It is to be a contemporary Sparta on the shores of the Mediterranean, bringing together the finest among the world's technological elite. An autonomous, independent city-state, as powerful as Renaissance Florence and as wealthy as Byzantium. A tax-free enclave, governed by free-market principles and managed by a king-CEO leading citizen-shareholders, thanks to blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI). Such is the utopian project of technology start-up Praxis, founded in New York in 2020 by American entrepreneurs Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan.
This organization, which claims to have the backing of AI troublemaker Sam Altman, has already raised $19 million. Its financial supporters include billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir; the Winklevoss brothers, who knew Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and made their fortune with Bitcoin; and Samuel Bankman-Fried, the convicted ex-boss of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, through his Alameda Research investment fund. Rounding out this list is cryptoeconomy figure Balaji Srinivasan, a former CTO for the digital exchange Coinbase and author of the book The Network State, in which he sets forth the concept of abolishing the nation-state and its borders in order to bring about a future consisting of "an archipelago of hyperconnected, interconnected autonomous enclaves (...) endowed with a leader and an integrated cryptocurrency."
Inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand, Srinivasan has based his model of ideal citizenship on individual choice: Anyone is free to leave the system to seek out something better. Taxation in these enclaves must remain minimal to encourage people to join and to stimulate free enterprise. Administration and governance are to be delegated to an algorithmic infrastructure.
'Government tyranny'
Are these the ravings of a few isolated lunatics? Not really. Projects of this type have been multiplying, and attracting capital. In California, the inscrutable company Flannery Associates has just acquired nearly 22,000 hectares of farmland for a "green city" project, after a bitter legislative battle. Its investors include the cream of Silicon Valley, according to the New York Times: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon and Marc Andreessen, of the firm a16z.
And then there is the start-up Prospera, which has obtained permission from Honduran authorities to set up shop on the shores of the Caribbean island of Roatan. This libertarian enclave has offered its inhabitants an ideal living environment, in line with the principles of the "longevity" movement, a branch of transhumanism whose followers are focused on living as long as possible in good health. The start-up was able to begin building the city from scratch once it received zoning status as a special employment and economic development project, made possible by a 2013 government law.
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