Much of this already existed. It was possible to use third-party payment systems, open online bank accounts, and register businesses remotely. It was also possible to spend your entire waking day in immersive gaming worlds like Fortnite, Minecraft, or Roblox. Many did. The difference was what Srinivasan saw as the end goal: putting out the flag of the private company to declare membership in a different polity.

  Instead of simply being online, you would eventually start “crowdfunding” territory to establish a settlement somewhere on earth.30 Where this cloud country would be was never mentioned and there was little reason to think Srinivasan would avoid the pitfalls that had sunk so many other would-be founders of micronations in the past. But he was tweaking the usual plotline in his idea of going “cloud first, land last,” building up an online customer base as a prelude to settling a new zone.31 Social media platforms had shown the possibility of scaling up rapidly. Srinivasan put the project in comparative terms. Facebook had 2.89 billion monthly active users, Instagram had 1 billion. By contrast, 20 percent of actual countries in the world had less than a million citizens apiece. These were, as he put it in tech terms, feeble user counts.32 “Imagine 1000 startup cities around the world competing for residents,” he said.33 The move would be made from the sovereign individual to the “sovereign collective.”34

  Srinivasan’s “cloud country” idea of exit was very different from the goldbug scenario of a well-stocked and well-armed hinterland retreat. Such retreats do exist in literature and in reality. Lionel Shriver’s novel The Mandibles, for example, features the Free State of Nevada, founded after a devastating financial crisis. In the real world, New Hampshire has seen similar efforts from libertarians trying to create a “Free State,”35 while white supremacists have been moving to the Idaho woods to build a would-be homeland since the 1990s.36 There are people selling decommissioned missile silos in North Dakota, while Thiel’s crowd builds luxury postapocalyptic retreats in New Zealand.37 Essential to all these scenarios is the isolation of the place, a move back to something more self-sufficient and less dependent on global economic ties. Srinivasan, by contrast, had no interest in either self-sufficiency or roughing it. His model was not Theodore Kaczynski’s cabin but Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. One of his favorite books was Lee’s From Third World to First.38 He described his model as “collective exit.” “The founder doesn’t just move to the cabin,” he said. “They whistle for backup and they bring their friends there and turn the cabin into a little settlement and then a town and then a city and then a bigger thing until they outshine the city they left.”39

  Like many tech libertarians, Srinivasan was often at pains to portray his state-building projects as business plans, complete with corporate-style pitch decks and charts. It seemed important for libertarians to insist that they were rejecting the tradition of republican democracy in favor of something more rigorous and empirically driven—“a society funded by subscription and seignorage,” as Srinivasan called his cloud country.40 But the republican political imagination still had a grip even on those who saw themselves seeking an exit from politics. Srinivasan’s description of his project as moving from sovereign individuals to the “sovereign collective” sounded very much like the classical notion of groups of people coalescing as a single demos. He referred to those who would create cloud countries as “founders,” with deliberate echoes of Silicon Valley but only slightly less obvious echoes of the American Revolution; the Declaration of Independence occasionally appeared in his slide decks.

  Unlike Thiel and Friedman, Srinivasan was also notable for his use of the language of democracy. He said that the existing system in a place like the United States was a “51% democracy” while he was advocating “100% democracy,” through models where one had to actively opt in.41 It is only when you look twice that you see that the difference lies in the question of ownership. The basic principle of republican democracy is one person, one vote. Srinivasan’s cloud city blueprints were curiously silent on the question of decision-making, but one can assume that they would take their cue from corporate governance: one share, one vote. When asked about property ownership in a future cloud city, Srinivasan surprised the interviewer by replying that an individual would not actually own land—the corporation that developed it would. The individual would instead own a share in the city as a whole.42 This model made perfect sense in the world of social media platforms. You don’t own your Facebook profile; you are granted Facebook’s service in exchange for your user data. There was even a real-world example that Srinivasan cited as a model: New Songdo City in South Korea, built by a private corporation in which citizen-customers held shares.43 The cloud country was a world of terms and conditions rather than rights and obligations. It was a realization of Yarvin’s vision of sovcorp, the sovereign corporate republic.

  One reason why Srinivasan seemed confident about something as far-fetched as founding a new country may have been that he had done something like it before. He was an active and early player in the world of cryptocurrency, which began with the launch of Bitcoin in 2009. The idea of competing private currencies had been widely discussed in libertarian circles since Friedrich Hayek wrote about the “denationalization of money” in 1976.44 They had never caught on, partly because of the difficulty of finding the right technical means.

  Bitcoin, designed by a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto, was an ingenious system in which digital “coins” could be securely transferred between participants, with all transactions and holdings recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain. The coins could be “mined”—that is, acquired—by running computer programs solving difficult equations, and the system limited the total number of bitcoins that could ever be mined to twenty-one million. If you distrusted the management of money by the organs of the democratic state, and especially if you were concerned about state-led inflation, this cap on the total bitcoin supply was very appealing. At the same time, the publicly visible blockchain seemed to promise both radical transparency and ironclad protection against meddling. Bitcoin offered the prospect of money beyond central banks. Bringing The Sovereign Individual’s “cybercash” into reality would remove the human factor from money. It also offered the tantalizing possibility of substituting technology for trust, enabling algorithmically governed “smart contracts” without judges or courts. In that sense, putting money and laws “on the blockchain” was the ultimate form of exit.

  In 2015, Srinivasan left Andreessen Horowitz to work full-time at a new company devoted to mainstreaming Bitcoin.45 The cryptocurrency was trading at about $258 per bitcoin when he started. Six years later, it peaked at about $58,000, translating into a return on investment of over 24,000 percent. In economic terms, he had borne witness to something as close to magic as you were ever likely to see. To describe the creation of cryptocurrency, Srinivasan reached for a term we have seen earlier in relation to the “joint fantasy” of David Friedman’s medieval re-creationism: live action role-playing, or LARPing.

  Bitcoin proponents had “LARPed” a currency into existence, he said. They had treated a line of code as if it were money, and enough people were convinced by the quality of their model that it became money.46 It had grown from a figment of an individual’s imagination in 2008 to a trillion-dollar part of the world financial system by 2021, with central banks worldwide contemplating their own moves into digital currencies. And if you could LARP money, one of the central filaments of social fabric, then why couldn’t you LARP a nation?47 “Where we are: start your own currency,” Srinivasan said in 2017. “Where we will be going to now: start your own country.”48

  Again, this was not quite so wild as it sounded. Political historians have written for decades on the “invented traditions” of modern nationalism: the way that modern nations were, effectively, brought into existence through the creation of mass rituals and pageantry, the codification of language in dictionaries and folk stories in anthologies, the writing and performance of national poems and plays, the erection of monuments, and the formalization of traditional forms of dress.49

  A classic of cultural history explains how print capitalism created the “imagined communities” of modern nations, as people who read the same newspapers, novels, biographies, and poems began to see themselves as part of a common collective. Sociologists have adapted the point to suggest that online media are having a similar effect, connecting people from all over the globe into new collectives, often based on the anticipation of a future outcome. Retail investors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts alike can become part of such “speculative communities.”50

  Srinivasan praised the internet as a “non-rivalrous frontier,” where anybody could re-create themselves and remix their identities.51 His parents had come to the United States to find opportunity, but the next generation would go to the cloud. A phrase he liked to use to describe this was “reverse diaspora.” He saw the real reorganization of global society after the end of the Cold War happening online, as speculative communities rearranged loyalties across national borders (at least insofar as firewalls permitted them). The territorial United States was to the internet what Great Britain had been to the United States in 1776: an incumbent polity destined to be abandoned and superseded.

  Srinivasan’s tweak to the start-up city model was to suggest that the online and offline worlds might be not alternatives to each other but complementary: you build online first, then you come down to earth. His replacement of the sovereign individual with “the sovereign collective” seemed like a break from Davidson and Rees-Mogg, but the difference was really only semantic. All three saw the same things: the possibility of exit created by new technology, the creation of a new global caste of meritocratic adepts, and the abandonment of the taxing, regulatory state in favor of new affiliations and even new territories organized along the lines of private corporations.

  3.

  The dream of the cloud country was based on a series of fairly obvious omissions. First of all, lost in Srinivasan’s scorn for the Paper Belt was the debt that Silicon Valley owed to it. The internet itself was a paper product, created by government and universities. Srinivasan’s former boss Andreessen invented the first web browser at a land-grant university in Illinois. Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google on a National Science Foundation grant. The NSF itself built the backbone of the internet before allowing it to be privatized in the 1990s.52

  Second was the silence on the question of resources. Nothing is created out of thin air. The cloud is anchored in sprawling data centers, which run hot and get cooled by rivers and coal-burning power plants. Cryptocurrency is a particularly notable resource hog. By the early 2020s, its rise in value was putting strains on electrical grids worldwide, as people wired together vast warehouses of computers running day and night to solve the equations that mined new coins. The more people tried to solve the equations, the harder they became. The harder they became, the more the computers needed to run. The more the computers needed to run, the more the strain on power grids. Iran banned bitcoin mining in 2021 after it led to blackouts and possibly the shutdown of a nuclear reactor. China, one of the world’s biggest bitcoin producers, banned it, too, leading miners to relocate their rigs to places like Canada, South Dakota, and Texas, sites of more traditional commodity extraction.53 The annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining is estimated to be higher than that of the entire country of Sweden.54 Srinivasan’s discussion of cloud country made no mention of energy usage or climate change. The burdens of adjustment to rising tides, floods, fires, and ever more frequent extreme weather events would presumably be borne by others.

  Most glaring was the idea of “bare land.” Srinivasan swallowed the frontier myth whole.55 He described himself as part of the “Oregon Trail generation,” referring to the popular 1980s computer game that let you role-play as a settler in a covered wagon heading westward. In his understanding, US history until the 1890s had been marked by openness, where “anybody could go out West and take a plot of land and turn it into something.”56 He saw the nineteenth century as a time of “equality of opportunity.” But opportunity has always depended on who one was. I remember Oregon Trail’s glowing green graphics from the school computer lab, too—but I also know that my great-grandfather, a Métis man of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry born in Montana, was ejected with his family from the lands of the American West as an illegal squatter. The bison herds his own father had hunted for trade and survival were dead, and families like his were left to gather bones for sale as fertilizer. The frontier was not a land of freedom for them.57

  Srinivasan made frequent reference to his own background and the need to draw in those not fortunate enough to be born with the right passport. But his version of the earth operates utterly innocent of the trail of suffering wreaked in the name of the settler-colonial fantasy. Where, after all, is the bare land? Is it in the sparsely populated Canadian North, where Indigenous communities have fought unsuccessfully for centuries for the right to shape the territory that their people have inhabited for millennia? Is it in the Australian West, where the Rio Tinto mining company dynamited sacred Aboriginal sites for iron ore in 2020? Is it in the South Pacific of French Polynesia, which the French used for nuclear testing into the 1990s? Or is it in the Indonesia that Srinivasan himself cited approvingly, where the Dayak people have been opposing gold-mining companies since the 1960s? These were all dark spaces on the map of the world at night that start-up city champions like Romer used to make their case. But this was a crude cartography of the earth’s inhabitants, a PowerPoint slide in place of understanding.

  Srinivasan preferred blue-sky (or, better, blank-whiteboard) speculation to real-world examples. Yet one of the successful examples he offered was telling: the state of Israel. This was indeed a reverse diaspora, organized through newspapers and texts that produced a kind of cloud country of a Jewish homeland through the media of the time. Kicked off by the publication of Theodor Herzl’s Jewish State in 1896, the Zionist plan translated only slowly into facts on the ground through small-scale acts of colonization, which were eventually accepted and given legitimacy by the dominant imperial powers of the day. But consider the consequences of this example. The land in Palestine was no more bare than anywhere else in the world, and it remains rent by competing historical claims over territory. Israel’s solution to the problem of demographic and political geography has been to create a two-tier system separating primarily Jewish citizens of the country from Muslim inhabitants of the region. Its fenced boundary—policed by cameras, drones, armed soldiers, and heat-sensing technology at the limit of the technological frontier—puts the Berlin Wall’s death strip to shame.58

  Perhaps there was an honesty in this example. Srinivasan and his fellow tech investors expressed frustration with the problems of San Francisco—a place rife with visible inequality and untreated mental illness, the legacy of centuries of racialized poverty, violence, and discriminatory immigration policy stretching back to the original expropriation of the land on which the city was built. It is clear that Srinivasan, with his resources, could find somewhere better. But as he seemed to admit himself, it would probably look like the state of Israel: militarized, paranoid, defiant—and also very invested in technology. It was not for nothing that a bestselling book on Israel praised by Srinivasan called it the “start-up nation.”59 Here was a template: a cloud country with a twenty-six-foot-tall border wall.

  4.

  In 2021, Srinivasan wrote that “an evacuation point is an interesting way of thinking about collective exit, about the sovereign collective, about what comes after the sovereign individual. When the state fails, pull the fire alarm and gather your community in a new hub.”60

  Srinivasan thought the trigger for the move to the cloud country had finally come when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe in early 2020. He rang the alarm early on the repercussions of the pandemic, foretelling a division of the world map into “green zones” that had contained the virus and “red zones” that had not. First used in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, such zones, designated by public health officials, seemed poised to become the basis for a new political economy. Color-coded zones were rolled out to control the coronavirus in Malaysia, Indonesia, northern Italy, and France; the strategy was also considered by the White House. India divided its 1.3 billion people into a patchwork of green, yellow, and red zones, with different freedoms and restrictions in each. Global investors took note. The global citizenship broker Henley & Partners forecast that “as the curtain lifts, people will seek to move from poorly governed and ill-prepared ‘red zones’ to ‘green zones’ or places with better medical care.”61

  Across the United States, regional “compacts” sprang up as competition intensified for lifesaving ventilators and protective equipment. The atmosphere was one of competitive federalism, with states reconfigured as economic units bidding in a marketplace. Governor Gavin Newsom termed California a “nation-state”; Maryland’s governor confessed to keeping COVID-19 tests in an undisclosed location under armed guard, in part to prevent their seizure by federal authorities.62

  “We are entering this fractal environment in which the virus breaks centralized states,” Srinivasan told a virtual summit organized by Startup Societies Foundation in the spring of 2020. Since the virus does not stop at borders, neither would the process of fragmentation. As regions seal themselves off to prevent contagion, “you can drill down to the state, or even the town or county level,” Srinivasan observed. Any state without the virus under control would “face defection” in an intensified contest for talent and capital. After the pandemic has passed, he predicted, “nations are going to turn into effectively vendors and entrepreneurs and relatively mobile people will be applicants.”63 The move to remote work, the reliance on delivery services, and the evaporation of face-to-face interaction, along with increasing fears of urban unrest and uprising—all of this made fertile ground for new settlements in the cloud.