It was a crisp March morning in Austin, and just outside the Texas Capitol a swarm of protesters large enough to fill a sports arena had gathered to wave signs and shout into megaphones. Packs of bureaucrats who worked in the building stood together with clipboards and whispered among themselves. It was unclear exactly what was being protested. But judging by the signs, with slogans like “F’Elon and the Felon,” it had something to do with Elon Musk: the firehose of daily chaos emanating from DOGE since the Trump inauguration, the sense that Musk had made himself something of a shadow president.
Four years had passed since Musk moved his companies’ headquarters to Austin, a period in which the city’s reputation as a low-tax respite for Silicon Valley dropouts had evolved from an uneasy joke to a defining element of the city’s character. The Texas hideaway once known for its limestone buildings and cowboy blues saloons had become the fastest-growing metro area in America, known for its Tesla Gigafactory and new anti-woke university. Increasingly, as Austinite Lawrence Wright put it in the New Yorker, the “tomato soup” of the Texas political map, with Austin as a “blueberry” floating in the middle, was looking like regular tomato soup. And Musk’s transformation from quirky Iron Man caricature to abrasive meme-lord dismantling the government was a key part of the story.
I’d stumbled onto the protest accidentally, after arriving from New York that morning in search of a “pop-up city” supposedly located in an office building downtown. Crypto builders, startup founders and charter-city advocates were gathering in Austin to discuss the creation of new cities in America and new countries around the world. Their focus, above all, was the creation of “network states,” a novel form of sovereign, state-like entity modeled on the distributed structure of computer networks. Advocates claimed it was the natural heir to the world’s current (failing, sclerotic) model of political organization—i.e., the nation state.
While ideas like these have been bouncing around the Valley for a long time—from Burning Man and its annual “pop-up city” to the early-aughts tech project of seasteading—the vision for this latest installment of tech utopia had grown in the last few years, sprouting from a long string of dead-end investments to an actionable business strategy amid the chaos of the post-COVID era. You know the story: social frustration at a high, institutional trust at a low, money machine going brrrrr, crypto markets booming, cultural vibes shifting, et cetera. It was into this cultural environment that, in 2022, Balaji Srinavasan (a self-dubbed proponent of “tech Zionism”) launched The Network State—a hybrid manifesto/playbook that explains why we need new countries, and how to build them. The argument went like this: in a world with countries like Palau—an archipelago in the Pacific with 18,000 residents, negligible GDP, and yet sovereignty equal in legitimacy to that of Germany—why couldn’t a group of tech people, with equal numbers and far more capital and clout, work toward their own form of legitimate political sovereignty? When countries as big as Ireland prostrate themselves to attract tech business, throwing tax credits at their feet, why wouldn’t one of those small countries give up a sliver of land for the chance at hosting a group of the nouveau crypto riche?
There were two network state events happening in Austin that week, scheduled to coincide with South by Southwest, the old mecca of the city’s alternative culture. The first was Edge City, a self-described “society incubator” dedicated to “advancing human flourishing” by hosting conferences about frontier technology. The other was called Arc Austin, a month-long “pop-up city” focused on infrastructure tech, with a three-day startup summit as its centerpiece.
It was Arc’s summit that had convinced me to visit Austin in the first place. Focused on “governance innovation,” the program mentioned, as if in passing, one of the Trump administration’s most elusive policy proposals to date—the creation of ten “Freedom Cities” on “unused” federal land. Originally announced as part of Trump’s Agenda 47 plan (which you might think of as the official counterpart to Project 2025), the proposal was introduced in March 2023 in a campaign video titled “A New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living.”
Standing between two American flags, Trump described how a public contest would be held to “charter up to ten new cities,” with building contracts issued to the best proposals. “Past generations pursued big dreams,” Trump said, referencing the interstate highway system. But our country has “lost its boldness.” With these brand-new cities, American companies could pursue the design of “vertical takeoff and landing vehicles,” leading to a “revolution in air mobility.” In other words, according to President Donald J. Trump, it was time for America to build flying cars and Jetson-like cities.
In typical Trump fashion, however, details had remained conspicuously sparse since the policy was first announced, leaving observers like me to speculate. Were Freedom Cities a Trojan horse for network states? Had J.D. Vance convinced the new administration to design “patchwork,” a Curtis Yarvin fantasy of opt-in tech cities run by monarch CEOs?
There’s a story you often hear from charter-city advocates, centering on China’s economic rise throughout the 1980s and 1990s. China studied the growth of Hong Kong, the story goes, and learned the power of special economic zones—discrete territories where the rules of commerce differ from the rest of the economy. China reproduced this logic in Shenzhen, which grew from a small rural town to a global manufacturing hub. And then it reproduced this model multiple times over again with different cities, dotting the Chinese coastline with special zones like Qingdao and Zhanjiang and Guangzhou, each for a different industrial purpose. Charter-city advocates argue that this strategy was essential to Chinese economic ascendance, and that, if American leaders were smart, they’d reproduce the model on American soil. Had the Trump administration begun to take notice?
The poster from the Arc conference suggested that they had—promising a dispatch from “the people working on Freedom Cities legislation under Trump.” It was the first time I’d seen anyone claim to have any real information on the topic, online or otherwise. Two months into the Trump presidency, and every campaign proposal that had once seemed impossible or ridiculous—from 20 percent tariffs to the colonization of Greenland—had suddenly materialized, dropping from the heavens like sanction from the gods. Turbo America was back, and while most people seemed to be reacting with fear or confusion, the Network State crowd was confident, even ecstatic. Sucked into a fantasy of jet packs and brain-computer interfaces, I set out to learn what was next on the timeline for this fledgling city on a hill. I booked a ticket to Austin for the next day.
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After searching the saloons on Congress Avenue for a decent plate of huevos rancheros, I checked myself into the “Capital Factory,” the coworking space where Arc Austin was located, and pasted a name card on my shoulder. Walking through the triangular room, I passed by posters with inspirational quotes set against faux paneling of reclaimed wood, and on the soundstage, a pull-up banner featured a towering Hellenic temple set over Elysian hills. Boxes of muffins and glazed cherry donuts were spread over a bar with a beer keg.
In the corner, I noticed Arc’s organizer, James Poulter, who I’d been messaging with on Telegram in the days leading up to the event. A former accountant with blond, shoulder-length hair and a posh British accent, Poulter greeted me confidently and gave me a tour around the room. Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart was sitting alone and etching in a leather-bound notebook the size of a baseball mitt. English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey was standing in the corner surrounded by a flock of students. I recognized him from his hallmark combination of daddy-core hair: a straw-like gray beard and a tight ponytail like an Irish friar. On stage was Patri Friedman in a golden velour sweatsuit, short and barrel-chested like his grandfather, the famous neoliberal economist Milton. Patri originally built his reputation as something like the meme-king of seasteading, and now he was running a venture capital firm called Pronomos Capital, named after the satyr who served as a messenger for Dionysus. Backed by Peter Thiel, the fund was known for making investments in a host of other network state/new country-style projects, foremost of which was Próspera—a special economic zone on the Honduran island of Roatán, where, within certain limits, companies can operate according to whatever rules they choose.
I knew all about Próspera because I’d been there in 2024, reporting on a “longevity network state” conference called Vitalia. To be admitted into the zone you need permission, so a few days before my arrival, I hopped onto a Zoom call with a “longevity educator” who was living there, hoping he’d vouch for me with the relevant powers. He showed up in a black muscle tee that said “DON’T DIE,” and asked me if I wanted to live forever. I replied, tentatively, “yes,” hoping this was the secret passcode. The next day I was descending into Roatán on a fifty-seat passenger jet, wondering if I was heading to the real-life island of Doctor Moreau.
The short version of the Próspera lore is that, within Honduras, the zone operates as something like a country within a country, with its own trade laws, immigration policies and police force. It has a regulatory framework cobbled together by cherry-picking parts of systems from around the world—the main selling point for aspiring entrepreneurs whose business models don’t easily fall within the category of what the United States would call “legal.” Spawned in 2013 by an amendment to the Honduran constitution, of all the zones around the world inspired by the network-state ideal, Próspera is by far the most developed. It has a fourteen-story apartment building, a golf course, a coworking space and a beach club with cold-plunging tanks as far as the eye can see. It has a longevity clinic and a biohacking lab, where medical tourists like Bryan Johnson come to inject various forms of speculative gene therapy. It has also been locked in an ongoing lawsuit with the Honduran government, which is attempting to reverse the constitutional amendment that gave them permission to operate in the first place.
I mentioned my time in Próspera to Poulter, and he signaled across the room to a man in a black polo and athletic slacks. The man’s cheerful gait and casual getup—his t-shirt had a Próspera logo on the breast—reminded me of a physical therapist or an HVAC salesman. Evidently hoping to give himself a few more minutes to set up, Poulter pointed in my direction and said, He’s a journalist. A friendly journalist. Been to Próspera. Interested in Freedom Cities. I wondered what Poulter meant by “friendly.”
The man introduced himself as Trey Goff, Próspera’s chief of staff. Average height with a shaved scalp and a Mississippi accent, he shook my hand and asked me to clarify my politics. I delivered a spiel about honesty and evenhandedness. Apparently satisfied with my answer, he explained that he would be giving the lecture on Freedom Cities. “Próspera is one of the most experienced groups in the world at creating legislation for special economic zones,” he said. “So naturally we were excited when Trump made the announcement.” Próspera pitches itself as a “platform for governance,” or “governance as a service (GaaS),” meaning that, while their land is on Roatán, their business model can be transported anywhere.
Goff explained that Próspera is one of two main groups attempting to imagine how Freedom Cities in the U.S. could actually work. Organized under an entity called the Freedom Cities Coalition, Próspera is pursuing what’s known as an “interstate compact,” an agreement between two states to cooperate on the administration of a shared resource, like a seaport or a hospital. Originally designed to settle boundary disputes between states without involving the federal government, Goff explained, the compact framework eventually became a way for states to collaborate on projects with overlapping jurisdictions. For example, the port authority in New York and New Jersey is managed via interstate compact.
“The cool thing about this approach,” he said, “is that congressional consent can occur after the states have each agreed to the compact. And once congressional approval is given, there are only two instances in which an agreement can be revoked.” I said it sounded like they’d learned something from their legal skirmish with the Honduran government. “Changing political attitudes are definitely a risk,” he admitted. “What we like about the interstate compact approach is that the Supreme Court has never once overturned one.”
When I asked Goff whether the Freedom Cities Coalition had been in touch with the Trump administration, he demurred: while they’d had some preliminary discussions, he said, he couldn’t speak more about the details. “I can say that the energy in D.C. is electric right now,” Goff said. “You can tell in the meetings that people are empowered to act on some of the more hyperbolic things Trump has suggested.” So he didn’t think there was any doubt whether Freedom Cities were going to happen. “We’re hoping to have legislation drafted by the end of the year.”
During his presentation, Goff mentioned the other group pursuing Freedom Cities legislation: the Frontier Foundation. Set up as a 501(c)4 nonprofit, it’s a partnership between a group of attorneys, researchers and startup founders who describe themselves as “distinguished domain experts.” The group is anchored by the Charter Cities Institute (CCI), a D.C. think tank that works with local groups in places like Kenya and Nigeria to help them organize forms of self-government.
The short version of CCI’s approach is that, instead of pursuing interstate compacts, they want to set up master-planned charter cities, like Dubai or Shenzhen, on federally owned land. CCI’s head of policy, Jeffrey Mason, explained their strategy by pulling up a map of the Southwestern United States on a PowerPoint. (The federal government controls more than 28 percent of U.S. territory, much of it administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Southwest.) Because any new city development would be best positioned for success near an existing city, the top contenders are places like Boise, Idaho; Grand Junction, Colorado; Redmond, Oregon; and the corridor between San Antonio and Austin. But developers in eastern states like Michigan have expressed interest too, and CCI soon hopes to put their plans in front of politicians.
Under CCI policy, the federal government would “unlock” plots of land from the BLM, and developers would apply to work on these projects, with their applications reviewed by some kind of governmental third party. “To get legislation passed, we need seven Democratic votes in the Senate,” CCI’s founder, Mark Lutter, told me. Which could be difficult, he acknowledged. But the tides seemed to be turning. Only days before our discussion, he pointed out, Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss went on Ezra Klein’s podcast and suggested that charter cities could repurpose defunct military bases. And other Freedom City entrepreneurs are hopeful that they can unlock some of the $10 billion in federal funding earmarked for the advancement of “Regional Technology Hubs” in the CHIPS Act, which specified eight critical industries eligible for funding, from biotechnology to nuclear energy to advanced manufacturing.
Still, it’s hard to imagine Democrats throwing their weight behind Freedom Cities, I pressed Lutter to admit. Because, of course, the impetus for starting over is more than just a desire for car-free laneways and cleaner streets. The explicit point is to sidestep regulations that prevent rapid change from happening. By creating a federal jurisdiction, you could create some kind of “regulatory opt-out,” Mason said. Not only would this help “bypass all of the insane state-level regulation” that makes building new things prohibitively expensive, it would also make it possible to “innovate” in key sectors, like drone manufacturing, experimental biotech and small-scale nuclear production. “Like in Próspera, down in Honduras,” Mason said, “you could expand the right to try experimental medicines, or create an expedited approval process if a drug has been approved in the U.K., EU, Japan, Australia.” Or, as Mac Davis, the founder of Minicircle, an anti-aging startup with offices in Próspera and Austin, put it during a panel discussion, “What I would like to see is a ‘longevity city’ where everyone’s on gene therapy and their dog is, too.”
It’s a vision straight from the movement’s source text, Srinivasan’s The Network State, which imagined that each startup country would be guided by its own core principle or “commandment,” like veganism, or the desire to live forever. Selecting a country to live in should be like joining a fraternity, or, say, a particularly committed subreddit. According to the vision, the world of network states would comprise a menu of cultures, lifestyles and moral or economic systems, and you can choose the one that suits you best. To increase “freedom” around the world—to force “legacy” nations (like the United States) to improve their product offering, the package we call citizenship—the movement would focus on increasing consumer choice in the market for international statecraft, one network state at a time.
With the Trump administration now in power, the political calculus is shifting in their favor. This is true not only for organizations like Próspera, which have spent the last decade swatting away critics who claim that their project is neocolonial, but also for charter-city and network-state advocates more generally, who spent the same period of time searching for a viable model in the absence of any political recognition. Because with Freedom Cities suddenly sprouting as a branch of federal industrial policy, what was once a LARP—or as Patri called it, a “meme factory”—is now the subject of congressional debate and a legitimate investment opportunity. The shadow teams of Twitter anons who were previously writing white papers in the corner are now being flagged as experts and sent in jets to Mar-a-Lago. “The point shouldn’t be to create distance from the federal government,” said the president of the Frontier Foundation, Nick Allen. “Let’s have proper oversight. It’s important to me that this not be some, like, insurgent thing.”
Allen is a fintech startup founder probably best known as the founder of Sovereign House, a social club for the dissident right of Dimes Square in lower Manhattan. He owns a property in Próspera and attended the opening ceremonies for Srinivasan’s “network school” in Singapore—a network state “academy” focused on the comically meta goal of “bootstrapping a startup society capable of bootstrapping other startup societies.” I was surprised to learn about Allen’s involvement in Freedom Cities, in part because it showed the size and interconnectedness of the New Right political world.
“It’s an American dynamism thesis,” Allen said, “that’s it. … The whole goal of ‘exit’ is to exit until there’s recognition that there should be changes, and I think there’s recognition.” Allen was referencing an economics polemic written by Albert Hirschman in 1970 called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that has become a key source text for the dissident right. The three basic responses that people might have to a decline in a firm—or a country, Hirschman wrote—are to quit, speak up or stay quiet. Hirschman was writing in the shadow of the Second World War as a wealthy Jewish emigree from Berlin. And it was this same framework that Srinivasan made central to The Network State, as part of his argument for why the formation of new internet-first countries was necessary. But now, under Trump, the state itself seemed to be open to radical change. And with this possibility open, the equation looks very different. As Allen asked, “Why exit? Why not remain?”
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Entering the garden area at Edge City—the second network-state event of the week, self-described as a “society incubator”—one might have been forgiven for thinking they were along the Hudson in Tribeca…or really any of the places that tech workers and digital nomads have begun to call their home. The event was located at Hotel Magdalena, steps away from one of Austin’s swankiest strips, where millennials in dad hats come to sip matcha lattes and buy embroidered t-shirts from Aimé Leon Dore. Kale salads sprouted from the coffee tables like garden weeds, and somewhere in the distance, Whole Foods founder John Mackey could be heard telling the people to make capitalism “conscious.” The word had swept throughout the country and made its way here to Edge City, where the benevolent people of crypto had taken notice. It was time for crypto to meditate on the nature of public goods. It was time for crypto to make capitalism good.
In practice, this meant presentations from a handful of entrepreneurs on their visions for a benevolent transformation of mainstream society. Eight city-building projects were discussed in the Austin area alone. A group of engineers in their twenties had bought a ranch between Austin and San Antonio with plans to build the next Shenzhen focused on “hard tech,” with robotics companies, materials scientists and rocket makers. A man in his sixties was raising $500 million to build a regenerative, sustainable eco-village. After his last startup IPO’d for $10 billion, a New York state-born entrepreneur was pitching a grocery store that would use Georgist taxation strategies to equitably compensate the local community for participating in gentrification. A Buddhist, dressed in kāṣāya, was starting a mindfulness business for tech accelerationists.
The focus of the lectures was infrastructure. A researcher from the Cato Institute delivered a talk on how, if you want to build new cities, you need to think about what families actually need: playgrounds and community centers and schools. A Canadian entrepreneur spoke about his nuclear-reactor startup, building plug-and-play atomic-energy units for the data-center market, powerful enough to energize ten thousand homes. He was in the process of raising $200 million. An architect from New York was fantasizing about building materials; 3D-printed adobe and eco-friendly insulation. Society could nudge its way to civic perfection: cars were out, bike lanes were in; software was out, hard tech was in. The future would be abundant and modular and green.
Amid the sense of optimism, I couldn’t help thinking about the protesters I’d encountered when I first arrived in Austin. Though the arrival of the tech class brought Austin many of the fixtures of top-tier global cities—digital parking apps, efficient garbage removal, boutique shops and a sizable market for tourism—locals have lamented the loss of the city’s character, the ominous high-rise projects and gridlock. Amid these cultural shifts and rising costs, longtime Austinites are leaving the city en masse. According to Wright, every day 238 Austinites left the city for good.
At Edge City, this tension was on full display in the presentation of an aspiring city founder with plans to build a “Bitcoin city” called “Austantinople.” His presentation started with a picture of Hadrian’s Wall, built in the first century to divide England from barbarian Scotland, with the injunction that the infrastructure we build now can last for thousands of years. Then he spoke about staircases and said that practical structures can be benign and industrial, like the concrete chambers inside parking structures. Or they can be creative and inspiring, pointing to a picture of the Vessel staircase in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. When I pointed out that this monument has become a prime location for people to kill themselves, he said that people in Austin didn’t know that much about New York. It didn’t undermine his point. When I asked whether a border wall was the right structure to highlight when a similar design was planned for the Southern border, he responded that borders could be good. “I don’t think Austantinople is intended to be a city for everyone,” he said. “At least not initially… It’s meant to be a place for a particular community, with particular interests and values and qualities.”
That much was clear. After the lectures wrapped, the crowd started pooling along the lawn for tacos with tofu and barbacoa, cheese plates and spiced charcuterie. A DJ set up gear on the lecture stage, but nobody was dancing. People were vaping but I couldn’t find a single cigarette smoker.
With the crowd splintering into small groups, I sat down on a picnic bench with an engineer who had spent the last few years building an aerospace startup putting tiny metallic memory capsules filled with artifacts of human culture into space. They’d just placed their first capsule on the moon. He told me that what Elon Musk is really doing with SpaceX is disrupting the airline industry. “Within five years,” he said, “there will be commercial rockets large enough to carry two hundred passengers that can get from Austin to Singapore in thirty minutes.” Musk was serious about colonizing space, he said. He knew this because he was friends with a number of SpaceX engineers. “Mainstream society might not like it, but Musk is using his power like a shield to push civilization toward the next stage.”
His argument made me think of an essay written by the anarcho-leftist anthropologist David Graeber in 2012, called “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Graeber argued that part of the reason our society has become so skeptical about technology is that, fifty years after the moon landing, when every American teenager was promised a future of jet packs and flying cars and space colonies, many of us feel a sense of disappointment that all we got were smartphones and information tech. The future never arrived as it was promised, and so the techlash served as an outlet for this anger. But a decade after Graeber wrote those words, something had shifted. Elon Musk was catching rockets like baseballs out of the sky. The president was promising flying cars again. Artificial intelligence was in everyone’s pockets. New cities are coming for the West and, some say, the moon. And yet: nobody but a small group of technologists appears to be pleased with these developments. The welcome party is nowhere to be found. The future is arriving again, out of the reckless political engineering of the new regime. And the dominant response seems to be one of anxiousness and fear.
“It’s because Trump is turning around the ship. Things are up for grabs in a way they haven’t been since World War II.” So said a software developer who splits his time between El Salvador and Austin, working primarily for Urbit, the software company started by Curtis Yarvin with aspirations to rebuild the internet from scratch. As the night wound down, I found myself in a group of Urbit engineers, sucking on Zyns and drinking Modelos. People are scared because when Trump was inaugurated, we stepped through a portal, one of them said. There are more fronts in this war than anyone can count. MAGA won the culture war outright, and now there’s not even a backlash. The truth about Curtis, one of them said, is that he never thought his ideas would be put into effect. He’s an edgelord, not a grand strategist. And suddenly the government of the United States is acting on his vision. “Which he systematically overestimates,” another added. The group laughed. But it seemed to me that this was exactly why people were scared, why the train seems like it’s about to jump off the tracks. Right at the heart of things, there were no adults in the room. Nobody—perhaps not even Trump himself—seems to know what’s happening. The future is being written in thick, red ink. Even the insiders seemed to have no clue.
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Back at Arc Austin, Patri Friedman was pointing at a PowerPoint slide with a chart of the U.S. national debt on one side and a picture of a mound of skulls, ostensibly from the Holocaust, on the other. “If you think of government as an industry,” he said, “the largest company is losing a massive amount of money. That’s the best company in the industry. The worst company in the industry mass murdered half of its population.” The situation was unacceptable and that’s what was motivating him. In the early 2000s, he explained, he wanted to learn why in most industries, there’s constant innovation but in governance there isn’t. He learned that the answer came straight from the industry structure: all the firms are huge, it’s hard to switch between providers, and there’s no recognized procedure for creating a competitor. He decided that was the problem that he wanted to solve—a journey that started in seasteading and is now focused on charter cities and network states.
Friedman’s current focus is “fund[ing] companies building cities that write their own laws,” meaning that pop-up cities like Arc are not part of his thesis, while territories like Próspera are. Over the last few years, they’ve made investments in Nigeria, where a group of investors are building Africa’s first “digital economic zone,” and in Bhutan, where an entrepreneur pitched the royal government to partner with him on a “21st century development in the last Shangri-La.” Pronomos also invested in Afropolitan, a “digital nation” attempting to unite the African diaspora on the network state ideal, and Praxis, a “sovereign network for the intelligence age.”
Another one of Friedman’s investments is a company called Metropolis, headed by a Taiwanese graduate of Columbia University named Elaine Wang. A biomedical engineer with blunt bangs and a mischievous smile, Wang told me she also sells firearms made in Taiwan to Ukraine. The company’s thesis hinges on the idea that, in a world increasingly driven by technology and investment, small island nations have become too dependent on tourism, which proved disastrous during COVID when international travel dried up. To remain competitive in the global economy, micro-nations can leverage another asset that’s now highly valuable to entrepreneurs: their sovereignty. During her presentation at Arc Austin, Wang asked: “How do we actually borrow or take advantage of the sovereignty of these micro-nations and sublease that to the global citizen?”
In practice, the company is focused on building digital e-residency programs that allow digital nomads, crypto traders and other high-net-worth individuals to set up tax residency in small countries from the comfort of their computer. The first project they launched was based in Palau, a small island in the South Pacific, where Wang’s business partner, Alain Seid, a native Palauan, served in the island’s legislature and ran for president in 2020. He didn’t win, but he remained deeply connected to the political class of the island’s 18,000 residents. So in 2021, when China officially banned crypto trading within the country, Metropolis saw an opportunity. They launched their digital-residency program, which grants tax-residency status without granting the right to live there. Thousands of Chinese crypto traders applied. “We have now to date about fifty thousan digital residents of Palau,” Wang said. “The digital nation of Palau is essentially bigger than the actual Palau.” All these residents need to do is pay a $250 subscription fee. The tax rate is zero percent.
The second program Metropolis launched was in the Philippines—the only country other than Switzerland with strict bank secrecy laws, Wang explained to me. This means that, even if the president of the United States asks about an individual’s transaction history, the bank will not report it to the banking network. Metropolis set up a digital residency program where applicants pay a $25,000 fee to the government and place $75,000 in a crypto fund. The project was a “smashing success,” and generated over $600,000 in revenue. Of these proceeds, Wang said, “a certain percentage will go back to the island, to the people who actually live there,” as a kind of crypto-fueled UBI.
Of course, for many of Metropolis’s digital residents, bank secrecy laws are presumably more of a draw than their humanitarian bona fides, so I asked Wang about her clientele. “Indeed, there are some interesting characters,” she said. Balaji Srinivasan had contacted Metropolis, and billionaire investor Tim Draper was their first Palauan resident. A few weeks ago, she had attended a “prayer breakfast” at Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago. She also once met with “someone from Africa.” “He refused to turn on his camera, and his voice was altered by AI,” she said. “He did piracy.”
After the lectures, the crowd broke out into small discussion groups, and I chatted with Rob Rhinehart, the Soylent founder, about his plans to start an eco-city in Athens, Georgia, where he’d already purchased a plot of land. People started migrating to a conference room with desk chairs and flat-screen TVs. Everyone was waiting to see if Srinivasan would let them into a Zoom call from Malaysia. There were zero women in the tightly packed room.
As the crowd thinned out, I found some time to sit alone with Friedman. “So, Metropolis is basically just tax havens for crypto,” I said to him matter-of-factly, waiting for his reaction. Friedman said it was more complicated than that—to really understand the relevance of a company like Metropolis, he argued, you had to situate it within the larger world-historical context. Unless Trump somehow manages to turn around the path of American decline, he said, “the looming fiscal crisis happens, and they have to either hyperinflate or default, and that will put a huge amount of stress on the Union.” He said you could see states that are net tax donors being, like, “fuck this,” and start to break away. And that’s only in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world—imagine what it will be like elsewhere, he explained. In that context, the ability to move between countries is going to be important for safety—both physical and financial. Eventually, he said, “I think the nation state gets less and less important. Like it already is.”
But as I listened to Friedman, it became clear that, really, I was listening to a recycled version of The Sovereign Individual, another urtext in the New Right canon. Published in 1997 by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, the book foretells the dawn of a looming age of fragmentation and disorder, characterized by the collapse of the welfare state and the rise of a new kind of globalist entrepreneur—one liberated from the “political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places.” Principally, taxes. “Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction,” the book proclaims, among many other strongly worded predictions. “The Internet means that everyone who chooses will have a tax haven in his laptop … Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.”
Besides a range of predictions for which the book has gained a cult following—from the rise of digital currency to the looming problem of fast-moving pandemics—it’s the book’s way of understanding this moment of history that continues to influence technologists like Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who wrote the preface to the 2020 edition. The authors argue that the 21st century shares a lot in common with the end of the fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the dominant European institution and the largest feudal landholder. “Just as government today offers poor value for the money it collects, so did the Church at the end of the fifteenth century.” And just as the printing press undermined the Church’s control of knowledge production, and new investment opportunities in the Age of Exploration made the merchant class less willing to pay for “indulgences,” now this same process is recurring with the internet and cryptocurrency. “The commercialization of sovereignty” online, they wrote, “will make the terms and conditions of citizenship in the nation-state as dated as chivalric oaths seemed after the collapse of feudalism.”
Walking around Austin that week, it occurred to me that The Sovereign Individual had gotten some things right. When tax residency is detached from physical residency and opened to the global market—when tax evasion ceases to be a tactic only available to the very rich—how does national sovereignty survive? When sovereignty itself becomes a commodity, no different than a mine or an oil field, how long until the nation-state system begins to appear like a nineteenth-century wrapper on a new world of networked power relations? “The crypto world already works like a pseudo-network state,” an investor had said to me while I was in Próspera. The last thirty years of tech have created a wealth class with different values from the power echelon that preceded it.
Yet it’s hard not to see in the oligarchs’ proclamations of victimhood so many crocodile tears. Here was a group that had benefited from the new digital economy more than anyone else in the entire world. A group already equipped to avoid taxation through any one of the running offshore schemes, that could prattle on about America First from a bunker in Montenegro. Complain about censorship on a podcast with millions of followers. Call the government inefficient then collect billions from it for their business. A source close to Próspera had told me that, allegedly, the zone only paid $100,000 in taxes to the Honduran government over the course of its eight-year existence—hardly the investment boon for locals that had been promised. Musk was on course to receive $42 billion to build the government’s broadband infrastructure—on top of the $38 billion he’d received to launch (mostly dysfunctional) rockets and build Tesla into a carbon credit machine. The Trump family had increased its net worth by around $2.9 billion in the first hundred days of the new administration—primarily from selling crypto—with over $300 million in trading fees alone. If this was the fifteenth century all over again, then the pope was using the Church machinery to dismantle the clergy, sack the city coffers, elect a new priestly class and install himself as king.
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At the end of the week, I drove to Friedman’s house for a SXSW party. The flier promised an “eclectic mix” of “open-minded, intellectually humble people” interested in alternative governance, seasteading, spirituality, psychedelics, immortality, libertarianism and AI safety. “Those who wander the wilds off the beaten path, where there be dragons—for the adventure, the profit, the lulz.” I saw a post about the party while searching for information about Arc on LinkedIn and paid twenty dollars to reserve my ticket.
In my fantasy, Friedman’s house was a four-story McMansion set on a hill, with a Talavera-lined swimming pool overlooking the city. A library with leather-bound books inherited from his grandfather would be inlaid floor to ceiling; it would be filled with attractive people drinking mimosas and laughing at the end of the world. What I found, instead, was a modest bungalow with an ash-gray carpet and standard-issue kitchen tile, with about twenty people milling about. Friedman was standing around holding a red plastic cup, wearing caramel velvet pants, a cat-ear headband and a tie-dye t-shirt that said “I am John Galt,” referencing the main character from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. So, I wondered to myself, gazing at the human-sized fox helmet and matching gloves that were resting on the couch, is Patri Friedman a furry?
Familiar faces from the conference greeted me at the door, and I learned that, instead of the barbecue promised on the invite, there were leftovers scattered haphazardly in Styrofoam boxes. People asked each other how they knew Patri. Most of them worked in tech. They were talking about countries interested in building network states. Guatemala was a maybe, El Salvador was a no. Supposedly Bukele wanted to go it alone. Someone was wearing a sweatshirt that said “seek discomfort.” Pictures of Friedman’s daughter hung on the wall next to a portrait of his grandfather, Milty.
Noticing my snooping, Friedman came over to greet me and deliver a mini tour. “I’ve lost over a million dollars three times in my career,” he told me. “This machine is all I have left from when I was rich.” He was pointing at a ten-foot-tall Dance Dance Revolution machine in the center of his living room, conspicuously large for the modest space. Friedman showed me his bookshelf, with sections marked for “utopian escapist fiction (usually libertarian),” books “formational” to his worldview, by/about his family, and haters. We sat down on the couch and spoke about his family life. “It’s difficult being the relative of someone extremely famous,” he said. His siblings had a hard time getting their lives together. When you live in the shadow of something colossal, he said, either you have to reject it or go all in.
He viewed his work on charter cities as a culmination of his grandfather’s, he said. His dad had been one of the founders of anarcho-capitalism, but his work was more academic; he never got to build out any of his ideas. But entrepreneurship is economics materialized, he said, so he saw himself as the bearer of their torch. “In another life, I might have been an academic,” he said. “But the university system is in decline. So startups it is.”
Eventually, people started swarming the couch to talk to Friedman and ask about his investments—what did he think of their new startup?—and he politely excused himself. After sampling some leftover chili, I decided to leave, saying goodbye to Friedman and shivering home through a desert wind.
“In the same way that Facebook had to have been started on a university campus,” Friedman told me, “there will be innovations that had to have started at a pop-up city.” I wondered if that was true. Looking back on the party a few days later, its mix of nerdy enthusiasm and casual radicalism, I was reminded of something that Nick Allen had said when we met for lunch in New York a few days after my return. The city builders and charter-city advocates I had met over the course of the week, he said, are basically “being paid to come up with renderings. Most will fail.” “Think about the rebuilding of JFK airport,” he told me. “It cost, like, $19 billion, and that’s an airport. With charter cities, we’re talking about an entire city.” The only way Freedom Cities could succeed, in his view, was as a “U.S. government initiative.” “That’s the only way this can ever get done. Otherwise, you’re creating a compound. And you may have some 3D printers on your compound,” he said. “But that’s not the scale that we need.”
And yet this cynical pragmatism couldn’t capture the full picture of what I’d seen that week in Austin. At one of the events, I overheard someone arguing that the founding fathers were kind of just a group of twentysomething idealists, running bootlegging tea businesses as a side hustle. They, too, were thwarting the English state. Revolutions end up celebrated, he said, but mostly they start as a small group working something out in a room. He referenced Jeff Bezos’ famous two-pizza rule, that no team should be so large that it can’t be fed by two large pizzas. It was a gross oversimplification, sure, but it also wasn’t entirely untrue. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was 33. Hamilton was nineteen. Madison was 25. Small things could prove much larger than they seemed. Fifty-one people attended the first congress of the Communist International. The PayPal Mafia was much smaller than that. Jesus had twelve disciples. The Royal Society also started as a team of twelve. Whatever this was, its being small now didn’t make it insignificant. It made it a powder keg.
Image credit: Header by SHYCITYNikon (CC / BY 3.0); photographs by Sam Venis.
It was a crisp March morning in Austin, and just outside the Texas Capitol a swarm of protesters large enough to fill a sports arena had gathered to wave signs and shout into megaphones. Packs of bureaucrats who worked in the building stood together with clipboards and whispered among themselves. It was unclear exactly what was being protested. But judging by the signs, with slogans like “F’Elon and the Felon,” it had something to do with Elon Musk: the firehose of daily chaos emanating from DOGE since the Trump inauguration, the sense that Musk had made himself something of a shadow president.
Four years had passed since Musk moved his companies’ headquarters to Austin, a period in which the city’s reputation as a low-tax respite for Silicon Valley dropouts had evolved from an uneasy joke to a defining element of the city’s character. The Texas hideaway once known for its limestone buildings and cowboy blues saloons had become the fastest-growing metro area in America, known for its Tesla Gigafactory and new anti-woke university. Increasingly, as Austinite Lawrence Wright put it in the New Yorker, the “tomato soup” of the Texas political map, with Austin as a “blueberry” floating in the middle, was looking like regular tomato soup. And Musk’s transformation from quirky Iron Man caricature to abrasive meme-lord dismantling the government was a key part of the story.
I’d stumbled onto the protest accidentally, after arriving from New York that morning in search of a “pop-up city” supposedly located in an office building downtown. Crypto builders, startup founders and charter-city advocates were gathering in Austin to discuss the creation of new cities in America and new countries around the world. Their focus, above all, was the creation of “network states,” a novel form of sovereign, state-like entity modeled on the distributed structure of computer networks. Advocates claimed it was the natural heir to the world’s current (failing, sclerotic) model of political organization—i.e., the nation state.
While ideas like these have been bouncing around the Valley for a long time—from Burning Man and its annual “pop-up city” to the early-aughts tech project of seasteading—the vision for this latest installment of tech utopia had grown in the last few years, sprouting from a long string of dead-end investments to an actionable business strategy amid the chaos of the post-COVID era. You know the story: social frustration at a high, institutional trust at a low, money machine going brrrrr, crypto markets booming, cultural vibes shifting, et cetera. It was into this cultural environment that, in 2022, Balaji Srinavasan (a self-dubbed proponent of “tech Zionism”) launched The Network State—a hybrid manifesto/playbook that explains why we need new countries, and how to build them. The argument went like this: in a world with countries like Palau—an archipelago in the Pacific with 18,000 residents, negligible GDP, and yet sovereignty equal in legitimacy to that of Germany—why couldn’t a group of tech people, with equal numbers and far more capital and clout, work toward their own form of legitimate political sovereignty? When countries as big as Ireland prostrate themselves to attract tech business, throwing tax credits at their feet, why wouldn’t one of those small countries give up a sliver of land for the chance at hosting a group of the nouveau crypto riche?
There were two network state events happening in Austin that week, scheduled to coincide with South by Southwest, the old mecca of the city’s alternative culture. The first was Edge City, a self-described “society incubator” dedicated to “advancing human flourishing” by hosting conferences about frontier technology. The other was called Arc Austin, a month-long “pop-up city” focused on infrastructure tech, with a three-day startup summit as its centerpiece.
It was Arc’s summit that had convinced me to visit Austin in the first place. Focused on “governance innovation,” the program mentioned, as if in passing, one of the Trump administration’s most elusive policy proposals to date—the creation of ten “Freedom Cities” on “unused” federal land. Originally announced as part of Trump’s Agenda 47 plan (which you might think of as the official counterpart to Project 2025), the proposal was introduced in March 2023 in a campaign video titled “A New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living.”
Standing between two American flags, Trump described how a public contest would be held to “charter up to ten new cities,” with building contracts issued to the best proposals. “Past generations pursued big dreams,” Trump said, referencing the interstate highway system. But our country has “lost its boldness.” With these brand-new cities, American companies could pursue the design of “vertical takeoff and landing vehicles,” leading to a “revolution in air mobility.” In other words, according to President Donald J. Trump, it was time for America to build flying cars and Jetson-like cities.
In typical Trump fashion, however, details had remained conspicuously sparse since the policy was first announced, leaving observers like me to speculate. Were Freedom Cities a Trojan horse for network states? Had J.D. Vance convinced the new administration to design “patchwork,” a Curtis Yarvin fantasy of opt-in tech cities run by monarch CEOs?
There’s a story you often hear from charter-city advocates, centering on China’s economic rise throughout the 1980s and 1990s. China studied the growth of Hong Kong, the story goes, and learned the power of special economic zones—discrete territories where the rules of commerce differ from the rest of the economy. China reproduced this logic in Shenzhen, which grew from a small rural town to a global manufacturing hub. And then it reproduced this model multiple times over again with different cities, dotting the Chinese coastline with special zones like Qingdao and Zhanjiang and Guangzhou, each for a different industrial purpose. Charter-city advocates argue that this strategy was essential to Chinese economic ascendance, and that, if American leaders were smart, they’d reproduce the model on American soil. Had the Trump administration begun to take notice?
The poster from the Arc conference suggested that they had—promising a dispatch from “the people working on Freedom Cities legislation under Trump.” It was the first time I’d seen anyone claim to have any real information on the topic, online or otherwise. Two months into the Trump presidency, and every campaign proposal that had once seemed impossible or ridiculous—from 20 percent tariffs to the colonization of Greenland—had suddenly materialized, dropping from the heavens like sanction from the gods. Turbo America was back, and while most people seemed to be reacting with fear or confusion, the Network State crowd was confident, even ecstatic. Sucked into a fantasy of jet packs and brain-computer interfaces, I set out to learn what was next on the timeline for this fledgling city on a hill. I booked a ticket to Austin for the next day.
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After searching the saloons on Congress Avenue for a decent plate of huevos rancheros, I checked myself into the “Capital Factory,” the coworking space where Arc Austin was located, and pasted a name card on my shoulder. Walking through the triangular room, I passed by posters with inspirational quotes set against faux paneling of reclaimed wood, and on the soundstage, a pull-up banner featured a towering Hellenic temple set over Elysian hills. Boxes of muffins and glazed cherry donuts were spread over a bar with a beer keg.
In the corner, I noticed Arc’s organizer, James Poulter, who I’d been messaging with on Telegram in the days leading up to the event. A former accountant with blond, shoulder-length hair and a posh British accent, Poulter greeted me confidently and gave me a tour around the room. Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart was sitting alone and etching in a leather-bound notebook the size of a baseball mitt. English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey was standing in the corner surrounded by a flock of students. I recognized him from his hallmark combination of daddy-core hair: a straw-like gray beard and a tight ponytail like an Irish friar. On stage was Patri Friedman in a golden velour sweatsuit, short and barrel-chested like his grandfather, the famous neoliberal economist Milton. Patri originally built his reputation as something like the meme-king of seasteading, and now he was running a venture capital firm called Pronomos Capital, named after the satyr who served as a messenger for Dionysus. Backed by Peter Thiel, the fund was known for making investments in a host of other network state/new country-style projects, foremost of which was Próspera—a special economic zone on the Honduran island of Roatán, where, within certain limits, companies can operate according to whatever rules they choose.
I knew all about Próspera because I’d been there in 2024, reporting on a “longevity network state” conference called Vitalia. To be admitted into the zone you need permission, so a few days before my arrival, I hopped onto a Zoom call with a “longevity educator” who was living there, hoping he’d vouch for me with the relevant powers. He showed up in a black muscle tee that said “DON’T DIE,” and asked me if I wanted to live forever. I replied, tentatively, “yes,” hoping this was the secret passcode. The next day I was descending into Roatán on a fifty-seat passenger jet, wondering if I was heading to the real-life island of Doctor Moreau.
The short version of the Próspera lore is that, within Honduras, the zone operates as something like a country within a country, with its own trade laws, immigration policies and police force. It has a regulatory framework cobbled together by cherry-picking parts of systems from around the world—the main selling point for aspiring entrepreneurs whose business models don’t easily fall within the category of what the United States would call “legal.” Spawned in 2013 by an amendment to the Honduran constitution, of all the zones around the world inspired by the network-state ideal, Próspera is by far the most developed. It has a fourteen-story apartment building, a golf course, a coworking space and a beach club with cold-plunging tanks as far as the eye can see. It has a longevity clinic and a biohacking lab, where medical tourists like Bryan Johnson come to inject various forms of speculative gene therapy. It has also been locked in an ongoing lawsuit with the Honduran government, which is attempting to reverse the constitutional amendment that gave them permission to operate in the first place.
I mentioned my time in Próspera to Poulter, and he signaled across the room to a man in a black polo and athletic slacks. The man’s cheerful gait and casual getup—his t-shirt had a Próspera logo on the breast—reminded me of a physical therapist or an HVAC salesman. Evidently hoping to give himself a few more minutes to set up, Poulter pointed in my direction and said, He’s a journalist. A friendly journalist. Been to Próspera. Interested in Freedom Cities. I wondered what Poulter meant by “friendly.”
The man introduced himself as Trey Goff, Próspera’s chief of staff. Average height with a shaved scalp and a Mississippi accent, he shook my hand and asked me to clarify my politics. I delivered a spiel about honesty and evenhandedness. Apparently satisfied with my answer, he explained that he would be giving the lecture on Freedom Cities. “Próspera is one of the most experienced groups in the world at creating legislation for special economic zones,” he said. “So naturally we were excited when Trump made the announcement.” Próspera pitches itself as a “platform for governance,” or “governance as a service (GaaS),” meaning that, while their land is on Roatán, their business model can be transported anywhere.
Goff explained that Próspera is one of two main groups attempting to imagine how Freedom Cities in the U.S. could actually work. Organized under an entity called the Freedom Cities Coalition, Próspera is pursuing what’s known as an “interstate compact,” an agreement between two states to cooperate on the administration of a shared resource, like a seaport or a hospital. Originally designed to settle boundary disputes between states without involving the federal government, Goff explained, the compact framework eventually became a way for states to collaborate on projects with overlapping jurisdictions. For example, the port authority in New York and New Jersey is managed via interstate compact.
“The cool thing about this approach,” he said, “is that congressional consent can occur after the states have each agreed to the compact. And once congressional approval is given, there are only two instances in which an agreement can be revoked.” I said it sounded like they’d learned something from their legal skirmish with the Honduran government. “Changing political attitudes are definitely a risk,” he admitted. “What we like about the interstate compact approach is that the Supreme Court has never once overturned one.”
When I asked Goff whether the Freedom Cities Coalition had been in touch with the Trump administration, he demurred: while they’d had some preliminary discussions, he said, he couldn’t speak more about the details. “I can say that the energy in D.C. is electric right now,” Goff said. “You can tell in the meetings that people are empowered to act on some of the more hyperbolic things Trump has suggested.” So he didn’t think there was any doubt whether Freedom Cities were going to happen. “We’re hoping to have legislation drafted by the end of the year.”
During his presentation, Goff mentioned the other group pursuing Freedom Cities legislation: the Frontier Foundation. Set up as a 501(c)4 nonprofit, it’s a partnership between a group of attorneys, researchers and startup founders who describe themselves as “distinguished domain experts.” The group is anchored by the Charter Cities Institute (CCI), a D.C. think tank that works with local groups in places like Kenya and Nigeria to help them organize forms of self-government.
The short version of CCI’s approach is that, instead of pursuing interstate compacts, they want to set up master-planned charter cities, like Dubai or Shenzhen, on federally owned land. CCI’s head of policy, Jeffrey Mason, explained their strategy by pulling up a map of the Southwestern United States on a PowerPoint. (The federal government controls more than 28 percent of U.S. territory, much of it administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Southwest.) Because any new city development would be best positioned for success near an existing city, the top contenders are places like Boise, Idaho; Grand Junction, Colorado; Redmond, Oregon; and the corridor between San Antonio and Austin. But developers in eastern states like Michigan have expressed interest too, and CCI soon hopes to put their plans in front of politicians.
Under CCI policy, the federal government would “unlock” plots of land from the BLM, and developers would apply to work on these projects, with their applications reviewed by some kind of governmental third party. “To get legislation passed, we need seven Democratic votes in the Senate,” CCI’s founder, Mark Lutter, told me. Which could be difficult, he acknowledged. But the tides seemed to be turning. Only days before our discussion, he pointed out, Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss went on Ezra Klein’s podcast and suggested that charter cities could repurpose defunct military bases. And other Freedom City entrepreneurs are hopeful that they can unlock some of the $10 billion in federal funding earmarked for the advancement of “Regional Technology Hubs” in the CHIPS Act, which specified eight critical industries eligible for funding, from biotechnology to nuclear energy to advanced manufacturing.
Still, it’s hard to imagine Democrats throwing their weight behind Freedom Cities, I pressed Lutter to admit. Because, of course, the impetus for starting over is more than just a desire for car-free laneways and cleaner streets. The explicit point is to sidestep regulations that prevent rapid change from happening. By creating a federal jurisdiction, you could create some kind of “regulatory opt-out,” Mason said. Not only would this help “bypass all of the insane state-level regulation” that makes building new things prohibitively expensive, it would also make it possible to “innovate” in key sectors, like drone manufacturing, experimental biotech and small-scale nuclear production. “Like in Próspera, down in Honduras,” Mason said, “you could expand the right to try experimental medicines, or create an expedited approval process if a drug has been approved in the U.K., EU, Japan, Australia.” Or, as Mac Davis, the founder of Minicircle, an anti-aging startup with offices in Próspera and Austin, put it during a panel discussion, “What I would like to see is a ‘longevity city’ where everyone’s on gene therapy and their dog is, too.”
It’s a vision straight from the movement’s source text, Srinivasan’s The Network State, which imagined that each startup country would be guided by its own core principle or “commandment,” like veganism, or the desire to live forever. Selecting a country to live in should be like joining a fraternity, or, say, a particularly committed subreddit. According to the vision, the world of network states would comprise a menu of cultures, lifestyles and moral or economic systems, and you can choose the one that suits you best. To increase “freedom” around the world—to force “legacy” nations (like the United States) to improve their product offering, the package we call citizenship—the movement would focus on increasing consumer choice in the market for international statecraft, one network state at a time.
With the Trump administration now in power, the political calculus is shifting in their favor. This is true not only for organizations like Próspera, which have spent the last decade swatting away critics who claim that their project is neocolonial, but also for charter-city and network-state advocates more generally, who spent the same period of time searching for a viable model in the absence of any political recognition. Because with Freedom Cities suddenly sprouting as a branch of federal industrial policy, what was once a LARP—or as Patri called it, a “meme factory”—is now the subject of congressional debate and a legitimate investment opportunity. The shadow teams of Twitter anons who were previously writing white papers in the corner are now being flagged as experts and sent in jets to Mar-a-Lago. “The point shouldn’t be to create distance from the federal government,” said the president of the Frontier Foundation, Nick Allen. “Let’s have proper oversight. It’s important to me that this not be some, like, insurgent thing.”
Allen is a fintech startup founder probably best known as the founder of Sovereign House, a social club for the dissident right of Dimes Square in lower Manhattan. He owns a property in Próspera and attended the opening ceremonies for Srinivasan’s “network school” in Singapore—a network state “academy” focused on the comically meta goal of “bootstrapping a startup society capable of bootstrapping other startup societies.” I was surprised to learn about Allen’s involvement in Freedom Cities, in part because it showed the size and interconnectedness of the New Right political world.
“It’s an American dynamism thesis,” Allen said, “that’s it. … The whole goal of ‘exit’ is to exit until there’s recognition that there should be changes, and I think there’s recognition.” Allen was referencing an economics polemic written by Albert Hirschman in 1970 called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that has become a key source text for the dissident right. The three basic responses that people might have to a decline in a firm—or a country, Hirschman wrote—are to quit, speak up or stay quiet. Hirschman was writing in the shadow of the Second World War as a wealthy Jewish emigree from Berlin. And it was this same framework that Srinivasan made central to The Network State, as part of his argument for why the formation of new internet-first countries was necessary. But now, under Trump, the state itself seemed to be open to radical change. And with this possibility open, the equation looks very different. As Allen asked, “Why exit? Why not remain?”
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Entering the garden area at Edge City—the second network-state event of the week, self-described as a “society incubator”—one might have been forgiven for thinking they were along the Hudson in Tribeca…or really any of the places that tech workers and digital nomads have begun to call their home. The event was located at Hotel Magdalena, steps away from one of Austin’s swankiest strips, where millennials in dad hats come to sip matcha lattes and buy embroidered t-shirts from Aimé Leon Dore. Kale salads sprouted from the coffee tables like garden weeds, and somewhere in the distance, Whole Foods founder John Mackey could be heard telling the people to make capitalism “conscious.” The word had swept throughout the country and made its way here to Edge City, where the benevolent people of crypto had taken notice. It was time for crypto to meditate on the nature of public goods. It was time for crypto to make capitalism good.
In practice, this meant presentations from a handful of entrepreneurs on their visions for a benevolent transformation of mainstream society. Eight city-building projects were discussed in the Austin area alone. A group of engineers in their twenties had bought a ranch between Austin and San Antonio with plans to build the next Shenzhen focused on “hard tech,” with robotics companies, materials scientists and rocket makers. A man in his sixties was raising $500 million to build a regenerative, sustainable eco-village. After his last startup IPO’d for $10 billion, a New York state-born entrepreneur was pitching a grocery store that would use Georgist taxation strategies to equitably compensate the local community for participating in gentrification. A Buddhist, dressed in kāṣāya, was starting a mindfulness business for tech accelerationists.
The focus of the lectures was infrastructure. A researcher from the Cato Institute delivered a talk on how, if you want to build new cities, you need to think about what families actually need: playgrounds and community centers and schools. A Canadian entrepreneur spoke about his nuclear-reactor startup, building plug-and-play atomic-energy units for the data-center market, powerful enough to energize ten thousand homes. He was in the process of raising $200 million. An architect from New York was fantasizing about building materials; 3D-printed adobe and eco-friendly insulation. Society could nudge its way to civic perfection: cars were out, bike lanes were in; software was out, hard tech was in. The future would be abundant and modular and green.
Amid the sense of optimism, I couldn’t help thinking about the protesters I’d encountered when I first arrived in Austin. Though the arrival of the tech class brought Austin many of the fixtures of top-tier global cities—digital parking apps, efficient garbage removal, boutique shops and a sizable market for tourism—locals have lamented the loss of the city’s character, the ominous high-rise projects and gridlock. Amid these cultural shifts and rising costs, longtime Austinites are leaving the city en masse. According to Wright, every day 238 Austinites left the city for good.
At Edge City, this tension was on full display in the presentation of an aspiring city founder with plans to build a “Bitcoin city” called “Austantinople.” His presentation started with a picture of Hadrian’s Wall, built in the first century to divide England from barbarian Scotland, with the injunction that the infrastructure we build now can last for thousands of years. Then he spoke about staircases and said that practical structures can be benign and industrial, like the concrete chambers inside parking structures. Or they can be creative and inspiring, pointing to a picture of the Vessel staircase in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. When I pointed out that this monument has become a prime location for people to kill themselves, he said that people in Austin didn’t know that much about New York. It didn’t undermine his point. When I asked whether a border wall was the right structure to highlight when a similar design was planned for the Southern border, he responded that borders could be good. “I don’t think Austantinople is intended to be a city for everyone,” he said. “At least not initially… It’s meant to be a place for a particular community, with particular interests and values and qualities.”
That much was clear. After the lectures wrapped, the crowd started pooling along the lawn for tacos with tofu and barbacoa, cheese plates and spiced charcuterie. A DJ set up gear on the lecture stage, but nobody was dancing. People were vaping but I couldn’t find a single cigarette smoker.
With the crowd splintering into small groups, I sat down on a picnic bench with an engineer who had spent the last few years building an aerospace startup putting tiny metallic memory capsules filled with artifacts of human culture into space. They’d just placed their first capsule on the moon. He told me that what Elon Musk is really doing with SpaceX is disrupting the airline industry. “Within five years,” he said, “there will be commercial rockets large enough to carry two hundred passengers that can get from Austin to Singapore in thirty minutes.” Musk was serious about colonizing space, he said. He knew this because he was friends with a number of SpaceX engineers. “Mainstream society might not like it, but Musk is using his power like a shield to push civilization toward the next stage.”
His argument made me think of an essay written by the anarcho-leftist anthropologist David Graeber in 2012, called “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Graeber argued that part of the reason our society has become so skeptical about technology is that, fifty years after the moon landing, when every American teenager was promised a future of jet packs and flying cars and space colonies, many of us feel a sense of disappointment that all we got were smartphones and information tech. The future never arrived as it was promised, and so the techlash served as an outlet for this anger. But a decade after Graeber wrote those words, something had shifted. Elon Musk was catching rockets like baseballs out of the sky. The president was promising flying cars again. Artificial intelligence was in everyone’s pockets. New cities are coming for the West and, some say, the moon. And yet: nobody but a small group of technologists appears to be pleased with these developments. The welcome party is nowhere to be found. The future is arriving again, out of the reckless political engineering of the new regime. And the dominant response seems to be one of anxiousness and fear.
“It’s because Trump is turning around the ship. Things are up for grabs in a way they haven’t been since World War II.” So said a software developer who splits his time between El Salvador and Austin, working primarily for Urbit, the software company started by Curtis Yarvin with aspirations to rebuild the internet from scratch. As the night wound down, I found myself in a group of Urbit engineers, sucking on Zyns and drinking Modelos. People are scared because when Trump was inaugurated, we stepped through a portal, one of them said. There are more fronts in this war than anyone can count. MAGA won the culture war outright, and now there’s not even a backlash. The truth about Curtis, one of them said, is that he never thought his ideas would be put into effect. He’s an edgelord, not a grand strategist. And suddenly the government of the United States is acting on his vision. “Which he systematically overestimates,” another added. The group laughed. But it seemed to me that this was exactly why people were scared, why the train seems like it’s about to jump off the tracks. Right at the heart of things, there were no adults in the room. Nobody—perhaps not even Trump himself—seems to know what’s happening. The future is being written in thick, red ink. Even the insiders seemed to have no clue.
●
Back at Arc Austin, Patri Friedman was pointing at a PowerPoint slide with a chart of the U.S. national debt on one side and a picture of a mound of skulls, ostensibly from the Holocaust, on the other. “If you think of government as an industry,” he said, “the largest company is losing a massive amount of money. That’s the best company in the industry. The worst company in the industry mass murdered half of its population.” The situation was unacceptable and that’s what was motivating him. In the early 2000s, he explained, he wanted to learn why in most industries, there’s constant innovation but in governance there isn’t. He learned that the answer came straight from the industry structure: all the firms are huge, it’s hard to switch between providers, and there’s no recognized procedure for creating a competitor. He decided that was the problem that he wanted to solve—a journey that started in seasteading and is now focused on charter cities and network states.
Friedman’s current focus is “fund[ing] companies building cities that write their own laws,” meaning that pop-up cities like Arc are not part of his thesis, while territories like Próspera are. Over the last few years, they’ve made investments in Nigeria, where a group of investors are building Africa’s first “digital economic zone,” and in Bhutan, where an entrepreneur pitched the royal government to partner with him on a “21st century development in the last Shangri-La.” Pronomos also invested in Afropolitan, a “digital nation” attempting to unite the African diaspora on the network state ideal, and Praxis, a “sovereign network for the intelligence age.”
Another one of Friedman’s investments is a company called Metropolis, headed by a Taiwanese graduate of Columbia University named Elaine Wang. A biomedical engineer with blunt bangs and a mischievous smile, Wang told me she also sells firearms made in Taiwan to Ukraine. The company’s thesis hinges on the idea that, in a world increasingly driven by technology and investment, small island nations have become too dependent on tourism, which proved disastrous during COVID when international travel dried up. To remain competitive in the global economy, micro-nations can leverage another asset that’s now highly valuable to entrepreneurs: their sovereignty. During her presentation at Arc Austin, Wang asked: “How do we actually borrow or take advantage of the sovereignty of these micro-nations and sublease that to the global citizen?”
In practice, the company is focused on building digital e-residency programs that allow digital nomads, crypto traders and other high-net-worth individuals to set up tax residency in small countries from the comfort of their computer. The first project they launched was based in Palau, a small island in the South Pacific, where Wang’s business partner, Alain Seid, a native Palauan, served in the island’s legislature and ran for president in 2020. He didn’t win, but he remained deeply connected to the political class of the island’s 18,000 residents. So in 2021, when China officially banned crypto trading within the country, Metropolis saw an opportunity. They launched their digital-residency program, which grants tax-residency status without granting the right to live there. Thousands of Chinese crypto traders applied. “We have now to date about fifty thousan digital residents of Palau,” Wang said. “The digital nation of Palau is essentially bigger than the actual Palau.” All these residents need to do is pay a $250 subscription fee. The tax rate is zero percent.
The second program Metropolis launched was in the Philippines—the only country other than Switzerland with strict bank secrecy laws, Wang explained to me. This means that, even if the president of the United States asks about an individual’s transaction history, the bank will not report it to the banking network. Metropolis set up a digital residency program where applicants pay a $25,000 fee to the government and place $75,000 in a crypto fund. The project was a “smashing success,” and generated over $600,000 in revenue. Of these proceeds, Wang said, “a certain percentage will go back to the island, to the people who actually live there,” as a kind of crypto-fueled UBI.
Of course, for many of Metropolis’s digital residents, bank secrecy laws are presumably more of a draw than their humanitarian bona fides, so I asked Wang about her clientele. “Indeed, there are some interesting characters,” she said. Balaji Srinivasan had contacted Metropolis, and billionaire investor Tim Draper was their first Palauan resident. A few weeks ago, she had attended a “prayer breakfast” at Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago. She also once met with “someone from Africa.” “He refused to turn on his camera, and his voice was altered by AI,” she said. “He did piracy.”
After the lectures, the crowd broke out into small discussion groups, and I chatted with Rob Rhinehart, the Soylent founder, about his plans to start an eco-city in Athens, Georgia, where he’d already purchased a plot of land. People started migrating to a conference room with desk chairs and flat-screen TVs. Everyone was waiting to see if Srinivasan would let them into a Zoom call from Malaysia. There were zero women in the tightly packed room.
As the crowd thinned out, I found some time to sit alone with Friedman. “So, Metropolis is basically just tax havens for crypto,” I said to him matter-of-factly, waiting for his reaction. Friedman said it was more complicated than that—to really understand the relevance of a company like Metropolis, he argued, you had to situate it within the larger world-historical context. Unless Trump somehow manages to turn around the path of American decline, he said, “the looming fiscal crisis happens, and they have to either hyperinflate or default, and that will put a huge amount of stress on the Union.” He said you could see states that are net tax donors being, like, “fuck this,” and start to break away. And that’s only in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world—imagine what it will be like elsewhere, he explained. In that context, the ability to move between countries is going to be important for safety—both physical and financial. Eventually, he said, “I think the nation state gets less and less important. Like it already is.”
But as I listened to Friedman, it became clear that, really, I was listening to a recycled version of The Sovereign Individual, another urtext in the New Right canon. Published in 1997 by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, the book foretells the dawn of a looming age of fragmentation and disorder, characterized by the collapse of the welfare state and the rise of a new kind of globalist entrepreneur—one liberated from the “political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places.” Principally, taxes. “Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction,” the book proclaims, among many other strongly worded predictions. “The Internet means that everyone who chooses will have a tax haven in his laptop … Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.”
Besides a range of predictions for which the book has gained a cult following—from the rise of digital currency to the looming problem of fast-moving pandemics—it’s the book’s way of understanding this moment of history that continues to influence technologists like Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who wrote the preface to the 2020 edition. The authors argue that the 21st century shares a lot in common with the end of the fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the dominant European institution and the largest feudal landholder. “Just as government today offers poor value for the money it collects, so did the Church at the end of the fifteenth century.” And just as the printing press undermined the Church’s control of knowledge production, and new investment opportunities in the Age of Exploration made the merchant class less willing to pay for “indulgences,” now this same process is recurring with the internet and cryptocurrency. “The commercialization of sovereignty” online, they wrote, “will make the terms and conditions of citizenship in the nation-state as dated as chivalric oaths seemed after the collapse of feudalism.”
Walking around Austin that week, it occurred to me that The Sovereign Individual had gotten some things right. When tax residency is detached from physical residency and opened to the global market—when tax evasion ceases to be a tactic only available to the very rich—how does national sovereignty survive? When sovereignty itself becomes a commodity, no different than a mine or an oil field, how long until the nation-state system begins to appear like a nineteenth-century wrapper on a new world of networked power relations? “The crypto world already works like a pseudo-network state,” an investor had said to me while I was in Próspera. The last thirty years of tech have created a wealth class with different values from the power echelon that preceded it.
Yet it’s hard not to see in the oligarchs’ proclamations of victimhood so many crocodile tears. Here was a group that had benefited from the new digital economy more than anyone else in the entire world. A group already equipped to avoid taxation through any one of the running offshore schemes, that could prattle on about America First from a bunker in Montenegro. Complain about censorship on a podcast with millions of followers. Call the government inefficient then collect billions from it for their business. A source close to Próspera had told me that, allegedly, the zone only paid $100,000 in taxes to the Honduran government over the course of its eight-year existence—hardly the investment boon for locals that had been promised. Musk was on course to receive $42 billion to build the government’s broadband infrastructure—on top of the $38 billion he’d received to launch (mostly dysfunctional) rockets and build Tesla into a carbon credit machine. The Trump family had increased its net worth by around $2.9 billion in the first hundred days of the new administration—primarily from selling crypto—with over $300 million in trading fees alone. If this was the fifteenth century all over again, then the pope was using the Church machinery to dismantle the clergy, sack the city coffers, elect a new priestly class and install himself as king.
●
At the end of the week, I drove to Friedman’s house for a SXSW party. The flier promised an “eclectic mix” of “open-minded, intellectually humble people” interested in alternative governance, seasteading, spirituality, psychedelics, immortality, libertarianism and AI safety. “Those who wander the wilds off the beaten path, where there be dragons—for the adventure, the profit, the lulz.” I saw a post about the party while searching for information about Arc on LinkedIn and paid twenty dollars to reserve my ticket.
In my fantasy, Friedman’s house was a four-story McMansion set on a hill, with a Talavera-lined swimming pool overlooking the city. A library with leather-bound books inherited from his grandfather would be inlaid floor to ceiling; it would be filled with attractive people drinking mimosas and laughing at the end of the world. What I found, instead, was a modest bungalow with an ash-gray carpet and standard-issue kitchen tile, with about twenty people milling about. Friedman was standing around holding a red plastic cup, wearing caramel velvet pants, a cat-ear headband and a tie-dye t-shirt that said “I am John Galt,” referencing the main character from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. So, I wondered to myself, gazing at the human-sized fox helmet and matching gloves that were resting on the couch, is Patri Friedman a furry?
Familiar faces from the conference greeted me at the door, and I learned that, instead of the barbecue promised on the invite, there were leftovers scattered haphazardly in Styrofoam boxes. People asked each other how they knew Patri. Most of them worked in tech. They were talking about countries interested in building network states. Guatemala was a maybe, El Salvador was a no. Supposedly Bukele wanted to go it alone. Someone was wearing a sweatshirt that said “seek discomfort.” Pictures of Friedman’s daughter hung on the wall next to a portrait of his grandfather, Milty.
Noticing my snooping, Friedman came over to greet me and deliver a mini tour. “I’ve lost over a million dollars three times in my career,” he told me. “This machine is all I have left from when I was rich.” He was pointing at a ten-foot-tall Dance Dance Revolution machine in the center of his living room, conspicuously large for the modest space. Friedman showed me his bookshelf, with sections marked for “utopian escapist fiction (usually libertarian),” books “formational” to his worldview, by/about his family, and haters. We sat down on the couch and spoke about his family life. “It’s difficult being the relative of someone extremely famous,” he said. His siblings had a hard time getting their lives together. When you live in the shadow of something colossal, he said, either you have to reject it or go all in.
He viewed his work on charter cities as a culmination of his grandfather’s, he said. His dad had been one of the founders of anarcho-capitalism, but his work was more academic; he never got to build out any of his ideas. But entrepreneurship is economics materialized, he said, so he saw himself as the bearer of their torch. “In another life, I might have been an academic,” he said. “But the university system is in decline. So startups it is.”
Eventually, people started swarming the couch to talk to Friedman and ask about his investments—what did he think of their new startup?—and he politely excused himself. After sampling some leftover chili, I decided to leave, saying goodbye to Friedman and shivering home through a desert wind.
“In the same way that Facebook had to have been started on a university campus,” Friedman told me, “there will be innovations that had to have started at a pop-up city.” I wondered if that was true. Looking back on the party a few days later, its mix of nerdy enthusiasm and casual radicalism, I was reminded of something that Nick Allen had said when we met for lunch in New York a few days after my return. The city builders and charter-city advocates I had met over the course of the week, he said, are basically “being paid to come up with renderings. Most will fail.” “Think about the rebuilding of JFK airport,” he told me. “It cost, like, $19 billion, and that’s an airport. With charter cities, we’re talking about an entire city.” The only way Freedom Cities could succeed, in his view, was as a “U.S. government initiative.” “That’s the only way this can ever get done. Otherwise, you’re creating a compound. And you may have some 3D printers on your compound,” he said. “But that’s not the scale that we need.”
And yet this cynical pragmatism couldn’t capture the full picture of what I’d seen that week in Austin. At one of the events, I overheard someone arguing that the founding fathers were kind of just a group of twentysomething idealists, running bootlegging tea businesses as a side hustle. They, too, were thwarting the English state. Revolutions end up celebrated, he said, but mostly they start as a small group working something out in a room. He referenced Jeff Bezos’ famous two-pizza rule, that no team should be so large that it can’t be fed by two large pizzas. It was a gross oversimplification, sure, but it also wasn’t entirely untrue. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was 33. Hamilton was nineteen. Madison was 25. Small things could prove much larger than they seemed. Fifty-one people attended the first congress of the Communist International. The PayPal Mafia was much smaller than that. Jesus had twelve disciples. The Royal Society also started as a team of twelve. Whatever this was, its being small now didn’t make it insignificant. It made it a powder keg.
Image credit: Header by SHYCITYNikon (CC / BY 3.0); photographs by Sam Venis.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.