Freo Neuhaus: the Human Spark Comes to Port

Seeding a Startup Society in Fremantle, Western Australia

From Nomad to Network

I am Electra Frost. I believe in open, permissionless systems, and since September 2024 I have been living and working among the techno-optimists at Network School in Malaysia. I also live in Fremantle (Freo) in Western Australia, where I’ll soon pilot a similar path: Freo Neuhaus.

Balaji Srinivasan founded Network School in Malaysia’s Johor-Singapore SEZ as an experiment in seeding a startup society that can bootstrap other startup societies (nodes) which may eventually become connected as Network States, as explained in his book. It has started in a hotel in Forest City- a ‘ghost island’ across the strait from Singapore - a great place for technologists to live, for many reasons.

Large internet communities of aligned people who share a vision of a better future may begin co-living on land; their economic mass that they bring from the digital-to-physical realm could even one day exceed the GDP of existing nation states. The Network State is a global concept that promotes peace and prosperity, not bloody revolutions nor any kind of one-world government.

I understand the internet-first “state” as being made up of many different tribes - independent physical societies around the globe where people can choose to live with others they align with - rather than being defined by where they were born. These high-trust societies introduce global mobility with on-chain, open governance.

I was raised by nomadic parents and have worked online and travelled for most of my professional life. As a Bitcoiner, I’ve chosen to go all in on this path. I was in the first small group of Network School long-termers to move out of the hotel and into apartments at Forest City. I also have a long visa and professional role in Malaysia. I actively invite my colleagues to join me at NS for professional collaboration.

So consider me a Network State maxi - but a conditional one.

High-Trust Needs Accountants and Artists

The network society movement needs to attract accounting professionals and creative people in large numbers if it is to function as a high-trust set of societies, long term. They would work with technologists, founders and governance architects to develop social protections and regulations, particularly around creator rights and finance.

Since September 2024, my personal mission at Network School has been to improve myself first, and to then lay pipelines for accounting and creative professionals to enter this space.

Balaji describes Network School as a campus (in V3) for scaling future Network States (in V4), so at that stage I seek to establish a faculty for accounting technologists and transnational tax coordination. I believe that presence lends legitimacy to support future negotiations for diplomatic recognition. That’s another essay…

Image source: https://balajis.com/p/network-school-2025

25 Years Serving Creativity

For my entire career I have been an accountant for creative people. Before that I was a musician and artist who wanted to help my friends grow legitimate businesses without fear, so I studied international tax and accounting and gained qualifications to represent their affairs to the government and investors.

This grounding purpose of wanting to empower the people I align with has not just set my professional directions, but also my early adoption of internet technologies and Bitcoin, work with cross border startups and DAOs, and the networks I have built with other niche practitioners around the world.

In my unusually nuanced conversations about new technologies with artists and accountants, I have noticed a shared sense of caution, moral code and social responsibility, even when they do not share many outward commonalities. Their values alignment is represented clearly in Bitcoin and open blockchain principles of trust, openness and incorruptibility - as financial and governance tools for the public good.

If anyone can lead accountants toward creative and advantageous adoption of crypto and blockchain with AI, it is artists. We need to bring artists into startup societies first. They will then teach accountants to use the “public good tech” confidently and up to their own standards.

When incentives line up, the builders who show up early are the beneficiaries. Freo Neuhaus is my way of helping that happen in Australia, for Australians, for the arts and for the accounting profession.

Queensland’s Digital Playhouse Experiment

Before Fremantle, I spent five years experimenting with all this in a small coastal town in Queensland. I co-founded Digital Playhouse Foundation (a PBI charity) with learning premises in Agnes Water with my friend Gordon Christian and later Kieran Nolan, who taught kids how to mine Bitcoin in a Victorian primary school.

Our centre’s motto: “If you want to play it, learn to build it”

I met Gordon when he made Agnes Water Australia’s first digital currency town in 2018. We built on that with a STEAM centre, STEM with an A for Arts, where we taught locals to use Bitcoin, kids how to code and make NFTs, and ran blockchain developer and Bitcoin builder projects with Stacks Australia. The aim was to create conditions for better social and monetary outcomes after COVID, by showing artists and locals new ways to upskill and earn with emerging and converging technologies.

We were inspired by the original School of Arts movement in Australia, which brought new technology and knowledge to ordinary people for self improvement during industrial revolutions. Digital Playhouse was like a School of Arts movement for the fifth industrial revolution and resembled an early Network School in its mission to “bring the global to local”. More here on X.

Although based in remote Queensland, we were plugged into large innovation networks and funded by the Stacks Foundation to build community around Australia. Kieran extended the mission to Victoria with Consensus21 School. We tried to attract innovators from around the world to make Agnes Water a blockchain hub with us, capitalising on our digital currency town story.

The problem was distance. Agnes Water and 1770 are pristine, and tech centers in paradise sound great, but for many founders, educators and investors it was simply too remote. After the first 90 day Network School V1 cohort, ending Christmas 2024, I went back to Agnes Water with Grace from Playhouse AI, following Balaji’s encouragement to scope it as a possible NS node.

Being very committed to the broader Network State vision, this was a real mission grounded in Digital Playhouse objectives. Grace’s unrelated Playhouse.AI startup for AI filmmaking made it feel serendipitous for her to join me! We got to work.

But after a month of brainstorming and location scouting, we accepted that the distance from a major urban centre was the real blocker.

Discovering Freo’s Perfect Spark

I’d been hankering to visit Perth again since speaking at WAWEB3 in 2023, and an old friend Kylie T (the rock and roll accountant) invited me to stay. So I packed up in Queensland and was heading back toward Network School for V2, but via Perth to check it out properly.

There I presented on Network States at a blockchain meetup. That is how I met Simon from Fremantle, and the Freo Neuhaus idea was born. Fremantle (a.k.a Freo) is the first settlement of Perth and is a working port. It has beautiful beaches and a historic town centre full of art, entertainment, cool old buildings and people from mixed backgrounds already doing a lot in arts, entertainment and startups. It reminded me of my home town of Newtown in Sydney, but by the ocean, with a stronger community and underused spaces.

Simon Owen showed me around and gave me a base in Freo. He is a legal adviser to startups and involved in civic groups here, so our conversations moved quickly to questions about where power and culture are actually heading. We found common ground in a worry that as AI and big platforms expand, they quietly take over the channels where human creativity lives, while people hand over more of their agency without noticing. We both wanted to see what it would look like if a port city like Fremantle decided that creative work and technology-for-good were the core things worth protecting and investing in.

Freo is a remote port town in close proximity to what matters - a place where we can fit in without creating an enclave from scratch. It has a direct train to Perth and the airport - only a five hour flight from Singapore - with active blockchain and startup scenes on both sides.

That social infrastructure and geography matters. Freo sits close enough to the Network School “mystery island” and Asian hubs to stay plugged into global trends, while still being very much an Australian town with its own history and character from absorbing new communities.

The more we talked, the clearer it became that Fremantle could host this network society in ways that Agnes Water and most of Australia never could. Time to act.

Designing Freo Neuhaus Together

Simon and I talked a lot about Bauhaus too. It was a working school founded in 1919 in Germany where artists, designers and craftspeople experimented with new materials and machines, and treated buildings, objects and daily life as one design problem.

Neuhaus is our nod to that spirit in Freo: a new house where art and technology sit close to the people working on money systems and rules, in the same conversations, with real streets of heritage buildings and engaging culture just outside the door.

After making this shift, I went back to Network School and updated Balaji that Agnes Water was not the right node for Australia, and that we should back Fremantle instead. Since March 2025 I have been returning to Freo every month, getting to know the place, speaking with locals, and finding allies and locations for a long term plan.

I do not want to design it alone or copy/paste my Network School experience here. The point is to bring in people with more startup community building experience and different ideas to my own, sit them with people who know this place, and build Freo Neuhaus together.

Join the 2026 Pop-Up Launch

We are drawn to what Freo Neuhaus stands for - to protect and strengthen the human spark.

First we had startup companies. Now we are seeing startup societies emerging, including Network School, internet first communities with meeting places on land where people can lock in and fast track their projects on shared network effects and economic mass. Freo Neuhaus is to become one of these.

It is launching as a pop up neighbourhood that seeds a startup society, a place where founders, artists, technologists and civic builders can work side by side and deliberately shape the conditions they want to build in.

Freo Neuhaus welcomes tech builders with purpose, creatives with curiosity and conviction, and founders, funders and civic allies in the AI age who want open, transparent civic infrastructure and more widely shared opportunity. We are designing for AI to be the assistant and financial machine that supports creative work, public goods and infrastructures, not a replicant that replaces it.

Sometime in 2026 we may run a 14 day Freo Neuhaus pop up in Fremantle with local, interstate and international innovators. Then, if it goes well, we’ll do a longer one. The outcome will be a social blueprint for a startup society and the founding scope for a permanent node in Freo.

Be a Founding Member

Subscribe for future announcements - collaboration with Arrayah - you can just do things!

If this sounds like where your project should live and launch, we’d love to have you at the start. Expressions of interest and applications will open at freoneuhaus.com.