AINEWS
Malaysia revoked the business licence for Network School this month, shutting down founder Balaji Srinivasan's Forest City campus in Johor and closing the first physical site of his long-promised "network state" project. The Star, Bangkok Post, and MarketScreener confirmed the revocation, the last with an official on the record. The Star said the campus, a former hotel in the multi-decade, Chinese-backed Forest City development where the Johor strait narrows toward Singapore, had been operating under a licence that did not cover its education-and-retreat model. Within days of the WSJ report reaching Srinivasan, he had already named the next jurisdiction.
Network School is the first physical proof of concept for Srinivasan's "network state" theory, the argument that a country-scale community can be assembled online first and on land second, then carried, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, toward a sovereign outcome. The plan runs across seven stages, of which the campus is step one. Losing a single site, in that frame, is built into the design: a modular camp where a community assembles, locates under a permissive licence, loses the licence, and relocates. Malaysia was the first country. Kazakhstan is, by Srinivasan's own claim, the second.
On July 22, Srinivasan announced a memorandum of understanding with the Republic of Kazakhstan for a new campus featuring "expedited visas, streamlined redomiciliation, and active recruitment of talent." That MOU is sourced only to his own X posts; no Kazakhstani official confirmation has been published. Fortune had flagged the Johor-Israel-Kazakhstan axis on July 26, days before WSJ and TechCrunch published. After the WSJ inquiry reached him, Srinivasan declared himself "a proud Singaporean" on X and called the coverage a "hit piece" that would make him look "like an odd duck … as opposed to an early adopter." TechCrunch reported Srinivasan "apparently renounced his American citizenship in 2023."
TechCrunch, re-reporting the WSJ piece, said attendees had complained of moldy rooms, a sparse demographic, and a lack of nightlife. ABC News Australia reported that Network School did not respond to questions about the shutdown. A "first step toward a new country" that couldn't pass a licensing review in its first host is the founding record the project now carries.
Whether the Kazakhstani government has signed, or merely entertained, the MOU is the next fact that will determine whether the pivot is real or staged. The structural answer, for now, is in. The network state, in its first jurisdictional collision, did not collapse. It migrated.