Cyberpunk is real T_T
“i sold my soul to the companyyy stooooorrrrrrree”
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”
These 10 percenters all think they will be Uncle Enzo and his pizza company while in reality they will be running low cost Rent-a-Copz outfits in rotted out strip malls in middle America when the real wealthy people crash them out of the system becoming untouchable ultra elites.
Yeah but be all get access to cool skateboards and 4’ of rebar. 🙃
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?
The word of the day is “technofeudalism”
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
In fairness to Picketty, he did think we could avoid neo-feudalism if ordinary people set aside their competitive and selfish natures to focus on the co-operation that is at the heart of our success as a species. Funnily enough, Mike Berners-Lee wrote the same thing at the end of There is No Planet B (a book I do wish more of the billionaire tech bros had read).
So, yeah: we’re big fucked.
Technofascism, even…
That’s better than religious fascism or pokemon fascism.
But I wanted religious pokemon society :(
I think we’ve tried company towns before. Let’s see if we can do it differently this time. :-/
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.
With company store?
Complete with scrip, er, microcoin crypto.
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.
It has to do with the US because this particular project is largely US-funded, driven by Peter Thiel, and also, according to this pretty good article, owned by a US-based company.
“Honduras Próspera, the Delaware-registered company that owns the startup city…”
This is not the only such US ancap exclave project in the world, either.
I’ve seen this movie.
slavery is freedom (1984, 2025…)
Didn’t trump already get rid of one run by Disney because they didn’t bend over enough? I’m sure he’ll remember that.
Wow, these rechbros read all the bad news world sci-fi! What could go wrong?
