Techno-utopia rises in Malaysia's US$100bil Forest City flop


Forest City, a project started in 2015, is a mega mixed development project on four reclaimed islands in Johor waters. — Filepic

In a hotel-turned-campus on a reclaimed island in Malaysia, crypto and tech entrepreneurs are building software, chomping down Australian prime ribeye, hitting the gym - and getting schooled in a radical blueprint for creating new sovereign states from scratch. 

They have descended on Forest City to attend Network School, the brainchild of former Coinbase Inc. executive and The Network State author Balaji Srinivasan. In this troubled megaproject once envisaged to house some 50 times its current population, they’re conducting a real-life experiment of sorts with Srinivasan’s vision of "startup societies” defined less by historical territory than shared beliefs in technology, cryptocurrency and light regulation. 

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