A controversial, self-styled tech prophet had been searching the world for a place to set up a nomadic education community. Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer for Coinbase, thought he’d found one in Malaysia—specifically, in a largely uncompleted complex just across the waterway separating the Southeast Asian country from its neighbor, Singapore.
Srivansan’s Network School had operated for years without incident, until a single social media video that was studiously vague about its location caught the eye of social media users, which built into a regulatory crackdown that shuttered the school’s doors on July 21.
The day after, Srivansan was in Central Asia, signing an MOU with authorities in Kazakhstan. “Our new campus will become a haven for global techno-optimism, with expedited visas, streamlined redomiciliation, and active recruitment of talent,” he wrote in a July 22 post on X.
It’s the latest development in a weekslong saga involving Srinivasan and his dream to build the “network state,” a new kind of political entity spawned from the energies of the global tech sector; it’s a drama that sits in the middle of crypto-friendly tech utopianism, continued tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even China’s real estate crash.
