Early last year, a group of entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts from around the world gathered inside a newly built dome on the Honduran island of Roatán to grapple with a problem: For thought leaders who want to move fast and break things, what can be done about laws that get in the way?
The conference, sponsored by the Salt Lake City–based Startup Societies Foundation, was being put on in Vitalia, a longevity-themed “pop-up city” that caters to American medical tourists sidestepping cumbersome FDA regulations. Its motto: “We’re here to make death optional.” Vitalia was in turn located in Próspera, a semiautonomous city on Roatán. Imagine a nesting doll, a city within a city within a city—all on a Caribbean isle.
A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.”
At the Roatán conference, participants excited about making Srinivasan-style special economic zones in the US complained about stringent city laws that stood in the way. During a Q&A following a talk by Lonsdale, an audience member wondered whether partnering with “jurisdictions that have equivalent and arguably even higher status, like federally recognized tribes,” might present a workaround. Lonsdale agreed. He had just spoken with someone from the Chickasaw Nation. “I think people at the federal level on the right are very open to these types of things,” he said. “We should probably get Elon to help us build the infrastructure for some Indians.”