Free Republic

In July 2024, I flew to a pop-up city named Vitalia that aimed to “make death optional.” Situated in the heart of a special economic zone on Roatan, a Honduran island, Vitalia advertised itself as a place to fast-track drug research outside of America’s burdensome regulatory constraints.The AI-generated pictures I’d seen made it look sleek and futuristic, like a cross between South Beach Miami and The Jetsons. Since its launch seven months before, Vitalia had attracted scientists, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts—among them longevity guru Bryan Johnson and Balaji S. Srinivasan, the author of The Network State. The special economic zone...

Plans are underway to create “Freedom Cities” — privately controlled corporate enclaves that would operate outside federal oversight — across the United States.According to Wired, a coalition of tech billionaires, venture capitalists, and corporate advocacy groups is drafting congressional legislation and meeting with the Trump administration to bring these experimental cities to U.S. soil.The outlets reports that these cities would be “free from certain federal laws,” allowing unregulated human longevity trials, nuclear reactor startups, and unrestricted infrastructure projects to move forward without government approval. As Wired puts it:The goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical...