The tech oligarchy’s newest project sits on a sleepy stretch of farmland, replete with small eucalyptus groves and rolling grassy hills, in between Rio Vista and Fairfield. It’s where they aim to create a city in their image. 

California Forever, the company behind the East Solano Plan, initially marketed the 60,000-acre suburban development in the north bay as “the first walkable American city in a century” and a revolutionary solution to the housing crisis. 

In reality, the East Solano Plan is the local node of an international secession movement aimed at weakening democracy and remaking municipal governance and regulatory policy. 

Tech elites began buying up properties in 2017, mainly through a front group called Flannery Associates. They successfully accrued $900 million worth of land — an area roughly the size of Oakland — before the story made waves in the press. When some locals resisted repeated offers, the billionaires filed a $510 million lawsuit charging them with “endless greed.”

After being rebuffed at the ballot box in 2024, when an initiative to create California Forever was rejected by voters in Solano County, the oligarchs changed strategy. They are now attempting to create the tech dystopia by expanding the borders of existing Suisan City, the county’s smallest municipality. Suisan City accepted the 250-page proposal in October 2025.

In late January, California Forever released a statement detailing the so-called “largest construction labor agreement in history” that spans 40 years and covers nearly all of the 110 square miles owned by the company. The recent release includes new plans for a shipyard and foundry, a disingenuous attempt to market the development as catering to working class industrial workers rather than upper-middle class tech workers. 

The financial support for this rural transformation comes from billionaires like venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs. Moritz, who has invested millions in his effort to move San Francisco in a rightward direction, once described the California Forever project as an opportunity to rethink everything from “design to construction methods and new forms of governance.” 

The last part is particularly telling, given that the ideological foundation for this movement comes from one of the Valley’s philosophical darlings: Balaji Srinivasan. 

Srinivasan, formerly the Coinbase chief technology officer, has become a kind of philosopher-king. His 2022 book, “The Network State: How to Start a New Country,” poorly received by most of the public, has become a foundational text for libertarian techies, unburdened by any understanding of reality. The book features a blurb from Andreessen: “Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.” 

In 2023, Srinivasan put on the first Network State conference aimed at “building a parallel establishment.” Srinivasan has described the movement as a kind of “tech zionism” where those not in line with his brand of techno libertarianism are purged.

The Network State and the Charter Cities movement has hundreds of different tendrils extended across the globe with non-profits and sub-networks connecting international capital to Silicon Valley financiers. Prospera, a “startup city” on the north coast of the Honduran island of Roatan, is one such tendril. Following a US-supported right-wing coup in 2009, Honduras passed the ZEDE law which allowed for autonomous zones that could create their own governing, taxation, and legal structure. Honduras has since repealed the law and the company behind Prospera sued, threatening to bankrupt the country.

The designation of “special economic zones” has been deployed elsewhere as well. Namely in the Trump administration’s plan to remake Gaza following the Israeli destruction of the strip and in eastern Ukraine. 

The banal sounding name is a useful instrument from the Network State toolbox. 

Trump’s “freedom cities” are a slight rebranding of the same concept, and the moneyed marauders from the Valley aim to establish similar cities elsewhere. For example, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman have voiced support for Praxis, another proposed freedom city in Greenland, presumably after the US seizes the island from Denmark. 

This kind of tech zionism is both a social and political experiment designed to test a potential vision of the future where city governments, and ultimately entire states, are largely deregulated with no democratic accountability and beholden to multinational corporations. Anyone not on board with this kind of settler-capitalism is ousted or ostracized. It is tech secession as a way of avoiding regulations and accountability. 

Labor, so far as it exists in these fantasies, is mostly high-skilled and employed by the companies that run the city. It conjures images of a 20th century company town with skyscrapers, but where workers will inevitably be replaced by AI. 

The development in the north bay is the first real attempt to bring this ideological project home. But, thus far, it’s been met with scorn or skepticism by locals residents. Despite the clever attempts at ingratiating the project with the Bay Area’s YIMBY movement, a candid look reveals both the techno-libertarian ideology grounding it and the attempts to export the project internationally. 

Said ideology, now very in vogue in the Valley, is valuable because of what it offers tech oligarchs for the future, or mainly what it doesn’t offer. That is to say, their future is one where regulatory bodies, democracy and governance are absent. As Jacob Silverman, author of the recently released, “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and Radicalization of Silicon Valley,” discussed in a recent interview, Musk and others view “any restraints on their power as being intolerable.” 

“There’s an impatience that the promised future has been withheld from them. The way that translates into politics is that they don’t want to be governed any more,” Silverman said.