The Network State, Exit, and the Political Economy of Venture Capital

Abstract This article focuses on the Network State movement as embodying the venture capital (VC) logic of exit. Exit constitutes both a strategy for lucrative returns and an ideology seeking out new territories for financial and technological speculation. This movement has emerged around Balaji Srinivasan and the technologies of Web3 that encode the imperatives of exit. In the construction of liberated zones for the Network State, VC operates through a territorial logic, under the leadership of the founder‐philosopher and with the affordances of the American state. These logics evince the discursive power at the heart of the political economy of VC. The desires of the VC class shape “future social necessity” (Howard 2024; Finance and Society 10) and are “imprinted” (Cooiman 2024; Environment and Planning A 56) upon the social and technological networks of the Network State. The valorisation through exit seeks to produce “hyperstitious” (Lynch and Muñoz‐Viso 2023; Progress in Human Geography 48) value creation in which VC is the fount of civilisation.