Where the cloud
touches the land.
A network state is cloud first and land last, but not land never. The Portal is the doorway: the moment a startup society chooses where to materialize its first physical node. Choose wrong and the community scatters. Choose right and it compounds.
Below: the twelve variables that matter, a live scorecard to rate any location, and a reverse-engineering of what Balaji optimized for when he chose Forest City for Network School.
Score a location.
KEY criteria are weighted 3x; others 2x. Score is the weighted sum normalized to 100. This is a thinking tool, not an oracle. The location that scores 72 and that you can move to next month beats the one that scores 88 and stays hypothetical.
What actually matters.
Your starting list, expanded. Visas, proximity to capital, cost of living, and distressed real estate are all here, weighted KEY, alongside the variables that quietly decide whether a node lives.
Access & Law
Citizens must be able to enter and stay. A long-stay or digital-nomad visa is the difference between a community and a vacation. Georgia's 365-day visa-free entry is the gold standard; a 30-day tourist stamp is a non-starter.
A pre-existing special economic zone, charter-city law, or free-zone regime saves years of legal groundwork. Próspera's ZEDE, RAK DAO, e-Residency. Build on a scaffold, do not pour your own foundation.
A government that is curious about you is worth more than a low tax rate. Hostility kills nodes faster than cost. You want a state that treats a network-state node as an asset, not a threat.
Economics
Can a citizen live well on a remote-work income? Geographic arbitrage (earn in dollars, spend in pesos) is the engine of early growth. The node should feel like a raise.
Cloud first, land last means you want land that is cheap, available, and ideally already built. Vacant high-quality inventory is the dream: you imprint a culture onto an empty canvas instead of competing for scarce space.
Closeness to a hub of financial capital and human capital. A node an hour from a global city (talent, flights, banking) compounds faster than one in the middle of nowhere. Proximity, not residence: near the hub, cheaper than the hub.
Community
Does the reverse-diaspora already gather here? A node grows fastest where aligned people already flow. You want to channel an existing current, not dig a new river.
Can citizens live and operate in the network's working language (usually English)? Friction here taxes every interaction, every lease, every hospital visit.
Livability
People bring families. A node has to be somewhere a citizen will raise a kid. Safety is table stakes; one incident can empty a community.
Weather, air, healthcare, walkability. The ambient quality of a day. People stay where the days are good and leave where they are not.
Strategic
Can citizens work with the networks that matter (usually California and London)? A node eight hours off its economic center forces a nocturnal life and quietly bleeds members.
Towers, fiber, power, water, an airport. Materializing into existing infrastructure is land-last on easy mode. Building it yourself is a decade-long detour.
🇲🇾 Why Forest City?
When Balaji chose Forest City, Malaysia for Network School, he was not picking a pretty city. He was solving the land-last problem optimally. Here is what the location scored on, in his apparent order of priority.
A $100B Country Garden megaproject, largely vacant. Tens of thousands of finished apartments waiting for residents. The ultimate land-last canvas: built, empty, cheap.
Thirty minutes from Singapore, one of the planet's densest concentrations of capital, talent, and flights. Near the hub, at a fraction of the hub's cost.
A Singapore-adjacent lifestyle at Malaysian prices. Geographic arbitrage built into the address.
Towers, fiber, power, malls, an international airport nearby. Nothing to build; everything to fill.
Malaysia's long-stay options and a government open to a Special Financial Zone make staying viable.
English works day to day across Malaysia and Singapore.
Low crime, family-safe, politically stable. Somewhere you would raise a kid.
The pattern: vacant high-quality real estate, next to a global capital hub, at arbitrage prices, with infrastructure already built, a friendly visa, and English. Forest City is a master class in land-last. The lesson is not “copy Forest City,” it is “find your Forest City.”
Six candidates, scored.
Scores are an interpretation, weighted by the framework above. Load any of these into the scorecard to see the per-criterion breakdown, or to argue with the ratings.
Found the place? Now build the polity.
The Portal picks the land. The Playbook builds the society on it, and the World catalog shows which countries already have the legal scaffolds in place.