Prospera Network State
SEE MAIN SEASTEAD FOR OLDER SORTA DISAMBIG
gil bk sri balaji
GIL BK
PRAXIS dryden BROWN COWAN EMERG V; sri greenland conflict minerals?
pronomos cap pt; altman, sbf, a16 winkel lonsdale, coinbase
-=-=
ca forever
gil bk hired gavin and kamala pol op; 2024 prop?
andrew isker xian
buskirk
GAZA
MARK LUTTER GMU VENEZ EMERG V
...
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GMAIL 10 26
The Collapse Of A Billionaire Tech Cult
- Smutstep, Pokémon Waymo swattings, foodie calls, the Cornell 7 merch economy, LinkedIn selfies, TikTok's hot dog bandit, .meow, and how the bad science of AI doomerism is good for big business
Taylor Lorenz
Oct 14
Some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech elites have a radical new dream to abandon modern democracy completely and build their own sovereign nation. A millionaire VC named Balaji Srinivasan is the leader of this new movement and he calls it the "Network State".
In this episode of my podcast, I speak with freelance journalist Sam Venis about his firsthand reporting at Balaji's Network School. We discuss what really went down at Balaji’s experimental new government pop up set up inside Forest City, a massive, abandoned ghost city in Malaysia. From aggressive NDAs and toxic black mold to clashes with local governments and authoritarian power trips, Sam breaks down his firsthand investigation into tech’s most bizarre and dangerous exit strategy.
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mpu 6 26 mpu
Peter Thiel's Plan To Replace Democracy (And Profit Off What Comes Next)
milton grandson 
lonsdale
gil duran: 9
In 1997, there was a book that came out called “The Sovereign Individual.”
3:03
It argued that in the 21st century, two technologies would result basically in the overthrow of democracy
3:11
and the demise of nations like the United States.
3:14
Cyber currency, which we would call crypto today.
3:17
And the other one was advanced automation that would create a world without jobs,
3:21
and that wealthy individuals who were savvy investors could profit from this coming doom
3:27
and prepare for it by making the right investments.
3:30
This book had a major impact on Peter Thiel.
3:33
And of course, it influenced the people Thiel was paying.
3:37
Joe Lansdale got to work.
3:39
He started a nonprofit, California Common Sense , allegedly dedicated to transparency and government
3:44
spending, so that voters could make a difference if they found things they were unhappy with.
3:48
On the surface, that sounds great, but two founders of that nonprofit started a for-profit:
3:53
OpenGOV.
3:54
OpenGOV is a software service for government agencies to manage data.
3:57
The idea of replacing democratic processes in the hands of all of us
GHIS MAXWELL!
4:29
But the think tanks would herald a few successful versions of their privatization plan.
4:34
Like Sandy Springs, Georgia, famously the first city in America
4:38
to privatize nearly all government services.
4:41
It was the darling of the libertarian press.
4:43
Everything for-profit, nothing public.
4:46
And a consulting firm making a little cash off the taxpayers at every juncture.
4:49
Those extra taxes for corporate profit started adding up, though.
4:54
Eventually, Sandy Springs unprivatized
4:56
saving taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
4:59
There were also nascent communities focused on Christian values
5:03
that the network state media heralds.
5:05
Battle Ground, Washington,
5:06
where a data center billionaire is buying up all the property to own the town,
5:11
the mayor is on his payroll,
5:12
and Highland Rim, a series of developments in Appalachia
5:16
run by the investment firm New Founding.
5:18
And that's not even including the California Forever Project,
5:21
a proposed tech city in Solano County
5:24
funded by Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman and other billionaires.
5:29
But what if this was never really about these little mini governments?
5:33
Here's Peter Thiel saying the quiet part out loud in 2010.
5:37
[Thiel] Technology is this incredible alternative to politics.
...
7:13
You could pass laws, know, Cicero's in 15 states, we're getting dozens of laws passed.
7:17
And then we're going to teach people that and go to the national level.
7:20
[Gil] Riling people up is definitely part of their game plan.
7:22
That's what we saw in the San Francisco recalls.
7:24
San Francisco had a spike in crime during the pandemic,
7:28
but so did almost every big city in the United States.
7:30
Only in San Francisco,
7:32
which has extremely low crime rates compared to most cities in red states,
7:37
did they create this massive panic using social media and doom influencers
7:43
to convince everybody that everything was worse than it ever been.
7:47
And as Lonsdale got into nonprofits and think tanks,
7:49
Patri Friedman – remember him?
7:51
Milton Friedman's grandson?
7:53
Started his own VC firm with backing from Peter Thiel
7:56
called Pronomos Capital, existing entirely for investing in privatized governments.
8:01
In Honduras, Pronomos invested in the first government
8:04
run entirely by a for-profit corporation: Prospera.
8:08
[Gil] Prospera is this little enclave on the island of Roatan in Honduras
8:13
That claims to be its own little charter city
8:16
that was funded by American venture capitalists and has been touted
8:20
as the flagship project of the network state movement.
...
lonsdale
8:24
But the real flagship project is something bigger:
8:27
the entire United States government.
8:30
It shows in policy.
8:32
Remember the whole thing about taking over Greenland?
8:35
That idea emerged and was celebrated by the people we've been talking about.
8:38
I think having a frontier is very healthy.
8:40
I think part of America being great is that it's is growing and creating more wealth for everyone.
8:44
If the people in Greenland want to be part of us, if we can use those resources
8:48
better and make sure Russia and China don't get advantages in the Arctic.
8:51
The Freedom City as a name didn't really gain momentum,
8:54
but the idea is there, and the influence in the administration is clear.
8:58
Joe Lansdale helped staff up the Trump administration
9:01
and just recently accompanied administration officials to the Philippines
9:04
to christen a new regulatory zone.
9:07
Just last week, we signed a historic deal with the Philippines, 4000 acres
9:11
right next to Subic Bay, where we're going to build a
9:14
first-of-its-kind, AI-native industrial park.
9:17
I was there for a day in the Philippines with everyone.
9:20
They’re, they’re excited, what you guys are doing.
9:22
That sounds a lot like a startup city....
9:37
that this stuff could travel to the White House.
9:42
[Gil] In September 2024, there was a conference at Fort Mason
9:46
in San Francisco called Reboot 2024,
9:49
and its website announced that we are now in a new reality.
9:53
And that Silicon Valley was waking up and about to become this powerful force in politics.
9:58
And the guest speaker was Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation
10:02
who was the guy who had shepherded Project 2025.
10:05
So here you had tech VCs in San Francisco...
kishner
10:20
for maritime prosperity zones,
10:23
districts on American soil with fewer regulations
10:26
for corporations to build ships and reinvigorate the industrial base.
10:30
Then there's the New American Industrial Alliance,
10:33
a tech industry interest group pushing for unrestricted data center growth.
10:37
They were listed as co-sponsors of the Blueprint for America,
10:41
lobbying for prosperity zones on American soil.
10:44
A plan to sell federal and public land to private companies
10:48
to build low regulation, low tax havens for progress.
10:52
Their co-sponsor on the Blueprint was the company behind Prospera in Honduras,
10:56
whose lobbying disclosures show they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
11:00
pushing for prosperity zones.
11:02
But they also spent big on begging the American government for handouts of your money.
11:08
They've lobbied on refunding the US International Development Financial Corporation,
11:12
a government organization run by Epstein associate Ben Black
11:15
that uses tax dollars to invest in American companies abroad.
11:20
That's privatized foreign aid.
11:22
And they might finally get their way.
11:24
Black went to Honduras and promised investment in real estate and technology there,
11:28
including an investment in La Ceiba, which is slated to be absorbed by Prospera.
11:34
But it's more than just government handouts.
11:37
It's war crimes.
11:38
So we did a master plan.
11:39
And we've developed ways to redevelop Gaza.
11:41
Gaza is President Trump's and saying has amazing potential.
11:44
And this is for the people of Gaza.
11:45
We've developed it into zones.
11:47
[Gil] It was sort of insane to see it all come together in this way.
...11:55
there's always the idea of a new city that they're proposing.
11:59
And it's not clear why we need these new cities.
12:01
You know, Gaza should be rebuilt for for the Palestinians.
12:05
But these guys see it as an opportunity to take the land.
12:09
And so that shows you the degree to which this thinking is starting to imbue everything that they do.
12:15
[Sean] Look at how the people in this fringe movement
12:18
reacted to other invasions.
12:20
In 2019, Mark Lutter, leader of a Peter Thiel funded new city think tank, said that
12:25
overthrowing the Venezuelan government would be an opportunity for these projects.
12:30
And when the invasion did happen, Lutter suggested America
12:33
establish a Florida or Texas style government there.
12:36
He cites America paying for a wholesale development plan after regime change.
12:41
Which is exactly what we're doing in Iran today,
12:44
to the tune of $300 billion.
12:47
Palmer Luckey, Lonsdale and Thiel associate, and founder of AI defense contractor Anduril,
12:52
pictured here in cosplay,
12:54
suggested a privatized city on Guantanamo Bay in Cuba,
12:57
which President Trump also threatened with invasion.
13:01
Again, nobody wants this.
13:02
They know that.
13:03
That's why they hate populism.
13:05
That's why they hate democratic representation
13:07
despite all of this being couched in freedom.
13:10
What they're asking for is to exit entirely from any government structure.
13:14
But that's just not how it works,
13:16
especially when most of these guys are government contractors, and are still wanting
13:20
to have the benefits of our society without having the responsibilities of our society.
13:26
These are people who don't like being told “no.”
13:28
They're angry at the pushback against data centers, that we don't want AI to take over everything,
gil
13:33
that no one supports annihilating a civilization to replace it with one they can profit from.
13:38
People need to understand that the billionaires have become radicalized against democracy,
13:42
and they're in the process of using everything they have to try to destroy it.
13:45
And that's the battle of our moment.
13:47
That's the battle of our time.
...
13:49
It's not too late to push back.
13:51
Public response to data centers works.
13:53
Many of the governance as a service startups are starting their work
13:56
in towns and states where you can still have a voice to stop them.
14:01
The billionaire class wants to turn your home into their playland,
14:05
completely change how everything is run to funnel more wealth to themselves,
14:09
create chaos,
14:11
and then when everything is all f*cked up,
14:13
walk away with their winnings to their own private enclaves,
14:16
all under the guise of fixing a broken government.
14:20
A government that they broke.
14:21
And yeah, sure, the government is broken,
14:24
but it's not because of democracy or lack of corporate privatization.
14:28
It's because of corporate power.
14:30
We need more democracy and less corporate control.
---
LONG
Is this how Pardons work now?
HONDURAS GIL DURAN STONE AT MAL CRISH SOCIALISM AND SAVE FREEDOM CITY PROSPERA TECH BROS
The Bitchuation Room (with Francesca Fiorentini)
242K subscribers
15,571 views Dec 28, 2025
In his first year in office of his second term, Trump has pardoned a whopping 2,000 criminals who have committed all kinds of horrible acts and are still menaces to society. We’re talking Jan 6 rioters who have abused children, killed people while driving drunk, and threatened other federal workers. Mind you, these are crimes they committed AFTER being pardoned! Surely they can expect new pardons for these crimes any day now, right?
11:12
disappearing people who take care of
11:14
three-year-olds. Or what about Juan
11:16
Orlando Hernandez, the former president
11:18
of Honduras, who was serving a 45-year
11:21
sentence for smuggling over 400 tons of
11:24
cocaine into the US in what prosecutors
11:26
called one of the largest and most
11:28
violent drug trafficking conspiracies in
11:30
the world. Well, he was pardoned in
11:34
December of this year and is now going
11:36
on right-wing podcasts like PBD. It's a
11:39
long pod, okay? Sometimes you need a
11:40
little boop boop. I mean, how else is
11:42
Vinnie that redfaced? When Trump was
11:45
asked about the pardon and its glaring
11:46
hypocrisy for a so-called tough on crime
11:49
president, he says he doesn't know him,
11:51
but that people asked him to do it.
11:54
You pardoned former Honduran President
11:56
Juan Orlando Hernandez and let him out
11:58
of prison even though he was convicted
11:59
in a massive international drug
12:01
trafficking scheme. How is that zero
12:03
tolerance on drug trafficking? Well, I
12:05
don't know him and I know very little
12:08
about him other than people said it was
12:10
like uh a Obama Biden type setup where
12:13
he was set up. You know, a lot of people
12:15
in Honduras asked me to do that and I
12:17
did it. I feel very good about it.
12:19
Yes, Mr. President. Quick followup.
12:21
Which people told you he was set up?
12:23
Which people told you to pardon him?
12:26
Because curiously, Hernandez had spent
12:28
years cozing up to the far right in the
12:30
US and made himself a lot of friends.
12:32
According to the Wall Street Journal, he
12:34
forged a partnership with Kelsey Warren,
12:36
a Texas energy billionaire and major
12:38
Trump donor who owns a utility company
12:40
in the country. Hernandez also helped
12:42
propel the privatized city of Prosper in
12:44
the country, a project in which Trump
12:46
donors Peter Teal, Mark Andre, Sam
12:48
Alman, and CEO of Coinbase Brian
12:50
Armstrong are all heavily invested.
12:53
Hernandez was their meal ticket. As Gil
12:56
Duran writes, he championed special
12:58
economic zones where investors could set
13:00
their own tax, labor, and regulatory
13:02
rules under long-term legal guarantees.
13:05
However, when Hernandez's successor,
13:07
Samara SP x Castro, came into office, she
13:10
rolled back the special economic zones.
13:12
That made longtime Trump fixer Roger
13:14
Stone write in January on his Substack.
13:17
Yes, even cartoon villains are on
13:19
Substack that Trump should crush
13:22
socialism and save a freedom city known
13:24
as Prosper. And indeed, it was Stone
13:27
that met with Trump at Mara Lago and
13:29
lobbyed him to pardon Hernandez. So yes,
13:32
400 tons of cocaine are a-ok okay to
13:35
enter the US. I mean, how else is
13:38
Palanteer's Alexander Karp supposed to
13:40
sit through an entire interview?
13:42
Lot of decisions when we began talking
13:44
annoying each other 10 years ago.
13:46
Hopefully I'm annoying you as much as 10
13:47
years ago. Uh or more uh when when when
13:52
Sorry, did I say sit? I meant fly. Now,
---
---
FB VID]
Brian Masck
·December 5, 2025 at 10:49 AM ·
Prospera, founded with funding from tech bros Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and others, operates on a small island in Honduras previously solely populated with an Afro-indigenous population. The city-state operates almost entirely independent of the country, including its own justice system in the form of 3 retired Arizona judges who rule via zoom.
When Prospera was created, they relied on then-president Hernandez to create special zones and set up a loose oversight organization which he loaded with his allies. Now that he is out of office, the liberal government has begun asking questions about Prospera, complaining about their lack of investment in the region, and have attempted to back out of agreements that require them to pay significant fines if the community fails.
As the Honduran government turned against
Prospera, the founders spent half a million dollars in the US to buy support from elected officials, urging them to sanction Honduras and deny visas to its politicians. Now, it appears they are banking on the election of a Trump-backed conservative candidate to ensure Prospera can continue its uninterrupted plundering of the region.
Background: plenty of people find Próspera’s goal — “building the future of human governance: privately run and for-profit” — unsettling. Critics have described it as a neocolonial state within a state, or an example of corporate monarchy, where yacht-owning C.E.O.s exploit land and labor in a poor country. Keller Easterling, the urbanist and architectural theorist, considers Próspera a city in name only, akin to “say, Mattress City.” Really, she says, the zones are low-tax, deregulated marketplaces.
As we peered over the edge of the tower’s rooftop, I considered the story of a subcontractor who was working at the apartment tower at night two months earlier. The power had gone out, and he walked to the edge of the floor to yell down to his crew to turn on a generator, but took a step too far and fell to his death. If companies choose their own regulatory frameworks, as they do in Próspera, who holds them accountable if they endanger or harm one of their employees?
“Próspera ZEDE has its own set of labor systems,” Colindres said when I asked him about it later. He told me the worker’s family was compensated appropriately — receiving at least as much as was required under Honduran law — but he declined to disclose details. If an independent investigation took place, its findings have not been released to the public. After all, the point of a place like Próspera is that there isn’t really a “public” to speak of.
This lack of transparency is one common criticism of Próspera, and today, it’s unclear whether this experiment can continue. In recent years, vehement opposition from the Honduran government and neighboring communities has imperiled Próspera’s future. Now its fate — and that of the private-cities movement writ large — hangs in the balance of a high-stakes case before an international tribunal.
---
GASLIT NATION
Prospera Honduras is a Zone for Employment & Economic Development (ZEDE) backed by Peter Thiel. Trump plans to pardon the former Honduran president who championed ZEDES b4 his drug trafficking conviction. Honduras current outgoing president has tried to eliminate ZEDES, an obstacle for Prospera."
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:we7sidyj3b5or2r7trtpfzt7/post/3m6ungpja622f</p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p dir="ltr">Terrell Starr Substack:
https://terrellstarr.substack.com/</p> <p> </p>]]></description>
:{FULL
The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down
The dream of Próspera, founded by a U.S. corporation off the coast of Honduras, was to escape government control. The Honduran government wants it gone.
Ricardo González, legal consultant for Honduras Próspera Inc., looking out on the Honduran island of Roatán.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
By Rachel Corbett
Published Aug. 28, 2024
Updated Sept. 19, 2024
Jorge Colindres, a freshly cologned and shaven lawyer, handed me a hard hat to take the elevator to the 14th floor of what is now the tallest building on the Honduran island of Roatán — nearly twice what the local building code allows. When construction is complete, Duna Residences will house 82 units overlooking a jungle of palm trees, the Caribbean Sea and several other new buildings that the Honduran government considers illegal.
Listen to this article with reporter commentary
If Próspera were a normal town, Colindres would be considered its mayor; his title here is “technical secretary.” As we looked out over a clearing in the trees in February, he pointed to the small office complex where he works collecting taxes and managing public finances for the city’s 2,000 or so physical residents and e-residents, many of whom have paid a fee for the option of living in Próspera or remotely incorporating a business there. Nearby is a manufacturing plant that is slated to build modular houses along the coast designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. About a mile in the other direction are some of the city’s businesses: a Bitcoin cafe and education center, a genetics clinic, a scuba shop. A delivery service for food and medical supplies will deploy its drones from this rooftop.
There’s not much else to see yet. But the Delaware-based company that founded this experimental town in 2017 has raised $120 million in investments — including from venture-capital funds backed by the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen — to transform the territory, about twice the size of Monaco, into the most developed start-up city in the world. Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.
A California company offers a Montessori education for approximately 60 students. Security is provided by a private firm of armed guards. An arbitration center staffed by three retired Arizona judges handles dispute resolution. (In order to enter the jurisdiction, I was told I needed to sign an “agreement of coexistence” binding myself to 4,202 pages of rules, violations of which would be subject to the jurisdictional authority of the arbitration center.)
Image
Jorge Colindres, the 31-year-old lawyer who would be considered Próspera’s mayor — if Próspera were a normal town.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
Próspera has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend.
“I can tell you when Próspera became most real for me,” Friedman told the audience. “When I sat down to fill out my informed-consent forms that said, like, ‘This agreement is adjudicated under the laws of the Próspera ZEDE; any disputes are arbitrated by the Próspera Arbitration Center.’ Like, you are under a different set of laws.”
There are more than 5,400 of these special economic zones in the world, ranging on a spectrum from free ports for duty-free trading all the way to the special administrative region of Hong Kong. About 1,000 zones have cropped up in just the past decade, including dozens of start-up cities — sometimes called charter cities — most of them in developing nations like Zambia and the Philippines. Some have actually grown into major urban centers, like Shenzhen, which went from a fishing village to one of China’s largest cities, with a G.D.P. of $482 billion, after it was designated a special economic zone in 1980.
Each zone offers a degree of escape from government oversight and taxation, a prospect that has excited libertarian and anarcho-capitalist thinkers at least since Ayn Rand imagined a free-market utopia called Galt’s Gulch in “Atlas Shrugged.” Today, escalating clashes between the government and Big Tech — like the S.E.C.’s regulatory war on crypto, or the Federal Aviation Administration’s repeated investigations into SpaceX — have spurred some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to seek increasingly splintered-off hubs of sovereignty. And with government dysfunction preventing reforms even in wealthy cities like San Francisco, locked in a decades-long affordable-housing crisis, and New York City, which just lost out on as much as $1 billion when Albany scrapped a 17-years-in-the-making congestion pricing plan that would have funded public transit, it’s not hard to see the appeal of starting from scratch.
Image
Pristine Bay, a gated golf community and beach club near Próspera. Parts of the community are now part of the Próspera zone.
González at the Pristine Bay Beach Club. The question of Próspera’s expansion plans drives much of the opposition to the project.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
In promotional materials, Próspera markets itself to “21st-century pioneers” craving not just laissez-faire policies but also “good times and Caribbean vibes.” Direct flights from Miami and Houston can transport these digital nomads to Roatán in less than three hours. Then, from a chaise longue on the beach, they can register a business with the tap of a button. Although only one residential building has been built so far, a forthcoming eco-condo was during my visit courting buyers seeking “more personal freedom” and less “political drama.” Próspera’s original investment plan projected that by 2030 the city would be home to 38,000 residents, and that foreign direct investment in the country would top $500 million by next year.
But plenty of other people find Próspera’s goal — “building the future of human governance: privately run and for-profit” — unsettling. Critics have described it as a neocolonial state within a state, or an example of corporate monarchy, where yacht-owning C.E.O.s exploit land and labor in a poor country. Keller Easterling, the urbanist and architectural theorist, considers Próspera a city in name only, akin to “say, Mattress City.” Really, she says, the zones are low-tax, deregulated marketplaces.
As we peered over the edge of the tower’s rooftop, I considered the story of a subcontractor who was working at the apartment tower at night two months earlier. The power had gone out, and he walked to the edge of the floor to yell down to his crew to turn on a generator, but took a step too far and fell to his death. If companies choose their own regulatory frameworks, as they do in Próspera, who holds them accountable if they endanger or harm one of their employees?
“Próspera ZEDE has its own set of labor systems,” Colindres said when I asked him about it later. He told me the worker’s family was compensated appropriately — receiving at least as much as was required under Honduran law — but he declined to disclose details. If an independent investigation took place, its findings have not been released to the public. After all, the point of a place like Próspera is that there isn’t really a “public” to speak of.
This lack of transparency is one common criticism of Próspera, and today, it’s unclear whether this experiment can continue. In recent years, vehement opposition from the Honduran government and neighboring communities has imperiled Próspera’s future. Now its fate — and that of the private-cities movement writ large — hangs in the balance of a high-stakes case before an international tribunal.
Image
González, left, at Duna Residences, an 82-unit tower whose completion was threatened by Próspera’s legal and financial tangle.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
There are about three dozen charter cities currently operating in the world, according to an estimate from the Adrianople Group, an advisory firm that concentrates on special economic zones. Several others are under development, including the East Solano Plan, run by a real estate corporation that has spent the last seven years buying up $900 million of ranch land in the Bay Area to build a privatized alternative to San Francisco; Praxis, a forthcoming “cryptostate” on the Mediterranean; and the Free Republic of Liberland, a three-square-mile stretch of unclaimed floodplain between Serbia and Croatia. Many of the same ideologically aligned names — Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Friedman — recur as financial backers; Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects and a critic of public housing, is behind several of their urban (or metaversal) designs.
Srinivasan, the former Coinbase chief technology officer and now an adviser to Pronomos Capital, Friedman’s fund to build start-up cities, argued in his 2022 book “The Network State” that these new business-friendly hubs would soon compete with nation-states and, one day, replace them. “The Network State” was inspired, he said, by the state of Israel. “That country was started by a book,” he tweeted in 2022, referring to Theodor Herzl’s 1896 manifesto, “The Jewish State.” “You can found a tribe,” Srinivasan said on a podcast. “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism — when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a ‘reverse diaspora.’”
The concept might have stayed on the fringes of libertarian and neoreactionary forums had Paul Romer, who would go on to be the chief economist of the World Bank and win the Nobel Prize, not made charter cities the subject of an influential 2009 TED Talk. He projected a photo of students in an African country doing their homework under streetlights, explaining that their government required the electric company to provide power at such low prices that the company decided not to service the homes in their area at all. When the president tried to reform the system, he went on, consumers and business leaders pushed back, and ultimately, nothing changed. Romer argued that charter cities would give developing countries a chance to prosper by ceding uninhabited territory to wealthier nations to develop.
This ruling country would act as a “guarantor” to the host country and write its own laws and regulations, which would attract private companies to invest and build the cities. In turn, jobs, technology and educational opportunities would pour into the host country, which would share in the revenue, too. Locals would stop leaving for richer countries, migrants would come to the zone, a virtuous cycle would take hold and students wouldn’t need to do their homework in the streets. “The city can be built,” Romer said in his talk. “And we can scale this model. We can go do it over and over again.”
Around the same time that Romer was delivering his TED Talk, Honduran soldiers stormed the home of the country’s left-wing president, Manuel Zelaya. They led him outside at gunpoint, still in his pajamas, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica. Zelaya had been planning to hold a public referendum on reforming the Constitution, which his critics saw as an attempt to illegally extend term limits. Shortly after the coup, the military held another election; it put into office the conservative candidate Porfirio Lobo, who lost the previous contest to Zelaya. Several nations, including the United States, questioned the legitimacy of an election staged by leaders of the coup.
President Lobo’s chief of staff, the Harvard-educated lawyer Octavio Sánchez, saw Romer’s TED Talk and thought it was just what Honduras needed to achieve economic prosperity. Sánchez arranged a meeting in Miami among Romer, Lobo and the president of Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández. Lobo told Romer that to do something as significant as he proposed — to create a zone that would replace Honduran laws with those of a wealthier nation — they’d need to amend the Constitution.
Romer visited Tegucigalpa soon after. Honduras, a country where over half the population lived in poverty and 75,000 people left each year for better opportunities in the United States, was an ideal testing ground for his vision. When Romer returned home, he recorded a follow-up TED Talk titled “The World’s First Charter City?”
A tumultuous three years followed: Romer and the oversight board he helped set up were sidelined, and the Honduran Supreme Court initially rejected the constitutional amendment. But Congress, led by Hernández, dismissed the four opposing judges in what some critics called a “technical coup.” (Hernández, who succeeded Lobo as president of Honduras, continued to have a career marred by corruption and was recently sentenced to 45 years in a United States federal prison for drug trafficking.) In 2013, Honduras amended its constitution to allow for the creation of autonomous zones, following China and the United Arab Emirates.
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The Duna Residences, under construction earlier this year. The building was completed in June.
I met Colindres outside his office on a “Wellness Wednesday.” Catering staff had set out fruit and granola bars on the counter of an open-air cafeteria at the city’s headquarters, a small complex of three interconnected buildings on a manicured tropical lawn. A guard in black combat fatigues with a double-barreled rifle paced near a porch swing. Colindres, who is 31, peeled an orange as he began to tell me about his family’s history in Honduras. One of his grandfathers fought in the Honduran armed forces against communism during the Cold War. Later, his uncle, the president of the chamber of commerce, was taken hostage by Communist guerrillas. Colindres’s hero is the family’s capitalist success story: his great-grandfather Constantino Marinakys, who immigrated from Greece after World War I and built a fortune, in part by opening grocery stores during the country’s banana boom in the early 20th century.
In the late 1800s, Honduras owed immense debt to Britain, and began offering land and financial incentives to attract foreign investment. Eventually, U.S. banana companies, like Cuyamel and United Fruit (now Chiquita), built railroads, port infrastructure and other projects in exchange for land. By the beginning of World War I, O. Henry had named the country the original “banana republic.” The six largest banana companies owned more than a million acres of fertile land on Honduras’s northern coast, and in 1911, one orchestrated a coup to install a puppet government.
Where many see a story about exploitation, Colindres describes one of private-sector productivity. As workers migrated to the coasts to work, the plantations grew into small cities with their own housing, schools, hospitals and stores. “Back then there was very poor infrastructure, and so when the banana companies came everything had to be done,” Colindres said. “No roads, no electricity — all of what we consider public infrastructure in Honduras, it was put in by the private sector.”
Colindres’s political views started hardening as a teenager living through the coup of 2009. He went to law school and came to the conclusion that he’d have to leave Honduras for the United States if he wanted to have a fulfilling career. But then came news that the ZEDE constitutional amendment had passed. Honduran law preserved national authority over a few fields, like criminal law, but granted the zones broad freedom to establish their own courts, fiscal policies and labor and environmental protections.
In 2014, as required by the amendment, Juan Orlando Hernández appointed a group to oversee the ZEDEs. Early members included a granddaughter of the final Austrian emperor and a band of Republicans from the U.S. that included the former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the former Reagan aide Faith Whittlesey, the libertarian economist Mark Skousen and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan. A couple of years later, Honduran lawmakers heard about an Arizona entrepreneur named Erick Brimen who was lobbying Washington to make creative use of the U.S. Constitution’s Compact Clause to pass a bill establishing low-regulation “prosperity zones.” Brimen was having a hard time implementing his vision in the States, so took the Hondurans up on their offer to develop a zone like the one Romer imagined, but run by a private company rather than by another nation.
Brimen, who grew up in a wealthy family in Venezuela until he moved to the United States at 12, met Gabriel Delgado, a Guatemalan entrepreneur who had already identified a couple of plots of land in Roatán as potential sites. In 2017, they decided to work together, with Brimen acting as chief executive and Delgado heading up fund-raising and real estate development. They secured early investments from Friedman’s Pronomos Capital and an unnamed investor “behind” SpaceX. But their success in establishing the first ZEDE, they said, is due in part to keeping their ideological beliefs quiet. “Instead of saying we are trying to create a libertopia,” Brimen told the libertarian magazine Reason in 2021, “we shifted the conversation away from advancing a political ideology toward, yes, liberty, but as a tool to development.” After a brainstorming session, Brimen came up with a name that might accomplish that: Honduras Próspera, Inc.
When Colindres heard the news that the project had broken ground, he reached out to Brimen, who expressed interest in his 2019 paper “Make Honduras Great: Charter Cities as a Development Program.”
“He said, ‘I also want to make Honduras great,’” Colindres recalled. He promised Brimen his support. “Let me bring all my contacts and all my clients and everybody to join,” he told him. “And then that’s what I did.”
Próspera has now incorporated 222 businesses into the ZEDE, including an outsource staffing agency and scores of experimental medical centers. Minicircle, founded by two young biohackers, offers a product that they say might cure Alzheimer’s and suppress all tumors; Symbiont Labs manufactures implants that turn people into “self-sovereign cyborgs”; the Bay Islands Fitness and Transformation Center offers affordable semaglutide injections; and the Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine provides stem-cell treatments. (A man sitting next to me on my flight from Roatán showed me severe burns on his arms that he’d come to treat at the clinic.) While I was visiting, a “pop-up city” called Vitalia used a dome it had erected on Próspera’s grounds to host events for biotech innovators who want to “make death optional.”
Much of the activity at Próspera takes place not in the area where the Duna tower stands and Colindres works but a 15-minute drive away at Pristine Bay, a green, gated golf community and beach club. Starting in 2021, Próspera began incorporating parts of the resort into the zone. Down by the tennis courts, I saw Vitalia’s white-tented dome, though organizers did not allow me to attend any of its events. Reason wouldn’t grant me access to a conference it was hosting at the hotel either. So I hung out by the pool, and down the street at AmityAge Academy, an old restaurant that a Slovakian math tutor had turned into a Bitcoin education center and cafe.
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A factory on Roatán supplying prefabricated parts for residences designed by Zaha Hadid Architects.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
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AmityAge Academy, a former restaurant in Próspera turned into a Bitcoin education center and cafe by a Slovakian math tutor.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
That’s where I met Zussel Ramos, at the time AmityAge’s 25-year-old lead educator, next to a bookshelf stocked with Ludwig von Mises’s “Bureaucracy,” Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism” and Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life.” I bought a coffee — the barista let me pay with “fiat” paper money on a one-time basis — and then Ramos took me on a tour. On the walls downstairs hung a Bitcoin mining machine, a portrait of Guy Fawkes astride a bucking green stallion and a map of Roatán with colored squares of paper marking the dozens of businesses that now accept Bitcoin, largely thanks to Ramos’s door-to-door persistence.
Ramos told me she couldn’t wait to move to Próspera — probably to the Duna tower. Then she’d apply for physical residency, giving her the right to vote in Próspera’s council elections, at least on some of the seats; if she buys property, she’ll be able to cast votes for an additional two seats — one vote for every square meter of land she owned, under the current rules. For now, very few people actually live full time in the ZEDE, which is a checkerboard of territory across both the island and the mainland. It started out with 58 acres in Roatán, but since a ZEDE’s territory doesn’t need to be contiguous, it has added 385 acres in La Ceiba on the mainland, followed by another 239 acres of Roatán’s Port Royal and then 322 acres of Pristine Bay.
Just how much land the Próspera ZEDE plans to absorb is the source of much of the conflict that now vexes the project. Early promotional images sparked outrage for depicting the north coast of the island dotted with skyscrapers, futuristic houses and yacht-filled ports, rather than the wooden shacks and jungle that exist there now. One image that forecast the growth of Próspera from a village to a town to a city made it look as if the project had “started engulfing the areas around it,” says Ricardo González, a legal consultant for Honduras Próspera Inc. “It was taken literally” by the people who lived in those areas, he says, but it shouldn’t have been. “Everything is voluntary, we cannot just pick up your land and say now it’s part of us.”
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González says that worries by Próspera’s neighbors that it might annex its surroundings are unwarranted.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
But it is also true that the ZEDE law allows the Honduran government to compel landowners to sell to a zone, so long as they are paid fair market value for the property. Brimen insists that Próspera would never take advantage of that provision, because it violates the sanctity of private-property rights, and that the company has self-imposed “the highest possible limitations on this in its charter.” Nevertheless, the provision’s existence set in motion a spectacular series of events as Próspera began incorporating land.
The Duna tower stands next to a fork in the road, with one path leading to the Próspera gate, manned by guards carrying guns and contracts, and the other winding down a dirt path to a small fishing village called Crawfish Rock. Roatán, thanks to its thriving tourism industry, generates more money than many parts of Honduras, but Crawfish Rock — home to a Black, English-speaking community (Roatán is a former British colony) — is an exception. Turquoise and peach houses sag and lean on stilts, their roofs patchworks of corrugated-metal scraps.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, vice president of Crawfish Rock’s patronato, or community board, it was 2019 when the first Próspera representatives came to the community, informing them of plans to develop a nearby resort. “It’s quite normal for us to have this kind of restricted, gated community popping up,” Cárdenas said. The island is full of them. They also wanted to do community development, they told her, and offered small-business loans to Crawfish Rock residents. But then odd things started to happen, Cárdenas said.
Próspera stationed armed guards on the road. Then Brimen tried to form a new patronato that Cárdenas said was stacked with Próspera employees. (A Próspera representative disputed this.) In 2020, Cárdenas received a voice message from someone in the community that said, “This project is not a normal project.” So she and Luisa Connor, the president of the patronato, began to research Próspera. They learned about the ZEDE law and about the involuntary sale of land. “By no means did they explain to us” what a ZEDE was, Connor says. “They came as a normal resort they were going to build next to the community.” (A Próspera representative disputed this, saying the company held multiple town halls describing the project to residents.)
Distrust spread among members of the community, who felt they had been lied to about Próspera’s intentions. In September 2020, Brimen tried to address the conflict by organizing a meeting in Crawfish Rock. Connor wrote a letter asking him to postpone it, because Covid was spreading rapidly on the island and the hospitals there were full. Brimen, who says he was invited by village elders, held the meeting that evening anyway, accompanied by guards. He stood on a second-story porch reading into a microphone the parts of the ZEDE law pertaining to land expropriation. “That’s when all hell broke loose,” Cárdenas said. People rushed up the steps, some shouting that he should leave, others to let him speak; shoves were exchanged, and Brimen’s MacBook tumbled off the railing. He yelled at people to back up and stop violating his right to social distance. Trucks of police officers arrived.
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Luisa Connor, far left, is the president of the patronato, or community board, in Crawfish Rock, a small fishing village not far from Próspera.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
Brimen later said that, before he was interrupted, he was trying to point out the ways the law restricts, rather than promotes, the forced sale of land. But a video of the encounter circulated throughout Honduran media, and the fear of expropriation became a galvanizing message used by anti-ZEDE groups on the mainland and the other Bay Islands. From that point on, the narrative changed from “ZEDEs are bad because they are violating constitutional rights,” González says, to the more forceful “ZEDEs are bad because they’re going to take your land.”
A national protest movement was born, and prominent politicians turned against the project. In 2021, Xiomara Castro, the wife of the ousted President Zelaya, made repealing the ZEDEs a central promise of her election campaign. The zones became associated with the corruption of Juan Orlando Hernández, the president at the time, whom many Hondurans now revile. Castro won with a clear majority. In 2022, Honduras’s Congress unanimously repealed the law and passed a constitutional reform that would abolish the three existing ZEDEs. “Never again will we carry the stereotype of the banana republic,” Castro declared to the U.N. General Assembly a few months later.
There was one problem, however: Congress, mired in competing legislative priorities, failed to ratify the reform. Furthermore, the original ZEDE law guaranteed the companies 50 years of legal stability — no matter what changes were made after a zone was founded. The net result is that Próspera is in a state of legal limbo.
Delgado seemed bewildered by the staunch opposition to Próspera. How had his dream to enrich Central America become a political piñata? “We’re not crooks,” he told me. “We’re just guys trying to get something good done.” He said he was inspired to help found Próspera after reading Machiavelli’s writings on the impossibility of reforming a system from within. “The idea is that if you go to a place where nothing, nobody has a stake, there’s no entrenched interests, you can make really deep reforms that won’t affect any of the players,” he said. Years of dysfunction and corruption would be replaced by radically simple governance. A free market and political stability would attract top innovators and investors from the West while empowering Latin America’s legions of microentrepreneurs — the guys on the side of the road selling oranges or “a chicken leg in a bag,” Delgado said — to grow real businesses.
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Crawfish Rock, home to a Black, English-speaking community. Conflict with Próspera over the ZEDE law sparked a nationwide protest movement.
Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
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Rosa Hendrix, head of the patronato for all the Bay Islands, which include Roatán. She opposes the Próspera project.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
But in seeking to sidestep politics, Próspera instead ran straight into them. The endemic corruption in Honduras, the sort of thing Próspera was supposed to combat, was also what enabled its creation and has plagued its pursuit of legitimacy. For Hondurans, the prospect of American capitalists promising prosperity may instead resurrect fears of exploitation and dispossession. Despite Próspera’s fantasy of exit, it uses roads, hospitals and ports built by the municipal government, and it shares an economy and ecosystem with its neighbors in Crawfish Rock. The national government that granted its right to exist, meanwhile, may still take it away.
In 2022, the government began stripping Próspera of some of the special privileges it was granted under its predecessors. It halted the company’s tax-exempt customs service, allowing the zone to continue to import goods only if it paid the same duties as the rest of Honduras. Colindres said that the National Banking and Insurance Commission also pressured Honduran banks to shut down accounts of Próspera businesses and bar lenders from financing its projects. Duna Residences, for example, “was going to be financed by one of the biggest banks of Honduras,” Colindres said. But once President Castro came to power, the financing evaporated and the building was delayed. “The third tower would already be under construction if they hadn’t done that.”
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Crawfish Rock residents.Credit...Brian Finke for The New York Times
At the end of 2022, Honduras Próspera Inc. and its affiliates filed an astronomical $10.775 billion lawsuit against the state in a World Bank tribunal called the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Próspera is thought to have a good chance of prevailing in part, critics say, because the court is biased toward corporations, which can bring suit against nation-states but cannot be sued by them.
A win for Próspera could demonstrate sufficient legal stability to attract investors and set the precedent for new cities around the world. If it loses, start-up city founders will need to look for new legal strategies. Colindres said that his mission now is to try to persuade the government, “whether this government or the next government,” to stop “harassing” the banks and let them finance Próspera projects. That could be the government of Juan Orlando Hernández’s wife, Ana García de Hernández, who would soon announce her candidacy for the 2025 presidential election.
With building delayed, the view from the Duna tower’s rooftop looked like little more than a construction zone — a patch of dirt littered with piles of two-by-fours and wooden pallets. There were as many sheds as finished buildings. Still, some think Próspera may already be too far along to fail: There is simply too much capital already invested, too many commitments made, to have them torn apart in Tegucigalpa. The government is making “emotional arguments more than anything else,” González told me. “If they had the legal right to do what they’re trying to accomplish, they’d have already done it.”
A correction was made on Sept. 19, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described how council elections work in Próspera. While land ownership currently gives residents the right to vote for certain seats on Próspera’s council, residents do not need to own land in order to vote at all.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2024, Page 28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Land of Liberty. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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