Hierarchical tech weasels made a splash in early May with their vision for Guantanamo Bay. The Charter Cities Institute (CCI), a front group for billionaire Silicon Valley interests, wants to turn the home of US torture chambers into a high-tech charter city, which will double as a “proving ground” for migrants seeking to enter the US.
Those lucky enough to make it to the imperial heartland might find themselves in Guantanamos anyways. That’s because so-called “freedom cities” might be coming to the 50 states as well.
What Are the “Freedom” Cities?
Elon Musk recently got his company town in Starbase, Texas, which could be viewed as a first step toward a US where these billionaires create laws in their own jurisdictions that fit their personal needs. To bring about Starbase, in December 2024, more than 70 county residents (believed to be SpaceX employees) petitioned for an election to make Starbase its own municipality. In May it passed overwhelmingly. Starbase can now raise funds through taxes, acquire property through eminent domain—which it is already doing— and create its own zoning rules. It has its own mayor and two commissioners—all SpaceX employees.
“Because this is a project that is closely affiliated with SpaceX, you can imagine that the goals for the municipality are probably in pretty close alignment with the needs of SpaceX,” Alan Bojorquez, an attorney who specializes in city governance, told Texas Tribune.
Indeed, one of the biggest benefits for SpaceX of the incorporation may be the ability to avoid environmental red tape. In July 2024, conservation groups filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration, alleging that it rushed SpaceX’s Starship permitting process without adequate environmental review or mitigation requirements. SpaceX is also facing fines of almost $150,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency for allegedly illegally dumping pollutants into a Texas waterway without a permit.
Starbase will almost certainly pass its own more permissive rules, and the Texas government is already voting to give Starbase more authority over the closure of a popular beach on weekdays for launches.
Along with Starbase, other tech giants are planning their own build outs in cities where they already run the show, dominating real estate and local government. Google is planning a massive neighbourhood around its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Meta is doing the same thing with “Zucktown” in Menlo Park, and Musk wants a Tesla town, too.
Many write-ups on Starbase and the freedom cities compare them to the company towns of old where one business owned and controlled everything, surveilled the population, paid workers in“scrip”, and led to startling rates of suicide and addiction among citizens.
That very well may be the future for some— if not most — of these freedom cities, but there’s another darker layer to this current push, which makes these new-age company towns more problematic.
While some of the freedom cities may be partially or wholly devoted to quasi-slave labor and human lab rat tests there also exists the possibility of population engineering to them, as well as to the rest of the country they would be leaving behind. From Urban Geography:
Freedom Cities are thus, not merely land development schemes; Freedom Cities are where deserving elements of the population are promised perks and subsidies that favor family formation and will build out the favored community as a replay of a mythologized past…
As a political maneuver, the Freedom Cities plan’s core purpose is precisely to conjure new cities in a distinctly fascist mold and generate a shared desire across the Trumpian movement not just to carry out a clean break with present-day cities but to turn their backs on the latter. In the imagined new city of his movement, prosperity and safety abound, while elements that have been cast as undesirable, abject, and anti-American are forcibly kept out through intensive policing and state protection.
The Charter Cities Institute (CCI) and others are lobbying the Trump administration for more than just the creation of company towns theoretically under the jurisdiction of the state. They essentially want their own statelets within the US. The argument is that exemption from some federal laws replaced by oversight by a tech baron would drive innovation and prosperity. Here’s more from The New Republic:
More controversially, CCI proposes to do something very akin to what the Emiratis are best known for doing—erecting a labor economy that more readily resembles modern-day slavery. The big selling point for its GITMO haven suggests that the hypothetical city could house migrants who wish to move to the U.S., keeping them under surveillance for a “probationary period” while “evaluating their contributions to the local economy and society.”
“High performers become prime candidates for U.S. residence, while those who disrupt public order can be repatriated quickly—no labyrinthine state courts involved,” the authors write.
Frontier Foundation, a 501c4 organization, as well as the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation, are also on board. In April, the groups issued a joint letter to the Trump administration that begins:
We, the undersigned founders, investors, builders, and scholars write to express our strong support for Homesteading 2.0, consisting of the Home Sweet Home and Freedom Cities initiatives designed to add 3 million new homes and drive American economic and technological dynamism.
It goes on to argue that the Bureau of Land Management should sell of 600 square miles of land for Freedom Cities. The Frontier Foundation has its eye specifically on BLM outside cities like Boise, Idaho; Grand Junction, Colorado; and Redmond, Oregon. The details of how the cities will actually function and who will own and run them are sketchy but appear similar to Starbase with perhaps even more “freedom.” Here is more from the letter (caution: high levels of dynamism incoming):
The newly established urban districts, with streamlined governance and targeted regulatory relief, hold tremendous promise for accelerating American innovation, strengthening our industrial base, and addressing the most pressing economic and technological challenges facing the United States.
Paired with new urban development, Freedom Cities can offer a dynamic regulatory framework for re-shoring critical industries, expanding housing affordability, and facilitating rapid progress in emerging fields such as biotechnology, aeronautics, and energy. By removing red tape, Freedom Cities can create jobs, improve global competitiveness, and push the technological frontier.
Much of their argument includes the promise that these freedom zones will have affordable housing. And in case it wasn’t clear from the letter, the Frontier Foundation’s policy memo also includes the following:
Regulatory Opt-Out Mechanisms: Grant the Secretary-level heads of agencies, such as the Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Transportation Secretary (DOT), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules, discretion to waive or expedite certain regulations within Freedom Cities. Streamlined Environmental and Building Approval: Mandate expedited National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews and simplified building codes, ensuring that infrastructure, housing, and industrial projects can break ground within months rather than years.
Who Is Behind the Freedom City Push?
Much of the money flowing into the likes of the Frontier Foundation, CCI and the Foundation for American Innovation are shrouded in secrecy due to their status as 501c3 non-profit organizations that have been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS.
But the Foundation for American Innovation, as an example, identifies numerous billionaire laundering services as “major supporters” including the Miles Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.
Two major players behind the movement, which is being driven by the likes of Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel who back the venture capital firm Pronomos Capital, which has funded a charter city in Roatán, Honduras and several city projects in Africa, including one in Nigeria called Itana. [1]
Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, tells WIRED that he and other Próspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration, which is unsurprisingly receptive. During his 2024 campaign Trump came out in full support of the freedom cities:
Reportedly the administration is so enthusiastic that the plan has grown in scope from creating ten such cities to as many “as the market can handle.”
Why Do Tech Overlords Want Them?
The official line is a collection of all the usual BS out of Silicon Valley. We can look to the rantings of Marc Andreesen for evidence. Andreessen, the billionaire who co-founded the venture capital firm a16z and, before that, played a role in the invention of the modern web browser. He is also one of the major backers of the freedom cities, as well as a major player in the Trump administration and a driving force behind the Signal groups that began during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which fueled the new alliance of tech and the US right.
Andreessen is considered some sort of wise sage by the hierarchical tech crowd. Take the word of Minicircle cofounder Mac Davis who is also working with the Frontier Foundation. Minicircle is a longevity biotech company focused on developing gene therapies to extend human lifespans. It’s backed by Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and it currently has offices in both Austin, Texas, and Próspera.
According to WIRED, Davis says that Minicircle’s gene therapy clinical trial on the protein follistatin—which he claims increases muscle mass without side effects, and also has life-extending benefits in mice—was only possible in Próspera, but noted he’d like to see that change.
And it will, he believes, when freedom cities bring “American Dynamism” a reference to writings from Andreesen screeds, which argue that tech companies under the leadership of their wise billionaire leaders will save us from our failing government institutions and the pratfalls of democracy.
Let’s take a brief look. Here’s Andreesen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” going beat poet on us with his societal visions:
There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.
Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.
And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology…
Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past…
We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars.
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology…
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. …Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand….
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder…
We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment…
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.
We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it get a raise in buying power, which is the same as a raise in income. If a lot of goods and services drop in price, the result is an upward explosion of buying power, real income, and quality of life.
Note Andreesen’s emphasis on abundance, which Democrats are now embracing to slash the red tape and let the vultures feast in an effort to get back in the good graces of money men like Andreesen. And notably, Jeffrey Mason, the head of policy at the Charter Cities Institute, tells WIRED the freedom cities lobbying groups are also having conversations with Democratic members of Congress. So this reimagining of the US as a federation of billionaire-run emirates will have staying power beyond Trump.
But back to Andreesen and the ideology he represents. His whole spiel is that anyone or anything standing in their way is preventing the creation of this utopia:
A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.
— Marc Andreessen 
(@pmarca) January 25, 2025
It is of course all complete nonsense. What Andreesen and his like are after is more money and power of which company towns or freedom cities are a major part. Here’s Brian Merchant summing up their true motivations at Blood in the Machine:
These notions—AI can replace workers, the government should function like a startup—are not meant to describe reality; they are meant to create a permission structure for those in power to obtain more of it. Here, AI will either allow Trump and Musk to install more loyalists, hollow out the administrative state, or degrade the quality of services once provided; all outcomes that favor Trumpism, and, I guess, Muskism. The startup mentality, meanwhile, seeks to give license to break laws, in the name of progress, of disruption, of building the future.
Same as it ever was: Way back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, early factory owners deployed automation to deskill workers, to justify employing precarious and child laborers, and as a means of circumventing long-held laws—all to produce more products at lower quality, and to concentrate profits, and power, in fewer hands.
That helps explain why despite Andreesen’s promises that earthly paradise is nigh, he and his fellow weasels spend so much time and money worrying about building a police state. Andreeseen is focused on his primary home of Las Vegas while other tech billionaires have their own pet projects. That makes sense if you subscribe to the teachings of monarchist pundit Curtis Yarvin who was reportedly lionized in the Andreessen-led Signal chats. Here’s Quinn Slobodian on Yarvin’s vision for the future—much of which is playing out in real time:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
One wonders what type of Gaza they have in mind for their American freedom cities. This?
Or this:
Or perhaps the first is a freedom city and the latter is one of the left-behind zones?
How Soon Could We Find Out?
Here are the options under consideration to breathe life into stateside freedom cities according to WIRED:
According to Goff, Freedom Cities Coalition has briefed White House officials on three options for creating freedom cities. One is through “interstate compacts.” In this scenario, two or more states could set aside territories with shared tax and regulation policies, with some state-specific carve-outs. Under existing law, these compacts can’t be revoked, though they can be dissolved under certain circumstances.
If an interstate compact is approved by Congress, it becomes valid under federal law. Goff says the coalition is considering Congressional legislation that would give “advanced consent” to any freedom city compacts. That way, Congress wouldn’t need to approve each individual city.
Two other options are creating federal enclaves with special economic and jurisdictional zones, or having Trump issue executive orders to create each new freedom city.
The freedom city lobbying groups are urging that sites would ideally be announced by July 4, 2026. So mark your calendar!
One concern with such cities is that they would hollow out the rest of country since they would be free from regulation from the likes of Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (A bunch of nuclear reactors in freedom zones powering AI data centers free of any oversight from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—what could go wrong?)
That “freedom” from oversight would draw investment and jobs away from the rest of the country choking on its last morsels of democracy. But perhaps DOGE and other Trump administration destruction of the state are an attempt to do the hollowing out before the building of the “freedom” cities. By starving all but the Pentagon and and Homeland Security of funds and intentionally blowing up the ability of the state to function, the administration helps make the case for freedom cities.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue in The Guardian that we are in the midst of “end times fascism”, which they claim is even worse than the mid-20th century version. While that might be a bit hyperbolic, perhaps we’ll get there at this rate. Regardless there’s no doubt that the Silicon Valley illuminati have designs to take us to—or leave us behind in— a dystopia of their making, and they have a government ready to accommodate them:
Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
Personally, I’d be inclined to let ‘em have at it—if those living in their little fiefdoms are there of their own volition, the creation of their statelets didn’t involve the destruction of ours, and their actions weren’t destroying our shared earthly habitat.
It doesn’t appear any of those three conditions will be met, however, which leaves me with just one question: What’s the progress report on Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars? That sounds like an ideal solution for all—except the red planet. Musk, Andreesen, Thiel, and friends could bring all their AI, crypto, and court jesters there and be completely free there to pursue their utopia.
Notes
1. The Honduran Congress passed a law in 2022 repealing the allowance of SEZs. Próspera then sued the Honduran government. The lawsuit is ongoing and, as of now, Prospera remains operational.
