transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:13] We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations. But examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] It's the year 1516, we're inside the pages of a book called Utopia, breathing the fictional air of Antwerp, Belgium.

Speaker 1:
[00:43] The Utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone, when he has all the stars in the sky to look at.

Speaker 2:
[00:52] An old, sunburned, long-bearded traveler named Raphael Haithaladeh has just returned to Europe after spending five years on an island called Utopia. And he's seeing the world with new eyes, ranting to anyone who will listen.

Speaker 1:
[01:08] I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the nation.

Speaker 2:
[01:15] About corrupt leaders, absurd laws, and the enclosure system, in which so-called landlords fence off lands belonging to villagers, turning them into their personal fiefdoms, all for the sake of profit. What a contrast to the island of Utopia, he reminisces.

Speaker 1:
[01:33] Where every man has a right to everything.

Speaker 2:
[01:36] Gold is used for chamber pots. Private property isn't a thing. Everyone wears the exact same colorless clothes and works six-hour days.

Speaker 1:
[01:46] Everyone has his eye upon you.

Speaker 2:
[01:48] And all movement is perfectly regulated.

Speaker 1:
[01:52] If any man goes out of the city to which he belongs without leave, he is taken for a fugitive and severely punished. And if he does this often, he is condemned to slavery.

Speaker 2:
[02:08] The author of this book, Thomas Moore, invented the word utopia. It's a Greek pun combining utopos, no place, and utopos, good place. It asks in a tongue-in-cheek way, is a perfect society possible? Or is the fantasy just a mirror held up to reality and a chance to change it?

Speaker 3:
[02:32] I mean, I hate to sound like utopic tech bro here, but if you'll excuse me for three seconds.

Speaker 4:
[02:36] These are things that are going to save lives.

Speaker 3:
[02:38] We can make the world amazing.

Speaker 5:
[02:40] More profound than fire or electricity or anything that we have done in the past.

Speaker 2:
[02:46] Over the last few decades, the tech sphere has thrived on the urge to optimize everything, including utopia. If we can just solve for x here and invent for y there, we can build the perfect society. Perfect for who? That's a different story.

Speaker 5:
[03:03] You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Speaker 6:
[03:07] You're hesitant.

Speaker 2:
[03:09] From private cities...

Speaker 7:
[03:10] California forever is building the next great American city...

Speaker 2:
[03:13] .to interstellar colonies.

Speaker 8:
[03:15] You could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy.

Speaker 2:
[03:19] Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders and laws. Most of us live by.

Speaker 9:
[03:28] Starting new countries is actually possible, preferable and profitable.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] So we were curious. Has anyone tried it? Has this fantasy of exit, of opting out of the rules and building a new world, been put to the test? I'm Rund Abdelfatah. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we'll take you from a forgotten arctic archipelago, the only place in the world with open borders, to floating cities in the ocean, out in the middle of nowhere, on your own, to private startup nations that might be coming to some land near you.

Speaker 4:
[04:02] Is this going to be a little private fiefdom run by these venture capitalists? What do they really want?

Speaker 10:
[04:12] Hi, this is Emil Hartz from Denver, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

Speaker 11:
[04:21] Part 1, A Weird World.

Speaker 12:
[04:26] We are told all the time that you have a certain number of countries in the world, that they all have borders surrounding them, and that's kind of the architecture of the world, of the political world and of the geographic world. But it turns out there's a lot more to it than that.

Speaker 2:
[04:41] This is Atusa Araxia Abrahamian.

Speaker 12:
[04:44] I'm the author of two books, The Cosmopolites, which is about the global market for citizenship and the hidden globe, how wealth hacks the world.

Speaker 2:
[04:54] Atusa has spent the last couple of decades traveling and studying the world with a skeptical eye, observing its hidden architecture, which she describes as a jumble of weird jurisdictions.

Speaker 12:
[05:07] Lots of people will find themselves in a weird jurisdiction at some point in their life. You might be at a border checkpoint. You might be working in a factory that's in a special economic zone. You might be on a ship that's flying a flag that you don't totally recognize.

Speaker 2:
[05:23] Or you might find yourself sailing by a small, very frozen archipelago called Svalbard.

Speaker 12:
[05:31] Svalbard is a northern territory of Norway in the Arctic Circle.

Speaker 2:
[05:36] Okay, let's be real. You probably won't find yourself there anytime soon. And honestly, I hadn't even heard of Svalbard before talking to Atusa. But you've likely heard of Svalbard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately.

Speaker 13:
[05:50] President Donald Trump reasserted in the New Year that the United States wants Greenland.

Speaker 14:
[05:55] We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.

Speaker 2:
[05:59] Like Greenland, Svalbard is involved in the race for the Arctic. Being near the North Pole makes it an ideal place to track missiles flying across the planet and download data from satellites. New shipping routes are buried under the ice, that climate change is rapidly melting. And buried in the ocean floor are a bunch of mineral resources, copper, zinc, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements used in all kinds of technology. But there's also something that makes Svalbard weird.

Speaker 12:
[06:31] Svalbard is the only place in the world with open borders.

Speaker 2:
[06:34] Open borders. Svalbard is part of the kingdom of Norway. But everyone from Indian climate scientists to Russian coal miners to Thai hikers are welcome. No visa required. Some might call that a fantasy, others a nightmare, but definitely weird. And the story of how Svalbard ended up that way gives us a window into how the world of nations and passports, a world we take for granted as reality, came to be, and what it means to exist outside it.

Speaker 6:
[07:11] About 9:30 a.m., land came in sight. Steep, rocky crags and peaks, covered or streaked with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly barren, and unlike anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds.

Speaker 2:
[07:38] In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longyear stumbled across Svobard while on a tourist cruise with his family. Longyear had built a huge timber and mining business in northern Michigan.

Speaker 12:
[07:51] This was a man who, legend has it, could smell coal. He went somewhere and he could just smell the coal he knew where it was.

Speaker 2:
[07:58] Call it a sniff sense. Sorry, I had to.

Speaker 12:
[08:02] I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north, and I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winter smelled like Svobard.

Speaker 2:
[08:19] Quick context. Svobard being so cold and so far north, was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century. And by the time Longyear came along a few hundred years later, Svobard still had no permanent population. It was terra nullius, a legal no-man's land. A rare thing to find by this time because of industrialization and colonialism. People knew there was coal there, but previous efforts to get it had been abandoned. Longyear though was up for the challenge.

Speaker 6:
[08:53] The enterprise of developing a new and practically unknown coal field within 800 miles of the North Pole was an interesting and satisfactory experiment.

Speaker 2:
[09:05] He sets up a settlement, names it Longyear City, after himself, and starts the Arctic Coal Company.

Speaker 12:
[09:11] People said that he thought of himself as a polar emperor, which gives you a glimpse at his mindset and the kind of animating philosophy behind these things.

Speaker 2:
[09:21] For a few years, he could live in this fantasy, slowly building a new little world on his terms.

Speaker 12:
[09:27] He's creating a company town. There's a shop, the laborers can only shop at the shop. They can only sleep at the dorms. Good luck finding another housing out there.

Speaker 2:
[09:38] But it turns out, building a new society was hard.

Speaker 6:
[09:42] Many difficult and unusual problems.

Speaker 12:
[09:47] So there were two kinds of conflicts that took place. One was between the management and the workers. So John Monroe Longyear and the local guys that he hired, they didn't like the food, he didn't like how lazy they were.

Speaker 6:
[10:00] Hundreds of laboring men speaking a foreign language and not always amenable to discipline.

Speaker 12:
[10:05] A classic tale.

Speaker 6:
[10:07] Strikes were instituted by disaffected socialistic leaders.

Speaker 12:
[10:10] And the other conflict was between him and other people like him, other people who were trying to start businesses and mine coal. And these were essentially disputes about property. Who owns what? Who can go where? Who planted the stake first? It got a little messy.

Speaker 2:
[10:28] But Svalbard had no courts, no police, no property law.

Speaker 12:
[10:32] There was no authority to really rule on these things.

Speaker 2:
[10:37] It seemed only a matter of time before some nation or empire would claim sovereignty over Svalbard and threaten his business. Longyear wanted to get ahead of that. So he reached out to his country of origin, the United States, and lobbied the government to get involved to protect his property rights in Svalbard.

Speaker 12:
[10:56] He did so under an older law called the US. Guano Act that allowed the US to claim unoccupied islands in the Pacific that contained large amounts of guano, bird shit, bird droppings.

Speaker 2:
[11:11] No joke, this is a real thing. This act from 1856 says that if an American citizen finds enough guano, bird poop, on an island not yet claimed by another country or empire, the US president could choose to use military force to claim sovereignty there. Why guano? Because it's a great fertilizer, necessary for maintaining food production at a time when synthetic fertilizers didn't yet exist. And it was also used to produce an ingredient for explosives. It was considered so valuable, it got the nickname white gold. US citizens invoked the Guano Act to claim over 100 islands around the globe. And John Runro Longyear tried his luck with it in Svalbard, arguing that it should be expanded to include not just guano, but also coal and other minerals.

Speaker 12:
[12:03] He had a lobbyist, he had a guy on K Street. He was even showing up to hotel lobbies to try to talk delegates into taking his side.

Speaker 2:
[12:12] The US government ultimately decided not to intervene. And then, in 1914, reality came knocking.

Speaker 12:
[12:30] The war made it quite difficult to export coal.

Speaker 2:
[12:34] When World War I broke out, his company's shipping and trade ground to a halt.

Speaker 12:
[12:40] The clock was ticking, right?

Speaker 2:
[12:42] And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to a Norwegian coal mining company.

Speaker 1:
[12:51] In order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, but the prescription of open, just and honorable relations between nations, agree to this covenant of the League of Nations.

Speaker 2:
[13:11] On June 28, 1919, in France's Hall of Mirrors, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending World War I. The treaty accelerated a shift that was already underway, moving the world from the age of empires to the age of nation states. And, it established the League of Nations, an international organization designed to maintain world peace through diplomacy.

Speaker 12:
[13:37] The powers we're meeting to kind of divvy up what was left of the world.

Speaker 2:
[13:41] This included convening a conference on quote, passport and customs formalities, to create a uniform 32-page booklet, a passport, that would be required to travel across borders. There wasn't really a place for a place with no ruler. And so…

Speaker 12:
[13:59] Svalbard was formerly kind of bestowed upon Norway by the international community.

Speaker 2:
[14:05] Why? Because Norway had been a good ally during the war. And it had the biggest presence on Svalbard, including a company that until a few years earlier had been owned by John Monroe Longyear. The treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svalbard, keeping its borders open for business.

Speaker 6:
[14:27] It is a pleasure to know that Svalbard, though now under the flag of Norway, is forever dedicated to the arts of peace. It probably can never be drawn into international controversy.

Speaker 2:
[14:41] Svalbard wasn't a utopia. But over time, it did come to represent a place of global cooperation.

Speaker 15:
[14:48] Seventy-five boxes of seeds were carrying down a red carpet today on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean, headed for cold storage, really cold storage.

Speaker 2:
[14:59] Since 2008, Svalbard has even housed a large post-apocalyptic seed vault, meant to safeguard the planet's food crops if the worst ever happens.

Speaker 16:
[15:08] Some call it a doomsday vault, others a Noah's Ark for global agriculture.

Speaker 8:
[15:13] This is the most valuable natural resource in the world. So in other words, as long as we intend to be on Earth ourselves, we're going to need this diversity.

Speaker 7:
[15:24] Tonight, we're heading north, way north, to the Arctic Circle, which is fast becoming one of the most contested regions in the world. And that means Beijing, Moscow, Washington and the European continent are in a race for influence.

Speaker 2:
[15:38] Recently, with the race for the Arctic heating up, and as more countries, including the US, have challenged the sovereignty of nations around the world, Norway has begun pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svalbard and fend off foreign influence, cracking down on land sales to foreigners, stripping away foreigners' voting rights, limiting scientific research, and claiming hundreds of miles of Svalbard seas. Maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall, that the world order might be shifting again.

Speaker 12:
[16:11] The nation-state model, I think if we take a thousand-foot view from it, is both very new and very fragile and might just be a blip.

Speaker 2:
[16:21] The question is, if the rules are being rewritten, who gets to rewrite them?

Speaker 12:
[16:27] Svalbard is a story about, you know, sorry to say it, but men who want to start something new in a place that they consider almost a blank slate. I think there's a lot of parallels with somebody like Elon Musk, who wants to explore space. And this kind of awareness that none of the rules are all that fixed. If you just try hard enough, maybe the rules will bend to your own desires.

Speaker 2:
[16:57] Coming up.

Speaker 17:
[16:58] It was like a message in a ball. You pop the cork in, you throw it out into the sea of the Internet, and see what happens.

Speaker 2:
[17:05] We take to the high seas.

Speaker 18:
[17:15] Hi, my name is Tim Berry. I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

Speaker 2:
[17:25] Part Two, Let a Thousand Nations Bloom. These are the opening lines of the 1956 movie starring John Wayne, called The Searchers. The music feels almost wistful, reveling in the adventurous spirit that pushed so many to head out into the frontier. The movie follows Wayne's character, a Civil War vet who fought on the side of the Confederacy after he returns home to Texas. And like any good Western, there are long panoramic shots of the vast landscape, deep red sands and intense blue skies, the great unknown.

Speaker 13:
[18:29] This has come a long way before he died, Captain.

Speaker 2:
[18:32] It's set just a few years after the 1862 Homestead Act passed, when anyone moving out west could claim land if they were willing to settle on and farm in.

Speaker 17:
[18:43] What was it like when people were colonizing the West? Setting out on their own to build a ranch and stuff like that. And I realized that being out there was going to be a very lonely existence for quite a while.

Speaker 2:
[19:00] This is Wayne Gramlich. He's a retired computer engineer, and he remembers watching The Searchers back in the 1990s, a time when he was finding himself spending more and more hours on the newly minted World Wide Web where he stumbled across a fascinating trend. Stories of people who, in the 60s and 70s, attempted to build micro nations at sea, all of which pretty much failed.

Speaker 17:
[19:25] Well, this is weird, but okay.

Speaker 2:
[19:28] He found himself imagining what those attempts might have been like, and considering how he would try to build a new nation in the middle of the sea.

Speaker 17:
[19:36] I was just sort of noodling around in the back of my brain.

Speaker 10:
[19:40] Another one, huh?

Speaker 2:
[19:42] Scenes from the searchers flashed through his mind. He thought maybe it would feel a lot like the Wild West, only wetter, with one big difference. I don't like it.

Speaker 19:
[19:53] What don't you like?

Speaker 14:
[19:54] Indians on the raid generally hide their dead.

Speaker 17:
[19:57] I don't like being political, but we really treated the Native Americans really poorly. So I thought it was a positive endeavor, largely because, unlike the colonization of the West, where there were previous occupants, in the ocean, the only previous occupants are the fish.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] So on a whim, he sat down at his computer and started typing, the blank page a kind of canvas to design a new world.

Speaker 17:
[20:31] How do you make the structures safer? Maybe we recycle the 2-liter bottles.

Speaker 2:
[20:36] In the paper, Wayne brainstormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he foresaw coming up.

Speaker 17:
[20:42] It's probably a bad idea.

Speaker 2:
[20:44] Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micronation attempts. Like how to survive the elements.

Speaker 17:
[20:51] We can extract energy from waves.

Speaker 2:
[20:53] Huge waves, relentless sun.

Speaker 17:
[20:56] Use the difference in temperature of the surface water.

Speaker 2:
[20:58] And what about food?

Speaker 17:
[20:59] You know, you can eat fish.

Speaker 8:
[21:01] It's out the middle of the ocean.

Speaker 17:
[21:02] Doesn't have a lot of fish.

Speaker 2:
[21:05] Wayne called the paper Seasteading, homesteading the high seas.

Speaker 17:
[21:10] To capture some of the romance of, you know, manifest destiny.

Speaker 2:
[21:16] It reads like an instruction manual, very much seen through an engineer's eye. He didn't talk much about the more dicey political stuff, like how you deal with pirates, or how you'd get the nation recognized by the UN. He figured it was just a thought experiment, so he didn't need to have everything figured out.

Speaker 17:
[21:37] Back then, I was just publishing everything I did on the Internet. It's like, why not?

Speaker 2:
[21:42] In 1998, he uploads his paper to the web. And for a while, nothing much happens. Three years later, in 2001, I got contacted by this guy named Patry Friedman.

Speaker 17:
[22:01] That was the beginning of the next phase of the story.

Speaker 12:
[22:08] I remember he said that he should eventually just join the family business.

Speaker 2:
[22:13] Journalist Atusa Araxia Abrahamian has interviewed Patry Friedman, the grandson of free market pioneer Milton Friedman, a number of times over the last couple of decades. We reached out to him for an interview ourselves but didn't hear back. Atusa says Patry came to see steadying from an economics angle.

Speaker 12:
[22:33] It was a way to create more nation states in the world, to create competition and have better ideas and kind of evolve from our land bound system of governance.

Speaker 17:
[22:48] We had a few back and forth. And then I think I asked him like, by the way, where are you? Because the fun thing about the internet is nobody knows where anybody is. He says, well, I currently live in Sunnyvale, California. So guess what? So do I. Let's get together for lunch.

Speaker 2:
[23:07] Can you take me to that first meeting? Because it's almost like an intellectual blind date, right?

Speaker 17:
[23:13] Oh, it absolutely isn't an intellectual blind date.

Speaker 2:
[23:17] And they hit it off. Wayne learned that Patry had studied mathematics and computer science, and they were both excited about C-studding. They started meeting up periodically, revising that instruction manual Wayne had drafted, getting to know each other along the way.

Speaker 17:
[23:34] Occasionally, he would tell me stories of grandma and grandpa talking about economics. This is a family who's very much into the libertarian movement, and I'm not really into the libertarian movement.

Speaker 2:
[23:49] The libertarian movement generally believes in individual liberty above all else, a competitive free market, and very little government interference in people's lives. And Patry saw something very libertarian in the seasteading idea.

Speaker 12:
[24:04] Experimentation was something that they talked about a lot.

Speaker 2:
[24:07] And Patry really wanted to make that experiment a reality. From that first email, he'd said to Wayne, I would really like to build one of these things.

Speaker 17:
[24:17] I'm going like, well, that's a lot of work.

Speaker 2:
[24:19] And it would require a lot of money. Money they didn't have.

Speaker 17:
[24:23] We were always playing with the money problem.

Speaker 2:
[24:26] Then the solution fell into their laps. It was 2007. Patry was interviewing for jobs at different companies in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 17:
[24:36] He did apply for a job at Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel's fund.

Speaker 2:
[24:44] Peter Thiel, the don of what's become known as the PayPal Mafia.

Speaker 15:
[24:49] The companies that have defined our era all share one link.

Speaker 5:
[24:52] Their founders trace their origins back to PayPal.

Speaker 2:
[24:55] Reporting about the PayPal Mafia can sound like a who's who of every major tech company of the past 30 years.

Speaker 20:
[25:02] Peter Thiel started a hedge fund. They were like the earliest angel investor into Facebook, a gazillion dollars. Jeremy Stompleman, Russell Simmons, Yelp, Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn. Obviously, there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.

Speaker 13:
[25:18] YouTube. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:19] In the 2000s, Thiel was pushing the idea that technology was an alternative to politics that could, unilaterally, change the world. His biographer described him as, secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley, a place that some people consider to be.

Speaker 17:
[25:37] The crowns are old, the libertarian movement.

Speaker 21:
[25:40] Whether we're going to have a much better future or not, I think it gets driven by the rate of technological progress.

Speaker 2:
[25:48] We reached out to Peter Thiel for this episode, but got no response.

Speaker 17:
[25:54] He aced the interview.

Speaker 2:
[25:57] Before he leaves, Patry casually brings up Seasteading, and the idea eventually makes its way to Peter Thiel.

Speaker 17:
[26:04] That is just nirvana to the libertarian movement, a place where you can set up a libertarian society via Seasteads. And so Peter said, well, what if I give you half a million to promote the idea and push it forward?

Speaker 2:
[26:19] So on April 15th, 2008, they co-founded the Seasteading Institute with funding from Peter Thiel. Patri liked to say, Let a thousand nations plume. And their logo seemed to reference the libertarian classic, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a man holding up the Seastead above his head.

Speaker 17:
[26:39] It might have been inspired by that.

Speaker 21:
[26:41] The science fiction things are very interesting because so few people are doing them. There is something about that that's contrarian, fundamental. It's not being done enough of.

Speaker 17:
[26:56] So, anyhow, money was allocated and then started doing stuff.

Speaker 2:
[27:01] Peter Thiel gave them two marching orders.

Speaker 17:
[27:04] One, push the engineering forward.

Speaker 2:
[27:06] And two, market it a little.

Speaker 22:
[27:11] So our love for the oceans has brought us together today to embark on a short journey into the unknown.

Speaker 2:
[27:17] Patri took the lead, giving TED Talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel of seasteading.

Speaker 22:
[27:23] We've run out of frontier. All land is claimed. And our revolutions have become increasingly superficial.

Speaker 12:
[27:31] I'm going to read you a quote from a story I did more than 10 years ago where Friedman said, what if Apple's genius designers build a city that's as fun to use as an iPad?

Speaker 22:
[27:43] Apple Nation, the country that knows what you want even better than you do.

Speaker 12:
[27:47] And I think that really sums up both the moment and sort of optimism around seasteading at the time.

Speaker 22:
[27:52] While saving humanity, we can also save the oceans.

Speaker 2:
[27:57] The seasteading pitch was pointing out some real problems with existing governments. Things like corruption, increasing federal power, and slow moving bureaucracy that were making it harder to respond to real social problems like rising healthcare costs and economic inequality. And a lot of people responded positively. It was time to give it a go.

Speaker 17:
[28:20] And then the question is whether or not we were going to do what we called the SFS, single-family seastead, or a larger one.

Speaker 2:
[28:29] They debated that question at the offices of one of Thiel's biggest companies, where they had a small space, a data analytics firm called Palantir.

Speaker 17:
[28:38] They didn't give us a room, they gave us a nook.

Speaker 2:
[28:41] Palantir might sound familiar for two reasons. The company has recently attracted a lot of controversy for its close secretive work with government intelligence, defense, and immigration agencies, and it's the name of the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 21:
[28:57] Originally created by the elves, it was meant to be used for good purposes.

Speaker 19:
[29:01] The power of Isengard is at your command. Sauron, Lord of the Earth.

Speaker 21:
[29:08] It is potentially a very dangerous technology. It's very powerful.

Speaker 2:
[29:18] Anyway, back in the mid-2000s, when Wayne was working on seasteading in a nook of their offices, Palantir wasn't on most people's radars yet. Wayne remembers one crucial meeting where he and Patry met with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and Peter Thiel's business partner, to decide how ambitious their first seasteading attempt should be.

Speaker 17:
[29:40] And I voted small and Joe and Patry voted large, and that's the way we went.

Speaker 2:
[29:46] But just as they started to put the wheels in motion to actually try to build something, you know, life intervened. Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate.

Speaker 15:
[29:58] The stock market is now down 21 percent. 43 percent.

Speaker 9:
[30:02] Everything and more has been completely wiped out.

Speaker 2:
[30:05] Wayne had been living off of some internet stocks that were doing great up until the 2008 recession hit.

Speaker 17:
[30:11] I had to go find another job.

Speaker 2:
[30:13] Which meant less time for seasteading.

Speaker 17:
[30:15] So I was still on the board, but I said I can't spend nearly as much time on it.

Speaker 2:
[30:21] I asked him if the co-opting of seasteading by libertarians played any role in his decision to step away.

Speaker 17:
[30:27] You're pulling me into the politics.

Speaker 2:
[30:30] Which he told me he wanted to avoid discussing. He said he'd always been most interested in the engineering.

Speaker 17:
[30:37] It was never really my intent to get involved in the politics. And so, sorry, you're just not going to find a very political answer out of me. My general view is, you know, sometimes you're walking along the road and you have to pick up a stone and you just need to move it a little further down the road. And the next person picks it up and moves it a little further.

Speaker 2:
[30:58] Pottery Friedman continued full force with seasteading for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a seastead was Ephemeral Isle, also known as Burning Man on the Water.

Speaker 23:
[31:10] It's billed as a floating celebration of community learning art and seasteading.

Speaker 2:
[31:16] In 2011, Pottery stepped down from the Seasteading Institute, as did Peter Thiel. Since then, there have been attempts to build a seastead island. One project involved an agreement with French Polynesia, but public concern over quote, tech colonialism led the local government to cut ties with the Institute. These days, most projects are focused on building single unit, self-sufficient, eco-friendly floating homes. Seastead projects are underway worldwide, including in Panama, South Korea, and even right here in the US, in Florida and Mississippi.

Speaker 17:
[31:54] I view large seasteading as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening and everybody calls them seasteads. So the name stuck.

Speaker 2:
[32:06] And it helped bring a fringe libertarian dream of exit more into the mainstream.

Speaker 17:
[32:12] Though Wayne says, If you're going to do this libertarian stuff, you might want to see if you can just find somebody who will loan you some dirt to do it on. It's probably going to be easier than building a seastead.

Speaker 2:
[32:25] Coming up.

Speaker 12:
[32:26] You don't need to start a seastead, you can have America.

Speaker 24:
[32:45] Hi, this is Yvonne Ambuero from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I love your show. You're listening to Throughline.

Speaker 2:
[32:56] Part 3, The Cities of Tomorrow.

Speaker 19:
[33:01] Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to Honduras.

Speaker 2:
[33:05] Local time is 10:43 p.m. In June 2025, Dan Gurma, a producer on NPR's Embedded Podcast, took a trip to the Honduran island of Roatan.

Speaker 25:
[33:19] Mangrove trees, flying tons of the coastline. You have pretty beaches on either sides.

Speaker 2:
[33:25] But Dan wasn't there for that. He drove to the northern side of the hills, to a place isolated from the rest of the island, a place called Prospera.

Speaker 25:
[33:35] You kind of dive into this very densely forested hillscape. There is a big sign, a big Prospera sign, once you get to that part, it kind of just cascades right into the sea. Prospera is kind of an experiment.

Speaker 2:
[34:00] An experiment in what the future of cities could look like if they were run by corporations. Almost everything in Prospera happens without any oversight from the Honduran government. It offers companies operating there a menu of laws and regulations. There's no FDA, no HHS, taxes are low, and crypto is a preferred currency.

Speaker 25:
[34:23] They have a startup venture capitalist vibe.

Speaker 2:
[34:28] Over $150 million have been invested in Prospera by venture funds affiliated with tech titans like Palantir's Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, open AI Sam Altman, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

Speaker 9:
[34:46] Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook was started from a dorm room within our lifetime. Bitcoin was started from a white paper within our lifetime. So new companies, communities, currencies have all been started in this way. Could we start new countries?

Speaker 2:
[34:59] Prospera is a real world case study for a growing movement to create so-called startup nations. The spiritual guide of this business movement is a book by Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Peter Thiel and fellow libertarian. It's called The Network State, How to Start a New Country.

Speaker 9:
[35:19] Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?

Speaker 2:
[35:24] It outlines a vision of digitally connected, exclusive communities that design so-called states online first, and then map them on to land.

Speaker 4:
[35:35] The idea is somehow they'll find land, push out the people that they don't want, who they call the blues, and keep the people that they do, who he calls the greys.

Speaker 12:
[35:44] Then lobby existing governments for sovereignty.

Speaker 2:
[35:51] Sreena Basin calls this approach Tech Zionism. Tech Zionism, a reference to the movement that led to the creation of the state of Israel.

Speaker 12:
[36:02] To me, Tech Zionism only really says one thing, which is that we only want to live with other Tech Zionists, and we want to choose our neighbors, well, who are the Tech Palestinians in this situation. I don't think that that's in the book.

Speaker 4:
[36:16] I think for a long time, Tech considered itself sort of searching for new frontiers. And in recent years, they're starting to look for literal frontiers.

Speaker 2:
[36:24] By the way, this is journalist Jacob Silverman. He writes a lot about the tech industry, focusing on the intersection of tech and politics.

Speaker 4:
[36:32] Rather than kind of reform or change existing institutions, a lot of tech elites want to either replace them entirely or create their own alternatives.

Speaker 2:
[36:41] There are all kinds of network state type projects being imagined right now, abroad and within our own borders. Exiting the system is no longer a fringe or weird idea. Starbase, Elon Musk's city in Texas, was created to build a path to Mars. The billionaire-backed California Forever Project is planning a new city on 50,000 acres of farmland on the edge of Silicon Valley. And President Trump has proposed building so-called freedom cities.

Speaker 14:
[37:12] We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities.

Speaker 2:
[37:16] Built on federal land, but privately funded and free from traditional regulations, environmental laws and labor unions. These projects are expensive, backed by billionaire tech investors, and most are still in the digital design phase, i.e. they don't yet exist in reality. Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does exist.

Speaker 25:
[37:45] There was a very long back and forth with the Prospera people about coming in as a journalist.

Speaker 2:
[37:52] It took Dengerma almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team.

Speaker 25:
[37:57] Their version of a government is like a board of directors.

Speaker 2:
[38:01] And in the meantime, he was digging into how this place ended up in Honduras.

Speaker 25:
[38:06] What I ended up finding out over time was that Prospera was born under circumstances where Honduras was under a lot of geopolitical turmoil.

Speaker 13:
[38:21] The coup has left Honduras deeply polarized.

Speaker 25:
[38:25] This is around 2008, 2009. Honduras had just undergone a coup.

Speaker 18:
[38:32] It's an example for all the other countries. Don't let yourself be overrun by tyrants.

Speaker 25:
[38:37] And it was trying to find a way to be led back into the global community. Trying to find new ways to develop its economy.

Speaker 3:
[38:47] Are there some rules we can develop for changing rules?

Speaker 25:
[38:50] While that's happening, there's this idea of something called a charter city. Charter cities developing totally separate.

Speaker 3:
[39:01] You start from uninhabited territory, people can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it.

Speaker 2:
[39:08] A Nobel Prize winning American economist named Paul Romer came up with the idea of charter cities. The idea was to have a more successful country lease an empty tract of land from a host country, set its own rules, operate as an autonomous city, and court foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation.

Speaker 25:
[39:29] The Honduran government learned about this man and his ideas, and they got interested in what he was proposing.

Speaker 2:
[39:36] Romer was eventually sidelined, and Honduran lawmakers opted for a slightly different proposal. Instead of another country administering the land, a private corporation would. It was an attractive idea for Honduras, which had long been open to private investment.

Speaker 25:
[39:53] This goes back all the way to right after the First World War, when the idea of banana republics were starting to pop up in the region. Honduras is the first nation to be labeled one of those, and it's always been very capitalism-minded, free, private enterprise-minded country ever since then.

Speaker 2:
[40:13] But plenty of people objected. Would it basically act as a state within their state? Would this threaten Honduran sovereignty? Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law greenlighting charter cities was passed.

Speaker 25:
[40:29] The Supreme Court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional.

Speaker 2:
[40:34] But afterwards, the Honduran Congress, led by members of the president's party, ousted four members of the Honduran Supreme Court.

Speaker 25:
[40:42] It was part of a couple of things causing a constitutional crisis in Honduras.

Speaker 2:
[40:46] On top of this, there was a lack of transparency, which didn't sit well with Paul Romer, that economist whose ideas had kickstarted all of this. The tech billionaire backers funding Prospera and the constitutional crisis were pushing the project in a direction he wasn't comfortable with, becoming what he called a libertarian fantasy, early signs of the network state movement. But the project continued without him. In 2017, Honduras' Prospera Inc. purchased its first plot of land, 58 acres, that bordered a small local fishing village whose residents say they were not properly consulted. Over the years, Prospera has come to own more than a thousand acres. Some local landowners protested. Not all residents have formal property titles and they fear their land claims are being undermined. Amid that, construction got under way on new housing and research facilities, employing some locals. Prospera has its own labor systems, which aren't clearly spelled out. When one worker died in an accident on the job, Prospera's management said the family was compensated, quote, appropriately, but details were not made public. And that's by design. The point of a place like Prospera is that there isn't really a public to answer to.

Speaker 25:
[42:13] It creates a particularly core irony when we think about Prospera as a libertarian hope, being able to be created because of this strongman approach.

Speaker 2:
[42:26] In other words, it's not pure exit in the classic libertarian mold. It's using the system's power to exit while shaping the system for others. Critics of Prospera say it echoes colonial dynamics familiar to Roatan.

Speaker 25:
[42:42] For years, the island of Roatan was actually kind of a disputed territory between colonial powers, including the Spanish and the British.

Speaker 2:
[42:52] In April 2022, after a new leftist government took power in Honduras, the charter city law was repealed.

Speaker 25:
[43:00] And then the Honduran government goes a step further and declares through the Supreme Court that the previous law is null and void.

Speaker 2:
[43:11] Nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate even if the law was repealed.

Speaker 25:
[43:18] And so now, as far as the Honduran government was concerned, Prospera was an illegal settlement.

Speaker 2:
[43:25] Prospera then sued the Honduran government in an international tribunal, seeking a massive amount of money.

Speaker 25:
[43:31] $10.7 billion.

Speaker 2:
[43:36] For context, that's about a quarter of Honduras' annual GDP. The tech investors backing Prospera are collectively worth much more than that. And they have the backing of the country with the most powerful military on earth.

Speaker 25:
[43:51] How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what you want to achieve?

Speaker 2:
[44:01] The case is still on-going, the future of Prospera hanging in the balance. Based on what Dan saw when he finally got to visit Prospera last year, development seems to have slowed down.

Speaker 25:
[44:12] We didn't see that many kind of like actual companies working. A lot of it is virtual.

Speaker 2:
[44:20] There were some residential buildings, a Montessori school, a few research facilities working on out-of-the-box medical experiments, like gene therapy meant to cure aging, but not many people.

Speaker 25:
[44:32] I've spoken to some people who are working more on charter cities outside of Honduras. And when I speak to them about Prospera, they tend to describe it as a learning experience for this movement, not so much the model that they want to replicate. I think Prospera probably best reflects some naked truths about the power that the developed world has right now, and the tools at its disposal to maintain its power.

Speaker 4:
[45:08] It is kind of the ideological groundwork for a lot of these efforts to make new cities or communities or kind of self-run polities.

Speaker 2:
[45:17] There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa.

Speaker 1:
[45:27] The utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone as all the stars in the sky to look at.

Speaker 2:
[45:37] When Thomas More wrote Utopia over 500 years ago, designing a perfect society was an allegory. Today, technology is making attempts to reshape reality and create versions of so-called network states more possible than ever. The impact of this kind of thinking can be seen all around us, on an island in Honduras, on farmland near San Francisco, amid the rubble of Gaza, or before long, maybe a crater on the moon. The people designing these cities might not care if their choices lead to utopia or dystopia for the rest of us, because the cities aren't necessarily for us.

Speaker 12:
[46:20] I don't think that Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this like perfect society on the moon. I don't even think that there's much of a desire to create a society. The focus really is on how can we make business work better, how can we cut through red tape. That's not utopian unless you live in a society of corporations.

Speaker 2:
[46:56] That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. Next week on the show, how reality became something you could edit and sell.

Speaker 11:
[47:08] The idea is that we're going to record people being people and placing them in very sort of strange, bizarre situations. And that's going to teach us something about what makes people tick.

Speaker 2:
[47:19] Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and...

Speaker 17:
[47:25] Julie Kane.

Speaker 11:
[47:26] Casey Miner.

Speaker 16:
[47:28] Christina Kim.

Speaker 2:
[47:29] Devin Kadiyama.

Speaker 12:
[47:30] Irene Noguchi.

Speaker 11:
[47:31] Kiana Moghadam.

Speaker 6:
[47:32] Thomas Coltrane. Sarah Wyman.

Speaker 2:
[47:35] Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Special thanks to Holly Baxter, Senior Staff Writer at The Independent, and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Johanna Sturge, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Leona Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keighley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.