Network State

December 4, 2025 7:10 PM Subscribe

Why Did Trump Pardon the Former Honduran President? Follow the Tech Bros. is a Mother Jones essay by Kiera Butler on Trump’s recent pardon of Honduran ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been serving 45 years in prison for using Honduras’ police and army to ship 500 tons of cocaine into the United States. Butler links the pardon to Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. According to some, Prospera is a "freedom city" and important part of the Network State movement; while for others, like Honduras’ leftwing President Xiomara Castro and Supreme Court (who found it unconstitutional), it is "merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere."

But what is the Network State movement?

Here’s an except from Kiera Butler’s previous report, Tech Moguls Want to Build a Crypto Paradise on a Native American Reservation (And hope to gobble up some land near you.):

In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws.

Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.”

A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.”