A vacation lodge known as the Wagon Box Inn in the tiny town of Story, Wyoming, has emerged as an unlikely hub of rightwing ambitions to reorient US politics and culture.
Events held there since it opened, and others planned for this spring, have brought together figures from the so-called “dissident right”, political figures backed by reactionary currents in Silicon Valley, and proponents of the “network state” movement.
According to founding documents on its website, Wagon Box is run as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a term for organizations managed in part via decentralized technologies like blockchains and smart contracts.
The current version of a document explaining the DAO aligns the project with the network state movement, claiming that “the grand project of liberalism is crumbling, and that in its wake people are looking for new avenues of allegiance and interdependence”.
The document continues “Balaji Srinivasan, among others, has identified this shift and suggested a process for uniting modern technologies with ancient human trends of association to create network states”, providing a link to Srinivasan’s self-published 2022 book of the same name.