Post-smart cities as digital authoritarian polities: The aesthetic politics of the Praxis Network State

Abstract

With proliferating proposals for blockchain, cryptocurrency or AI-driven post-smart cities, this short piece focuses on the Praxis Network State (PNS). The PNS presents a coherent but dangerous rationale for such post-smart urbanism: a vision of a planet and people in crisis that is to be survived and ultimately abandoned in order to catalyze a posthuman future in the stars. It argues that an examination of its aesthetic politics and rhetoric can help us identify the outlines of this urban version of digital authoritarianism, in order to resist and ultimately overturn it.

Introduction

Corporations, their entrepreneurial leaders and venture capital backers, are seeking more control of urban futures, with proliferating proposals for blockchain, cryptocurrency or AI-driven post-smart cities, which are based on corporate technology platforms, public–private partnership models or entirely privately managed and/or owned. These cities are characterized by ubiquitous surveillance, separation from surrounding polities, exclusionary security, and entrepreneurial citizenship and authoritarian political form, with low taxes and property prioritized over democracy and human rights (Akbari, 2022; Wood, 2025). This short piece focuses on the current apogee of these plans, the Praxis Network State (PNS), ¹ founded by entrepreneurs, Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan, and backed by a variety of venture capitalist funds and wealthy Silicon Valley figures connected to the so-called PayPal Mafia, the extended network around Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and others (Oreskovic, 2024). The PNS draws on the wider conceptualization of the Network State, whose aesthetic politics open up an increasingly coherent vision behind such post-smart urbanism: a vision of a planet in crisis that is to be survived and ultimately abandoned by an economically and eugenically select few who would protect “the light of consciousness” (Musk, 2020) and catalyze a posthuman future in the stars.

What is the network state?

The Network State is a new spin on an old neoliberal idea: that capital should be “free” from the restraints of the state (Slobodian, 2023). The Network State concept argues that digitally connected cities could replace the political architecture of the state and provide a basis for a new type of society, citizenship and indeed humanity (Balaji, 2022). This new phase of post-smart city development was heralded by the rhetoric around the failed Toronto Quayside development by Alphabet urban development spin-off, Sidewalk Labs, which claimed in 2017 that it would be “a new city, from the Internet, up” (Wood, 2020). Other early examples include the failed attempt to create “Innovation Zones” in Arizona, which would have allowed corporations to create their own polities with the power of U.S. counties, and the Próspera Platform, an international charter city vehicle, presenting itself as an all-purpose platform for the creation of semi-independent entrepreneurial tech cities (Lynch and Muñoz-Viso, 2024).

The Network State concept was more widely popularized by cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Balaji Srinivasan (“Balaji”). ² The politics of Silicon Valley had long been assumed to be a kind of default libertarianism, that “Californian ideology” defined by Barbrook and Cameron (1996), which merged hippie freedom with tech capitalist entrepreneurialism. Balaji indeed has a fairly conventional if eccentric techno-libertarian political philosophy. His tripolar political economic categorization differentiates between “communist capital” (represented by the Chinese Communist Party), “woke capital” (represented by the New York Times) and the “crypto capital” of the Network State (Balaji, 2022). Balaji specifically includes Asian and African participation in The Network State and advocates nurturing what he calls “dark talent”—innovators who he believes have not been served by “legacy” institutions, whether they be “woke” or “communist.”

The authoritarian Network State

David Golumbia (2024) warned us that the libertarianism that appears to characterize Silicon Valley masks authoritarianism, not just in potentia, but as intrinsic to the entire enterprise. Likewise, Quinn Slobodian (2020) made it clear that neoliberalism will sacrifice democracy for the needs of the market. And most other versions of the Network State are more overtly exclusive, racist and authoritarian than Balaji's vision, if not necessarily based on obvious recent authoritarian models. For example, in the Nevada Innovation Zones proposal, government would have been based not a democracy, but on a triumvirate of corporate appointees, similar to some periods during the Roman Empire. In Próspera, the model of rule and political engagement seems to derive from an alternative casting of the history of rights, partly founded in the elitism of Plato's Republic and the idea of “philosopher kings,” and partly founded in the philosophy of property rights advocated by John Locke and early British liberal capitalists. Rights in this casting are not inalienably part of human identity or existence, but instead are properties. Ownership is the foundational aspect and it is only ownership of the body, similar to the ownership of property, that grants a person what others would call “human rights.” Próspera's charter has limits on who may stand for election based on their qualifications and experience—only those with management and/or business experience may put themselves forward—and the number of votes a person has depends on how much property they have purchased in Próspera (Iqbal, 2023).

The PNS embodies such an authoritarian politics, underpinned with a distinctly racist ideology. It is therefore no surprise to find white supremacist South Africans at the heart of the PNS. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk whose parents moved to South Africa because of apartheid, are both explicitly technofascist, racist, antihumanist and eugenicist in their beliefs. Rather than nurturing Balaji's “dark talents,” their necropolitical imagination (cf. Mbembe, 2019 ³ ) identifies people like them as carriers of white European civilization, often read as an abstract humanity or simply consciousness (and not real existing humans or conscious beings), who need both to breed extensively and be protected in order to out-compete the dark and less evolved threats that surround them (see Gebru and Torres, 2024).

PNS is an overt expression of this racist, authoritarian urban utopia, combining white supremacist nostalgia with the libertarian charter city model and “TESCREALism” (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism), a bundle of beliefs promoting the survival of a tech-enabled elite over the interests of wider humanity (Gebru and Torres, 2024). It is a curious political and aesthetic amalgam which perfectly encapsulates the emerging belief system of platform capitalism (see Wood, forthcoming). For example, Praxis's AI-generated imagery seems to combine the sinuous concrete modernism of Zaha Hadid Associates (the architect of choice for Próspera), the architecture of European Gothic cathedrals, and the neoclassical gigantism of Albert Speer's Third Reich Berlin plan.

PNS wants “to restore Western Civilization.” It is geared specifically to a sense of the alienation of the very people who are at the centers of power: the idea that white, western European civilization is under threat from the polycrisis and particularly uncontrolled flows of population. The narrative of PNS is specifically fascist, claiming to be “driven by a vital energy that seeks transcendence through heroic action and contemplation.” However, fascism and nativism are not enough for the building of a new belief system. In a rhetorical move that comes directly from the days of settler-colonialism, this combines an overt nostalgia for the “great” days of the west, with an equally overt futurism, arguing that the revival of the west via “a new America, built on the internet” will be the platform to “pursue our ultimate destiny of life among the stars.”

PNS and imperial geopolitics

Just as Balaji has his own eccentric geopolitics, in making explicit the connection between this project and “a new America,” the PNS also highlights the geopolitical. Until Trump, the tech industry had tried to navigate a profitable path between democratic demands and the orders of authoritarian states, trying more or less successfully to play both sides. Behind this was a largely unspoken reliance of post-smart city projects on conventional economic and military power projection. The Próspera charter was unusual in claiming its right to call on external military power but even that document did not name any specific state upon whose military it might call (Iqbal, 2023).

However, President Trump's overt fascism and imperialist rhetoric has made it easier for U.S. platform corporations to drop any pretence of neutrality and fully embrace both U.S. (and allied) military contracting and for their founders, funders and executives, to be more explicit about their beliefs. PNS's hypercolonial vision will be facilitated not by wagon-trains and rifles, but by experimental cities and alignment with American military imperialism. PNS has been advancing a technological accelerationist project to generate knowledge about terraforming Mars for future colonization, starting with the challenging environment of Greenland as a neocolonial tabula rasa supposedly free of existing social and political constraints (MacColl, 2024). This would be impossible without military backing and Trump has made explicit threats to “take” Greenland for “international security” reasons (Yeung and Blackburn, 2025). However, in the absence of an actual takeover of Greenland, PNS has retreated to the United States itself, making it even more clear how closely this supposedly libertarian project is allied with American military state power. The most recently discussed site for a PNS project is a “defense-focused spaceport city” called Atlas, proposed for Vandenberg Airforce base (Brown, 2025), which will “defend the West on Earth, and beyond.” This has happened at almost the same time as Starbase, the housing that has been built up around Space-X's launch site in Texas, has been incorporated as a formal township. ⁴ Both of these projects make explicit the importance of space ports for space colonization, just as new port cities built by European invaders formed the bridgehead for the infrastructure of terrestrial colonization (cf. King, 2015).

Resisting the Network State

Despite the apparent clarity of its rhetoric and imaginaries, in practice it is hard to know what to make of the PNS. Should we treat it as another platform capitalist grift? Or mere ideology, unimportant to material history? Or should we see it as an imminent threat? I think it is a mistake to see ideology as unimportant, and in addition, a “limit case” like PNS can help us determine the shape of the “something worse” (Wark, 2019) that is reanimating the corpse of capitalism as we have known it. PNS itself may not be the only or even the most significant threat. However, an examination of its aesthetic politics and rhetoric can help us identify the outlines of the urban instantiation of the necropolitical technofascist digital authoritarianism (Akbari and Wood, 2025) that is being increasingly proposed as the answer to planetary problems in the 21st century, in order to resist and ultimately overturn it.