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Olivier Jutel
University of Otago
Abstract
This paper considers the emerging network state movement as evidence of the interplay between exit
ideologies and exit strategies in the political economy of venture capital. Web3 and blockchain have become
fixations for venture capitalists and founders as they offer a means of financial exit and tell the story of
libertarian exit from the state as an oppressive centralized power. Exit functions as a neocolonial and spatial
power as the promises of an abundant frontier relies on settling the interstital zones of global finance made
possible by the Washington Consensus of global trade. The network states’ spatial logic of networks, the state
and urbanity also reimagines cities as enclaves of venture capitalists and founders. The importance of this
fantasy upon the political economy of venture capital is in ‘imprinting’ (Cooiman, 2024) upon founders the
values of the techno-philosopher VC; from Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreessen to Peter Thiel. This paper
identifies the 2023 Network State conference as a high point for the movement in which exit ideologies
perform a ‘hyperstitious’ (Lynch, and Muñoz-Viso, 2023) logic that is integral to venture capital.
The Network State, Venture Capital and the Political Economy of Exit
This paper will exam the relationship between the technologies of web3, the political economy of venture
capitalism and the neocolonial geographies of blockchain. The technological imaginary of web3 has been dealt a
series of blows. Exchanges have collapsed, retail investors were wiped out in 2022 and media attention has
shifted to artificial intelligence. What remains is a set of venture capitalists, tech-founders and techno-optimists
that have coalesced around the idea of the network state and exit. Exit denotes both a strategy and ideology. As
a financial strategy exit is how investors realizes value through liquidating an equity stake. Ideologically it is the
libertarian ideal of exiting the state to settle new territories as a digital nomad. Venture capital (VC) firms like
a16z have staked a great deal on web3 as a lucrative means of raising capital and devising exit (Allen, 2024).
This bleeding edge of fintech and arbitrage has also relied upon ‘interstitial spaces’ (Simpson and Sheller, 2022)
and neocolonial geographies (Jutel, 2023) to gain a foothold on the margins of global finance. Exit as strategy
and ideology are mutually reinforcing in creating web3 as a frontier territory.
The network state movement consists of funders, founders and techno-evangelists drawn to overdetermined
fantasies of the techno-frontier. While bitcoin represents the-ur technology of freedom and self-sovereignty at
the core of the network state, this idea has attracted all manner of techno-optimists and accelerationists. The
network state has been able to transmute the failures of crypto to revolutionize finance and governance,
through the idea that networks of web3 enthusiasts represent future states and an expression of power and
sovereignty. The defacto leader of this movement is Balaji Srinavasan, an angel investor, former a16z partner
and author of the book ‘The Network State’. He assumes the role of an investor-philosopher-influencer as he
works dark enlightenment (NRx) concepts into web3 governance ideals. The network state expands upon VC
led investment in developing world crypto (Jutel, 2021) and the charter cities movement (Ebner and Peck,
2022; Lynch, and Muñoz-Viso, 2023) in articulating exit. This movement has relied upon a techno-colonial
imaginary, bifurcated between frontier self-determination and the more counterculture tones of digital
nomadism. These fantasies are played out over both the virtual territories of web3 and in the footholds of
special economic zones and developing world nations where jurisdictional arbitrage has secured territory.
This paper will argue that the network state project embodies the exit strategies and ideologies at the heart of
the political economy of VC. Blockchain, crypto and web3 start-ups have been a preoccupation of VC as the
result of favourable state policies towards Silicon Valley. This has created a herd mentality towards software
and hyper-financialization over more capital-intensive forms of technology (Lee, 2022; Allen, 2024). a16z has
been the most bullish investor in web3 with its cofounder, Marc Andressen, a vocal NRx accelerationist and
exit ideologue. For a16z web3 offers workarounds of securities laws, the ability to raise capital through tokens
and an ease of liquidating their position with far less oversight than an IPO. Thus the financial innovations of
blockchain platforms and crypto are less important than their ‘fundamental continuity’ (Omarova, 2019) with
financialization, regulatory arbitrage and the privileging of VC in the tech economy. Web3 promises of
tokenizing the social world further fuse the logic of exit strategies and ideologies. It fosters the tendency of
start-up founders to ‘imprint’ (Cooiman, 2024) upon VCs and their “unicorn” benchmarks with quixotic value
propositions. The Network State and the political economy of VC comes to rely on the NRx logic of
‘hyperstition’ (Lynch, and Muñoz-Viso, 2023). The Silicon Valley mantra of “fake it ‘til you make it” takes on a
techno-religious character as faithful pronunciations become the means to bring about the epochal changes of
web3.
In order to capture the interactions between the social and political economic logics of exit this article will
focus on the Network State Conference held in Amsterdam in October of 2023. Conferences and meet-ups
have been highwater marks for the movement in the attempt to frame social networking and pitch decks as
“building” new nations. The conference brought the scope of the network state network into relief; ranging
from life extension therapy, AI home-schooling, supper-club meetups and charter cities. Srinivasan figures
prominently as the philosopher/funder of these various invocations of the network state. Behind the one
leader, one commandment principle that he lays out for network state projects is the exaltation of VCs and
their ideological priorities. The start-ups and network states featured at the conference can be identified as
either part of Nomad Networks, the Charter Cities movement or the ideologues of Exiting the Cathedral. The
fanciful elements of network state utopianism and NRx culture war concretize the political economy of VC
with speculative technological horizons used as paths for exit.
Network State Movement
The concept of the network state can be seen as a placeholder for the failures of crypto and web3. Satoshi’s
white paper remains a founding, pseudo-religious text, however the various instantiations of blockchain have
failed to deliver on their revolutionary promise. Crypto payment methods and financial inclusion in the
developing world have failed to scale. Web3 startups in Africa that were viewed as the vanguard of this
techno-revolution (Jutel, 2023) have had the VC spigots turned off, with ensuing lay-offs and shutdowns. The
exuberance of the 2021 crypto market, replete with memecoins and NFTs, saw average retail investors wiped
out while whales made their exit and ‘ate the krill’ (Bank of International Settlements, 2023). The exchanges
that were supposed to decentralize finance and build a trustless economy have been mired in legal woes and
guilty of spectacular financial crimes. The hopes of the industry and remaining whales have been placed in
minor regulatory victories such as crypto exchange-traded funds backed by the likes of BlackRock. This is a far
cry from Satoshi’s white paper and so the network state serves as a way to rekindle a grander vision until the
next bubble emerges or a friendly administration regains the White House.
This movement and rhetorical shift has been led by investors and venture capitalists that have pushed the
colonial boundaries of blockchain (Jutel, 2021; Jutel, 2023; Rosales et al, 2024; Crandall, 2023). There is a
convergence of interests around landgrabs, arbitrage in the developing world and the belief that Satoshi
‘reopened the frontier’ (Srnivasan, 2022: 237). It is a network and fraction of class power that ‘know each
other, invest in each other, compete with each other’ (Little and Winch, 2021: 17) and share a view of
themselves as unrestrained in effecting social transformation. The network state embodies Silicon Valley as an
extension of American empire not simply through notions of techno-liberty but in familial lineage. Patri
Friedman, grandson of arch-neoliberal Milton, has been attempting to expand the frontier of techno-liberty
with the backing of Peter Thiel through the Seasteading Institute. Friedman now heads Pronomos Capital a VC
fund which backs charter cities, special economic zones and network state projects across Latin America,
Africa and the Asia Pacific region. Among these projects are ventures backed by other investors and crypto-
colonialists including Peter Thiel, Tim Draper, Binance’s CZ and Srinivasan.
Friedman cites as an inspiration Paul Romer, the economist who was drawn to Milton Friedman’s adulation for
Hong Kong as a free market success story. The development panacea for Romer and the charter cities
movement is new terrain for free market experimentation and ‘Burning Man urbanization’ (Ebner and Peck,
2022: 26). For the Network State there is no theory of urban life or the state, in all its complexity, other than
as a terra nullius for entrepreneurs and digital nomads. The network state is a product of the charter cities
movement, and by extension the Washington Consensus of market-led development (Jutel, 2023), in that it
has made use of Special Economic Zones and the liminal spaces of the global economy for experimentation.
This colonial politics has been masked by invocations of robust legal frameworks, competition and property
registries. With blockchain these charter city legal principles become folded into one platform and augmented
by wild speculation around life extension therapy, AI healthcare and nano-tech (Lynch and Muñoz-Viso, 2023:
9). In the developing world this has meant creating digital nomad residency programs and viewing the
developing world as a blank slate for crypto-innovation and performative experiments of exit (Simpson, 2021).
Romer’s invocation of Milton Friedmann and the cyber counterculture captures the performative range of the
network state movement. The creator of the Ethereum blockchain Vitalik Buterin represents the fraction of
the movement that leans into the iconography of the new communalists and the Californian Ideology (Brody et
al, 2023) as opposed to Bitcoin’s hard libertarian rhetoric of self-sovereignty. Buterin has created ‘Zuzalu’
1
as a
1
Zuzalu was chosen as a name for Buterin’s network state using ChatGPT prompts.
network nation that included a month-long resort pop-up for blockchain nomads and ‘tribes’ to tease out the
network state’s ideals (2023). This amorphous utopianism has led Stewart Brand to claim Ethereum as an
extension of the Whole Earth counterculture (Brody et al, 2023). The Whole Earth ‘Ltronic Link in particular
is an apt comparison as a techno-utopian social network that would launch notable founders. This self-selecting
elite social network in Silicon Valley has successfully universalized their experience through networks as the
ideology that informs the tech economy and a concept such as Burning Man urbanism. While the Ethereum
blockchain hosts Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO) and experiments in governance, Buterin and
Ethereum are at the heart of exit strategies. Ethereum is the blockchain that makes ICOs, governance tokens
and smart contracts possible. Buterin (2022) has expressed some critiques of Srinivasan’s Network State as
privileging the wealthy and containing democratic deficits while still identifying himself as a partisan of the
movement. It is a remarkably sanguine critique considering just how openly Srinivasan and Peter Thiel,
Buterin’s original benefactor, are aligned with NRx ideals and a techno-imperial chauvinism.
The network state fuses this Californian Ideology with the legacies of financial and military imperialism. One of
the key figures in securing territorial and legal concessions for blockchain and the network state in the
developing world is Tim Draper. Draper is a third generation venture capitalist, with his grandfather William H
Draper Jr at the fulcrum of finance, national defence and industry in the 20th century. Draper Jr was a two-star
general and investment banker with ties to German industry both before and during the post-War occupation
(Martin, 2016) and who held the first US ambassadorship to NATO. Draper Jr established Silicon Valley’s first
VC firm alongside an airforce Major General and the president of the Ford Foundation (Berlin, 2014). Tim
Draper has used this esteemed lineage and a techno-optimism to establish Draper University and Draper
Start-Up Houses as the foundation for Draper Nation as ‘the world’s first Bitcoin nation’ (2023). These
networks of Silicon Valley solutionism have allowed Draper to acquire an MoU with the government of Papua
New Guinea (Jutel, 2021) and establish a blockchain digital residency program in Palau (Howson and Jutel,
2022). Draper was ceremonially inaugurated as the first digital resident of Palau by the president Surangel
Whipps Jr who compared Draper to the original Pacific wayfarers (RNS, 2022). He would later be joined by
Buterin and CZ as digital residents, while Patri Friedman has also invested in the digital residency program
through Pronomos. Palau is a key staging point for the crypto economy and the network state. The digital
residency program has been a form of nominal KYC for exchanges like Binance, Srinivasan has feted Whipps Jr
as a visionary and these nomad residencies are now part of the Solana blockchain (Zmudzinski, 2024).
Silicon Valley Exit
The fantasies of exit are inextricably linked to Silicon Valley as an imperial core. It is the techno-financial centre
of VC and the start-up economy but also the convergence point of American technology and the frontier. As
Malcolm Harris writes of the Valley, Stanford University is a particular locus of American historical,
technological and settler colonial forces (2023). It is a university forged by railroad oligarchy, extractive
industries and at the forefront of eugenics, or the study of “genius”. Its legacy of technological innovation owes
to its status as ‘the exemplary Cold War university’ (Harris, 2023) backed by Pentagon funding. It has created
the urban ideal of tech campuses, networked clusters of innovation and the Palo Alto suburban garage.
Network staters like Thiel, Patri Friedman, Draper and Srinivasan all leverage their Stanford pedigree in the
start-up space. The Stanford network fuses class and cultural power as start-ups founded by Stanford alum
enjoy the largest share of pre-seed and seed funding (Glasner, 2023).
This milieu matters in terms of accessing financial backing but also as an ideological project that cannot
reconcile the fixity of Silicon Valley and the desire for frontier exits. In 2014 Rebecca Solnit wrote in Harper’s
Magazine that Friedman, Thiel, Draper and Srnivasan were the architects of a tech-secessionist movement that
included the Seasteading institute, Draper’s ‘6 Californias’ ballot initiative and Srinivasan’s call for ‘Silicon
Valley’s Ultimate Exit (Srinivasan, 2013). Speaking at Y Combinator he urged the startup community to ‘show
what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like’ (Srinivasan, 2013). Designating the old world of
government and media as the ‘paper belt’ he invoked the Godfather in calling for ‘a horse’s head in all their
beds’ (Srinivasan, 2013). But as will be seen in the analysis of the network state conference San Francisco,
Stanford and the Valley remain an imperial core for this techno-geography of exit.
This politics of exit has culminated with Srinivasan’s the self-publication of his book ‘The Network State; in
2022. The text can best be described as an NRx screed in which Srinivasan draws on his particular fixations as
universal questions of government and the state. He leans on the Thiel acolyte Curtis Yarvin in formulating the
network state’s antagonist along the lines of the Cathedral (Smith and Burrows, 2021). This ‘left authoritarian
network’ is lead by the New York Times, academia and systems of government fiat. The current political
configuration which demands exit is a tripolar global balance of power between the New York Times, the
Chinese Communist Party and Bitcoin. He designates this tripartite structure of networks as relying on
different technologies of truth: ‘paper (NYT), party (CCP), or protocol (BTC)’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 145). His
book is replete with crank political scales and graphs (see figs. 1-3) including theories of history such as ‘The
Right Cycle’ in which the poles in political history are determined by the far-right manosphere maxim;
‘strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times
create strong men’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 112)
Srinivasan has embraced the role of the investor-philosopher and online culture warrior much like Marc
Andreessen, Elon Musk or David Sacks. On ‘The Network State podcast’ he declared explicitly fascist politics
alongside Joe Lonsdale, Palantir co-founder, Stanford alum and network state VC. The pair praised Argentina’s
Javier Miliei as a devotee of Milton Friedman but said this was not enough; ‘you need to make sure socialists
don’t try to take over your country [Lonsdale]…I agree the social responsibility of entrepreneurs is to keep
out the socialists [Srinivasan]’ (Srnivasan, 2024). He has also mused on his podcast of ‘ethnically cleansing’ San
Francisco of political progressivism through a crypto led coup and coaptation of local governance (Duran,
2024b),
Srinivasan’s network state combines the right-wing culture war gripes of techno-accelerationists with an
overdetermined fantasy of an apolitical society based on bitcoin. The germ of the state is described as a ‘highly
aligned online community with a capacity for collective action’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 9) including territorial
footholds from digital nomad enclave. It will be blockchain based as Bitcoin’s immutability ‘is the most rigorous
form of history yet known to man’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 32) and will allow the network state settlers to reclaim
history from the woke. This record of history is analogous to the Library of Babel and will create a Leviathan
network effect in which ‘network-worshipping crypto tribes’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 48-49) will resist the ability of
the woke to control networks. Exit will create a highly aligned society that overcomes politics in the way that
computers, robotics or pure math are described by Srinivasan as apolitical (Srinivasan, 2022: 100). The decisive
revolutionary actors in this movement are venture capitalists who ‘seek out the founders, the ambitious
leaders of new technology companies and new political movements’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 104). He goes on to
describe the formation of network states in a manner analogous to VC moulding a start-up and founder in an
investor’s image. The network state should be based upon:
‘One new moral premise. Just one specific issue where the history and science has
convinced you that the establishment is wanting and where you feel confident making your
case in articles, videos, books and presentations. These presentations are similar to startup
pitch decks. But as the founder of a startup society, you aren’t a technology entrepreneur
telling investors why this new innovation is better, faster and cheaper. You are a moral
entrepreneur (sic) telling potential future citizens about a better way of life’ (Srinivasan, 2022:
134).
Srinivasan’s own examples of his ‘one commandment’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 26) principle include a Distributed
Autonomous Organization that would provide insurance against being cancelled by the woke and a Keto
Kosher, sugar-free society. The gap between utopian promise of the network state and this petty imaginary is
illustrative of the social dynamics of VC that structure this politics of exit.
Figure 1: The Right Cycle
(Srinivasan, 2022: 111)
Figure 2: 'The Tripolar
Triangle' (Srinivasan: 145)
Figure 3: The Global Flippening (Srinivasan: 128)
The Political Economy of VC Exit
The network state movement is not simply the vision of NRx eccentrics, it embodies the political economic
logic of VC and hyper-financialization. Its ideals of governance, the state and the urban reflect the imperatives
of VC and exit. Exit; whether “Going Galt” or liquidating shares, is ‘the only constitutional right’ (Smith and
Burrows, 2021: 156) in its notion of governance. The ideological power of this vision derives from the outsized
role of VC and Silicon Valley solutionism on the global economy. This American form of cultural and economic
power is a result of political and regulatory arbitrage by VC that has been harmful overall to innovation and
financial stability (Lee, 2022; Allen, 2024). Crypto and web3 have been particular fixations as they offer the
easiest route to exit for VC. Financial exit denotes the selling of shares for lucrative returns, traditionally
achieved through growing a start-up until it is ready for an initial public offering (IPO). The lack of utility or a
business case for crypto or web3 startups is immaterial to this process so long as the requisite hype exists to
pump coins and tokens. In the startup economy irrational exuberance and delusional optimism are ‘structural,
and not just a matter of group think’ (Allen, 2024: 15) with attendant ‘naturally occurring ponzi schemes’
(Allen, 2024: 20). The network state movement takes these social dynamics of the investor/founder
relationship and the overdetermined bluster of techno-solutionism to imagine its movement of exit as the
apogee of innovation. The success of venture backed start-ups like Facebook serve as miraculous tales of value
creation which can be transposed onto the creation of states (Afropolitan, 2022). Frontier fantasies,
immortality and a one million dollar price for bitcoin are all part of a technology fetish in which venture capital
and founders are able to create value outside of the state and real productive processes (Kampmann, 2024).
While the ideology of exit is antithetical to the state, the rise of venture capitalists and tech-founders in the
broader economy owes specifically to policies of the US government. Alongside investment from the
department of defense, financial deregulation has significantly shifted the role of technological innovation away
from research and in-house corporate R&D to VC. Reductions in capital gains tax, the rise of stock option
compensation for executives and the ability to use pension funds for VC investment amount to a subsidization
of the industry (Lee, 2022: 629-630). The emergence of the platform and gig economy was enabled by Obama
policies of a $2 billion matching capital fund for VC backed startups and the Jumpstart Our Business Startups
Act which legalized modern crowdfunding and ‘eased startups’ pathway to IPOs (Lee, 2022: 631). In terms of
monetary policy the low interest rate environment created by quantitative easing made the high yield seeking
behaviour of VC more attractive to investors and created the incentives for growth before profit model that
define the platform economy
2
.
In this environment crypto and web3 offer seeming remarkable returns and extend this trajectory of
regulatory arbitrage. Omarova defines the function of crypto and fintech as arbitrage tech attacking securities
law and representing a ‘fundamental continuity’ (2019: 771) with prevailing modes of hyper-financialization.
Where a start-up like WeWork still has to rely on traditional financial intermediaries like investment banks to
go public and realize investor value, crypto offers founders and investors the ability to raise capital, issue stock
and create the appearance of an expansive web3 vision. VC funds like a16z will invest in crypto/web3 startups
like Coinbase, Opensea, Uniswap Labs, Yuga Labs or MakerDAO in exchange for discounted coins or a high
concentration of governance tokens that can be easily liquidated. The process of issuing tokens and coins
offers workarounds of securities law, public reporting requirements and enables self-dealing. At the heart of
FTX’s and Binance’s legal woes were the mixing of customer funds, fictious reserves and the conflicts of
interest that stem from conflating broker, custodian and market maker functions.
a16z is the key VC fund backing this economy with over $7.6 billion invested in web3 under the leadership of
Chris Dixon. Following the crash of 2022 Dixon and a16z have sought to disavow this crass speculative
economy through the spurious distinction between ‘casino’ and ‘computer’ crypto (a16z Crypto, 2023).
Blockchain infrastructure is said to foster the creation of DAOs and Decentralized Applications (DApps) that
will hardcode the maxim ‘don’t be evil’ as immutable protocol (a16z Crypto, 2023). Its portfolio includes over
100 startups that range from digital identity management, Ethereum based social networking platforms, API
development, crypto index funds and web3 games among others. Among the largest recipients is Adam
Neumann’s, formerly of WeWork, Flowcarbon which raised funds from an a16z-led seed round ($32 million)
and through issuance of its Goddess Nature Token ($38 million) (Crawley, 2022). Flowcarbon claims to
tokenize carbon credits as part of the “ReFi” blockchain paradigm which would bring liquidity and tradeable
property rights for developing world natural resources. It is part of the subprime logic of blockchain
financialization which creates ‘a fractal universe driven by the unifying logic of self-replication’ (Omarova, 2019:
767-8). On the ground ReFi has been a mixture of falsification and arbitrage; a form of crypto-colonialism that
2
One of the hallmarks of this era coming to a close was the Silicon Valley Bank crash, the bank that serviced
VC and start-ups in the low-interest rate era. The high concentration of this client base, and assumptions of
endless low interest rates, proved fatal when Peter Thiel’s Funders Fund precipitated a run on the bank. This
was followed by online venture capitalists and influencers baying for a bailout from the Federal Reserve which
they received (Ongweso Jr, 2023). It was a remarkable demonstration of the hypocrisies of tech-libertarians,
the myth of VC risk taking and the role of social media in stoking risk.
produces garbage inputs (Asher-Schapiro and Texiera 2023). What the computer, as opposed to casino,
approach offers is a means to radically expand the bounds of arbitrage and the financialization of everything.
The network state’s call to exit and supplant the existing state is a class project that imagines new capitalist
territories without a public or labour. It rests on a technological fetish of value creation with coins and tokens
created on the blockchain and imbued with this vision. Crypto and web3 are the perfect fetishistic platforms as
they conflate an alternative governance infrastructure with irrational expectations of value and the fantasy of
trustless politics. Exit via liquidation or forking are the prime virtues and means to overcome real friction. The
myopia of the network state vision is a function of VC and the social dynamic of ‘imprinting’ (Cooiman, 2024).
The role of Srinivasan, Thiel or Andreessen within this paradigm are not simply as funders but gatekeepers
who ‘imprint’ their networks, structures and priorities on startups. Thiel in particular is known for his
aggressive monopoly strategy and reluctance to invest in anything that does not have the potential to return
his entire fund (Cooiman, 2024). In this way VC and founders are characterized by herd behaviour (Lee, 2022;
Allen, 2024) particularly as new hype cycles seek to replicate the manoeuvres and business cultures that appeal
to the mythology early investors. There is also a geographic principle at work as Silicon Valley looks to map its
notion of exit on to other territories
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. Venture capitalists imbricate startups into their ‘tribes’, that is ‘exclusive
networks that push each other’s investments and exclude outsiders’ (Cooiman, 2024: 8). Innovation in this
sense comes to resemble networks of self-selecting enclaves that wish to be free of any encumbrance.
That web3 and the network state come to fuse financialization, technology and a NRx radicalism is a function
of the philosopher-founder that emerges from this myopic VC milieu. Srinivasan’s insistence that the network
state have a founder, one commandment and a highly aligned community is indicative of the cloistered
intellectual environment in the Valley. Tech critic Ed Zitron has called a16z a ‘financial cult’ (2023) incapable of
dealing with the world as it exists and perceiving any accountability as a form of big government tyranny.
Andreessen himself is exemplary as a self-professed TESCREAList (Gebru and Torres, 2024), he espouses an
AI-religiosity and NRx principles while also positioning himself as a techno-optimism visionary. Web3 startups
are shaped by these values, not simply by the imprinting of VC networks, but in having to contribute to the
‘quasi-occultic’ practices of ‘hyperstition’ (Lynch and Muñoz, 2023: 12). Here the startup “fake it til you make
it” mantra and the NRx techno-religious faith of ushering in the future through practice and belief, are
indistinguishable. The incoherence and unfeasibility of Andreessen or Srinivasan’s futurist musings matter little
when the economic and ideological incentives are paired as a form of faith in VC. The network state emerges
as a project overdetermined by its potential for hyper-financialization, fantasies of exit and abundance.
The Network State Conference
Having identified the centrality of exit strategies and ideologies to the network state movement this article
turns to the start-ups and social networks that are marking out territory for the network state. What follows
is an analysis of the network state conference held in Amsterdam, October 2023. This is preferred to an
investigation of blockchain protocols, valuations or funding rounds as much of this information is inaccessible
and a majority of projects remain highly conceptual. The political economic logics of the network state are also
inherently discursive and performative as the pitch deck, tech conference and token offering rely upon
spectacle. Srinivasan’s conference coalesces the logics of hyperstition, imprinting and exit affirmations around
his techno-philosophical musings. The event was also indicative of the fledgling network states that Balaji views
as embodying his vision. On the ‘Network State Dashboard’ (The Network State, 2024a) there are 91 different
projects listed as either a ‘digital society’, ‘physical society’, ‘pre-launch’ or ‘not a community’. These projects
follow the one principle, one founder maxim such as Exit; ‘a fraternity of like-minded men who take short
position on the present system and build for what comes next’ (The Network State, 2024b). The founders and
proponents featured on stage constitute the cream of the crop. My analysis identifies the contours of the
network state around ‘Nomad Networks’, ‘Charter Cities’ and ‘Exiting the Cathedral’.
Nomad Networks
The conference begins by striking new communalist tones with invocations of unconferencing and the creative
hacker ethos of networked clusters of innovation. The founders of Cabin, The Neighbourhood, Nomad, Fractal,
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In Aotearoa/New Zealand the logic of imprinting is evident at the policy level. The government’s Finance and
expenditure committee’s inquiry into cryptocurrencies features an independent advisory report that begins by
uncritically framing blockchain and crypto in the terms defined by Andreessen (Leary, 2023).
Culdesac, Yayem, Metacartel, Cover, Spectra and Vibecamp offer up their start-ups as experiments in social
alignment and prefiguration for the network state. Cabin describes itself as a network city that is mobile, with
housing, education and social services migrating through cabin membership passes that allow access to twenty
three communalist footholds. Some of the communities featured include a California commune with geodesic
domes and drum circles, spartan workers’ quarters known as ‘Bootstrap City’ in a Honduran special economic
zone or a former poultry factory in Portugal (Cabin, 2024). These nomad enclaves are loaded with the
contradictions and geographic contingencies, conflating the frontier and the suburban invoking
‘neighbourhoods where you’d want to grow up’ to bring together ‘like-minded individuals’ with access to
nature (Cabin, 2024).
Srinivasan’s emphasis on social alignment reaffirms the desire for self-selecting enclaves and exclusivity within
these nomad networks while also presenting the problem of loneliness. For Cabin this is overcome through
sponsored supper clubs as the tech-lead Grin puts it; ’If you are serious about network states…than a local
dinner is the best way to get started’ (Grintsvayg, 2023). Vibecamp describes the twitter algorithm as the
means to ‘find your tribe’ (Bowman, 2023) for Burning Man style meet-ups and social experiments. Metacamp
is a DAO and web3 subculture that prizes ‘rage quiting’ as a core governance principle, while funding Dapps,
adventure retreats and meetups in nomad zones like Costa Rica (Mewn, 2023). Nomad and Yayem strike more
corporate and elitist tones rejecting the ‘hammock hopping digital nomad’ lifestyle for ‘curated experiences
[and] enchanting spaces’ (Elkin, 2023) via subscription.
The nomadic pledge to ‘go where culture, nature and governments treat us well’ (Milburn, 2023) is in tension
with unshakeable urban ideal of San Francisco and the Valley. The Neighbourhood is a vehicle for gentrification
and resettling San Francisco with hacker houses, accelerators and co-living/co-working spaces. Under a
creative New Urbanist guise the neighbourhoods of Haight-Ashbury, Pacific Heights, Japantown and The
Castro are rebranded as “Cerebral Valley” and imagined as one giant tech campus (Benn, 2024). The
Neighbourhood has a real estate arm that is based on referral marketing and the digital ringfencing of this
desired real estate. While already strongholds for tech executives and workers Benn offers a vision of venture
and founder comingling as a totalizing spatial, urban principle. It is a countercultural version of Srinivasan’s
avowedly fascist ‘tech Zionism’ in which he would reverse San Francisco’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the hands of
progressives
4
(Duran, 2024b).
For Benn technology is the means to engineer a social organicism and alignment. He describes The
Neighbourhood as a ‘repeatable machine that creates communities that are both very well curated and very
densely connected’ (Benn, 2023). This “machine” is a protocol for Cerebral Valley based on the idea of
‘unconferencing’, a concept made popular by web evangelist Tim O’Reilly and integrated into Silicon Valley
corporate culture (Levy, 2012). Unconferencing might be thought of as ideational Burning Man with creativity
and ‘self-correcting networks’ flourishing in communal spaces where residents might be ‘building tentacle
robots or hacking Afghanistan’ (Benn, 2023). It is not surprising that founders whose key outputs are pitch
decks think of conferences and “getting in the right room” as an urban principle. Benn’s machine organizes
unconferencing meetups by sorting residents through a ‘dashboard’, using GPT to pair participants through a
‘preferences matrix’ and balancing the ratio of VCs (15%) and founders (54%) (Benn, 2023). Benn claims as one
of the most notable achievements of The Neighborhood as the exclusive hacker house HF0. Touted as a
residency program for repeat Unicorn founders ‘community’ is analogous to being around VCs and other
founders ‘who are going to run the world’ (Font, 2024). Finding your tribe or your creative self in the campus
environment conforms to the logic of imprinting upon VC and devising financial exits as indicated by “repeat
founders”.
4
Network Staters such as Y Combinator’s Gary Tan are also at the heart of attempts to wrest San Francisco
city politics back from the supposed excesses of progressivism (Duran, 2024a).
These nomadic articulations of the Network State are exemplary of the liminality between what Sadowski and
Beegle term the ‘expansive’ and ‘extractive’ networks of web3 (2023). They are expansive in proporting to
prefigure myriad social relations and governance ideals while ultimately redounding to extractive hyper-
financialized platforms. Spectra is featured as an expansive network with an online urban design gamified
community reimagining urban space and creativity. Its prefigurative experimentation of ‘practicing the virtual to
physical process’ (Rzepecki, 2023) has resulted in a resort and conference center in Puerto Rico, the original
site of crypto-colonial extraction (Crandall, 2019). Modular home designer Cover follows Spectra as a urban
spatial solution that will allow new cities to ‘built at a speed never before seen’ (Rivas, 2023). The modular grid
will allow ‘valued spatial traits such as views, pirvacy and light’ to be turned into tradeable property rights,
presumably on the blockchain (Rivas, 2023). Thus expansive networks inevitably become tokenized or steered
towards the Solana blockchain which touts itself as offering ‘every possible thing you can have in finance’ at the
micro or macro scale (Yakovenko, 2023).
Charter Cities
These social experiments and networks are the prefigurative basis for something material. The charter cities
movement is the foothold ‘from online to on-land’ (Bremin, 2023). It leverages histories of colonialism and
power imbalances between the developing world and western capitalism to access land for the frontiers of exit
and the network state. The charter city projects of Prospera, Praxis, Pronomos and Vitalia are in one sense the
most material exemplars of the network state movement and the most hyperstitous relying upon leaps of faith
and magical thinking. And when that fails there is the power of global right-wing networks, the American state
and trade treaties to impose upon the developing world.
Prospera is key a node for the network state. Based in the Honduran special economic zone or ZEDE of Roatan
it offers itself as a ‘governance platform for parallel societies’ (Bremin, 2023). Exiting legacy systems is what will
allow the ‘best of us in society; the entrepreneurs, the inventors, the innovators’ to have ‘flying cars’ or ‘live to
200’ (Bremin, 2023). For exit-utopians the promise of charter cities is the development of privatized
‘government as a service’ (Bremin, 2023). In practice this has meant benefiting from the coup-installed
Honduran government radically expanding the autonomy of ZEDEs. Prospera has defended itself from threats
by the new centre-left government to repeal ZEDE laws through the International Centre for Settlement of
Investment Disputes, a key supranational legal arm of neoliberal world trade (Long and Main, 2024). The US
State department in response to the local pushback against Prospera has voiced concerns that investor
protections and international trade agreements were not being honored (Long and Main, 2024). Thus the exit
fantasy remains within the auspices of the Washington Consensus and its power to engender frontiers for
foreign capital.
The founders of the charter and start-up cities are among the more risible members of the Network State
movement of eccentrics, utopians and cranks. Dryden Brown the founder of Praxis had the ignominy of being
profiled in the New York Times with the headline ‘Who Would Give This Guy Millions to Build his own
Utopia?’ (Bernstein, 2023). The answer is VC network staters like Srinivasan, Joe Lonsdale, Shervin Pishevar
and the Winklevoss twins in spite of Praxis existing principally as a pseudo-intellectual NRx internet subculture
the fetishes Greco-Roman notions of beauty. Pishevar for his part conflates the acquisition of the Bahamian
private island ‘Norman’s Cay’ with creating a ‘Smart/Digital Island’ (Pishevar, 2023). There is nothing of
substance to this claim aside from declaring that the nation-state irrelevant, that Uber is a network state and
finally name-dropping of Elon Musk, Lonsdale and Srinivasan (Pishevar, 2023).
Perhaps the most ludicrous figure is Laurence Ion of Vitalia. Vitalia was a co-host of Vitalik Buterin’s pop-up
city in Montenegro, Zuzualu, and has run ‘Longevity City’ in Prospera for months at a time. Vitalia presents
itself as a longevity DAO with the crowd-sourcing of life extension research through the VITA token. Ion’s
one commandment for Vitalia is ‘making death optional’ through exiting ‘this regulatory environment that tells
you what you can and cannot do with your body’ (Ion, 2023). Ion’s pitchdeck strikes farcical and religious
tones rallying his audience to ‘stop fucking around…[and] coordinate to cure aging before this terminal disease
kills you and your loved ones’ (Ion, 2023). These projects share the same venture capitalists and imprint upon
their fantasies of immortality as a hyperstitous faith in their own powers.
The role of Patri Friedman is crucial in imparting money and political connections upon the movement. His
Pronomos capital investment fund is backed by crypto wealth through Srinivasan, Andreesen, Lonsdale, Thiel
and others (Friedman, 2023). He also connects the movement to right-wing NGOs like the Free Cities
Foundation, The Charter Cities Institute and The Atlas Network. His familial lineage evokes a multi-
generational mission for freedom and exit that has now become real through access to SEZs and his network
state portfolio including zones Nigeria, Malawi and Palau. Friedman uses the techno-metaphors of blockchain
to characterize SEZs as open-source legal systems and a ‘software library’ for exit (Friedman, 2023). He
describes Dubai as a progenitor realizing that ‘homegrown Sharia law was not supportive tech…Dubai forked
London’s code base’ (Friedman, 2023). With the creation of Bitcoin the promise of these charter city zones
has gotten “real”. Friedman is excited to present videos of greenfield sites in the developing world that
proport to demonstrate these principles. His talk culminates with the declaration ‘this is so real that this week
I am going to Prospera to get my genes edited with a treatment only available there. Like that is real! Really
really real’ (Friedman, 2023). The generic elements of Friedman’s libertarian triumphalist presentation do not
evince proof of concept for the network state, however performing “exit” upon his body represents the
spectacles of freedom that have been key to coalescing the movement (Simpson, 2021). His pleas that
Prospera is “real” might rightly be viewed as snake oil to outsiders or a demonstration of the collective
hyperstitous belief that exists within this movement of funders and founders.
Exiting the Cathedral
The final contingent of the Network State are the philosophical vanguard that answer Balaji’s call to build the
parallel media and intellectual institutions of exit. I use here the NRx metaphor of the Cathedral rather than
Srinivasan’s ‘Paper Belt’ as they denote the same idea that journalism and academia constitute an oppressive
class structure persecuting technologists. It is no surprise that these exit philosophers and activists are
reactionaries however they model a cultish devotion towards Srinivasan. They are name droppers of
Srinivasan, Thiel and Musk and offer themselves as proof of VC imprinting and exit as the singular source of
value. The pseudonymous Beff Jezos presented this thesis to the Networks State conference as the founder of
effective accelerationism (e/acc) (Jezos, 2023). The e/acc philosophy holds that there is a ‘cybernetic loop’
between technology and capitalism that constitutes an intelligence that should be unleashed through the
maximum consumption of energy (Jezos, 2023). Here the NRx subculture captures the VC fetish of value
creation as a civilizational mission that is made real by the enormous amounts of energy devoted to AI chips
and GPUs as a form of hyperstitious magic.
This concept of building and acceleration, whether toward the singularity or the infrastructure of exit, is the
fount of universal truth that will replace the Cathedral. In his disdain towards the New York Times as ‘woke
capital’ in the tri-polar global struggle Balaji offers the rule ‘dashboards > newspapers’ (Srinivasan, 2022: 171).
The massive energy consumption of blockchains and AI constitute the protocol of truth (digital) which is
superior to the tyranny of human systems (paper). It’s a view of self-sovereignty and control that Golumbia
describes as a Hobbesian fantasy to ‘exercise computational mastery over others in the social world’ (2009:
187). The dashboard fantasy is a means to attack the New York Times, as Ashley Rindberg does by calling for
social reality to be determined by on-chain digital consensus rather than fiat (2023). He presents his book ‘The
Grey Lady Winked’ in which the paper is a trans-historical evil, both fascist and communist driven, by its own
mendacious accrual of power. In his genealogy of the paper the Times’ critical reporting on Bitcoin mining and
Tesla is an act of centralizing power analogous to collaborating with Stalin and Hitler.
Michael Gibson is the author of ‘The Paper Belt on Fire’ and leads the attack on academia (2023). Gibson is the
founder of the VC firm 1517 and the Thiel Fellowship which provides scholarships for teenagers who forgo
university. Alumnus include Vitalik Buterin while many of the fellows reflect the vanities and pet projects of
Thiel and the VC class from asteroid mining to longevity research (Chafkin, 2021: 162). Gibson cites Thiel as
an inspirational iconoclast who pushes you towards your truth which for Gibson is unabashed belief in child
labour. The successes of the fellowship are presented strictly in the metrics of valuations and the exit from
Figma, Luminar and Ethereum. This logic of exit is what is offered as an alternative to current universities
described as ‘woke madrasas’ (Gibson, 2023) overrun by Palestine solidarity protests
5
.
Amidst the culture war gripes, Synthesis offers itself as an AI solution to exiting the Cathedral, with Srinivasan
as its lead investor (Crunchbase, 2024). Synthesis touts itself as SpaceX’s homeschool program embodying
Musk’s pedagogy. It describes its mission as protecting civilizational values and beauty as wokeness threatens
numeracy and literacy. Synthesis also serves as neat demonstration of VC imprinting as both a financial and
ideological principle. Their product is characterised as a ‘Superhuman [AI] Tutor’ and Frank’s presentation is
accompanied by a demonstration video of a child doing a computer-assisted multiplication exercise (2023).
Synthesis launched this AI tutor product three days after Marc Andreessen wrote in his manifesto ‘AI Will
Save the World’ in which he stated ‘every child will have an AI tutor…helping them maximize their potential
with the machine version of infinite love’ (2023). Andreessen’s quote is pinned atop the Twitter accounts of
Synthesis and Franks and its his vision, along with Musk and Srinivasan, that function as form of technological
and ideological proof for the start-up. Its also a considerable rebrand as the company website touted in the
weeks’ before the launch of having ‘classes led by dedicated teachers’
6
(Synthesis, 2023a) with no mention of
AI. At the Network State conference Frank ties this product launch to Srinivasan’s notion of exit, by
referencing Balaji’s tweet claiming that Synthesis ‘can now replace every woke teacher with an AI teacher that
shares your values as a parent’ (2023).
Conclusion
The network state is a movement of venture capitalists, founders and crypto enthusiasts that seek to
materialize the fantasies and financial strategies of exit as urban and state governance principles. The proposed
communities and cities of the network state demonstrate the particular interests and social logics engendered
by VC as the ascendant fraction of class power within tech-capitalism. It is a project rooted in the economic
geography of Silicon Valley and its pursuit of physical and technological frontiers for exit. This geographic
specificity accounts for a herd mentality around web3 and the fetishization of VC networks to create value and
new lands, abstracted from the realities of urban processes. It is a vision of the state that necessarily disavows
the advantages that VC has gained from state policy or enjoys in settling the interstitial zones of global finance
for charter cities, nomad enclaves and special economic zones.
The network state is an unbounded vision as it intermingles technological protocols with quasi-religious
declarations of a singular blockchain truth. Concomitantly the hyperstitous performances of VCs and founders
create opportunities to drive value, sell stakes and exit. Srinivasan designates VCs and founders as the
revolutionaries of the network state movement able to create alignment around one leader, one
commandment. It is a clear demonstration of the logic of imprinting that is at the heart of the political
economic and geographic power of VC. And it is a power that Srinivasan would like imprinted upon his
leadership as calls he himself ‘the id of technology’ (Jorgensen, 2023: 15). This message is clear upon the
conclusion of the network state conference when Srinivasan offers attendees a parting gift, a free copy of his
book ‘The Anthology of Balaji’. The book is a compilation of tweets and aphorisms and is blurbed by Marc
Andreessen stating that ‘Balaji has the highest “good idea output rate” of anyone I know’ (Jorgensen, 2023).
Srinivasan’s books and web presence position him as a techno-philosopher-investor able to align social media
networks and start-ups into the NRx alliance of the network state. His access to VCs like Andreessen and
5
Zionism features prominently in the exit imaginaries of the network state, from Srinivasan’s Tech-Zionism to
the claim of Spearbit DAO founder Spencer MacDonald that ‘Israel is the original network state’ (2023a). In
Zionism they find the crucible of civilization and the frontier; and an exemplar of defence-tech innovation.
MacDonald is a proponent of cryptography, AI drones and militias for network state defense in addition to the
info war against the pro-Palestinian and woke New York Times (2023b).
6
Upon launch this was changed, removing all references to teachers and declaring that ‘In the future, the best
tutors will be computer programs, not people. That future is here’ (Synthesis, 2023b).
canonical musings align start-ups behind the overdetermined, hyperstitious qualities of web3 and frontier
technologies.
The network state conference demonstrates how different projects of exit coalesce around Srinivasan’s vision
but also embody Silicon Valley’s neocolonial view of technology, urban life and the state. Nomad networks
envisage new zones for Burning Man urbanism. Behind the countercultural maxims of “finding your tribe” is a
view of developing world countries as a space for resorts, retreats and enclaves. In other words a frontier or
greenspace where value is created through nomad networks, DAOs and Dapps as opposed to the existing
states and communities. This notion of the frontier and exit are essential to generating interest in web3 as an
overdetermined application of abundance. This frontier logic retains Silicon Valley as its metropole, with
Neighbourhood imagining a way to reterritorialize San Francisco for hacker houses and an endless tech campus
to align founders and VCs. Where these nomad networks are prefigurative, the charter cities movement is
providing the footholds to reimagine the state and the urban as built from the blockchain up. In the interstitial
spaces of global trade and finance where network state urban projects are the most real, there is an emphasis
on hyperstitious faith, from flying cars to immortality. The imprinting on Srinivasan, Andreessen and Thiel is
the strongest among VCs and founders that explicitly rail against the Cathedral or “Paper Belt”. Academia is
reimagined in NRx terms with the singular goal of start-up valuations and financial exit; journalism should be
subservient to “on-chain” truth. In the start-up Synthesis we can see a transformation of its core product to
align with the NRx philosophy of Srinivasan and Andreessen. It is in this way that geographically and
intellectually cloistered venture capitalists attribute innovation to start ups and founders that embody
ideologies and strategies of exit.
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