This article is the companion piece to the Fortean Winds podcast episode “Cloud First, Land Later” — episode two of our three-part series on the technocratic vision for a post-democratic future. Start with The Cadre and the Cathedral if you haven’t already.
Forest City, Malaysia. Built on reclaimed land off the southern coast, near Singapore — a ghost development of empty towers for years, until 2024, when a residential compound opened inside it called Network School. People moved in. They worked on companies together, studied technology together, and lived according to a shared philosophy about what a society could be if it were built from scratch instead of inherited.
In July 2026, the Malaysian government revoked the operating license. One regulatory decision, one government, and the experiment built to prove that a community no longer needed permission from existing governments discovered it needed exactly that to continue existing at all.
Eleven days before this piece was published, it reopened — in Astana, Kazakhstan, with government cooperation on visas and early discussion of something considerably larger: a full settlement called Network City, in a region called Burabay.
This piece maps what that project actually is, who is funding it, what has already been physically built, and why religion has become one of its most explicitly discussed pieces of infrastructure.
The Research Question
Is there a coherent movement, centered in Silicon Valley, seeking to build privately governed or founder-led political communities outside ordinary democratic institutions? Who funds and intellectually shapes it? What has actually been built, what is planned next, and how are religion, nationalism, and “Western civilization” being incorporated into its recruitment strategy?
The evidence supports the existence of a real and increasingly organized network-state ecosystem. What the evidence does not establish is that every prominent figure associated with it — Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and their adjacent circles — operates as one centrally directed project with a shared command structure. What exists more closely resembles an interlocking ideological, financial, and institutional network in which different actors pursue overlapping objectives without needing to coordinate directly. That distinction matters, and we hold it throughout this piece.
What a Network State Actually Is
Balaji Srinivasan — former Coinbase CTO, former Andreessen Horowitz general partner — laid out a precise, non-metaphorical definition in his book The Network State. The development sequence runs in stages: a startup society, an online community organized around a shared idea; a network union, the same community with real economic coordination; a network archipelago, distributed pockets of physical property held by members across multiple countries; and finally a network state — a full government, with territory and, eventually, diplomatic recognition from other sovereign states.
The strategic innovation that separates this from a century of failed micronation attempts is the sequencing, captured in Srinivasan’s own phrase: cloud first, land later. Earlier efforts started with territory — buy an island, raise a flag, discover no economy and no recognition follows. Srinivasan’s model inverts the order entirely. Build the ideology, the community, and the economic network first, entirely online, before acquiring a single acre. By the time territory enters the picture, the group isn’t a person with a flag — it’s a functioning economy with capital and members, looking for a jurisdiction to house it.
The founder model is explicit rather than implied: Srinivasan argues a new political community needs a recognized founder holding concentrated authority, comparable to a startup CEO able to make consequential decisions without waiting for consensus. Citizens function closer to early employees or platform users than to voters in the conventional sense. And the central move — rather than organizing to reform a jurisdiction you’re dissatisfied with, you leave it. Exit, not voice.
The Intellectual Lineage
Curtis Yarvin’s neocameralism — covered in The Cadre and the Cathedral — supplied important upstream influence on the anti-democratic, founder-governance strand of this movement, but it would be inaccurate to describe Srinivasan’s specific network-state blueprint as Yarvin’s invention. The more direct lineage runs through a different figure: Patri Friedman, grandson of economist Milton Friedman, who founded the Seasteading Institute in the 2000s. Its mission was as literal as it sounds — floating cities in international waters, outside any nation’s jurisdiction, where alternative systems of government could be tested the way a company tests product features. Peter Thiel provided early capital.
Seasteading did not succeed, and the reasons why are instructive: the ocean is expensive, physically hostile, and legally uncertain in ways that never let the economics close. Friedman did not abandon the underlying goal — he changed the delivery mechanism, founding Pronomos Capital, a venture fund that finances alternative jurisdictions on actual land, negotiated directly with existing governments rather than located outside all of them. That pivot from sea to land is the single most important strategic evolution in the movement’s history. Srinivasan’s contribution layers the “cloud first” sequencing on top of Friedman’s land-based vehicle: Friedman supplies the mechanism, Srinivasan supplies the go-to-market strategy.
What Has Actually Been Built
Pronomos’ current portfolio includes Próspera in Honduras, Itana in Nigeria, Praxis, and several smaller jurisdiction projects. Próspera is the most mature and the clearest working example: it operates inside a Honduran legal framework permitting semi-autonomous economic zones, with its own regulatory regime and dispute resolution largely separate from the rest of Honduran law. It falls short of Srinivasan’s full network-state definition — there is no diplomatic recognition — but it demonstrates a government voluntarily carving out and selling access to a piece of its own sovereignty.
Praxis describes itself outright as a digital nation, building online membership and shared culture with the explicit, stated intention of eventually acquiring physical territory. Network School is the most concrete social prototype of the group — an actual residential experiment testing recruitment, governance, and daily life under founder-led community structure before any territorial claim is made. Built in Malaysia in 2024. Shut down in July 2026 when Malaysian regulators withdrew the operating license. Reopened in Astana, Kazakhstan on August 18, 2026, with the Kazakh government cooperating on visa arrangements and preliminary discussion of a considerably larger settlement in Burabay, called Network City.
The Network State Conference, meanwhile, has grown into a genuine gathering point — drawing figures including Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, and representatives connected to Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and El Salvador. These conferences function simultaneously as recruitment events, elite social networking, investor matching, and political legitimization — attendance does not imply agreement with the full doctrine, but it does document a real and growing convergence of capital and political interest around the idea.
Religion as Infrastructure
This is the area where the primary-source evidence is strongest, and where precision matters most. It is possible to establish that religion is being used strategically as a community-building mechanism. It is not possible, from the public record, to establish whether any individual’s underlying religious belief is sincere, cynical, or something in between — and this piece does not attempt to make that determination.
Srinivasan states directly that a startup society requires what he calls a “moral innovation” — something beyond financial incentive capable of generating real commitment. Traditional religion is one of the examples he offers, and he cites Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option specifically: the conservative Christian argument that serious believers should intentionally build tight, separated communities rather than continue losing ground inside a secularizing mainstream culture.
His stated reasoning is the most consequential single sentence in the source material for this piece: “missionary societies outcompete mercenary ones.” The argument is that a community held together purely by financial self-interest lacks the cohesion to survive real hardship — people leave the moment a better offer appears elsewhere. A community organized around a moral mission, something members believe they are sacrificing for, retains people through difficulty in a way compensation alone cannot. Srinivasan is not describing his own faith here. He is identifying, as a builder, which retention mechanism performs best under stress. In his framework, religion functions as a technology.
Praxis takes the same underlying instinct and removes the analytical distance entirely. Its own manifesto speaks directly of revitalizing what it calls Western civilization, framing the choice in front of society as whether to sacrifice family, country, and God to pure economic materialism. It cites the Amish, the Mormons, and Israel by name as models of the multigenerational cohesion it is pursuing, and describes a future organized around culturally and religiously reconstructed communities.
This connects to — without repeating — the material covered in The Cadre and the Cathedral. Thiel’s Antichrist lectures operate at the level of eschatology: cosmic stakes, apocalyptic framing, who the Antichrist might turn out to be. What’s documented here is a different layer of the same underlying architecture — not the theology held by the founders, but theology deployed as the retention mechanism holding recruits together once they’ve joined. Different function. Same structural role.
The Anomaly: Anti-State Projects That Need States
Every project examined here runs into an identical structural wall, regardless of how far along it is. Property law that a court will actually enforce. Immigration status for recruited members. Courts, security, physical infrastructure — and ultimately, if diplomatic recognition is the goal, other sovereign governments willing to grant it.
Malaysia is the cleanest available case study. Network School existed for exactly as long as one government’s licensing board permitted it to. The moment that approval was withdrawn, the experiment did not relocate smoothly on its own terms — it collapsed and had to be rebuilt from a standing start, entirely dependent on a different government’s willingness to say yes.
The realistic version of this movement, on the evidence available, is not an escape from the nation-state system. It is a search inside that system for governments — typically smaller, developing, or motivated by foreign investment and technological prestige — willing to sell, lease, or delegate pieces of their own sovereignty. Honduras did this with Próspera. Kazakhstan appears to be doing it now with Network School and the early Burabay discussions. That is a fundamentally more achievable, and more testable, political strategy than the “exit the nation-state” framing suggests on its own.
Four Competing Explanations
We hold four explanations open simultaneously, because the evidence does not currently support collapsing to one, and doing so would repeat exactly the kind of overreach this site exists to push back against.
Genuine governance experimentation. Proponents sincerely believe existing governments are dysfunctional and want voluntary alternatives to exist. Evidence: strong. Their published writing consistently and specifically argues this position.
Regulatory arbitrage. The civilizational and ideological language provides cover for a simpler goal — jurisdictions friendly to crypto, biotech, and AI development, without the surrounding framing carrying real operational weight. Evidence: moderate to strong. Regulatory autonomy appears repeatedly as a stated draw, though it doesn’t fully explain the movement’s heavy investment in culture and identity.
Billionaire neo-feudalism. The underlying purpose is replacing democratic citizenship with privately governed jurisdictions controlled by capital owners. Evidence: moderate. The founder-centric, investor-financed structure makes the interpretation plausible, though it cannot currently be established that every participant consciously intends this outcome.
A coordinated anti-democratic political project. Powerful actors are deliberately building parallel institutions capable of eventually superseding democratic nation-states as one directed effort. Evidence: moderate. There is abundant documentation of shared ideology, overlapping financing, personal networks, and common projects. What is absent is evidence of a central operational authority directing Thiel, Andreessen, Musk, Srinivasan, and Yarvin as a single organization.
The analytical model best supported by the current record is networked coordination rather than centralized conspiracy — and that distinction is not a smaller or more reassuring finding. A conspiracy with a defined command structure is comparatively fragile: identify the leader, expose the internal communication, and the chain breaks. A networked coordination requires no single point of failure. Participants do not need to agree with each other on much of anything. They only need incentives that point in compatible directions, and the system organizes itself without anyone directing it centrally. In some respects, that structure is more durable than an actual conspiracy would be.
Evidence Strength Summary
| Claim | Confidence |
|---|---|
| A real network-state movement exists | High |
| Srinivasan is its principal public theorist | High |
| The ultimate objective includes territorial sovereignty | High |
| Venture capital is financing physical governance experiments | High |
| Thiel is financially and intellectually connected | High |
| Religion is deliberately used as a cohesion mechanism | High |
| “Western civilization” rhetoric is incorporated into recruitment | High |
| Andreessen is financially/ideologically connected | Moderate–High |
| Yarvin substantially shaped the anti-democratic intellectual environment | Moderate–High |
| Musk operates as part of a coordinated network-state organization | Low–Moderate |
| All actors operate according to a single directed plan | Low / unproven |
A Note on Elon Musk
Musk should not currently be placed in the same category as Srinivasan or Friedman. There is real ideological and social overlap, but no evidence has surfaced showing Musk operating as a central organizer of the network-state movement itself. He does, however, run two important parallel experiments. Starbase, SpaceX’s South Texas complex, formally incorporated as a city in May 2025, with a resident and voter base closely tied to the company and its leadership — a genuine reappearance of the old company-town model with municipal governance, though it remains fully subject to Texas and U.S. law and is therefore not a network state in Srinivasan’s sense. And SpaceX’s Starlink terms of service contain unusual language asserting a concept of Mars as a “free planet,” anticipating that future disputes there would be resolved according to self-governing principles established by Martian settlers. Both are relevant parallel ideology. Neither constitutes evidence of Musk belonging to a Srinivasan-directed organization.
What to Watch — and What Comes Next
- Burabay — whether the Kazakh government partnership develops into an actual settlement, or fades the way seasteading originally did
- Other governments following Kazakhstan’s example — smaller states seeking foreign capital and technological prestige are the most likely next partners
- The financial architecture underneath all of this — the strongest open lead is not Yarvin’s writing or Srinivasan’s public theory, but the financial and institutional bridge running from Thiel’s early seasteading investment, through Patri Friedman and Pronomos, into today’s charter-city projects and Network School’s attempts to secure territory and government cooperation
The next installment in this series will follow that bridge directly: Pronomos’ limited partners and portfolio transactions, Praxis’s financing rounds and beneficial investors, Network State Conference sponsors, Thiel Foundation grants, and the overlap — if any — between the capital funding this ideology and the capital funding related political campaigns and media. If the same sources repeatedly appear across the ideology, the influencers, the political contributions, and the physical city projects, the appropriate description moves from a loose intellectual tendency toward an actual political-economic influence operation. That is a testable question, and it’s the one we intend to test.
Related Research on Fortean Winds
- The Cadre and the Cathedral — part one of this series: the wealth transfer, the counter-elite theory, and Thiel’s theology
- Unraveling Elite Influence: Who Really Runs the World? — the original mapping this series extends
- The Occult History Series — including the chapter on political occultism referenced in part one
Core Sources
- Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State: How to Start a New Country. 2022.
- Antipode. Peer-reviewed political-economy analysis of the network state movement, 2025/2026, tracing intellectual influences including Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.
- Pronomos Capital — public portfolio disclosures (Próspera, Itana, Praxis, Alpha City, Yung Drung City).
- Praxis — public manifesto and civilizational writing.
- Reuters. Reporting on Network School’s relocation to Astana, Kazakhstan, and discussions of Network City in Burabay, August 2026.
- The Wall Street Journal. Reporting on Network School’s operations in Malaysia’s Forest City, including participant surveys on politics and pronatalism.
- SpaceX / Starlink. Terms of service concerning Martian governance and dispute resolution.
This is part two of a three-part series. Part three will follow the financial architecture underneath the network-state movement — the funding graph connecting Pronomos, Praxis, the Thiel Foundation, and the venture capital ecosystem to the political and media operations examined in part one.
Fortean Winds: Anolmalous Research 