Randa Abdel-Fattah

There are all kinds of network state-type projects being imagined right now, abroad and within our own borders.

Exiting the system is no longer a fringe or weird idea.

Starbase, Elon Musk's city in Texas, was created to build a path to Mars.

The billionaire-backed California Forever Project is planning a new city on 50,000 acres of farmland on the edge of Silicon Valley.

And President Trump has proposed building so-called freedom cities.

Built on federal land, but privately funded and free from traditional regulations, environmental laws, and labor unions.

These projects are expensive, backed by billionaire tech investors, and most are still in the digital design phase, i.e., they don't yet exist in reality.

Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does exist.

It took Dan Gurma almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team.

And in the meantime, he was digging into how this place ended up in Honduras.

The coup has left Honduras deeply polarized.

A Nobel Prize-winning American economist named Paul Romer came up with the idea of charter cities.

The idea was to have a more successful country lease an empty tract of land from a host country, set its own rules, operate as an autonomous city, and court foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation.

Romer was eventually sidelined, and Honduran lawmakers opted for a slightly different proposal.

Instead of another country administering the land, a private corporation would.

It was an attractive idea for Honduras, which had long been open to private investment.

But plenty of people objected.

Would it basically act as a state within their state?

Would this threaten Honduran sovereignty?

Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law greenlighting charter cities was passed.