The Network State

Every day we're warned about the dangers of impending Fascism, Nazism, authoritarianism, and autocracy — and with good reason. In the United States, our system of constitutional checks and balances has broken down quickly. Each day we awaken to dark new realities: people being disappeared illegally, defiance of court orders, citizens' rights being threatened, agencies being illegally dismantled. Trump and his allies are very obviously following the “fascist playbook” — and it's working.

Implicit in that observation is the idea, reinforced by tropes that ask “why didn't anyone do anything to stop this,” that we should take action. As if we could simply forcefully uninstall the fascist software, reinstall liberal democracy, and live happily ever after — having neutralized the threat. But reality is seldom quite that simple. Doing something is hard, and requires people to disrupt their lives to rise to the occasion.

But what if our turn onto the authoritarian path is irreversible? What if the way back (and other ways out) are captured, blocked, or seeded with landmines? Or have authoritarians so muddled our capacity for sense-making that we are simply incapable of finding the way out? There is a strong argument that this is now the case, and that we are now faced with a convergence of our political poles — where both sides are dissatisfied with the status quo and demanding new solutions, new approaches, and new blood. Perhaps there is no way back — only forward, through the dark forest.

Why is a company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires trying to seize Greenland from Denmark?

In this video, we break down the shocking plan to turn Greenland into a tech-controlled Network State, with investment from a company linked to tech investors like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen. Backed by Praxis, a startup that claims to have over $525 million in funding, this movement is pushing to build a corporate-run city-state — far from democracy and accountability.

With Donald Trump floating ideas to buy or take over Greenland, and his allies like Ken Howery and JD Vance pushing the agenda, this plan is gaining real political backing.

The last few decades have seen the accumulation of an immense amount of wealth and power in the hands of a few Silicon Valley tech titans.

At the same time that these executives have increasingly come to dominate our lives with their products and technologies, many of them have become disenchanted with the liberal political order that governs the Western democracies in which we live. Lately, they have spun that disenchantment into a techno-political movement that seeks to break with our current society and create a brave new world—one that they can shape and control.

The Network State movement has been called a “cult,” a “scam,” a “kooky” dystopia, and, by its supporters, “the future” of human civilization. It would be easy to write the movement off as a fanciful daydream of idle billionaires, were it not for the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars are currently being poured into making it a reality. Efforts are being made to build new cities all over the world, and these cities, in turn, are serving as a testing ground for the feasibility of the utopian techno-vision that undergirds their development.

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Several groups representing “startup cities”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned.

According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the startup city known as Próspera, tells WIRED that he and other Próspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea in recent weeks. He claims the administration has been very receptive. In 2023, Trump floated the idea of creating 10 freedom cities. Now, Goff says that Próspera’s vision is to create “not just 10, but as many as the market can handle.” They hope to have drafted legislation ready by the end of the year.

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Historians (if they exist in the future and any records of this period survive) will note this month as one where the United States slipped fully into authoritarianism. Incompetence, luck, and real leadership may yet intervene, but we have already crossed several “red lines” warned about by experts.

In the course of just a few days, Americans have cataloged a laundry list of signs that the country has reached a tipping point into authoritarianism: SignalGate; "Liberation Day" tariffs; reversal of (some) tariffs (maybe); deportations to El Salvador; defiance of the Supreme Court; asserting that "home growns" (aka citizens) are next; taking control of Columbia University by placing it into receivership; bullying law firms to provide pro-bono services supportive of the regime; indiscriminate revocation of student visas; calling for the revocation of the broadcast license for CBS over dislike of 60 Minutes content; attempts to criminalize media figures like Norm Eisen; investigation of former Trump administration officials Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs on grounds of treason; forcing Americans to use X to interact with the Social Security administration; widespread DOGE cuts of programs and agencies without Congressional approval; decline of the dollar under pressure from tariffs and market chaos. The list goes on and on.

At the TED conference this past week in Vancouver, British Columbia, about 1,700 multidisciplinary thinkers gathered to hear and discuss dozens of prepared talks. But the real action was among the attendees, who gathered all week in impromptu salon discussions to share their concerns about the state of the world and what can be done to change course.

The conference itself is loaded with smart, interesting people from around the world, genuinely trying to do good and useful work. The real conversations are in the hallways, at the bar, and at dinner. And never in sixteen years of attendance at various TED events have I heard those people more concerned about the state of the world.

The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.

Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.

Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.

The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.

“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.

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“We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start,” says investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

In a searing talk, she details a fast-moving technological coup and the rise of the “broligarchy”: an unprecedentedly powerful class of tech executives (like Elon Musk) who are complicit in dismantling democracy and enabling authoritarian control across the world.

She shares a guide on how to digitally disobey in this age of runaway corporate power, data harvesting and mass surveillance — and reminds you that you have more power than you think.

Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump administration.

Since Clearview’s existence first came to light in 2020, the secretive company has attracted outsize controversy for its dystopian privacy implications. Corporations like Macy’s allegedly used Clearview on shoppers, according to legal records; law enforcement has deployed it against activists and protesters; and multiple government investigations have found federal agencies’ use of the product failed to comply with privacy requirements.

By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country.

Today, one of the company’s top customers is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but immigrants aren’t the only people at risk. With Trump pursuing “retribution” against his political enemies, Clearview offers a range of frightening applications. “It creates a really disturbingly powerful tool for police that can identify nearly every person at a protest or a reproductive health facility or a house of worship with just photos of those people’s face."

No federal laws regulate facial recognition, and many federal agencies have deployed Clearview for years with little accountability. This story, based on interviews with insiders and thousands of newly obtained emails, texts, and other records, provides the fullest account to date of the extent of the company’s far-right origins and of the implementation of its facial recognition technology.

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In Episode 2 of the Nerd Reich Podcast, host Gil Duran sits down with investigative journalist Eoin Higgins, author of the explosive book "Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left."

Together, they reveal how right-wing tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are not just shaping platforms—they’re controlling the media narrative, silencing dissent, and redefining what journalism means in the digital age.

Working Americans who understand what it’s like to struggle from paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet have never been well represented in the White House. But the extraordinary wealth of appointees President Donald Trump is naming to help run the government represents an unprecedentedly hands-on intervention by the billionaire class. This is not just government by the top 1% – Trump’s government is rule by the top 0.0001% (read as the top one ten thousandth percent).

The collective net worth of Trump’s top appointees is reportedly estimated to exceed $460 billion, including Elon Musk’s $400 billion net worth. Even without Musk, Trump’s cabinet and top appointees in 2025 by far exceeds the wealth of previous cabinets, including his previous cabinet (and previous record holder), which was worth $3.2 billion. President Biden’s cabinet collectively was worth $118 million.

Sixteen of Trump’s 25 wealthiest appointees and nominees are members of the 0.0001%, meaning they are among the 813 billionaires in the United States, where some 341 million of the rest of us make up the 99.9999% (earning an average yearly income of about $61,000). Elon Musk’s outrageous wealth places him in a category all his own, as the world’s richest person.

Will rule by the ultra-rich deliver for the other 99.9999% of us? Time will tell.

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A group of Silicon Valley billionaires is causing chaos in the federal government by shuttering agencies, firing workers en masse and flouting legal and political norms. According to journalist Gil Duran, the chaos is carefully orchestrated, as figures like Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel follow a playbook conceived by far right thinkers on how to take down institutions and seize power. We talk to Duran about what these tech elites – a group he calls “The Nerd Reich” – are reading, thinking and saying.

A couple of years ago, Andrew Isker, a pastor and father of six, made a big decision. He would move his family away from Minnesota, where six generations of his ancestors had lived before him, to a rural community in Tennessee.

Leaving his home state wasn’t easy, he told Tucker Carlson on Carlson’s YouTube show in March. But he had no choice; the progressive excesses of Governor Tim Walz simply had become too much to bear. So Isker decided to move to rural Appalachia—choosing that particular location to help launch a new community near the small town of Gainesboro, Tennessee, in the central northern part of the state.

There were reasons other than just its natural beauty that this area was appealing. The community that Isker is helping to build in Tennessee is part of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America: “Thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.”

But the Highland Rim Project is not just another old-fashioned utopian fantasy. Rather, it is deliberately forward-looking, infused with Silicon Valley techno-libertarian values. The communities will be designed around “digital self-governance” including cryptocurrency and a culture “in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”

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. 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 idea. As New Founding CEO Nate Fischer put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the principal form of government today. I see no reason Christian nations or peoples couldn’t organize network states.”

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So, here’s the supervillain plan.

We’re going to tank the global economy. The old order will collapse. Yes, there will be chaos, violence, mass suffering, and pain, but it’s worth it. A phoenix can only rise from the ashes before it ascends to glorious heights and flies to Mars, which is our eventual destination because the Earth, as we know, is completely f’d due to climate change. However, we must first prepare for our future extraplanetary adventures by hoarding resources, acquiring wealth, and amassing power. We will buy the dip as Americans are “liberated” from their 401k plans. Hopefully, the dollar will weaken, and we can finally replace it with Crypto, which we control.

Our partners and puppets with political power will work with us to divide up the country into network states that we will each control like mini-fiefdoms. The masses will naturally yield to our guidance because, after all, we are chosen by fate and God to lead humanity due to our innate brilliance and superior intellect. Unfortunately, not everyone can join us in this next chapter. We have to cull the weak and thin the herd through a humane eugenics process. Eventually, the creme de la creme of genetically superior humans shall become the new human species that will merge with technology and live forever across the galaxies.

Now, let’s get to work and help Trump get elected.

You might read that and say that’s terrifying and ridiculous but ultimately entertaining dystopian fiction. Journalist Gil Duran, editor of The Nerd Reich newsletter, would say that haven’t paid attention to the ideology and plans of Elon Musk and the broligarchy.

“Normie journalists,” as Duran refers to them, are failing to understand Trump’s murder-suicide of the economy because they are relying on old modes of conventional thinking. It’s not baffling and incomprehensible to Duran because he’s been researching and writing about the broligarcy for years and says it’s all part of their long-term plan. Yes, there aspirations sound utterly batshit, but they are nonetheless at play now because they have access to political power through Donald Trump.

In this Chai Talk, Duran breaks down why Musk and the broligarchy are celebrating America’s pending economic collapse and how they seek to benefit from it to implement their long-term master plan. I know it all sounds like kooky science fiction at first, but Duran brings the receipts.___

As the world continues to digest Donald Trump's haphazard announcement of wide-ranging tariffs that threaten to upend the global economy, reshape capital markets, and decimate individual retirement accounts, one vulnerability is becoming clear: the MAGA coalition is not united, and contains exploitable fault lines.

Voices as diverse as Mike Pence and Elon Musk have expressed concerns about the tariffs, their scope, and their potential effects. Pundit Ben Shapiro said the tariffs were imposed “unilaterally” by Trump, and “probably unconstitutional.” Pence described them as “the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” and Musk criticized White House advisor Peter Navarro, the architect of the tariffs, saying “he ain't built shit.” This is hardly a united front, and creates opportunities for Democrats to identify and exploit differences between factions.

After years of vague hand-waving and generalized opposition to Joe Biden, it's clear there is no one actual single strategy being followed by Republicans. Partisans who imagined they were all on the same page are realizing they were suffering from a shared hallucination. As futures markets nervously await signals about what's coming next, here's some of what else we're tracking as this unfolds.

The accelerated destruction of the United States, the global economy, and the modern liberal democratic order is underway. Yet Curtis Yarvin – Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher,” who has been advocating such extremism for years – is disappointed. The San Francisco software programmer behind the so-called Dark Enlightenment doesn't seem to be enjoying the fruits of his own revolution. In fact, he sees failure ahead.

Though regarded by many as a mere internet troll, Yarvin – who Vice President J.D. Vance affectionately calls a “reactionary fascist” (and often quotes) – is now getting his due. His extreme theories on replacing democracy with corporate dictatorship are finally being tested in Washington. The Financial Times, the New York Times and Time Magazine have all paid homage to his role in shaping our current reality.

But there’s a problem: Yarvin is unfulfilled. Musk’s destruction of government apparently does not meet the vaunted Dark Enlightenment guru’s standards. In fact, he gives the effort a mediocre grade and says it will likely fail.

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