3/11/2025
The Silicon Valley billionaires have an endgame
The Silicon Valley billionaires have an endgame. It’s called the Network State and it’s essentially an openly fascist mashup of techno authoritarianism and feudalism. It is a stunningly ambitious agenda, sometimes called “Start-Up Nations” all stemming from venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan 2022 book The Network State: How To Start a New Country although the idea of the Network State has been around for a decade before that in elite tech circles. It’s already coming to life around the world in corporate city-states like Prospera in Honduras or the mysterious new city tech elites have been trying to build in California’s Solano County.
Driving wedges into the fault lines of the MAGA coalition
I think the idea of the Network State is a great target to publicize because the ideology and naked billionaire class interests that it represents, are way out beyond what the MAGA base supports. It’s half crazy, sci-fi fantasy, very aligned with transhumanist and even post-biological visions of the future. The ideology it represents is the reason for Steve Bannon’s public attacks on Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. He is fighting their influence in the MAGA coalition because he see that their ideas would elevate oligarchs like Andreessen, founder of one of the largest Venture Capital firms in the world as essentially kings in a new system that Bannon has called technofeudalism.
Think of the way the Right used “critical race theory” – identifying an esoteric part of the broader progressive project, elevating it out of context and using it to frame the debate in a way that mobilized right-wing resentment and split progressives. It was unethical and highly effective. I’m not suggesting we borrow the unethical part––because our claims are actually true––just the effective part.
If we want to defeat authoritarianism we need to drive wedges that break up the larger MAGA coalition. Drawing attention to the Network State ideology can mobilize ordinary people to resist technofascism while heightening the contradictions that could split MAGA.
Beware the Network State agenda is coming to life as “Freedom Cities”
And it’s important we do it now, before the tech broligarchy manages to normalize this new type of extremism. Or worse, harness the very crises they are generating to make it seem like the best path forward. Their vision is coming to life legislatively as “Freedom Cities.” The VC clique that created Prospera (the corporate city in Honduras) has now put together a “Freedom Cities Coalition” that is actively pushing legislation. We stand at the cusp of a huge historic pivot away from even the semblance of Democracy towards tech authoritarianism. It’s essential we stop it now before the oligarchs solidify their alliance with the MAGA rank and file and build a whole new power base.
And don’t forget to connect it all to world class creep Curtis Yarvin
And for folks familiar with Curtis Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment ideas around replacing the U.S. President with a CEO with full dictatorial power, there is an opportunity to connect all this to his creepy worldview. The Network State blueprint emerges from the same set of Silicon Valley thinkers and is seen by many as an aligned vision. It could be their stepping stone to a full transformation of the US system or just a way to abandon large swaths of the population by destroying governance as we know it. Or step towards Yarvin’s infamous fantasy (he claims he was joking) of “converting non-productive people into biodiesel.”
These careless oligarchs have left a long paper trail of their elite, undemocratic, and frankly spooky ideas. We need to use it to expose their sinister intentions and frame the ongoing battle against MAGA and authoritarianism. Which is why we should all be talking about the Network State now before they can solidify the power to implement this dangerous agenda.
Some different resources to learn more about the Tech Fascist Agenda
Here’s a couple of good resources to learn more:
- Gil Duran’s blog https://www.thenerdreich.com has dedicated the last year to tracking the rise of Bay area technofascism and broke the story about the Freedom City vision for the Presidio. I highly recommend his handy 5 minute explainer video.
- Wired has good coverage of the Freedom Cities Coalition: https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-legislation
- https://www.vcinfodocs.com/what-is-the-network-state
UPDATE 4/13/25: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor have written a very useful piece in the UK Guardian called The Rise of End Times Fascism which analyzes the apocalyptic assumptions that have united the Christian Right, Tech Oligarch “accelerationism” and the MAGA base. Highly recommend as a good overview and political compass since we can’t stop their doomsday agenda unless we understand it.
UPDATE 5/22/25: File under Sh*t-Is-Getting-Weirder… Emile P. Torres, the researcher who coined the term TESCREAL to help explain various overlapping ideologies like transhumanism that have become popular among the tech elite, outlines some of the existing tensions around Artificial Intelligence within the MAGA coalition in this fascinating piece in Truthdig:Machine Learning MAGA: Rise of the Christian Cyborg