2028: Red and Blue Vs. Tech?
Sounds good to me.
Not my idea though. I must give credit where credit is due.
Balaji meant it as a warning to his fellow tech bosses, but I’m taking it more as a great suggestion.
Those of you not familiar with Balaji Srinivasan should reference this Gil Duran piece from the New Republic from 2024.
Relevant bits:
…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a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”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.
The Financial Times had more on the “network state” or as they call them “for-profit cities.”
John P. Ruehl at Naked Capitalism has covered a specific “network state” in Honduras called Próspera that has been underdevelopment for some years and may have played a role in Trump’s decision to interfere in the recent Honduran elections after pardoning their drug-dealing ex-president.
I’d include an excerpt or two from the above, but I want to stay on topic as this is just by way of background on Balaji.
The main point is he can tell that the techbros (and the rest of the oligarchy) are close to wearing out their welcome with the American people.
When/if the AI bubble pops and when/if it takes down the larger stock market and possibly the entire U.S. economy, their welcome will be thoroughly worn out.
The secondary point is that Balaji and his ilk don’t care about The United States of America, they’re already planning their post-nation state moves.
His rhetorical tactics remind me of those AI boosters who choose to contribute to Nvidia’s stock price by “warning” that “imminent AGI” is a threat to destroy humanity.
Originally published at IanWelsh.net on December 10, 2025.