Yeah, This Has "Dystopian Young Adult Novel" Written All Over It

It looks like a group of tech bros are trying to convince Trump and his Evil Minions™ to give them a license to create lawless corporate cities.

You know, the sort of corporate run arcologies that feature prominently in the genre of Cyberpunk:

Several groups representing “startup nations”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned.

According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, basically these dudes want to be able to operate recklessly with nuclear power, potentially irradiating the surrounding areas, conduct medically dubious experiments on live human beings, and pollute our water and our air.

This is Nazis with nukes.

………

But Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, warns that building new cities from scratch could have negative consequences. “To be outside of the law and above the law, what does that mean for the rest of the country?” he asks. “It seems like you're going to start hollowing out other places in order to have these places where the rules are suspended and don't apply anymore to certain people.” 

………

But Duran says that the same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities’ ultrawealthy backers. “These are going to be cities without democracy,” he claims. “These are going to be cities without workers' rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people, is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities.”

These people all think that they are the character John Galt from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged when in fact they are all people who feed the bears and destroy the town.

This has been tried many times, and in many places, and they have all failed, with the majority of attempts never constructing much of anything besides fraud.