Peter Thiel’s recent moves, snapping up property in Argentina, maintaining New Zealand citizenship, and hedging against U.S. instability, perfectly illustrate the worldview laid out in William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s 1997 book The Sovereign Individual. As detailed in Gil Duran’s recent piece for The Nerd Reich, https://www.thenerdreich.com/the-sovereign-individual-thiel-argentina-and-the-network-state/?ref=the-nerd-reich-newsletter
The Sovereign Individual 1997, serves as a manual for wealthy ‘cognitive elites’ to escape collapsing welfare states, nation-state taxation, and democratic accountability through technology, multiple passports, private security, and strategic relocations. Thiel’s protégé Balaji Srinivasan has built on it with the Network State concept: online communities that crystallise into physical territories with their own rules, operating outside the norms of democratic governance.
This isn’t abstract futurism. It is being enacted incrementally through ‘exit’ strategies, deregulated enclaves that let capital and high-value individuals opt out of normal governance while still benefiting from existing public infrastructure. In the UK, this ideology has been imported wholesale, paving the way for full-scale experiments such as Forest City 1 in Suffolk.
URGENT WARNING: Forest City 1 and the Charter City Agenda
Forest City 1 is the first of a planned network of privately controlled charter cities on British soil - 45,000 acres of Suffolk farmland to be transformed into a governance experiment by a consortium of right-wing libertarian ideologues. More developments are in the pipeline. The supporters behind this scheme are not confused property developers. They are the architects of Britain’s post-Brexit zone archipelago and charter-city governance model.
To understand how it arrived here, you need to follow the policy transmission belt, and that belt runs directly through one man: Shanker Singham.
The Sovereign Individual Thesis and Its Modern Disciples
The Sovereign Individual predicted that information technology, cyber-currencies, and automation would erode nation-states’ monopoly on violence and taxation. Sovereign individuals, mobile, high-productivity elites, would ‘shop’ jurisdictions, negotiate private treaties, and form affinity-based protections akin to a ‘merchant republic of cyberspace.’ Rees-Mogg and Davidson explicitly flagged Argentina and New Zealand as bolt-holes. Thiel has called the book profoundly influential; Srinivasan hails it as prescient.
Their network includes Pronomos Capital, the venture firm backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen, which funded Próspera in Honduras, a private semi-autonomous city operating as a Zone for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE) on the island of Roatán. Other investors in Próspera and related ventures include Balaji Srinivasan, Joe Lonsdale (of the PayPal Mafia network), and, as of January 2025, Coinbase’s venture division. The Praxis project, formerly Bluebook Cities, billing itself as ‘the world’s first network state’, has raised $525 million from investors including Thiel, Alameda Research, and Winklevoss Capital, and has floated locations from the Mediterranean to Greenland.
The pattern is consistent across all these projects: start small with tax advantages and regulatory carve-outs, scale to parallel governance structures where ‘exit’, voting with your feet or your capital, replaces ‘voice,’ meaning democratic participation. Duran identifies three modes by which this ideology seeks escape from democracy: destroying democratic governments; creating democracy-free territories; or capturing weaker democracies where institutional resistance is low. All three are visible in the UK context.
Shanker Singham: The Policy Transmission Belt
The ideological link between the Thiel-Andreessen-Srinivasan network and the British free zone programme does not operate through vague cultural osmosis. It runs through a specific individual who moved the deregulatory blueprint from US academic institutions into the heart of the British state. Shanker Singham, Oxford-educated trade and competition lawyer, self-described ‘evangelist for freeports’, is the figure who built the intellectual scaffolding for the UK’s SEZ and freeport expansion, and who enjoyed access to senior government figures that other observers described as, to use the published word, ‘extraordinary.’
In 2013, Singham was appointed Managing Director of the newly established Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project at Babson Global, a wholly owned subsidiary of Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The project was established specifically to work with developing countries on ‘enterprise cities’, zones with regulatory autonomy from their host governments, and to develop the ‘how to’ of regulatory environments for such zones. It was, in short, the intellectual R&D operation for what later became the UK’s free zone architecture. The question of why this work was conducted through a US institution rather than a British one is not incidental. It reflects the degree to which the ideological foundations of these policies were transatlantic in origin, rooted in US libertarian ‘exit’ thinking, competitive governance as a market, that would have faced far greater scepticism had it been presented under domestic branding from the outset.
Singham’s career trajectory is the story of that ideology moving progressively closer to power. He was a cleared advisor to the United States Trade Representative from 2009 to 2015, working on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and TTIP. He moved to the Legatum Institute as economics director, an organisation whose Brexit-era activities were later ruled by the Charity Commission to have ‘crossed the line’ of charitable objectives, before moving to the Institute of Economic Affairs, which is itself opaquely funded and has faced repeated scrutiny over undisclosed donor relationships. At the IEA, he was caught up in a cash-for-access scandal when recordings emerged of the IEA’s then-head describing Singham as ‘unbelievably well connected’ to Brexiteer ministers.
During the Brexit negotiations, Singham met repeatedly with senior officials and ministers, including meetings with the permanent secretary of the Department for Exiting the European Union, Brexit Secretary David Davis, and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, in encounters that were frequently unminuted or subject to disclosure refusals. He was described in press coverage as ‘the Brexiteers’ Brain,’ and Environment Secretary Michael Gove called him ‘probably the UK’s leading expert on trade deals.’ He was a key figure in what investigative reporting described as a ‘secret kitchen cabinet charting the course for a hard Brexit, off the books, behind closed doors.’
Singham’s most recent significant role was as head of Liz Truss’s Growth Commission. He has also been publicly named as an adviser to the Anglesey freeport and as an adviser to Próspera LLC in Honduras, making him one of the very few figures with documented operational involvement in both the UK freeport programme and the Thiel-backed charter city network simultaneously. His company Competere explicitly lists advising on Special Economic Zones and Free Zones as a line of business, and documents show it met with government ministers over fifty times on freeport-related policy. That Singham developed his enterprise cities framework at a Massachusetts college before importing it through Whitehall corridors is not a coincidence of biography, it is the mechanism.
UK Free Zones: The Quiet Import of Exit Ideology
Post-Brexit, the UK rapidly expanded a patchwork of Freeports, Enterprise Zones, Investment Zones, AI Growth Zones, and now consolidated ‘Industrial Strategy Zones’, 91 free zones in total: 74 SEZs, 12 Freeports, and 5 AI Growth Zones launched by Keir Starmer in January 2025. These were sold as growth engines and regional levelling-up tools, but function as laboratories for Sovereign Individual logic: carve-outs where normal rules don’t fully apply, attracting capital that can later demand more autonomy.
The financial scale is extraordinary and almost entirely absent from mainstream coverage. Each Investment Zone receives a funding envelope of up to £160 million over ten years in state aid. Multiply that by 74 and you reach £11.84 billion in public subsidy to SEZs alone. Each Freeport receives £25 million in seed capital alongside substantial tax incentive packages. Sunak’s flagship Teesside Freeport has already spent £560 million of public money, with profit share split 90/10 in favour of the private sector, a ratio that would be illegal under EU state aid rules, which the UK exited along with the single market. Tees Valley Combined Authority has since been placed into special measures and issued a Best Value Notice for governance failures. Projected costs over the full 25-year contract periods of all zones approach £64 billion of public expenditure.
The critical enabling mechanism is Brexit’s removal of EU state aid constraints. Under EU rules, the European Commission scrutinised member state subsidies to prevent market distortion and fragmentation. The UK is now bound only by weaker WTO anti-subsidy rules, which lack enforcement teeth and rely on complaints from other states. The EU was already investigating UK freeports for potential state aid violations in 2020. We left their regulatory orbit before the findings materialised. The deregulatory logic of the Sovereign Individual, competitive governance as a market, jurisdictions competing on taxes and rules, could not have been operationalised at this scale inside the EU. Brexit was not merely the occasion for these zones. It was the structural precondition.
These zones import US libertarian ‘exit’ thinking, competitive governance as a market, per Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman, another Pronomos Capital figure), echoing the Sovereign Individual’s call for fragmented jurisdictions competing on taxes and rules, much like historical free ports or modern charter city experiments. They represent corporate sovereignty displacing social democratic governance: appointed boards, not elected representatives; 25-year licenses, not democratic mandates; profits flowing outward at ratios determined by private contract rather than public interest.
