Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, is a weird guy. He’s talked about living forever. He helped finance a pro-steroids athletic competition. And he once threw away a million dollars betting a random Twitter user that Bitcoin would cost a million dollars each. By far, the weirdest thing about Srinivasan, however, is that he is the proselytizer of a new ideological movement that wants to do the same thing to cities that crypto did to money.
For a very long time, Srinivasan has been calling on 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. Srinivasan is one of the main proponents behind “the network state,” an anarcho-capitalist school of thought that seeks to basically create privatized communities that break with modern historical precedent and run themselves like decentralized corporations rather than cities with governments.
While it would take a much longer article to effectively explain what Srinivasan believes and what he hopes to get out of his crypto-laced hyper-libertarian project, the short story is this: big money is fueling Srinivasan’s vision and proponents are already attempting to create real-world proofs of his weird belief system in experiments like the Honduran enclave of Prospera. Some people have alleged that California Forever, the floundering tech-funded urban development project in the Bay Area, is another effort connected to the ideology.
Srinivasan has recently opened a school where would-be disciples of his bold new philosophy can go to learn about the tenets of the “network state.” He even seems to have nabbed an island where this education can take place. “Through the power of Bitcoin, we now have a beautiful island near Singapore where we’re setting up the Network School,” a website connected to the project claims. It also advertises the opportunity to “learn technology,” “burn calories,” and “earn currency.” The “90-day residential program” started Monday and will continue until Dec 23, the site states.
Wired reports that tuition is free, although participants will have to pay $1000/month for accommodations with roommates and $2000 for a solitary room. For that price of admission, there’s a lot of weird stuff being offered. Participants will get to “complete daily problems in mini classrooms” that “involve a combination of coding and posting on social media, and earning “proof-of-learn” NFTs upon completion,” Wired writes. It’s not really clear what that means, though when you put it all together it sounds like an expensive DeFi-themed summer camp.
Even more unappealingly, Wired writes that Srinivasan has offered attendees the opportunity to do “workouts, meals, and health lessons” led by Bryan Johnson, the tech guy who has spent millions of dollars to “de-age” himself but has only really succeeded in making himself look like an unhealthy version of Tilda Swinton.
If, for some reason, all of this sounds appealing to you, you can follow the technocapitalist experiment via Srinivasan’s Substack. I would advise against it but, as they say, it’s a free country.
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