During our conversation, Brown compared Praxis to Israel—minus a world war and a holocaust, of course. “There were these stateless people who were scattered,” he says, and they had “this idea of Judea and building a state and returning to the OG homeland.” (Srinivasan has been even more direct in the past, saying, “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism.”)

Of course, the beauty of a network state is that it can embody “the West” without actually having to be there. In addition to the Vandenberg location, Praxis announced that its team would be traveling to Morocco, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, among other countries, to explore the possibility of establishing an SEZ. While Brown says he does not consider Morocco to be Western, Praxis is willing to work with countries that are willing to give it land. Like Ion, Brown promises an influx of companies and tech talent that “can radically benefit” those places, boosting property values and creating jobs for local residents. It is unclear if those Moroccan residents would be considered “citizens” in a Praxian SEZ. In the meantime, through an initiative called Praxis Development, the group plans to buy up residential properties where its members can live as a stepping stone toward “real territory, real assets, and real power.”

“This is a colonial project, aimed at tech empire,” says Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the independent newsletter The Nerd Reich. “It sounds like colonization 2.0. When you go to another person’s country and create your own country there, no matter your excuse, no matter your rationale.”

Or, as the Praxis X account posted on September 1, “Cyberpunk East India Company.”

The most evolved version of the SEZ strategy is Próspera, a charter community, backed by Pronomos Capital, on the island of Roatán in Honduras. It has an arbitration system, low taxes, and a code of rules. (Vitalia, Ion’s original project, considered setting up a permanent location within Próspera.)

Próspera’s leaders say they do not consider it a network state, that their goal is “city-scale development that advances human progress and prosperity—within Honduran sovereignty and law.” The Honduran government, then led by Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, granted the city its charter in 2017. But Hernández was arrested in 2022 for drug trafficking (he has since been convicted), and the new government repealed Próspera’s SEZ status, alleging that these types of zones violated the country’s sovereignty. Próspera then filed an $11 billion lawsuit against the Honduran government, alleging that the government had failed to “honor its guarantees of legal stability.” The case is ongoing.

Ion, for his part, says that he “would approach different things differently” in Viva City.

Back at Viva Frontier Tower, after the morning rave and a full day of sessions on health and longevity, Ion, now dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, leads a few dozen attendees on a tour of his pop-up fiefdom. While the AI-generated images on the group’s website portray a semitropical seaside paradise that looks like a cross between Monaco and Atlantis, in real life, the WeWork turned “vertical village” turned temporary network state is in various states of repair.

Meta announced Friday that Facebook and Instagram users in the UK will be able to buy ad-free subscriptions, extending a model already in place in Europe, to comply with regulation.

Starting in the coming weeks, UK-based users can opt out of personalized ads by paying a monthly fee of £2.99 ($4) on the web, or £3.99 via iOS and Android apps.

The US tech giant said the move comes “in response to recent UK regulatory guidance,” noting that the subscription model gives users a choice over whether to allow personalized ads.

The UK price will be lower than what is offered in the European Union, where ad-free subscriptions start at 5.99 euros ($7) per month.

Meta first announced its ad-free option in the EU at the end of 2023 to comply with tougher regulation intended to rein in big tech.

The company has long profited from selling user data to advertisers but this business model has led to multiple battles with regulators over data privacy.

The European data regulator last year told Meta it must not force users to pay for the right to data protection, pushing the company to tweak its model.

Meta on Friday criticized the “overreach” of regulators in the EU, where it must provide a version of its platforms with “less personalized” ads.

It meanwhile welcomed the “constructive approach” of the British privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The ICO said the subscription option would allow Meta to comply with UK law.

© 2025 AFP

Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC this week. Sort of. About a quarter of ABC’s usual audience couldn’t see the talk show host this week after two major owners of ABC affiliates, Sinclair and Nexstar, refused to carry the show. Those right-leaning companies apparently felt that Kimmel’s joke—which included some disputed facts—was so unpardonable that they couldn’t expose their viewers to the comedian. They were also the first organizations to pull the plug on Kimmel, after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr seemed to threaten action. That means that even the stations that did carry the show—as well as Disney, which owns ABC—might be courting the ire of a government official who seems eager to use his powers to silence critics.

Carr does have power. The FCC can grant and revoke broadcast licenses if stations don’t serve the public interest. It’s an artifact of a time when virtually 100 percent of viewers got their shows over the air, via television antennas. Local TV stations were granted slices of the very limited broadcast spectrum to beam their programs and had to meet certain standards to keep that privilege. But that era has passed. Local television stations now reach their audience via cable or internet bundles. Also, networks increasingly stream their programming through apps. Yet Carr still has the ability to bully networks and affiliates by threatening to take their licenses.

This raises a question: What’s the point of maintaining the current system? It’s certainly a mess for Disney and its fellow network owners like Comcast, which owns NBC, and Paramount, which owns CBS. Instead of kowtowing to free-speech-hating regulators, and toadying affiliates who are fine with censoring ABC programming, maybe Disney should bid farewell to stations that decline to run its programming. Disney already streams shows on Hulu (which it controls) and on its own app. There have long been examples of local stations owned and operated by networks. What if Disney or Comcast let contracts with troublesome affiliates lapse and then started their own local stations without using spectrum—both as apps and cable channels? Let Nexstar and Sinclair find their own programming, where they can tailor content to any standard they want. Disney can happily bypass the airwaves without worrying about FCC threats. They can even say those seven dirty words!

I ran this idea past a former FCC commissioner, who pointed out some potential problems involving existing contracts and such. But generally, he agreed that the idea not only made sense but was already in motion, on the largest scale. “It’s what Disney is doing by streaming ESPN and everything else. It is something that has to be coming,” he tells me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Blair Levin, the former chief of staff to an FCC chairman, was even more sympathetic to my idea. “Broadcast is a melting ice cube,” he says. It’s only a question of how long it will take to thaw. Five years? Ten?

So my idea is less novel than I thought. The Kimmel conundrum has only turned up the heat on a doomed chunk of frozen water. Even as I chatted with former FCC officials, Needham, an investment bank that tracks media, put out a note that suggested even more drastic action is warranted. Disney, it said, should immediately begin streaming its entire schedule! The money it would reap from ads or subscriptions would more than make up for any losses, and Disney’s market cap would rise.

I don’t expect that to happen right away. The multiyear contracts and ongoing relationships between affiliates and networks lock in the current situation for a while. But when I asked an executive from a company that owns TV stations whether the current arrangement was sustainable, I didn’t get the pushback I expected. “It’s a real question,” he tells me, admitting the relationship of late has become more fraught.