Introduction
This is a book review of part of Gil Duran’s “Network States and the Rise of Cryptocurrency to end democratic governments.” Which is mainly about Peter Thiel, who has had the greatest effect, more even than Elon Musk, in his influence on right-wing libertarian radicalism in the U.S., including getting J D Vance appointed to the Vice Presidency. And other Silicon billionaires who have joined with Thiel and his world views.
As someone interested in how people and communities will thrive in the future as we return to the past before coal as fossil fuels decline, I was most interested in the billionaires plans to form new Network States. Peter Thiel, who is very aware of Peak Oil aware and spoken with many of the writers at The Oil Drum, Postcarbon and others. Are these network states going to be the way billionaires save themselves and tech workers?
Well, the plan is more like them to become kings. Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and backer of many prominent technology companies, has explained the plan at Network State conferences. Basically, the plan is for the gray “tech tribe” to partner with the Republican “red tribe” to form nation states that the “Blue tribe”, Democrats will not be welcome at. To put it mildly, since they are on the wrong side of the coming Second Civil War the gray & red tribes will wage against them. The new nation state will will have a corporate CEO (presumably the founding billionaire), backed by the police they bestow great wealth upon, and other security forces. The war will be fought over the internet, that they control, to restrict or publish their version of reality (of which they have very little as you will see below). This will not only crush democratic governments, but also universities, the media, and government institutions. Pretty much the same as the Project 2025 plan of the Heritage Foundation – who have spoken at some of their Network State conferences and gatherings.
So, as far as Nation States goes, Peter Thiel now has bunkers in New Zealand and Argentina where he appears to be trying to set up a network state. According to The Guardian’s 2026 article “Apocalypse prep or pure pragmatism: what is behind Peter Thiel’s move to Argentina?”:
“…Last week, Argentina’s chamber of deputies held a six-hour debate on a set of sweeping regulatory changes put forward by President Javier Milei’s rightwing government shortly after Thiel moved to Buenos Aires. Juan Marino, a member of the chamber of deputies and the leader of the Piquetero party, said the new laws amounted to a “technofascist legislative package” aimed at entrenching the power of US tech billionaires in the country. Thiel has not publicly advocated for them, but Marino and others have said that their timing was suggestive, and the new laws amounted to a “technofascist legislative package” aimed at entrenching the power of US tech billionaires in the country.
One of the laws, the “super RIGI”, would put in place an investment regime offering foreign companies a minimal tax rate and a 30-year guarantee against regulatory change. It specifically names AI data centers among investments it hopes to attract. It will become law if the Senate passes it.
Another, which failed, aimed to eliminate most of the restrictions around foreigners buying land in Argentina. A final decree would require some civilian government departments to share vast amounts of personal data on Argentinian citizens with the state intelligence services. There is no evidence that Thiel has advocated for these laws directly. But in the months after he moved to Buenos Aires, he held closed-door meetings with Milei and key presidential advisers.”
The land law, said Marino, could have paved the way for semi-autonomous “startup cities” – such as the controversial Próspera development in Honduras that Thiel has advocated as a way for libertarians to carve out zones outside state control. Milei wrote an article in the Financial Times advocating the creation of “non-human corporations” – “entities operated by AI agents or robots”. It parallels a vision put forward by OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who predicted in 2024 that the world could soon be run by AI-owned companies. It also raises dark, thorny questions about the legal liabilities of those entities.”
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I cannot find the details of how Thiel would run his nation state, but one of his billionaire buddy Balaji Srinivasa mentioned above has written a 262 page book on this called “The Nation State” available free here: https://thenetworkstate.com/book/tns.pdf
I looked at it to see the details of how these nation states would grow food, what energy they would use, and the other ways future societies would need to back to the past, of agriculture before fossil fuels arrived. Well. It turns out we are not going back to the past, we are going to a glorious techno-optimistic future! One where there are no limits to growth, energy, or resources. My comments are in italics. I scanned for the words food and energy.
FOOD
Will there will be peasants?
“…you don’t want the society where everyone must be sovereign, because taken to its irrational16 limit that means pumping your own water from out of the ground, growing your own food, not trusting any vendor or person other than yourself, and generally ending the division of labor that makes capitalism run. Extreme autarky might sound romantic, but in the absence of robotic breakthroughs going truly off-grid is a recipe for dramatic regression in the standard of living.
No, there will be robots!
“…Today, there’s a human in the loop for things like food delivery. But as robotics improves, this could in theory become a completely electromechanical process, just like printing. Every individual step from the farm to table could be automated. As this visual shows, there are already robots for each step: robots in the fertilizer factories, for harvesting, and for last-mile delivery. stack example where someone “prints” out an apple and it’s fully robotically grown and delivered, even if in practice you’d have stockpiles of apples rather than (slowly!) growing them on demand
A potential nation state: r/keto
“To build a network union, the members of r/keto would need some kind of collective action that members do together (like bulk purchases of keto food or reviews of keto books). To turn it into a network archipelago, they might need to start keto clubs and restaurants and link them together (networked physical territory). Their vision might stop at a cohesive society, instead of an all-encompassing state; their network archipelago might be part of a network state that rejected not just the USDA Food Pyramid, but also the US Fed pyramid schemes.”
ENERGY (no mention of electricity, any of the fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear, trucks)
Srinavasan recommends this review of J Storrs Hall: “Where’s My Flying Car?” about how the world used to be on an increasing energy production curve until regulatory barriers of the 1970s. The Amazon blurb describes the book as: “From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion technology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. He then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder.
Say what? From a review Srinivasan recommended about this book
Basically anything could be constructed with “atomically precise manufacturing, placing each atom one at a time exactly where you want it, giving you complete control over the structure of matter. The incredible speed alone would dramatically lower the price of literally every physical product. Hall estimates that the entire capital stock of the US—“every single building, factory, highway, railroad, bridge, airplane, train, automobile, truck, and ship”—could be rebuilt in a week. And nanotech would allow materials with extreme properties, such as the strength of diamond, to be used for everyday manufacturing and construction.
The “space pier”, a set of towers a hundred kilometers tall with a magnetic accelerator to shoot payloads into orbit, saving the fuel required to escape Earth’s gravity well and bringing down launch costs by three orders of magnitude. Or the “Weather Machine”, a fleet of quintillions of centimeter-sized balloons floating in the stratosphere, made of nanometer-thick diamond, with remote-controlled mirrors that can reflect light or allow it to pass through, forming a “programmable greenhouse gas” that can regulate temperature and direct solar energy. And of course, affordable flying cars.
A large part of progress is harnessing ever-more resources and putting them to productive use. And indeed, we’re going to need lots more energy if we’re ever going to get nanotech manufacturing, regular space travel, and of course flying cars. And where would we get this energy? Nuclear-powered everything. Nuclear homes with local, compact reactors—they don’t need to be on the grid. Nuclear cars, whether flying or ground. Even nuclear batteries
Why don’t we have these things yet?
True nanotech, he says, was killed by federal funding. And no matter what you do, regulation will shoot your invention down, like it did nuclear power.
Srinavasan wrote at the end of his book: Bits reopen innovation in atoms. Innovation in areas like biomedicine, robotics, and energy is not upstream of the network state, it’s downstream of it. The network state solves the problem posed by Thiel, Cowen, and J Storrs Hall. We’re using bits to reopen innovation in atoms, because innovation in atoms has been blocked by regulations, which are in turn created by the US establishment
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (2026) by Gil Durán
What follows are excerpts from the book about “Nation States”
The notion of creating special places governed by new rules was hardly original. Capitalists have long sought to create what historian Quinn Slobodian calls “alternative political arrangements at a small scale” through “acts of secession and fragmentation, carving out liberated territory within and beyond nations.” Already there are tax havens designed to hide the wealth of corporations and the rich. Then there is Dubai’s 22-square-mile Jebel Ali Free Zone caters to 11,000 corporations with long tax and union-free tax breaks. Communist-ruled China has over a dozen Special Economic Zones where capitalism (but not democracy) reigns supreme. Britain’s most famous overseas special zone was Hong Kong, which operated as a free port under British rule from 1842 to 1997.
Today, Google cofounder Larry Page suggests carving out part of the world as a zone where tech companies can operate without regulations.
Balaji Srinivasan
Srinivasan, author of “The Network State”, portrays technology s an unstoppable force destined to undermine nations and transform global governance by replacing democracies with corporate controlled governments to replace existing democracies. He declared San Francisco a city of “anarchy and tyranny” worse off than Rwanda, and that it might be easier to start a new city than to reform San Francisco. Not long after that, he published The Network State: How to Start a New Country, a free, online 474-page ebook,
He predicts a civil war in the United States and called on people to “exit” American democracy for life in privatized micro-nations called network states, which is “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
Tech companies would offer subscriptions to these new network states, applying the techniques of startup companies to startup societies. “Financing, attracting subscribers, calculating churn, doing customer support—there’s a playbook for all of that. It’s just Society-as-a-Service, the new SaaS.”
Srinivasan adapts the idea for a tech audience that, despite talk of techno-optimism, feels what Slobodian calls a “sense of creeping paranoia” about the future. Motivated by “greed, megalomania or the desire to have a zero percent tax rate,” they seek to escape into privatized societies where they make all the rules. It’s a dystopian vision straight out of The Sovereign Individual: existing countries and zones hollowed out by capital flight and falling tax revenues, left to collapse as the wealthy flee into highly fortified arks.
“The proponents of crack-up capitalism envisioned a new utopia: an agile, restlessly mobile fortress for capital, protected from the grasping hands of the populace seeking a more equitable present and future,” wrote Slobodian in Crack-Up Capitalism.
Since the federal government is the most determined opponent of liberty, he suggested that a solution would be to abandon citizenship in nation-states like the USA for membership in the fragmented governance model of his proposed network states.
What Yarvin called “The Cathedral”, Srinivasan called the all-powerful liberal cabal of “Woke Capita.”
Defeating Woke Capital would require anti-woke forces to unite in battle against their common enemy, the professors, activists, bureaucrats, and journalists. He divided the US into three political tribes. Democratic voters are the Blue tribe, dangerous fanatics with a quasi-religious belief in government.
The red tribe were Republicans, who fell into three groups: “Red God,” “Red State,” and “Red Network.” The Red God group consists of religious conservatives. They form a powerful constituency of the Republican base, he wrote, but their numbers are waning as Americans turn away from religion. The next group, the Red State, is composed of secular nationalists—mainly “national security hawks” who “reflexively support the US in every foreign intervention” and hate liberals but fear China more than anything else. Rounding out the Red tribe is the Red Network, which consists of “people of the Network” who are also “the folks in favor of commerce and trade networks, both within and across borders—the capitalists.”
The third group is the tech tribe, the Grays who lean libertarian and prefer online communities over real-world ones. They have no allegiance to the old politics of Red or Blue but form an emerging and decisive political force. To crush the Blue tribe, the Gray tribe must form an alliance with the Red tribe.
Another factor that will undermine the power of governments, is when crypto-fueled decentralized tech network states become the dominant force. Dollars and nation-states will end and crypto and privatized governments take over. Bitcoin will replace the dollar. Corporate government will replace democracy. Network state education, media, and political organizations will replace existing versions and play a central role in the conflict Srinivasan refers to as the “Second American Civil War,” that is already underway. The public will revolt and eventually American anarchy arise that will begin the American Civil War, fought mainly through propaganda and polarization, not uniformed soldiers, tanks and planes. It might start if government tried to confiscate Bitcoin.
It will be an information war, where victory comes from one side invading the minds of the other side rather than physically invade. This will be possible by controlling the digital networks—which tech controls and will determine what people can and cannot do in the digital world, and the key to maintaining control over the U.S. This big information network war would lead to a great “unbundling” of the country, a full meltdown in which “no one is in charge and everything is in chaos.” The Second American Civil War would end with the death of the nation and the rise of the network state.
Curtis Yarvin
Yarvin is an American political theorist, blogger, and software engineer who advocates for replacing American democracy with a corporate-style monarchy. He proposed that new countries should be small, city states that competed for citizens. Democracy would be replaced with city states governed as joint-stock corporations. But first the Cathedral needed to be overthrown, the evil shadow government of universities, media, and government institutions secretly controlling American democracy.
Yarvin, in his 2022 substack “the butterfly revolution” saw Trump returning to power with a vengeance in 2024 and dismantle the federal government. He would call for a “full reboot” of government, and install “a CEO” to gut the bureaucracy. This would be accompanied by an “army of ninjas”—“ideologically trained”—to “parachute” into government agencies to dismantle them. These ideological ninjas would also fan out to invade and destroy other institutions of democratic influence. Ninjas will have to land on the roofs of these buildings too—mainly journalism, academia and social media.”
Coincidentally, Elon Musk announced plans to buy Twitter shortly afterward, complaining that Twitter’s algorithms and rules favored liberals and squelched free speech. Musk viewed control of Twitter as necessary to halt the progress of what he called a “woke mind virus” infecting the world. The Wall Street Journal later revealed that Musk had been goaded into buying the site by a “shadow crew” of right-wing billionaires. “Before and during Mr. Musk’s breakneck takeover of Twitter, a close-knit group of libertarian-leaning activists and businessmen have been encouraging him to get involved,”
“This group includes the so-called PayPal mafia—former executives at the online payments company who include Mr. Musk, the investor Peter Thiel and entrepreneur David Sacks—as well as ancillary figures like the venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson,
Marc Andreessen
Andreessen had long been on the nation state train. In 2013, he predicted there would be an explosion of new countries in the 21st century, with double, triple, as many quadruple countries in the future.
In a blurb for Srinivasans book, Andreessen said ““Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met, and The Network State may be his best”.
Other blurbs:
Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO: “Balaji is a visionary, one of the most original thinkers of our time.”
Vitalik Buterin, a computer prodigy who received a Thiel Fellowship and cofounded a crypto platform called Ethereum: “We’ve started new currencies. Now The Network State shows us how to start new cities and new countries.”
Sam Altman
Thiel, known for snarky criticism of fellow tech figures, offers conspicuously high praise for Altman. “We should treat him more as a messiah figure,” Thiel told Hagey. Altman listed rogue AI, nuclear war, and a deadly virus among his worries. “I prep for survival,” he said, adding that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” As a backup plan, he planned to hide out with Thiel on a compound in New Zealand.
The profile depicted Altman as a man convinced of his own grand destiny to shape the world through venture capital. “I think his goal is to make the whole future,” said Graham. This future included a plan for Y Combinator to create its own city. “It would lie somewhere in America, or perhaps abroad, and would be optimized for technological solutions: it might, for instance, permit only self-driving cars,”
Altman envisioned crowdfunding the creation of a tech city of 100,000 acres and up to 100,000 residents and said he was already scouting locations.
Network State Conference, 2023, hosted by Balaji Srinivasan
A few hundred people—mostly men—gathered. Srinivasan said that multiple efforts were already happening to start new network state countries, including projects in Arizona, Texas, Latin America, and San Francisco.
There were four real estate projects: Culdesac, a 17-acre car-free suburb in Tempe; Cabin, which billed itself as a start-up building a “network city of modern villages” around the world; Neighborhood SF, a start-up which claimed to be building a one-square-mile tech colony in the middle of San Francisco; and Próspera, a start-up city funded by Andreessen, Thiel, and Srinivasan through Pronomos Capital, a company founded by Patri Friedman—the seasteading advocate—to build network state cities around the world. New companies would rise to challenge all existing institutions—banking, education, law, media, government—and eventually grow strong enough to replace them. Srinivasan proposed replacing Harvard University with the Thiel Fellowship.
Dryden Brown, the 28-year-old CEO of a project called Praxis, announced plans to build a tech city in the Mediterranean backed by Sam Altman, Joe Lonsdale, and Srinivasan, along with investments from Thiel. Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute had plans for a new city in Zanzibar and a “stealth” project called Braavos Cities that planned to build a settlement in the Caribbean.
The speakers said that the competition to create new states was heating up—so much so that future network state sovereigns had already begun to consider the finer details, such as military-grade security for their future realms.
Spencer Macdonald, a former army officer with a cryptosecurity firm, said that we need to start talking about security, and warned the audience that technology and walls will be insufficient to protect network state cities. He encouraged them to recruit former Special Operations soldiers to staff private police forces and hire social media teams capable of waging “info war.” Another of his slides showed an image of California Forever, a controversial new project that sought to build a 400,000-person city in rural Solano County, 60 miles from San Francisco, where a secretive group funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Andreessen, had spent $900 million to quietly buy up 60,000 acres of land in the county. An urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. News of this grand plan surprised the voters of Solano County, who immediately launched a movement to oppose it due to concerns over traffic, pollution, and sprawl.
A ballot measure to make the project happen was abandoned after polls showed that 70% of voters opposed the project that both Democrats and Republicans in opposition to his billionaire city scheme. It didn’t help that California Forever had filed a $510 million lawsuit against a group of local landowners and farmers who had refused to sell their property, with the company of out-of-town billionaires accusing the locals of “endless greed.” California Forever abandoned efforts to get countywide approval and began trying to pick off Solano County’s cities one by one, promising jobs, development, and tax-base expansion in exchange for annexation and support.
Srinivasan fantasized about purging the liberals from San Francisco, where the Gray tribe would buy large swaths of the city to seize power and territory. The Gray tribe would wear gray shirts emblazoned with corporate logos to signify their tech affiliations, showing allegiance to Musk, Bitcoin, or Y Combinator for example. They would receive special ID cards enabling access to tech-controlled sectors of the city.
They would also form a close alliance with the police providing regular banquets and jobs in “tech security” for the officers’ family members. Officers who signed on with the Grays would get special uniforms to represent their allegiance, and the Grays would donate heavily to police charities to “merge the Gray and police social networks.”
Corporate logos would fill the skyline in the Gray sector, and streets would be renamed to honor tech figures. Meanwhile, the Grays would build monuments and screen propaganda films to remind people of the alleged horrors inflicted by progressive Democratic governance. Police, bribed with food and jobs, would become an arm of tech capital. This would be bad news for the Blues—the Democrats and progressives who make up most of San Francisco’s voting population. Blues would be unwelcome in zones controlled by Grays.
The goal was to do to San Francisco what Musk had done to Twitter: Gut it, purge it, and harvest its power.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a key author of Project 2025, a 920-page plan for right-wing government that would soon become the key strategy document of the second Trump administration also spoke. Project 2025 included a proposal to purge the government by eliminating up to 1 million federal workers and dismantling entire agencies, a plan resembling Yarvin’s 2012 call for a total “reboot” of the government.
Mike Solana of Thiel’s Founders Fund, had a fireside chat with Brendan Carr, an outspoken right-wing member of the Federal Communications Commission. Longtime Thiel associate Trae Stephens of Anduril and Founders Fund spoke about “rebuilding America’s defense arsenal”.
Two months before Trump back in power, the Grays and the Reds gathered in San Francisco to discuss the dawning of a new era that would bring MAGA Republicans and Silicon Valley into one unified network. Trump received massive support from Silicon Valley. Musk, who had initially pledged to stay out of the election, was Trump’s biggest donor and most vocal supporter. He spent $290 million to elect him, and also turned X into a right-wing propaganda machine.
Cryptocurrencies as a way to capture government
Trump had returned to power with help from a gigantic investment of cash from Silicon Valley. Musk alone spent over $291 million to support Trump and the Republican Party, making him the single largest individual donor by a wide margin. His massive contribution rivaled the money rolling in from the crypto industry, which suddenly became the most significant corporate donor in US politics by raising more than $175 million through a network of super PACs and crypto groups led by Fairshake—an effort heavily backed by Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase and Ripple along with a16z and its cofounders.
As it turns out, crypto is a weapon for capturing government through the maximization of political corruption. The crypto PACs, which flooded money into the 2024 election, were but a sideshow. Crypto’s real political innovation was the creation of a towering corruption machine through which the president of the United States could be openly bribed. Trump became a crypto billionaire the same week he returned to the White House. “The Trump family’s new crypto tokens are worth well over $10 billion on paper, after a frenzied rally pushed up the value of the digital assets in the days before the inauguration,” reported The New York Times on January 20, 2025, as a Trump-themed crypto product called $Trump surged.
The lords of Silicon Valley had become a political technology, a venture capital system with seemingly infinite money to throw at high-risk bets on whoever and whatever might help them control the digital infrastructure of future governance. Crypto bought them an alliance with Trump, who had long derided the industry as a “scam” but now became a champion of a Silicon Valley vision built on crypto, AI, war, and the network state.
At their core, cryptocurrencies are designed to challenge government authority by competing with it. While most crypto buyers likely view it as little more than a kind of digital lottery ticket, crypto products like Bitcoin are inherently political because they seek to privatize a key public necessity. Efforts to legitimize Bitcoin as actual currency, however, have flopped. In 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to embrace Bitcoin as legal tender. But Salvadorans largely shunned Bitcoin for transactions, and Bukele’s government quietly rolled back its crypto experiment
Rather than serving merely as a digital currency, Ethereum was conceived as a programmable blockchain—a platform for building entire digital institutions. Ethereum aspires to offer infrastructure for alternative social and institutional systems altogether. It functions as a distributed computing platform maintained by a global network of participants. Ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum whose market capitalization reached a high of nearly $600 billion in August 2025, fell to $203 billion in June 2026. It is the second-biggest cryptocurrency in the world, behind Bitcoin. So, while Thiel’s funds are not the largest investor in crypto, his investments have been among the most consequential, aiding the growth of Bitcoin and leading directly to the creation of Ethereum.
The early investments by Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz are notable because they poured millions of dollars into crypto when it was still an obscure, high-risk bet on a technology that mostly seemed useful to drug traffickers and pariah nations.
A 2021 study by the Government Accountability Office found that crypto had “been central to the rise of drug sales in the U.S., specifically fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.” Drug dealers were among the first to embrace crypto. Silk Road, a digital marketplace for illegal drugs that conducted transactions in Bitcoin, did $213 million in illicit business between 2011 and 2013. The founder, Ulbricht was arrested at a San Francisco public library. On Ulbricht’s computer, prosecutors found messages in which he appeared to pay $650,000 in crypto for a purported Hells Angels hit squad to murder specific individuals on his behalf. Ulbricht’s imprisonment made him a martyr for the crypto cause, but he had always viewed himself as more than a digital drug kingpin. In 2013, he told a journalist that Silk Road was “at its core… a way to get around regulation from the state. Their time is coming to an end.”
During his campaign, Trump had vowed to pursue the “death penalty” for drug dealers, but he pardoned Ulbricht—crypto’s drug kingpin poster boy—on his second day in office.
Crypto also appeals to pariah nations like Iran, Russia, and North Korea. They love crypto because it allows them to evade sanctions and fund their authoritarian regimes.
Teams of North Korean hackers run global crypto theft scams to fund the country’s nuclear program. Human traffickers, along with various and sundry other criminal types who keep their money in the shadows, also favor crypto. These are the actual use cases of crypto—the rare situations in which people use it as a shell for moving currency into illicit schemes.
Most people who put their money into crypto are simply gambling. They buy into these schemes based on the idea that prices will continue to rise, turning small investments into life-changing windfalls. Real currencies like the dollar are backed by the full power of the US government, including its military and its nuclear arsenal, but crypto schemes mostly rely on something called the “greater fool theory.” Like most scams, this creates a small pool of winners and a vast population of losers. By pouring real money into imaginary digital currencies, crypto speculators drove crypto’s total market capitalization to a peak of nearly $4.4 trillion in late 2025. (It plunged, again, to $1.2 trillion in June 2026.)
“Hamas’s terrorism is fueled by cryptocurrency,” Brown wrote in a 2023 post. “We need to crack down on illicit crypto and stop terrorists from moving money around, evading sanctions, and funding their acts of evil. We must curb this emerging threat and protect our national security.” Stand With Crypto rated this Brown tweet, and many others, as “very anti-crypto.” Brown had backed Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call for hearings into links between crypto and terrorism, and he had called for strong crypto regulations to protect consumers from scams and abuses. So, as Brown sought a fourth term in 2024, the crypto industry decided to make an example out of him. Crypto carpet-bombed Ohio voters with ads in support of Brown’s opponent, Bernie Moreno. In total, crypto-funded PACs spent $40 million to elect Moreno, a largely unknown car salesman who had never held public office but enthusiastically supported Bitcoin.
Gallego and Slotkin, like Moreno, were the most prominent among the 53 members of Congress elected with crypto support in 2024, a year during which the industry claimed an 85%-win rate for its picks.
Within months, the Trump family’s estimated net worth skyrocketed by billions in an orgy of unprecedented corruption so staggering it made all previous bribery scandals look like penny-ante grift.
“Trump’s crypto schemes are the Mount Everest of corruption,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, who coauthored a bill called the End Crypto Corruption Act of 2025 to bar elected officials from crypto schemes. “We must ban Trump-style crypto corruption so all elected federal officials—including the president, vice-president and members of Congress—cannot profit from shady crypto practices.”
The End Crypto Corruption Act stalled in Congress, but Trump signed a pro-crypto bill, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act (GENIUS), in July 2025. Among other things, it freed stablecoins from oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. More importantly, it lent government legitimacy to crypto and gave the industry its first major legislative win.
DOGE and purging of federal workforce was in both nation state and Project 2025 plans
In announcing the creation of DOGE, Trump said it would “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Musk’s decision to use the name for his government assignment dramatically pumped up the price of the Dogecoin yet again.
By May 2025, a tally by Reuters estimated that 260,000 federal workers had been purged via firings, layoffs, buyouts, and forced early retirements. This amounted to roughly 10% of the entire federal workforce and marked the largest such reduction in history. As part of the DOGE project, Musk unleashed AI systems inside government, vacuuming up troves of data to allegedly drive DOGE’s decision-making. In May 2025, Reuters reported that Musk’s use of his own AI system, Grok, was “potentially violating conflict-of-interest laws and putting at risk sensitive information on millions of Americans.”
Musk had promised that DOGE would operate with the utmost transparency, but that was a lie. Exactly how Grok was being used inside the government remained a mystery, and it quickly became known that the DOGE team was using the encrypted messaging app Signal to communicate, in violation of public record laws. “The use of AI and Signal reinforces concerns among cybersecurity experts and government ethicists that DOGE is operating with limited transparency and that billionaire Musk or the Trump administration could use information gathered with AI to further their own interests, or go afer political targets,” reported Reuters.
This was a deliberate effort to challenge Congress and the courts, a strategy detailed in Project 2025, a blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation and over 1000 Republican organizations. The Center for American Progress called it an “authoritarian playbook” that would “weaken the independence of public agencies, install political cronies throughout the government, punish people it disagrees with, and control what news the media can report.
DOGE was one among many shocking triumphs for Thiel’s network in the second Trump era. For example, Yarvin had called for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration,” all of became policies of the Trump Administration.
While Yarvin was far from the only right-wing thinker to express some version of these ideas, his obvious influence on the new administration attracted mainstream press attention. Two days before the inauguration, The New York Times Magazine ran a long interview with Yarvin headlined Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done. Powerful conservatives are listening.” Yarvin argued American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy run by a ‘C.E.O.’ — basically his friendly term for a dictator. The article also mentioned Yarvin’s ties to Andreessen, Thiel, and Vance.
On February 5, 2025, a group of anonymous researchers with tech backgrounds published a memo, “Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries,” which warned that “the rapid takeover of federal infrastructure mirrors the broader ambitions of the neoreactionary (NRx) movement—a small group of Silicon Valley elites who reject democracy and seek to install a ‘CEO Monarch’ to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin. Once considered fringe, their ideas are now embedded into the core of government operations.
Thiel’s extended network fanned out across the administration, with Bloomberg reporting that at least sixteen of Thiel’s longtime associates had taken high-level positions in Washington. They included Sacks, who Trump appointed as his AI and crypto czar. “A billionaire tech entrepreneur who used his wealth and influence in Silicon Valley to help Donald Trump win the presidency has deep connections to the new administration’s efforts to remake the government,” reported Bloomberg.
AI: existential threat or a way to rip off the creative ideas of millions of people?
I think that the whole “existential risk” brouhaha is a way to distract the public from the actual harm they are doing, which Duran writes “create their products by harvesting every bit of accessible content and data in the world, strip mining the creativity, knowledge, and intellectual property of billions of people to feed their networks without permission, payment, or acknowledgment—all in a quest to transform the collective output of humanity into private corporate property.”
The book “AI Snake Oil” shows how many of the models are flat out wrong, and so people are denied jobs, kept in jail because they are too poor to post bail – losing work and families – because AI has predicted they might not pay it back. Health care systems reject claims unfairly. And so on.
Duran continues: Worse, this massive process of theft and regurgitation requires tremendous amounts of energy, making AI systems a nightmare for the natural world. “The energy resources required to power this artificial-intelligence revolution are staggering, and the world’s biggest tech companies have made it a top priority to harness ever more of that energy, aiming to reshape our energy grids in the process,” wrote James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart in the MIT Technology Review in May 2025.
Nearly every aspect of the AI race appears to require the maximal exploitation of people, land, and resources. AI’s boosters pitch it as the solution to every problem imaginable, but the current approach seems destined to create more problems than it solves. “Essentially what we have in this generation of what is called AI is a business where there’s 10,000 mostly white men who are benefiting, and eight billion people around the world who are being either exploited, at a minimum, or directly harmed by the success of those 10,000,” said Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and billionaire turned Silicon Valley critic.
I can’t help but wonder if the AI bubble will pop any day now, and hopefully defund nation state ambitions. Duran points out that “Investors were pouring cash into the development of AI, but AI was producing a relative trickle of revenue, making the AI boom look to some like an economic bubble. Tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta invested a combined $410 billion in AI hardware and infrastructure in 2025 alone and are projected to escalate that to as much as $650 billion in 2026. Meanwhile, venture capital has fueled roughly $259 billion in investment in start-ups and software.”
Trillions are being spent to build out the technology, but the revenue for AI software and services is projected to remain under $200 billion in 2026. J.P. Morgan Chase analysts anticipate $5 trillion of spending on AI infrastructure between now and 2030,” reported Time. The AI race hinges on an inherently accelerationist logic: that burning maximum cash and energy to scale the technology as fast as possible will produce both a world-shifting miracle and infinite profits. Unlike the crypto race, which was heavily dependent on venture capital for its survival, major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta helped lead the charge into AI, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars for AI infrastructure and data centers.
Trump’s return was a bonanza for the crypto industry, but it was an even bigger windfall for AI. During his first week in the White House, Trump announced the creation of Stargate, a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that pledged $500 billion to build up to ten new AI data centers. He also repealed a Biden executive order emphasizing the need for safety, security, and workers’ rights, issuing a new executive order on AI focused on the need to “enhance America’s global AI dominance” and pledged to bulldoze regulations to speed up the development of AI,
On June 13, 2025, Trump escalated the relationship between AI and government with the creation of Detachment 201, which inducted four high-level AI executives into the US Army Reserve with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Despite having no military background, four executives from Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir donned camouflage fatigues and combat boots.
Three days later, OpenAI received a $200 million contract to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” according to a statement from the Pentagon. In July, Anthropic, Google, and xAI also received contracts worth up to $200 million apiece. One month later, the US Army announced plans to consolidate seventy-five different technology contracts worth as much as $10 billion into one single contract with Palantir. In February 2026, the DHS signed a purchasing agreement worth up to $1 billion with Palantir.
“As the economies of more countries more deeply assimilate information technology, they will see the emergence—so evident already in North America—of a more or less unemployable underclass. This is exactly what is happening. This will lead to a reaction with a nationalist, anti-technology bias.”
AI would not destroy governments by hollowing out the economy over time. Instead, AI became the operating system for governance itself. The Sovereign Individual imagined technology forcing the cognitive elite to flee collapsing nation-states destabilized by severe economic decline. What is unfolding is far more profitable and sinister: Technology is becoming the infrastructure of state power, arriving precisely at the moment when those who controlled it had captured the presidency for an aspiring dictator distinguished by a bottomless appetite for greed. The arrangement allowed him to feast on crypto corruption while they gorged on government power and lucrative state contracts to bolster their risky bets on speculative technologies. Instead of collapsing government, they colonized it.
Democracy was too unpredictable, its institutions unlikely to crumble overnight. Failure would mean severe consequences for the oligarchs who had tried to overthrow the most powerful nation in the world. Srinivasan had long worried about a massive backlash against Silicon Valley.
Trump and Freedom Cities (Nation States)
In May 2023, Trump’s campaign announced a “quantum leap” plan to “create a new American future and modernize communities across the country.” The first item on its agenda: “BUILDING FREEDOM CITIES.” “President Trump will work to open up the American frontier, holding a contest to charter new cities where families and individuals can have a new shot at the American Dream,” read the plan. “The federal government owns nearly one-third of the land mass of the United States. Hundreds of millions of these acres are empty.” The quantum leap plan envisioned a competition in which the ten best proposals for new cities won vast plots of federal land on which to build. Trump did not explain why it was necessary to build new cities from scratch rather than invest in existing cities, and few asked. Mainstream news outlets reported on the plan without questioning the idea, and few have mentioned it since.
No project received more media attention than Praxis, which, after failing in its yearslong search to find a willing host country, took a more hostile approach under Trump. In the summer of 2024, Dryden Brown visited Greenland to scout locations for his project. “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” he explained in a series of social media posts in November. One month later, president-elect Trump declared that “the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” in a social media post announcing his decision to appoint a new ambassador to Denmark: Ken Howery, a longtime Thiel associate who cofounded PayPal and Founders Fund. “As the Trump administration intensifies efforts to acquire Greenland from Denmark — or take it by force — some Silicon Valley tech investors are promoting the frozen island as a site for a so-called freedom city, a libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation,” reported Reuters in a story headlined “Greenland ‘Freedom City’?
Newsweek (Is ‘Freedom City’ being planned for Greenland? What We Know) reported that Reuters found that Silicon Valley tech investors Thiel and Andreessen had been advocating for the idea of a “freedom city” in Greenland, “a libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation”. New Scientist reported that Praxis had raised hundreds of millions in seed funding. On X in 2024, Brown wrote he wanted to create an early model of Terminus—the name Elon Musk has suggested for a future city on Mars. “We must build a prototype of Terminus on Earth before departing for Mars. I believe Greenland is the place,” Brown posted.
In another article, Newsweek reported that “According to reports from Wired, some groups calling for freedom cities have already been in communication with the Trump administration. The Freedom Cities Coalition, a think tank pushing for the creation of unregulated areas in every state, said that it had informed the White House about the use of interstate compacts to create the cities. One organization pushing for the concept is Próspera, 1,000 acres, some on the resort island of Roatán, supported by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Thiel, Srinivasan, and Andreessen. Thiel already has close ties to the Trump administration and has supported Vice President JD Vance’s political career since his run for Senator in Ohio.
There isn’t much to see at Próspera’s main headquarters near the town of Crawfish Rock on Roatán, just an office building and a smattering of businesses including “a Bitcoin café and education center, a genetics clinic, a scuba shop,” according to The New York Times Magazine. Two thousand residents supposedly call the zone home and few physically are actually there. The sparse settlement is mostly known for allowing experimental medical treatments not approved by the FDA. Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation,” wrote journalist Rachel Corbett in The New York Times Magazine in 2024. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from 36 countries or make their own. Próspera claims that 250 companies are incorporated in the zone, which has become a destination for biohackers who visit for those experimental therapies.
The Honduran public is not in favor of Prospera, made possible by President Juan Hernanez, who the
US government indicted on drug trafficking charges. He was arrested and extradited to the US, where he stood trial and received a 45-year sentence in 2024, the same year that the Honduran Supreme Court ruled that his laws allowing Próspera was unconstitutional. In 2025, Trump pardoned Hernández. A story in The Wall Street Journal shed light on the president’s motivations for freeing a man convicted of smuggling 400 tons of cocaine and being at what a federal prosecutor called “the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Republican operative Roger Stone had lobbied for the pardon, citing Próspera as part of his rationale. “In a blog post on the week of Trump’s inauguration in January, Stone argued that the new president could ‘crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras’ by pardoning Hernández, branding Prospera as a utopian project with ‘major implications for U.S. policy and the future of freedom throughout the world,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
Stone’s decision to make Próspera part of his argument raised questions about whether tech oligarchs played a role in the Hernández pardon. “The reason seems clear: Hernández helped some big-time American crypto bros turn their dream of a government-free utopia into a reality, and these broligarchs—the best known of whom is Peter Thiel—are the same people who helped fund President Trump’s first presidential campaign, and J.D. Vance’s political career.” Srinivasan has long identified Próspera as the prime example of his network state idea in action—a venture-capital-backed settlement governed by a private corporation.
Praxis, the brainchild of a surfer and college dropout named Dryden Brown, billed itself as a future city of 10,000 somewhere in the Mediterranean. Praxis investors included Andreessen, Altman, and Lonsdale, along with the Winklevoss twins, Fred Ehrsam of Coinbase, and, for a while, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Along with Próspera, Praxis became a flagship project on Srinivasan’s official Network State Dashboard, a web page that tracks the progress of such projects around the globe. “Network States offer a path to crypto’s next wave of adoption by integrating onchain infrastructure into the parallel institutions supplanting the global system’s core functions, and As local communities dissolve and Nation States stumble, Network States will ascend” declared the Praxis website. Though Brown claimed to have ample financing and interest, finding an amenable host government proved challenging. The search took on a game show quality as Brown traveled the world searching for a location, even popping up in Argentina and the Dominican Republic to consider the finer points of locating there.
Brown is now pitching another location for his network state / freedom city. A Vanity Fair profile featured Brown trumpeting a new plan to build a city called Atlas on the 100,000-acre grounds of Vandenberg Space Force Base near Santa Barbara, California. “The idea goes like this: Let the so-called Praxians build a city on federal land in Vandenberg,” wrote Zoë Bernard. “They will erect facilities, housing, and offices. They will attract tech talent from nearby Los Angeles and San Francisco. With their newfound city, they will help revitalize American manufacturing. They will build drones and ships and space infrastructure. Brown cited Ayn Rand and the Founding Fathers as inspirations,
Another project, the Highland Rim Project, sought to build a network of aligned Christian communities in the rolling hills along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Highland Rim is closely associated with Andrew Isker, a controversial right-wing pastor aiming to create Christian zones explicitly designed to operate outside secular democratic governance.
Isker has described Indians as “cow worshippers,” Judaism as “literally blasphemous and anti-Christian,” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a law that aids a war “against Christians, men, and white people.”
“There’s a name for the rough concept that Isker describes: the ‘Network State,’ an ascendant and buzzy tech movement where internet groups are beginning to explore what it might be like to start their own new countries,” wrote Kiera Butler of Mother Jones. “At first, these new countries would appear online, and eventually in actual physical locations. Simply put, the Highland Rim Project is the Christian nationalist take on that
Nate Fischer, the CEO of New Founding—and funder of American Reformer, the Christian nationalist publication formerly edited by Chris Buskirk, JD Vance’s partner in the Rockbridge Network—explicitly described his idea as a network state. “Nation states are not the principal form of government today,” Fischer wrote on X. “I see no reason Christian nations or peoples couldn’t organize network states.”
New Founding had received investment from Marc Andreessen, and Fischer had invested in Pronomos Capital, Friedman’s fund for network state projects. It was a strange marriage: one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists directly funding a company behind a Christian nationalist separatist project that openly identified as a network state.
Most of these new concepts cropped up in California—and seemed designed to tap into Trump’s freedom city proposal. In San Francisco, Mark Lutter and Jeffrey Mason of the Charter Cities Institute proposed a tech-focused freedom city in the Presidio, a sprawling park on federal land with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, that would focus on “development and deployment of innovative technologies under a more permissive regulatory framework which can then safely be deployed at scale.”
In Alameda, an island city in the San Francisco Bay, a tech worker named James Ingallinera proposed the creation of “Frontier Valley” at the site of an old navy base, describing the project as a “new special regulation district” with “the most accelerated code in the US for robotics and physical innovation.”
In Sonoma County, 87 miles north of San Francisco, a Stanford computer science graduate named Devon Zuegel pitched “Esmeralda,” a new walkable city for “high-agency people” on the outskirts of the bucolic town of Cloverdale.
Freedom cities are simply Trump’s rebranding of the same idea. Palmer Luckey, cofounder of Anduril, called for Trump to build a freedom city in Cuba. “The United States should immediately expand our base on Guantanamo Bay into Liberty City, an American Singapore of the Caribbean,” he wrote. “We already control Guantanamo under a perpetual lease, complete with a deepwater port, airfields, and proximity to key trade routes. Why not turn it into a special economic zone?”
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, one of the more vocal evangelists for the network state, agreed. At the 2024 Network State Conference, he had explicitly linked his company to the concept, stressing the need to create “an archipelago” of private cities to serve as a “refuge where the builders of the world can make sure they have a place to reside.”
We should designate ~10 or so like this across different pieces of federal land, each with its own exemption from federal and state law,” he wrote on X in response to Luckey’s call for a colony in Cuba. “One for bio, one for drones/aviation, one for crypto, one for robotics, one for mining, etc. See what happens without so much regulation within a small sandbox.” Trump was already thinking along those lines. “I have concepts for Gaza that I think are very good,” Trump said during a trip to the Middle East in May. “Make it a freedom zone. Let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone. I’d be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone.”
Months earlier, he had shared an AI-generated video of a dystopian future Gaza, complete with a Trump resort, a golden statue of himself, and dollar bills raining from the sky. His Gaza fantasy was the network state in its most ghoulish incarnation: a tech-fascist casino amid the ruins of a genocide. The result: Project Sunrise, a $112 billion proposal from Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner that would displace Palestinians and build a tech city in Gaza. “Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids,” reported The Wall Street Journal.
Seizing land and creating new colonial settlements backed by tech capital had become a key part of Trump’s foreign policy. Within days of the US raid to capture and arrest Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute publicly called for the creation of yet another tech city there. “Venezuela doesn’t need to become another Iraq,” he wrote on X. “It needs a Freedom City… A Freedom City = new land, new rules, real property rights, real rule of law—built with the U.S.
Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine calls for the creation of a “free economic zone” in the Donbas region,
most of which is currently occupied by Russian military forces. In Kazakhstan, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced vague plans for a “cryptocity” near the capital, Astana. On the Caribbean island of Nevis, a Belgian Bitcoin investor named Olivier Janssens was buying up land for a proposed city called Destiny, which Janssens describes as an American Dubai. On the Venezuelan island of Isla Margarita, a German crypto entrepreneur was planning CryptoCity, a housing development for 1,000 people where every transaction would be handled via crypto. In Nigeria, Itana City—backed by Pronomos Capital and the crypto exchange Binance—was supposedly rising inside the Lekki Free Zone near Lagos which bills itself as the “global jurisdiction of choice on the African continent for the Internet citizens of the world.” Wired called it “a Peter Thiel-backed startup city” that “wants to be Africa’s Delaware”.
Pop-up conferences like Edge City and Zuzalu toured Thailand, Bhutan, Patagonia, and Montenegro, spreading the gospel of future digital citizenship. Srinivasan himself launched a so-called Network School in Forest City, a Chinese-funded development off the coast of Malaysia that had become a “ghost city” with fewer than 7,000 residents and rows of empty high-rise apartment buildings. Network School aimed to provide “a three-month learning retreat marketed to people interested in ‘network nations,’ a kind of utopia for the anarcho-capitalist set,” according to Wired. A different Forest City emerged in the English countryside. In October 2025, the Albion City Development Corporation unveiled a proposal to build Forest City 1, a new settlement of 1 million people on 45,000 acres of prime agricultural land near the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border, the brainchild of Shiv Malik. Malik and Reeve are currently seeking government approval to become an officially designated development corporation, which would empower them to acquire land and steamroll opposition. Malic said that a development corporation is an authoritarian tool that can force people to sell their land.
Ravikant is no stranger to bizarre ideas. He is also an investor in something called the Balaji Fund, which invests in network state projects globally. Other investors in the Balaji Fund—named for Balaji Srinivasan—include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Coinbase board member Fred Ehrsam. Neither Johnson nor Ravikant mentioned the network state in their conversation, but it was a recurring presence at the Don’t Die conference. Multiple speakers lectured the crowd on network state projects like Vitalia, a “pop-up city” located at Próspera in Honduras which has declared its goal to “make death optional.”
Another speaker mentioned something called Vitalist Bay, an additional longevity-themed “pop-up city” in San Francisco. The Vitalist Bay presentation featured a large picture of Thiel on one side and an AI-generated version of the city skyline on the other. A network state presence made sense, because Johnson is also planning his own Don’t Die country to “defeat all causes of human and planetary death, promoting prosperity and longevity.” “I’m also building a network state, very similar to a nation-state,” said Johnson in an Instagram video. In interviews, he laid out hopes to create a Don’t Die network state 20 million strong in a year’s time.
The Tech Industry enters the Defense industry
Silicon Valley’s pivot back to defense technology is one of its most dramatic shifts in recent years. In 2024, defense tech start-ups raised nearly $3 billion in venture capital across one hundred deals, according to TechCrunch, setting a record. Defense investment surged even higher in 2025.
Just as tech venture capitalists took chunks out of the hotel, media, taxi, and retail industries, they now hope to redirect the military funding spigot to their own coffers.
In late 2024, Elon Musk derided Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet as “the worst military value for money in history,” declaring, “Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.” The comments caused Lockheed Martin’s stock to drop by 3.8 percent, “wiping out nearly $5 billion in market value.”
a16z also regularly takes potshots at the old-school military-industrial complex. “The system is failing us,” the firm declared in a 2025 paper calling for defense reform. “The Pentagon has spent trillions to defend America and deter our adversaries. Yet our fleet is shrinking, weapon systems are delivered late and over budget, and warfighters lack the tools to win the fight of the future.” In other words: Give the money to Silicon Valley.
Venture capital now clusters around defense tech the way it clusters around AI and crypto. Under the banner of ‘patriotic tech,’ this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.”
In June 2025, a report by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese blasted tech companies for providing AI infrastructure used by Israeli military to commit genocide in Palestine, because it is lucrative for many,” The forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech—providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability—while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”
Conclusion
Why wouldn’t Thiel decide to get loud about the Antichrist as the war went on? All his prophetic interests now converged. AI-augmented war raged in the Holy Land as the crypto billionaire president fantasized about building an AI-powered network state Trump casino atop the rubble. Meanwhile, a small but powerful group of Thiel’s protégés were also pitching holy war as venture strategy and pushing Christianity as a networking opportunity. For him, the ultimate threat (the Antichrist) is any form of international political order, be it any kind of world state or even a strong United Nations. In Thiel’s view, this must be countered.”
Thiel and his cohort of powerful industry leaders are done pretending. They’re hyping death, decline, and diabolical futures from which—in their grim, self-serving fairy tale—only they can save us.
Its mandate for perpetually exponential growth makes constant destruction the path to profit. The quickest way to scale a multibillion-dollar bonanza is to collapse existing systems—taxis, hotels, media—or escape into new ones: AI, Mars, digital immortality, network states. The ending of worlds has become the business model.
Tech oligarchs are hardly unique in their quest to remake the global order. Their struggle aligns with a larger push by authoritarians worldwide who wish to rid the world of liberal democracy this century.
They form networks of like-minded forces working to legitimize authoritarian forms of governance. “Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation,” wrote Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another.
They prefer a world in which different systems—Chinese authoritarian capitalism, Russian kleptocracy, Hungarian “illiberal democracy,” Saudi-style absolute monarchy—will coexist on more equal footing. To achieve this requires unseating the US as the world’s dominant superpower. This is a main goal of multipolarity, when democratic nations will be entirely powerless to stop authoritarian domination. Billionaire investor and network state enthusiast Naval Ravikant jumped on the multipolarity train in 2025. “The US will actually do better in a multipolar world, because it’ll no longer have to subsidize and police everyone else.”
Stripped of all the religious gobbledygook, the core arguments of Dugin and Thiel converge on a simple thesis: The United States—a young nation that rose to power at unprecedented speed, becoming a hegemonic world power exerting force and influence through pax Americana and a vision of liberal democracy they slander as an enemy of freedom—is the most likely Antichrist.
“Brexit, just the beginning,” wrote Jeffrey Epstein to Thiel on June 26. “Of what,” replied Thiel. Epstein explained: “return to tribalism. counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and i both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office… finding things on their way to collapse… was much easier than finding the next bargain.” Like Thiel, Epstein saw the world headed toward a breaking point and looked for ways to capitalize. It sounds crazy to most people, but a certain class of men has long seen chaos and collapse as a recipe for destiny, and some among them believe the apocalypse is now at hand.
The release of the Epstein files in 2026 revealed the extent to which Epstein had been a major early player in crypto, investing $3 million in Coinbase and helping to fund the development of Bitcoin at a critical stage in 2014. “At the very moment Bitcoin’s future was in jeopardy, Epstein’s money and access placed him inside the institutions that were beginning to frame the cryptocurrency as a tool to route around nation states—and consolidate power among a new class of networked tech elites,” wrote journalist Nafeez Ahmed.
Their zeal for disruption has already made democracy into an endangered species. Once held up as a global beacon of liberty, America has been revealed as highly vulnerable to destruction. Pushing it to the brink wasn’t particularly difficult. It required only enough wealthy and influential people who were willing to fund it, or at least go along with it quietly. Quickly, we witnessed the rise of an openly corrupt president who is selling out the country for crypto, launching illegal invasions of foreign countries, threatening to attack NATO allies, sending troops into American cities, deploying masked terror squads to abduct immigrants, and openly abusing the justice system to prosecute his political enemies while also selling presidential pardons to the highest bidders. He is just getting started.
The capture of democracy extends beyond government to media as well. Radical tech oligarchs now control The Washington Post and CBS—in addition to Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok—and some fantasize about a hostile takeover of The New York Times. In 2025, a16z launched the a16z New Media Fellowship “for operators, creators and storytellers shaping the future of media.” The firm is also a leading investor in Substack. It’s all a chilling realization of Balaji Srinivasan’s call for Silicon Valley oligarchs to create a parallel media system that essentially replaces journalism with propaganda—a crucial element of any fascist movement.
I feel that I personally have to start thinking realistically about how to flee the country. Everyone else in a similar position should have a 2029 plan as well.
While the champions of tech fascism see the Republican Party as the best vehicle for its hopes, they also understand the inherent corruptibility of the Democratic Party, which also serves its wealthy donors more than it serves anyone else.
During his 1999 speech at the Independent Institute, Thiel predicted that official Washington would be too dumb to understand what was happening and too powerless to stop it, and so far he seems correct on that point.
Yarvin is also correct that Trump is failing to go full fascist authoritarian, to do The Thing—a full-on state of exception that suspends the Constitution and the rule of law, as called for by his cockamamie theory.
A dramatic overnight lurch into full fascism would likely result in an explosion of widespread resistance that could spark economic devastation and end badly for him. Trump, an octogenarian who increasingly struggles to keep his eyes open in public, seems to prefer a more gradual sort of decline that does not interrupt his moneymaking schemes (or his nap time). Despite occasional threats, Trump does not currently seem inclined to start executing journalists, judges, or members of Congress. Such measures, and more, would be necessary to achieve a full treasonous overthrow of American democracy.
Those who still believe in democracy must avoid being lulled into complacency. Democracy’s enemies specialize in long-term strategies, and they have enough money to operate in perpetuity; they are scheming for global control.
Trump is a symptom of a far greater disease in our system, a disease that will continue to grow and metastasize after he dies. The billionaires of Silicon Valley have a plan to succeed. They understand that a political system dependent on checks from wealthy corporations and individuals is inherently tilted in their favor.
To create a better future, we must create a world without billionaires. We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both. If we continue to allow a tiny group of men to stockpile the majority of the world’s wealth, they will continue to buy the power they need to impose hierarchy, oppression, subjugation, and death on the vast majority of people, whom they see as their inferiors. History strongly suggests that extreme wealth has a tendency to drive people insane and transform them into tyrants.
All it took was a handful of people with billions of dollars to begin the unraveling of our entire nation. The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the nation itself mean nothing to these people, who view it as little more than an asset to be divvied up and liquidated. This current onslaught of anti-democracy billionaires exposes an existential flaw in our system. In a nation where money buys power, money can buy power to destroy the nation itself. We do not allow private citizens to own nuclear weapons because such power does not belong in the hands of individuals.
“The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book,” wrote Adam Becker in More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. “Without billionaires, fringe philosophies like rationalism and effective accelerationism would stay on the fringe, rather than being pulled into the mainstream through the reality-warping power of concentrated wealth.”
Tomorrow, our country will be poor, and our children and grandchildren will be among those deemed unworthy of food and care. But only if we allow them to accelerate their schemes of exponential chaos and decline while walling us out of the digital castles they seek to erect.
This brings us to the challenge of accountability. Holding powerful people accountable for complicity in the overthrow of democracy is not just a matter of justice, it’s a crucial mechanism for self-defense. If we do shake loose from the grip of fascism, we must harden our systems to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. Our system failed to hold Trump accountable for his crimes the first time around, and we are reaping the consequences. We need investigations, hearings, prosecutions, and likely some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. We need a full postmortem of our brush with national death, as well as prison sentences and severe financial penalties for those who participated in, or profited from, the defiling of our government.
Their rise must become a cautionary tale that future children learn about in history class.
we should ban crypto, which is designed to defraud the public and undermine national security and stability. In addition, it should become official US government policy to view the network state and all similar anti-government schemes as what they are—extremist ideologies designed to foment sedition and societal harm.
