Tech Execs Are Pushing Trump to Build ‘Freedom Cities’ Run by Corporations

Those already have a name - company town.
They failed the last time they were tried and will fail again.
- But before they failed, they stole a ton of labor/profit from the residents.
  
  I mean, they can only steal so much / so quickly WITHOUT building them...
  
  Right. They worked very well for the companies!
- You load sixteen tons 🎶
  
  And what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt...
  
  I'm always torn between this version and the Johnny Cash one.
- They didn't just fail on their own. They were very successful until the labor movement decided to meet violence with violence.
  
  Now that's a tradition I wouldn't mind we go back to, seems like the only way we ever got labor protections in this country
- America is truly going back to its roots. American towns, ethnic cleansing of native populations, all that's missing is chattel slavery (of course we still got that modern slavery). This crumbling empire deserves to collapse, and collapse quickly
  The Un-American, yet totally American | Company Towns
- Ask Appalachia about company towns. Folks here at least ought to know better.
- Severance / kier. 😁
- It’s more insidious than that:
  https://piped.wireway.ch/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no%3Fsi%3Dfev-OzgZmzcUfsPW&t=1

A city run by a corporation is the opposite of a "freedom city"
- It's freedom from government regulations, many of which stem from the last time we let companies set up their own towns. What could possibly go wrong?
  
  Last time we got full scale shooting wars between workers and companies. If I'm putting on my optimist hat then I'd say at least we'll get to shoot some rich folk.
  
  they tried it with a town before, it dint work out.
- Yes, but it does follow republican naming convention. Right to work states are anything but, for example.
- Just look at SpaceX‘s town. Pure dystopia.
  
  The one where they stole the land from cards against humanity?
- Cyberpunk IRL
  
  Honestly, the beauty of the game is the sheer irony of it all.
  And I kinda wish those neo-kitsch high fashion Kevlar-lined clothing was real, because some of the Corpo drip in Cyberpunk looks cool as fuck.
- If it's in the name you know it's the opposite like "Democratic People's republic of Korea"
- It makes much more sense when you understand the differences between the Northern version of freedom vs. the Southern version of freedom. These asshats think of freedom as the freedom to rule over others.
- "It's freedom when I do it and tyranny when you do it."
- It's not the people living in the city that are the free ones. It's the owners

“ You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store “

In September of last year, the podcast Behind the Bastards did a two part series on right wing blogger Curtis Yarvin, his connections to Peter Theil, and his influence on JD Vance. I highly recommend these episodes for anyone who wants to know where this is all headed.
Yarvin has, for years, pushed the notion of RAGE (retire all government employees), and his dark enlightenment movement centers on dismantling democracy and installing a neo-feudalistic system of government in which oligarchs rule as kings.
This is not some crazy new proposal that will be ignored by the people in power. This is the endgame. The oligarchs and right wing fascists Trump has surrounded himself with have been pushing this for years, just waiting for their moment.
If you don't think this is a big deal, then you probably won't realize until it's too late.
- Thank goodness we had a corporate media that not also did nothing to instruct on this, but played lots of stupid bothsiderist games for the horse race.
  Not to mention lots of so-called leftists telling Americans to either sit out or do a protest vote because something something Gaza, BidenSoOld and KamalaSameAsBiden.
  
  Yeah I got called a bootlicker because of saying that business as usual was far better than the unmitigated disaster we are facing now. I hate being proven right.
  
  How does one push their elected to a desired position, if there's nothing backing that push?
  Remember: Our vote is like the only tool we have to hold electeds to account.
- If you don't think this is a big deal, then you probably won't realize until it's too late.
  American history in one sentence.
- God Bless Robert Evans
- This is a pretty good write up:
  https://www.dailygrail.com/2024/10/the-technocratic-conspiracy-how-tech-tycoons-plan-to-disrupt-democracy-and-become-the-new-rulers-of-the-world/
  
  It's chilling that this article is from October and basically lays out how the overthrow of democracy would take place - exactly what's been happening since then.
  The speed at which we're descending into the dark enlightenment period is beyond alarming.
- Thanks for the heads up, I'll give it a listen. I've been hearing about the network state since I saw someone link this here a few months ago.
  https://www.vcinfodocs.com/what-is-the-network-state

This is the dumbest branding exercise ever. There are no additional "freedoms" that you can get in a corporate-run city versus a regular city; except that perhaps the corporation has more freedom to trounce upon the rights of the citizenry.
If the future that Curtis Yarvin and his type envision starts to shape up, we're gonna need to go full, 100% anti-corporation to push back.
- except that perhaps the corporation has more freedom to trounce upon the rights of the citizenry.
  That is exactly the kind of freedom they are looking for, and don't underestimate the psychology there - it feels like freedom to them, the kind of freedom that allows for injustices to prevail. I'm reminded of an anecdote of Ẑiẑek, talking to a bunch of fascists in former Yugoslavia, where they in no uncertain terms revealed, that it had been tyranny to them to not be able to be violent, rape, plunder, etc. and that the chaos of the breakup had been a liberatory event for them, psychologically.
  Never assume "freedom" is something, that opposing classes and groups in general agree upon when it comes to its definition.
- We should really be doing that regardless, the corporation has outlived its utility and has become a chain on the collective neck of humanity
- The billionaires get the freedom for being the best Americans

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy.
Why do I read this as incel rape cities?

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.
Yes because the first thing I think needs regulations is fucking nuclear power!
- If anyone reads that and goes “hell yea”…
  Also what the fuck is a “nuclear reactor startup”?!? God, tech bros really take a whole bunch of privilege and advantage and just throw it all away to be dumber than anyone could have thought possible.
  
  It's like a regular nuclear reactor, except it's run by people who don't know anything about nuclear reactors, the waste is dumped wherever without consequence, and the power output is only used to run an AI and mine cryptos.
  
  The double-meaning of the word "startup" might throw people off, but when the other items from the list in the quote are "trials" and "construction" you can imagine they are talking about an action rather than an entity. Here a "reactor startup" would be the process of a reactor going from subcritical, extremely low power state to the point where it can heat water on its own through fission. This is a standard term in the nuclear power industry, and this confusion seems like one more reason reactors should not exist in an unregulated venture capital environment.
- The "move fast and break things" mantra of silicon valley is bad enough when you aren't talking about breaking a goddamn nuclear reactor.
- Sounds too much like Vault-Tec for my tastes.
- Why stop there? Can we get a nuclear and biological weapons startup in there too?!
- Can we just build an artificial island in the middle of the ocean for these losers? Just drop them there and let them try to figure it out. See how long before they come begging for help.

Do you want Night City? Because this is quite literally how you get Night City.
- I'm starting to think that's what they want.
  
  Always has been. Cyberpunk (the genre) was a warning. We didn't listen.
  
  Time to become Johnny Silverhand then.
- And isn’t Night City one of the better places to live there?
  
  Yes, partly because there's still competition for the territory.
- Or Rapture

Tech bros love to rename terrible shit from the past and call it an invention.
- That's all fElon has ever done.

This reads like an email or news message you find on random computers in dystopian computer games like Deus Ex or Cyberpunk 2077.

I just wish they would be honest with their naming schemes. Stop with the "freedom this" and "freedom that" nonsense. They don't give a good goddam about freedom and we all know it. They are just trying to build "company towns" with touchscreens. We've already been down this road. You can slap all the lipstick you want on it, but it's still a fucking pig.
- Its spelled Freedumb now.

I didn't think I would live to see Cyberpunk become a reality. Or the return of Company Towns. Either one sounds preposterous.
- We’re not even getting the cool parts of cyberpunk like cybernetic limbs.

Ah, corporate run cities?
“It’s a fine day, full of opportunity!”
“If it took more than one shot, you weren't using a jakobs.“
"Hyperion would like to take this opportunity to say: cha-ching!"
"Anyone can live. Have the courage to die!"
“Just remember, you died doing what you loved! And what you were told to do!"

Libertarians do not understand how society works.
- The baseline, no. The thinkers are just trying to restablish slavery.

So like a town, owned by a company, like some sort of company town, but now with freedom! The freedom to live in a house owned by your employer, shop at a store owned by your employer, and you have to use special money that your employer pays you in. Yup, nothing says freedom more the having incredibly limited choices.

So they basically want to bring back the company towns from the gilded age, but more dystopian thanks to the possibilities of modern technology. Characteristics of company towns often were: "controlling and/or exploitative".
Control: If your employer does something unethical, will you dare go against it, if it means that not only will you lose your job, but you and your family will be also be kicked out of your house, school, town, ... Very few would.
Exploitative: where can the company town residents shop and find services? In the company shops of course. This constrained supply also leads to subpar service for high prices. And if company sales are down, the company will spend less on wages, but keep the company shop prices the same since the shoppers have no alternative anyhow.
Add in modern technology, and some of those towns will be like Brave New World, while others will evolve into 1984. Dystopian.
- guns

I guarantee those execs think they will be building Star Trek / Federation level society. But the comment above is right, it will be Cyberpunk just with shittier technologies driven by “the invisible hand of the market” or some other drivel.
- Oh they know exactly what kind of cities they want to build. The wealthy have been wanting their slaves back since 1865.
- I believe the federation in Star Trek doesn't even use money
  
  They do, they don't inside the federation because it's in practice largely post scarcity. Outside of federation space they use federation credits (likely based on stores of rare hard/impossible to replicate materials) and specifically around ds9 the currency was gold pressed latinum.
  Also voyager with replicator rations and Holodeck time.
  
  they only allowed it on ds9 space station , when dealing with other races. in the form of latinum. also barring the marque colonies.
- Literally Snow Crash, each burb is a independent corpocity state
  
  With a side of Jennifer Government.
- I guarantee those execs think they will be building Star Trek / Federation level society
  Nah, they know they will just be building the Ferengi Trade Empire.
- I'm leaning more towards Halcyon and less like Night City

- First off, this video is obligatory watching on the topic. Go watch it now if you haven't.
  Ok, back to Próspera. From the Wikipedia article:
  The company is financed by several investors and venture capital firms, including Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, through the venture capital company Pronomos Capital.
  It's literally the same guys, and they're trying it in the US too btw.
  That Balaji guy in particular is the one who came up with the idea of "freedom cities", which he calls network states. He's also a follower of Curtis Yarvin, obviously, and just like him he's a two bit fascist crank who thinks he's of superior IQ.
- Let them do it, then point and laugh and don't let them back into civilization.

government officials ending every phrase with, "brought to you by carls jr" is getting more real of a likelihood all the time.

Isn't this how RoboCop starts.
- It's also like Chapter 4 in Parable of the Sower
- Big part of robo cop 3 I think.

More people need to play BioShock to understand why this is a bad idea.
- Or look at the history of company towns
- No, no, Rapture was an EXCELLENT idea. Let's send Trump, Musk, and all the rest down there, and watch the results on television. It would be cathartic.
  
  "Get into the idiot squishers!"
- Elon is literally a fan of Blade Runner. He just Identifies with the CEOs of megacorps rather than the suffering poor.

Freedom Cities is a branding exercise in the same tradition as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The more you have to advertise how free a society is, the less free it tends to be in practice.

These tech libertarians never stop trying to make their own company towns.
Here was a recent failed attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalk_Toronto
Also this piece never gets old. https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
- This is one of my favorites:
  A Libertarian Walks into a Bear
  It would be funny if a billionaire shit ass wasn't doing this exact thing on a national level.

Every time an oppressor wants to enslave people, they use "freedom" as an excuse.
Exhibit A: People's Liberation Army. Its not a conquering, its liberating 🤣
Or Exhibit B: Maga
How do people ever get fooled by this? Its so dumb

Ah, so Peter Thiel's crazy ass ideas are spreading. This is the same shit Musks' granddad dreamed of - a technocracy with governors...
- Technocracy
  noun
  the government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts.
  No mate, this is plutocracy. Technocracy implies knowledge, expertise, and facts dictating policy and direction. What you have is greedy rich fucks wanting yet more.
  There is a fundamental difference.
- This is why he bought Vance…
- guns

Christ, why did we have to get the Shitty Dystopia versions from Snow Crash, Jennifer Government, and every Gibson novel, but none of the cool and fun shit like flying cars, off-planet living, and advanced medical/cybernetic tech.
Gonna have the corpo company town again. Instead of an online walled garden it’ll be a walled city with it’s own currency that gets traded at a steep loss if you try to go anyplace nicer. Keep you in your place.
- The cool tech is why they want network states or 'freedom cities'.
  Unregulated biotech research is how we they get cybertech and biohacking. So oligarchs can outlive the rest of us.
  It's all in their plans for the network state.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no&themeRefresh=1
  
  @treefrog @RememberTheApollo high on their own supply, though. A lot of government regulation is there to make sure the plebs feel just happy enough that they don't rise up. I'm not advocating anything, just to be clear, but if people have nothing to lose then they start... trying stuff. Wasn't the final straw that started the French Revolution the price of bread?

"Sold my soul to the company store."

Why are billionaires such free loaders? Build your own shit with your own money!
- They tried a couple times but people just don't really want to move to the middle of the ocean of a jungle compound in South America
- That's silly, if they do that they'd have less money. While if they do it with your money, you're the one with less money.

Good morning! Today is brought to you by our friends at ocular implant world. With their help you can see everyday through rose tinted digital filters! Just a reminder, you are now in debt to the corporation for $42,547,880.46. Would you like to listen to another targeted advertisement for $0.35?
- Now I'm sad
  
  You just need ocular implants!

Yay! Corporate towns! I look forward to be paid in company script!
- Scrip, no t, but there are positive pro community versions of this where cities use their own as a way of circulating money within the local economy.
  
  I agree, it's a novel approach for small towns that are trying to rebuild or boost their local economy.
  We can all agree that the Corporate scrip is just a fancy of screwing workers.

I can't wait to live in DowIndustrialRunoffVille, 3Mcancertowne, and Exxondumpsiteburgh.... Oh wait we already do. Can you imagine how bad it would be if they had pure control and zero oversight or restrictions? The US is really sprinting headlong into the worst kind of dystopic hellscape.
- Don't worry, surely any of those negative repercussions will be neatly contained within their city limits.
  
  Then it will just be the problem of Merck county, P&G township, or the state of Pepsi to worry about.

I think it’s hilarious that they are so dumb that a satire movie like RoboCop is regarded as blueprint for the future. How cartoonishly evil do they have to be?
- They tend to take those fictional tales of warning, and use them as blueprints. Like, they read "Don't Build the Toment Nexus" and decided that building the Torment Nexus was a grand idea.

Did these guys play cyberpunk? Like that game pretty much embodies what these guys are asking for.
- They would love that. That game is all about execs essentially being royalty. That's like their wet dream.
- I think Musk has talked about the game, and obviously every message was completely lost on him and his main takeaway was that "Arasaka is cool. I want to be that."
  That is exactly what they want.
  
  “Blade Runner would drive a cybertruck!”
- I thought the same thing. Scary AF
- Hey everyone, Chaz from Cool Sci-Fi Productions Brought to Life LLC here with an exciting announcement! Our team of dedicated overpaid engineers has finally finished our first working prototype of the famous Planetary Destruction Cannon from the cult-classic 1982 film “Do Not Build Planetary Destruction Cannons!”

You know what? They should approve it. Give all the MAGAts free homes there and they can all suck trumps dick their. Let the rest of us live in an actually productive and healthy society.
- The problem is that they're also tanking the economy. Many people won't have the economic freedom to choose their employment.
  Already, people don't really work in Amazon warehouses because they want to piss in bottles.
- If that free home is on Mars, sure.

I actually like this idea. So long as the CEOs are required to live in the town as well a minimum of 300 days out of the year.
Because working in an office is worth the collaboration.
And I like knowing where the CEOs are so that checks instance name I can play Minecraft with them in person. I get so much more enjoyment playing Minecraft in person and would like to make sure the latency is really low.
- It would never happen that way.
  By the way, we used to do this. You can read all about it. It's very very bad.

The French had an answer to "Let them eat cake."
Me thinks the tech-bros won't like that answer very much.
- The French wouldn't have let things get nearly this bad in the first place.

Is Elon so mad that he wasn't in the game Cyberpunk 2077 but Grimes was, and wants to spitefully create his own Night City and Arasaka tower in real life to have his little fantasy?

Cyberpunk 2025

Ironically, “Freedom Cities” not free.

Dystopian AF.
One of these ghouls that I rarely hear brought up in these discussions is Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. I believe that she is involved in the effort to build something like this in Solano County, California. She’s supposed to be a big Democratic Party supporter, so I suspect that the effort to create corporate cities is not an exclusively Republican project. I wish there was more reporting on her.
- The US Democratic party is also a neoliberal right-wing party, just a bit more moderate.

Friendly reminder that company towns and company scrips are the industrial revolution's take on micro transactions.
- Well put

This is what happens when you let white people read Atlas Shrugged in college. smh.

Snow Crash anyone?

He really is going to kill us all. His plan is to eventually kill social security or something that will piss off his opposition.
His opposition will take to the streets and cops will be there. Anyone who kills a cop gets put to death. Martial law declared.
Then he'll take true power.
And religious people will eat it up as destiny because their books speak of an end similar to this. It almost seems too perfectly planned.
We're so fucked.
- if i were trying to stop that scenario, i'd probably form/join a guerilla resistance, neutralize the cops, dethrone him and musk, then round up all the christians for reeducation camps and help ensure a 'never again' attitude for the surviving population.
  
  yeah, but no ones fucking organizing anything right now.

And you'll be paid in such lovely scrip, too. Just don't try using it somewhere else.
- Hence, crypto.

This is exactly what Elon Musk and Peter Thiel want, to own city states as kings using neo-feudalism.
See:
DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America
The Network State: How To Start a New Country
- SpaceX is trying to buy a town as we speak. Maybe not "buy" in the traditional sense but I'm sure money, or promises of money, will tilt this in their favor.
  https://www.fox7austin.com/news/starbase-texas-election-spacex
- I'm glad to see this already here. Scary stuff.

They should absolutely do this because tech bros cannot do municipal government and they will spend years throwing all of their money into a nuclear powered bitcoin mining boondoggle with open sewage that produces nothing.
- Fordlandia, multiplied by the 1%. If that removes billionaires from our society for good, I approve.

Soon they'll start building freedom camps around these cities and will fill them up with the millions of incarcerated Americans so they can work towards freedom. As Germans have put it before, work makes you free.

Holy shit, it's the Burbclaves from Snow Crash.
- Or the corporate entities from Jennifer Government.
- I just started that book like a week ago, Even just the first couple pages and it was like "oh... oh no", even got the meta verse in there
  
  Hilarious, isn't it?
  The writers of this timeline couldn't even come up with new material.
  This timeline is itself AI slop. Prove me wrong.

War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.

Slave Plantations?

These people idolize Henry Ford, so they should double check the history on how he tried and failed spectacularly at the same thing: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/19/lost-cities-10-fordlandia-failure-henry-ford-amazon

Is anybody actually watching Severance? An underlying theme of the last episode was that this kind of crap specifically is a bad idea.
Frickin’ wild that Apple TV+ puts it out at all, honestly…