polemic by the Singaporean urbanist Lee Kah-Wee titled Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress, and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity. The book argues that by investing in casinos like MBS and rebranding them as “integrated resorts,” the government engages in “moral laundering,” where the so-called vice of gambling is washed away with the construction of pro-family, pro-business institutions. In this way, the city’s resorts reflect a contradiction at the heart of Singapore’s identity, Lee argues: a place where chewing gum might put you in jail, but also a playground for global capital, where the rich remain above the rules.
It was fitting that Balaji had chosen to host his big event here. On the tech right, Singapore is often held up as the ideal of a successful “startup city”; Lee Kuan Yew, its founding father, the model of the “CEO-politician” whose blend of cultural authoritarianism and technocratic planning helped transform Singapore from, as one journalist put it, “a mosquito swamp into a gleaming city-state.” As Quinn Slobodian identifies in Crack-Up Capitalism, back when Francis Fukuyama declared liberal democracy’s victory over Soviet-style communism as the end of history, he also suggested that the “soft authoritarianism” of East and Southeast Asia might be the West’s only true ideological competitor. Singapore was the prime example. Four hundred delegations of Chinese politicians and policy planners traveled to the city-state in 1992 alone to study the “Singapore model” and learn how it might be replicated on Chinese soil.
One answer was the special economic zones: industrial charter cities with low regulation, tailor-made for courting international investment. In 1979, China’s central planners began dotting the coastline with SEZs from Shenzhen to Fuzhou, and over the next few decades continued to expand their use—a strategy that many economists claim was essential to Chinese economic ascendance. Charter-city advocates have argued that if American policymakers were smart they would reproduce this model on American soil—a push that culminated in Trump’s Freedom Cities plan. The network-state crowd has embraced this policy package and positioned themselves as its intellectual and commercial muscle. The plan is to both “exit” the American-led order and “enter” its power structure at the same time. Trump, in this sense, is both a Napoleonic figure remaking the world in his image and an ideological fence, laundering techno-accelerationism into the political mainstream.
Travis went back upstairs, and I stood alone on the balcony overlooking the bay. Every few minutes, a bushy-tailed crypto HODLer would approach, wearing company swag and explaining the finer points of his startup’s prediction market or micro-payment system. I’d come to the conference hoping to speak with impassioned ideologues. But when I asked them what they thought about the network state, their answer was typically some version of “it’s pretty cool.” Most of them had come for TOKEN2049, a larger crypto event happening in Singapore that week. Once they realized I had nothing to offer them, they would slink away.
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After all my desperate emails and solicitations, the solution to my access problem turned out to be quite simple: call myself a writer and submit the form. Eager to attract new recruits, the school’s screening process had slipped enough for a member of the Stasi to break through. The next day I was standing outside a Singapore shopping mall, rubbing shoulders with prospective students. “Are you ready for our North Korean tour?” Travis asked, approaching me after getting off the train. “Let’s be sure to stay on the lookout for the Balaji statue,” he continued, his red curls bouncing as he smiled and turned his head.
We arrived at the school to a royal welcome. Dressed in black NS.com t-shirts, a pack of students surrounded the coach and led us past the Network School sign on the hotel exterior. As if on cue, a man in flip-flops approached with a 3D VR headset and asked me to try it on. The network-state flag appeared over a floating globe, with a network-state plus sign in the middle. “Eton for Edgelords!” Travis quipped. The tour would start in about an hour, the guide said. Until then we were welcome to check out the terrace on the fifth floor.
Two blonde influencers were on the terrace filming a video. The one speaking was in tennis sneakers and a cropped safari dress with a LAV mic clipped to her collar. She had that affect and appearance native to Instagram—a vibe I’d describe as vaguely Australian, possibly AI. Which was fitting, I thought, because in the distance behind her was a city without people: long rows of empty apartment buildings furry with tropical shrubs and modular McMansions huddled in semicircles, completely deserted. “In the future,” she said to the camera, bending her knee in a little curtsy, “AI won’t just be in your phone, and in your computer, it will be in the real world.” She emphasized those last two words: real world. I stood to the side smoking a cigarette, wondering if I was breaking some rule. Watching them, I was thinking about humans mimicking algorithms mimicking humans; social networks mimicking city-states mimicking social networks.
It was my first time seeing a real-world ghost city. The phenomenon first came to public attention in the late 2000s, when a cadre of Western reporters traveled to Inner Mongolia and found a landscape of cities devoid of people. These eerie scenes quickly became symbols of China’s failing growth model, but the backstory is more interesting. After markets tightened during the 2008 financial crisis and factories began to close, Beijing responded with a stimulus package of four trillion yuan (about $586 billion) that empowered local governments to borrow heavily and build. In China, developers don’t buy land; they lease land-use rights for terms of forty to seventy years. This effectively turns local politicians into “monopoly” suppliers of urban land. Development becomes their primary source of revenue.
The result is a model some theorists call “state entrepreneurialism.” According to an oft-cited statistic, China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. Part of the ghost-city phenomenon is outright mismanagement: because local politicians’ performance was evaluated on the basis of short-term GDP gains, the system encouraged investment in trophy projects; by the time projects were completed, officials had often moved on to new jobs. But the other part is structural. In 2014, the CCP announced a new urbanization plan that would relocate hundreds of millions of rural Chinese citizens to cities. By 2025, a reported 68 percent of China’s population was living in cities, up from 50 percent in 2010—or about 290 million more people. Some ghost cities have become less ghostly over time, though dozens still exist.
Forest City is somewhat different. By the time ghost cities started getting attention in the Western media, China realized it had a problem. They curbed local officials’ access to capital to avoid overdevelopment, but their economy still relied on massive industries producing building materials like concrete and steel. So instead of focusing on domestic development they invested in another program, the Belt and Road Initiative. You might think of it as China’s version of the Marshall Plan, focused on building infrastructure (and soft power) around the world, especially in Africa and Asia. The other part is empowering Chinese development firms to build for-profit enterprises outside the mainland, which operate, when they’re large enough, like appendages of the Chinese state. Forest City was one such project. But once the CCP started preventing its citizens from moving funds offshore, the project quickly tanked. COVID hit a couple years later.
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The tour of the Network School started on the fifth floor, with a quick look at the amenities and shared spaces: a media room for podcasting, a theater center with flat screens on the wall and a “darts room” with brown leather couches and reflective mirrored gilt. Aesthetically, think Shanghai strip club converted into office space.
We took the elevator to the ground floor past the swimming pool and coworking space, where a Network State flag and Bitcoin flag were hoisted side by side. We entered the bedrooms, which were large and unremarkable: bed, desk, balcony, kitchenette. Most importantly, we went outside for the tour’s climax: the gym, in a white PVC military tent large enough to fit a wedding.
After a lunch of Buddha bowls and oat cups—a Bryan Johnson recipe, apparently very popular at the school—the group of prospective students walked together to the main coworking space, about ten minutes away, for an official orientation. On a small podium stage, the school’s founding director, Jackson Steger, explained the NS philosophy. “I grew up in a Catholic home,” he said, “where we talked about the mind, body and soul. People go to Bali, where they talk about ‘eat, pray, love.’ Here at the Network School, we talk about ‘earn, burn and learn.’” The main kind of person they try to attract is someone interested in leveling up, he said. “So everything we do, we try to do, like, ‘What’s the V1 version? What’s the V2 version?’ And improve on that as a community.”
Currently, there were about 250 people at the school, Steger explained, with hopes to expand to a thousand. “We tell members, before they come to NS,” he said, that it’s “‘frontier, not fancy,’” meaning things go wrong. “I know the lobby of the hotel looks nice and, yeah, we’re on the beach, and the rooms are reasonably cool, but things break all the time here,” he said. “So the best thing that you can do to contribute to NS is just make it a better place to live.”
And things do break, especially in the tropics. A few months later, I received a trove of documents from a researcher close to the school. The packet, entitled “Mencius Moldcult,” an ironic pun on Curtis Yarvin’s pen name, told a hidden story about the early NS days, one painstakingly scrubbed from public view.
There were extensive pictures of the mold, taken from the hotel’s twelfth floor. There were copies of the contract signed by students, with an airtight anti-mainstream media NDA. There were “compatibility” surveys filled out by students as part of their NS application.1 And there were recordings from the town hall melodrama when Balaji was confronted about the mold.
About a month after the school opened, the full group gathered for a conversation that quickly became heated. Multiple students claimed to be experiencing health problems. A number of participants had been complaining in a private group chat. A pack of wild dogs had been stalking Forest City. “Balaji,” one of the students said during a particularly heated moment, “you spot exponential trends early … what is the percent likelihood on zero to a hundred that all of Forest City more or less needs to get torn down because of mold?”
After some cajoling, Srinivasan responded: “Look, I wouldn’t be here if I thought it was a big deal, okay? That’s the ultimate proof. I think it’s honestly a social contagion, like trans stuff.” Then one of his employees explained their five-step plan to mitigate the mold.
Steger clarified why “earn”—alongside burn and learn—was one of the most important NS values: “If you look at the history of how people move or how cities are built, the number one reason … is for economic opportunity.” That’s why they have a fellowship that’s analogous to Y Combinator in the U.S., he said, and a new “earn” program, where students would be able to win Bitcoin or USDC bounties for completing tasks, like clipping Srinivasan’s podcast or reviewing Peter Thiel’s books. On the screen behind him, a white slide with bold text read: “Anyone. Anywhere. $100k. Global meritocracy is here.”
Again, the recordings tell a more complex story. Four days after the first town hall, the group met again. “We are rebooting the community as a tech tribe,” Srinivasan said to start the meeting, “and our core competency will be turning around distressed real estate.” “We’re still doing ‘Learn, Burn, Earn, Fun,’” he continued, but now they were asking students to “double opt in or opt out.” Double-opting in meant that students were required to volunteer either one hour, ten hours or one hundred hours a week for the “full-time tier.” “We need resilient people for the path forward,” he said. “I want to make sure that people understand that they’re signing up for a ‘frontier, not-fancy’ kind of thing.”
One of Srinivasan’s students later explained to me NS’s mission to convert “distressed real estate.” Think of WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new startup, Flow, he said: “WeWork plus apartments plus amenities in a single building”—an integrated tech campus. Volunteering for Srinivasan could mean scouting new developments, building out the student curriculum, combating the mold. It’s a multitiered system, he said, with volunteers as near-outsiders and full-time workers as “generals.” The generals joke that they’ll get their own fiefdoms when the network state succeeds, he said. They all behave as if Balaji is king.
The mold situation, he observed, indicated one of the main weaknesses of corporate city-states. Tech states are just as likely to become “enshittified” as legacy states, he said, but when things go wrong, the downsides are far worse. Coined by the journalist Cory Doctorow, the term “enshittification” describes how large tech platforms degrade their products once they reach a certain scale and systematically gate the exits to maximize profits. “The logic of corporate city-states is that because they’re consumer-focused, they’ll perform better than democracies as service providers,” the student said. “But corporations are just as likely to become degraded.” Balaji forcing people to double-opt in or leave is like Instagram banning user profiles that violate their terms of service, he said, since there’s no political recourse. Either you comply with TOS or you can’t use the platform. Now apply that logic to a full-fledged city-state: “What kind of user is more locked in than a homeowner?”
Our tour group was invited to join a workout in the hangar, but I found myself lagging behind, wandering through the empty streets. Small patches of dirt broke through the concrete, and orange heliconias dangled from the trees.
The day before, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had said onstage that, to him, the Network School was like a monastery, where people go to feel spiritually engaged. This reminded me of a week I’d spent, more than a decade earlier, at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. I’d gone to Israel for ten days of falafel and military history on a trip similar to Birthright, and the yeshiva was a free way to extend the visit. For eight hours a day, I argued with a black-hatted rabbi in his fifties. We spoke about kashrut, the coming of the Messiah and the metaphysics of chosenness, the Jewish idea that God has a special purpose for you. The rabbi had tried to convince me that studying at yeshiva was a way to be closer to God, to become a better person. Srinivasan was offering his students a similar opportunity to level up. The time was now to ascend like a bodhisattva and Become Yourself 2.0. Build your own tech tribe and inherit the earth—become a sovereign individual.
I wondered if that’s what Srinivasan meant when he described his vision for the network state as “tech Zionism.” Ever since The Network State was published, Srinivasan had been citing Israel as a practical inspiration and comparing himself to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. The idea was that in effect he would do for technologists what Zionism did for Jews: provide self-determination for the “gray tribe,” the digital nomads of the emergent tech religion, who had no place in a red-versus-blue America locked in a terminal civil war. When “tech Zionism” gets mentioned in the media, it’s usually to capture Srinivasan’s unique brand of edgelordism, or the recklessness of his “colonial” ambitions. But, as a former student explained to me, Balaji views Judaism as a “social technology.” And when it comes to social tech, “Judaism is the GOAT.”
At the same time, it also serves another purpose, which is to insinuate that tech nomads are a persecuted minority. For over a decade, Srinivasan has fixated on the media backlash to the growing power of tech. “They are basically going to try to blame the economy on Silicon Valley,” he said of the media establishment, when introducing the network-state concept in 2013. They would argue that “it was the iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts, the bankruptcies, and the bombings.” Since then, he’d started claiming that “anti-tech violence is ramping up” and that when Democrats are “torching” self-driving cars “the message is: today it’s the car, tomorrow it’s you in the car.” “Technology is a class,” Srinivasan wrote on X, and most of the violence in the twentieth century “was on the basis of class.” “That’s what communism was,” he wrote: “mass murder of the capitalist class.”
It was a Herculean act of psychic inversion: having spent so much time fighting the politics of identity, he’d incorporated its ideas to manufacture an origin story of violent oppression. It was a story in which the billionaires were the oppressed and the libtards were the mob and the journalists were the Stasi and the newspapers were the Church. The technologists were the Jews and the Democrats were Hitler and it was only a matter of time before the Third Reich would begin. And so Balaji was Herzl and he was also Ben-Gurion, and soon he’d lead the people into the promised land. Zion was a ghost city built by China. It was called the Network School.
After ten minutes of walking, I made it back to the hotel, where a small group had assembled with cameras by the door. Srinivasan was wearing sports shorts and flip-flops with a camera pressed to his face. The YouTuber Nas Daily was talking to him, urging him to try again, with a little more energy.
“My name is Balaji and this is the Network School,” he said.
“One more time.”
“My name is Balaji and this is the Network School.” He drummed his arms in a circle.
“Why is he dressed like such a slob?” I asked Travis, who was approaching from across the courtyard. “Counter-signaling?” He shrugged as we walked closer. A group of students gathered behind Srinivasan, crossing their arms and flexing in black muscle shirts.
Nas indicated that he’d gotten the right footage and the crowd began to splinter. Most of them headed upstairs for a concert in “the mafia room.” The buses idled outside the hotel lobby.
I walked upstairs for the concert; about sixty people were packed into the room, facing a black digital piano on an elevated platform. A girl with dark hair came onto the stage and said that she’d be singing a song by Lorde. If the crowd knew the words, she added, they could sing along—and they did.
And we’ll never be royals (royals)
It don’t run in our blood
That kind of luxe just ain’t for us
We crave a different kind of buzz
Let me be your ruler (ruler)
You can call me queen bee
And baby, I’ll rule (I’ll rule, I’ll rule, I’ll rule)
Let me live that fantasy
●
I woke up on the 35th floor of a hotel down the street from the Network School. Save for the maintenance crew and security guard, I hadn’t seen a single other person in the hotel (even though, as recently as 2023, Forest City’s developers boasted that its two hotels were “always fully booked”). I stood on the balcony and watched the sun rise over the fishing boats and oil tankers. A car had been doing donuts on the beach, so there were dark circles in the sand.
I’d decided to stick around for an extra day instead of heading back to Singapore with the rest of the group; there was a mini-conference happening in the private wing of the school headed by James of Ârc. A few days earlier, I’d asked James if I could join and he said, “I don’t care what happens, man. As long as I don’t see you.” He didn’t want to anger Balaji.
When I arrived, Patri Friedman was in the lobby, wearing a beer tank top and a bandana. “My Malaysia outfit,” he chuckled, taking a drag on his vape.
Srinivasan walked through the lobby in his t-shirt and sport shorts. He was surrounded by a throng of people, who migrated each time he moved from end to end. “He has to keep moving,” Friedman explained, because if he stays in one place he’ll get mobbed with questions. We walked up to Srinivasan and I introduced myself, explaining that I was writing a book about the network state. “Send me the manuscript,” he said, with a smile and a fist bump. Then he was off, a group of blackshirts hot on his tail.
I asked Patri about what had happened the previous night, after the orientation ended. He said there’d been a “scheming dinner” for the conference speakers, and then our conversation turned to the growing discomfort in the tech world with Balaji’s gestures toward alignment with China.
I’d seen it myself when Srinivasan was onstage at the conference, during the final Q&A. “If we want our network states to last thousands of years,” one person had asked, “we have to think about defense … Is it something like paying the U.S. a fee to protect us? Is it holding a U.S. military base? Is it joining the UN?” Srinivasan responded: “China is by far the world’s strongest military power, like it or not.” One Chinese shipyard makes more ships than the entire U.S. Navy combined, he reminded them. “So my view is: the U.S. can’t fight China.” And if that’s the case, “You have to not fight in the physical realm because you can’t win the physical realm … Try and be as win-win as possible.”
When I got to the conference room, James was sitting on the stage in a white cotton jacket and matching shorts with no shoes. Behind him there were four pull-up banners with blue skies and classical architecture; a statue of a man in a toga with his arms stretched wide was facing the sea.
“Do you think we are at an inflection point in terms of, like, acceptance, or just people believing that it’s plausible that we can build these things?” James asked.
“Definitely,” Patri responded, nodding vigorously in a new change of clothes. There are people in the media, he explained, who “think we’re taking over the First World” with freedom cities and free ports. “We’re real threats to them.”
“Is there some scarcity here?” James asked, referencing a country where one of Patri’s portfolio companies had recently announced a zone. “If it’s 10 percent of their land that’s being contributed, they can’t do that many more times,” he said, crossing his legs like a Buddha on the seat.
“I sometimes joke that governments are even more herd animals than venture capitalists are,” Patri said. “And when they see stuff working, they all want it.” So there could be a domino effect of zones. “Like, my personal, lifetime, North Star metrics,” he said, “are about how much of world population, GDP and land area is zoned into 21st-century government. And look: the entire world needs to be rezoned into 21st-century government. The entire Global South needs to do a Singapore and come up to standard.”
James and I locked eyes for a second, and he quickly looked away. I’d arranged for a bus to take me back to Singapore, so I grabbed my bags and headed for the door. I hadn’t seen any mold in the building during the time I was there, but I had seen many dehumidifiers. At least anecdotally, it seemed, the decontamination strategy had worked.
In the end, though, it wasn’t the mold that did them in, but the government. A few weeks ago, on July 21st, the Iskander Puteri City Council announced it would revoke the Network School’s business license, effective the next day, and ordered it to cease operations.
This was the outcome of a public imbroglio that had erupted over the course of July after the Network School was investigated for hiding Israeli nationals. (Malaysia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel but also doesn’t explicitly forbid Israeli citizens from entering the country with second passports.) In a lengthy response posted on X after the probe turned up no illegitimate immigration documents, Srinivasan claimed the investigation was a hit job by an anti-tech Malaysian political group. He also posted a 32-minute video response, emphasizing his companies’ investments in Malaysia (supposedly more than $100 million RNM, or $25 million USD), and suggesting he could take the school elsewhere if it wasn’t wanted.2 The government evidently interpreted the video as a threat—they revoked NS’s business license instead. The same day, Srinivasan announced that the school was moving to Kazakhstan.
Maybe this proved that network states are doomed to fail, as Joshua Dávila, a crypto researcher with ties to the school, suggested to me. Assuming that culture is fungible, they imagine that for every problem there is a price to fix it. Or maybe, as Patri Friedman suggested, it simply proves Srinivasan’s thesis about the waning importance of physical geography: there will always be another state to make a deal with, another opportunistic leader who wants to attract global tech talent.
The inconvenient reality, of course, is that while the location may change, wherever you go there you are. Ideas keep tumbling back down to earth. As in his handling of the mold, when confronted with a crisis, Srinivasan’s response is to ask others to “opt in” or leave—his project framed as above environmental conditions, above nation-states and their laws, above the system of nationalism itself.
As the bus pulled into Singapore, I imagined Balaji in Forest City, walking through the jungle green. He had come a long way to this hotel-sized fiefdom. If the school was for a young version of himself, I wondered, who would that young person be? I imagined him floating over the buildings, pointing out mold where the people were supposed to be. The corkscrew was spinning somewhere in the dark beyond the city. The golden future of the gray tribe must have seemed so close.
Photo credit: Sam Venis
A tropical rain had landed in Singapore, breaking the swelter of October’s first days. It was a period of anticipation and planning that, for me, had involved shipping off a packet of disarming-sounding emails and text messages to my sources, attempting to gain access to Balaji Srinivasan’s corporate home base. Srinivasan is the author of The Network State, a manifesto explaining how tech titans can start new countries; now he’s the presiding chief of a movement to make that vision a reality. The base was a school he’d built on an island over the border in Malaysia: an academy for “dark talent” and “frontiersmen,” as his announcement put it, with the ultimate goal of “bootstrapping a startup society capable of bootstrapping other startup societies.” He called it the Network School, or NS for short.
“Don’t think it’s gonna fly this time,” said James over Telegram, meaning me getting into the Network School. “Sorry mate but it’s outside my control.”
James Poulter—who is known online as James of Ârc—is a tall ex-corporate accountant, with shoulder-length blond hair and a posh London accent; he often dresses like Russell Brand in his god era LARPing as a tech founder. I met him a few months earlier in Austin, where he was hosting a conference focused on “Freedom Cities,” special economic zones proposed for development by the Trump administration on “unused” federal land. James is something of a network-state socialite, now leading a cohort of young “builders” inside the Network School, so I thought he might be in a position to convince Srinivasan to offer me access. But when we spoke about it a few months earlier, he explained that when it came to the school, Balaji was unlikely to trust an outside journalist. (In his book, Srinivasan compares journalists to the “Stasi.”) “Check in in a few months,” he said, “closer to the event.” But as I landed in Singapore, I learned the answer was still no.
“The event” was a global summit for the network-state movement, hosted annually by Srinivasan since 2023. Whereas the Network School was shrouded in mystery, the Network State Conference was ostentatiously public, with no formal approval process for tickets and a livestream posted on X and YouTube.
The event page said that over eight thousand people would be attending, including a coterie of celebrity speakers like Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum; Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase; and Andrew Huberman, the daddy-core longevity influencer. On the announcement page, baubles of the speakers’ faces were connected like nodes in a computer network underneath a list of the network-state ecosystem’s accomplishments: “billion dollar funds,” “billion dollar companies,” “billion dollar coins,” “million follower creators,” “public intellectuals” and “startup societies.”
Though I’d been writing about the network-state movement for the past few years, I’d yet to visit the flagship conference—for no other reason than Singapore is far from home in New York, and the talks can be streamed online. But with Donald Trump back in the White House and tech barons copping contracts for everything from space travel to defense, suddenly the stakes of a tech conference claiming to represent Silicon Valley’s vision for the future of nationhood seemed higher than ever before.
In the months leading up to the conference, network states, which had long seemed like an elaborate pipe dream, had emerged as a kind of tertiary MAGA priority. Trump had gestured toward a takeover of Greenland; shortly thereafter, the founder of a network state called Praxis announced his company’s interest in building a “crypto-city” there. Próspera, a charter city backed by Peter Thiel, had been facing a legal battle with the Honduran government. In Honduras’s next election, the Trump administration supported a right-wing candidate—seemingly to protect the future of the zone, and thus Thiel’s investment. Network-state insiders were drafting Freedom Cities proposals and flying in chartered jets to Mar-a-Lago. “We’re hoping to have legislation drafted by the end of the year,” Próspera’s head of growth told me when we met in Austin. He didn’t think there was any doubt that Freedom Cities would happen.
As the public face of Silicon Valley secessionism, Srinivasan’s Network State Conference seemed like a prime window into the techno-capitalist frontier. I fantasized that if I made the eighteen-hour trek to Singapore, Balaji would see how seriously I took his movement and, like a reluctant Gatsby finding his Nick Carraway, usher me into the school.
I came armed with the information that had so far trickled out through gossip networks and the news. The school was on a man-made island about an hour from Singapore called Forest City, a partly finished urban-development project born out of a joint partnership between Chinese and Malaysian firms. Like a private-equity coffee franchise setting up shop next to the local favorite, the developers planned to spend $100 billion USD over twenty years to build a Chinese “city of the future” to compete with Singapore. Originally meant to attract a population of seven hundred thousand, the project stalled within the first few years—at first due to China’s tightening restrictions on investments outside the mainland, then throughout COVID. By 2025, with close to five billion dollars already spent on apartment towers and McMansions, only ten thousand people had actually moved there—a little over one percent of the initial target.
In a bid to save the project, the developers teamed up with the Malaysian government to rebrand Forest City as a “special financial zone,” dropping the corporate tax rate to 5 percent and allowing family offices to operate tax-free. Srinivasan moved 128 resident students into one of its complexes that same month, in September 2024. Explaining his rationale in a blog post, Srinivasan wrote that the Network School was designed to “empower the dark talent of the world”—people who “admire Western values,” “recognize that Asia is in ascendance” and think “the next world order is more properly centered around the Internet.” Early reports suggested morning coding sessions and afternoon sermons on topics like the Meiji Restoration, the late-nineteenth-century effort to imperialize Japan. “Many Network Schoolers will attend with the intent of eventually starting their own societies,” Srinivasan had written when announcing the program. “We intend to fund the best.”
But initial reviews were mixed. Just as gushing testimony began pouring out from the first two-month cohort, accompanied by lifestyle-inspo and health-food pics, rumors began to spread of a serious problem with mold (an unsurprising consequence, perhaps, of moving into an abandoned hotel in an equatorial rainforest). Some alleged that, instead of fixing the problem and moving on, Srinivasan forced his students to sign NDAs. Dissenters were booted from the program. Multiple students left of their own accord. Everyone remaining was asked to “leave as friends” or “double opt in,” meaning they would volunteer for Srinivasan’s new development firm. (Srinivasan did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Despite the rumors, hundreds of students continued to trek into the jungle after the first cohort, suggesting that for Srinivasan’s army of “dark talent,” the allure of the school was strong enough to overcome any worries about comfort. I heard from multiple applicants who hadn’t been accepted that there was a backlog of thousands still hoping to get in—most of them crypto workers and digital nomads in search of opportunity. Describing his selection criteria in a 2024 blog post, Srinivasan wrote: “The more respect you have for legacy institutions, and the more respect they have for you, the less suitable you’ll be.” Because ultimately, he said, he was building the Network School for a “young version of myself.”
I wanted to meet these young Balajis; to walk among them in the inner sanctum. Presumably they were coming, just like I was, to get a glimpse of Balaji’s promised future.
●
Marina Bay Sands is a 57-story megalith on the shore of Singapore’s inner harbor, a location so conspicuous that its three looming towers, connected by a giant sky bridge, are almost always visible from wherever you stand in the downtown core. It was opened in 2010 with a development cost nearing six billion dollars, making it the single most expensive hotel and casino ever built. Funding for the Sands came primarily from Las Vegas casino baron Sheldon Adelson—a man known in the United States as a Republican Party kingmaker, Trump’s largest donor in 2016 and the primary funder of Birthright, a program offering free trips for young Jews to Israel.
The complex was developed as part of the Singapore government’s plan, circa 2004, to build “integrated resorts” to attract tourism. MBS, as it’s known colloquially (no relation to the Saudi Crown Prince), has a five-star hotel with 1,850 rooms, an art-and-science museum plus shopping centers and a nightclub. It is also home to the Sands Expo & Convention Center, with a maximum capacity of 45,000 people. That’s where the Network State Conference was to be held.
I entered an auditorium that was packed with thousands of slipcovered chairs, almost all of them occupied. Onstage, Srinivasan sat down for a “fireside chat” with Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX. In 2022, Hayes and several BitMEX executives were convicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act; three years later BitMEX was fined a hundred million dollars for the same reason. In 2025, Hayes received a federal pardon from Trump, and so did the exchange—the first ever pardon granted to a corporation.
“Arthur, you had a quote a few years ago,” Srinivasan began. “‘Get your Bitcoin and get out.’ Why don’t you elaborate on that?”
Hayes explained that his attitude came from observing the false promises of the traditional financial system: “I listen to what the politicians say all around the world, and usually it’s a similar thing of ‘We’re gonna build more bombs. We’ll give you free health care. Everyone’s gonna have a job. It’s all gonna be great.’ And you never hear anything about raising taxes,” he added. “So how are they gonna do it? They’re just gonna print a fuck ton of money … until it explodes in our face.” So the point, he said, was to “take this fiat, however you can earn it, convert it to Bitcoin or gold or great equities, and then exit stage left.”
“Get to a country like Singapore, or get to a country like Dubai,” Srinivasan interjected.
It was a mantra that he had been reproducing in various forms for over a decade—on Twitter, in his book, during podcast interviews and presentations. It was a philosophy that said: get out of America, stop trusting legacy institutions, go to a place like Singapore, trust cryptography instead. The future of power, according to Srinivasan’s worldview, was divided along three axes, each corresponding to its own ideological principle: NYT, or the American establishment; CCP, or the centralized Chinese state; and BTC, or the global internet, which he defined as “the international ideology of Bitcoin and web3.” These are the only “coalitions” with the scale and talent to survive the “all-out digital struggle that has already commenced,” he wrote. Srinivasan’s “network state” was BTC on a mission for self-determination; techno-capital attempting to break free.
But something had changed from his original pitch. Back before the techlash, Srinivasan’s vision for network states had been decidedly digital-first, the logical endpoint of a world where two people can meet on Match.com and make a life together, as he wrote in Wired in 2013. “There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year.” And if those trends continue, “we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries materialize out of thin air.”
Here at the conference the focus was different. It was the network state as a physical, discrete unit: a vessel through which techno-capital could remake the geopolitical map. Onstage in a Substack t-shirt, the blogger Noah Smith likened the concept of the network state to a “new Hanseatic League.” From the twelfth through the fifteenth century, the German Hansa ruled the Baltic Sea, using their control of salt and fishing rights to build a network of cities, connected through trade alliances, that spread across borders. The network-state movement could do something similar, he suggested, creating “a modern-day network of network cities” that would function like a unified trade bloc.
According to this model, digital nomads were the market and network states were the service providers. Out in the lobby, people explained confidently—and incorrectly—that there are over forty million digital nomads in the world, so all that was needed was to build the right living spaces and the nomads would come. A hostel owner explained he was opening a network-state “node” in Belize. Another spoke about buying land in Panama. “The network state is the new crypto,” an NS student said matter-of-factly. “The network state is the new globalization,” he continued, trying again: a counterforce to an increasingly balkanized world.
I was reminded of a factoid I’d seen a couple months before, when the market valuation of crypto briefly reached an all-time high of $4 trillion: that if crypto were a country, it would have the world’s sixth largest GDP. It was a misleading statistic, to be sure; market cap and GDP are not the same. But the investment volume was significant and the money (at least theoretically) was real. This was a “country” with 36 billionaires and 241,700 millionaires, as a report making the rounds in crypto stated. Srinivasan was positioning himself as the architect of this society for the nouveau riche, a society preparing for epochal change.
A Substacker named Tomas Pueyo gave an overview of the mechanics of this coming transformation in a lecture titled “The End of Nation States?” According to Pueyo, societies tend to organize themselves around the most efficient means of wielding violence and power. Nowhere was this more evident than in the development of the nation-state. First the printing press broke the Church’s monopoly on information. Then, the heavy plow and horseshoe increased crop yields, speeding up urbanization and making it easier for officials to collect taxes. The gunpowder revolution created an arms race until only the richest fiefdoms could fight wars. The economic result was centralization and the political result was the nation-state. And now, about five hundred years later, he said, a similar process was happening in reverse. “All these technologies that used to make the state a bigger force now make it weaker”—from the internet to cryptocurrencies and even the rise of English as a lingua franca.
In The Network State, Srinivasan offers up a similar theory. History isn’t a linear progression, he argues. It’s more like a helix—a corkscrew—winding upward through a series of revolutions shaped by the real driver of history: technology. Change occurs during times of “unbundling” and “rebundling” or centralization and decentralization. The CD gets unbundled into the MP3, which gets rebundled into the Spotify playlist. “That’s the cycle that happens in computing,” he told Wired in 2022. “And I think it’s also happening here with nations and with states.” Either you’re whipped forward and upward on the corkscrew, or eventually you collapse. Either way, technology is destiny.
●
A few aisles ahead of me, I noticed Travis Bresa, who I’d met on a reporting trip to Próspera, the Honduran charter city. When we first met, Travis was an anthropology student at Oxford writing a thesis on transhumanism; now he was a banker at HSBC. He asked if I’d applied for the Network School “Open Day” departing from Singapore the next day. I hadn’t, so he sent over a link to the application and I started working through it. Eventually, though, I got stuck when it asked for my “profession.”
I thought back to a comment Patri Friedman had made at a lunch he hosted the previous day. The grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, Patri is best known in this world as the guy who “started seasteading”—a 2010s precursor to the network-state model that involved floating tech islands in international waters. Now he runs a Thiel-backed VC firm called Pronomos Capital that has invested in all the major network-state projects, from Próspera to Praxis. Because of his high profile, I thought Friedman might be able to convince Srinivasan to grant me access to the school. He had agreed to forward an email I’d written to Srinivasan, but there was still no response. I wondered out loud whether I should call myself a writer instead of a journalist. “I mean, you’re a journalist he doesn’t know, and it’s Balaji,” he said. “What do you expect?”
I entered “writer” and hit submit.
Travis and I descended to a lower level of the building where a large terrace overlooked the bay. The three looming towers of MBS stood suspended overhead, the palms of the sky bridge junglescape visible along the platform’s edge.
The architect for MBS was Moshe Safdie—great-uncle to the American filmmakers—who once described the design brief from the Singapore government as building a “microcosm” of the city-state. Admirers use the term to reflect the building’s iconic shape and topographic features, but critics have understood the microcosm metaphor differently. MBS is featured on the cover of a 2019 polemic by the Singaporean urbanist Lee Kah-Wee titled Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress, and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity. The book argues that by investing in casinos like MBS and rebranding them as “integrated resorts,” the government engages in “moral laundering,” where the so-called vice of gambling is washed away with the construction of pro-family, pro-business institutions. In this way, the city’s resorts reflect a contradiction at the heart of Singapore’s identity, Lee argues: a place where chewing gum might put you in jail, but also a playground for global capital, where the rich remain above the rules.
It was fitting that Balaji had chosen to host his big event here. On the tech right, Singapore is often held up as the ideal of a successful “startup city”; Lee Kuan Yew, its founding father, the model of the “CEO-politician” whose blend of cultural authoritarianism and technocratic planning helped transform Singapore from, as one journalist put it, “a mosquito swamp into a gleaming city-state.” As Quinn Slobodian identifies in Crack-Up Capitalism, back when Francis Fukuyama declared liberal democracy’s victory over Soviet-style communism as the end of history, he also suggested that the “soft authoritarianism” of East and Southeast Asia might be the West’s only true ideological competitor. Singapore was the prime example. Four hundred delegations of Chinese politicians and policy planners traveled to the city-state in 1992 alone to study the “Singapore model” and learn how it might be replicated on Chinese soil.
One answer was the special economic zones: industrial charter cities with low regulation, tailor-made for courting international investment. In 1979, China’s central planners began dotting the coastline with SEZs from Shenzhen to Fuzhou, and over the next few decades continued to expand their use—a strategy that many economists claim was essential to Chinese economic ascendance. Charter-city advocates have argued that if American policymakers were smart they would reproduce this model on American soil—a push that culminated in Trump’s Freedom Cities plan. The network-state crowd has embraced this policy package and positioned themselves as its intellectual and commercial muscle. The plan is to both “exit” the American-led order and “enter” its power structure at the same time. Trump, in this sense, is both a Napoleonic figure remaking the world in his image and an ideological fence, laundering techno-accelerationism into the political mainstream.
Travis went back upstairs, and I stood alone on the balcony overlooking the bay. Every few minutes, a bushy-tailed crypto HODLer would approach, wearing company swag and explaining the finer points of his startup’s prediction market or micro-payment system. I’d come to the conference hoping to speak with impassioned ideologues. But when I asked them what they thought about the network state, their answer was typically some version of “it’s pretty cool.” Most of them had come for TOKEN2049, a larger crypto event happening in Singapore that week. Once they realized I had nothing to offer them, they would slink away.
●
After all my desperate emails and solicitations, the solution to my access problem turned out to be quite simple: call myself a writer and submit the form. Eager to attract new recruits, the school’s screening process had slipped enough for a member of the Stasi to break through. The next day I was standing outside a Singapore shopping mall, rubbing shoulders with prospective students. “Are you ready for our North Korean tour?” Travis asked, approaching me after getting off the train. “Let’s be sure to stay on the lookout for the Balaji statue,” he continued, his red curls bouncing as he smiled and turned his head.
We arrived at the school to a royal welcome. Dressed in black NS.com t-shirts, a pack of students surrounded the coach and led us past the Network School sign on the hotel exterior. As if on cue, a man in flip-flops approached with a 3D VR headset and asked me to try it on. The network-state flag appeared over a floating globe, with a network-state plus sign in the middle. “Eton for Edgelords!” Travis quipped. The tour would start in about an hour, the guide said. Until then we were welcome to check out the terrace on the fifth floor.
Two blonde influencers were on the terrace filming a video. The one speaking was in tennis sneakers and a cropped safari dress with a LAV mic clipped to her collar. She had that affect and appearance native to Instagram—a vibe I’d describe as vaguely Australian, possibly AI. Which was fitting, I thought, because in the distance behind her was a city without people: long rows of empty apartment buildings furry with tropical shrubs and modular McMansions huddled in semicircles, completely deserted. “In the future,” she said to the camera, bending her knee in a little curtsy, “AI won’t just be in your phone, and in your computer, it will be in the real world.” She emphasized those last two words: real world. I stood to the side smoking a cigarette, wondering if I was breaking some rule. Watching them, I was thinking about humans mimicking algorithms mimicking humans; social networks mimicking city-states mimicking social networks.
It was my first time seeing a real-world ghost city. The phenomenon first came to public attention in the late 2000s, when a cadre of Western reporters traveled to Inner Mongolia and found a landscape of cities devoid of people. These eerie scenes quickly became symbols of China’s failing growth model, but the backstory is more interesting. After markets tightened during the 2008 financial crisis and factories began to close, Beijing responded with a stimulus package of four trillion yuan (about $586 billion) that empowered local governments to borrow heavily and build. In China, developers don’t buy land; they lease land-use rights for terms of forty to seventy years. This effectively turns local politicians into “monopoly” suppliers of urban land. Development becomes their primary source of revenue.
The result is a model some theorists call “state entrepreneurialism.” According to an oft-cited statistic, China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. Part of the ghost-city phenomenon is outright mismanagement: because local politicians’ performance was evaluated on the basis of short-term GDP gains, the system encouraged investment in trophy projects; by the time projects were completed, officials had often moved on to new jobs. But the other part is structural. In 2014, the CCP announced a new urbanization plan that would relocate hundreds of millions of rural Chinese citizens to cities. By 2025, a reported 68 percent of China’s population was living in cities, up from 50 percent in 2010—or about 290 million more people. Some ghost cities have become less ghostly over time, though dozens still exist.
Forest City is somewhat different. By the time ghost cities started getting attention in the Western media, China realized it had a problem. They curbed local officials’ access to capital to avoid overdevelopment, but their economy still relied on massive industries producing building materials like concrete and steel. So instead of focusing on domestic development they invested in another program, the Belt and Road Initiative. You might think of it as China’s version of the Marshall Plan, focused on building infrastructure (and soft power) around the world, especially in Africa and Asia. The other part is empowering Chinese development firms to build for-profit enterprises outside the mainland, which operate, when they’re large enough, like appendages of the Chinese state. Forest City was one such project. But once the CCP started preventing its citizens from moving funds offshore, the project quickly tanked. COVID hit a couple years later.
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The tour of the Network School started on the fifth floor, with a quick look at the amenities and shared spaces: a media room for podcasting, a theater center with flat screens on the wall and a “darts room” with brown leather couches and reflective mirrored gilt. Aesthetically, think Shanghai strip club converted into office space.
We took the elevator to the ground floor past the swimming pool and coworking space, where a Network State flag and Bitcoin flag were hoisted side by side. We entered the bedrooms, which were large and unremarkable: bed, desk, balcony, kitchenette. Most importantly, we went outside for the tour’s climax: the gym, in a white PVC military tent large enough to fit a wedding.
After a lunch of Buddha bowls and oat cups—a Bryan Johnson recipe, apparently very popular at the school—the group of prospective students walked together to the main coworking space, about ten minutes away, for an official orientation. On a small podium stage, the school’s founding director, Jackson Steger, explained the NS philosophy. “I grew up in a Catholic home,” he said, “where we talked about the mind, body and soul. People go to Bali, where they talk about ‘eat, pray, love.’ Here at the Network School, we talk about ‘earn, burn and learn.’” The main kind of person they try to attract is someone interested in leveling up, he said. “So everything we do, we try to do, like, ‘What’s the V1 version? What’s the V2 version?’ And improve on that as a community.”
Currently, there were about 250 people at the school, Steger explained, with hopes to expand to a thousand. “We tell members, before they come to NS,” he said, that it’s “‘frontier, not fancy,’” meaning things go wrong. “I know the lobby of the hotel looks nice and, yeah, we’re on the beach, and the rooms are reasonably cool, but things break all the time here,” he said. “So the best thing that you can do to contribute to NS is just make it a better place to live.”
And things do break, especially in the tropics. A few months later, I received a trove of documents from a researcher close to the school. The packet, entitled “Mencius Moldcult,” an ironic pun on Curtis Yarvin’s pen name, told a hidden story about the early NS days, one painstakingly scrubbed from public view.
There were extensive pictures of the mold, taken from the hotel’s twelfth floor. There were copies of the contract signed by students, with an airtight anti-mainstream media NDA. There were “compatibility” surveys filled out by students as part of their NS application.1For the survey, students were asked to rank their preferences on a number of cultural phenomena—from wealth taxes, Greta Thunberg and drag-queen story hour (presumably cringe) to traditional femininity, bootstrapping and life extension (presumably based). There were three potential outcomes: Ally, Aligned or Another. If you were “really into communism” you were not a fit; if you were really into veganism, “you might eventually join one of our allied communities.” The final option was acceptance; you’re fully aligned. “For example, you’re really into technocapitalism.” And there were recordings from the town hall melodrama when Balaji was confronted about the mold.
About a month after the school opened, the full group gathered for a conversation that quickly became heated. Multiple students claimed to be experiencing health problems. A number of participants had been complaining in a private group chat. A pack of wild dogs had been stalking Forest City. “Balaji,” one of the students said during a particularly heated moment, “you spot exponential trends early … what is the percent likelihood on zero to a hundred that all of Forest City more or less needs to get torn down because of mold?”
After some cajoling, Srinivasan responded: “Look, I wouldn’t be here if I thought it was a big deal, okay? That’s the ultimate proof. I think it’s honestly a social contagion, like trans stuff.” Then one of his employees explained their five-step plan to mitigate the mold.
Steger clarified why “earn”—alongside burn and learn—was one of the most important NS values: “If you look at the history of how people move or how cities are built, the number one reason … is for economic opportunity.” That’s why they have a fellowship that’s analogous to Y Combinator in the U.S., he said, and a new “earn” program, where students would be able to win Bitcoin or USDC bounties for completing tasks, like clipping Srinivasan’s podcast or reviewing Peter Thiel’s books. On the screen behind him, a white slide with bold text read: “Anyone. Anywhere. $100k. Global meritocracy is here.”
Again, the recordings tell a more complex story. Four days after the first town hall, the group met again. “We are rebooting the community as a tech tribe,” Srinivasan said to start the meeting, “and our core competency will be turning around distressed real estate.” “We’re still doing ‘Learn, Burn, Earn, Fun,’” he continued, but now they were asking students to “double opt in or opt out.” Double-opting in meant that students were required to volunteer either one hour, ten hours or one hundred hours a week for the “full-time tier.” “We need resilient people for the path forward,” he said. “I want to make sure that people understand that they’re signing up for a ‘frontier, not-fancy’ kind of thing.”
One of Srinivasan’s students later explained to me NS’s mission to convert “distressed real estate.” Think of WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new startup, Flow, he said: “WeWork plus apartments plus amenities in a single building”—an integrated tech campus. Volunteering for Srinivasan could mean scouting new developments, building out the student curriculum, combating the mold. It’s a multitiered system, he said, with volunteers as near-outsiders and full-time workers as “generals.” The generals joke that they’ll get their own fiefdoms when the network state succeeds, he said. They all behave as if Balaji is king.
The mold situation, he observed, indicated one of the main weaknesses of corporate city-states. Tech states are just as likely to become “enshittified” as legacy states, he said, but when things go wrong, the downsides are far worse. Coined by the journalist Cory Doctorow, the term “enshittification” describes how large tech platforms degrade their products once they reach a certain scale and systematically gate the exits to maximize profits. “The logic of corporate city-states is that because they’re consumer-focused, they’ll perform better than democracies as service providers,” the student said. “But corporations are just as likely to become degraded.” Balaji forcing people to double-opt in or leave is like Instagram banning user profiles that violate their terms of service, he said, since there’s no political recourse. Either you comply with TOS or you can’t use the platform. Now apply that logic to a full-fledged city-state: “What kind of user is more locked in than a homeowner?”
Our tour group was invited to join a workout in the hangar, but I found myself lagging behind, wandering through the empty streets. Small patches of dirt broke through the concrete, and orange heliconias dangled from the trees.
The day before, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had said onstage that, to him, the Network School was like a monastery, where people go to feel spiritually engaged. This reminded me of a week I’d spent, more than a decade earlier, at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. I’d gone to Israel for ten days of falafel and military history on a trip similar to Birthright, and the yeshiva was a free way to extend the visit. For eight hours a day, I argued with a black-hatted rabbi in his fifties. We spoke about kashrut, the coming of the Messiah and the metaphysics of chosenness, the Jewish idea that God has a special purpose for you. The rabbi had tried to convince me that studying at yeshiva was a way to be closer to God, to become a better person. Srinivasan was offering his students a similar opportunity to level up. The time was now to ascend like a bodhisattva and Become Yourself 2.0. Build your own tech tribe and inherit the earth—become a sovereign individual.
I wondered if that’s what Srinivasan meant when he described his vision for the network state as “tech Zionism.” Ever since The Network State was published, Srinivasan had been citing Israel as a practical inspiration and comparing himself to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. The idea was that in effect he would do for technologists what Zionism did for Jews: provide self-determination for the “gray tribe,” the digital nomads of the emergent tech religion, who had no place in a red-versus-blue America locked in a terminal civil war. When “tech Zionism” gets mentioned in the media, it’s usually to capture Srinivasan’s unique brand of edgelordism, or the recklessness of his “colonial” ambitions. But, as a former student explained to me, Balaji views Judaism as a “social technology.” And when it comes to social tech, “Judaism is the GOAT.”
At the same time, it also serves another purpose, which is to insinuate that tech nomads are a persecuted minority. For over a decade, Srinivasan has fixated on the media backlash to the growing power of tech. “They are basically going to try to blame the economy on Silicon Valley,” he said of the media establishment, when introducing the network-state concept in 2013. They would argue that “it was the iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts, the bankruptcies, and the bombings.” Since then, he’d started claiming that “anti-tech violence is ramping up” and that when Democrats are “torching” self-driving cars “the message is: today it’s the car, tomorrow it’s you in the car.” “Technology is a class,” Srinivasan wrote on X, and most of the violence in the twentieth century “was on the basis of class.” “That’s what communism was,” he wrote: “mass murder of the capitalist class.”
It was a Herculean act of psychic inversion: having spent so much time fighting the politics of identity, he’d incorporated its ideas to manufacture an origin story of violent oppression. It was a story in which the billionaires were the oppressed and the libtards were the mob and the journalists were the Stasi and the newspapers were the Church. The technologists were the Jews and the Democrats were Hitler and it was only a matter of time before the Third Reich would begin. And so Balaji was Herzl and he was also Ben-Gurion, and soon he’d lead the people into the promised land. Zion was a ghost city built by China. It was called the Network School.
After ten minutes of walking, I made it back to the hotel, where a small group had assembled with cameras by the door. Srinivasan was wearing sports shorts and flip-flops with a camera pressed to his face. The YouTuber Nas Daily was talking to him, urging him to try again, with a little more energy.
“My name is Balaji and this is the Network School,” he said.
“One more time.”
“My name is Balaji and this is the Network School.” He drummed his arms in a circle.
“Why is he dressed like such a slob?” I asked Travis, who was approaching from across the courtyard. “Counter-signaling?” He shrugged as we walked closer. A group of students gathered behind Srinivasan, crossing their arms and flexing in black muscle shirts.
Nas indicated that he’d gotten the right footage and the crowd began to splinter. Most of them headed upstairs for a concert in “the mafia room.” The buses idled outside the hotel lobby.
I walked upstairs for the concert; about sixty people were packed into the room, facing a black digital piano on an elevated platform. A girl with dark hair came onto the stage and said that she’d be singing a song by Lorde. If the crowd knew the words, she added, they could sing along—and they did.
●
I woke up on the 35th floor of a hotel down the street from the Network School. Save for the maintenance crew and security guard, I hadn’t seen a single other person in the hotel (even though, as recently as 2023, Forest City’s developers boasted that its two hotels were “always fully booked”). I stood on the balcony and watched the sun rise over the fishing boats and oil tankers. A car had been doing donuts on the beach, so there were dark circles in the sand.
I’d decided to stick around for an extra day instead of heading back to Singapore with the rest of the group; there was a mini-conference happening in the private wing of the school headed by James of Ârc. A few days earlier, I’d asked James if I could join and he said, “I don’t care what happens, man. As long as I don’t see you.” He didn’t want to anger Balaji.
When I arrived, Patri Friedman was in the lobby, wearing a beer tank top and a bandana. “My Malaysia outfit,” he chuckled, taking a drag on his vape.
Srinivasan walked through the lobby in his t-shirt and sport shorts. He was surrounded by a throng of people, who migrated each time he moved from end to end. “He has to keep moving,” Friedman explained, because if he stays in one place he’ll get mobbed with questions. We walked up to Srinivasan and I introduced myself, explaining that I was writing a book about the network state. “Send me the manuscript,” he said, with a smile and a fist bump. Then he was off, a group of blackshirts hot on his tail.
I asked Patri about what had happened the previous night, after the orientation ended. He said there’d been a “scheming dinner” for the conference speakers, and then our conversation turned to the growing discomfort in the tech world with Balaji’s gestures toward alignment with China.
I’d seen it myself when Srinivasan was onstage at the conference, during the final Q&A. “If we want our network states to last thousands of years,” one person had asked, “we have to think about defense … Is it something like paying the U.S. a fee to protect us? Is it holding a U.S. military base? Is it joining the UN?” Srinivasan responded: “China is by far the world’s strongest military power, like it or not.” One Chinese shipyard makes more ships than the entire U.S. Navy combined, he reminded them. “So my view is: the U.S. can’t fight China.” And if that’s the case, “You have to not fight in the physical realm because you can’t win the physical realm … Try and be as win-win as possible.”
When I got to the conference room, James was sitting on the stage in a white cotton jacket and matching shorts with no shoes. Behind him there were four pull-up banners with blue skies and classical architecture; a statue of a man in a toga with his arms stretched wide was facing the sea.
“Do you think we are at an inflection point in terms of, like, acceptance, or just people believing that it’s plausible that we can build these things?” James asked.
“Definitely,” Patri responded, nodding vigorously in a new change of clothes. There are people in the media, he explained, who “think we’re taking over the First World” with freedom cities and free ports. “We’re real threats to them.”
“Is there some scarcity here?” James asked, referencing a country where one of Patri’s portfolio companies had recently announced a zone. “If it’s 10 percent of their land that’s being contributed, they can’t do that many more times,” he said, crossing his legs like a Buddha on the seat.
“I sometimes joke that governments are even more herd animals than venture capitalists are,” Patri said. “And when they see stuff working, they all want it.” So there could be a domino effect of zones. “Like, my personal, lifetime, North Star metrics,” he said, “are about how much of world population, GDP and land area is zoned into 21st-century government. And look: the entire world needs to be rezoned into 21st-century government. The entire Global South needs to do a Singapore and come up to standard.”
James and I locked eyes for a second, and he quickly looked away. I’d arranged for a bus to take me back to Singapore, so I grabbed my bags and headed for the door. I hadn’t seen any mold in the building during the time I was there, but I had seen many dehumidifiers. At least anecdotally, it seemed, the decontamination strategy had worked.
In the end, though, it wasn’t the mold that did them in, but the government. A few weeks ago, on July 21st, the Iskander Puteri City Council announced it would revoke the Network School’s business license, effective the next day, and ordered it to cease operations.
This was the outcome of a public imbroglio that had erupted over the course of July after the Network School was investigated for hiding Israeli nationals. (Malaysia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel but also doesn’t explicitly forbid Israeli citizens from entering the country with second passports.) In a lengthy response posted on X after the probe turned up no illegitimate immigration documents, Srinivasan claimed the investigation was a hit job by an anti-tech Malaysian political group. He also posted a 32-minute video response, emphasizing his companies’ investments in Malaysia (supposedly more than $100 million RNM, or $25 million USD), and suggesting he could take the school elsewhere if it wasn’t wanted.2The “anti-tech” group is called MP4P, or Malaysian Protest 4 Palestine, and its online criticism of the Network School centered on Srinivasan’s “tech zionism.” In his public condemnation of MP4P, including in his response video, Srinivasan did not use the words “Israel” or “Palestine,” sidestepping what was, for MP4P, the core issue. The government evidently interpreted the video as a threat—they revoked NS’s business license instead. The same day, Srinivasan announced that the school was moving to Kazakhstan.
Maybe this proved that network states are doomed to fail, as Joshua Dávila, a crypto researcher with ties to the school, suggested to me. Assuming that culture is fungible, they imagine that for every problem there is a price to fix it. Or maybe, as Patri Friedman suggested, it simply proves Srinivasan’s thesis about the waning importance of physical geography: there will always be another state to make a deal with, another opportunistic leader who wants to attract global tech talent.
The inconvenient reality, of course, is that while the location may change, wherever you go there you are. Ideas keep tumbling back down to earth. As in his handling of the mold, when confronted with a crisis, Srinivasan’s response is to ask others to “opt in” or leave—his project framed as above environmental conditions, above nation-states and their laws, above the system of nationalism itself.
As the bus pulled into Singapore, I imagined Balaji in Forest City, walking through the jungle green. He had come a long way to this hotel-sized fiefdom. If the school was for a young version of himself, I wondered, who would that young person be? I imagined him floating over the buildings, pointing out mold where the people were supposed to be. The corkscrew was spinning somewhere in the dark beyond the city. The golden future of the gray tribe must have seemed so close.
Photo credit: Sam Venis
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.