Before Rachel Corbett could set foot in Próspera, she had to sign an "agreement of coexistence"—thereby "binding myself to 4,202 pages of rules," any violation of which would be handled by an arbitration center operated by three retired Arizona judges. In a lengthy piece for the New York Times, Corbett explains what she found in the experimental town, which is located off Honduras and was founded in 2017 by a Delaware-based company that has backing from VC funds tied to the likes of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen. "Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation.
The light regulation is particularly apparent when it comes to medicine. Corbett describes one financial backer who had his Tesla key implanted into his hand via a chip. Her piece is complex: She places Próspera within the much larger collection of the special economic zones and the far smaller group of charter cities that exist across the world. She highlights criticism that Próspera has taken shape as a "an example of corporate monarchy, where yacht-owning CEOs exploit land and labor in a poor country." Indeed, fears that Próspera would subsume nearby land has led many people and politicians in Honduras to sour on the project; two years ago, the government yanked some of its privileges and put up some financing roadblocks. Próspera responded by filing a nearly $11 billion suit against the country with a World Bank Tribunal; it's unresolved. (Read the fascinating article in full.)
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