Reporter Arlen Levy takes a tour inside a new San Francisco building called Frontier Tower to learn more about the vision behind the project, and some of its more controversial affiliations.
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Story Script:
ELLIOT ROTH: So we can start over on the right side of things …. This is our little co-working space here. We got some new residents and also, remind me, Arlen?
ARLEN LEVY: Yes.
REPORTER: I'm in a small creaky elevator with two newly enrolled “citizens” of Frontier Tower. Our tour guide Elliot Roth cheerfully narrates as the elevator takes us from floor to floor.
Sound of elevator dinging
ELLIOT: So we just passed from the eighth floor, which is the biopunk community, down to the seventh floor, which is like prototype and maker space and stuff like that … and then the arts and music floor which is the old headquarters of Burning Man, actually.
REPORTER: Elliot is the leader of the biohacking community here. A biohacker is what sounds like: someone who hacks their own biology using technology like implants or even gene editing.
ELLIOT: So I am, covered in some implants. Part of the reason why I like giving tours is that I have an NFC chip in my hand..
REPORTER: He literally has the key to the building embedded in his skin.
ELLIOT: So I'll be able to open the door to the lab and every other door in this building with this little NFC chip and then I have a magnet in my finger.
REPORTER: Elliot waves his hand in front of the door and it unlocks.
Sound of electronic lock opening
ELLIOT: So now we're going to the private office spaces. Do you guys like kombucha?
REPORTER: This floor looks like a co-working space in slight disrepair –– a bit grungy, a film of coffee water on the counter top next to a kombucha tap. People hunch over laptops in small office cubbies, programming or taking calls.
They seem irritated when we enter so we move on to take a look at something special.
ELLIOT: This is a fully autonomous vending machine named Valerie.
REPORTER: An animation of a woman appears on the screen of the machine. This is Valerie, the AI agent who is keeping tabs on the needs of the tower.
ELLIOT: It is an agent that actively, uh, figures out what people want in the space and actually orders things that people would order. We have everything from Elon's Fuel, which is Diet Coke, all the way to, uh, Poppi and LaCroix.
REPORTER: Valerie dreamily waves us on as we head back down to the basement to complete our tour.
In many ways the tower feels like a kooky makerspace, reminiscent of the Bay Area’s cyberpunk days of yore, but, there is a much grander vision here.
XENOFON KONTOURIS: So we, um, we're building a vertical village and a decentralized network society.
REPORTER: THIS IS Xenofon Kontouris, the Head of Partnerships at Frontier Tower.
He says the project is part of something called the network society. And remember this phrase, we’ll come back to it. Basically, the term network society refers to intentional communities formed online and brought into the real world.
XENOFON: The generation that's coming up is just desperate for community.
REPORTER: Xenofon views unused space, like empty office towers in downtown San Francisco as an opportunity to remedy that.
XENOFON: We buy properties which are often vacant and underutilized, highly distressed assets, and we embed them with communities of technologists and innovators and entrepreneurs. We are something in between a WeWork, a Soho House, Burning Man, and Zuzalu, as I like to say.
REPORTER: You’ve probably heard of We-work, the co-working space and Burning Man, the week-long festival in the desert every year. Soho House is a network of private member-only clubs all over the world and Zuzalu was kind of like Burning Man but with an innovation focus, part music festival, part tech convention, held in Montenegro in 2023.
XENOFON: And that's really the vision behind the Network Society, is find the people that you care about the same things with and build across multiple fields to achieve your mission and vision. And this is the network.
REPORTER: After my tour, I decide to explore more deeply on my own. I take the long ride back up to the 11th floor.
Sound of door opening
REPORTER: This is the longevity floor, where people research wellness, life extension and even immortality. It is on this floor that I meet Laurence Ion, the floor lead and one of the longevity movement’s hardcore believers.
ARLEN: To open, I'd love. on mic, just for you to introduce yourself.
LAURENCE ION: Right. I'm Laurence Ion, from Romania originally. I’m one of the community leads here and um, yeah, my main focus is on longevity.
REPORTER: Longevity is a buzzword that can mean everything from practicing healthy habits to AI-informed stem cell replacement therapies. Here on this floor, I see everything from people getting barometric oxygen treatments to a French guy making AI water filters. Laurence coordinates all these activities.
His personal vision of longevity seems to be influenced both by folklore …
LAURENCE: … Being from Romania, right? The original vampires, Transylvania, wanting to live forever.
REPORTER: And by sci-fi …
LAURENCE: I wouldn't want there to be a limit. I love life so much. Maybe pause time and, and set the timer on the cryo-pod for, like, 1,000 years. Like, why would I ever fully ever stop and not just at least travel into the future via this cryopreservation idea?
REPORTER: Laurence wants to build his own network society –– he’s calling it Viva City –– and it will be a community built around a shared interest in longevity.
LAURENCE: Not only living healthy together that also means accelerating innovation in biotech so we can actually stop or reverse aging.
REPORTER: In order to make this city a reality, he is searching for countries that permit independent economic zones which allow for regulatory flexibility. That means a place where he can do all the biotech and longevity experiments he wants without government interference.
LAURENCE: Where we have our own little sandbox, where we have our own laws and regulations which are different than the country we're in.
REPORTER: Here’s the thing: Laurence has already experimented with this concept. He successfully cofounded a pop-up longevity themed city in 2024. The city was in a special economic zone in Honduras named Prospera.
I’ve already heard of Prospera; it’s one of the most recognized network state projects. Remember how Frontier Tower’s Head of Partnerships, Xenofon Konotouris described the tower as a network society project?
Well, a network state is a related but much more controversial idea.
GIL DURAN: The network state is a cult of tech billionaires and tech workers who believe that they're not only starting companies, they're starting new countries and new nations.
REPORTER: Gil Duran is a San Francisco journalist who has built his career reporting on ideological trends in Silicon Valley.
GIL: They believe that technology, specifically AI and crypto, is going to allow them to escape democracy and start their own little countries that they can rule as basically authoritarian corporate fiefdoms.
REPORTER: The notion of the network state was created by the Silicon Valley mogul Balaji Srinivasan. In interviews, Srinivasan has advocated for a politically segregated system in San Francisco in which an elite tech tribe controls certain parts of the city, like the police-- a vision he calls “tech zionism.”
GIL: Early on, Frontier Tower identified and aligned publicly with the network state.
REPORTER: Frontier Tower is listed on the official network state website as one of its projects. So why was Xenofon insistent on using the phrase network society? I call him up to clarify, and he confirms that Frontier Tower’s mission is aligned with the network state, with one key difference: they aren’t trying to create a special economic zone in San Francisco.
XENOFON: We are looking to build within existing societies that have strong economies, strong rule of law. We're not trying to go and build our own thing somewhere on a remote Caribbean island or somewhere in Southeast Asia.
REPORTER: But he doesn't totally rule out the idea of exploring independent economic zones in the future.
XENOFON: Our long-term expansion plans and goals are not fully clear. I know there is interest in exploring how special economic zones can enhance the economic activity of the community that we're trying to build.
REPORTER: Regardless of what Frontier Tower’s real ideological underpinnings are, journalist Gil Duran says it’s possible that their most concrete goal is actually something easier to understand: investing in real estate.
GIL: Since time immemorial, the smartest thing to do with large amounts of money is put it into real estate, which tends to grow in value over time and retain its value.
REPORTER: The investment group behind Frontier Tower took advantage of San Francisco’s empty downtown to purchase two properties, populating them with “citizens” who pay to become members. And they want to purchase more.
GIL: And if you strip away all the gobbledygook of ideology and shared ideas and building a city, it's just an effort to take a distressed, empty property and put some revenue into it.
REPORTER: So is Frontier Tower just a real estate investment, a co-working space or a controversial ideological project?
I can’t say for certain.
During my time in the Tower I met earnest, curious people like Elliot Roth who are using the space to experiment and think outside the box. I saw a butoh clown group practicing and newcomers making friends. I saw interesting and helpful research being done.
But Frontier Tower is also connected ideologically with the network state movement which has some really controversial visions for our future.The tower is a lot like San Francisco itself –– a confusing mishmash of DIY values, aggressive real estate speculation, and an unconditional belief in the transformative power of technology.
A project this contradictory could maybe only happen here.
