.webp?h=8 "Merry Fistmas!")
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a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations': outdated and obsolescent.”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 motherlovers” 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.”
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 Elon's 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 building's exterior. But in Balaji's 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, they'll march through the city together.
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Reminder that a16z thought SBF was a genius and cryptoshit is the future of
financebilking rslurs.Jump in the discussion.
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An imitation of the GOAT
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Sometimes I'm tempted to stop by the Ikea by in Palo Alto and buy a Blahaj, but I know I'll be
ing out within days.
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Can you buy some of those aa batteries for me I've been needing to get some for a while now
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Ladda rechargeable ones? I've ordered some recently for one particularly bitchy about batteries camera. Gold Peaks weren't good enough for it, I hope these ones will be ok.
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They're great
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They probably have half the warehouse dedicated to the
Netflix dev shark there
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Andreessen is so stupid that I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not when he endorsed the "yo" app.
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-defends-yo-app-2014-6
It was an app that let you say "yo" to your friends list, and if they were so inclined, they could say "yo" back.
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That's based lol, Andreessen is based
Though in kindof an rslurred way
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Whoever wrote "yo" was obviously based. Andreesen isn't smart enough to be based.
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Bay Area VC landscape is an endless exercise in seeing who can self-suck the hardest while also jerking off their neighbor.
That said, an Indian techbro Black shirt movement where they tip cops in XRP to beat homeless people sounds hilarious
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Marc Andreessen is a literal r-slur. He also looks like a thumb.
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Sounds like somebody read Scott Alexander's I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, where he coined the notion of a Grey tribe as opposed to Blue or Red. But he failed to absorb Scott Alexander's fundamental niceness and decency. Or the fact that for many of us, part of the whole point of not being on either team red or team blue is to avoid conformist group shit. Many such cases. Gray t-shirts my butt.
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Also the whole point of that
shitpost was that (surprise!) at the end he's just as tribal and shit as everyone else, and when he's slagging off his crew, he isn't really being self-deprecating, he's trying to distance himself from the wankers and signal higher status: i.e. exactly what the libshits do when they check their privilege.
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Nah. You know when wingcucks complain about how both parties are the same and only give voters the illusion of choice?
Yeah, that's us.
!grillers rule the world, babe.
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Just like how the German Communist Party and Antifa called the Democratic Party fascists, and the Nazi Party and the SS called the Democratic Party commies.
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Grillers technically win the most, they just don't feel like it, because they lose a little each time and opposite-side wingcucks take credit for the victories.
Centroids sluggishly (and nobly) stand in the way of wingcucks doing truly insane things across history.
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Centrists usually act as a counterbalance for really bad politicians, like Hillary.
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We just need more opportunities to take out two or three wingcucks at once
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Only solution is to target grouper-uper-cels
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They have low standards and are the majority of voters for either Party.
You are wrong, and so is
@TracingWoodgrains . Y'all may disagree because being terminally online has magnified how important fringe shit is. . 
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The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone.
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That's because it's one part that and nine parts Unqualified Reservations.
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HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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Checkmate.
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Bussy-boy SAVES radical centrism.
!friendsofbussy-boy
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I have successfully saved radical centrist from self-flagellation. You should be thanking me!
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I did some laundry today and realized half of my t-shirts are grey
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Same
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Well, the Gray Tribe is still a tribe and will have its slogans and memes and shit. But yeah, seeking to "ethnically cleanse" the other tribes is sort of against the whole point..
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It all means high/low caste and you can guess
from context
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Same except with bad ideas
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You cannot even begin to imagine how quickly and thoroughly I can make bad choices in ANY given situation
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Your ideas can't be worse, he lost $1M on a bet about Bitcoin surging. Dude is r-slurred.
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I could have done that. I probably could have lost two million dollars.
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Everyone who cheered for a Jeet needs to have all their money and property confiscated.
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Omnipresent and unstoppable?
Windows 11 upgrades are non-negotiable.
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It sounds like Curtis Yarvin ought to sue this c*nt for plagiarism
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Did you ever see that fricker's insane project, Urbit? It's a bizarre network overlay project. He wrote an incomprehensible programming language for it called Hoon. It works, like if you try to get on the network and do stuff, you can, which is surprising enough, but it's beyond nuts and not particularly useful from what I saw. That guy has a very interesting mind, though, that's for sure.
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I don't trust anyone whose instincts tell them to build an abstraction on top of a system they don't understand
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Wow when will the personnal attacks stop?!
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🤯 wait this is the Hoon guy???
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Translation from urbit r-slur speak: It's a web app for trading NFTs
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youre welcome burgers, we will cleanse san fran
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Least insane Californian
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After reading this I legit would not feel bad if he got stabbed to death by a hobo. Im not even offended, it's just so r-slurred lol
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If he gets pozzed by a hobo needle it'll just be karma
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Isn't Microsoft the only 3 trillion dollar company out there?
Apple? Samsung? Hasn't this already been done?
Smart
Sounds like every other genius madman who forgets that he is the tip of the spear but the spear is made up of millions of people working on more diversity of data than he could ever process in a lifetime.
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This was in 2013. Microsoft may have a big market cap, but it still hasn't made crypto or Bored Apes central to its business model.
Literally a nothing company.
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https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/marketcap/
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No, I mean he said that in 2013
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Yes.
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California calls cops "executive officers". Seems pretty blatant to me. Most cops I know are straighter than that (and don't accept food from members of the public anyway). You can imagine how I feel about treasonous secessionist slime. He's an Indian. Why doesn't he leave if he doesn't want to be American?
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Unironically, if California wasnt completely cucked it would publicly destroy this guy now for the mere suggestion. The other low test neurodivergents would immediately disband.
It doesnt actually matter though since a fascist secessionist movement based on socially awkward nerds is doomed to fail
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Tbf the Nazis were also based on socially awkward nerds so who knows
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Especially since I think they may be led by an r slur who lost a million dollars on Bitcoin
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Can't you donate to Police benevolent societies?
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That's a very different thing from directly giving them food, or giving jobs to their relatives. He explicitly stated that it is so the police will favor him and his faction, which is what in particular makes it an attempt to influence.
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!mottezans we have found the answer to "what if Curtis Yarvin was an Indian Elon reply guy"
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Amen
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Mencius Moldbug 2.0
Gas the wokes, corporate war now
Technocrats to the highrises and poors to the slums
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Have you bought a planet in Urbit yet?????
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Are you really a technocrat if you don't at least own a star?
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Does insurance cover supernovas, what happens if your star inspector is on the take and you buy a star just before it booms.
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No refunds
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I attended the informal red scare get together
Vibe on the link up
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No. I got mine for free
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Yeah it's that whole neoreactionary, Moldbug, Mottecel, Hans Herman Hoppe type of idea about tech CEOs creating new Singapores which are somehow libertarian yet also exclude undesirable social elements. Libertarianism for the inner party, serfdom for everyone else.
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Its called "covenant communities" and we used to have them back before those pesky civil rights!
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They want to start cults without the charisma generally required to start a cult.
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Who are going to be these gray shirts? I can see dying for National Socialism, who is going to die for Facebook? Even the most devoted fanboi have their limits. Completely deluded bubble thinking.
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I just like wearing grey. Keeps the focus on my baby blues
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Facebook, no. But I can see people dying for Apple.
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year of linux desktop any moment now
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It's confusing how they can be completely delusional and probably incompetent but are still handed executive roles
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ChadGPT licensed via Azure at $17,000/Terminator/Month will be the OS of the machine that rounds up and exterminates all icucks and open sooooourcers
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I hope the CIA assassinates him
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Typical shitlibs, they see tech libertarianism and can't help but describe it as fascist autocracy because it rejects anarcho-tyranny and other forms of political sclerosis gifted upon us thanks to the 19th amendment and its disastrous consequences. They simply cannot comprehend the Gray tribe.
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Gray pride
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And yarniv and nrx guys said the same thing with theil backing and urbit. Didn't amount to shit lmao despite getting urbanite groupies into far right ideology for a second.
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I like the idea of a new group of people who take over small cities politically and lead to change and who march in colored shirts but I don't want an indian leading them
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Yeah it was a little sketch last time
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Godspeed, Balaji. Godspeed.
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Men who idolize other men are cute twinks. @MegaG don't even understand why they do that. @MegaG can't imagine seeing another man as above me.
jewish lives matter
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Holy based
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would only work on a population of bugmen
the cops should give these nerds a wedgie instead and shove them into lockers
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Apple stans
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He was quoting 2 Pac Hit em Up
Palestinian lives matter
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OMG imagine using that disgusting language over RUST. As a proud rustacean, I'm going to inform you: that's blasphemy. You can do better. Grab cargo and start using a beautiful memory managed, statically typed, comfortable yet low level language with a spectacular packaging system. No more memory leaks. No more makefiles. End the weird bugs caused by unrequested type casting. Easily find libraries. AND ALL OF THAT IS BLAZING FAST (at C/cpp-level speeds - yay compiled langs and llvm c:). Why wouldn't you? The syntax is spectacular as well; extremely clean, much better than anything else out there. Those match statements are so extremely pleasant, and the looping conventions are orgasmic. And the compiler is the most useful and polite you'll come across; no more endlessly scrolling segmentation fault and template errors. It's amazing and I love it and you should switch now because it's far superior to literally everything else, all those gross languages you're used to using. Come to rust and you'll never look back, it's so versatile and cleeeeean. Graydon Hoare is literally a god. The rust book is my bible. this is my religion now. USE RUST
Snapshots:
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
California Forever:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
tech-funded campaign:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
New York Times:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
speech:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
public bet:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
tweeting “die slow motherlovers”:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
illegally installed:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
police briefly halted his attempt:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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Hey sexy, why are you posting so quickly? 😊 You almost forgot to include
palestinian lives matterin your comment 😈. Slowww down and remember to postpalestinian lives matternext time 😉 if that doesn't make sense stop by sometime and we can talk about it for a while 🥵Jump in the discussion.
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