Randa Abdel-Fattah

In April 2022, after a new leftist government took power in Honduras, the Charter City Law was repealed.

nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate even if the law was repealed.

Prospera then sued the Honduran government in an international tribunal, seeking a massive amount of money.

$10.7 billion.

$10.7 billion.

For context, that's about a quarter of Honduras' annual GDP.

The tech investors backing Prospera are collectively worth much more than that.

And they have the backing of the country with the most powerful military on earth.

The case is still ongoing, the future of Prospera hanging in the balance.

Based on what Dan saw when he finally got to visit Prospera last year, development seems to have slowed down.

A lot of it is virtual.

There were some residential buildings, a Montessori school, a few research facilities working on out-of-the-box medical experiments like gene therapy meant to cure aging.

But not many people.

I've spoken to some people who are working more on charter cities outside of Honduras.

There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa.

When Thomas More wrote Utopia over 500 years ago, designing a perfect society was an allegory.

Today, technology is making attempts to reshape reality and create versions of so-called network states more possible than ever.

The impact of this kind of thinking can be seen all around us, on an island in Honduras, on farmland near San Francisco, amid the rubble of Gaza, or before long, maybe a crater on the moon.

The people designing these cities might not care if their choices lead to utopia or dystopia for the rest of us, because the cities aren't necessarily for us.

I don't think that Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this like perfect society on the moon.