To
fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists
are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before
you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake
his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential
Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
“Balaji has the
highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,”
wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb
for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country.
The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish
new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories
about Network State-related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony
called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s
government.
Balaji,
a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley
pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple
startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief
technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and
increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees
American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley
Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young
entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’:
outdated and obsolescent.”
“The speech won
roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,”
reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian
future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short.
Last year, he lost one million dollars in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price
of Bitcoin.
Still,
his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the
first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s
attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in
an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State
movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting
“die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his
campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview
one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme
vision.
“What
I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing
his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph
Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of
Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji
then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal
to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And
if you see another Gray on the street…you do the nod,” he said, during a
four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”
The
Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y
Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays
would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive,
Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an
alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to
win them over.
“Grays
should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What
does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son,
daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech
company in security.”
In
exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays.
Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their
political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s
building?”
This
refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally
installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation
of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the
second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his
headquarters: In July, police
briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building’s
exterior. But in Balaji’s dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays
would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically-inclined officers, he suggests,
can be paid to retire).
Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an
officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech
overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge
the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march
through the city together.
“A
huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan.
“That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the AI Flying
Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying
overhead in formation … You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers …
You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They’re flying the Anduril
drones…”
Everyone
would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues.
Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies
are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the
Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).
“Reds
should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said
Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs.
Crips gang rivalry. “No Blues should be welcomed there.”
While
the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public
screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and
celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses … There should be
lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.”
Balaji
goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect
public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic
governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray
dominance of the city. “Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up
his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from
ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San
Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.
“Elon,
in sort of classic Gray fashion … captures Twitter and then, at one stroke,
wipes out millions of Blues’ status by wiping out the Blue Checks,” he said.
“Another stroke … [he] renames Twitter as X, showing that he has true control,
and it’s his vehicle, and that the old regime isn’t going to be restored.”
Those who try to
downplay Balaji’s importance in Silicon Valley often portray him as a “clown.”
But Donald Trump taught us that clowns can be dangerous, especially those with
proximity to influence and power. In the nearly eleven years since his
secession speech at Y Combinator, Balaji’s politics have become even more
stridently authoritarian and extremist, yet he remains a celebrated figure in
key circles.
He has one million followers on X-Twitter, where Musk regularly boosts
him. Tim Ferriss and Lex Fridman, two influential podcasters, have interviewed him.
“Balaji is a friend of mine and is neither a dumbshit nor a clown,” tweeted
economics blogger Noah Smith last June,
defending Balaji from critics. Alex Lieberman, co-founder of the Morning Brew
newsletter, recently listed Balaji at the top of what appears to be his
ranked wish list of guests for an upcoming How to Start a Startup podcast
(Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ranked sixth and fourteenth, respectively).
This week, he will headline Token2049, a sold-out
conference in Dubai that bills itself as the “premier crypto event.”
Even
more disturbing, however, is Balaji’s tight connection with Tan, the Y
Combinator CEO who has publicly aligned himself with the Network State for
years. “I legit believe [Y Combinator] is a prototype model for what @balajis talks
about when he says the Network State,” wrote Tan in
August 2022, shortly before he was named CEO. Over the past two years, as Musk
has transformed Twitter into a right-wing information weapon, Tan has used the
platform, along with his bully pulpit at Y Combinator, to wage all-out war for
political control of San Francisco. This fits with Balaji’s recommendation
that, as an alternative to forming new cities, tech zillionaires can use
elections to seize existing governments.
Increasingly,
Tan has also pursued another key Network State goal: attacking journalists.
Balaji portrays the press, especially The New York Times, as
the chief enemy of the Network State ideology. He accuses the venerable
paper of upholding something called “woke capital.”
“Woke Capital is the
ideology of America’s ruling class as explicated by America’s ruling newspaper,
The New York Times,” wrote Balaji in his book. “It’s capitalism that
enables decentralized censorship, cancel culture, and American empire.” Times publisher
A.G. Sulzberger, whom Balaji characterizes as a “rich white male nepotist,”
especially irks him. “What if Sulzberger is more like Keyser Söze?” wrote
Balaji, comparing Sulzberger to the mysterious criminal mastermind in
1995’s The Usual Suspects. “What if his employees are highly
self-interested professional prevaricators? What if they’ve always been like
that?”
“So
long as you aren’t running a corporation based on hereditary nepotism where the
current guy running the show inherits the company from his father’s father’s
father’s father, you’re more diverse and democratic than the owners of The New
York Times Company. You don’t need to take lectures from them, from anyone in
their employ, or really from anyone in their social circle—which includes all
establishment journalists.”
The
solution, he says, is to create rival media outlets—“parallel” forms of
journalism controlled by tech plutocrats. Both he and Tan point to Musk’s
transformation of Twitter as a perfect example of parallel media: a propaganda
machine that smears real journalism as “fake” while aggressively promoting
disinformation.
Over
the past year, Tan has ramped up his attacks on reporters at The San
Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Standard,
and Mission Local. “If you want to understand why we got here, you
have to understand three things,” Tan wrote in an anti-media Twitter screed
last year. “1/The local political machine and the local media (Chronicle,
Mission Local) are complicit in keeping it this way, supporting the worst, most
corrupt candidates and repeating their propaganda.”
“Nobody
likes this article,” he tweeted at the Standard, owned by
billionaire Michael Moritz, after the site published a feature about a
progressive leader last year. “Fix your headline,” he commanded in a tweet
after it published a story about a Cruise robo-taxi hitting a
pedestrian in October.
“Mission
Local besmirches the city with unbalanced coverage that only emboldens Preston,
Peskin, Chan,” he wrote in November, name-checking three of the elected
officials upon whom he would later wish a “slow death.”
Amid
his drunken tweet scandal, Tan paused such attacks. He hired a public relations
consultant, apologized, and ceased sending out caustic tweets—temporarily.
Then, on March 29, the Times published a favorable profile of him. Written by former Chronicle columnist
Heather Knight, it characterized him as a “middle-of-the-road” Democrat
agitating for “common sense” ideas. Tan came across as contrite and humble, a
civic-minded centimillionaire who let his passion for political change get the
best of him. “Mr. Tan has tried to learn from his online mess—or says he
has,” wrote Knight. “In person, he speaks kindly and calmly and smiles often,
frequently bowing to people while making a prayer gesture with his
hands.”
Progressives
groaned at what they saw as a conspicuous whitewashing of Tan’s behavior. Tan
proudly shared the piece on social media. He has nevertheless returned to his
old antics. “SF legacy media is dishonest and lies to you,” he wrote to his
428,000 followers on April 1.
What’s
stunning, however, is the degree to which coverage of Tan has been quite
evenhanded and fair, if not positive. The press has unquestioningly accepted
the framing that he represents moderate or “common sense” politics. Not one
local story has mentioned his long affiliation with Balaji or the Network State
cult that is currently trying to create tech-controlled cities around the
globe, and which maintains
a fascination with an alt-right, neo-fascist movement known as the “Dark Enlightenment.” (In 2021, Cade Metz
of the Times wrote that Balaji had suggested targeting journalists who mention these
connections. “If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark
Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and
turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their*
advertisers/friends/contacts,” wrote Balaji in an email viewed by
the Times.) In a twisted way, these omissions almost lend credence
to claims that mainstream press outlets don’t tell us what’s really going on.
In the
aftermath of Tan’s death threat tweets, both the Chronicle and
the Standard
hesitated for at least a day before publishing
full stories. For a moment, it seemed unclear whether they would cover it at
all. Yet despite the local media’s generally fair approach and the puffy Times glow-up,
Tan continues to rage against the press. Nothing less than absolute control and
fealty seems acceptable to the Network State types.
“Do
not hire PR,” tweeted Balaji on April 4, days after Tan’s PR-wrangled Times profile. “They
want to ‘train’ you to talk to journos. But journos hate you! So this is an
obsolete model. Instead, just hire influencers. Build your own channel. And go
direct.”
Tan boosted
the message to his feed.
>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : New Republic – https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
