How earthly notions of conquest — and Big Tech power moves — are playing out in the stars
THE NEW UTOPIA
The summer is over and the secret is out about Flannery Associates, the once-mysterious company that has bought thousands of acres of land east of the San Francisco Bay as part of a Silicon Valley billionaire-backed venture to build a “new California city.” The New York Times reported in late August that some of the industry’s biggest names — including Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz — plan to build a techno utopia in largely rural Solano County and have already spent around $800 million to make it happen. Investors and other sources familiar with the pitch said the new city was billed as a bustling metropolis that would bring thousands of jobs to the area, be “as walkable as Paris” or New York’s West Village and even help solve the Bay Area’s housing crisis.
This kind of magical thinking is nothing new — it has deep roots in northern California, and in some ways it echoes visions of a utopian cyberspace that people like Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow espoused. But the kind of undertaking that Flannery Associates has in mind takes a special kind of hubris and a ton of money. The hubris and the money are not new for people of this ilk. But the effects of their actions are becoming bigger and more consequential for the rest of us.
Indeed, a new kind of utopia seems to be emerging, whether in Solano County, California or in Saudi Arabia’s Neom, which my colleague Oliver Bullough described earlier this week as “a blandly-named but horrific new city that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has decided to build in the desert because he can.”
But why limit yourself to earthly endeavors? This must have been the question on Elon Musk’s mind when he built SpaceX. In space, there is literally no one to answer to. Musk, the ultimate techno utopian conquistador of our times, can do almost anything he wants. And he has.