network state

Jonestown to Network States: Tech Bros Revive Religious Cult Utopias

Silicon Valley extremism and religious extremism meld in Trump 2.0 era

Gil Duran

08 Apr 2025 — 4 min read

Network State OG Jim Jones (center) in 1977. (photo: Nancy Wong/Wikimedia Commons)

In the 1970s, a San Francisco-based preacher started his own sovereign colony. He leased a plot of land in a small South American country and urged his network of church followers to migrate there. He chose Guyana, an impoverished nation susceptible to influence from outsiders with money. There in the jungle, near the border with Venezuela, Jim Jones founded the People’s Temple Agricultural Mission, a self-styled religious cult compound.

We know it by another name: Jonestown. In 1978, over 900 men, women, and children tragically lost their lives there in a mass murder-suicide ordered by Jones, the crazed and megalomaniacal preacher. Most died after drinking – or being forced to drink – Flavor Aid spiked with cyanide.

Jonestown, in many ways, serves as an early prototype of the idea some tech bros call the Network State. This concept advocates for the establishment of new territories governed by tech billionaires or other ideologically-extreme leaders. As usual, the big brains of Silicon Valley haven’t actually invented anything new. They’re simply attaching their label to an escapist concept – the cult commune – that already exists in other forms. Jonestown is one especially horrific example.

In 2025, the idea of starting new religious cult societies is as powerful as ever. And a new generation of religious zealots has become interested in Silicon Valley's Network State ideology. Kiera Butler, a senior editor at Mother Jones, has written a crucial story about a new plan to create a religious-themed territory called Highland Rim:

From the story:

But the Highland Rim Project is not just another old-fashioned utopian fantasy. Rather, it is deliberately forward-looking, infused with Silicon Valley techno-libertarian values. The communities will be designed around “digital self-governance” including cryptocurrency and a culture “in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”

And:

There’s a name for the rough concept ... the “Network State,” an ascendant and buzzy tech movement where internet groups are beginning to explore what it might be like to start their own new countries. At first, these new countries would appear online, and eventually in actual physical locations. Simply put, the Highland Rim Project is the Christian nationalist take on that idea. As New Founding CEO Nate Fischer put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the principal form of government today. I see no reason Christian nations or peoples couldn’t organize network states.”

In the Trump 2.0 era, Silicon Valley extremism is finding ways to meld with religious extremism. Expect the Network State movement to become a more central part of the political conversation in 2025.

Writes Butler:

Dystopian and preposterous though this may sound, fans of the Network State are trying to convince the Trump administration to scale up their vision—and there are signs that the president is listening. In 2023, during the leadup to his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proposed building “freedom cities,” which would convert federal land in rural areas into zones with laws specifically designed to attract industry and manufacturing in specific sectors.

Please read Butler's entire story: “Christian 'TheoBros' are building a tech utopia in Appalachia”:

Follow Kiera Butler on BlueSky

Interesting Side Note: One of the major supporters of the project, a Christian Nationalist named Andrew Isker, is known to “make statements that sometimes cross the line into antisemitism.” In addition, he says he avoids going through TSA scanning equipment at airports because he believes the machines cause homosexuality. Instead, he prefers a physical pat-down:

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