The mini-manifesto that surveillance tech company Palantir posted on X last weekend reads a bit like what you might get if you asked ChatGPT to write you a monologue for a techbro supervillain. The post, summarizing a 2025 book called The Technological Republic co-authored by company CEO Alex Karp, is
The Liberty Acceleration Summit 2026, wrapping up today in the micro-mini “startup city” of Prospera, located on an island off the coast of Honduras, was clearly intended as a celebratory affair, a fact made abundantly clear by the garish and intrusive confetti animation on the event’s website, which will
Hey! My latest piece in The Nation is about Marc Andreessen's war on introspection and how it conveniently absolves him from accountability for some of his, er, more problematic investments in the startup sector of the military industrial complex. Here's the lede, which should hopefully inspire
BREAKING NEWS! The newspaper owned by the world's third-richest man thinks it would be a very bad idea for the government of the country that enabled him to become so rich to take back five percent of his $232 billion fortune. A post on Jeff Bezos' personal
So, as you may have gathered from the headline here, I have a piece in The Nation on Brotopian philosopher-king Peter Thiel and his weird (or maybe not-so-weird) bromance with Jeffrey Epstein. [W]hat really united this odd couple was a common political and ideological project. Both believed that civilization
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