Malaysia shuts down Network School, Balaji Srinivasan's techno-utopian project, over licensing issues; Srinivasan says he is opening a new campus in Kazakhstan
Balaji Srinivasan left Silicon Valley and created an incubator for new countries in an Asian ghost city, before the government shut it down
Context & Ripple Effects
Network School had drawn crypto and tech entrepreneurs to Forest City to test Srinivasan’s network-state ideas, as documented in earlier coverage of its entrepreneur cohort. Malaysia’s licensing action turns that experiment from a host-site project into a test of whether such communities can operate within conventional local regulatory frameworks.
The planned Kazakhstan campus makes relocation—not abandonment—the immediate response. That shift matters because the project’s premise depends on sustaining a community across jurisdictions, while each host government retains authority over education, business, and residency-related activity.
First-order effects
- Network School must cease its Malaysian operation over licensing issues, disrupting its local campus and the participants using it as a base.
- Srinivasan is redirecting the project toward a proposed Kazakhstan campus, moving operational and regulatory work to a new host country.
Second-order effects
- The move makes licensing and local compliance a central constraint on the project’s expansion, rather than a back-office concern after a campus is established.
- Prospective participants and partners must weigh continuity across jurisdictions; rival founder communities can use regulatory certainty as a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- If cross-border, ideology-driven communities continue to seek physical campuses, their durability will depend less on online affiliation than on negotiated fit with host-country rules.
- The episode points to a persistent tension in network-state experiments: global mobility can change locations, but it does not displace territorial regulators’ control over on-the-ground institutions.
The trend: Tech-led communities are testing portable, jurisdiction-shopping models, but physical operations remain bounded by the licensing regimes of the countries that host them.