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.