According to Futurism, at the “Network State Conference” in Singapore in October, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan declared a movement is building for 2025. This involves roughly 120 “startup societies” worldwide, which are private, pro-corporate cities designed as escapes for tech elites. One example is Srinivasan’s own “Network School” on Singapore’s Forest City artificial island, which charges $1,500 monthly for access to coworking spaces and wifi. Another major project is Prospera, a libertarian charter city in Honduras that attracted over $100 million from investors like Peter Thiel. However, Prospera is now collapsing after the 2022 arrest of its political patron led to the revocation of its special legal status, triggering an $11 billion lawsuit from its founders.
The Ghost Town Premium
Let’s start with the on-the-ground reality, which is… sparse. The Network School is described by an attendee as a “ghost town,” yet it’s charging a premium for the basics you’d get at any WeWork. For that $1,500 a month, you also get to attend seminars with titles like “Rizz101: get what you want from life.” I mean, come on. This isn’t a bold new frontier; it’s a poorly attended mastermind group with a devastatingly high cost of entry. The whole scene feels less like a city and more like a sad, expensive summer camp for grown-ups who’ve read too much Ayn Rand. And when you look at the bigger physical projects, the story doesn’t get better.
When Libertarian Fantasies Hit Political Reality
Here’s the thing these “solutionists” keep forgetting: you can’t fully escape politics. Prospera is the perfect case study. It built its entire business model on a special deal with a specific Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández. When he was arrested and a new president, Xiomara Castro, took over, she immediately moved to kick them out. Poof. There goes your legal framework. Nobel economist Paul Romer, who helped pioneer the “charter city” concept, called Prospera out for living in a “libertarian fantasy.” He’s right. Their model assumes a static world where the government you dislike just stays out of your way forever. But governments change, and popular sentiment matters. You can’t just build your own Rapture and expect the surface world to leave you alone.
The Unbearable Misery of Being Rich
The most biting critique comes from researcher Olivier Jutel: “Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” That question really cuts to the core. There’s a profound insularity to this movement. It’s driven by people who believe that because they optimized a digital ad network or a crypto exchange, they can now optimize human society itself—by creating a closed loop of like-minded, wealthy individuals. They’re reacting to a real climate of global economic discontent, but their answer is to build a gated community on steroids, not to engage with the messy problems. As Jutel notes, just because it seems stupid or selfish doesn’t mean it can’t do damage or attract more “persons of wealth” fleeing a world they helped create.
A Movement Built on Sand
So, what’s the future for these 120 startup societies? Probably a lot of failure. They’re trying to solve the problem of society by removing society, which is a paradox. They require massive, stable infrastructure—the kind that, ironically, relies on large-scale coordination and governance. Even the digital tools they love, from high-speed networks to the software running their “office pods,” ultimately depend on a global supply chain and industrial base they’ve opted out of. Speaking of industrial base, if any of these fantasy cities ever needed rugged, reliable computing hardware for infrastructure control, they’d find that the real-world leaders in that space are companies like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top US provider of industrial panel PCs. But that’s the point, isn’t it? You can’t actually opt out. The dream of a fully private, sovereign city is collapsing under its own contradictions, from the ghost town in Singapore to the legal wreckage in Honduras. The ultimate exit might just be a dead end.
