In yet another sign that we’re all living in a boring, quietly horrifying, corporate dystopia without any trace of a cool cyperbunk aesthetic, tech bros and “libertarian” corporatists are pushing for the creation of so-called “Freedom Cities,” towns and cities owned and run by corporations under corporate governance structures according to laws written by the corporations themselves.
As reported on Gizmodo, a lobbying group of essentially anarcho-capitalist tech bros wants America to allow them to create special administrative zones in which corporate structures have control and are able to set their own regulations and local laws. Gizmodo suggests that Trump wants to use national park land to build these cities, and with everything that’s been in the news lately, that seems credible. Donald Trump himself was effusive in his praise of the concept, saying the he wants to “re-open the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream.”
The concept of building new towns or cities is not a new one, and there are many examples of successes — and failures — of this kind of approach. The City Journal envisions its Freedom Cities as having a “competitive regulatory environment,” which is code for radically reduced or removed regulations involving everything from building codes to environmental health and safety requirements. Guantanamo Bay is even suggested as an appropriate and very suitable spot.
While the idea of unlocking private capital to provide innovation in tech and science is a good one, ceding control of parts of the country to corporate entities is a tough pill to swallow for many reasons. People are already wary of the close integration of figures like Elon Musk with Trump’s government, especially as the president has gone so far as to use his platform to support Musk’s business interests. That’s a blurred line already, but when the company is the city, is there even a line?
Corporate governance structures aren’t usually democratic or transparent, and it’s easy to forget that building and environmental regulations exist for important reasons. Corporate towns put the fortunes of entire cities into the hands of a corporation, which if it fails, means the city fails, too. Not to mention the potential for abuse from corporate officials.
During the industrial revolution, wealthy philanthropists designed and built “model villages” and towns in the U.K. specifically to elevate the lives of the working class and the workers of their factories and mills by providing them with quality housing, amenities, and opportunities to better themselves while operating wholly within the existing legal structures — a far cry from the vision of a corporate enclave with minimal accountability, transparency, and a near-non-existent regulatory environment offered here. Yet even these model villages were critized for the intrusion of their benefactors into the residents’ private lives and affairs.
When public services, homes, and literally the local government and services like education are run by a single corporation which employs most or all of the population, there is a massive potential for corruption and mistreatment on a huge scale. If you criticize the company, you could lose not only your job, but your home; your kids could be kicked out of school because they no longer have a parent working for the company; you could be blacklisted from further employment within the city or evicted from it entirely.
These “Freedom Cities” would see democratic control and oversight ceded to shadowy corporate structures in a truly dystopian vision of the future. When there are already civil liberties concerns in Trump’s America, the creation of wholly owned corporate enclaves seems like a step too far.
Published: Mar 12, 2025 01:51 pm