Saturday Hashtag: #PrivateProsperityZones

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In 2014, at TEDx WDS2, Ghislaine Maxwell declared, “I’m going to leverage technology to create a new country,” explicitly emphasizing: “country, not company.”

She never built one. But her stated intent captures a broader long-standing Silicon Valley ambition: using technology to escape institutional constraints and gain greater control over the rules that govern economic and political life.

Peter Thiel made that political logic explicit in a 2010 Libertopia speech (at 4:31). He said, “We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people.”

Using technology to make government work better is ordinary innovation. Using it to bypass government is an attempt to subvert democracy. 

Thiel said it plainly: With too few voters to win elections, they could use technology to “unilaterally change the world.” That is power without democracy.

The practice of dodging regulation is a staple of US industry and predates Maxwell and Thiel. But Silicon Valley has radicalized that impulse, seeking not merely to evade regulation but to escape government oversight and democratic control altogether.

In 2008, Seasteading Institute founder Patri Friedman (son of Milton Friedman) and his board chair, Joe Lonsdale, used the organization to push that agenda. Thiel gave the institute $500,000 that year. Its aim was to evade government oversight under the guise of “innovation zones.” Thiel ultimately invested $1.7 million before resigning from its board in 2011.

The motivation was explicit when Lonsdale told Glenn Beck that Silicon Valley had “changed a lot of industries” but had “not been able to change the government.” 

In 2020, Patri Friedman, speaking at Instituto Mises Brasil, a São Paulo-based nonprofit think tank, described government in the same entrepreneurial terms: He began to say (at 16:58) starting a new “country,” then corrected himself to “company,” would require “a war, an election, or a revolution,” which he described as a ridiculous barrier to entry for an “entrepreneur.”

Friedman put the idea into practice in 2019 by founding Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund, to create privately governed, for-profit cities. Its flagship project, Próspera in Honduras, operates as a semiautonomous zone with its own tax, regulatory, and arbitration systems.

After the Honduran government moved to repeal the legal framework that enabled it, Próspera’s investors sued Honduras for $11 billion in international arbitration. Lobbying records also show Honduras Próspera Inc. has spent $906,000 lobbying the US government.

But escaping government constraints does not always mean building a new jurisdiction. In 2025, Elon Musk pursued the inverse approach through DOGE: dismantling existing government institutions. Musk said agencies should be “deleted,” not reformed.

Another approach is to create new enclaves within existing states while giving private interests greater freedom from conventional government constraints. California Forever puts that idea to the test on American soil.

This project strategy has already collided with local politics. The company, backed by Czech entrepreneur Jan Sramek, amassed more than 65,000 acres in Solano County, CA, for a “new city” but, after strong local opposition, shifted toward a 7,500-acre shipyard. 

It is now seeking a Maritime Prosperity Zone in Northern California under a new Trump initiative, spanning the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers through Suisun and San Pablo bays, with tax incentives and federal regulatory support.

The zone offers tax incentives and federal support to promote shipbuilding and jobs. California Forever says its proposal would use those incentives to build a new shipyard.

The issue is not shipbuilding itself, but tech oligarchs leveraging a new federal program to revive their agenda after local voters rejected it. That raises fundamental questions about land, political influence, and democratic control.

The same logic is emerging around artificial intelligence. The utopian Institute for Progress has proposed Special Compute Zones for AI clusters. The proposal would accelerate permitting through federal authority, superseding local zoning and limiting environmental review.

And the model has gone global, blurring government and private power. Jacob Helberg, a former senior Palantir employee turned under secretary of state for economic affairs, is promoting a 4,000-acre Economic Security Zone for private corporations in the Philippines’ Luzon Economic Corridor under Pax Silica, a US-led effort to secure supply chains for AI, semiconductors, and critical minerals, 

On Lonsdale’s American Optimist podcast (at 22:39), Helberg called it “one of our flagship efforts,” adding: “We are developing a product-driven approach to foreign policy.” [Emphasis added.]

Since World War II, US foreign policy has been driven by a complex balance of national security, strategic interests, and political goals — not the fatuous logic of product placement and venture-capital rollouts. 

Helberg is replacing statecraft with myopic, Palantir-style corporate partnerships, turning public strategy into private profit and putting strategic sovereignty in private hands.

Later in the interview (between 26:18 and 26:42), Lonsdale remarked: “Maybe, given what we’re doing in Venezuela, who knows? … Maybe something with Israel?” Helberg just echoed Lonsdale’s approving laugh.

That does not establish that US actions in Venezuela or Israel are intended to create economic zones. But it raises a more fundamental question: When foreign policy becomes intertwined with private corporate interests, who is actually setting the agenda — and who stands to profit?

The same scrutiny should be applied to Jared Kushner’s Gaza deal, where private investment is central to the reconstruction. Before treating the Gaza destruction as a development opportunity, however, basic questions of land ownership, property rights, compensation, displacement, and political control must be resolved.

The people behind these projects are not marginal outsiders. They are billionaires, tech executives, investors, lobbyists, and government officials with enormous financial stakes.

The issue is not whether technology can improve government. It is whether technology is being used to bypass democratic deliberation.

The evidence does not absolutely prove a coordinated plot to abolish democracy, or that foreign-policy decisions are being made for investors. But the pattern is hard to dismiss: Influential technology investors repeatedly seek to reduce government constraints, while governments create exceptional accommodations for capital.

Since she is now a ward of the state, Maxwell’s “new country” never became a sovereign state. But the ambition survives within a vast architecture of concentrated power: exceptional jurisdictions, government-backed enclaves, and private control over land, regulation, and economic life.

Less conspicuous than a new country declaring independence, yet significantly more consequential, the shadowy privatization machine is not breaking from the political order; it is consuming it from within.

Hashtag Picks

Democracy v the Machine: The Birth of the Digital Age and the Warnings That Were Ignored 

The author writes, “Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia — but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?” 

Is Every Billionaire a Policy Failure?

The author writes, “Recently I was eating at an outside cafe when a man walked by me wearing a shirt that said, ‘Every billionaire is a policy failure.’ But is that really true? Apparently, he is not the only one who feels this way. … All across the country — and across the world — there has been a growing backlash against billionaires, the wealthy and the uber-rich. New York City’s mayor wants them to pay more taxes. So do a growing number of people in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Rich people aren’t popular. Then again, when were they ever popular?” 

Seasteading Is Making a Comeback — But These Utopian Paradises on the High Seas Have a History of Failure

From The Independent: “They promised utopian paradises, unshackled by governments and buoyed by tech. What they built instead was a costly illusion. Holly Baxter reports on how seasteading started, unraveled and is now rising again in popularity.” 

Silicon Valley’s AI Companies at a Crossroads: Ethics vs. the Pentagon

The author writes, “I’ve spent the better part of my life observing the complex dance between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. Indeed, at one point, I served as a mediator between the Department of Defense and Intel when the U.S. government sought to ban exports of Intel’s X80386 PC chips to Russia in the name of national security. However, what is presently happening between the Department of Defense and the artificial intelligence sector may be the most important and telling moment yet. At the heart of the controversy are two of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence companies — Anthropic and OpenAI. What’s unfolding now highlights a fundamental conflict the tech industry can no longer ignore: Who is at the helm, and what rules define the game?”

America’s New Oligarchy

From The Financial Times: “In America’s Gilded Age, millionaire robber barons operated from the shadows, bribing pliant lawmakers to do their bidding. Under President Donald Trump, billionaires have gone one better. Some are in his cabinet. According to one widely cited estimate, Trump’s cabinet members have a combined net worth of $7.5bn, making his administration the richest in American history. Including Trump himself, the figure reaches roughly $14bn. The US has long prided itself on being the world’s leading democracy. But its system of government is increasingly dominated by an economic elite that has parlayed its immense riches into tangible political influence.” 

Private Equity Profit Motives Clash With Public Interest

From Legis1: “A new Congressional Research Service report is putting private equity policy squarely in Congress’s crosshairs, arriving at a moment when the Trump administration’s deregulatory posture is colliding with bipartisan unease about Wall Street’s expanding footprint in health care, housing, child care, and local news. The central tension is straightforward: private equity firms are built to maximize returns for investors, typically within a five-to-seven year window. The industries they’ve moved into are built to serve the public. Whether those two missions can coexist is the question Congress is now being asked to answer.”

Crowding Out: How Rising Public Debt Squeezes the Economy

From the Bipartisan Policy Center: “Federal debt held by the public has reached $32 trillion as of July 2026 — about the size of the entire U.S. economy — and there are few signs that the fiscal outlook will improve in the near term. When the government borrows, it competes with private borrowers for the same pool of savings that funds new housing construction, business expansion, car loans, and student loans. Competition for those funds pushes interest rates up, as borrowers must offer higher returns to attract lenders away from virtually risk-free Treasury securities. Economists call this dynamic ‘crowding out.’ This explainer examines the mechanisms behind crowding out and how increased government borrowing raises costs for Americans.” 

A Peter Thiel–Backed Startup City Wants to Be Africa’s Delaware (2023)

From Wired: “Spearheaded by one of Nigeria’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, and real estate entrepreneur Luqman Edu, Itana is an aspiring tech hub that promises to host Nigeria’s internet workers and help nurture a new generation of tech unicorns. Taking advantage of the Lekki Free Zone’s preexisting tax breaks to appeal to itinerant entrepreneurs, the founders envision the completed city as somewhere between the glittering spires of Dubai and Delaware, the small US state that is the registered home of more than 1.5 million companies from all over the world.”