Do you feel it? That eerie sense of altered physics in the widening gyre? That spinning sensation as our vessel circles round and down into the maelstrom, ever closer to the obscure, possibly overhyped, but strongly implied crackup at the bottom? Maybe you're loyal to the ship of state and its crew. But maybe you have—despite yourself—been contemplating some escape routes in recent rotations: Moving to Canada or whatever lies beyond Canada, perhaps. Or prepper stuff. Or striking off for some ideology that doesn't fit the maddening starboard-and-port duality of politics on this dumb schooner. If so, Balaji Srinivasan is way ahead of you. Heck, to him, this maelstrom looks like progress. The future doesn't belong to ships at all, as he sees it. It belongs to people who can take leaps, find each other online, and build their own bespoke societies in the cloud. Mind you, this is coming from a guy who's a fabulously wealthy tech founder and investor, a consummate Twitter troll, a crypto guru, a onetime Covid oracle, and a gadfly who is gunning so hard for the old-line liberal establishment that he's been told to chill out by some of the most virulently neoreactionary, anti-democratic figures around Silicon Valley. He's also the author of a new book called The Network State, and a weirdly ubiquitous intellectual presence in tech. Does Balaji Srinivasan want you to read this dizzyingly artful, insightful story about him by WIRED senior editor Anthony Lydgate? Probably not. He'd probably tell you that we only wrote it because—as corporate media incumbents—we're still clutching the shares we hold in this ship, and we need to keep people onboard as long as we can. But reader, the leaps you take are up to you. This one, at the very least, offers a great ride. John Gravois | Features Editor |
