Reverse-engineering a Society vs Software
Day 27 at Network School
Thank you Daeun, Eric, Nat, Phil, and Seeeun for thoughtful feedbacks. It’s much more readable now!
Governments in the Far East are busy hosting their own pop-ups. Japan and Korea want to become nomad magnets. But these state-sponsored programs are mostly filled with natives. They call it a ‘Workation.’ I call it a local tourism stipend.
In contrast, Network School is actually hosting the magnets. Claude had its official meetup here this month. Buses ferried people from Singapore to this once-deserted island. Speakers traveled from Kuala Lumpur to JB; Imagine that: tech talent traveling from Seoul to Namhae. Not Busan(2nd city of Korea), but Namhae!1
This weekend will be the OpenClaw meetup and an AI × Commerce Hackathon partnered with Shopify.
The locals in Johor Bahru are starting to notice. They say weird things are happening on the island. (We were spotted running topless?) The laundromat lady yells “Thank you NS!” every time she sees me. She knows the code name.
I called NS a ‘factory dormitory’ on my second day. Now, on day 27, I’ve surrendered to its brutal practicality. NS is a great product. It’s a basecamp for nomads. The location is a cheat code: right next to Singapore’s flight paths, a quick hop to anywhere in Asia. This ghost island, Forest City, hosts both ocean and greenery. Waking up to birds singing is a luxury that doesn’t get old.
I arbitrage cheap labor and live in a five-star bubble. I never have to pick up after myself, enjoy hotel breakfast and blueprinted meals. Three gym classes a day and 24/7 access to the coworking space. NS is the Easy Life Infrastructure for Nomads.
And it can be printed! Choose your next deserted hotel!
Which side of the FOMO?
I am not sure if there is a FOMO for contributing to the NS ecosystem just yet. But thanks to the recent kickbacks, the referral FOMO is real.
I find myself pitching NS to some friends, but I am starting to lose track: am I recommending this because I truly believe it is the future, or because I am just hungry for that rebate? The line between a true believer and a marketer is getting blurry.2
The ghost of the hackerhouse is haunting me.
“Let’s build a country.” That pitch lured me into the hackerhouse life years ago. I was a long-termer. We were the true believers of crypto, high on decentralization, looking for a hideout. We called the place ‘Basecamp for Future Rebels’.
As we scaled to 100+ residents and coworkers, the identity blurred. We were a startup community, but the ‘decentralization high’ wore off. It was still a healthy community; 15 months median stay, people FOMOing to contribute back.
But it was bad business. Mostly because we never intended to be a business in the first place. We were playing a real estate game, a losing game for everyone except the landowners. We turned down half of our applicants for the sake of curation. WeWork never did this, yet still went south.
My mission was to find the business model for the beloved community. I failed. Communities are built on reciprocity. The moment you tax them, co-creators turn into customers. I didn’t tax my own popup in fear of turning it into a group packaged tour.
Sure, the event industry is lucrative, and a sense of belonging may be the ultimate luxury I can sell. The next iteration for ProtoVille shall be taxing the customers and not the co-creators.
Can you print a society from the cloud to IRL?
Now, NS is selling a great product to its customers. When the base hits 1,000, will it become a society? Do NS-ers identify as customers or believers? If you keep stacking societal features onto a product, does it eventually become a society? What societal features does NS have?
Can you print a sense of belonging? Surely you can, otherwise bees and humans would not commit kamikaze for their hive. Churches have operated for centuries on a 10% revenue share model. So how would you tax the exit tribe?
Maybe you can’t reverse-engineer a complex system like society anyway. Maybe a society just springs up naturally once a group of people, like a customer base, reaches a certain ‘escape diversity’. Maybe it’s not the job of the NS core team, but the long-termers’ to build a society, to host rituals, to invite, connect, hold accountable, to make the society ‘sticky’. NS team’s role is simply to hold the foundation strong and make sure the long-termers don’t burn out or end up being gentrified. So that a thousand societies bloom on top.
Perhaps you don’t even need to be a society to be a node in a network state. ‘Welfare of Seafarers’ was the social infrastructure for sailors in the 19C. The infrastructure must have played a role in creating an attractive identity of a sailor. But would the sailors identify with the infrastructure itself? Which one is fatter, a protocol or an app on top?
Maybe the nomads are ‘users’ and the real customers who pay are a city or a state, desperate for talent in an era of global mobility and a declining population. So Network State can either be a B2C play, a ‘novel’ way to finance your real estate project with ‘magic internet money’, or a B2B play where the product is a society of real humans sold to a dying state.
What an interesting time we live in, watching a company service a society, as the society we know of is dead. Long live society! I’m glad to have a front-row seat.
But my time here is up. I have a popup to host. Come find us in the blooming Namhae!
I will go back to NS for
People with high pain tolerance of hard physical workout and sugar-free meals
AI in the air
I will not go back to NS because
I already have a base
The abundance of Plastics & pesticides. I want to stay away from them.
Postscript
Japan once committed seppuku and was reborn to draw an accurate map of the world. (See: Cartographing Network States from Japan Workation) Its neighbors refused to open up and later were colonized by the New Japan.
History is looping. In this age of global exit and demographic collapse, North East Asia faces a choice: commit seppuku and accept gaijin as one of our own, or refuse and eventually be colonized by the New World.
Japan offers a nomad visa, but you’re out in six months. Korea has one too, but you need to earn double the local average. Welcome, walking ATMs! Even with the suicidal birth rate, no one is desperate enough just yet.
It’s been a year and a half since the Western tech billionaire, who wrote the book ‘Network States’, started to repurpose the beachfront hotel in the Special Economic Zone(SEZ)* in Malaysia. Now, Malay talent is traveling from the capital to this once-deserted island. Who knows, maybe the diaspora will return for NS.
But can there be a Malay native node in Malaysia? Will Korea ever open its SEZs to the New World? Or grow popups and hubs for both gaijins and locals?
I wonder who the colonizer will be this time.
Footnote on SEZ
Forest City launched in 2016 as a reclamation project by Country Garden, a Chinese developer, targeting Chinese investors. It faced massive headwinds from China’s capital controls in 2020, Malaysia’s political instability (2020–22), and COVID-19. It became a ‘massive boondoggles’.
In January 2025, Malaysia and Singapore signed the JS-SEZ(Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone) agreement at the size of 4.7 times Singapore with 9 economic zones. The RTS Link shuttle train connecting the two is due to open at the end of the year, and the business district around the station for 2030. Johor can be the industrial hinterland for Singapore-based HQs.
Forest City was included in this ambitious project as a Special Financial Zone within JS-SEZ, offering 0% corporate tax to Single Family Offices.
Interestingly, the Malaysian government just postponed the masterplan launch scheduled for March 30, 2026.
Namhae is one of the ten villages that get rural UBI from the central government of Korea. Read: disappearing town. It is part of the oldest Marine National Park of Korea and has beautiful nature. Also where ProtoVille 0.1 is happening!
Full disclosure, i don’t have any plan to go back to NS in the foreseeable future. Consider my referral link as a burner account.. and I rug pull you in the unforeseeable future