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Joshua Scheer
If you think the future of global capitalism looks like more deregulation, more privatization, and more billionaire capture of public life, you’re only seeing the surface. As Margaret Flowers lays out in this week’s Clearing the FOG, a new class of ultra‑wealthy libertarian visionaries is carving out private city‑states — zones where democratic law simply doesn’t apply, where corporations write the rules, run the police, and operate as sovereign powers. As the transcript notes, these projects are “privatized economic…free zones…where very wealthy people are trying to create these zones that can make their own rules, have their own police, and operate outside of the governments in the places where they exist.”
What began as a fringe experiment in post‑coup Honduras has metastasized into a global movement backed by Silicon Valley money, crypto‑utopian ideology, and — disturbingly — the full enthusiasm of the Trump administration. These “network states” aren’t just playgrounds for tech futurists. They’re now being tied directly to U.S. military infrastructure, with Praxis proposing a private weapons‑development zone beside Vandenberg Space Force Base — a plan Flowers calls “a very scary thing.”
And while the public is distracted by the escalating U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, the same forces pushing for regime change abroad are quietly building billionaire thiefdoms at home — deregulated enclaves designed to profit from war, displacement, and the collapse of democratic oversight.
This conversation with anthropologist Beth Gilia is a warning shot: the future these elites are engineering is not hypothetical. It’s being prototyped right now — in Honduras, in California, in Greenland, and in every region where land, law, and crisis can be exploited.
If you want to understand the architecture of the next phase of neoliberal authoritarianism, start here.
The story Margaret Flowers and Beth Gilia unravel isn’t just about libertarian fantasy projects or quirky crypto‑utopians. It’s about the next frontier of privatized governance, where billionaires and tech futurists carve out sovereign enclaves to escape democratic oversight — and then fuse those enclaves with military power.
The show makes clear that these zones are not benign experiments. They are “private zones where…they can make their own rules, have their own police, and operate outside of the governments in the places where they exist.” What began as a post‑coup land grab in Honduras has evolved into a global strategy: deregulated territories designed for capital accumulation, shielded from labor protections, environmental law, and public accountability.
What’s new — and far more dangerous — is the militarization of these projects. Praxis, the most ambitious of the network‑state outfits, is now proposing a private “beachside industrial zone” adjacent to Vandenberg Space Force Base, where it plans to “fast‑track the development of weapons, drones, space infrastructure… and then use the military base to test that technology.” This is not urban planning. It’s the outsourcing of the military‑industrial complex to private sovereign actors.
And while these billionaire enclaves expand, the U.S. is simultaneously escalating a catastrophic war with Iran — a war Flowers describes as “quickly becoming a regional war that many people are calling the beginning of World War III.” The chaos of war becomes the perfect cover for the rise of these private jurisdictions. As states destabilize, capital moves in. As public institutions weaken, private governance fills the vacuum.
Beth Gilia’s warning is blunt: these projects are settler‑colonial ventures, backed by crypto wealth, Silicon Valley ideology, and U.S. geopolitical power. They are designed to profit from crisis, displacement, and deregulation. And they are spreading — from Honduras to Venezuela, from California to Greenland, from Brexit Britain to any region where elites can buy land, rewrite law, and build a state within a state.
Beth Geglia is an anthropologist and documentarian focused on urban political economy, land politics, and tech-futurist territorial movements. She holds a Ph.D. from American University and is based in Washington, D.C. and Barcelona.
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