The Private Fiefdom as Planetary Project

NUMEROUS ARE THOSE who have trekked recently to Washington, DC, to bend the knee and curry favor. Among those guaranteed a warm reception are peddlers of “Freedom Cities,” which were referenced by then–presidential candidate Donald Trump in a 2023 speech in which he claimed that Americans once “pursued big dreams” and “pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier.” He was, of course, hinting that, under previous administrations (his own excepted), such big dreams and ambitions had wilted. His return would change that. He suggested taking a small percentage of public land and making it available through a contest that would invite applicants to charter cities liberated from sclerotic bureaucracy, overregulation, oppressive taxation, and time-consuming red tape. As per classic anti-government argument, the government would intervene to circumvent government.

Trump’s use of the verb “charter” was not a Trumpism (“covfefe,” anyone?). It is part of the lingo of a generation of tech bros and market authoritarians, many linked to Silicon Valley, who dream of and finance efforts to create new sovereign private communities—proprietary countries and cities—run not through democratic processes and constitutions but through private charters or contracts. But what does it take to build new countries and cities from scratch? And what do they promise most of us?

Libertarian tech bros and futurists are having a moment, their presence proliferating in popular culture beyond the science fiction of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and others. A cursory glance yields appearances in shows such as Love, Death & Robots (2019– ) and films such as Elysium (2013), Don’t Look Up (2021), Blink Twice (2024), and Mountainhead (2025). They’re also present in contemporary fictions such as Madeline Ashby’s Glass Houses (2024), Elizabeth Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023), Cory Doctorow’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (2019; a bunker-prepper reworking of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic), and, most recently, Richard Powers’s Playground (2024).

Political culture has caught up with popular culture. Trump has embraced the tech bros, their money, and the alleged promise of cryptocurrencies. In turn, they have embraced him—his monarchical pretensions, and his art of the grift. One of their own, Elon Musk, has attempted to gut the government from within in the name of efficiency (in a department aptly named DOGE, which harkens back to the lords of Italian city-states and the cognate “duce,” as in Mussolini’s title) while cashing in on the billions in taxpayer money he has already received.

Meanwhile, moneyed tech titans in Northern California have proposed building a new city on thousands of acres they surreptitiously bought over the previous decade in Solano County. El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele is planning a Bitcoin City on the slopes of a volcano while his government profits from the imprisonment of people illegally deported from the United States. Argentina is currently presided over by Javier Milei, a chain saw–wielding, self-professed anarcho-capitalist. Post-Brexit Tories wanted to create multiple semiautonomous special economic zones (SEZs) in UK port cities, an idea that has survived the shelf life of both Liz Truss and a head of lettuce. They all promise the same thing (cue Mel Gibson in a kilt): FREE-DOM!

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The exuberance with which libertarian communities are being marketed suggests that their advocates are attempting to make up in print what they have been unable to accomplish in reality. Yet all the media attention and promotional hyperbole has obscured the fact that most of this stuff is not particularly new. In the 1960s, private sovereignty schemes were common, inspired, on the one hand, by the rise of private homeowner associations and gated communities and, on the other, by Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch, in her 1957 novel ­Atlas Shrugged­, a fictional capitalist retreat high in the Rockies (and named after John Galt, the book’s capitalist hero) to which the managerial class decamps while awaiting the supposed downfall that will result from the withdrawal of their “labor.” That they have no labor to withdraw (they’re managers) is beside the point. Men such as land developer Michael Oliver, pharmaceutical engineer Werner Steifel, and Leicester Hemingway (Ernest’s younger brother) sought to build private countries on the ocean during this period. Aspiring to take advantage of a new era of decolonization and political volatility, they were, however, foiled by the law, weather, and obdurate political realities in those places they sought to colonize. Building platforms on reefs or outfitting barges for international waters proved much more difficult than crafting constitutions, forging currencies, designing flags, and proclaiming oneself monarch.

Private countries waxed and waned but seemed primed for a new lease on life in the 1990s with the emergence of Silicon Valley and platform capitalism. Anti-statist ideologies appealed to coders opposed to the regulation of cyberspace, their position articulated in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto. At the same time, analog libertarians continued to explore the possibilities of creating new and private countries, whether at the 1995 New Country meeting held in New York City or via Laissez Faire, Inc., whose founders advertised their project—“What would Ayn Rand do?”—in the pages of The Economist that same year.

James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg would interweave these two threads in their 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, recently reissued with an introduction by Peter Thiel. That book turned investment strategies for high-net-worth individuals into a political theory of private sovereignty. “As new, more market-driven forms of protection become available,” Davidson and Rees-Mogg wrote, “it will become increasingly evident to the large numbers of able persons that most of the supposed benefits of nationality are imaginary.” They envisioned a time when the individual entrepreneur would be able to navigate through and across various jurisdictions at will, in the process rationally calculating his or her “protection costs,” which is what recent commentators have termed jurisdictional arbitrage. Newer versions of private sovereignty build on those ideas and also draw inspiration from Burning Man, although most of their manifestations up to this point more closely resemble Billy McFarland’s ill-fated Fyre Festival. (If anything best captures the likely reality of individualistic private communities walled off from society, it is a $500 soggy grilled cheese delivered in a Styrofoam package.)

In the early 2000s, charter cities gained traction. First proposed in 2008 by economist Paul Romer, charter cities are privately run urban complexes created from scratch on land given over, through lease or purchase, by a nation-state to an international oversight board. The cities are supposed to have their own legal systems and laws, labor codes, and regulatory apparatus, all laid out in a contract signed by residents. There would be no voting or representative government. You could opt in or out, but the contract would stand as law.

Since first proposed, charter cities have had a predictably tough go of it. Madagascar and Honduras were the initial sites for experimentation. A 2009 coup in Madagascar brought that dream to an abrupt end; a coup in Honduras a few months later gave it new life. Those very same years saw the creation of the Seasteading Institute (TSI), originally financed with support from Peter Thiel and under the direction of Patri Friedman (son of anarcho-capitalist David D. Friedman and grandson of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman), which seeks to create private floating platform communities on the high seas. In the 2010s, the Free State Project sought to move 20,000 libertarians to New Hampshire to experiment with libertarian governance. A few years later, in Chile in 2013, a group sought to create a libertarian haven in Curacaví, just west of Santiago, under the name Galt’s Gulch Chile, a callback to Atlas Shrugged. (Other Randians have declared themselves adherents of Anthemism, an ideology of individualist private state-making based on Rand’s short 1938 novel Anthem, made famous by Canadian rock trio Rush in the 1970s and ’80s.)

Fast-forward another decade, and interested investors with a cryptocurrency sensibility can seek out Satoshi Island off the coast of Espiritu Santo in the archipelago of Vanuatu, invest in Bukele’s Bitcoin City in El Salvador, buy digital citizenship in the 58-acre Próspera development on the Honduran island of Roatán, or do whatever it is Brock Pierce and his fellow puertopians think they are doing in Puerto Rico. In the Balkans, there is the Free Republic of Liberland, on the Croatian banks of the Danube, and Montelibero in the mountains of Montenegro, both inflected with a libertarian crypto ethos. Further afield are dreams of orbital space pods and Mars colonization.

Perhaps the most hyped recent entry in the—what to call it: proprietary state? private sovereignty?—sweepstakes is self-professed Stanford “lifer” Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State, detailed in his book of the same name, which has generated an enormous amount of heavy breathing in Silicon Valley. Srinivasan has been hailed as “a visionary,” “one of the most brilliant thinkers alive”—and, by Marc Andreessen, as the person with “the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.” With such acclaim, one can be forgiven for thinking there is more to the network state than there is. The basic premise is that the network state inverts the logic of the nation-state: if the latter is geographically stable and ideologically fluid, the former is ideologically stable and geographically fluid. It begins as a cloud community, little more than Facebook or any other digital collective, made up of ideologically like-minded individuals, but eventually coalesces somewhere on land. In other words, it begins as a social network but aspires to be more: it has a “national consciousness,” is held together in part by an “integrated cryptocurrency” and “a consensual government limited by a social smart contract,” and, importantly, is composed of “an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories” with “a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.” The multiplicity of linked territories is what distinguishes Srinivasan’s network state from others.

Srinivasan is clearly interested in history. “To build a new society,” he writes, “it’d be helpful to have some knowledge of how countries were built in the first place, the logistics of the process.” This is indisputably true, but unfortunately, Srinivasan’s conceptualization of history reads like a fairy tale. If, as he asserts, “new countries begin with new stories,” it is worth looking at the story Srinivasan tells. It pivots on an anomalous 20th century in which technologies, information, and knowledge were centralized, and conformity and conservatism were the norm; in which government and corporate monoliths undercut individual freedom and innovation; in which the shared experience of watching I Love Lucy was a portent of homogenization and a lack of critical thinking. So far, not so bad. This kind of critique of capitalist alienation and conformity was brilliantly articulated, among other places, in Erich Fromm’s 1941 book Escape from Freedom. But then things go awry when Srinivasan offers his solution: a libertarian escape route. Doubling down on the disenchanted individualism that undergirds monopolistic capitalism, he embraces the tired frontier thesis invoked by Trump in his Freedom Cities speech, with its sanitized celebration of westward expansion as the inevitable outlet for “ambitious men” keen to find freedom from the state.

The internet thus may be a place to forge preliminary new communities, but with “sufficiently good technology,” interested parties could rediscover (“reopen”) a territorial frontier on “remote pieces of land, on the sea, and eventually in space.” Srinivasan calls this his “generalized Frontier thesis” (invariably with tech bros, it is never enough to merely make an assertion; even the most anodyne of claims needs to be celebrated as a “thesis,” a “law,” or an “axiom”). This all sounds like what it is: colonization. Exactly what this will entail for those living in the places where networkers land is unclear, but we can imagine what is likely to happen. Here, Srinivasan would have done well to consult the works of historians such as Richard Slotkin or Greg Grandin to understand the violence, and the inevitable displacement, that accompanied the “opening” of the US frontier. That he did not is perhaps a function of his theory of history—that it should be written “to the ledger” rather than “by the winners.” I have no idea what this means. His further suggestion that history as written to the ledger—apparently the blockchain—is the “most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision,” does not help.

A generous reading would be that Srinivasan has fallen victim to the noble dream of objectivity—of an irrefutable past, known, fixed, and stable. A more likely conclusion is that he has little idea of what history is, or how it is written, interpretated, and reinterpreted. In any case, Srinivasan’s ledger is not history. It could be, depending on the questions one wishes to ask, an archive. But history? Not even close. With no grammatical structure, no narrative motion, and no interpretive meaning, the ledger is bookkeeping, and Srinivasan is a CPA.

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Few, if any, terrestrial privatized communities have emerged from the ether and become concrete realities. Liberland has garnered positive commentary from Milei, Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist head of state, but its status is ambiguous at best, and no one has settled there permanently. Satoshi Island is a lease-held property and part of the state of Vanuatu. No matter how many “Citizenship NFTs” you purchase, you still need a legitimate passport to pass through Vanuatu customs and immigration. No matter how many “Land Deed NFTs” you purchase, the land is lease-hold and dependent on renewal by custom owners—which makes you, in effect, a renter with a long commute. Galt’s Gulch Chile imploded soon after its creation. One of its main promoters, Jeff Berwick, moved on to Mexico where he founded the annual libertarian gathering advertised as Anarchapulco, the subject of a recent six-part HBO documentary misleadingly titled The Anarchists, which ends with the deaths of three of its protagonists. The Free State Project succeeded in attracting a slew of people to New Hampshire, but the subsequent negative impact of anti-government infiltration of municipal councils on public space, municipal services, and quality of life in towns such as Grafton serves as fair warning for those who think government has little to offer. The wet dream of seasteading remains just that.

Despite TSI’s promotional strategy, floating platforms on the high seas are nowhere to be found. A modest project like the libertarianesque “SeaPod” in a sea zone (a special economic zone on the water) off the coast of Panama flopped when a prototype dwelling teetered over in front of the crowd gathered for its grand opening. Meanwhile, Roatán’s Próspera, a charter city born under the aegis of a regime installed by a Honduran military coup d’état, is more akin to a country club than a country, albeit one dedicated more to rounds of non-FDA-approved life-extension experiments than to golf. And just in case it isn’t already obvious, Mars colonization has little chance of coming to fruition in the near future.

Adam Becker, in his new book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, cites scientists who suggest we’ll need at least a millennium to do anything close to colonizing Mars. Space colonization is just one of the numerous harebrained schemes critiqued by Becker. These schemes are devised by men—and they are, indeed, almost entirely men—with inflated egos and bank accounts, along with a messianic belief in themselves and in technology, from life-extension experiments and genetic modification to cryogenics and the coming singularity. They have created an entire genre of anti-science fiction that generates attention with pseudophilosophical pronouncements but ignores, as he drolly notes, the fact that “it’s hard not to die in space.”

Musk, of course, knows this. His hyperbolic pitch for Mars colonization is intended to ensure his growing profit margins. Shooting for the stars with sci-fi operatic arias is much sexier than admitting one is groveling with a handout while saying “We’d like to have more NASA contracts, please.”

None of this should be a surprise. Reality has a way of taming adolescent fantasies. Attending to history reveals just how tough a business it is to start a country. Charter city advocates or the founders of Próspera would have needed to look no further than the history of Honduras itself for a cautionary tale. In the 1820s, in the midst of the continent-wide overthrow of Spanish imperial rule, a Scottish mercenary named Gregor MacGregor sought to create a new polity (Poyais) on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. MacGregor, the story goes, took full advantage of the chaos of imperial collapse to sell investors on a sketchy scheme to settle colonists with the blessing of regional Mosquitia king George Frederic Augustus II. MacGregor’s Poyais project, which scandalized Britain in the early 1820s in much the same way the South Sea Bubble created consternation a century before, has long been understood as a scam. That standard narrative is upended in Damian Clavel’s forthcoming Financing Sovereignty: The Poyais Scandal in the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Based on extensive and careful archival research, the book shows that MacGregor was not engaged in a scam but was pursuing a similar course of action to those taken by various independence leaders of the time—namely, borrowing money via the City of London’s sovereign debt market in order to finance the armies and infrastructure necessary to defeat rivals and found an independent country. MacGregor’s effort failed not because he couldn’t sustain a grift but because building a new country is a complicated affair.

A century and more later, the 1970s efforts of Carson City–based Michael Oliver, in collaboration at various points with a weapons manufacturer and mercenary (Mitchell Livingston WerBell III), an investment specialist (Harry Schultz), and a University of Southern California philosophy professor (John Hospers), similarly saw little success, despite their roaming from the Caribbean to the southwest Pacific to distant atolls in Oceania. (Such schemes may have been the inspiration for travel writer Paul Theroux’s cautionary 1981 novel The Mosquito Coast, featuring a fed-up-with-society protagonist who drags his family from Massachusetts to Honduras to follow in the footsteps of MacGregor. He encounters even worse results: he dies, and his family returns home.) The trials and tribulations of the one place that has survived for decades—the Republic of Sealand—suggests just how demanding it is to make a country stick. The Bates family, who bought and occupied the abandoned North Sea platform, has had to cope with solitude, indifferent if not hostile governments, attempted kidnappings and takeovers, and legal questions regarding fraudulent passports. Hardly an inspiring example to follow.

Advocates of seasteading may be learning that lesson. Despite the flurry of media attention, both positive and negative, no oceanic Elysium is forthcoming anytime soon. One basic issue is the cost of labor far out at sea (a subject brilliantly addressed in Naomi Kritzer’s 2023 novel Liberty’s Daughter). Seasteaders have tried moving closer to shore, signing in 2017 a nonbinding memorandum of understanding with a functionary in French Polynesia to explore the possibility of building an anchored seastead in one of Tahiti’s lagoons. This was met with a great deal of controversy: promises of job creation were countered by critiques of tech-bro billionaire colonization; ideas about technology-driven climate change mitigation encountered skepticism and claims of further ecological damage.

The controversy caught the attention of Richard Powers, who made it (and seasteading) a central node in his Booker Prize–nominated 2024 novel Playground. When tech mogul Peter Mathias (a thinly disguised Peter Thiel) seeks to recolonize the island of Makatea, previously a site of phosphorous extraction, as a base for constructing seasteads, the islanders’ responses are varied. For some, seasteading is a colonialist scheme; for others, it is an investment in communities with limited options in terms of jobs, salaries, and health facilities. Bringing the ocean to life by following the trajectories of multiple characters, Powers carefully navigates the choppy waters of seasteading, ocean colonization, and oceanic life writ large. But it is telling that, in a metafictional turn at the end, AI generates, so it seems, the memories that make up the narrative. Human intelligence, meanwhile, has its own ideas about whose playground the ocean will be. By the time Powers’s book appeared in print, Tahitians had successfully tanked the Seasteading Institute’s MoU.

Despite the repeated setbacks, new-country aspirants have bobbed along with earnest resolve. What gives? If history is any measure, there is little to be gained and much to be lost in pursuing private sovereignty. At least a partial answer can be found in the fact that many of those involved have vast economic resources, and in libertarian start-up mythology, a small investment may yield a serious return. It isn’t a huge leap to imagine how the special economic and foreign trade zones that currently dot the globe—more than 1,000 of the latter exist in the United States alone—might acquire the sovereign powers usually given only to nation-states. Private sovereignty might seem like the logical next step in the corporatization of the state, a process that began half a century ago with the transfer of public wealth into private hands through austerity auctions, the gutting of social services and reductions in public spending, and the deregulation of financial industries. The special economic zone is thus “merely,” as it were, being scaled up to the level of hegemonic political structure.

A political theory, the Dark Enlightenment, tries to make historical and theoretical sense of, and to justify, this vision of a world composed of corporate sovereignty. Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug), one of its main promulgators, imagines a world made up of thousands of small city-states owned and operated by for-profit sovereign corporations. Zones and jurisdictions are, then, test sites for advancing Promethean projects: the reterritorialization of a planet governed by techno-capitalist relations, concentrated private property, and antidemocratic, monarchical political structures. Few degrees separate credit card or home mortgage or student debt peonage from outright serfdom. Welcome to the private fiefdom as a planetary project.

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We ignore the steady growth of such efforts at our peril, and especially so when they resonate with the aims of profit-seeking heads of state. A journalist wrote me recently to suggest that these various projects are no longer fringe. With large numbers of people working as digital nomads, involved in crypto and interested in libertarian ideas, perhaps we are indeed entering an era when proprietary states and Freedom Cities will become reality. If that is the case, then we need to pay attention to what such projects offer and how they might be reworked and reappropriated for different political ends.

This is partially the task Atossa Araxia Abrahamian sets for herself in her thoughtful and perceptive 2024 book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. Abrahamian tracks the extraterritorial places wedged inside or under the state patterns we typically see on the globe. These nether places allow the wealthy, as her subtitle puts it, to “hack the world.” Her solution, or rather her envisaged future beyond such hacking, is not a return to nationalism. For one thing, the nation-state itself has created the possibilities for such “hacks”: an array of holes, often intentional, in the nation-state’s legal fabric allows those with means, wealth, and connections to rework regulations, laws, and taxes to their advantage. (Extraterritorial spaces are, after all, designed largely for the benefit of the already-benefited, who can live above and beyond nationalities and laws, as Brooke Harrington shows in her rollicking 2024 forensic study Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism.) Moreover, as Abrahamian suggests, nationalism and nation-states have generated profound and deadly exclusions. If they have been a mediocre midwife for the birth of a good life, why go back? And what are the alternatives? What if the political form of some of these new projects could be separated out from their ideological content?

For the moment, such spaces may be examples of how wealth hacks the globe, but in the near future, they might become welcome alternatives to a deeply unequal system—in terms of mobility, access, and well-being—all too often naturalized as inevitable. Alternative jurisdictions and zones might offer something better for many of the world’s vulnerable, particularly those who are stateless or displaced. “[I]n the best of worlds,” Abrahamian writes in a chapter on charter cities, “such a hybrid jurisdiction could represent a new kind of place, with new rules for all people: a temporary, or even a permanent, city of refuge. To cede this territory to rigidly ideological capitalists alone would be a big mistake.”

One alternative to capitalist network states and wealth-hacked worlds might be to scale up rather than down. This is the argument of Jonathan Blake and Nil Gilman’s Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (2024). The anti–network state is not to be found in a nostalgic return to the 20th-century welfare state nor in the construction of progressive or left-wing enclaves such as Hakim Bey’s “permanent autonomous zones,” but rather in a kind of planetary governance that sits alongside traditional nation-state structures. “What,” Blake and Gilman ask, “would governance look like if our planetary condition was central rather than ancillary to our political self-conceptions?”

Confronting the threat of catastrophic climate change, they propose the opposite of a libertarian, new-country, bunker-prepper ideology: a system of “planetary subsidiarity” in which governance duties are assigned at the planetary, national, and regional levels depending on the scale of the issues to be managed. This would not entail beefing up the United Nations or creating a world state but, rather, forming planetary institutions “tasked with managing specific planetary problems” and populated by experts in particular fields (pandemics, climate, and so forth). There are a multitude of difficulties here, but perhaps the most salient is that Srinivasan, Musk, and a host of others are quite cognizant of what the future holds in social and planetary terms. The libertarian tech bros won’t be dialing back anytime soon on earth metals mining, deep sea colonization, seafloor extraction, and the like. Theirs is, to some degree, a flat-footed effort to create a real-life Elysium—and to leave the ever-growing lumpen behind.

That means there is nothing innocuous about private sovereignty projects, despite protestations that these are about “letting a thousand nations bloom.” They generate controversy and resistance for a reason. Contrary to their claims that resistance results from the ignorant masses not knowing what is best for themselves, or from corrupt politicians eager to protect their own entrenched racket, or from people unable or unwilling to imagine something better, it comes from a well-founded skepticism toward the slick sales pitch, the glossy brochure, the soaring rhetoric, and the promise of untold riches. And it comes from an awareness of capitalism’s history. Does anyone in Honduras really need to be reminded, when they look at Próspera, of the United Fruit Company and its company towns?

Adam Becker suggests that billionaire control over the rest of us is not “limited to the future—it’s here, now.” “[W]e need,” he continues, “to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.” It means we need to pay attention to the long history of company towns and free ports, of SEZs and charter cities, of colonization and its aftermath, and to the hard lessons learned by the legions of people who have suffered the consequences of the rich man’s promise of freedom.

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