The Network School
balajis.com
We’re starting a new school near Singapore for the dark talent of the world. Apply online at ns.com/apply.

Pay $1000 a month to live on Balaji and Bryan’s private island grindset Sorbonne. Hone your Dark Talents at the Wizarding school from guys who don’t believe in society, but DO believe in getting teenage blood transfusions. Featuring Proof-of-LearnTM!

  • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I’m not an investigative journalist or anything, but I’d love to go undercover and expose wtf is going on here because I bet it’s way weirder than people imagine.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    “totally not a cult” says leader of group that milks rubes for large sums of money to place them in isolated environs with extremely atypical lifestyle facilities

    one moment you’re paying rent, the next moment you’re an “attendee”

    zero mention of what kinds of infrastructure is available

    And we have plenty of day passes for visitors.

    day… passes… to summer brainwash camp. which I bet there will be an application process and “admin” for

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    MFs looked at SBF and thought, yeah, more of that thanks.

    Who do we have to bribe to just have a pitfall trap in place of whatever it is they’re trying to build?

    • Thrashy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I’ve looked into it, but in the sense of “tiny island in the middle of a freshwater lake where I can become the local cryptid living in a spooky shack.” Does that still count?

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        I don’t make the rules, so you’d have to consult whoever does make the rules. I’m not really sure who that is though

      • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.socialEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        Did you know that Sweden has over 250,000 islands, but only 1,000 are inhabited? Also, anyone can buy land in Sweden regardless of citizenship. I don’t think that comes with a residency visa though.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Most people who buy entire islands in Sweden are evil as in they are very very rich, don’t give a crap about the local community, and do dumb things like build giant pools depleting the scarce local water supply.

          But if you wanna start a cult just snag a big ole house in the relative boondocks and have it there. Creepy cults in the country are a staple of mid-budget TV action thrillers here, so apparently they’re everywhere.

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Okay, first of all, classic question from me, who the fuck is this? How many chuds were produced by the crypto bubble, it’s insane, you could have a fucking Pokemon card deck with them. My brain already struggles to retain information about both SBF and Wrinklewusses, there are no more resources to be allocated to a Balaji.

    Second, most of this is irrelevant bullshit even for the standards of a crypto grifter, but I really wanted to read the “Learn” section. First there’s some nonsense about “proof-of-learn” which, again, completely irrelevant, and finally the single paragraph that actually says anything about the curricullum:

    Our initial material focuses on founding tech communities, as distinct from tech companies.

    Is there a word for stuff like this? Filler? Cruft? Meaningless, utterly redundant words that just pad the text. Anyway, this post is 90% that.

    As such it touches on everything from crypto, AI, and social media to history, politics, and filmmaking.

    So your idea of “everything” in tech is crypto, AI, and social media, in order: a useless tech that is already dead, an ill-defined hype term for tech that doesn’t exist in the best case and is useless in the worst, and just a general concept of platforms with users? Don’t get me wrong, you can learn a lot of software engineering by analysing the architecture of pre-collapse Twitter, like you can run an entire course on microservices just off the back of that, but I somehow doubt that’s what this guy is selling.

    It should be useful even if you’re just growing a traditional company or building a following.

    What the fuck does this even mean. This should be useful if you’re growing a company or not actually trying to do or achieve anything? Do you need any sort of education for “building a following”? What does that even mean, like a traditional Jim Jones-style following? You definitely don’t need a school for that shit.

    Also what’s a non-traditional company? What’s the avant-garde corporate trend now? Companies that actually turn a profit?

    Over time, of course, every branch of the sciences and humanities becomes relevant when building a community.

    I’m not sure what he categorises as “building a community” but I’m not sure if like molecular quantum mechanics ever become relevant for what in my head is community-building, as in establishing networks of support and communication between people. Just saying that choosing “building a community” as the guiding principle of what to include in your curriculum might tend to exclude some important branches of science.

    Also lol, lmao even, dude how the fuck is AI or crypto relevant to building any sort of community other than a communal fart-sniffing chamber.

    But we’re intentionally starting with something simple. Our learning is about continuous education, about solving the problem-of-the-day [emph. mine].

    Oh, so they’re gonna tackle climate change almost exclusively! You know, the actual problem-of-the-day we have in this current day! Wonder how crypto helps with that, though… 🤔

    Anyway, in conclusion, your “university” doesn’t have a coherent fucking curricullum, what are you even doing. I hope this is going to be a sex island, otherwise this is a giant waste of everyone’s time.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      (quick basic background typed mobile while still trying to get started on day)

      balaji shillranivan is the primary thonkfuck espousing the view of “the network state”, which is a stance that’s largely a nerdsnipe made up of “eww all this human society shit is messy and hard. fuck it all let’s go shopping rebuild society only on code. code is law!”

      it doesn’t actually say the first bit, of course. as with all good obscurantist shit that’s the hidden foundation layer, but it’s what it taps into

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      balajis has been a bitcoin shill since almost the very beginning (I was blocked from following his crap on Xhitter ages ago probably because he applied a collective banlist to everyone who had ever expressed an anti-BTC sentiment he knew of ) His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously. Now I think he’s just coasting on his VC billions, slowly self-radicalizing in a social media soup. If the superyacht he was traveling in to his Arbeitslager island was sunk by orcas at least we’d get a decent headline out of it.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously.

        Oh, I remember that one! That’s a claim to fame if I’ve ever heard one.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    It’s weird how secretive they’re being about the location. The website doesn’t say where it is, just that it’s an hour away (by boat? by plane?) from Singapore. There’s no actual photos, just AI mockups or whatever. You need to apply to find out the location apparently. No word on if they have actual buildings or tents or shacks or what.

    Imagine if you wanted to go to a non-culty school and they were like “yeah, we’ll tell you what country our campus is in… once you apply!”

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Looking at the map of Singapore there are lots of islands around it (Singapore was probably chosen as a reference datum because libertarians like it and it’s a big transport hub). Most of the islands seem to be Indonesian territory.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      This reminds me of a story by somebody I knew who once was a libertarian once told me. He was into heavy metal, as a lot of people I know/knew are, and a libertarian so he was curious about NSBM, so he applied to go to one of those concerts and eventually he got a meeting point where they all gathered, and then they were bussed to the actual location of the concert (which was secret so kafka (our antifascist research group) couldn’t identify the location and do something about the fascists. Not many people I know really talk to this guy anymore (he has some ‘interesting’ opinions on borders now).

      Anyway, mostly unrelated to the culty school, I was just reminded of this story of fascists doing reasonably good opsec. (And the failure of me and the metal community at large to not do something about this, can’t recall anybody (me included) to react to this enormous red flag in hindsight).

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Yes, sorry, I forgot that this isn’t that common term.

          Also note that there is quite a lot of edge and badness in the metal scene, and a lot of this wasn’t shunned/no-platformed nor criticized as hard as it should be (metal is not punk), so these bands must have been quite extreme for them to go to these kinds of measures.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              4 months ago

              Neo-folk is even worse. But all comes with the territory I guess, loads of negative attention from people who don’t understand the genre makes it easy to dismiss any criticism from outsiders, which the far right/abusive people love to use as plausible deniability.

            • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              4 months ago

              Yeah but like national socialist power metal isn’t a thing in the way nsbm is.

              I wonder if it’s primarily occultism’s nazi problem metastasizing, foundational dorks like Vikernes notwithstanding.

  • shinigami3@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    the Network School is for Indian engineers and African founders, for makers from the Midwest and the Middle East, for Chinese liberals and Latin American libertarians, for Southeast Asia’s rising technologists

    Most of these cannot afford $1000 rent in addition to flights to Singapore and food expenses. Genius

    Also, his example of “rejuvenating democracy”: a DAO. lmao

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Pretty sure that was just a Tao Te Ching joke.

          So let’s run with it (I’m so sorry)

          Chapter 1

          The DAO that can be patched is not the enduring and unchanging DAO. The domain name that can be transferred is not the enduring and unchanging ENS name.

          Having no name, Satoshi is the Originator of heaven and earth; having a name, he is the Mother of all coins.

          Always without weak hands we must be found, If its deep fucking value we would sound; But if FUD always within us be, The price we deserve is all that we shall see.

          Under the unchanging protocol, it is really the same; but as development takes place, it receives the different transaction formats. Together we call them the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. Where the git tree is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.

          Chapter 2

          All in the world know the beauty of the scarcity, and in doing this they know what fiat is; they all know the value of the decentralized currency, and in doing this they know what the US dollar is.

          So it is that value and fiat give birth the one to the other; that difficulty and ease produce the other; that hodlers and weak hands fashion the two sides of a transaction; that orange-pilled and normies arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones of Zuckerberg’s cryptocurrency music videos become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being still early and late give the idea of one following another.

          Therefore the hodler manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his transactions without the use of a hot wallet.

          New blocks spring up, and there is not one which declines to show itself; they grow, and there is no claim required for their ownership; they go through the blockchain, and there is statistically no expectation of a block reward. The work is accomplished, so that the transactions may flow.

          The work is done, but how no one can see; 'Tis because we don’t talk about coins to family.