By Nat Wilson Turner
Sounds good to me.
Not my idea though. I must give credit where credit is due.
2020: blue and tech against red
2024: red and tech against blue
2028: blue and red against tech— Balaji (@balajis) November 30, 2025
Balaji meant it as a warning to his fellow tech bosses, but I’m taking it more as a great suggestion.
Those of you not familiar with Balaji Srinivasan should reference this Gil Duran piece from the New Republic from 2024.
Relevant bits:
…you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.
Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless.
The Financial Times had more on the “network state” or as they call them “for-profit cities.”
John P. Ruehl at Naked Capitalism has covered a specific “network state” in Honduras called Próspera that has been underdevelopment for some years and may have played a role in Trump’s decision to interfere in the recent Honduran elections after pardoning their drug-dealing ex-president.
I’d include an excerpt or two from the above, but I want to stay on topic as this is just by way of background on Balaji.
The main point is he can tell that the techbros (and the rest of the oligarchy) are close to wearing out their welcome with the American people.
When/if the AI bubble pops and when/if it takes down the larger stock market and possibly the entire U.S. economy, their welcome will be thoroughly worn out.
The secondary point is that Balaji and his ilk don’t care about The United States of America, they’re already planning their post-nation state moves.
His rhetorical tactics remind me of those AI boosters who choose to contribute to Nvidia’s stock price by “warning” that “imminent AGI” is a threat to destroy humanity.
Eric Anderson
Maybe allowing them to create their little tech enclaves isn’t such a bad idea.
A great idea actually.
Concentrating them in a small geographic area would certainly expedite their … ummm …
Well, you can fill in the blanks how you wish.
Purple Library Guy
I find all these techbro schemes for their own cities weirdly amusing. Sure, they’re creepy and dystopian and whatever, but techbros with these ideas have them because they’ve been drinking their own kool-aid. The process seems to go:
–I have become fantastically rich, generally after being born on third base.
–I would like to be even fantastically richer, because if I weren’t that kind of person I wouldn’t have gotten this much money in the first place.
–For that, it would help not to pay taxes.
–But I want to feel GOOD about both being rich, getting richer, and not paying taxes to get richer still. I need an ideology that will tell me the world should be GRATEFUL for me both being rich and not paying taxes. That way I can have both the ruthless greed AND warm and fuzzy feelings about how wonderful I am.
–Libertarianism does that! Guess I’ll be a Libertarian, with some Ayn Rand seasoning. Let’s not worry much about whether it works . . . it works to make me feel good, so it must be true.
–The way the world operates is not very Libertarian. I should make my OWN little world and run it on Libertarian lines (except for the authoritarian part, because I should be in charge of course). It’ll be all laissez faire and no taxes and no handouts and no public works, so the market can show how perfect and efficient it is! Winners will win and losers will lose because “meritocracy” but at exactly the same time markets will provide for everyone because if we make markets free enough the theory of perfect market prosperity for all will manifest!
What will actually happen:
It won’t work because Libertarianism is comically deluded and cannot work. You need public goods, which markets mostly do no provide, and high inequality makes economies unstable and violent and unhealthy and all kinds of stuff. Probably the whole thing fails and nobody wants to go to the shiny new utopian city because it sucks. Maybe if they had good PR and it’s hard for people to leave it actually becomes a hive of scum and villainy full of beggars for a while. But maybe they are more determined to make their shiny thing work than they are to maintain the principles they founded it on, in which case they start having taxes and public works and redistribution, and it works but it’s a concrete rebuttal to all their stupid Libertarian ideas. So yeah, every time one of these guys starts talking about this kind of nonsense I reach for the popcorn.
As to whether Red and Blue in the US will team up against tech after a massive crash . . . sounds nice but I’m not confident. Did Red and Blue team up against finance in 2009?
Nat Wilson Turner
I’m definitely not confident of a uniparty turn against tech either, just think it would be great to see.
As for the libertarian cities, their big competition ironically is Abu Dhabi and/or Dubai (which one is hosting all the Irish gangsters?). Is there much difference for the end user between an Islamic theocratic dictatorship and a Silicon Valley techno-utopian dictatorship of the market? I expect it will come down to ad budgets and superficial amenities. Also who’s better at concealing the on-the-ground reality from prospective residents and how good they are at “locking in their user base” as the techbros say.
Hairhead
Sigh. It is as it ever was. Basically, all these guys want is what all princes, kings, Khans, Shoguns, generals, General Secretaries, Presidents, Prime Ministers, etc. have wanted throughout history: a population of slaves from whom they can choose inappropriately-aged sex toys, and who will provide them with enough bully-boys to keep (they believe most fervently) the other poor slobs in order.
mago
What’s missing from the discussion is what the native populations think about the yanqui assholes taking over their home turf.
The Hondurans seem none too pleased from what little information I’ve been able to glean.
Maybe part of the tech-whitey delusion is thinking those dumb greasers are going to roll over or be bought off. Got news for the self entitled nitwits, the natives are smarter than you in ways that count and are handy with a shiv. Bribery will only get you so far.
This wet dream is wrong in so many ways it beggars description. Stupidity hasn’t stopped anyone from trying so far and it’s not going to stop them now. Suerte mop.
Joan
I personally am no fan of AI but I’m surrounded by people who are fascinated by it and I think as long as it can do homework for students it’ll remain popular. I worry Gen Alpha will graduate high school having never written an essay for themselves and we’ll have widespread literacy issues on our hands.
Eric Anderson
Joan,
If the aussies can ban social media for minors we can ban AI for minors.
Soredemos
I long for the day these fucking weirdo nerds stop being ‘masters of techno-industry’. We need to go back to shoving geeks in lockers. These types have their place. But it isn’t to be in charge of anything.
Eric Anderson
Soredemos:
It’s the tyranny of specialization. The STEM emphasis has gutted the ability to think comprehensively about how we want to govern ourselves. Everyone who succeeds in their niche thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, despite the fact that their specialization only allows them to see perhaps 1/10th of the problem.
A long for the respect the renaissance thinker used to gather.
Purple Library Guy
@Soredemos Give me a break. Shoving geeks in lockers, and the whole culture surrounding that, is moronic.
Very few of the billionaire technocrats are real nerds in the first place; most of them just pretend to themselves that they are. That goes all the way back to Bill Gates. Gates of course got his start when his mom, who hung around with IBM top honchos, got him hooked up to provide DOS for their new microcomputers–so he hunted up someone who had a DOS, bought it for a tiny sum of money, and changed its name. Because he didn’t have a DOS and wasn’t up to writing one.
Who we need to be shoving in lockers is rich kids. And their rich parents.
Meanwhile, the Trump bunch are a strange alliance between these techbro billionaires who were all born on third base and thought they coded a home run, and the exact culture of deliberate stupidity that believes in shoving nerds in lockers . . . and by “nerd” they always meant ANYONE who values intellect in any way, doesn’t matter if it’s a computer type or a science type or an artsie. Aligning oneself with that attitude just to oppose techbros is incredibly dim.
Soredemos
@Purple Library Guy
No, I stand by my statement.
I’ve spent a lot of time around nerds (that includes things like sports nerds as well). Smart for smartness sake isn’t enough (I recall Welsh has said something to the effect that just having a high IQ can merely mean you get to the wrong place faster). This isn’t anti-intellectual. Just having a specialist skill doesn’t make someone an intellectual. We need well versed and rounded people in charge, especially people with a real ethical or moral education, and decently humane driving principles, who can assign more specialized people to appropriate areas with oversight. But those specialists should be carefully contained. Otherwise we get to where we are now, with this crew of politically powerful goobers who seriously think things like they’ll be able to become immortal by putting themselves on a harddrive, and they have essentially unlimited money to throw at such bullshit, as well as socially engineer the rest of us.
I’ll include many doctors as morally imbecile dweebs in all this too, especially after the last few years. They tend towards a default unthinking smug liberal ‘believe science!’ attitude, and if they aren’t that they’re knuckle-dragging (even more) conservatives.
Purple Library Guy
@Soredemos You stand by your statement? You’re taking the side of the high school bullies who made my life shit and you can go to hell. I can see thoughtlessly saying dumb shit like that because you vaguely wanted to be provocative, but if you think about it and then stick to it that is fucking rancid.
different clue
What the techbros want is Law-Free Zones so they can attract whatever industries they can into their Zones and since the Zones are granted Law-Free status by the Tech-Bro-captured government of the surrounding real country, they will be granted their Law-Free status to build or invite business to build a polluting industry of whatever type and freely emit all its pollution into the surrounding real country.
(Among all the other things they want.)
Carborundum
Eric:
I think it’s partially what you highlight, with the addition of network effects. We have this real tendency to look at current technological success and attribute it to pure intellect (founder as nerd-hero), when a lot of it is actually attributable to network effects. I wouldn’t want to insinuate that there haven’t been some smart moves to *foster* network effects (and other non-network effects factors), but you’d honestly think these people must be without exception utterly brilliant from the way people worship them and that just doesn’t seem to be so. Smart, yes. As smart as billed? A significant part of the time, not so, so much.
Thinking about specialists and our tendency to foible (and intellectuals, for that matter), I’m put in mind of something that Pat Lang once said of someone to the effect that they had been educated beyond their natural level of intellect, (which I may yet have tattooed in tiny IR-visible reverse type between hairline and eyebrows)…