Just visited Forest City in Malaysia and finally understand what Balaji Srinivasan has been building with the network school experiment. Honestly, the gap between the Twitter narrative and ground reality is pretty wild.

So here's what happened: Balaji tweeted about this 'beautiful island near Singapore' where they're launching a network school, and the Web3 crowd immediately got excited. But when you actually drive there, Forest City is... let's say it's a lot quieter than the hype suggests. It's this massive real estate project by China's Country Garden on four artificial islands, but the market cooled and now it's basically a ghost town with pristine buildings and barely anyone living in them. BBC even called it a ghost city. Pretty surreal.

But here's where it gets interesting. Despite the desolation, there's actually something compelling happening inside the network school. I met Nikki, who's been there since June, and she explained that this isn't really a traditional school at all. It's more like a community of Web3 builders who are tired of the corporate grind and willing to trade cheap living costs for the freedom to build something. The network school charges $1500 monthly for accommodation, all meals, gym access, and course participation. Currently running at 270 members, which is their largest cohort yet.

The location actually works. You're about an hour from Singapore by car, so you get access to all the crypto conferences and networking events, but your living costs are a fraction of what they'd be in the city. The network school provides transport for members too. It's basically geographical arbitrage for Web3 professionals.

What surprised me most was the actual infrastructure. The network school operates from a seaside hotel with co-working spaces, a gym they built from scratch, meeting rooms, a library, and this cafe with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the strait toward Singapore. Members can stay short-term in hotel rooms or long-term in apartments. They follow a 'Blueprint' diet plan focused on health, and the daily rhythm involves morning workouts, co-working sessions, afternoon learning challenges (like finding website vulnerabilities or creating content), and community dinners.

Balaji's vision seems to be creating what he calls a 'Society-as-a-Service' model. Phase one was the 90-day trial from September to December 2024, and phase two launched in March 2025 with the goal of systematically training what he calls 'social builders.' Projects like Solana Superteam and Monad Residency have already set up operations there.

Nikki put it well: 'This is a gathering place for dark talents—people who don't fit traditional education systems but want to create the future.' That's actually the core of what the network school is trying to do. It's attracting people who left tech companies to pursue Web3, people exploring what's next, people building accelerators and incubators.

Walking through Forest City itself is genuinely eerie—modern high-rises with empty balconies, Chinese restaurants and supermarkets, but very few actual people. Yet somehow that isolation creates something unique. When Nikki jogged through the residential area with friends, they realized almost every house was vacant. It's like building a utopia in the most unlikely place.

Is $1500 a month worth it? Depends on what you're looking for. If you want a cheap co-working space, there are better options. But if you're serious about being around people building Web3 infrastructure and want the freedom to explore what you're actually interested in, the network school offers something different. It's not about the price—it's about whether you're willing to spend time with people who are genuinely trying to create something new, even if they're doing it in a ghost city.