There’s a twisted, deformed culture of rich capitalists in California who come up with some of the worst ideas and get lauded for them, and one of the wackiest is a guy named Balaji Srinivasan. You know he’s bad when he’s endorsed by Marc Andreessen.
“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a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
So he hates democracy and wants all the rich people to leave the US and establish independent countries (where?) that they can control. If he’s building his own little fiefdom, though, he’s going to need a population to rule over, one that he’s denying any political influence. How will he entice people to join his movement and work for him? He has a vision.
“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”
The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.
“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”
In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”
Oh. He’s fantasizing about an authoritarian cult. Raise your hand if you want to put on a gray shirt covered with corporate logos and surrender your autonomy to a pampered class of cops who obey a tiny group of rich boobs!
Is becoming a demented sociopath a prerequisite to becoming rich? It sure seems like it.
I honestly didn’t expect to see the end of democracy in my lifetime, but now I wouldn’t be surprised if the next spate of elections in Canada and the US* are the last free elections.
*Many red states already suppressing the vote and working on ways to subvert the will of voters should the electoral college not go their way.
This is a good example of how to get people to dislike you and not buy into your fantasies of power and money.
Elon Musk wants the worst for everyone else and doesn’t make any secret of it. Those Everyone Else’s are refusing to buy his dubious cars and websites.
Elon Musk is the poster person for cuckoo, delusional tech bros.
He has turned into a Nazi or at least a Nazi sympathizer who has open contempt for most of the humans on the planet.
It’s not working out too well for him.
.1. Tesla is all of the sudden not doing well at all.
Car sales are falling and the company is laying off people en masse.
.2. He has managed to wreck Twitter now X in record time.
“New Report Suggests X Usage Has Declined 30% Year-Over-Year”
He’s driven off the normal people and enabled the Nazis on X, formerly Twitter.
I will never buy anything even remotely associated with Elon Musk.
He hates me and people like me so why should I do anything that benefits him?
I even trashed my Paypal account because it was started by Peter Thiel.
He isn’t involved any more but that is close enough. I don’t need it anyway.
There are near infinite ways to spend money.
“Is becoming a demented sociopath a prerequisite to becoming rich?”
These people have traits which predispose them to demented sociopath. As they gain money and power those traits are enhanced, and their delusional views become their reality. Or, if they start out rich, they are brought up delusional.
His idea of a cult with him as the leader isn’t going to work.
Most normal people know all about cults and know enough to stay away.
Remember Heaven’s Gate, the new age techie cult? The one where 39 of them committed suicide to join the UFO behind the comet.
He also is delusional about how unified the Silicon Valley culture is. It isn’t. There are the executives, the management, and…the workers.
There is very definitely a hierarchial caste system where the management exploits the workers. The workers know who do the work and who gets the high salaries and stock options and it isn’t them.
They are as loyal to their company as their company is to them, which is usually around zero.
I’d never heard of the guy and now that I have, this is someone to point at, laugh at, and stay as far away as possible.
Used to have a grey t-shirt, even had a tech logo on it.
It was the Linux penguin, though. Not sure that would have gotten me into the club…
The guy, obviously, is full of great ideas. I mean, gray t-shirts for a uniform….
If only they were red or orange, I might be interested.
Average American: “But he’s good at the business-sport and knows how to make money, so he must know how to run a society.”
“Is becoming a demented sociopath a prerequisite to becoming rich?”
Considering the ONLY way to become rich is to lie, cheat, exploit and occasionally murder, fuck YES!
Is there a secret handshake? What about, like, a decoder ring? Can we build a tree fort?
Wait…are girls allowed? It’s kind of a deal breaker if girls are allowed.
Is that before or after the lines of coke?
Wasn’t grey the colour of the confederate army? I’m sensing a pattern here.
Grey lives matter???!? /s
Isn’t that corruption? Clearly the coke buzz has kicked in, as you think this is a good idea.
What if they want to be programmers? Then again, rent-a-thugs probably have better working conditions than most programmers these days.
From Confederate to Nazi sympathizer in one easy bound. The buzz has gone into hyper-drive.
If he’s looking to found Galt’s Gulch there’s a city in on the drawing board for Saudi Arabia. Or they could go sea-steading on an amazing and absolutely workable boat. Or we could just send him and his mates to Snake Island.
Anyone can be original if they’re ignorant enough.
Well, I work in the tech industry. As a matter of fact, I have on a gray shirt right now, and some others I could wear. But, damn, I don’t know how to “do the nod”. No clue what that means.
And I never met a cop that I could talk to for longer than absolutely necessary to get the traffic ticket or report a property crime.
Guess I’m just another wage slave.
gijoel @ #10 said, “Is that before or after the lines of coke?” Isn’t coke sort of “so 80s” in the Valley? I thought they had upgraded their stimulants by now.
Interesting that he’d choose the colour gray given that The Grays are the most common alien in modern UFO fandom, tiny guys with giant heads and spindly bodies. He might actually lose some potential cult members if they’re paranoid enough about aliens doing whatever.
Srinivasan moved to Singapore in 2020. I wonder if the Internal Security Department, Singapore’s domestic intelligence and counterintelligence agency, keeps watch on guys like him. They might think he’s got ideas on subverting the Singapore government so he can try his ideas there.
The Loonytarians actually did have a Galt’s Gulch in Chile.
It fell apart before it even started.
The original founders just stole all the startup money.
It takes more than money to run a society.
Among other things, you need something called “Rule of Law” that is, a system of laws, enforcement, and court systems.
A social safety net although a lot of the ruling class consider that optional.
What this SV kook wants is something we’ve tried before.
Tribal authoritarianism or maybe Feudalism.
While some people might be OK being serfs, most of us have moved beyond that to “citizen”.
He might be trying to outrun the police.
OP…and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase.
He was the CTO of Coinbase.
The US SEC is going after them in court right now.
So far, Coinbase is losing.
Two crypto bros are already in prison, the FTX guy and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.
this guy basically wants to create the dystopia featured in Mirror’s Edge. he’s openly calling to dismantle and subvert democracy – i.e. this guy is proudly anti-American and actively calling for citizens to radicalize against the US government, which would ultimately be viewed as an act of terrorism, which makes him a domestic terrorist
feralboy12 @ #9 “Is there a secret handshake? What about, like, a decoder ring? Can we build a tree fort?
Wait…are girls allowed? It’s kind of a deal breaker if girls are allowed.”
You bet there’s a secret handshake and a decoder ring. It goes on in the silicon when you log into work. I don’t know about “girls” but women are definitely on the job, and in a major way where I work.
I’ve worked in the tech industry for 40 years. While I’m just a grunt…and not a technologist…I’ve known personally some of the key people responsible for the explosion of computing in the mid-80s and after. None of them were like these guys PZ highlights now and then. Not to say some of them weren’t jackasses, but by and large they were just workers. They liked to think about the possibilities but well aware of the realities.
For most of these guys it would be only girls allowed so that they will have any hope for a date. Not saying that there would be only the one and that the women go to the bathroom early and never seen again.
This sounds like a fantastic idea for a dystopian novel.
This may be apocryphal, but Einstein supposedly said, when asked where he got his ideas, “I don’t know, I’ve only had one or two.”
But I guess this Balaji guy is X multiples smarter than Einstein! (/s for whoever needs it)
Also, related:
https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/
@16: Never read that, but I was thinking of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash — fiefdoms run by one corporation or another, including states that managed to corporatize themselves (Greater Hong Kong), and then of course there’s even a whole parallel VR-world. Sounds like that’s about what this guy wants.
Well, Balaji’s right about one thing: democracy and capitalism don’t work well together.
His mistake is taking issue with democracy.
Actually, no, he was totally dead wrong about that: democracy and capitalism can work VERY well together, as long as democratic states remain truly democratic and stay on the ball WRT keeping capitalists honest. The history of America since the New Deal, and Western Europe since WW-II, prove this very clearly.
As much of an ass as this guy is, I’m grateful to him for confirming that yes, Y Combinator is a cult.
All these secessionists, including Balaji, who are going to form sovereign states carved out of current US territory!
Have they ever heard of long-range artillery? Are they even aware that the US has a military, with that kind of hardware and more?
Kind of puts a damper on those ideas right from the beginning.
I have a grey T-shirt from the Thai Room restaurant in Nag’s Head. Would that get me on the Terayacht stadium-turtleboat? Last I checked, all the visible food stains were completely washed off.
PS: Thanks, gijoel, for that link to the Terayacht video. I guess someone has to make Neom look sensible and workable, right…?
California Forever is trying to set up its utopian community in our neck of the woods (Fairfield, Suisun City, Rio Vista in Solano County). Many of the locals are doing what they can to combat them.