Network State Comes for Venezuela
Less than one week after American military forces conducted an illegal raid to kidnap the authoritarian president of Venezuela, some want to build a Network State there.
Mark Lutter, executive director of the Charter Cities Institute, has issued a public call for Trump to put a “freedom city” in Venezuela:
Venezuela doesn’t need to become another Iraq.
It needs a Freedom City.
The mission is not endless war. It is to end a criminal regime without another trillion-dollar disaster.
Reality: the old system is still there—corrupt courts, cartels, broken institutions. Fixing everything at once won’t work.
So don’t fix everything. Start with one city that actually works.
A Freedom City = new land, new rules, real property rights, real rule of law—jointly built with the U.S.
Freedom city is Trump’s word for a network state—a new sovereign territory ruled by corporations. The concept keeps popping up these days. From Gaza to Greenland, from Honduras to Ukraine, all of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy moves seem to come with a side of Network State ideology. Suddenly, the United States has been seized by a spirit of colonial conquest, seeking to plant flags and build strange new cities everywhere.
(For a basic backgrounder, read this short piece I wrote for Tech Policy Press: Trump’s Gaza Fantasy and the Network State: The Tech-Fueled Future of Privatized Sovereignty.)
My forthcoming book (pre-order here!) will detail the Silicon Valley plan to cover the globe in a network of these tech dystopian cities. If you wish to learn more right now, researcher and writer Jenny Cohn has been posting very informative threads and links over on BlueSky.
Yesterday, I joined writers Wajahat Ali and Jacob Silverman to discuss Silicon Valley’s role in Trump’s plot to seize Venezuela and Greenland. Watch it below: Transcript available on YouTube.
