Latest news with #Próspera
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's 'Freedom Cities' Are a Devious Scam
Tech bros love to repackage old ideas as innovation. We've all seen it. But their latest foray into disruption no one else wants, the so-called 'network state' and its constellation of start-up cities, deserves our attention. This notion has been embraced by President Donald Trump, who has rechristened them 'freedom cities.' In reality, the scheme is a techno-fascist vision of the future that's been quietly but persistently pushed and funded by billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and Sam Altman for years. Despite the shiny marketing materials for places like Próspera and California Forever, which make outlandish promises of futuristic utopias, the start-up city as a concept is a modern, ketamine-infused repackaging of something that flopped into obsolescence long ago: the company town. And I would know. I grew up in a coal-mining town in Southwestern Wyoming and compiled an oral history of the place called Out Here On Our Own. I talked to multiple people who grew up in the old coal camps where one company owned and controlled everything. The surveillance, the practice of paying workers in dubious currency (commonly referred to as 'scrip'), and the ultimate goal of creating small fiefdoms for company masters—it's all been done, and to horrific effect. From staggering rates of suicide and addiction to a constant sense of fear among citizens, the trauma of living in a company town cascades through generations. The company town framework gained steam during the Industrial Revolution. Pullman, Illinois, is a notorious American example. George Pullman, who owned Pullman Palace Car Company, forced people to work interminable hours in unforgiving factory conditions, and he paid them in scrip that was worthless outside his own stores. In 1893, Pullman cut workers' wages by 25 percent without lowering rent on their homes—not to mention the grocery prices in those same company stores—which led to fierce labor organization efforts and the bloodiest strike America had seen. The Pullman strike showed the world that the company town was a doomed experiment in human control. But the industrialists of the time were every bit as hubristic as today's tech oligarchs. They saw Pullman as a barometer for how much cruelty workers would endure before revolting. The profit margins were too enticing to abandon the model altogether, so company owners built fiefdoms across the country, albeit in slightly less extreme forms. The end result was always the same: worker organization—and often violent revolt. Coal, steel, and lumber companies set up camps and towns across the West based on where those resources were abundant, not where people wanted to live. My hometown, Rock Springs, is a paragon of that phenomenon. It's a windy, barren, and often frigid place that never would've been colonized and developed as somewhere to live were it not for its surfeit of coal. Coal jutted from the hills and badlands in the area. Union Pacific, or UP, didn't hesitate to lay tracks, dig mines, and set up a network of mining camps. By the early 1900s, Rock Springs grew into a proper town that was, for all intents and purposes, owned by Union Pacific. The company built shoddy housing with paper-thin walls for workers who toiled in mines where they were as likely to get mangled by runaway pit cars as they were to die in cave-ins or explosions. One former resident recalled visiting his uncle in company housing: 'The UP coal houses were stark. They were clapboard, and I remember the linoleum being all worn out. The lighting was simply a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.' Meanwhile, Union Pacific Coal raked in a fortune. Then, as now, my hometown had crushing rates of addiction and suicide. With miners regularly dying at work, the experience of living there was defined for many by despair. As if that wasn't enough, Union Pacific evicted families from their meager homes whenever miners got killed. Former inhabitant Les Georgis told me about an explosion near Rock Springs that killed several miners. Following a mass funeral, where 'the miners were laid out like cordwood,' Union Pacific evicted surviving family members from their homes, leaving them to fend for themselves. 'My wife's grandma had been living in a coal camp house, and she had a little baby,' Georgis said. 'The coal company told her that, since her husband wasn't around to work the mine anymore, she had to move out. They put all her stuff out on the street. I knew another family that happened to as well.' Such cruelty combined with harsh conditions in the mines to push miners to organize and strike. Union Pacific's desire to own and operate coal mines deflated when the train company switched to diesel engines, but Rock Springs and its satellite settlements still relied on coal mining. Union Pacific shuttered its mines with no concern for how people would survive. Other coal companies had moved in over the years, but UP closing its mines was a massive blow. The company simply boarded them up and left. Abandoned mines caused subsidence in neighborhoods where houses warped and sank, but what did Union Pacific care? Growing up in a mining town, and the conversations I had with multiple generations of residents, made it clear to me that it's a colossal mistake to allow companies and investment groups to build towns where they're free to do as they please. There have been efforts over the years to prevent company towns from forming again, but that hasn't stopped corporations like Amazon, Google, and Meta from flirting heavily with the concept. The network state movement goes well beyond those prior flirtations: It seeks to form a collection of corporately owned charter cities where regulation doesn't exist. This idea started gaining momentum with the publication of Silicon Valley gadabout Balaji Srinivasan's book, The Network State, which put him firmly in the company of those tech barons who've made democracy itself a target of their ire. Srinivasan argues that nation-states are dying and should be replaced with a global collection of corporately controlled enclaves, each functioning as its own de facto country. In his view, we should dismantle and replace countries like the United States, as engineers would an outmoded piece of software. Seen by tech fascists as an appealing alternative to democracy, the network state is the company town framework on a cocktail of steroids, ketamine, and life-extending placebos. Rebranded as freedom cities, this sophomoric thought experiment has been given the green light by Trump. But for the call to disrupt democracy, this movement has few, if any, new ideas. A direct callback to the use of scrip in company towns, cryptocurrency is a key component of freedom cities. One function of unregulated scrip in places like Pullman was to further ensnare workers by controlling their spending power and ability to leave. Paying workers in crypto coins, each of which is highly mercurial and vulnerable to scams and price manipulation, would provide similar levers for control. (It's worth noting that Amazon uses Swag Bucks, its own version of scrip, to reward high-performing employees, despite scrip becoming illegal in 1938.) What's truly disturbing is how far along the network state movement has gotten. Located off the coast of Honduras, a start-up city called Próspera hosts medical facilities that are free to explore genetic experiments with abandon. According to The New York Times, a construction worker died building Próspera. He fell to his death during a blackout. In northern California, a real estate coalition dubbed California Forever seeks to create its own city that local residents fear will buy up all the land, clog roads, and pollute their skies. Elon Musk's SpaceX owns Starbase, Texas, which poses threats to local wildlife and uses the old-hat tactic of filing employees away in company housing. The conditions of Musk's prefabricated homes are obviously better than the old coal camp houses, but there's still the question of what would happen to an employee's family if they got fired, especially in the face of eroded regulation and a CEO who thinks empathy is weak. As with company towns, where spying was a common tool to crush dissent and disrupt collective action, each of these start-up cities is, or will be, subject to relentless surveillance. Representative democracy has always been the enemy of plutocrats like George Pullman, Peter Thiel, Brian Armstrong, and now Elon Musk. Whether you call it a company town or a freedom city, the goal is the same: to foster a fascistic version of capitalism where company owners are free to explore the depths of their greed and sadism. But as Trump allows such ghouls to form their so-called freedom cities, those of us who've learned from human history will do well to recall that this has all been tried before—and remember the Pullman strike.
WIRED
07-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
‘Startup Nation' Groups Say They're Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities'
Photo-Illustration:Several groups representing 'startup nations'—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create 'freedom cities' in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned. 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. Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the startup nation known as Próspera, tells WIRED that he and other Próspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea in recent weeks. He claims the administration has been very receptive. In 2023, Trump floated the idea of creating 10 freedom cities. Now, Goff says that Próspera's vision is to create 'not just 10, but as many as the market can handle.' They hope to have drafted legislation ready by the end of the year. 'The energy in DC is absolutely electric,' Goff says. 'You can tell in meetings with the people involved that they have the mandate to do some of the more hyperbolic, verbose things Trump has mentioned.' Three Paths Forward According to Goff, Freedom Cities Coalition has briefed White House officials on three options for creating freedom cities. One is through 'interstate compacts.' In this scenario, two or more states could set aside territories with shared tax and regulation policies, with some state-specific carve-outs. Under existing law, these compacts can't be revoked, though they can be dissolved under certain circumstances. If an interstate compact is approved by Congress, it becomes valid under federal law. Goff says the coalition is considering Congressional legislation that would give 'advanced consent' to any freedom city compacts. That way, Congress wouldn't need to approve each individual city. Two other options are creating federal enclaves with special economic and jurisdictional zones, or having Trump issue executive orders to create each new freedom city. 'It depends on what Trump and the White House want to do,' Goff says. 'Whatever pathway they want to take, we want to help them make that a reality.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. A Network of Backers (and Detractors) Freedom Cities Coalition was created by an entity called NeWay Capital LLC, which owns several trademarks for Próspera. Since opening on the Honduran island of Roatán in 2020, Próspera has been attracting tech workers and startups by promising low taxes, few regulations, and a businesslike government that considers its citizens to be akin to customers. Its financiers include Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Coinbase. Startup nations outside the US have largely relied on the creation of special economic zones (SEZs), where the regular rules governing businesses are waived, often in order to attract foreign investment. The hope, it appears, is to bring a similar model to the US. Notably, the current government of Honduras considers Próspera and its special economic status to be illegal. The country's previous president, Juan Orlando Hernández, gave Próspera a permanent charter to operate on its own terms. However, many Honduran citizens opposed Próspera, arguing that it has increased poverty and worsened biodiversity in the area. The Honduran Congress passed a law in 2022 repealing the allowance of SEZs, and Próspera sued the Honduran government shortly after. The lawsuit is ongoing. President Donad Trump mentioned the idea of freedom cities on the campaign trail in March 2023. He promised that if he was elected president, he would hold a contest to pick 10 winners to build their own freedom cities on federal land. Trump hasn't referred to the idea in public since, but Goff says he's confident that it wasn't a throwaway line from the president. 'It's not just a marketing tactic—they take it very literally,' Goff adds, referring to members of Trump's team. 'They intend to follow through with all of the promises they made on the campaign trail.' A Second Legislative Push Freedom Cities Coalition isn't the only group currently lobbying the Trump administration. Frontier Foundation, a 501c4 organization, is working in partnership with the nonprofit Charter Cities Institute to bring freedom cities to the US. Jeffrey Mason, the head of policy at the Charter Cities Institute, tells WIRED that several other groups have recently joined their effort, including the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation. They're drafting legislation that Mason says should be ready 'hopefully sometime in the next several months.' He adds that members of these groups are having 'casual conversations with people in the White House,' in addition to Republican and Democratic members of Congress. In a 2025 memo shared with WIRED, the Frontier Foundation argues that 'domestic innovation and production has been significantly impeded for decades by outdated and unnecessarily restrictive federal regulation.' Allen tells WIRED that using federal land would lower the cost of development for startup cities. The Frontier Foundation suggests that federally owned land outside western cities like Boise, Idaho; Grand Junction, Colorado; and Redmond, Oregon would be suitable candidates. 'If we're able to get a legislative transfer of land from the US government to make a public-private partnership, or a trust, or even a private corporation, then it's a lower cost of capital,' he explains. The Frontier Foundation memo also recommends allowing private landowners to become freedom cities and to 'allow municipalities to vote to become Freedom Cities, allow Freedom Cities to expand with the consent of the contiguous land owners.' When asked why the Freedom Cities movement has chosen not to focus on revitalizing existing post-industrial cities like Detroit or Toledo, Ohio, Allen tells WIRED that 'when you're building these new facilities, you need to sort of start from scratch.' He noted that Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the federal departments to lease federal lands to be used as data centers in the final days of his administration. 'There's so much capital and there's so much political will, but yet there's an inability to develop these technologies,' says Allen. 'And the inability comes from lack of space and too many regulations.' But Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, warns that building new cities from scratch could have negative consequences. 'To be outside of the law and above the law, what does that mean for the rest of the country?' he asks. 'It seems like you're going to start hollowing out other places in order to have these places where the rules are suspended and don't apply anymore to certain people.' Goff says that unlike Próspera, which has an entirely different tax structure from surrounding Honduras, freedom cities in the US would likely pay a similar amount in state and federal taxes as other American cities. The main difference would be how the cities are regulated. American Dynamism One company that stands to benefit from the rise of freedom cities is Minicircle, a longevity biotech company focused on developing gene therapies to extend human lifespans. The company's seed funding came from Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and it currently has offices in both Austin, Texas, and Próspera. Minicircle cofounder Mac Davis is also working with the Frontier Foundation. Davis says that Minicircle's gene therapy clinical trial on the protein follistatin—which he claims increases muscle mass without side effects, and also has life-extending benefits in mice—was only possible in Próspera, but noted he'd like to see that change. 'I'd like a 'longevity city' where everyone and their dog is on gene therapy,' Davis says. Davis adds that he can imagine many other companies benefiting from freedom cities, including SpaceX, the defense hardware and software company Anduril, and Oklo, a nuclear fission startup chaired by Sam Altman. Many of the industries Allen says he hopes to foster in Freedom Cities–energy, nuclear, semiconductors, and defense technology–are, not coincidentally, ones 'a lot of venture [capital] is going towards' as funding moves away from SaaS, digital, and internet consumer brands. 'The theme is American Dynamism,' he says, referencing the 2022 manifesto from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which argues that 'the scientific and operational excellence of consequential technology companies made up for the shortfall of our flailing governmental institutions.' Since 2021, venture capitalists have plowed more than $100 billion into defense tech startups alone. Some tech companies have been considering revitalizing nuclear power in order to sustain AI data centers, which use a huge amount of energy. Amazon signed several nuclear power agreements last year, Google made a deal with a nuclear power company in October 2024, and Meta is asking for proposals on how the company can leverage nuclear power. Goff tells WIRED that he thinks freedom cities could also be used as manufacturing hubs and shipbuilding ports, allowing builders to bypass the environmental review process. Mason says the American Enterprise Institute, which is partnering with the Frontier Foundation and Charter Cities Institute, is eager to find ways to use freedom cities to increase housing. Mason says he's most excited about speeding up innovation in sectors like biotech and using nuclear power to power AI data centers. 'There's a lot of exciting opportunities here, especially as we need a lot of data centers,' Mason says. 'There's a lot of land that you can tap.' But Duran says that the same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities' ultrawealthy backers. 'These are going to be cities without democracy,' he claims. 'These are going to be cities without workers' rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people, is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities.'
