Dave Karpf wrote about the Silicon Valley Edgelords’ plan for world domination and it’s important:
Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network State is a blueprint of sorts. It is the wild fever-dream of Silicon Valley’s libertarian investor-class. It imagines a near future in which online communities use the blockchain to opt out of government and form their own competing “network states.”
It’s essentially just Galt’s Gulch, plus blockchain.
If you want to know what the Tech Barons are attempting to replace democracy with, then it is important to take Srinivasan seriously.
But Balaji is not a serious person. The book is manifestly ridiculous. It is a blueprint drawn in crayon. Balaji’s ideas are stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright.
Imagine if Creed Bratton, from The Office, was a multibillionaire and he composed a manifesto, to which his even richer pals remarked “[Creed] has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.”
That’s the lesson I drew last week, while reading this pitiful excuse for a book (you can read the 135-post bluesky reaction thread here): The tech barons do have a blueprint. But they have not thought any of their plans through.
We ought to take them seriously; we ought to laugh in their faces.
I would laugh if it didn’t make me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head — forever. But they are ridiculous:
(1) Start by launching an online community, organized around “One Commandment” or shared belief.
(2) Build a capacity for collective action and resource acquisition.
(3) Buy property, distributed across the globe, connected through the blockchain and Artificial/Virtual Reality.
(4) get “diplomatic recognition” from existing nation-states. Boom, congratulations, the future has arrived.
This is all delivered in painfully stilted startup-speak. To Balaji, governments are just like startups. Social movements are just like startups. There is a real “Boss Baby tweet” motif throughout the book. Srinivasan simply can’t think beyond his own proximate life experience.
Read the whole thing. It’s not the first time I’ve read something about this bizarre geek wet dream. A bunch of them have actually been buying up land in California to build their Disney-style “City of Yesterday”:
Tens of thousands of acres later, a group backed by Silicon Valley’s wealthiest says it’s done buying up land in northern California for its walkable, utopian city.
Flannery Associates has been grabbing plots of land in Solano County, about 60 miles from San Francisco, for the past five years. The company has spent about $800 million to purchase tens of thousands of acres of farmland with the support of tech billionaires, including Marc Andreessen and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Renderings of the company’s plan show two- to three-story rowhouses, children biking in the middle of the streets, and parents taking a stroll — all without a car in sight. Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, said the company wants to build a “city of yesterday.” The project has been named California Forever.
Now, the company says it has all the land it needs to carry out its vision.
There have been many science fiction stories based on this idea. None of them turn out well.
I urge you to read Karpf’s entire piece because we desperately need insight into what’s going on beneath the surface of this chaos. The Bitcoin nonsense, the silly vision of utopia informed by movies and TV, it’s all nonsense. But they have a lot of money and it’s giving them power to actually act on this lunacy.
Trump is an idiot who just wants revenge and has been convinced he’s an emperor. His narcissism and ignorance are being used by these cyber-barons to see their puerile visions come to fruition (and they are very, very stupid visions.) But we have to pay attention because it’s all so dangerous.
Karpf concludes:
The reason we have to take Balaji’s musings seriously at all is that they provide a window into what Elon Musk and the DOGEkiddies are trying to accomplish.
The tech barons think they should be allowed to opt out society. They do not know what the administrative state does. They do not care to find out. And they figure we could save a whole lot of money if we just turn the whole thing off.
Gil Duran has an excellent newsletter, The Nerd Reich, that covers all their activities.
They have tried to establish their own private tech-utopia cities. Multi-billionaires have invested millions into these schemes — which is either proof that they are serious or proof that they have such absurd wealth that they throw away millions on unserious larks (or, more likely, both).
They have spent hundreds of millions, bankrolling political candidates and trying to take over existing governments. At the national level, in the United States, it seems they have succeeded.
They have taken control of the U.S. financial system and begun to weaponize it (please read Henry Farrell’s latest, if you haven’t already).
Balaji provided the blueprint in 2022. His self-published diatribe was taken very seriously by very rich people who are entirely convinced of their own self-importance.
It would be a mistake to dismiss this out of hand. It is a serious threat.
But also, it is so very, very foolish.
Vast wealth in the hands of a bunch of emotionally infantile, intellectually stunted nerds (with the help of a bunch of Wall Street pirates) has brought us to a major crisis. We need to understand it.
They aren’t omnipotent, they’re just rich. Their ideas are inane. They can be defeated.