The shirtless man in the golden mask and cape has plans to lead his own country one day. There is no location yet, but it will be a crypto- and AI-powered paradise of medical experimentation, filled with people who want to “make death optional,” he says.
For now, though, he’s leading a sparsely attended rave on the second floor of a San Francisco office building. A DJ is spinning at one end of an open room. A handful of people sway and jump on the space cleared out as a dance floor. It’s 10 am. At a nearby table, coffee is available with many alternative milks.
The man in the mask is Laurence Ion, a programmer from Romania. After winning a Google Code-in competition as a teenager, he worked for various startups and became what he describes as “financially free.” Four years ago, Ion helped launch VitaDAO, a decentralized organization for bankrolling longevity research, which attracted funding from Balaji Srinivasan, a former biotech founder and Coinbase executive, and the drug company Pfizer’s venture arm. Now 31, Ion is part of a crowd of self-styled future-builders that includes Vitalik Buterin, the billionaire cocreator of the Ethereum protocol.
Ion helped organize Zuzalu, Buterin’s 2023 “pop-up city” for life extensionists at a resort in Montenegro, and another pop-up called Vitalia, on an island off the Honduran coast. For his latest project, Viva City, Ion has booked this 16-story office building on Market Street. Once the headquarters of Burning Man, it turned into a WeWork, then into Frontier Tower. For the six weeks that Ion and his citizens-to-be are here—bonding over life extension, playing with blockchain and crypto and AI, and maybe occasionally sleeping over—the place will be known as Viva Frontier Tower.
The vibe here is more summer camp than city-state. But in a speech to the 100 or so people who attend the first day of a weekend boot camp, Ion underscores just how personal the project is for him. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals,” he says. He was born with a disease called multiple osteochondromas, which causes bone tumors that are most often benign but can be painful. “I know what it’s like to feel frail, and I don’t want more of that as I age,” he says.
Waiting for governments to help ease his suffering—that is an old way of thinking. “I realized it’s going to be faster to create a city than to go through the FDA.” To that end, Ion says, Viva City will be offering a “bounty”: $2 million for anyone who connects the group with a politician, anywhere in the world, who can help them acquire the land and pass the laws to establish their own special jurisdiction. In Viva City, the typical lengthy approval procedures and rules around biotechnology and experimental medical treatments won’t apply.
Ion has a tough road ahead of him, even with the bounty, and even accepting the logic that creating a city from scratch is faster and more effective than a clinical trial. For one thing, he has a lot of competition. Helped by a literal playbook for drawing online communities down from the cloud to establish real, physical homelands—Srinivasan’s 2022 book The Network State—a growing number of moneyed tech types are trying to build new enclaves where they set the rules. This, in some ways, is 2025 in a nutshell. For some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth today, the political division that matters isn’t right or left, Democrat or Republican—it’s the nation-state versus the network state.
The Zuzalu network has hosted a series of other pop-up cities around the world, from Bhutan to Argentina. Another proposed project, Praxis, calls itself “the world’s first Digital Nation” and has received funding from Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects, investor and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and Winklevoss Capital. Praxis claims more than 100,000 members and announced plans earlier this year to build a new defense-tech city called Atlas next to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. (The group also set its sights on Greenland).
In the US, there have been some well-publicized real estate deals that may scratch the same itch for wealthy tech leaders to create communities in their own image. The Esmerelda Land Company plans to build a family-friendly walkable village in Sonoma County and has options on a piece of land in Cloverdale. California Forever, a project reportedly backed by Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a who’s who of other Silicon Valley billionaires, already controls 65,000 acres of farmland in Solano County. CEO Jan Sramek said last year that he has “zero interest” in either “network states” or “smart cities” and that the group’s goal is to “make California build again.”
Network states are a crazy idea—hubristic, irrational, expensive, both utopian and a direct affront to the ideal that a just society should strive to leave no one behind. But the conditions are ripe for at least some of these projects to move beyond lip service. This is a moment when trust in government is at an all-time low, the “liberal international order” that has stood since the end of World War II appears to be fracturing, private interests are divvying up public goods, and the internet has made it so that people may have more in common with their online communities than their fellow citizens.
Now the question becomes: How does Ion turn his office rave into a real place, a piece of land bought from a friendly government—or maybe just a weak one? Can it really be that easy to conjure up a country of one’s own?
About a week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, on the heels of the first major campaign to leverage social media, a startup founder and far-right blogger named Curtis Yarvin published Patchwork, one of the original texts of network statism. Bemoaning what he called Obama Derangement Syndrome, Yarvin imagined a new political future. “As the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote. “If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’”
Among Yarvin’s fans was the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who had begun to sour on the whole idea of liberal democracy and felt that other forms of government might better protect his personal freedoms. Months before Obama took office, Thiel committed $500,000 to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit aimed at building floating cities in international waters to experiment with new forms of governance. The institute’s cofounder was Patri Friedman, the grandson of economist Milton Friedman. (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.)
Illustration: Fromm Studio
While the Obama administration made itself a friend of the tech industry more broadly, not everyone in Silicon Valley was on board. For some, says Émile Torres, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Human Extinction, the urgency to “exit” is rooted in a belief that technological progress is both inevitable and inherently positive—a straight shot to utopia. In this view, Torres says, it is immoral for the government to do anything but “get the hell out of the way and let people innovate.”
In 2013, Srinivasan gave a speech called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit” at Y Combinator’s Startup School. He later adapted his thoughts about the need for “cloud countries” for (where else?) WIRED. David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, likens Srinivasan’s vision to the fictional libertarian utopia in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, where “men of the mind” retreat from an oppressive society of taxes and regulations, taking their talent with them.
“It’s Galt’s Gulch plus the blockchain,” Karpf says. “All the makers have their own exit and live in their own society, and things are more perfect.” In the real world, Karpf argues, “we don’t have enough land for everyone to just go out and colonize and set up their own community. Government is for managing across difference: People who don’t have your same ideals also have rights to live here.”
Seasteading didn’t really pan out. “There is no Galt’s Gulch,” Thiel declared in 2014. “There is no secession from society.” Instead, for the better part of a decade, Silicon Valley’s libertarian right would set its sights on something else entirely. “There’s colonizing Mars or establishing a community on a spacecraft—that’s one possibility,” Torres says. “Another is just infiltrating the US government and converting the US government from the inside out.”
In 2016, Thiel backed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential bid. When Thiel’s protégé JD Vance ran for the US Senate, talking on the campaign trail about “this guy Curtis Yarvin” and his advice to fire “every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people,” Thiel reportedly donated $15 million. Though he didn’t donate to Trump and Vance’s 2024 campaign for the White House, many other members of Silicon Valley’s elite (who themselves are close to Thiel) did. One of those was Andreessen, the billionaire investor and author of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Another was Elon Musk, whose dreams of a Martian “exit” strategy seem to have taken a back seat to his dreams of running a Silicon Valley–style takeover of the US federal government.
Even as that takeover has made the government friendlier to, say, slashing regulations on experimental medical treatments, people like Ion still hold onto the dream of a truer “exit.” Friedman now runs Pronomos Capital, a venture firm that finances the creation of what he calls “innovative zones” and whose investors include Andreessen, Srinivasan, and Thiel.
But in a society built by and for “makers,” where membership is essentially for sale, who are the baristas, the janitors, the security guards? Do those workers have the means to “exit” if the place doesn’t align with the way they’d like to live? Do they enjoy all the benefits of a utopian society, or are they the underprivileged class that commutes in to keep it running? These questions go largely unaddressed in The Network State, nor do they seem to be a focus of Srinivasan’s Network School, launched last year on an island near his now-home, Singapore. (His former boss at Coinbase, CEO Brian Armstrong, is a major funder.)
When I put the question to Friedman, he said that “often the first version of something is very expensive”—but then it gets cheaper and more accessible over time, he argued. “If you’re going to build a place for people, then you have to build something they can afford and charge them for it,” he said. “It’s not charity.”
The future, it would seem, is only worth talking about for some.
Growing up in Romania, Ion initially wanted to become an orthopedic surgeon, but, he says, he “couldn’t really talk to people—to strangers, especially.” He leaned into math and computer science. And that 2013 speech that Srinivasan gave at Y Combinator? That’s how Ion first heard about the concept that would eventually crystallize into the network state.
Theoretically, any shared community could form a network state—furries, Swifties, crypto enthusiasts. For Srinivasan, and many who align with his vision, a pillar of this future society is striving for “eternal life.” (Bryan Johnson, the well-financed entrepreneur and founder of the “Don’t Die” movement, was advertised as a featured speaker at Srinivasan’s Network School and has spoken about potentially starting a “Don’t Die” country.)
“Eternal life” is the primary underpinning of the community at Viva City too. When Ion talks about the project, he sometimes sounds less like a founding father—the governance of this planned city appears to be largely up in the air—than an early-stage startup founder. Pop-ups like the one at Frontier Tower are a way to build a high-value community, one that will be a selling point for Viva City’s ultimate location, Ion says. It’s how they’ll persuade a nation-state that this network state is worth letting in.
What Ion wants, ultimately, is a piece of property and a special economic zone. SEZ status would allow Viva City to set some of its own commercial and financial regulations. In exchange, Ion says, “we can bring in a lot of foreign direct investment. We can bring a lot of jobs to the locals with that investment. We bring the smartest in, especially when it comes to medicine. We bring top doctors, researchers, and build a tier-one hospital—something a small county wouldn’t ever see.”
Viva itself remains somewhat small—it is less than a year old and has fewer than 1,300 followers on X. Right now, Ion is looking at locations in the Caribbean and parts of Europe, where he believes his citizens would want to live and where “we can make an impact.” (This might also answer the question of where the network state’s service staff will be drawn from.)
Illustration: Fromm Studio
Other projects seem to be at a similar stage—less claiming new land and new rights for their citizens, more trying to sell the value those citizens could generate to investors and existing nations. Praxis, the group with plans to build a city near Vandenberg Space Force Base, pitches itself as “defending the West.” Being Praxian isn’t just about freedom from taxes or access to new technology—it is about a particular cultural vision of the “West.” The project’s leader, Dryden Brown, says the “West” refers to “countries that were formed by people from Europe” and includes many former European colonies. “We are the inheritors of a different set of cultural values. What we think about is Rome, Athens, and Sparta,” Brown says. In addition to its funding from Altman, Lonsdale, and the Winklevosses, the group is also backed by Pronomos Capital.
During our conversation, Brown compared Praxis to Israel—minus a world war and a holocaust, of course. “There were these stateless people who were scattered,” he says, and they had “this idea of Judea and building a state and returning to the OG homeland.” (Srinivasan has been even more direct in the past, saying, “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism.”)
Of course, the beauty of a network state is that it can embody “the West” without actually having to be there. In addition to the Vandenberg location, Praxis announced that its team would be traveling to Morocco, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, among other countries, to explore the possibility of establishing an SEZ. While Brown says he does not consider Morocco to be Western, Praxis is willing to work with countries that are willing to give it land. Like Ion, Brown promises an influx of companies and tech talent that “can radically benefit” those places, boosting property values and creating jobs for local residents. It is unclear if those Moroccan residents would be considered “citizens” in a Praxian SEZ. In the meantime, through an initiative called Praxis Development, the group plans to buy up residential properties where its members can live as a stepping stone toward “real territory, real assets, and real power.”
“This is a colonial project, aimed at tech empire,” says Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the independent newsletter The Nerd Reich. “It sounds like colonization 2.0. When you go to another person’s country and create your own country there, no matter your excuse, no matter your rationale.”
Or, as the Praxis X account posted on September 1, “Cyberpunk East India Company.”
The most evolved version of the SEZ strategy is Próspera, a charter community, backed by Pronomos Capital, on the island of Roatán in Honduras. It has an arbitration system, low taxes, and a code of rules. (Vitalia, Ion’s original project, considered setting up a permanent location within Próspera.)
Próspera’s leaders say they do not consider it a network state, that their goal is “city-scale development that advances human progress and prosperity—within Honduran sovereignty and law.” The Honduran government, then led by Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, granted the city its charter in 2017. But Hernández was arrested in 2022 for drug trafficking (he has since been convicted), and the new government repealed Próspera’s SEZ status, alleging that these types of zones violated the country’s sovereignty. Próspera then filed an $11 billion lawsuit against the Honduran government, alleging that the government had failed to “honor its guarantees of legal stability.” The case is ongoing.
Ion, for his part, says that he “would approach different things differently” in Viva City.
Back at Viva Frontier Tower, after the morning rave and a full day of sessions on health and longevity, Ion, now dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, leads a few dozen attendees on a tour of his pop-up fiefdom. While the AI-generated images on the group’s website portray a semitropical seaside paradise that looks like a cross between Monaco and Atlantis, in real life, the WeWork turned “vertical village” turned temporary network state is in various states of repair.
Some floors, like the one designated for “crypto and ethereum,” appear to be regular coworking spaces. On the eighth floor, designated for “biotech and neurotech,” is a lab with various machines in what appears to have once been a large meeting room. Ion tells the group he hopes to build a longevity clinic on the 11th floor, and he chuckles proudly when saying that some of the members’ stem cells are stored in a fridge on this floor. A list of things titled “Need” in the hallway includes “biohazard disposal.” As we ride the elevator back down to the second floor (there’s a vibe-coding session), Ion and a member reminisce about battling robots in the basement earlier in the week.
The response to Ion’s vision seemed generally positive, although the specifics remained fuzzy. Kiba Gateaux, one of the Viva Frontier Tower attendees, has visited several Zuzalu pop-up cities and told me he is in the process of buying land in Japan with some other friends to build an intentional community. He says he’s mostly here for the people, and while he agrees with many of the values, he doesn’t need an SEZ to live the way he wants to.
“There’s a large dichotomy in communities in general,” he says. “Do we do this because we love to versus, like, this is a business that can make money?” For Gateaux, the network state is about “making society better” by creating more startups, “so we can make more money, because that creates a more prosperous society.”
As with the MAHA and MAGA movements, there are real, unmet needs behind what has drawn people to the network state. At Frontier Tower, I met Victoria Forest, who has been a part of several pop-up cities hosted by the Zuzalu network. Forest, a pop-up city organizer and podcast host, is from Moldova originally and met Ion in Bucharest in 2021 after leaving her corporate job. She helped him build VitaDAO.
“This exit strategy is something that has its reasons—we’ve seen governments failing us,” Forest says. It frustrates her that regulations keep people like her from the treatments they desire. “Why should the government be in my way as a woman if I choose to have an abortion?” she asks. When I mention that many of the network state’s wealthiest cheerleaders also support the Trump administration, which is seeking to roll back abortion rights for American women, Forest seems surprised.
Would she actually consider moving to a network state like Viva City? Yes, she says, but she’s “conservative” and would want to make sure there were “walkable streets, safety, schools, hospitals,” and other “basics.” And she has another concern, she says. “I’m also a little bit skeptical and doubt that all the interventions that potentially will be available in the network state will be widely accessible for everyone,” she says. “There might be a scenario where only wealthy people will have access to them initially, and hopefully that will be the case for all of us later. But I don’t know.”
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