Meet Me in the Eternal City

Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias. Who's ready to move in?

- Kaitlyn Tiffany

I.

The international airport serving the capital of Montenegro has only two arrival gates, and last spring they were busier than usual. I was there for the same reason many others were: The tiny Balkan state had become the unlikely center of a mostly American social and political movement.

Specifically, I had come to observe Zuzalu, a two-month coliving experiment that had been organized and to some extent paid for by Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the eco-friendly cryptocurrency ethereum. It was being hosted at a new resort and planned community on the Adriatic coast, not far from the village of Radovići. Part retreat and part conference, it was also a dry run for the more permanent relocation of tech-industry digital nomads to different parts of the world, where they could start their own societies and design them to their liking. Some 200 people had signed up for the full two months. Others, like me, popped in and out. The slate of talks for the days I was there was titled "New Cities and Network States." European tourists smoked cigars on the promenade while Zuzalu attendees bounded around making plans for excursions and exercise and shuttles to a private Grimes show later on.

The network state is a concept first advanced by Balaji Srinivasan, a bitcoin advocate who is influential in tech circles. As he describes it in his book, The Network State, self-published in 2022 on the Fourth of July, a network state starts with an online community of like-minded people, then moves into the offline world by crowdfunding the purchase of land and inhabiting it intensively enough that “at least one pre-existing government” is moved to offer diplomatic recognition. There isn’t necessarily any voting; the best way to vote is by either staying put or “exiting” for another network state you like better.