To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for whats to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpots ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody Ive ever met, wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balajis 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balajis ideas in two previous stories about Network Staterelated efforts in Californiaa proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Franciscos government.
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call described a speech in which he told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become the Microsoft of nations: outdated and obsolescent.
The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator, reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.
Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tanthe current Y Combinator CEO whos attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Franciscoparticipated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting die slow motherfuckers at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in moderate politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.
What Im really calling for is something like tech Zionism, he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (spiritual father of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. And if you see another Gray on the street you do the nod, he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. Youre a fellow Gray.
The Grays shirts would feature Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular. Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly policemans banquets to win them over.
Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police, said Srinivasan. What does that mean? Thats, as I said, banquets. That means every policemans son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.
In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: Did you want to take the sign off of Elons building?
This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the Twitter signage from the buildings exterior. But in Balajis dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).
Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and merge the Gray and police social networks. Then, in a show of force, theyll march through the city together. ... While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses. There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.
Balaji goes onand on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. Ethnically cleanse, he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.