The billionaires' utopia blueprint

feelings, we seek to leave you seeing the world unmu.

“Radiolab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know, wherever you get podcasts.”

We did not ask if you had seen any monsters for monsters of ceased to be news.

There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who pray on human beings, snatch away their

food or devour our whole populations. But examples of why social planning and not so easy to find. It's the year 1516 where inside the pages of a book called Utopia, breathing the fictional air of Antwerp Belgium. The Utopians failed to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam

with a tiny bit of stone, when he has all the stars in the sky to look at. An old sunburned, long-bearded traveler named Raphael Heifallide, has just returned to Europe after spending five years on an island called Utopia, and he's seen the world with

“new eyes, ranting to anyone who will listen.”

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men, securing their own commodities

under the name and title of the nation. About corrupt leaders, absurd laws, and the enclosure system, in which so-called landlords, fence-offlands belonging to villagers, turning them into their personal fief dumps, all for the sake of profit, what a contrast to the island of Utopia, who reminisces. Where every man has a right to everything.

Gold is used for chamber pots, private property is in a thing. Everyone wears the exact same colorless clothes and works six hour days. "Everyone has his eye upon you, and all movement is perfectly regulated." If any man goes out of the city, so which he belongs without leaves, he is taken for a fugitive and severely punished, and if he does this often, he is condemned to slavery.

The author of this book, Thomas Moore, invented the word Utopia. It's a Greek pun combining utopos, no place, and utopos, good place. It asks, in a tongue-in-cheek way, is a perfect society possible, or is the fantasy just a mere held-up to reality, and a chance to change it. "I mean, I hate to sound like Utopic Techbro here, but if you'll excuse me for three

seconds, you know, these are things that are going to save lives.

We can make the world amazing, more profound than fire or electricity or anything that

we have done in the past." Over the last few decades, the text fear has thrived on the urge to optimize everything, including Utopia. If we can just solve for X here and invent for why there, we can build the perfect society. Perfect for who? That's a different story." "You would prefer the human race to endure, right? Your hesitant will."

From private cities, to interstellar colonies, you could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy. Like billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Teele have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders and laws, most of us live by. "Starting new countries is actually possible, preferable, and profitable." So, we were curious. Has anyone tried it? Has this fantasy of exit, of opting out of the

“rules and building a new world? Been put to the test?”

I'm Randabit Fethaf. On this episode of Through Line from NPR, we'll take you from a forgotten Arctic archipelago. "The only place in the world with open borders, to floating cities in the ocean." "Not the nowhere on your own." To private startup nations, that might be coming to some land near you.

"Is this going to be a little private thief dump run by these venture capillists? What are they really want?" "From NPR." Hey, Lulu here, whether we are romping through science, music, politics, technology, or feelings, we seek to leave you seeing the world unnew.

Radiolab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know, wherever you get podcasts. Part one, a weird world. We are told all the time that you have a certain number of countries in the world, that

Of the political world, and of the geographic world. But it turns out there's a lot more

to it than that. This is Attusa, Iraqsea, Abrahamian. I'm the author of Two Books, The Cosmopolites, which is about the global market for citizenship, and the hidden globe, how wealth hacks the world. Attusa has spent the last couple of decades traveling and studying the world with a skeptical

why, observing its hidden architecture, which she describes as a jumble of weird jurisdictions. Lots of people will find themselves in a weird jurisdiction at some point in their life. You might be at a border checkpoint, you might be working in a factory that's in a special economic zone, you might be on a ship that's flying a flag that you don't totally recognize.

Or, you might find yourself sailing by a small, very frozen archipelago called Swabbard.

Swabbard is an northern territory of Norway, in the Arctic Circle. Okay, let's be real.

“You probably won't find yourself there anytime soon, and honestly, I hadn't even heard”

of Swabbard before talking to Attusa, but you've likely heard of Swabbard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately. President Donald Trump reasserted in the new year that the United States won't screenland. We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not. Like Greenland, Swabbard is involved in the race for the Arctic.

Being near the North Pole makes it an ideal place to track missiles flying across the planet and download data from satellites.

New shipping routes are buried under the ice that climate changes rapidly melting, and buried

in the ocean floor are a bunch of mineral resources, copper, zinc, coal ball, lithium, rare earth elements used in all kinds of technology, but there's also something that makes Swabbard weird. Swabbard is the only place in the world with open borders, open borders.

“Swabbard is part of the kingdom of Norway, but everyone from Indian climate scientists”

to Russian coal miners to tie hikers are welcome, no visa required. Some might call that a fantasy, others are a nightmare, but definitely weird. And the story of how Swabbard ended up that way gives us a window into how the world of nations and passports, a world we take for granted as reality, came to be, and what it means to exist outside it.

About 930 a.m. land came inside. Steep, rocky cracks and paints, covered or streaked with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly bare, and I'm like anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be born and holed to the clouds.

In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longier, stumbled across Swabbard while on a tourist cruise with his family.

“Longier had built a huge timber and mining business in Northern Michigan.”

This was a man who legend has it could smell coal, like when somewhere you could just smell the coal he knew where it was. All of us sniffed sense, sorry, I had to. I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north, and I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winter smelled like small bar.

Quick context. Swabbard being so cold and so far north was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century. By the time Longier came along a few hundred years later, Swabbard still had no permanent population.

It was Terra-Nolius, a legal no-man's land, a rare thing to find by this time because of industrialization and colonialism. People knew there was coal there, but previous efforts to get it had been abandoned. Longier, though, was up for the challenge. The enterprise of developing a new and practically unknown coal field within 800 miles

of the north pole was an interesting and satisfactory experiment. He sets up a settlement, names it, "Longier City" after himself, and starts the Arctic coal company. "People said that he thought of himself as a polar emperor, which gives you a glimpse in his mindset and the kind of animating philosophy behind these things."

For a few years, he could live in this fantasy, slowly building a new little world on his terms. He's creating a company town. There's a shop, the laborers can only shop at the shop.

But it turns out, building a new society was hard. "Many difficult and unusual problems."

“So there were two kinds of conflicts that took place.”

One was between the management and the workers, so John Monroe Longier and the local guys that he hired, they didn't like the food, he didn't like how lazy they were.

Hundreds of laboring men speaking before in language, and not always amenable to discipline.

A classic tale strikes were instituted by disinfected socialistic leaders. And the other conflict was between him and other people like him, other people who were trying to start businesses and mine coal. And these were essentially disputes about property, who owns what, who can go where, who planted the stake first, and got a little messy.

But Swabbard had no courts, no police, no property law. "There was no authority to really rule on these things." It seemed only a matter of time before some nation or empire would claim sovereignty over Swabbard and threaten his business.

On year one had to get ahead of that.

“So he reached out to his country of origin, the United States, and lobbied the government”

to get involved to protect his property rights in Swabbard. "He did so under an older law called the U.S. Guano Act that allowed the U.S. to claim unoccupied islands in the Pacific that contained large amounts of Guano, birch it, bird droppings." No joke.

This act from 1856 says that if an American citizen finds enough guano, bird poop, an an island not yet claimed by another country or empire, the U.S. president could choose to use military force to claim sovereignty there. Why guano? Because it's a great fertilizer, necessary for maintaining food production at a time

once synthetic fertilizers didn't yet exist, and it was also used to produce an ingredient for explosives. It was considered so valuable. It got the nickname "White Gold."

“U.S. citizens invoked the Guano Act to claim over a hundred islands around the globe.”

And John Monroe Longyear tried his luck with it in Swabbard, arguing that it should be expanded to include not just Guano, but also coal and other minerals. "He had a lobbyist who had a guy on K-Stree that he was even showing up to hotel lobbies to try to talk delegates and to taking his side."

The U.S. government ultimately decided not to intervene, and then, in 1914, reality came knocking.

The war made it quite difficult to export coal. In World War I broke out, his company shipping and trade round to a halt. The clock was ticking, right? And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to an Norwegian coal mining company. In order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security,

by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war. The prescription of open, just and honorable relations between nations agree to this covenant of the League of Nations. On June 28, 1919, in France's Hall of Mirrors, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending World War I.

The Treaty accelerated a shift that was already underway, moving the world from the age of empires to the age of nation states, and it established the League of Nations and international organization designed to maintain world peace through diplomacy. The powers were meeting to kind of divvy up what was left of the world. This included convening a conference on, quote, "passport and customs formalities" to create

a uniform 32-page booklet, a passport that would be required to travel across borders. There wasn't really a place for a place with no ruler. And so, it was formally kind of bestowed upon Norway by the international community. Why? Because Norway had been a good ally during the war, and it had the biggest presence on

Svabbard, including a company that until a few years earlier had been owned by John Monroe Longyear. The Treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svabbard, keeping its borders open for business. It is, a pleasure to know that Svabbard, though now under the flag of Norway, is forever

dedicated to the arts of peace.

Svabbard wasn't a utopia, but over time it did come to represent a place of global cooperation.

“75 boxes of seeds were carried down a red carpet today on an Norwegian island in the Arctic”

Ocean headed for cold storage, really cold storage. Since 2008, Svabbard has even housed a large, post-apocalyptic seed vault meant to safeguard the planet's food crops if the worst ever happens. Some call it a doomsday vault, others, a no-as-arc for global agriculture. This is the most valuable, natural resource in the world.

So in other words, as long as we intend to be on earth ourselves, we're going to need this diversity. Tonight, we're heading north way north to the Arctic Circle, which is fast becoming one

of the most contested regions in the world.

That means Beijing, Moscow, Washington and the European continent are in a race for influence. Recently, with the race for the Arctic heating up and as more countries, including the US have challenged the sovereignty of nations around the world, Norway has begun pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svabbard and fend off foreign influence. Cracking down on land sales to foreigners, stripping away foreigners, voting rights, limiting

scientific research, and claiming hundreds of miles of Svabbard seeds. Maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall. That the world order might be shifting again.

“"The nation's state model, I think if we take a thousand foot view from it, is both very”

new and very fragile and might just be a blip."

The question is, if the rules are being re-written, who gets to rewrite them? Svabbard is a story about, you know, sorry to say it, but men, who want to start something new in a place that they consider almost black slate. I think there's a lot of parallels with somebody like Elon Musk who wants to explore space.

And this kind of awareness that none of the rules are all that fixed. If you just try hard enough, maybe the rules will bend to your own desires. Coming up? It was like a message in a ball, you pop the cork in, you get throw it out into the sea of the internet, and see what happens.

We take to the high seas.

“Hi, my name is Tim Barry, I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina, and you're listening”

to "Through Line" from NPR. This message comes from everything everywhere daily. One of the world's most popular daily education podcasts. In about 10 minutes, you'll learn something new about history, science, geography, and more. Everything everywhere daily, wherever you get your podcasts.

Part two, let 1,000 nations bloom. What makes a man who wonder, what makes a man who roam, what makes a man be bed and born, and turn his back on home. These are the opening lines of the 1956 movie, starring John Wayne, called "The Searchers." The music feels almost wistful, reveling in the adventurous spirit that pushed so many

to head out into the frontier. The movie follows Wayne's character, a civil war vet who fought on the side of the Confederacy after he returned home to Texas. And like any good Western, there are long panoramic shots of the vast landscape, deep red sands, and intense blue skies.

The great unknown. It's set just a few years after the 1862 home set act passed, when anyone moving out west could claim land if they were willing to settle on and farm it. What was it like when people were colonized in the west sat now on their own to build a ranch and stuff like that, and I realized that being out there was going to be a very

lonely existence for quite a while. This is Wayne Graham-Lick. He's a retired computer engineer, and he remembers watching the searchers back in the 1990s. A time when he was finding himself spending more and more hours on the newly minted Worldwide Web, where he stumbled across a fascinating trend.

Stories of people who in the 60s and 70s attempted to build micro nations at sea, all of

He found himself imagining what those attempts might have been like, and considering

“how he would try to build a new nation in the middle of the sea.”

It was just sort of doodling around in my back to the back of my brain. Seans from the searchers flashed through his mind. He thought maybe it would feel a lot like the wild west, only wetter, with one big difference. "I don't like it." "I don't like engines on the rage, generally high they're dead, and if it wasn't, I'd

be political, but what we really treated the Native Americans really poorly. So I thought it was a positive endeavor, largely because unlike the colonization of the west, when there were previous occupants, in the ocean, the only previous occupants are the fish." So on a whim, he sat down at his computer and started typing.

The blank page, a kind of canvas, to design a new world. "How do you make the structures safer, maybe we recycle these two liter bottles?"

“In the paper, Wayne brain stormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he”

first saw coming up. "It's probably a bad idea." Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micro-nation attempts, like "How to survive the elements." "We can extract energy from waves."

Huge waves for let-less sun. "It's the difference in temperature of the surface water." "And what about food?" "No, you can eat fish, it's up in the middle of the ocean, doesn't have a lot of fish." Wayne called the paper, "Seestetting," home-setting the high seas.

"To capture some of the romance of, you know, manifest destiny." It reads like an instruction manual, very much seen through an engineer's eye. He didn't talk much about the more dicey political stuff, like how you deal with pirates, or how you'd get the nation recognized by the UN. He figured it was just a thought experiment, so he didn't need to have everything figured

out. "Back then, I was just publishing everything I did on the internet, it's like why not?" In 1998, he uploads his paper to the web, and, "For a while, nothing much happens." Three years later, in 2001, "You've got mail." "I got contacted by this guy named Patrick Freepman.

That was the beginning of the next phase of the story." "I remember he said that he should eventually just join the family business." Journalist Atusa, Roxia Abrahamian, has interviewed Potry Freepman, the grandson of Freepmarket Pioneer Milton Freepman, a number of times over the last couple of decades. We reached out to him for an interview ourselves, but didn't hear back.

Tusa says Potry came to see setting from an economic angle. "It was a way to create more nation states in the world to create competition and have better ideas and kind of evolve from our land-bound system of governance."

“"We had a few back and forth, and then I think I asked him, like, by the way, where are”

you? Because he has a fun thing about the internet, and nobody knows where anybody is." He says, "Well, I currently live in Sonnyville, California, so I guess what, so do I." "Let's get together for lunch."

Can you take me to that first meeting?

Because it's almost like an intellectual blind date, right? "Oh, it absolutely isn't an intellectual blind date." And they hit it off. Wayne learned that Potry had studied mathematics and computer science, and they were both excited about C-steading.

They started meeting up periodically, revising that instruction manual Wayne had drafted, getting to know each other along the way. " Occasionally, he would tell me stories of grandma and grandpa talking about economics. This is a family who's very much into the libertarian movement, and I'm not really into the libertarian movement."

The libertarian movement generally believes in individual liberty above all else, a competitive free market, and very little government interference in people's lives. And Potry saw something very libertarian in the C-steading idea. "Experimentation was something that they talked about a lot." And Potry really wanted to make that experiment a reality.

From that first email, he'd said to Wayne, "I would really like to build one of these things.

I'm going like, "Well, that's a lot of work." And it would require a lot of money. Money, they didn't have."

Then the solution fell into their laps.

It was 2007.

“Potry was interviewing for jobs that different companies in Silicon Valley.”

"He did apply more and job at Founders Fund, which is Peter Tiel's Fund." Peter Tiel, the don of what's become known as the PayPal Mafia. The companies that have defined our era all share one link. Their founders trace their origins back to PayPal. Reporting about the PayPal Mafia, can sound like a who's who of every major tech company

of the past 30 years. Peter Tiel, started a hedge fund. They were like the earliest angel investor into Facebook, a gazillion dollar, Jeremy Stompleman, Russell Simmons, Yelp, Reed Hoffman, linked in. Obviously there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Shad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed

Korean. YouTube, yeah. In the 2000s, Tiel was pushing the idea that technology was an alternative to politics that could, quote, unilaterally, change the world.

“His biographer described him as, quote, "Secretly, the most important person in Silicon”

Valley." A place that some people consider to be... "Growling's your old. We're perterian movement." Well, there were, kind of, a much better future or not.

I mean, it gets driven by the rate of technological progress. We reached out to Peter Tiel for this episode, a gotten no response. "Yes, the interview." Before he leaves, Patrick casually brings up sea setting, and the idea eventually makes its way to Peter Tiel.

That is just Nirvana to the libertarian movement, a place where you can set up a libertarian society.

He has sea studs, and so Peter said, "Well, but if I give you half a million to promote

the idea and push it forward." So on April 15, 2008, they co-founded the Sea Stepping Institute with funding from Peter Tiel. Pottery, like to say, "Let a thousand nations plume." Their logo seemed to reference the libertarian classic, "In Rans Atlas Shrutt, a man holding up the sea steppe above his head."

"It might have been inspired by that." The science fiction things are very interesting because so few people are doing it. There is something about that that's contrarian, fundamental. It's not being done enough of." So hey, how money was allocated, and then started doing stock.

Peter Tiel gave them two marching orders. One, push the engineering forward, and two, market it a little. So our love for the ocean that's brought us together today, to embark on a short journey into the unknown. Pottery took the lead, giving TED talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel

of sea setting. We've run out of frontier, all land is claimed, and our revolutions have become increasingly superficial. "I'm going to read you a quote from a story I did more than 10 years ago, where Friedman said, "What if Apple's genius designer is built a city that's as fun to use as an iPad?"

"Apple nation." The country that knows what you want even better than you do.

“And I think that really sums up both the moment and the sort of optimism around sea setting”

at the time. "Saving humanity, we can also save the oceans." The sea setting pitch was pointing out some real problems with existing governments. Things like corruption, increasing federal power, and slow-moving bureaucracy that were making it harder to respond to real social problems like rising healthcare costs and economic

inequality. And a lot of people responded positively. It was time to give it a go. "And then the question is whether or not we were going to do what we call the SFS single family sea set, or a larger one."

They debated that question at the offices of one of Teele's biggest companies, where they had a small space, a data analytics firm called Palantir. "They didn't give us a room, they gave us a knuck." Palantir might sound familiar for two reasons. The company has recently attracted a lot of controversy for its close, secretive work with

government intelligence, defense, and immigration agencies, and it's the name of the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings. "I originally created by the Alps that was meant to be used for good purposes of power of ice, and God is that you will come on so young, you know what I'm talking about." "It is potentially very dangerous technology."

"It's very powerful, or you'll be a only worthy of the world."

"Anyway, back in the mid 2000s, when Wayne was working on sea setting in a knuck of their offices, Palantir wasn't on most people's radar yet.

of Palantir and Peter Teele's business partner, to decide how ambitious their first sea setting attempt should be.

“"And I voted small and Joe and Patrie voted large, and that's the way we went."”

"Just as they started to put the wheels in motion, to actually try to build something." "You know, lighter and a bead." "Let's talk about the speed, with which we are watching this market deteriorate stock market,

and his now down 21 percent."

"Full seat, three percent, everything, and more has been completely wiped out." Wayne had been living off of some internet stocks that were doing great, up until the 2008 recession hit. "I had to go find another shop." "Which meant less time for sea setting."

"So I was still on the board, but I can't spend it nearly as much time on it." I asked him if the co-opting of sea setting by libertarians played any role in his decision to step away. "You're pulling me into the politics." "Which he told me he wanted to avoid discussing."

He said he'd always been most interested in the engineering.

"It was never really my intent to get involved in the politics, and so, sorry, you're just not going to find a very political answer out of me."

“My general view is, you know, sometimes you're walking along the road and you have to”

just pick up the stone and just need to move it, put it further down the road and the next person picks it up and moves it a little further." Patry Friedman continued full force with sea setting for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a sea set was a femurile, also known as Burning Man on the water.

"It's built as a floating celebration of community-thurning art and sea setting."

In 2011, Patry stepped down from the sea setting institute, as did Peter Teele. Since then, there have been attempts to build a sea-stead island. One project involved an agreement with French Polynesia, but public concern over-quote "tech colonialism" led the local government to cut ties with the institute.

“These days, most projects are focused on building single unit, self-sufficient eco-friendly”

floating homes. Sea-stead projects are underway worldwide, including in Panama, South Korea, and even right here in the U.S., in Florida and Mississippi." "I view large sea setting as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening and everybody calls them sea-steads, so the name's stuck."

And it helped bring a fringe, libertarian dream of exit, more into the main stream, though Wayne says, "If you're going to do this libertarian stuff might want to see if you can just find somebody who will won't use some dirt to do it on. It's probably going to be easier than building a sea-stead." Coming up, you don't need to start a sea-stead, you can have America.

"This sea-voluntum flight of, from even ferry, Minnesota, I love your show. You're listening to through-line." This message comes from everything everywhere daily, one of the world's most popular daily education podcasts. In about 10 minutes, you'll learn something new about history, science, geography, and more. Everything everywhere daily, wherever you get your podcasts." In June 2025, Dan Germa, a producer on NPR's embedded podcast, took a trip to the Honduran

Island of Rhoa-Ton. "Mango of trees, flying tons of the coastline, you have pretty beaches on either sides." But Dan wasn't there for that. He drove to the northern side of the hills to a place isolated from the rest of the island, a place called Prospera. "You kind of dive into this very densely forested hill-scape. There is a big sign, a big

prosperous sign, once you get to that part. And it kind of just cascades right into the sea." Prospera is kind of an experiment. An experiment, and what the future of cities could look like, if they were run by corporations. Almost everything in Prospera happens without any oversight from the Honduran government.

There's no FDA, no HHS, taxes are low, and crypto is a preferred currency.

“"They have a startup venture capitalist vibe."”

Over $150 million have been invested in Prospera by venture funds affiliated with tech

Titans, like Palantir's Peter Tiel, venture capitalist Mark and Dreson, open AI, Sam Altman, and former Coinbase CTO, Balaji Srinivasan. Prospera is a real-world case study for a growing movement to create so-called start-up nations. The spiritual guide of the business movement is a book by Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Peter Tiel, and fellow libertarian.

It's called the Network State, how to start a new country. "Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?" It outlines a vision of digitally connected exclusive communities that design so-called states

online first, and then map them on to land.

The idea is somehow they'll find land, push out the people that they don't want, who they call the blues, and keep the people that they do with it, he calls the "grays." Then, lobby existing governments for sovereignty. Srinivasan calls the approach "tech Zionism." Tech Zionism, a reference to the movement that led to the creation of the state of Israel.

"To me, tech Zionism only really says one thing, which is that we only want to live with other tech Zionists, and we want to choose our neighbors, the walk-ward of tech Balistonians in this situation.

I don't think that that's in the book."

“"I think for a long time tech considers self sort of searching for new frontiers, and”

in recent years they're starting to look for literal frontiers." By the way, this is journalist Jacob Silverman. He writes a lot about the tech industry, focusing on the intersection of tech and politics. Rather than kind of reform or change existing institutions, a lot of tech elites want to either replace them entirely or create their own alternatives.

There are all kinds of networks-state-type projects being imagined right now, abroad and within our own borders, exiting the system is no longer a fringe or weird idea. Starbase, Elon Musk's city in Texas, was created to build a path to Mars. The billionaire-backed California Forever Project is planning a new city on 50,000 acres of farmland on the edge of Silicon Valley.

“And President Trump has proposed building so-called freedom cities.”

"We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities." Built on federal land, but privately funded and free from traditional regulations, environmental laws, and labor unions. These projects are expensive, backed by billionaire tech investors, and most are still in the digital design phase.

I.e. they don't yet exist in reality. Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does exist. "There was a very long back and forth with the Prospera people about coming in as a journalist." It took Dangerma almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team. "There version of a government is like a board of directors."

And in the meantime, he was digging into how this place ended up in Honduras. What he ended up finding out over time was that Prospera was born under circumstances where Honduras was under a lot of geopolitical turmoil. "The coup has left Honduras deeply polarised." This is around 2008-2009 Honduras had just undergone a coup.

And it was trying to find a way to be led back into the global community, trying to find new ways to develop its economy. "There are some rules we can develop for changing rules." While that's happening, there's this idea of something called a charter city. Charter cities developing, totally separate.

You start from uninhabited territory, people can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it." A Nobel Prize-winning American economist named Paul Romer came up with the idea of charter cities.

country, set its own rules, operate as an autonomous city, and court foreign investors through

low taxes and light regulation. "The Honduran government learned about this man and his ideas and they got interested in what he was proposing." Romer was eventually sideline, and Honduran lawmakers opted for a slightly different proposal. Instead of another country administering the land, a private corporation would.

It was an attractive idea for Honduras, which had long been open to private investment. This goes back all the way to, you know, right after Firstful War when the idea of banana republics were starting to pop up in the region, Honduras is the first nation to be labeled one of those.

It's always been very capitalism-minded, private enterprise-minded country ever since then.

"But plenty of people objected.

“Would it basically act as a state within their state, with this threatened Honduran sovereignty?”

Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law-grinlighting charter cities was passed." "It's a cream court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional." But afterwards, the Honduran Congress led by members of the president's party, outstit four members of the Honduran Supreme Court. "It was part of a couple of things causing a constitutional crisis in Honduras."

On top of this, there was a lack of transparency, which didn't sit well with Paul Romer, that economists whose ideas had kickstarted all of this. The tech billionaire Bakers funding prosper and the constitutional crisis were pushing the project in a direction he wasn't comfortable with, becoming what he called a libertarian fantasy, early signs of the network-state movement.

But the project continued without him.

“In 2017, Honduras prosper a ink, purchased its first plot of land, 58 acres that bordered”

a small local fishing village whose residents say they were not properly consulted. Over the years, Prospera has come to own more than 1,000 acres. Some local landowners protested, not all residents have formal property titles, and they fear their land claims are being undermined. Amid that, construction got underway on new housing and research facilities, employing some locals.

Prospera has its own labor systems, which aren't clearly spelled out. When one worker died in an accident on the job, Prospera's management said the family was compensated, quote, "appropriately," but details were not made public, and that's by design. The point of a place like Prospera is that there isn't really a public to answer to. It creates a particularly core irony when we think about Prospera as a libertarian hope,

being able to be created because of this strong man approach.

“In other words, it's not pure exit in the classic libertarian world.”

It's using the system's power to exit while shaping the system for others. Critics of Prospera say it echoes colonial dynamics familiar to Rooton. For years, the island of Rooton was actually kind of a disputed territory between colonial powers, including the Spanish and the British. In April 2022, after a new left-is government took power in Honduras,

the charter city law was repealed. And then the Honduran government goes a step further and declares through the supreme court that the previous law is null-invoid. nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate even if the law was repealed.

And so now, as far as the Honduran government was concerned, Prospera was an illegal settlement. Prospera then sued the Honduran government in an international tribunal, seeking a massive amount of money. $10.7 billion.

$10.7 billion for context, that's about a quarter of Honduras' annual GDP.

The tech investors backing Prospera are collectively worth much more than that. And they have the backing of the country with the most powerful military on earth. How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what she want to achieve? The case is still ongoing, the future of Prospera hanging in the balance.

Based on what Dan saw when he finally got to visit Prospera last year, development seems to have slowed down. We didn't see that many kind of actual companies working a lot of it is virtual.

out-of-the-box medical experiments like Jean Therapy meant to cure aging, but not many people.

I've spoken to some people who are working more on charter cities outside of Honduras. And when I speak to them about Prospera, they tend to describe it as a learning experience for this movement, not so much the model that they want to replicate.

“I think Prospera probably best reflects some naked truths about the power that the”

development world has right now. And the tools at its disposal to maintain its power is kind of

the ideological groundwork for a lot of these efforts to make new cities or communities or kind of

self-run policies. There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa. The utopian failed to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone as all the stars in the sky to look at. When Thomas Moore wrote Utopia over 500 years ago, designing a perfect society was an allegory.

Today, technology is making attempts to reshape reality and create versions of so-called network states more possible than ever. The impact of this kind of thinking can be seen all around us on an island in Honduras, on farmland near San Francisco, amid the rubble of Gaza, or before long, maybe a crater on the moon. The people designing these cities might not care if their choices lead to Utopia or dystopia for the rest of us, because the cities aren't necessarily for us.

Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this like perfect society on the moon. I don't even think that there's much of a desire to create a society.

“The focus really is on how can we make business work better, how can we cut through red tape?”

That's not Utopian unless you live in a society of corporations. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ron Dr. Fatah and you've been listening to "Throughline" from NPR. Next week on the show, "How Reality" became something you could edit and sell. The idea is that we're going to record people being people and placing them in very sort of strange bizarre situations, and that's going to teach us something about what makes

people take. Throughline was created by me and romtina Adablui. This episode was produced by me and Juli Kaye, Casey Meiner, Cristina Ken, Devancariama. I read Noguchi, Kiana Moketem, Thomas Coltrane,

“Sarah Wyman, fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl, special things to Holly”

Backster, senior staff writer at the Independent and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Johannes dergi, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Ferrar, Diana Symsdrum, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Ilanda Sengwani, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music for this episode was composed by romtina and his band, "Drop Electric," which includes "Navid Marvi, Show Fujiwara" "Ana, Mizani" and finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show,

please write us at [email protected]. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple,

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