A couple weeks ago, the clarion of digital wrongdoing in the second Trump administration, Wired, published an article entitled ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’. I wrote about these guys, or one subset of them, in early January. Dryden Brown is chief of a startup called Praxis, which is in the “business” of founding new sovereign “start up societies.” On paper, he claims to have raised half a billion dollars for his company. But, actually, those are commitments contingent on his founding a new sovereign state. So that’s kind of like a lot of richies committing money to your new unicorn farm contingent on your finding two unicorns. In any case, Dryden had been focused on finding a chunk of land to found a new “network state” in the Mediterranean after getting bounced out of Africa. But once Donald Trump started making noises that Greenland might be on the market, he flew to Greenland to meet with officials and see if he could buy it.
In any case, that’s our boy Dryden. This new piece in Wired is about Trey Goff, the “chief of staff” of a thing called “Prospera,” which is a sorta, kinda “network state” recently established in Honduras, which the current government of Honduras is already trying to abolish. Prospera and a few other “network states” in the making are based on laws for “Special Economic Zones” which exist in some countries. The conceptual structure stems from certain duty-free areas that exist in certain countries, free ports of various kinds which have long existed and have often, but not always, been tied up with the history of European colonialism and, of course, the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. U.S. urban policy has a sort of pale version of this in “enterprise zones” where businesses starting up in a certain area get certain tax benefits or expedited regulatory review. If you read about “Prospera,” a decent amount of at least the surface appeal is having these kind of boutique nerdvilles where tech micro-bros can high five each other because, like, if you want to buy a croissant at the coffee shop you have to pay in bitcoin. Stuff like that. The “government,” very much by design, follows the structure of venture investing, with different classes of stock and thus voting power. All that fun stuff.
Goff is working with a lobbying group called Freedom Cities Coalition, which Goff claims is getting a great reception at the White House and on Capitol Hill, with the idea of drafting legislation to create 10 “freedom cities” in the United States. The model they seem to be most interested in is creating interstate compacts in which two states neighboring each other set aside contiguous pieces of land and hand it over to a tech bro to run. I’m skeptical we’ll be seeing that legislation anytime soon, though I’m certainly not ruling it out, depending on how the next couple years go. You often have this kind of rah-rah talk at the beginning of a new administration. But I’m focusing on it because in addition to it being fascinating and thoroughly dystopian in itself, it’s an important window into what’s happening right now with DOGE. Once you get beneath what we might call the cyber-libertarian spray tan, these are really digital lordships which at a fundamental level would be very at home in the Middle Ages or in the early transitional phases of a number of European maritime empires.
The second paragraph of the Wired piece gives you a good idea of what the real goals are …
According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
You can see some of the problems right away. I actually believe we should, under a tight regulatory regime, be investing more in civilian nuclear power. But you can see the problem here for anyone who lives downwind of a “freedom city” owned by a group of tech bros. They’d be able to crank up a nuclear reactor without any sign off from federal nuclear regulators. Same goes for whatever they might want to do with other pollutants and the EPA.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me as Elon’s crew has taken his DOGE firing squads door-to-door through NIH: why are they doing this? Everyone gets why some ultra-rich people want to abolish Social Security or Medicare. They don’t need it. But anyone can get cancer. How can they possibly think that’s a good idea? As I explain, part of it is the MAGA/oligarch belief that higher education and the research sector are the seedbed of the people they see as their political foes. So destroying America’s biomedical research capacity is, to them, kind of like draining the swamp. Perverse, but that is really how they see it. And from a certain degenerate perspective, they’re kind of right. A lot of these folks also think that AI is ready to take over. I’ve talked to a lot of medical and biomedical researchers over the last two months. And not a single one of them doesn’t think machine learning isn’t at least a major new part of research. But this is different. A lot of the people in Silicon Valley think AI is ready to take over entirely. But as you can see from that graf above, there’s another simple thing at play: they want to bring Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos to clinical trials. In Nerdville you can try out the latest gene editing idea without the now-obsolete, rival nerds at the FDA getting in anyone’s business. Just click through the EULA and you’re good to go.
Some people won’t agree with me on this. But the level of risk aversion we apply to the regulation and testing of medications is fundamentally a matter of democratic self-government. Just as Congress would be totally within its rights if not wisdom to shut down USAID and a slew of other agencies, if the American people through their organs of self-government decide that we should take greater risks for greater potential gain, they can do that. But you can see that the real idea here is to stand up what amounts to a sovereignty-free-zone where private corporations can step out of democratic self-government, which is of course the point. As I said, there’s nothing particularly “digital” or “networked” about any of this. These are just lordships which oligarchs now want to carve out of a democratic Republic. And that is the best way to understand DOGE. It’s not geographical. But it amounts to what we might call a time-out from the Constitution and democratic self-government. It’s all up to Musk. Yes, Donald Trump could pull his license, probably. But with that license, it’s all his call.
And in case you think I’m exaggerating, you should look at this thread from earlier this month from Balaji Srinivasan, an extremely influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist in what we might call the Elon-Thiel-o-sphere. As he proposed in a tweet on March 5th, the key to rebuilding American manufacturing was the creation of a Special Elon Zone in Texas. “There’s a simple way to rebuild manufacturing in the US: just give @elonmusk control of a huge swath of land surrounding Starbase, Texas and allow him to set whatever regulations he wants.”
He goes on …
Given the security risks Elon faces, he’ll need border control. So you might designate the land surrounding Starbase to be a military base or something similar, so that he can fence it off and determine at his sole discretion who can enter. Similarly, ideally every single person in the zone has opted in to be there, so no one can complain about the pro-builder regulations.
And what about the laws of the state of Texas or the United States? Well, it turns out Balaji, as he seems to be universally known, has an innovative idea of how executive orders work. He continues …
President Trump and Governor Abbott of Texas can use executive orders to remove obsolete laws at state and federal level. And for anything they can’t remove, they can direct state and federal police to exercise discretion in terms of non-enforcement. Think of Starbase as a “sanctuary city”, but for innovation — using leftist tactics in reverse.
And it gets better.
Nail it, then scale it. Once there’s traction, replicate the idea in other states, giving other proven founders like @PalmerLuckey their own special economic zones. I’m sure Florida and Ohio would want theirs after Texas proves it out.
Luckey, in case you’re not familiar with him, is another member of the Elon-Thiel-o-sphere. He founded Oculus and then sold it to Facebook. He was a tech mogul for Trump before it was cool, way back in 2016. He now runs the military contractor Anduril. His sister is married to Matt Gaetz. Apparently Palmer gets a lordship too.
Will Elon soon be the sovereign over a chunk of Texas? Are we about to start handing out digital lordships to the top oligarchs? I have no idea. What interests me about this, however, is that we’re actually in the midst of one such experiment. A digital lordship is really what DOGE is. It’s not geographical. Or rather, it’s the entire country. We don’t know how long it will last. And, of course, there’s a lot else that’s going on at the same time. It’s happening within Donald Trump’s rapid effort to turn the American Republic into an autocracy. But it’s distinct. And it really lines up in every particular with the proposed Tech Oligarch lordships operating under the banner of “freedom cities.”
