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.
