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Chris Kremidas-Courtney is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre, associate fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and author of ‘The Rest of Your Life: Five Stories of Your Future.’
You arrive in the city and instead of a passport check, it’s a retinal scan. Your residency contract, a service agreement you must accept to live here, can be revoked at any time. Elections don’t exist; the “mayor” is the CEO who built the skyline. Advertisements offer a “genetically blessed” child and the fine print explains financing options are available to citizens in good standing. Your rent is paid in cryptocurrency, and your rights depend on both your credit score and your compliance.
This isn’t a dystopian novel, but the trajectory set by a small circle of tech billionaires and their political allies already putting these visions into practice. Elon Musk pushes for technocracy. Peter Thiel funds projects to bypass democratic oversight and praises political theorist Curtis Yarvin, whose neoreactionary vision swaps democracy for CEO-style rule. US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advances policies echoing eugenics; from an autism registry and “wellness farms” for re-education to framing disability as a defect to be eliminated.
While the epicentre of this power shift is in the United States, its ideology has eager allies in Europe. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin designs decentralised economic blueprints from his European base, and Patrik Schumacher promotes private “free market” cities across the continent. Figures like Musk find ready amplifiers among Europe’s hard-right populists from Germany’s AfD and Spain’s Vox to Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, who share his hostility to democratic regulation.
From privatised city-states and eugenics to cryptocurrencies and decentralised governance, the details vary but the direction is the same: shifting power from democratic institutions into enclaves where the public has no meaningful say.
Some aim to control our living spaces as enclaves run by corporate charters, not democratic governance. Others target the human body itself. Orchid markets genetic embryo selection for health and intelligence. Musk, whose own children with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis were reportedly “Orchid babies,” has spoken of propagating superior intelligence. This is eugenics repackaged as lifestyle choice for those who can pay.
The same pattern appears in finance and governance. Cryptocurrency, sold as liberation from banks, instead concentrates wealth among early “whales” and moves capital beyond the reach of elected governments. Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) promise “leaderless” decision-making, but in practice those holding the most tokens (the digital units that confer voting power) control the outcome, hard-wiring plutocracy into the system.
Malta brands itself the EU’s ‘Blockchain Island,’ granting DAOs full legal standing and a permissive regulatory environment for token-based governance inside the Union. This creates a form of regulatory arbitrage that risks importing plutocratic, one-token-one-vote systems into Europe’s democratic space.
In the UK, new “Free Port” zones follow the same logic by creating territories with reduced oversight, where corporate interests shape the rules and public accountability thins out. These echo the semi-autonomous enclaves of private charter cities advocated by Schumacher.
What unites these threads is the belief that the future belongs to an “enlightened” few, free from regulation and the consent of the governed. From Musk’s Mars colony dreams and Thiel’s contempt for voting rights to Kennedy’s public-health agenda and the self-executing rules of blockchain governance, the constant is a conviction that democracy is too slow and messy to be trusted with what comes next.
Some of these currents also align with Kremlin interests. Deregulated cryptocurrency markets and opaque governance models give sanctioned Russian elites new channels to move wealth and sway politics in the West, while Kremlin propaganda benefits from any Western movement that erodes trust in democratic institutions.
Defending democracy in this age begins by recognising these new patterns. Private cities without elections, an embryo marketplace for the rich, and currencies designed to evade state authority. None of these are isolated innovations. Together they form the architecture of a post-democratic order.
Resisting it means naming it, updating antitrust rules to check corporate fiefdoms, bioengineering ethics set through public debate, digital finance and blockchain governance brought under the rule of law, and renewing the democratic story so the public sees government as a problem-solver and not an obstacle.
Technology is already defining the 21st century. The question is whether it will serve all of us, or only those who can afford to reshape the human condition in their own image. History has seen self-anointed philosopher-kings before. The names change but the belief that they know best does not.
The choice to resist or acquiesce remains ours, for now.
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