The mystery buyer of $800m worth of land in northern California was revealed as a consortium of Silicon Valley investors who plan to build a "utopian city" there. The efforts to buy up farms in Solano County spooked locals and got the front organization sued, and now the group, which includes Michael Moritz and Reid Hoffman, have decloaked in The New York Times.
He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. "Let me know if this tickles your fancy," he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. … The company's ambitions expand on the 2017 pitch: Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert into it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.
Sounds lovely, but zoom out only an inch and it's all comically in-keeping with the stereotype of wealthy libertarian guys wanting to create micronations where like-minded individuals can do what they want. Something something "Bioshock but they're desperate for water" in the California contract compound.
