Próspera, the Network State and the New York Times

The Point: The New York Times just published an extensive magazine story about Próspera, a major Network State "charter city" in Honduras. Here's a gift link to read it:

The Backstory: I have been writing about this weird Network State stuff over the past year because very few journalists have seemed interested in telling the story. Even as a growing number of tech bro types have crowed about their plans to create post-democracy cities – and taken steps to create them – the mainstream press has remained ominously silent. But this appears to be changing.

In "The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down," Rachel Corbett tells the story of Próspera, a Network State project on the Honduran island of Roatán. Her story mentions Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, the East Solano Plan (a.k.a. California Forever) and many other names that will be familiar to readers of The Nerd Reich:

There are about three dozen charter cities currently operating in the world, according to an estimate from the Adrianople Group, an advisory firm that concentrates on special economic zones. Several others are under development, including the East Solano Plan, run by a real estate corporation that has spent the last seven years buying up $900 million of ranch land in the Bay Area to build a privatized alternative to San Francisco; Praxis, a forthcoming “cryptostate” on the Mediterranean; and the Free Republic of Liberland, a three-square-mile stretch of unclaimed floodplain between Serbia and Croatia. Many of the same ideologically aligned names — Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Friedman — recur as financial backers; Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects and a critic of public housing, is behind several of their urban (or metaversal) designs.

And here's a detail that will ring familiar to readers in Solano County, where a group of Network State-connected investors is trying to build a new tech utopia city called California Forever: The backers of Próspera have filed an $11 billion lawsuit against the Honduran government. The conflict arose after a new government sought to make Próspera pay its fair share.

The endemic corruption in Honduras, the sort of thing Próspera was supposed to combat, was also what enabled its creation and has plagued its pursuit of legitimacy. For Hondurans, the prospect of American capitalists promising prosperity may instead resurrect fears of exploitation and dispossession. Despite Próspera’s fantasy of exit, it uses roads, hospitals and ports built by the municipal government, and it shares an economy and ecosystem with its neighbors in Crawfish Rock. 

I encourage you to read the whole story and share it with anyone who might be interested.

Analysis: It's great to see this story in the NYT. While her piece looks specifically at Próspera, Corbett does a great job of outlining all of the characters involved. She even mentions Balaji Srinivasan's "tech Zionism" quote from a podcast interview I surfaced in the New Republic in April:

Srinivasan, the former Coinbase chief technology officer and now an adviser to Pronomos Capital, Friedman’s fund to build start-up cities, argued in his 2022 book “The Network State” that these new business-friendly hubs would soon compete with nation-states and, one day, replace them. “The Network State” was inspired, he said, by the state of Israel. “That country was started by a book,” he tweeted in 2022, referring to Theodor Herzl’s 1896 manifesto, “The Jewish State.” “You can found a tribe,” Srinivasan said on a podcast. “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism — when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a ‘reverse diaspora.’”

This story is major progress, and hopefully a sign that people will start to pay closer attention to this issue. When I first started writing about this, it seemed like some kind of weird and obscure conspiracy thing. But now it's the subject of a long piece in the Times, and wide out in the open for all to see.

And big thanks to everyone who has been pushing to get this story out there. You know who you are.