These ideas are no longer confined to obscure books or fringe tech summits, they’re entering mainstream politics.
Nigel Farage’s recent announcement to make Britain a “global crypto powerhouse” might sound like a typical macho Farage campaign stunt, but it’s part of a much bigger, increasingly influential transatlantic movement to radically reshape the relationship between technology, finance and the state. And one we need to watch.
Whatever governments can do, tech can do better, or so claims Balaji Srinivasan, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and serial tech entrepreneur. In 2023, speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, Srinivasan laid out his vision for a radical, tech-driven future.
“We start new companies like Google; we start new communities like Facebook; we start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum; can we start new countries?” he asked.
Described as a ‘rockstar’ of the crypto world, Srinivasan is a champion of disruption, part of a growing movement of tech elites who see disruption not as a phase but as a governing principle. Having already transformed industries from media to finance, these entrepreneurs now have their sights set on governance itself.
“Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Srinivasan told the audience.
If tech can reinvent everything else, why not the nation-state?
Tech ‘Zionism’
At the heart of this vision lies Srinivasan’s concept of the Network State, a kind of digital-first, crowdsourced nation, inspired, he says, by the founding of Israel.
“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism – when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a ‘reverse diaspora’,” he explained.
Far from being a sci-fi fantasy, projects like Praxis, a proposed city on the Mediterranean backed by Srinivasan and significant investment, are already in development. Founded by Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan, the idea is that Praxis is a crypto city for tech bros and tastemakers. Brown has raised $19.2 million for his crypto state project, which, as the New York Times notes, is a “paltry amount in the worlds of venture capital and urban development.” Praxis’ government relations team reportedly includes Stephen Harper, the former Conservative Party prime minister of Canada, who the BBC described as having a “conservative record that would make an American Republican proud.”
Praxis embodies the ideals of techno-libertarianism: Bitcoin over central banks, AI over human courts and judges, start-ups over civil service. As Srinivasan put it, it’s for “those who want Silicon Valley without San Francisco.”
Afropolitan
Then there’s the concept of Afropolitan. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the company behind Afropolitan began to focus on digital media, quickly building a 50,000-member community. Since then, it has launched its own podcast and is now executing a four-stage plan to transform this online community into a physical nation for the African diaspora, including the release of a Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) campaign that will serve as a digital passport.
“African countries were put together by accident and force. We have suffered the consequences of that decision with no light at the end of the tunnel,” said Echeme Emole founder of Afropolitan. “We believe that by working with the best minds and leveraging current technology, we can build a country by reflection and choice; A nation people opt into, launched first as an online community before materialising physically on land after reaching critical mass.”
But critics believe the concept promotes a Westernised, commodified image of Africa and its people, potentially erasing complex historical and cultural contexts.
“Critics—and the term has so many critics—will say that the Afropolitan is all empty style, a crass and shallow effort to make African identity into a fashion accessory, skin-deep at best, exoticising at worst,” warns Aaron Bady, who teaches 21st-century African literature at the University of Texas.
Of the wider crypto-state movement, critics believe these ideas are not just disruptive, they’re destabilising. The New Republic described the movement a “cultish tech phenomenon,” aiming to replace governments in much the same way crypto aims to replace traditional currency.
But the anti-state ideology is also gaining traction in broader reactionary circles. Groups like the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), whose backers include Jordan Peterson, ex-Brexit financiers, and far-right figures, are supportive of Silicon Valley’s radical futurism.
Amy Westervelt, executive editor of Drilled, warns that the group’s fusion with Silicon Valley ideals creates a toxic mix.
“You’ve got your pro-natalists, your white supremacists, your anti-immigration nationalists, your anti-trans fanatics, your climate denialists all in one big “saving Western values tent.”
The Network State project, reflects, argues Westervelt, “Silicon Valley’s elite desire to replace democracy with techno-feudalism,” with a “mix of artificial intelligence, crypto, biohacking and longevity.”
The Sovereign Individual
For Westervelt and others, the roots of this technocrat movement and the Network State stem from a late 90s book called The Sovereign Individual, co-written by none other than William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times and father of Jacob Rees-Mogg and US investor James Dale Davidson. The authors argue that there is no such thing as the common good or public interest, only various competing self-interests, and that democracy is dumb and needs to be replaced by something better in much the same way as the Enlightenment enabled science to replace religion.
But what is perhaps most alarming is that these ideas are no longer confined to obscure books or fringe tech summits, they’re entering mainstream politics.
During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land, echoing the Network State principles. In May, Trump’s media and technology company announced a $2.5 billion push into bitcoin.
“We view bitcoin as an apex instrument of financial freedom,” said Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, hailing the move as a “big step forward” in the company’s plan to acquire “crown jewel assets consistent with America First principles.”
Eric Trump, Trump’s third child, famously said that he “would love to see some of the big banks go extinct.”
Trump’s vice president, JD Vance has long been a crypto-loving, bitcoin holder, who’s well-connected to the conservative-libertarians of Silicon Valley. Vance’s most prominent supporter is PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who employed Vance at his global investment firm in 2017. He then nurtured Vance’s political rise, donating $15 million to his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign and helping him win a closely fought GOP primary before going on to capture the seat in the general election.
What was once a decentralised, anti-establishment fringe project is now a key plank in right-wing politics. And now, the American-born crypto crusade is crossing the Atlantic.
Enter Nigel Farage.
At a Las Vegas crypto conference last month, Farage announced that Reform had become the first in Britain to accept crypto donations from eligible donors. He also outlined a policy proposal to make London a “global crypto powerhouse.”
And this wasn’t Farage’s first foray into the crypto world. At a similar event in Amsterdam earlier this year, he praised crypto as an “economic insurgency” led by those “worried about the size and scale of big government.” He called bitcoin “the ultimate freedom, the ultimate liberty,” citing his own experience being “debanked” by Coutts and NatWest as a catalyst for his interest in decentralised finance.
Ahead of the general election last year, Farage said: “The idea that you can be debanked, the idea that with increased regulation the banks can control how you spend your money, whether you even have access to your money, again, there’s quite a feeling here amongst the whole crypto community that this is a form of individual sovereignty.”
Farage’s embrace of crypto, perhaps ironic given that he made his fortune the old-fashioned way, through a career linked to the London Metal Exchange, mirrors the enthusiasm of his counterparts in the US, where cryptocurrency is increasingly becoming a partisan issue.
As economist and journalist Dominik Leusder observed in Jacobin last October: “Donald Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency, which is dominated by the most reactionary and stupid representatives of the tech industry, has made it a partisan issue.” Leusder argued that the Trump campaign’s alliance with right-wing tech billionaires could ultimately prove to be a liability.
True to form, the marriage between the technocrat movement and populist politics is volatile, as seen by the colossal fallout between Trump and Elon Musk. Trump has warned of “serious consequences” if the tech billionaire, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to back Trump and other Republican candidates in 2024, funds his political rivals.
Even so, markets have surged on Republican crypto enthusiasm. Musk continues to amplify claims that bitcoin could replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency if Washington doesn’t reduce its ballooning debt.
“If the electorate doesn’t hold Congress accountable to reducing the deficit, and start paying down the debt, bitcoin is going to take over as reserve currency,” Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of crypto exchange Coinbase, posted to X, which was shared by Elon Musk.
The impact of cryptocurrency on the nation-state
As crypto adoption grows, its implications for sovereignty, governance, and policy enforcement will become increasingly profound.
The European Policy Centre (CPU) warns that cryptocurrencies may erode democratic institutions by shifting power from public bodies to private actors, pushing societies toward governance models where digital tokens matter more than democratic votes.
“By hyping crypto-assets and hollowing out public institutions, the US is drifting toward a public-private governance model in which digital tokens are more important than democratic votes.”
Tax systems may struggle to keep pace with the decentralised and anonymous nature of crypto assets. New reporting rules are expected to come into force in the UK from January 1 2026, which will introduce additional risks for digital asset platforms and crypto exchanges including corporate criminal prosecution if they fail to prevent tax evasion by their investors.
Additionally, the energy-intensive nature of some cryptocurrency mining processes raises concerns about resource allocation and environmental impacts.
What we’re witnessing is the rise of the crypto tech right, a strange but increasingly powerful coalition of tech billionaires, libertarian ideologues, and populist politicians. Once confined to Silicon Valley elite, their vision is now being imported into British politics, with Nigel Farage its loudest ambassador. I wouldn’t be surprised if, at the next general election, bitcoin isn’t just a talking point, but a battle line. All of which brings two things to mind: George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ seems positively cosy compared with what is now coming down the line. And Winston Churchill’s famous assertion that ‘democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.’ Well I’ve got news for Winston: the tech bros certainly think they’ve got something better than democracy.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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