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."
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."