Philip K. Dick Or Jules Verne?

     It's seems too far-out to be real: Silicon Valley techbros and their pals really, really like the idea of "Freedom Cities," where only the owner(s) are free and the laws of the surrounding state and nation don't apply.  Salon says Elon Musk and Vice-President Vance's sponsor Peter Thiel are all in on the idea, linking it to Musk's appetite for bulldozing Federal agencies.

     Gil Duran expands on the general idea, linking back to a (subscription required) article at Wired that goes into even greater depth.  Tl;dr: they figure the more broken the surrounding polity, the better these fiefdoms will prosper.

     On first sight, it reads like something out of Philip K. Dick: relentlessly commercial neo-feudalism, with little regard for individual freedom as an inherent right: everything's got a price tag, including human dignity.  But the notion of a carve-out for ruthless sociopolitical experimentation goes back much farther, finding expression in The Begum's Fortune by Jules Verne,* in which a pair of millionaire-run competing cities, operating in the late-19th Century American West under a carve-out from Federal sovereignty, compete in super-science and forms of government.  I won't spoil the ending for you, but even the hero's city sounds a lot less free than then-contemporary Chicago or Boston, especially for the inhabitants working for a living.

     There's a lot of loud, noisy politics in the center ring at present, headline-grabbing stuff.  But something else may be gnawing away at the base of the Big Top's tent poles, and it bears watching.
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* Verne maintained extensive press-clipping files, covering cutting-edge science and technology -- and politics.  Famous as the father of science fiction, from another angle he's the parent of Crichtonesque technothrillers as well.  English translations have often failed to live up to the originals until fairly recently.