Throughline - The billionaires' utopia blueprint

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Starbase. Prospera. California Forever. Mars. From private cities to interstellar colonies, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders — and laws — most of us live by. So we wondered: has this happened before? In this episode, we visit an Arctic archipelago, homesteads floating in the ocean, and a startup city in Honduras to explore where places built with the ultra-rich in mind leave all the rest of us.Guests:Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Cosmopolites and The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the WorldWayne Gramlich, retired computer engineerDan Girma, producer on NPR's Embedded podcastJacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon ValleyTo access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations. But examples of why social planning are not so easy to find. It's the year 1516, where inside the pages of a book called Utopia, breathing the fictional air of Antwer, Belgium. The Utopians failed to understand where anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of 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 Heitholidae, has just returned to Europe after spending five years on an island called Utopia, and he's seeing the world with new eyes, ranting to anyone who will listen. I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring 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-off lands belonging to villagers, turning them into their personal fiefdoms, all for the sake of profit. What a contrast to the island of utopia, he reminisces. Where every man has a right to everything. Gold is used for chamber pots. Private property isn't 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 to which he belongs without leave, 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 mirror held up to reality and a chance to change it?

I mean, I hate to sound like utopic tech bro 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 tech's first. has thrived on the urge to optimize everything, including utopia. If we can just solve for X here and invent for Y there, we can build the perfect society. Perfect for who? That's a different story.

You would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitant. From private cities. California Forever is building the next great American city. To interstellar colonies. You could absolutely colonize the whole. galaxy. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel 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 Fetach. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we'll take you from a forget. forgotten Arctic archipelago. The only place in the world with open borders. To floating cities in the ocean. Out in the middle of 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 fief run by these venture capitalists? What do they really want? This is Amelhearts from Denver. And you're listening to Thrulyne from NPR. Part one. A Weird World. We are told all the time that you have a certain number of countries in the world, that they all have borders surrounding them,

and that's kind of the architecture of the world, of the political world and up the geographic world. But it turns out there's a lot more to it than that. This is Atusa Aeroxia 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. Atusa has spent the last couple of decades traveling and studying the world with a skeptical eye,

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 Swabard. Svalbard is a 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 Swabard before talking to Atusa. But you've likely heard of Swabard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately. President Donald Trump reasserted in the new year that the United States wants Greenland. We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not. Like Greenland, Swabard 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 change is rapidly melting.

And buried in the ocean floor are a bunch of mineral resources. copper, zinc, coal, lithium, rare earth elements used in all kinds of technology. But there's also something that makes Swabard weird. Spalbard is the only place in the world with open borders. Open borders. Swabard is part of the kingdom of Norway. But everyone from Indian climate scientists to Russian coal miners to Thai hikers are welcome. No visa required.

Some might call that a fantasy. Others a nightmare. but definitely weird. And the story of how Svalbard 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 9.30 a.m., land came in sight.

Steep, rocky cracks and peaks. Covered or streaked with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, Weird landscape, utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds. In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longyear stumbled across Swabard 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.

He went somewhere and he could just smell the coal he knew where it was. Call it a sniff 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 Swalbard. Quick context. Swabard, being so cold and so far north, was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century. And by the time long year came along of,

few hundred years later, Swabard still had no permanent population. It was terra nullius, 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. Longyear, 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 Long Year 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.

They can only sleep at the dorms. Good luck, you know, finding another housing out there. 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 Munro Longyear 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 of foreign language and not always amenable to discipline. A classic tale. Strikes were instituted by disaffected 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? It got a little messy. But Swalbard 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 Swabard and threaten his business. Longyear wanted 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 Swabard. 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, bird shit, bird droppings. No joke, this is a real thing. This act from 1856 says that if an American citizen finds enough guano, bird poop, on 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 when 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 100 islands around the globe.

And John Monroe Longyear tried his luck with it in Svalbard. arguing that it should be expanded to include not just guano, but also coal and other minerals. He had a lobbyist, he had a guy on K Street. He was even showing up to hotel lobbies to try to talk delegates into 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.

When World War I broke out, his company's shipping and trade round to a halt. The clock was ticking, right? And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to a 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, by 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, an 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... Spalbard 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 Svalbard, including a company that until a few years earlier had been owned by John Monroe Long Year. The treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svalbard, keeping its borders open for business.

It is a pleasure to know that Svalbard, though now under the flag of Norway, is forever dedicated to the arts of peace. It probably can never be drawn into international controversy. Swalbard wasn't a utopia. But over time, it did come to represent a place of global cooperation. 75 boxes of seeds were carrying down a red carpet today on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean headed for cold storage. Really cold storage. Since 2008, Swalbard 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 bulb, others a Noah's Ark 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. And that means Beijing. 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 U.S., have challenged the sovereignty of nations around the world, Norway has begun pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svalbard 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 Svalbard's sea, Maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall that the world order might be shifting again. The nation-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 rewritten, who gets to rewrite them? Spellbart 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 a blank 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 corp in, you throw it out into the sea of the Internet, and see what happens. We take to the high seas. Hi, my name is Tim Berry.

I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina, and you're listening to Drew Line from NPR. Part 2. Let a thousand nations bloom. 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 returns 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. This has come a long way before he died, Captain. It's set just a few years after the 18th century. 62 Homestead 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 colonizing the West, setting out 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 Gramlich. 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 World Wide 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 which pretty much failed. Well, this is weird, but okay. 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.

I was just sort of noodling around in the back of my brain. Not that one, huh? Scenes 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. What don't you like? Indians on a raid generally hide their dead.

I don't mind you 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, where there were previous occupants, in the ocean, the only previous documents 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 recycled the two-liter bottles. In the paper, Wayne brainstormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he foresaw coming up.

It's probably a bad idea. Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micronation attempts. Like, how to survive the elements. You can extract energy from waves. Huge waves, relentless sun. Use the difference in temperature of the surface water. What about food? You know, you can eat fish.

It's out in the middle of the ocean. It doesn't have a lot of fish. Wayne called the paper seesteading, homesteading 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 U.N. 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 Patry Friedman. 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 Aroxia Abrahamian has interviewed Potry Friedman, the grandson of free market pioneer Milton Friedman, a number of times over the last

couple of decades. We reached out to him for an interview ourselves, but didn't hear back. Atusa says Patri came to sea-studding from an economics 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 us. And then I think I asked him, like, by the way, where are you? Because the fun thing about the Internet is nobody knows where anybody is. He says, well, I currently live in Sunnyvale, California. So, well, guess what? So do I. Let's get together from lunch. Can you take me to that first meeting?

Because it's almost like an intellectual blind date, right? Oh, it absolutely is 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 sea-steading. They started meeting up periodically, revising that instruction manual Wayne had drafted, getting to know each other along the way.

Occasionally, he was. 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 Patry saw something very libertarian in the seesteading 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. We were always playing with the money problem. Then the solution fell into their laps.

It was 2007. Patry was interviewing for you. jobs at different companies in Silicon Valley. He did apply for a job at Founders Fund, which is Peter Teal's fund. Peter Teal, the dawn of what's become known as the PayPal Mafia. The companies that have Defender 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 Thiel started a hedge fund. They were like the earliest angel investor into FaceMate. A gazillion dollars. Jeremy Stompleman, Russell Simmons, Yelp, Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn. Obviously, there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. YouTube.

Yeah. In the 2000s, Teal 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... Crown Searle, the libertarian movement. Whether we're going to have a much better future or not.

I think it gets driven by the rate of technological progress. We reached out to Peter Thiel for this episode, but got no response. He aced the interview. Before he leaves, Padre casually brings up seesteading, and the idea eventually, makes its way to Peter Thiel. That is just nirvana to the libertarian movement, a place where you can set up a libertarian society via C-steads. And so Peter said, well, what if I give you half a million to promote the idea

and push it forward? So on April 15, 2008, they co-founded the C-stetting Institute with funding from Peter Thiel. Patri liked to say, let a thousand nations bloom. And their logos seem to reference the libertarian classic Ein Rann's Atlas shrugged, a man holding up the C-stead 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 anyhow, money was allocated and then started doing stuff. Peter Thiel gave them two marching orders. One, push the engineering forward. And two, marketed a little. So our love for the oceans has brought us together today to embark on a short journey into the unknown. Potry took the lead, giving TED Talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel of sea-steading. 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 designers build 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-steading at the time. While saving humanity, we can also save the oceans. The seesteading pitch was pointing out some real problems with existing governments. Things like corruption, increasing federal power and slow-moving. that were making it harder to respond to real social problems like rising health care 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 C-stead, or a larger one. They debated that question at the offices of one of Teal'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 nook. 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. Originally created by the elves, it was meant to be used for good purposes. The power of Eisengard is at your command. It is potentially very dangerous technology. It's very powerful. Anyway, back in the mid-2000s, when Wayne was working on c-steading in a nook of their offices, Palantir wasn't on most people's radars yet. Wayne remembers one crucial meeting where he and Patry met with

Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and Peter Thiel's business partner, to decide how ambitious their first C-setting attempt should be. And I voted small and Joe and Pocci voted large, and that's the way we went. But just as they started to put the wheels in motion to actually try to build something, you know, life intervened. Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The stock market is now down 21%. 43% 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 job. Which meant less time for c-steading. So I was still on the board, but I said I can't spend nearly as much time on it. I asked him if the co-opting of c-stetting 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 pick up a stone and you just need to move it a little further down the road, and the next person picks it up and moves it a little further. Patry Friedman continued full full full. forced with seesteading for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a seestead was ephemeral, also known as Burning Man on the Water.

It's billed as a floating celebration of community learning art and seesteading. In 2011, Patry stepped down from the Seasteading Institute, as did Peter Thiel. Since then, there have been attempts to build a seestead 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. Seastead projects are underway worldwide, including in Panama, South Korea, and even right here in the U.S., in Florida and Mississippi. I view large cesteading as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening, and everybody calls them C-steads, so the name's stuck.

And it helped bring a fringe libertarian dream of exit more into the mainstream, though Wayne says, If you're going to do this libertarian stuff, you might want to see if you can just find somebody who will loan you some dirt to do it on. It's probably going to be easier than building a c-stead. Coming up, you don't need to start a C-stead. You can have America. This is Ciguanam Fuerre from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I love your show. You're listening to Thru Line. Part 3. The Cities of Tomorrow Ladies and gentlemen, Japur, I'd like to welcome me to Honduras. Local time is 10.43 p.m. Please remain seen.

In June 2025, Dan Germa, a producer on NPR's Embedded podcast, took a trip to the Honduran island of Roatan. Mangrove 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 island. 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 hillscape. There is a big sign, a big Prospera sign. Once you get to that part, it kind of just cascades right into the sea.

Prospera is kind of an experiment. An experiment in 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. It offers companies operating there a menu of laws and regulations. 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,

with tech titans like Palantiers Peter Thiel, Venture capitalist Mark Andresen, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and former Coinbase CTO, Balaji Shrinavasan. Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook was started from a dorm room within our lifetime. Bitcoin was started from a white paper within our lifetime. So new companies, communities, currencies have all been started in this way. Could we start new countries? Prospera is a real-world case study for a growing movement to create so-called,

called Startup Nations. The spiritual guide of this business movement is a book by Bilaji Shrinabasin, a close friend of Peter Thiel 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, who he calls the grays. Then lobby existing governments for sovereignty.

Shrinobasan calls this 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. Well, who are the tech Palestinians in this situation? I don't think that that's in the book. I think for a long time, tech considered itself 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 network 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 Dan Germa almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team. Their 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 I 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 polarized. This is around 2008, 2009. Honduras had just undergone a coup. It's an example for all the other countries. Don't let yourself be overrun by tyrants. 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. Are there 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. The idea was to have a more successful country lease an empty tract of land from a host country, set its own rules, operate as an autonomous city, and court foreign investors through low-taxed.

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 sidelined, 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 First World 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. And 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? Would this threaten Honduran sovereignty?

Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law greenlighting charter cities was passed. The Supreme Court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional. But afterwards, the Honduran Congress led by members of the president's party, ousted 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 kick-started all of this.

The tech billionaire backers funding Prospera 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 Prospera, Inc. 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 a thousand 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 mold. 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 Roetan. For years, the island of Roaton was actually kind of a disputed territory between colonial powers, including the Spanish and the British.

In April 2022, after a new leftist 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 and void. Nullifying a guarantee made to prosper 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. 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 pay. powerful military on earth. How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what you 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 like actual companies.

working. A lot of it is virtual. There were some residential buildings, a Montessori school, a few research facilities working on out-of-the-box medical experiments like gene 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 developed world has right now and the tools at its disposal to maintain its power.

It is kind of the ideological groundwork for a lot of these efforts to make new cities or communities or kind of self-run polities. There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa. The utopians failed to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone. He has 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. I don't think that Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this 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 Rand Abd al-Fattah, and you've been listening to, listening to ThruLine 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 tick. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtinada Blewe. This episode was produced by me and... Julie Kaine. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Irene Noguchi.

Kiana Mugetam. Thomas Coulthrain. Sarah Wyman. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Special thanks to Holly Baxter, senior staff writer at The Independent and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Johannes Durge, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar,

Leanna Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org.

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