BUCKS WITHOUT BORDERS

In the geography of the rich and mobile, sovereignty is for sale.

- GIDEON LEWIS5-KRAUS

In the past few years, a secretive consortium of technologists and investors has spent almost a billion dollars to purchase about ninety square miles of farmland on the eastern reaches of San Francisco Bay. The intention is to create a bespoke suburban oasis. In circles where the terraforming of Mars is a question of when rather than why, a planned community on the order of a Levittown or an Irvine ranks as a relatively modest ambition. The mythology of Silicon Valley originates with secession in 1957, the "traitorous eight" left one semiconductor outfit to start a competitor and the contemporary standard-bearer of this tradition is the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. In a pep talk delivered a decade ago to graduates of an élite startup incubator, Srinivasan condemned the Paper Belt, by which he meant the centralized institutions that enforce conformity and regulate individual initiative. It was up to these aspiring entrepreneurs to make the "ultimate exit"-to found not merely a firm but an "opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology."

Marc Andreessen, he added, was anticipating "an explosion of countries." In 2022, Srinivasan assembled his thoughts in a viral manifesto called "The Network State," in reference to a concept he defined as "a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preëxisting states." The new kind of citizen might happen to reside in Tokyo or Los Angeles or São Paulo, but would live by the dictates of an operating system in the cloud.

Science-fiction writers had already conjured such a scenario. In Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash," published in 1992, the fortunate live under the private sponsorship of corporate overlords, while the unlucky drift around the ocean on a violent gang-run pile called the Raft.