A protester outside the Disrupting Democracy event, where the Honduran president had been scheduled to speak.Josh Harkinson
On Monday, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was expected to appear in San Francisco to talk about his efforts to cede a chunk of his impoverished Central American nation to an international group of investors who want to create an autonomous, self-governing, libertarian paradise. There was one problem, however: His talk was part of a speaker series called Disrupting Democracy, which may be a better venue for someone like Rand Paul than the beneficiary of a military coup who won office using funds allegedly embezzled from the national social security system.
Hernández and his deputies skipped Disrupting Democracy due to “civil unrest,” according the event’s organizers. On Sunday, 8,000 protesters had marched through the capital city of Tegucigalpa calling for his ouster.
“Before we begin, I would like to apologize for some confused messaging,” said panelist Randy Hencken, who directs the Seasteading Institute, which promotes the creation of floating technoutopian nation-states and cosponsored the event. “Here in Silicon Valley, when we want to improve something, we say ‘disrupt,'” Hencken continued. “Nobody in Honduras approved or even knew about that whimsical title, which, when translated from English into Spanish, could easily be construed in a negative and unintended light.”
At least a dozen anti-Hernández protesters showed up oustide the event, which was held at the South of Market headquarters of Lincoln Labs, a tech incubator cofounded by a former Mitt Romney campaign staffer.
The first Disrupting Democracy event, held in May, featured Paul discussing the growth of “a new generation of voter engagement.” Any subject that appeals to both libertarians and techies appears to interest Lincoln Labs, which was founded in 2013 to serve “liberty advocates living in Silicon Valley”—”a forgotten community that felt ostracized with no home.” Other Lincoln Labs events include its Reboot conferences and hackathons focusing on the technology of political campaigning.
Everyone at Monday’s event seemed to agree that the Honduran scheme, known as Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs, now seemed imperiled—a discouraging turn, given Hernández’s close cooperation with antitax crusader Grover Norquist and high-ranking representatives of the libertarian Cato and Hayek Institutes.
Yet the seasteaders were undeterred, even emboldened. If Honduras didn’t want to create a Hong-Kong style city on its coast, maybe it would host a floating city in its territorial waters. “That gets rid of complaints of ceding over large portions of land,” noted Seasteading Institute member Mike Doty, who had a long gray beard and a pirate-skull-patterned bandanna. “On the Pacific side, there’s a large bay there…They’ve done the engineering studies, the feasibility studies. We’re pretty far along.”
One thing that can never be disrupted, it seems, is the vision of a technolibertarian.
