Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, turns to address the hundreds of tech workers and investors filling a darkened arena in Singapore — all there to learn how to build empires.
It is early October and Srinivasan is hosting what he’s called the Network State Conference, an event targeting “those interested in founding, funding and finding new communities”.
For years, the entrepreneur has preached to clubby tech gatherings that they should gather their online comrades and set up a physical homeland — a network state, be that a city or a country — by joining together to buy land. He has hailed this as the “ultimate exit” by Silicon Valley from “failing” US institutions and democracy.
But what was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation. While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works, according to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan. A few have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive.
For proponents, the initiatives offer the opportunity to address all that they believe has caused a decline in American dynamism, from monetary policy to taxation. San Francisco, in particular, has for years been affected by high levels of homelessness and crime, prompting an exodus of tech workers during Covid.
But the movement’s toughest critics — of whom there is no short supply — cast it as either a bid to play god or an attempt to avoid red tape, more opportunistic than idealistic. Others argue it is part of a broader rise in techno-fascism, or a form of authoritarian rule by technocrats. Either way, they assert, the movement is born from an elite victim complex.
Thiel, who has a net worth of $27bn and is one of the biggest funders of the space, gave a series of Manichaean lectures in recent weeks about the “Antichrist”. In between arguing that AI sceptics and Greta Thunberg were Satan, he complained that wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment”.
“Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” says Olivier Jutel, a lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand and an expert in cyberlibertarianism. “They think they are the grand solutionists that can fix all the problems, but it’s so insular. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”
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