https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/4076
What if you could opt out of a country and start your own?
What if you could create your own rules and regulations?
What if you could run a country like a business?
This 3-part audio series investigates the rise of semi-autonomous city projects controlled and managed by corporations. Where cities stop acting as public institutions and instead governance becomes a product. The series explores how some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals from Silicon Valley are using these projects as infrastructural tools to leverage and influence governments and international institutions, as they attempt to create a blueprint of a new societal structure.
Próspera, a privately developed charter-city project on the island of Roatán in Honduras, is the primary case study. This series features excerpts from interviews with historians, professors, journalists, human rights organisers, legal advisors and more. Full interviews will be available in the Silicon States archive from October 2nd.
Zones of special regulations and jurisdiction are not a new phenomena, and neither are countries being essentially governed by corporations. To understand how these contemporary autonomous projects we are seeing today, we must first look back to the past. This first episode traces the historical lineage, from medieval free cities, to libertarian exit projects, colonial corporate rule and the development of special economic zones, all of which paved the way for these Silicon Valley billionaires to imagine their own private enclaves.
Guests for this episode include Raymond Craib and Quinn Slobodian.
Produced by Manda Shutler.
Sound design by Darcy Adam
Raymond Craib is professor of History at Cornell University, specialising in Latin American history at intersections of space, politics, and everyday practice. He is Author of Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).
Quinn Slobodian: Professor of International History at Boston University and author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. (Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2023).
