The Network State: Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, and Silicon Valley's Quest for Greenland
How the Crypto Broligarchy May Explain Donald Trump's Bizarre Greenland Fixation
(This is a follow-up piece to Democracy is Dead: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy and assumes knowledge of that content.)
Aloha Greenland
In 2019, Donald Trump stunned the world by announcing his desire to purchase Greenland. As Americans slowly growing accustomed to Trump’s daily stream of bats*** insane suggestions—nuking a hurricane, the sound of windmills causes cancer, stealth jets are literally invisible to the naked eye—we collectively rolled our eyes, shrugged our shoulders and said, Huh?
Greenland?
We assumed that giant, barren patch of ice rock over Canada’s right shoulder was Donnie Quixote’s latest real estate windmill to go tilting at. Or maybe the “very stable genius” was miffed about never making Santa’s Nice List and was looking for a staging ground to invade the north pole and put whatever elves felt like defecting to work on H-1B visas at Doral.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the idea “absurd” and assured the world that Greenland “wasn’t for sale,” prompting Trump to call her “nasty” and cancel a scheduled diplomatic meeting with the country.
The whole juvenile spat never developed much beyond that, and since Trump has the attention span of a coked-up raccoon in a Temu warehouse, he was on to the next shiny object within a week, and that was the end of it.
Except it wasn’t.
PayPal Mafia founding member Elon Musk shelled out more than $290 million of his personal fortune to buy Trump a second round of presidenting; PayPal Mafia “don” Peter Thiel finagled the political show pony he’d bought himself in 2022, JD Vance, onto the ticket; Trump and Vance managed to convince 77 million [allegedly] educated adult human persons that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating peoples’ cats and dogs, and rode that tidal wave of white-hot nonsensical outrage all the way to the White House.
And just like that, Greenland was back in the conversation again.
To show everyone he meant business this time, Trump sent out a Greenland scout party—made up of his i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶ eldest son, Don Jr., and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk for some reason—the first week of January for “diplomacy talks,” which went about as well as you’d expect anything involving Trump’s crackhead offspring and the dude who thought a dolphin fetus was a human being to go. Greenland’s political establishment refused to meet with them, forcing Tweedledumb & Tweedledumber to resort to rounding up homeless people and bribing them with a free lunch to pose in MAGA hats and pretend to be happy about it.
Don Jr. returned to the States and—in true Trumpian fashion—declared this colossal embarrassing failure a roaring success.
For some reason, Elon Musk felt led by the Spirit to chime in on this…uh...”good news.”
Apparently, the quest for Greenland wasn’t another bit of Trump bloviating buffoonery. Only this time Trump wasn’t merely suggesting purchasing the world’s largest island, he was floating the idea of taking it by military force, if necessary, for “national security purposes,” an argument that may have been slightly more convincing if not for the fact that America already has a military base there that is already being used for “national security purposes”(since 1943).
Previously, Trump’s Greenland aspirations had mostly been confined to Twitter. This time, he was boldly proclaiming his intention to gain control of Greenland “one way or the other” at the State of the Union address with the entire world watching. If this was all in jest, Denmark wasn’t in on the joke, taking Trump’s latest threat seriously enough to boost their Arctic defense spending by $2 billion.
Was there something else going on with Greenland that maybe somebody wasn’t mentioning?
One possible explanation was the increase in international attention Greenland has been garnering as North Atlantic shipping lanes have started opening up due to global warming and the melting polar ice caps, dramatically reducing maritime trade routes previously relegated to the Panama and Suez canals for traversing the globe. But since Trump built an entire political movement centered on the counter-factual notion that global warming isn’t real and climate change is a Chinese hoax, convincing his supporters that we needed to invade Santa’s Magic Workshop to capitalize on the global warming that doesn’t exist might’ve invited a tougher conversation with the perpetually-outraged Red Hats than he was up for.
Another possible explanation—one that squares rather nicely with Trump’s ambitions in the Ukraine peace talks—is Greenland’s abundant natural resources. Like Ukraine, Greenland has a vast, untapped supply of rare earth minerals that are critical to the construction of computer chips and semiconductors, which we’re currently reliant on China and Russia for. Say, that reminds me—you know who would really love to get their hands on a virtually unlimited supply of computer components?
Silicon Valley.
In Democracy is Dead: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy, I outlined how the PayPal Mafia and billionaire tech bros of Silicon Valley are ideologically aligned with the dystopian political philosophies of Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment (I’m not going to rehash it here; click the link for a refresher). Yarvin got the bulk of the attention last time; this time, Thiel’s name is going to come often enough you’re going to be sick of hearing it before we’re done.
The last thing I’ll say about Yarvin for now is that his “burn everything down and turn society into The Matrix” isn’t the only anti-American/anti-democratic ideology out there, merely the most extreme. There are less radical movements to choose from—some of them downright utopian sounding—but they all have two things in common: 1) an end to the American way of life as we know it, and 2) the financial backing of Peter “I No Longer Believe That Freedom And Democracy Are Compatible” Thiel.
Seasteading
If there’s a unifying theme across the disparate anti-American tech-bro ideologies, it’s the concept of “Libertarian Exit”—individuals or groups seeking to withdraw from government control, taxation, or societal norms they find oppressive.
A great example of this movement is the concept of seasteading—the idea that if you can somehow figure out a way to live in international waters, subject to no government, you could claim complete autonomy and, above all, pay no taxes.
One of the pioneers of this Waterworld project was anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman, and if that last name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the grandson of Milton Friedman, arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century.
Patri founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008, dedicated to figuring out how to flip the bird to government and live amongst the Merfolk. And if you’re thinking, That sounds kind of expensive–who the hell has the money to build an experimental floating retirement village 20 miles west of Seattle? that’s a fair question. The answer is: Patri Friedman’s co-founder, Peter Thiel, who put up the initial seed money and at least three more rounds of investment worth an estimated $1.7 million.
See? It’s not all dystopian nightmare fodder. Impractical? Maybe. Unrealistic? Not exactly. They’ve currently got 8 projects in the works around the globe. In case, you know, living upstairs from Aquaman and trading in your golden doodle for a beluga whale is your thing. The point here isn’t that every anti-government movement is inherently sinister, it’s that every anti-government movement seems to involve Peter Thiel.
The Network State
Situated somewhere between Yarvin’s techno-fascist Hunger Games hellscape and Friedman’s saccharinely optimistic Sea World Adventure is Belaji Srinavasan.
Though not formally part of the PayPal Mafia, Srinavasan is thick-as-thieves with the whole lot of them. An entrepreneur and venture capitalist, he co-founded Counsyl—a genetic testing company—that was acquired by Myriad Genetics in 2018 for $375 million before going on to become a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz1, the venture capital firm founded by Paypal Mafia members Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz He also served as the CTO of the global crypto exchange Coinbase.
Peter Thiel is such a huge fan of Srinavasan that he actively lobbied Donald Trump in 2017 to appoint him head of the FDA (Trump passed).
In 2018, Srinavasan published The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which outlines a vision for a new form of governance and societal organization enabled by technology.
The concept of a “network state”—as opposed to a “nation state”—is that the latter is confined to an actual physical location with borders and boundaries. A network state is a digital-first (online) community that organizes around common values, goals, and identity. Over time, this group gains economic power, cultural influence and, ideally, physical territory that allows it to function as a sovereign entity.
Feet, not Voice
One of the guiding philosophies of the network state is the concept of “feet, not voice.”
Voice refers to voting, protests, activism—any activity that involves a proactive attempt to use influence to affect change within the system. Feet refers to the act of moving on and leaving the system behind rather than doing anything to try to change it.
The biggest drawback to the whole “physical territory” aspect of this plan is that Earth, in 2025, is all taken up and spoken for.
In 1492, if you wanted some new land to start a new country or colony or theme park or whatever, you had to borrow your favorite monarch’s favorite boat and try not to sail off the edge of the world in it (that, or just find someone who already had what you wanted and “relieve” them of it.) Trying that today is like trying to get into a game of Monopoly that’s been going on for 2 hours—there’s no property left to claim, you’re best hope is to sit in jail so you don’t land on a hotel, and you’ll have way more fun if you just go back out in the garage and play ping-pong with Jeff until the inevitable Boardwalk fist-fight breaks out and ruins the evening. (Unless you’re Russia, in which case…just take whatever you want, I guess?)
Enter Crypto
Supposing you were dead set on creating an autonomous community and were okay with not having a physical location, could you actually pull it off? Until very recently, that answer was no.
It’s physically impossible to operate autonomously when you have to rely on: government roads to travel to a third-party meet-up spot, on third-party postal or telephone services to communicate, on brick-and-mortar establishments to earn a living, and on centralized banking institutions to transact.
The internet solved the first three issues. Now, you could meet in a chatroom—regardless of your location—communicate in real-time with your entire tribe, and work and earn a living from the comfort of your couch. The only snag was that you still needed institutional, centralized banking to get paid and make purchases. Whether you had direct deposit or received a physical check, you had to have a place for the deposit to go, or a recognized currency someone would give you in exchange for the check.
Until crypto came along.
With blockchain technology, Silicon Valley knocked over the final pillar that kept communities desiring maximum autonomy from achieving it: they decentralized banking, completely removing legacy financial institutions from the equation.
Trump’s Crypto Pivot
One of the most curious topics Trump has executed his world-famous flip-flopping on is crypto. After leaving office in 2021, Trump told the Fox Business Network: "Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world.”
Fast forward to now and Trump’s stance on crypto has done a remarkable 180. On March 6, he signed an Executive Order creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.
"Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar.” - Donald Trump
Appointed to overseeing this new crypto endeavor Trump was completely opposed to four years ago was brand new “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks.
Who is David Sacks?
Among other things, David Sacks is a right-wing megadonor who gave $1 million to JD Vance’s 2022 senate campaign and raised $15 million for Trump. Beyond that, he’s a South African venture capitalist who co-founded a small payment company called Confinity with a man named Peter Thiel, and then merged it with Elon Musk’s X.com to form PayPal.
Yep, he’s a founding member of the PayPal Mafia!
After leaving PayPal, Sacks founded Yammer, and then Craft Ventures—a venture capital firm behind Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The tech bros and Libertarian Exiters and anarcho-capitalists and anyone else who desired to be free of centralized government restraints already had everything they needed to be a fully-realized network state. Now they had a personal champion in the White House. The final leap was taking the step from the virtual world to the physical one.
But what do you do if you want to start a new sovereign nation and there’s no physical places left to start one? (assuming you’re not totally enamored with seawater)
Praxis
In 2019, a 23-year old surfer/hedge fund manager by the name of Dryden Brown founded a small company called Praxis that was self-described as an “internet-native nation” with stated plans to create a 10,000 population city “somewhere in the Mediterranean.” It was heavy on vision, light on specifics, but man did it have some sweet AI futuristic aesthetics!
It sounded like the Star-Trek-meets-Lord of-the-Rings fever dream of a second-year philosophy major who’d just read every word of Ayn Rand and did a bong hit every time he came across the word capitalist. It was gloriously bonkers.
And every major player in Silicon Valley wanted a piece of it.
The company’s initial investor pitch in 2022 claimed the city would be a “crypto state,” which drummed up quite a bit of enthusiasm from San Francisco’s broligarchy. By the time Brown was asked to give a keynote speech at the 2023 Network State Conference in Amsterdam—sharing the stage with none other than Network State founder Belaji Srinavasan himself— Brown had already raised $17.5 million. Not exactly enough to begin construction of Captain Kirk’s Minas Tirith on the French Riviera, but not exactly chump change either.
Key investors piled in, including—you guessed it—the Peter Thiel-backed Pronomos Capital, Peter Thiel-partner Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel-associate Belaji Srinavasan, Peter Thiel’s [government surveillance company] Palantir, Alameda Research (the crypto trading firm Sam Bankman-Fried used to fund his FTX scam, for which he earned an $11 billion fine and 25 years in prison), Apollo Projects (founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman), and the Winkelvoss twins’ Winkelvoss Capital Management, among others.
By 2024, Dryden Brown’s Praxis fever dream was sitting on $525 million in capital, and his network state included 14,000 Praxians in 84 countries who had, in total, founded companies worth more than $400 billion.
That’s when Dryden Brown decided he was going to… buy Greenland.
Wait, I thought Brown wanted to build Praxis in the Mediterranean? I’m no geologist, but I’m pretty sure Greenland’s not in the vicinity. What gives?
Right you are, imaginary internet friend. Greenland is pretty much the polar (no pun intended) opposite of the balmy Mediterranean, so who in their right mind would select that desolate, frozen wasteland in lieu of a tropical paradise? Here, I’ll let Brown explain his reasoning to you:
(Terminus, obviously, being the name Elon Musk picked out a while back for his first Martian colony.)
“Greenland is an actual frontier. It's hardcore. If humanity is going to build Terminus on Mars, we should practice in Greenland. It can serve as a sandbox for terraformation experiments, funded by realizing its potential as a mining and industrial hub.”
Unfortunately for Brown, Denmark was approximately as receptive to his offer to buy their terrestrial Mars stand-in as they were to Trump’s. They weren’t.
If this deal was ever going to happen, it was surely going to take someone to schmooze the Danes. Someone with diplomatic finesse. Someone with an intimate knowledge and understanding and appreciation of Danish culture. What it was probably not going to take was a venture capitalist from the PayPal Mafia with no discernible ties to Denmark being appointed America’s Ambassador to Denmark.
Trump Appoints PayPal Mafia Venture Capitalist with No Ties to Denmark Ambassador to Denmark
While Trump passed on Thiel’s suggestion to make Belaji Srinivasan head of the FDA during his first term, he acquiesced to Theil’s recommendation of Ken Howery for Ambassador to Denmark this time around.
Who is Ken Howery?
Ken Howery is one of the billionaire PayPal Mafia OG’s—a PayPal co-founder, along with Musk and Thiel, and its original CFO.
After selling PayPal, Thiel and Howery co-founded the venture capital Founders Fund, which invested in projects like Facebook, AirBnB, Spotify, Stripe, Palantir, and perhaps their biggest goldmine: SpaceX.
Trumped tapped Howery in 2019 to serve as Ambassador to Sweden, which Howery accepted and immediately rankled a bunch of right-wing conspiratorial feathers by brokering a handful of AI, quantum computing, and 5G projects between the two countries. (Most notably was Swedish telecom giant Ericsson’s contract to build 5G equipment in the U.S. right around the time Covid was hitting, leading to a host of Conservative outrage nonsense about 5G causing the pandemic.)
Why would Donald Trump want a Silicon Valley tech bro fostering diplomatic ties to Denmark? Perhaps that’s the wrong question and misses the point.
Maybe a more insightful question is: Why would Peter Thiel want his investment partner behind SpaceX serving as ambassador to the country that owns the patch of the land Thiel’s other investments are trying to acquire for a trial run of SpaceX’s terraforming ambitions on Mars?
Because the answer to that question seems a bit obvious.
And if that is truly what’s going on here, it would make a helluva lot more sense than “senile real-estate developer wants to buy frozen continent because he likes doing deals.”
As Curtis Yarvin said in 2017, “I’ve been coaching Peter Thiel… he’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
Or it could be that I’m just seeing a whole bunch of connections that aren’t really there.
“I’ve been coaching Peter Thiel… he’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.” - Curtis Yarvin
In any event, I secretly kind of hope they manage to secure Greenland because Praxis actually does sound pretty cool. I know it’s not the Mediterranean paradise they originally wanted, but all of the Mediterranean coastal real estate is currently spoken for and occupied at this point, and certainly has no need for terraforming or city-building.
Unless there are some recent developments in the region I missed.
Andreessen Horowitz funded Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and donated nearly $90 million to Donald Trump and Trump PACs)