Tag Archives: charter cities

Prospera, Trump, Thiel and the Honduras drug trafficking pardon

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The former president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking and then pardoned by Trump, has ties to Peter Thiel and the “charter city” Prospera. I keep tabs on Prospera, as I was initially interested in the charter city idea after hearing a lecture by Paul Romer (a Nobel prize winning economist). The original concept, which was about economic opportunity, efficiency, and clarity of mission, has morphed into something far more corrupt and ugly.

This governing arrangement was organized in part by Hernández, who served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 until January 2022. Prospera was permitted to launch the charter city after Hernández allowed for the creation of semiautonomous Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs. The ZEDEs were then overseen by a committee that included three of Hernández’s underlings and several American libertarian activists.

So there you have it. I am not saying this is proof that Prospera is the reason for the pardon. But what we see in the press is a lot of puzzlement that the U.S. government can be simultaneously fighting an anti-drug war on the Venezuelan government and supporting a pro-drug former Honduran government. This is logically inconsistent. On the other hand, simultaneously supporting right-wing big business interests in Venezuela (think oil contracts if not outright ownership for US corporations) and right-wing big business interests in Honduras is logically consistent (not to mention corrupt and cynical).

Forest City

Forest City is a sort of boondoggle new town development in southern Malaysia, just across the border from Singapore. I think the idea was that people and companies would want to live there cheaply and commute or do business in Singapore. It hasn’t lived up to its promise.

Anyway, what caught my eye in this Los Angeles Times article was a tech entrepreneur setting up yet another seminar on the whole charter cities libertarian enclave city-state idea.

They have descended on Forest City to attend Network School, the brainchild of former Coinbase Inc. executive and “The Network State” author Balaji Srinivasan. In this troubled megaproject once envisaged to house some 50 times its current population, they’re conducting a real-life experiment of sorts with Srinivasan’s vision of “startup societies” defined less by historical territory than shared beliefs in technology, cryptocurrency and light regulation…

Nearly 400 students, many of them entrepreneurs, have so far made the journey to Forest City to study everything from coding to unconventional theories on statehood. They’re building crypto projects, fine-tuning their physiques and testing whether a shared ideology — rather than just shared territory — can bind a community. The price starts at $1,500 per month, including lodging and food, for those who opt for a shared room…

“We’re all getting jacked,” said Prad Nukala, a student at the school and founder of crypto startup Sonr, which describes itself as a “blockchain for decentralized identity.”

If there is any doubt, “jacked” here is a reference to weight lifting.

$1500 per month doesn’t sound bad at all for an all-inclusive month-long vacation.

March 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. might be headed for recession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competent advice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.

Most hopeful story: Trump seems to have some anti-nuclear (weapons) instincts. We will see if his actions bear any relation to his words.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.

what’s new with “charter cities”?

The original idea advanced by Paul Romer has morphed into some weird unregulated cryptocurrency biotech thing in Honduras.

Prospera, if you haven’t come across it before, is a libertarian mini-state which is funded by crypto investors and tech oligarchs including Thiel and DOGE recruiter Marc Andreessen. Operating outside of Honduran law and run by a small council of venture capitalists and crypto libertarians who set their own laws and regulations, Prospera is under threat from the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, who wants to strip it of its special legal status…

Prospera is just one of a number of crypto-based, parallel institution states-within-states that tech oligarchs are trying to establish around the world. With Trump having embraced crypto libertarians as his ticket back to power, we should expect him to defend and advance their interests, not least because of their potential, as in the case of Prospera, to be the tip of the imperial spear in the developing world.

Biotech experiments off the coast of a central American country? What if they made a theme park with genetically-engineered dinosaurs? Somebody should really develop a book and movie franchise on this original idea! (Yes, once upon a time there was a book called Jurassic Park, and it was original.)

There is a William Gibson reference in this article to Freeside, a private city on a space station in Neuromancer.

And yours truly once attempted a not-very-good novella after attending a lecture by Paul Romer on his charter cities concept in Singapore, which embodies some aspects of the concept to begin with.

what is “dark enlightenment”?

Well, according to Quartz, basically “dark enlightenment” is a neo-fascist ideology to beware of, in which democratic governments are replaced by corporations.

What are the tenets of Dark Enlightenment theory? There are a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. “It’s an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point,” says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester and author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.

Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that “elites” will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.

Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to Dark Enlightenment, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO.


I’m reminded of a lecture I attended by Paul Romer on his idea of “charter cities”. The basic idea was to create something that looked very much like a corporate state where virtually all institutions including politics would be subordinated to the maximization of economic growth. Now, I am not accusing Paul Romer of being a fascist. In fact, in his conception people from any country can be part of the charter city, as long as they have skills and follow norms of behavior designed to maximize economic growth. But one thing his concept does appear to share is that those norms of behavior are imposed from above, and the only free choice people have is that society is a choice to either be part of it or not.

refugee cities

This post makes a case for establishing cities for refugees rather than “camps”.

Second, the world now has 60 million refugees. That is a number roughly the size of six Belgiums, Hungarys, or Swedens. If they were to create their own country, it would be the size of France. In the face of such staggering numbers, commitments to take thousands or even tens of thousands of people will do almost nothing to alleviate the misery of millions.

Rather than conflating the issues of refugees and terrorism, politicians and policymakers should be addressing each separately. On the question of refugees, Western countries should take in as many as their populations can assimilate, demonstrating a willingness to make good on the universal values they profess for both moral and political reasons.

But the world also needs far bolder solutions than twentieth-century approaches like limited asylum quotas and “temporary” refugee camps. In particular, it is time to embrace the prospect not of camps but of cities – places where up to a million refugees of any particular nationality can live safely and learn how to build a better future.

This reminds me a little of Paul Romer’s “charter cities”. The idea was to create entirely new city states focused on economic growth that people from anywhere in the world could opt into, provided they agreed to certain norms of behavior. I find the idea compelling, although Romer’s attempts to realize it on the ground in Honduras ended up on the rocks. You can argue that Singapore developed somewhat along these lines, although it was not founded based on this ideology (in fact, it was not even founded voluntarily, but just sort of cast adrift.)