A few years ago Critical Frequency, the podcast production company that makes Drilled, partnered with Stitcher on a podcast that, on the face of it, had nothing at all to do with climate change. It was called Unfinished: Short Creek and it was about a town straddling the state line between Utah and Arizona, where half the residents were part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the FLDS) and the other half were former members of the church who had left. To really do the project justice, our lead reporter, producer and co-host on the project, Sarah Ventre moved to the town for several months, we read the Book of Mormon from start to finish, and the show's other reporter, producer and co-host Ash Sanders, who had grown up Mormon, filled in the gaps for the rest of us.
The recent history of Short Creek was deeply intertwined with end days prophecies, particularly around Y2K, when FLDS prophets predicted the world would end. One former faithful told us that everyone in town had terrible credit because every time they thought the world was ending they would go on a shopping spree and then the world wouldn't end and they'd be left with a bunch of unexpected credit card debt they couldn't afford to pay off. When I asked Ash how people squared various beliefs around stewardship and the Earth being a gift from God with what seemed to be a total lack of concern around pollution or climate change, she explained that when you assume the world is ending imminently and that you will inherit your own planet, where you will live peacefully with your family for eternity, whatever is happening on Earth doesn't seem all that important—that's for the non-believers left behind to deal with.
I've been thinking about that project and the belief system underpinning religious ideas of the rapture, end times, and so forth a lot lately because I tuned into an alt-right conference a couple weeks ago and a lot of folks—especially the tech guys—were saying similar things to what the fundamentalists told us back then.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC (yes, that is a Noah's Ark reference) was formed a couple of years ago. A Drilled listener kindly let me know about it and at the time I didn't have time to delve into it much so I spread the word to other reporters who might be interested. But I've been following what they're up to over the years and this year decided to spring for a live stream pass to their annual conference. The group is helmed by Jordan Peterson, funded by many of the same folks who funded the campaign for Brexit, and includes former politicians and alt-right heroes from the U.S., Canada, Australia, the UK and a handful of other locales all under one roof. You've got your pro-natalists, your white supremacists, your anti-immigration nationalists, your anti-trans fanatics, your climate denialists all in one big "saving Western values" tent. This year they were joined by their new Silicon Valley friends, who put together a whole slate of presentations on the wonders of AI.
There was a lot of pretty wild stuff happening at the ARC conference (I will never forgive them for making me feel sorry for David Brooks, who was painted as a radical liberal and treated to a dose of English snobbery we're not used to seeing outside of Downton Abbey), but the thing that's stuck with me most is the wacky end days cult vibes coming off some of the tech gurus in the room.
Eric Weinstein, for example, who runs Peter Thiel's venture fund, making him one of the more powerful figures in the tech industry, first declared himself an atheist Progressive Jew and thus a "DEI speaker" at the conference, then went off on a tear about men, vitality and how trans rights are akin to authoritarian emasculation and a "reproductive holocaust", followed by some paranoid raving about how hotels keep guest logs and are thus spying on all of us, mixed in, ironically, with various things ChatGPT had taught him. When he finally got to what seemed to be the point of his talk, Weinstein sounded more like a religious fanatic than an atheist or a technologist.
According to Luke 21, the two figures, the Joker and the Thief, are crucified on each side of Christ. Now the Joker says there's got to be some way out of this. Right now, where we are, is four light years from the nearest star. There is no way to get to the speed of light or even close. We are marooned in our solar system with only two habitable rocks that aren't the Earth and that's with a lot of work. We cannot stay with all of us on one planet with one atmosphere, with people this crazy and tools this powerful.
He then went on to claim that the Biden White House had told (famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist) Mark Andreeson that it had "stagnated deliberately fields of theoretical physics," and that "they"—and it is unclear here whether he meant the Biden administration, the U.S. government, or the vague "world order" that is keeping him and his rich friends down—have distracted all the theoretical physicists by getting them to focus on quantum gravity. But, aha! If we can get theoretical physics back on track then all the good people can find some way out of this hellhole.
We learned that Earth is our womb, not our home. We cannot stay here. Because we have to go. We cannot all share one atmosphere safely. The tools are too powerful. If an indefinite human future can be restored, and I believe that it can, there is one way out, and that's physics. And Mike Lazaridis, if you're out there somewhere, thank you for building the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics to do this. I'm sorry it got taken over by quantum gravity.
Couple things here, beyond my initial reaction of "woah, lay off the ketamine, my dude." First, the parallels between how Weinstein spoke here, pretty nonchalantly, about Earth being done, but that's okay because we're on to the next thing, and the way evangelicals talk about the rapture or Mormons talk about the end of days is uncanny. Second, it is wild that the solution to any societal tension or to the limits of a planet with finite resources is "welp, scrap this one, let's blow this joint, on to the next!" and not "how do we fix this?” It reminded me a lot of another story I worked on a long time ago, about lab-created meat, during which one social scientist I spoke with said it seemed like the height of cynicism to him that technologists believed it was easier to get humans to eat lab meat than to just eat less meat.
To understand it, you have know a couple things about the cosmovision of Thiel world, which mostly stems from a late 90s book called The Sovereign Individual, mixed in with a more recent book that updated and expanded upon it, called The Network State, along with the ramblings of a blogger Silicon Valley calls a "philosopher" named Curtis Yarvin. In very broad strokes, The Sovereign Individual, written by English journalist William Rees-Mogg (father of former conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg) and American investor James Dale Davidson, posits that there is no such thing as the common good or public interest, only various competing self interests, and that democracy is dumb and needs to be replaced by something better in much the same way as the Enlightenment enabled science to replace religion. The Network State, by startup founder and former VC (at Andreeson Horrowitz) Balaji Srinivasan, along with Yarvin's work, builds on these ideas to propose a new world order based on, you guessed it: corporate states. What if instead of countries there were just a bunch of regions controlled by corporations? Srinivasan posits. Ah, "disrupting" democracy with...feudalism! I'm sorry but as someone who reported on cleantech during the dot-com boom and watched startups "disrupt" everything from laundry to taxis, making all such services worse for people and more profitable for one annoying douchebag, it's hard to take these ideas seriously.
And yet, we must, because for years now Thiel, Andreeson et al have been talking about their disdain not just for democracy, but also for the United States, the dollar, the rights of anyone they deem beneath them, and for the very idea of a "common good." And because they now have an enormous amount of control over not just the U.S. government but several others, and are moving to enact their plans.
An early pilot of the Network State idea already exists: Próspera, a sovereign tech utopian community on the island of Roatán off the coast of Honduras. When president Xiomara Castro took office in 2022, she moved to get rid of the ZEDE—Zone for Employment and Economic Development, a special economic zone in Honduras—and Próspera filed a $10.7 billion dollar investor-state dispute claim. We've covered ISDS before, but this quasi-legal system was created by trade agreements and enables companies to sue governments if they believe the government has unfairly caused the company to lose money on an investment in their country. Chevron filed an ISDS claim against Ecuador for allowing its courts to rule against it, for example, and TransCanada filed an ISDS against the U.S. when the Keystone XL pipeline was canceled.
In this case, Próspera's claim, which is ongoing, is equivalent to two-thirds of Honduras's annual budget. Meanwhile, the investors behind Próspera—Thiel, Andreeson, and Pronomos Capital, which the two back and which also includes as investors Patri Friedman (grandson of free-market economist Milton Friedman), Joe Lonsdale (co-founder, with Thiel, of Palantir), and Balaji Srinivasan—are looking to expand elsewhere.
In early 2024, Magatte Wade, a senior fellow with the Atlas Network, announced that she was the new co-founder of Próspera Africa. "All we need are governments that allow us to create zones where we can proceed to implement law and governance, de facto establishing a zone with a world-class environment in a country that is otherwise ranked poorly in terms of economic freedom," she wrote in her blog post announcing the idea.
In late 2024, a Network State proposal called Praxis (hilarious), backed by Open AI founder Sam Altman, attempted to buy Greenland (sound familiar?). The project, which Lonsdale also backs, is now exploring whether the Dominican Republic might be a good place to call home. Disrupting democracy not just with feudalism but also...colonialism!
There are attempts to build The Network State in the Global North as well, particularly in—no surprise—the Bay Area, where these projects are often positioned less as hostile tech takeovers and more as groovy communal living campuses. As the website Venture Capital Status (an excellent resource on this stuff) notes, Network State projects focus on a mix of artificial intelligence, crypto, biohacking and longevity. Several also have a pro-natalist, vaguely eugenicist vibe, encouraging high intellect, "high-agency" people to have large families (Musk has also talked about the need for people to have more children; a favorite past time of the media of late is counting his various progeny). Some have met with severe backlash, most notably a campus planned in Solano County, where venture capitalists (including Andreesen) purchased some 52,000 acres with the intention of building a project first called California Forever, and now East Solano Plan. Their proposal was yanked from the ballot in 2024 amidst fierce opposition, but they have vowed to be back in 2026.
During his campaign, Trump promised to build "freedom cities" that sounded an awful lot like Network State projects on federal land. Earlier this month, Trey Goff, the chief of staff for Próspera, told WIRED that he and other Próspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition had been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea.
None of this is secret, nor has much of an attempt been made to make it so; you'd think now that several of these folks have their hands on the puppet strings in Washington more people would be paying attention to it, but it's still shockingly missing from a lot of conversations about the moment we're in. Some of that's just down to the overwhelming amount of information being thrown at us all at any given time, and how scary a lot of it is. But I suspect there's something else at play, too: I think it's tough for some folks to wrap their heads around the idea that there are people out there who aren't just self-interested, but actually see self-interest as a virtue. Who do not in fact want to be in a society with you. Who genuinely don't care if they harm the public in their pursuit of whatever they want because they believe they are past such concepts as "the public interest," that they have evolved beyond such things. That there are folks who think feudalism and colonialism are the future so long as they're enabled by AI and crypto, that eugenics is a good idea that just got a bad rap, that if you're smart enough you can cheat death, and that most people are too dumb to know they're serfs.
This is the ideology we're dealing with, any strategy to reverse course must take that into account.
This piece originally came out in our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to have weekly analysis and a reading list sent directly to your inbox, you can sign up here!
Further Reading
Rather than the usual climate must-reads, this week I've pulled together a list here of further resources on the Network State and the technofascists currently gutting the U.S. government. All of these folks have been on this much longer than I have and are worth a read:
If I'm missing someone or some outlet that is incredibly obvious, it's only due to ignorance – tell me about them!
