Hot take: this is not necessarily a bad idea, and worth experimenting with. After all, Disneyland is an existing example of such a setup, and it’s arguably better governed than other jurisdictions within Florida. And when Ron DeSantis flexed the state government power to transfer decision making from Disney back to the politicians, it was not an improvement.
It only works because it’s Disneyland
Article starts with Honduras, and wtf does that have to do with US, but
the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks.
The key is how much “we” get paid for their privilege, and does it buy the “utlimate tax free sov cit dream”? while residents get to make money from America, and evade American tariffs.
Best part if it fails, everyone leaves, it can be turned into unregulated nuclear waste dump with child hookers.
I think we’ve tried company towns before. Let’s see if we can do it differently this time. :-/
With company store?
Complete with scrip, er, microcoin crypto.
Good thing letting corporations run things has never gone poorly for anyone in the history of the human race even once!
Wow, these rechbros read all the bad news world sci-fi! What could go wrong?
I’ve seen this movie.
I am a “pro-corporate libertarian”, I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t like this sort of thing, but my response is “If you don’t like it, don’t move there.” They’re not proposing to turn existing cities into these.
It seems quite possible that the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks.
That’s possible in the sense that it isn’t forbidden by the laws of physics, but it’s quite a stretch. The federal government owns over a quarter of all the land in the USA - 650 million acres. National parks cover less than one seventh of that land. There’s plenty of space to build charter cities without having to use the most unpopular possible places to put them.
If anyone wants to know what happens in libertarian run communities, read “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear”.
Alternatively, if a book isn’t your style, just search for “Grafton, New Hampshire” and get ready for some wild reads.
Sure ignore all the environmental issues arise from these cities when normal cities cant even keep conpanies in check with their dump.
So building these cities close to any national parks is as stupid as your attempt at justifying the push
slavery is freedom (1984, 2025…)
Congrats and welcome to Thielsburgh, you’re pre-approved for housing because of your blood type. For your own safety please keep the bathtub full of ice at all times.
This shit is the basis for like 12 different dystopian sci-fi novels.
When I read Snow Crash, I had a hard time getting into it because I though the idea of wholesale privatisation of government responsibilities and territories went a bit too far…
Tech bros really have a hard on for the Torment Nexus.
A lot of well-connected scions of wealth read that, along with Ayn Rand, and thought “fuck yeah”
Going to keep linking similar threads Everytime I see this subject so people don’t forget what this actually means https://lemmy.world/comment/15538652
These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy.
As if a corporation isn’t just another form of hierarchical organization with departments and redundancy.
The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight.
Ah, there it is.
They also want to build on Federal land, which is mostly national parks. So obviously conservation is not a part of our future.
And this is just a fucking speed run into a cyberpunk dystopia. Like an extra stupid mix of Snowcrash and BioShock. If the Federal government allows a bunch of technofascists to build independent cities free of Federal regulatory oversight, then what’s stopping them from just not being part of the US at that point? They won’t be paying taxes, they won’t be represented in Congress, and they won’t be subject to Federal law, so why should we allow this?
Thomas Picketty predicted this in Le Capital au XXI e siècle / Capital in the 21st Century (2013), as the nearly inevitable outcome of neoliberal economic behaviour, based onvast statistical evidence gathered by governments and expert organisations over more than a century. About the only thing he got wrong was, like even the meteorological experts, underestimating the speed at which climate chaos was going to overwhelm the world’s societies and abet the billionaires’ takeover.
I really, REALLY recommend that book, if you have the capacity to slog through dense academic prose (in translation, yet!). To make it easier to lift the book, which would otherwise have been maybe 5,000 pages, give or take a couple of complicated graphs, , Picketty put all the footnotes and appendices online. They do reward reading/examining, at least where you want to see the evidence in very fine detail.
Or, get an economics geek to translate for you.
I studied economics
Tldr: we’re big fucked
Technofascism, even…
That’s better than religious fascism or pokemon fascism.
