Elon Musk has always been the most ambitious of all the Brotopians. While his colleagues may dream about building largely unregulated and tax-free cities in Honduras or Venezuela or Nigeria, Musk has been talking about sending a million earthlings (including, possibly, him) to live in a self-sustaining city on freaking
If you’ve ever wanted to stab a crypto-bro biohacker in the face with a knife, now’s your chance! All you have to do is to get yourself down to the island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras by the evening of March 21st and enter yourself in
It turns out that this whole conjuring-a-whole-city-out-of-thin-air thing is a bit harder than you might think. Not quite ten years ago some dudes with something like $200 million in techbro dollars decided to start up their own brand new city on an island in Honduras. They called it Prospera, which
The guys I call the brotopians – the tech billionaires funding charter cities, network states, and various other grandiose and extremely stupid schemes to “exit democracy” – tend to be a very particular brand of libertarian. That is, the kind who thinks that taxation is theft when it’s applied to them,
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” the “free-market” fetishist Milton Friedman once wrote, “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Mark Lutter, founder and Executive Director of the Charter City Institute, is one of those guys whose
Scratch a techbro billionaire – scratch him hard, enough to bleed – and chances are good you’ll find a restless dreamer, a utopian of sorts desperate to transcend our messy and sometimes depressing world. Some of these brotopian dreamers seek personal transcendence, adopting bizarre diet and workout regimens and sometimes even