The Fortress
#007 · Auckland, New Zealand · founded by Peter Thiel
“Build moats. Mistrust competition.”
Citizens hold monopoly stakes in their own niches. Privacy is absolute. Defensibility is a civic virtue. The only growth that matters is power-law.
contrarian founders, deep-tech investors, ex-PayPal, libertarian engineers.
🇳🇿Auckland, New Zealand
Peter has held NZ citizenship for years and the South Island is already a quiet billionaire bunker. Anchor in Wanaka or Queenstown with a citizen ranch, then federate digitally with operations in Wyoming and a backup compound in Patagonia. The polity has redundancy by design.
The moral case.
Sovereignty is the asset class of the next century. The Fortress is the only network state explicitly engineered for civilizational tail risk. When the legacy nation-state falters, citizens of the Fortress already have an exit and an entry.
From idea to polity.
- 01Charter the Wanaka ranch as the founding node
- 02Open citizenship to Founders Fund LPs and their families
- 03Charter a parallel digital citizenship for those without NZ residency
- 04Charter a treasury allocation policy heavy in BTC, gold, and uranium
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta after 1,000 citizens
Why I sent you this link.
I have lived at Network School for over a year. I have watched the network state thesis go from a book to a real, lived experiment. I have seen Balaji put it to work, and I have seen what is missing.
The missing piece is a federation. A meta-layer that gives every distinct community a constitutional home, a shared census, an interoperable passport, an anthem, and a way to recognize each other as legitimate.
That is what Interneta is. The United States of Interneta. The optimistic meta-layer for network states.
The Fortress is what I think you would build, if you decided to build one. The One Commandment is what I have inferred from your public work. The site scout, the next steps, the citizenry: all educated guesses. They are wrong wherever you say so.
If any of this lands, I would love a fifteen-minute conversation. If none of it lands, I would still love your reply telling me where I missed.