CYBER SECESSIONISTS

Silicon Valley moguls are creating regulation-free, crypto-based “network states.” And hoping to gobble up land near you.

- By Kiera Butler

EARLY LAST YEAR, A GROUP OF ENTREPRENEURS and tech enthusiasts from around the world gathered inside a newly built dome on the Honduran island of Roatán to grapple with a problem: For thought leaders who want to move fast and break things, what can be done about laws that get in the way? The conference, sponsored by the Salt Lake City-based Startup Societies Foundation, was being put on in Vitalia, a longevity-themed “pop-up city” that caters to American medical tourists sidestepping cumbersome FDA regulations. Its motto: “We're here to make death optional.” Vitalia was in turn located in Próspera, a semiautonomous city on Roatán. Imagine a nesting doll, a city within a city within a city—all on a Caribbean isle.

Próspera, the project of entrepreneurs funded by venture capital firms backed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and venture capital mogul Marc Andreessen, was established in 2017 and continues today, despite repeated efforts from Honduras to shut it down. An example of a “special economic zone,” Próspera is an autonomous jurisdiction with limited regulations. The general idea has been around for years—Mother Jones wrote about a failed Thiel-backed effort to build floating cities at sea back in 2012, for example. But in recent years, Silicon Valley founders, as they like to call themselves, have reworked the concept into the “network state,” as coined by entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Thiel’s and a former colleague of Andreessen’s. As journalist Gil Durán observed in a New Republic piece on Srinivasan last year, “Balaji’s politics have become even more stridently authoritarian and extremist, yet he remains a celebrated figure in key circles,” including multiple Signal chats that, Semafor reported in April, helped radicalize the Silicon Valley elite.