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Notes -
Balaji/Network State v Malaysia
Not sure how much this one is escaping beyond the SEA-sphere. Balaji's Network State is a large adult daycare/startup incubator based in Forest City, Malaysia. Forest City is a favorite of travel youtubers, but essentially is a Chinese-backed City development approximately an hour from Singapore, in Malaysia. It was supposed to have a population of 1 million or so, but due to a combination of capital controls, wobbles in the Chinese economy and shifts in legislation has been woefully underpopulated since completion. A few years ago, the Malaysian government decided to try and salvage sunk cost by providing a relatively-inexpensive golden visa pathway for buying homes there. As part of that, Balaji's Network State has taken up residence there.
The state of Malaysia that Forest City is in, Johor, has a quite-modern Sultan who owns approximately half of the real estate development. Johor is seen as essentially Singapore's hinterland in a lot of ways, and has received significant investment towards data centers and other tech manufacturing in recent years as Singapore runs out of cheap land and cheap labor. The Johor Sultan is by far the strongest state-level leader in the country, with his family being obscenely wealthy. However, Malaysian politics are frequently dragged around by the states on the Thai-Malaysian border which are very Muslim and very Malay ('Local' ethnicity. The legal inhabitants of the country are 55% Malay, 30% Chinese, 10% Indian, 5% other roughly. Also huge amounts of illegal migrant workers from Indonesia, Bangladesh etcetera but they can't vote so fuck 'em). Malaysia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and nominally doesn't allow Israeli citizens to enter the country.
Due to some internal politics focusing around pushing antizionism to keep the Muslim base happy, Network State has had a recent Immigration raid to check everybody is there under a legitimate passport (Which they are, since nobody is entering under Israeli docs even if they may potentially have other docs). Now Balaji is asking to meet with the PM of Malaysia as essentially equals, instead of doing the intelligent/normal thing which is shutting up for a couple months and waiting for the Federal Electorate to move their gaze elsewhere. Additionally, people inside Malaysia are really seizing on the 'digital sovereignty' ideal that Balaji espouses as proof of him wanting to create an actual seccessionist enclave, when realistically it's more about having an incubator space than that.
Man I can't believe how stupid these tech bro "leaders" are. Pretty much all the charter city efforts etc. have all failed because the idiotic leaders of the efforts think that because they bring in the money that makes them an equal to the actual sovreign state whose land they are on and demand they should be treated with the same level of respect and deference in the country as senior figures in its government.
Naturally this pisses off not only the senior government figures but also the ordinary population who are naturally already suspicious of the project because it's usually targetted at higher income levels than the median in the country and so you've given the leaders, who are pissed off at you for insubordination an easy way to both get rid of you as well as get some popularity points with the comman man by kiboshing your project. And so yet another effort to do something which in all respects should be massive net positive utility for humanity gets shut down because tech bro leaders who've been fellated one too many times by the US government at home can't shut up.
The more and more time goes by and I think about it, the more and more convinced I am that China did the right thing with Jack Ma those few years ago vis a vis putting people in their rightful place.
- (reading) "You crowdfund the territory. The diplomatic recognition comes later." That doesn't sound like a charter company to you?
- The Founders were thirteen colonies and a group chat. The fathers of our country. What's your point?
- My point is he's on the cap table of a private city that's suing Honduras for two-thirds of their national budget. In a private court. That the city helped write the rules for.
- You gotta walk in Balaji's shoes to see what he's up against. Guy's got nothing. No sovereignty, no army, no seat at the UN. People still think you need a government, for crying out loud. So he builds one. From scratch. On an island. In an empty city somebody else already went bankrupt building. That took guts. You remember when we went to El Salvador? The heat? And the wifi?
- Yeah, it took guts to bet a $1M the dollar was finished and lose it all in ninety days.
- He's ahead of his time.
- Who cares? It's what he did.
- He's founding a nation is what he did. He's a brave American founder. And in this house, Balaji is a hero. End of story.
No, it will not come. The last new country officially recognized by international community was ... guess ... South Sudan back in 2011.
All of world's powers in single day, 9 July 2011. See that South Sudanese independence was already fait accompli, decided beforehand.
This will not happen to some adventurer seizing some land in the middle of nowhere, the international community has zero tolerance for filibusters and freebooters. US+allies will treat such people like terrorists, and China the same, only harsher.
No one wants to give adventurous folks idea that you can just do thing, you can just leave your day job and become bandit in the swamp.
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Balaji Srinivasan has never been, is not now, and will never be American. He is a paper citizen, the son of two Indians, grandson of four Indians, and his well demonstrated absence of loyalty and allegiance to the country of his birth is a stain upon him and all others like him.
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