MAGA Globalism

Trump's latest executive order is another indication that the tech oligarchs are in charge

This is my debut opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard. I’ll be writing for them semi-regularly going forward.

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President Donald Trump’s executive order to defund the Presidio Trust is already legitimizing a preposterous idea that’s been floating around tech circles: converting the park into an autonomous city devoted to unregulated capitalism.

Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, which promotes “deregulated new cities,” co-wrote an article published last month in Palladium magazine in which he advocated turning the Presidio into a “Freedom City” modeled after Shenzhen in China. Shenzhen was founded in 1980 as a “Special Economic Zone” with the autonomy to set its own rules — specifically, minimal regulations on business. Its lack of regulations made it a mecca for investment and transformed what was once a bunch of fishing villages into a colossal metropolis and a center of global production.

The notion of turning the Presidio into a Freedom City percolated in the tech world last year after Trump announced a plan to create 10 Shenzhen-style Freedom Cities in the United States. Patri Friedman, a founder of The Seasteading Institute and the grandson of Milton Friedman, applauded Trump’s proposal, tweeting in November that “my dream is to turn part of the Presidio (federal land) into a neo-Tokyo of LED-accented skyscrapers and Make San Francisco Great Again.”

The Freedom Cities proposal was an awkward fit for the MAGA/America First agenda as most people understand it — it’s literally the opposite of economic nationalism. But it’s perfectly suited to the long-standing aspirations of one of Trump’s first converts from Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel.