I watched fifteen minutes of More Perfect Union — a pro-labour newsroom with a very clear point of view — walk through a story its host calls one of the weirdest he's ever reported: a movement among the tech elite to replace governments with companies. Private societies run by CEOs, built for profit, not for people. It's easy to file that under conspiracy and move on. I didn't, because the boring parts are true and already funded.

Where the idea comes from

The spine of it is a book. In 1997, “The Sovereign Individual” predicted that two technologies — digital money and automation — would hollow out the nation-state, and that the smart and rich could exit it entirely and live as “sovereign individuals” above any government. Peter Thiel loved it enough to write the foreword to the 2020 reissue. From there it's almost a straight line: in 2008 his foundation seeded the Seasteading Institute — floating libertarian city-states at sea — run by Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman.

From the sea to Honduras

The sea didn't work, so the money moved to land. Friedman started a venture firm, Pronomos Capital — backed by Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan — to invest in privately governed cities. Its flagship is Próspera: a semi-autonomous 'charter city' on the Honduran island of Roatán, running its own low taxes and light regulation as a special economic zone. When Honduras elected a government that repealed those zones in 2022, Próspera sued the country for roughly $11 billion — about two-thirds of the national budget — in a private investor court. A city built to escape the state, suing the state for the right to exist.

Exit, not voice

This is the phrase I'd keep from the whole thing. The economist Albert Hirschman said that when something fails you, you have two moves: voice (stay and fight to fix it) or exit (leave). Democracy is voice. Balaji Srinivasan's 2022 book “The Network State” is a manual for exit — start a country online first, then buy the land, and let people who already agree opt in. Thiel said the quiet part out loud back in 2010.

The tell is who never gets a vote: the people who already live where these cities land.

The real flagship isn't a tiny city

Here's the turn that makes it more than a curiosity. The video's argument is that the enclaves were never the point — the machinery of existing governments is. DOGE and Palantir wiring into US federal systems. Joe Lonsdale's 8VC funding 'GovTech' — surveillance, drones, AI to replace public workers. California Forever, a new tech city that quietly bought some 50,000 acres of Solano County farmland with money from Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs.

And it isn't only rhetoric. This April the US and the Philippines signed a real agreement — a 4,000-acre 'AI-native' economic zone at New Clark City, to be governed under US common law. That's the State Department's own announcement, not a theory.

Where the film pushes too hard

I'm not going to launder the framing. More Perfect Union is advocacy journalism — the documented spine is solid, but the connective tissue gets stretched to alarm you. It calls every foreign-policy move an 'invasion,' folds Gaza and Venezuela and a '$300 billion' Iran figure into one grand plan, and describes Cicero Institute homelessness bills as 'concentration camps.' Some of that is real policy with ugly edges; some is rhetoric doing the work of evidence. The honest version doesn't need a single villain with a master plan — it needs an ideology, a lot of money, and a decade of patient investment, which is scarier because it's true.

Underneath the alarm, though, the film names the mechanism cleanly — and this part I think is exactly right:

My take

Strip the thriller music and the argument that survives is simple: a slice of the tech elite has decided that democracy is too slow, too accountable, and too willing to tell them no — so they'd rather build somewhere it doesn't apply. Not win the argument. Skip it. That's the part worth sitting with. You don't need to believe in a cabal to notice that 'governance as a service' is being sold, funded and, in the Philippines, signed.

It lands close to home for me. I live between countries by choice, and I know the pull of exit — the fantasy of just leaving a system that isn't working. But there's a difference between a person choosing where to live and a company choosing who governs. One is freedom. The other is a country you can't vote in, run by people you can't vote out. The answer to a broken government was never less democracy, sold back to us at a markup. It's more of us insisting on the vote they'd rather we skip.

• Learn one phrase: exit over voice. Once you can name it, you see it everywhere — from charter cities to 'just leave' politics.
• Separate the spine from the scare. Thiel's foreword, Próspera's lawsuit and the Philippines zone are documented; 'invasion' and round-number figures are framing.
• Follow the zone, not the city. The real move is special economic zones and govtech contracts, not sci-fi island utopias.
• Notice who never votes. In every one of these projects, the people already living there aren't asked.
• Push back locally. These startups begin in towns and states where a public still has a voice — which is exactly why the voice matters.

• Watch the investigation (More Perfect Union)↗
• Gil Duran — The Nerd Reich↗
• Próspera — overview↗
• US–Philippines 'AI-native' zone (US State Dept.)↗
• The Network State — Balaji Srinivasan↗