The eviction of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School exposes the limits of portable citizenship

You wake at sunrise on an island that did not exist twenty years ago. A trainer is already waiting downstairs, the workout is programmed, and the meal afterwards has been optimised down to its macros. By mid-morning you are at a desk among a few hundred people building software and companies. In the evening Vitalik Buterin is speaking, or Bryan Johnson is explaining how not to die. The sea is on three sides. Someone is filming.

This was the Network School, and it printed its four pillars without embarrassment: Learn, Burn, Earn, Fun. Around US$1,500 a month bought the room, the meals, the gym, the coding sessions and the speakers. It opened on 23 September 2024, and by its founder’s own account more than 4,000 people from over 80 countries applied for its first 128 places — an acceptance rate close to 3%. Scarcity was part of the pitch. Residents described the place, quite seriously, as a prototype for a new kind of society.

All of this paradise, the advertisement promised, on a man-made island near Singapore.

Near Singapore. Which is a way of describing a place without ever naming the country it sits in. On 10 July 2026 Malaysians began asking the obvious follow-up — near Singapore, yes, but in what? — and the answer set off a sequence that ended twelve days later with an enforcement officer taping a seal to the door.

The island was Forest City, in Johor: forty minutes from Johor Bahru, and a strait away from the country the advertisement had chosen to name. Within days an activist group, Malaysian Protest 4 Palestine, accused the project of recruiting foreigners to build what it called a settlement on Malaysian soil, and alleged that Israeli nationals were among the participants — a serious charge in a country that does not recognise Israel and bars its passport holders.

On 15 July, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said any Israeli national found to be involved would be deported immediately.

The immigration department then did the unglamorous work. It ran two rounds of checks across 379 foreigners linked to the campus and found no evidence of travel-document violations. Immigration director-general Zakaria Shaaban put the total number of people connected to the commune at 430: 210 still in Malaysia, 201 already departed, 19 unaccounted for. Nothing was substantiated.

The school was closed anyway. On 21 July the Iskandar Puteri City Council revoked the business and advertising licences of its operating company, NSO Malaysia Sdn Bhd, on the grounds that the activities on site differed significantly from its approved office-use licence. At 10.45am the next morning, enforcement officers sealed the premises under By-law 49(2) of the council’s Trade, Business and Industrial Licensing By-laws 2018. The signboards came down.

The most boring instrument available

That is the detail worth sitting with. A national-security controversy, a prime ministerial warning and a two-round immigration investigation produced no finding. What closed the Network School was a municipal licensing by-law about what a room is zoned for.

Johor Menteri Besar Onn Hafiz Ghazi framed it as a matter of principle, saying no investor, company or organisation could be placed above the sovereignty of the country’s laws. The technology newsletter Asia Tech Review read the sequence more sceptically, arguing that the administrative grounds were the stated reason while geopolitics was the actual driver, and that this ordering — politics overriding investment promotion — is what should worry anyone betting on Johor as a technology hub. The reading is fair on the evidence. It is also, in a sense, beside the point.

Because the instrument matters more than the motive. A state does not need an extraordinary power to remove a tenant it has soured on. It needs a clerk, a file and a by-law from 2018. Whatever the reason, the mechanism was mundane, domestic and entirely legal — and there is no version of a portable, cloud-first community that can engineer its way around a zoning classification.

Who is Balaji Srinivasan

Network School’s founder has been filed under crypto-guy in much of the coverage, which undersells the story. Balaji Srinivasan holds a PhD from Stanford, where he also taught. He co-founded the genetic-screening company Counsyl, acquired by Myriad Genetics for US$375 million in 2018, and the bitcoin start-up that became Earn.com, which Coinbase bought for US$120 million the same year, making him Coinbase’s first chief technology officer. He was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and in 2017 the Trump administration considered him for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

He is, in other words, a serious operator. He is also an ideologist, and the ideology is the relevant part. His 2022 book The Network State argues that online communities can crowdfund territory and eventually negotiate recognition as new societies — jurisdiction as something you assemble, rather than something you are born into. He has used the phrase “tech Zionism” to describe digital citizens materialising onto new land. That phrase, in Malaysia, in 2026, was combustible in a way that a spreadsheet of tax incentives could never offset.

The school itself was never expensive by the standards of comparable programmes in Silicon Valley or the Gulf, which was part of the appeal. It began as a 90-day pilot for 128 people, doubled to 256 places on 1 March 2025 and stretched to a year-long format, and counted several hundred participants by the middle of that year.

What the money actually was

One figure has travelled badly. Network School is widely said to have spent 100 million on the campus, and readers have understandably assumed US dollars. The claim was RM100 million — roughly a fifth of that in dollar terms — and it came from Srinivasan himself, stated to Malaysian media on 16 July as the controversy peaked, alongside an assertion that a RM500 million expansion had been imminent and was now shelved. No breakdown was published and no independent audit exists. Treat both as claims by an interested party under pressure, not as established figures.

The US$100 billion that floats around this story belongs to something else entirely: Forest City itself.

The city built for people who do not exist

Forest City was unveiled in 2016 by the Chinese developer Country Garden, on four islands reclaimed at the mouth of the Johor Strait, deliberately sited within sight of Singapore. The projected development value was US$100 billion. The design capacity was 700,000 residents. It sold, overwhelmingly, to buyers in China.

Then it broke three times. Beijing’s capital controls from 2017 cut off the buyers. In August 2018 Mahathir Mohamad declared that foreigners could not buy there and would not be granted visas to live there — later clarified to mean citizenship, though by then purchases had frozen. And in 2023 Country Garden itself collapsed under a debt load approaching US$200 billion.

What stands today is roughly 15% of the plan, around 1% occupied, with something near 9,000 residents against that 700,000 target, though later estimates run higher. Resale units trade well below their launch prices. Malaysians call it the ghost city.

The zone was built to catch exactly this tenant

Here is where the two stories fuse. Anwar announced a Special Financial Zone for Forest City in August 2023. Parliament passed five bills in July 2024 granting duty-free status. The zone launched on 20 September 2024 with a package that reads like a recruitment poster for the footloose: 0% tax for single-family offices, 5% for fintech and global business services, a flat 15% income tax for knowledge workers against a top rate near 28% elsewhere in Malaysia, and multiple-entry visas. In January 2025 the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone agreement made Forest City its financial-services flagship, and the zone has since been marketed hard on its early traction.

Malaysia spent a decade and a set of tax statutes constructing a place designed to attract mobile, foreign, jurisdiction-agnostic capital. Network School was the intended customer, arriving on schedule.

And the collision had a rehearsal. In 2018 the objection at Forest City was Chinese buyers; in 2026 it was a tech commune. Same reclaimed land, same charge — a foreign enclave on Malaysian soil that Malaysians do not live in. The advertisement naming Singapore instead of Malaysia simply said aloud what the whole development had always implied.

Twenty-four hours to Kazakhstan

Within a day of the sealing, Srinivasan announced a five-year memorandum of understanding with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development: expedited visas, streamlined redomiciliation, active recruitment of talent.

He meant it as vindication, and in one sense it is. The community moved in a day, which is precisely what the thesis promises. But the speed cuts the other way too. A tenant who can relocate overnight gives a host very little reason to absorb domestic political cost on its behalf. Portability and leverage are not the same thing. Forest City discovered which one it had been sold.

What this costs the region

Every ASEAN government now runs some version of this pitch. Malaysia has DE Rantau for digital nomads, Thailand its Long-Term Resident visa, Indonesia its second-home route. Each rests on the same wager: that a country can import high-mobility foreigners on favourable terms without importing a domestic argument about who the country is for.

Johor lost that wager in a fortnight, and the loss had less to do with Israel or with crypto than with a zone whose entire commercial logic is detachment — from tax, from local labour markets, from the ordinary business of being somewhere — running into a politics organised around attachment. As we found when Bali blacklisted an expat running club, the enforcement that follows these flashpoints tends to be swift, administrative, and aimed at whoever is easiest to remove.

The lesson for the region’s zone-builders is narrower than the headlines and harder to fix. Incentives can be legislated in a July sitting. Consent cannot. A special zone that sells the promise of being not-quite-in-the-country will, sooner or later, be reminded exactly which country it is in — and the reminder will arrive as paperwork.