Network School

= co-working and cultural community for the Network State movement initiated by Balaji Srivanasan, located in Forest City, Johor, Maylaysia, near Singapore

URL = https://ns.com/

Description

"The Network School is an experimental, physically-located educational and community-building initiative situated on an island near Singapore, launched in September 2024 as a pilot program for the broader network state concept popularized by Balaji Srinivasan in his 2022 book The Network State: How to Start a New Country.

The Network School is designed as a startup society and immersive residency program that combines elements of education, community governance experimentation, and physical wellbeing. It seeks to gather remote workers, digital nomads, technologists, blockchain and Web3 builders, creators, and self-improvers from around the world to live, learn, work, and build together in a concentrated setting."

Status

2026

Parallel Citizen:

"* The status of the Network School projecj after its move to Kazakstan:

https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/ns-2026-highlights

"In 2025 the pitch was exit. This year, Balaji opened with a photo of himself meeting Kazakhstan’s prime minister. He arrived in July planning to stay three days. Within a week Network School had signed MOUs, found its new home, and brought the crypto regulator on board. He said ten other countries have since bid for similar deals.

He called the arrangement “network plus state”: a middle ground between internet communities and nation-states, much as stablecoins sit between fiat and Bitcoin. Kazakhstan’s selling point is space, with about 3,000 times Singapore’s land area and only three times its population.

San Francisco can incubate startups, he argued, but Kazakhstan can incubate startup cities.

Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev said more than 90% of the country’s 1,300 public services are online, digital IDs have the same legal standing as physical ones, and Alatau City is an 88,000-hectare zone run under English common law.

Network School now occupies a full floor of the government’s AI center in Astana, three floors below an AI-driven government office. Last year, Vitalik described NS as a “monastery.” It has now moved about as far toward his “embassy” end as it could go.

My May 2026 review of Network School is also already out of date. According to the Deputy PM, more than 200 people followed NS to Kazakhstan in under three months, which suggests the community moves with the project."

(https://www.parallelcitizen.xyz/p/ns-2026-highlights)

Discussion

Brian Chau:

"It’s more of a city than a school. The idea is that you pay a flat $1500 rate for all the city services, including food, electricity, rent, coworking space, and gym membership. This is where I’ve been living for most of the past year, in an island next to Singapore.

My favorite phrase for Network School is zeroth world. There’s a visceral difference between third world and first. There’s a similar difference between American and East Asian cities. But NS keeps the American vibe, without the crime. One friend who read a draft of this article told me he can’t process what an American vibe is like without rampant drug use and broken windows. This is the part of the essay where I try to explain that, knowing full well that I probably wouldn’t understand it myself if I spent my whole life in the West.

There’s a genre of brilliant conversation you will have in America. It can’t easily be categorized. It’s often about software or philosophy, but not just about that. There are programmers and philosophers in other countries, but they’re culturally perverse somehow. One example: it’s clear that the UK has not believed in freedom of speech for several decades at least. Every time they say the word “freedom” they’re stochastic parrots repeating American words without any real meaning. Every non-American country has that unmistakable jester quality, though few match the British in their clownsmanship.

So, why did I actually move here?

Number one is the pleasantness. It’s a massive social good to quarantine away degenerate behavior from normal people, and to fill the normal world with pleasant and aspirational things that make you want to spend your life there. But how does that affect you personally reply guys be damned, I realize my quality of life is improved significantly by being 8000 miles away from the SF homeless even if none of them have managed to physically injure me yet.

Number two is that the Network School thesis is completely true for me, and for anyone who’s reached my level of career escape velocity. Anyone I can do a podcast with in SF, I can do a podcast with here. Anyone I can author a paper with in SF, I can author a paper with here. And if there’s a person I need to meet in person, it’s going to be a meeting that pays for the trip.

If you’re at the total start of your career, I would still encourage visiting Network School, but I understand if you can’t always find the intro to your specific niche career pursuit yet. Growth and talent networks are part of the work I’m doing, so it might help to know that I’ll find you the right intros if I can.

Number three is that I’m surprised at how well moving a bunch of high-iq, open, pro-tech people to the same place instantly re-created San Francisco culture. It’s an awesome refutation of the “magic dirt” theory, but in the opposite direction. We’ve known for a long time you can’t bring savages to civilization and expect them to civilize, but now we also know we can bring a groupchat to a near-empty empty island and recreate civilization.

A secret fourth thing that I didn’t realize until I spent a few months here is that Network School is a great natural filter for most valuable things from Twitter without all the Retard Politics. Which is something you may or may not care about, but which I think is a major achievement.

There’s also a few things that might matter to you that aren’t priorities for me: it’s much cheaper than major American cities, has an easier travel process for those who can’t get into America, and has over-monthly events with top crypto chains like Ethereum, Solana, and Base."

(https://www.fromthenew.world/p/the-post-post-apocalypse)

The Class Dynamics Behind an Elite Project

Rebecca Grace Rachmany:

"In my circles, to call someone an elitist is an insult. But if you are an elitist, that’s not an insult. It’s the truth. Meritocracy is just the natural way of things. Some people are the winners in the meritocracy. Those winners obviously have a better sense of how to run things than losers like myself. If you are an elitist, there is no acknowledgement of games other than the game you’re playing (becoming measurably successful in the financial game). Nobody is a “winner in a different game.” We’re just losers. (Note, one non-explicit but obvious part of this elitism is that women are considered inferior. Fewer than 5% of the employees on the NS team are female, and this year the Network State Conference somehow managed to reduce the number of female speakers from last year’s 4 to only 1. Nine hours of five-minute talks featuring only one woman. You have to make an effort for that.)

I gotta hand it to them, they live in full accordance to their ideology. From the first day in the Network School, the hierarchy is clear. Short-term residents are at the bottom of the pile. After that are long-term residents, then the Team who keep the place running. On top is Balaji. If you are in the lowest tier, your access to the highest tier is your right to ask Balaji a question at the weekly meeting focused on getting you to the next tier. If you are a long-term resident, you can get a 5-minute meeting with Balaji to present your idea. If he likes it, maybe, just maybe, you might get to present to some other investor, and maybe someone will invest in your great idea. If you make some progress on your prototype and it passes the qualifications for a startup, you might even get funding with a term sheet which is favorable to the investors.

My biggest beef with the marketing of NS is that they tout the great speakers and investors that they have brought to NS. However, any VIPs who do visit are carefully escorted and generally do not mix with the riffraff. In other words, you are paying to be with your peers, and you will not be introduced to any investors or VIPs during your stay, unless you are extremely lucky or extremely loved. (Or, if that VIP decides they want to know what is really happening and decides to have breakfast with the riffraff.)

A third of the residents strive to become a paid staff (team) member and work for Balaji, to receive the privilege of a 18-hour days and fully paid residency. The team jobs are coveted for the same reason anyone lives here long-term. Network School is a last resort location, in both senses of the word ‘resort’. No local job would pay enough for you to stay, so you either need an independent source of income or a job on the team.

Lest you think that there’s a double-standard in the elitist ideology, it is not that way at all. People like Balaji and Donovan (founders of NS) are second-tier elite multimillionaires. They aren’t billionaires like Elon Musk or Peter Theil. According to the breakfast bro, the whole idea behind the Network State project is that the elite will create a global archipelago of these outposts where they can live in luxury anywhere they like An investment buys them into a global network of all-inclusive home-like experiences for themselves and their families.

Myself and other Network School residents are just guinea pigs to see how the first trial goes, as well as a potential labor source for the global elite who will need white collar workers to man their startups.

Second-tier elites like Balaji (and this bro) are still working all hours of the day and night to create these real estate projects for the first-tier elite. It makes sense. If you are an elitist, and you aren’t a first tier person, that’s due to your own shortcomings. You just aren’t as merit-worthy as the tier-one guys. You can still have a pretty fancy lifestyle, one or more wives, as many children as you want, and live in a posh neighborhood with private schools while the regular residents live in hotel rooms.

It’s a pretty good life on tier two, and the tier one guys have unlimited money to invest in this escapist society.

Which explains why the billionaires didn’t withdraw their money from NS when the residency imploded. They don’t care about 500 guinea pigs who didn’t have anywhere else to go in the first place. That’s just collateral damage of their society-as-a-service venture. Because the society they’re building is for the elite.

I mean, what could be better than a network of outposts where you can go to find the best talent in the world at a discount? The setup has a built-in filter where the big investors are at the top, with some sort of timeshare that allows them to drift between proto-nations, live in the penthouses, and see as many startup pitches as they like, presumably pre-filtered by Balaji’s staff. Once they know what to invest in, they have an endless supply of displaced Ukranians, Belarusans, Iranians, Indians, and other elite engineers from across the globe. These folks are some of the finest software developers and architects in the world. If you know the exact budget they need to sustain their lifestyle, now you’re in the perfect position to hire them."

(https://gracerebeccarachmany836224.substack.com/p/elitism-embodied-the-real-network?)