It is the year 2050, and print newspapers still exist.
The one I am reading, the October issue of a publication called The Nomad Citizen, boasts a provocative headline on its front page: “Internet Country Joins UN in Historic First!” The article reports that “the world’s first internet country—a digitally-native, borderless state built on distributed infrastructure—was granted full membership in a historic 134-27 vote.”
Dissent, it appears, is baked into the statehood fantasy of SafetyWing, an insurance tech startup that is currently (meaning, in the year 2025) handing out coffee, snacks, and marketing materials, including copies of The Nomad Citizen, at its month-long “pop-up embassy” at 717 Market St.
If you don’t pick up The Nomad Citizen, and you aren’t keyed into the dog whistles for the privately-funded startup societies known as “network states,” the pop-up is as vaguely pleasant and innocuous as any coworking office. The small space overflows with houseplants, and is awash in light pink and robin egg blue. Tufted clouds hang from the ceilings, and birdsongs play softly from some hidden speaker. Wall decals and branded hats, hoodies, and keychains proclaim SafetyWing’s company mantras: “Built for global citizens.” “Child of the internet.” “The first country on the internet.”
What makes an internet country? SafetyWing cofounder Sondre Rasch has boiled it down to two things: “A passport and a social safety net.”
Sitting in the lounge of his “play embassy,” as he called it, Rasch said SafetyWing is on its way to providing both to its customers.
SafetyWing was hatched out of Y Combinator in 2018 by three Norwegian cofounders: Rasch, Sarah Sandnes, and Hans Nyvold Kjellby. When I visited the pop-up last week, Rasch told me the idea for SafetyWing had come from his experience as the founder of another startup called SuperSide, a hiring platform for freelance designers.
“All these online freelancers didn’t have any sort of social safety net because they worked for a foreign employer, essentially,” Rasch said.
His solution? A members-only version of the Nordic welfare state, which SafetyWing currently sells to remote workers and digital nomads via two main products: individual health and travel insurance, and health insurance plans for distributed companies. For now, those products tick the box for the social safety net part of their internet country. But its most ambitious product is Nomad Citizen, which the company launched in August. Its flagship feature is a passport, the second component that Rasch sees for his vision of an internet country.
For a company to offer a legitimate passport, actual countries have to get on board. Lauren Razavi is the executive director of Plumia, a division of SafetyWing branded as an internal think tank that “interfaces with a lot of governments,” she said.
“We’re essentially building diplomatic relations for ourselves as an entity with existing countries,” Razavi said, noting that she presented a policy proposal to simplify the visa process for digital nomads at the UN earlier this year. “We also collaborate with the Estonian government and the Malaysian government. We have an annual summit in Morocco, so we work quite closely with the Moroccan government.”
Razavi said Nomad Citizen is in its “v. 1” stage. It has 100 active policy holders and 2,000 on the waitlist, one of the company’s product managers told me. Currently, for $400 a month, members get health, life, disability, and income insurance, as well as a service where the company applies for digital nomad visas on the member’s behalf.
In SafetyWing’s grand vision, the goal is a boundaryless life — purchasable freedom from migration restrictions, immovable homelands, and what they consider to be arbitrary rules decreed by sclerotic public governments.
That sort of freedom is also a large part of the idea behind the network state, which has been buzzing beneath Silicon Valley for some time. The term, coined by controversial venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan in 2022, refers to a type of privately-funded society whose citizenry generally originates as an online community of like-minded people.
These startup societies can take many forms; the “pop-up city” at Burning Man is one of them, as was the failed Hayes Valley “startup neighborhood” called City Campus. Another form is the “master planned city,” like the tech billionaire-backed Solano County project called California Forever, and the semi-sovereign “Freedom Cities” Donald Trump proposed building on American soil during his second presidential campaign.
Some network society scenarios go: Secure the land first, bring the highly-aligned citizens second. The network state SafetyWing imagines for itself in The Nomad Citizen is the opposite; physically, it would be no more than a network of locally-recognized embassies. (“This is the first prototype,” said Razavi, gesturing around the pop-up. “Possibly with hotel rooms as well.”)
But culturally, SafetyWing’s internet country would be filled with dinner parties, AI education, and pop-up maker spaces — like Airbnb Experiences, except all the time, as a lifestyle. The values upon which SafetyWing citizens would align, Razavi said, line up with the average tech striver: “pro-tech, pro-immigration, and globally minded.” Most of all, the citizenry would embrace a rapid societal restructuring orchestrated by tech investors.
“Look at Uber, Airbnb, Google, Amazon. The commercial world is extremely efficient. But when you look at governments, most governments around the world have had a bit of a failure of a digital transformation,” Razavi said.
With Big Tech as its lodestar, it makes sense why a globally distributed company like SafetyWing would pop up in San Francisco. But on a more basic level, San Francisco is in America, a terribly rich country with a richly terrible social safety net.
Told through personal anecdotes, much of the SafetyWing messaging points to real social democracies, and then in the same breath sells it back as a product to security-starved Americans. Razavi lives in Amsterdam and enjoys the comprehensive array of Dutch social services. Rasch lives in Atherton but maintains his Norwegian citizenship. During an all-day summit on network states hosted by SafetyWing in the Digital Garage event space behind the pop-up embassy last weekend, a SafetyWing product manager named Brennan Cowley Adam also made sure to emphasize the good healthcare he gets as a Canadian in his keynote speech.
“We want to roll that out to the whole world,” Razavi said.
Instead of trying to push for similarly strong public institutions and social democracy in countries like the US, she believes “the most efficient and effective mechanism for that, from our perspective, is being a VC-backed company.”
