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 what’s to come:
A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s 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 I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz,
in a blurb for Balaji’s 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 Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California
—a proposed tech colony called California Forever
—and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s 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“told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”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 #Tan
—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco
—participated 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 I’m 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. “You’re 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 “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay?
All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan.

“What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets.
That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

#NetworkState #grayshirts
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat