CHASING UTOPIA, STARTUP STYLE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Silicon Valley's tech barons have several projects to develop new frontiers for human life. The projects are based on the desire to withdraw from existing societies and their high taxes and regulations. Stemming from a yearning for new forms of self-governance and citizenship, these political exit projects illuminate the real problems of society, like the failure of nation-states to respond adequately to modern crises, disintegrating social cohesion, and the epidemic of loneliness. While the idea of being a sovereign individual may sound appealing to Silicon Valley billionaires, the world's most poor and desperate often experience such lawless locales as antithetical to freedom as some of the worst abuses flourish in the absence of the state.