Tech investor Balaji Srinivasan has announced plans to move into an abandoned resort city in Malaysia called Forest City where he hopes to build a “network state.” The network state is a type of anarcho-capitalism where “governments” are run by decentralized corporations.
The city was built by China at a cost of over $100 billion but has remained largely unused. The network state activist is starting a school in the ghost town called the Wake Forest School where tech utopians can come learn about the network state while they test their network state theories out in the ghost town.
Tech Utopians Are Using a Chinese-Built ‘Ghost City’ to Trial Their Network State Fantasies – Gizmodo
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Excerpt:
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.
