Elon Musk’s “Starbase City” was just incorporated as an official municipality within Texas. This incorporation granted SpaceX greater control over local governance, including infrastructure and zoning decisions.
In May 2025, residents of Starbase, Texas (formerly Boca Chica Village) received formal notice that a new zoning ordinance could strip them of the right to continue using their property “for its current use.”
The proposed "Mixed Use District" would redefine the land to support residential, retail, office, and small-scale services, aligning with SpaceX’s long-term development plans.
The developments are part of his broader vision to create a self-sustaining community that can serve as a blueprint for future settlements on Mars.
Starbase functions as both a launch facility and a residential community for SpaceX employees. Approximately 500 people reside in the area, with over half employed by SpaceX or related entities. The company has provided housing options ranging from modest homes to Airstream trailers to accommodate its workforce.
At least the commute is short.
The work environment at Starbase is characterized by high expectations and a fast-paced culture. Employees often face long hours and demanding schedules, reflecting the company's ambitious objectives.
Musk encourages 80–100 hour workweeks among core teams. Turnover is high. Burnout is common.
Musk has stated that his ultimate goal is to make humanity multi-planetary, a backup plan for our species as the odds of a planet-wide extinction event continue to rise.
He positions the goal as a moral imperative. SpaceX and Starlink employees are expected to sacrifice time, sleep, and often personal life for the larger mission.
SIde Track: The Company
Eight of the original thirteen British colonies in North America began as chartered companies.
The first permanent English settlement in what would become the United States was a “company town”. Jamestown, was founded by The Virginia Companyof London (1607), a joint-stock corporation chartered by King James.
Primarily a profit-seeking venture, its goal was to extract wealth (especially gold and other raw materials) and return dividends to English investors. The Jamestown colony was the result.
By late 1609, about 300 settlers were living in Jamestown but it still wasn’t generating a profit. The first colony struggled early on with starvation, disease, and drought, and even siege by the natives. Colonists were reduced to eating horses, dogs, rats, snakes, shoe leather, and eventually each other.
“And now famished and in despair, our men did gnaw on the corpses of the dead… And some did that which is horrible to hear, namely, did kill and eat their own wives.” –George Percy,
Though they didn’t find much gold, they managed to finally start up a lucrative tobacco export that was productive and large enough to need indentured servants and, eventually, enslaved workers.
The company also introduced representative government with the first meeting of the House of Burgesses—an attempt to attract more settlers by offering a sense of self-rule.
Land was increasingly privatized and parceled out to investors and settlers, escalating expansion into Powhatan territory whom the colonists had ongoing, tense relations with. This included “miscegenation” aka the mixing of white and native people (think John Smith and Pocahontas).
The 1619 Project came under scrutiny recently for suggesting this moment as the true founding of America. What is less often discussed is how the English sent “mail order brides” in 1619 to discourage “promiscuity”.
Unlike the Disney version of events, there were two Johns and the real Pocahontas (Matoax) was captured and held against her will.
The Virginia Company was desperate to rehabilitate its image after years of financial failure, famine, conflict with Native peoples, and reports of cannibalism. She was brought to london and presented Pocahontas as a "civilized Indian princess" to promote investment and recruitment for the struggling colony.
But she never made it home. She was poisoned in London and her mixed race infant son, who would never know either parents, was raised in England (to eventually become a future plantation owner).
Tobacco profits soared, which encouraged even more land grabs and displacement of local tribes.
In 1622, the colony suffered a massive Indigenous uprising the Powhatan Massacre, killing nearly a third of English settlers.
Even before the massacre, internal records show the Virginia Company suffered from poor accounting, favoritism, and infighting. Many of the shareholders (known as "adventurers") never received dividends. Despite huge profits, the were heavily in debt from a decade of borrowing.
The massacre, paired with public scrutiny and poor returns on investment, led King James I to revoke its charter. The Virginia Company dissolved in 1624 The colony became a royal colony, directly governed by the Crown. But it proved that it was possible to start a business in the New World.
5 years later theMassachusetts Bay Company landed in Plymouth. Another English joint-stock company, but unlike other colonial ventures, it was founded by Puritan separatists seeking to build a moral society, not just extract profit.
It was a company town for God, organized around strict religious conformity and communal labor, with spiritual purity as its organizing principle.
Company Man
In a leaked 2021 email Elon, urged his employees to work through the Thanksgiving holiday, warning the company was in danger of bankruptcy without reliable Raptor rockets Starship didn’t launch it’s V2 satellites soon.
“The consequences for SpaceX if we can’t get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume *nor* the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1 by itself is financially weak, whereas V2 is strong.” - Musk
“What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.” - Musk
Eric Berger’s Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX is a very telling account of how Musk’s scrappy, underfunded startup nearly collapsed multiple times while developing the Falcon 1 rocket before becoming one of the most powerful space companies in history.
One former SpaceX VP was part of an early team that went on strike on Omelek island after they ran out of food but they were still forced to work around the clock.
Bulent Altan was an engineer at the time and said they felt like like slaves. Emergency chicken wings and cigarettes were airdropped to appease the starved technicians.
Side Track: The Rocket
In 1829, engineers George Stephenson and his son Robertunveiled their prototype locomotive TheRocket. More than a machine, it was a signal: railroads weren’t a novelty; they were the future.
A year later the unveiled their Planet class locomotive.
Before the Civil War, the U.S. was a patchwork of competing economies.
The South ran on slave-based agriculture and global exports like cotton.
The North was industrializing with wage labor, railroads, and banks.
Railroads (green lines) circa 1830
Within a decade, the U.S. had begun building its own locomotives, laying track across the Northeast and Midwest. U.S. designs evolved quickly, emphasizing larger engines, and more rugged construction to handle longer distances and rougher landscapes.
Railroads by 1840, many of these lines where built on speculation and proved to be redundant and/or useless.
Many U.S. cities, especially in the 19th century, began as nothing more than railroad stops or junction points, strategically placed to support westward expansion, commerce, and settlement.
These were often referred to by placeholder names like "Terminus," (which meant end of the line) and eventually became large urban centers like Atlanta.
SpaceX has faced several regulatory actions from both the FAA and the EPA in recent years, primarily related to procedural oversights and environmental compliance issues.
In Jan 2025, the EPA fined SpaceX for unauthorized discharges of industrial wastewater, including deluge water and a liquid oxygen spill, into wetlands adjacent to their Starbase facility in Texas.
But in early May 2025, the FAAapproved a significant increase in Starship launches. The company is now permitted to conduct up to 25 Starship launches per year. This is a fivefold increase from the previous limit of 5 launches annually.
TheFAA Environmental Assessmentestimates that each Super Heavy/Starship launch produces approximately 3,894 metric tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions.
It also projects that 25 annual launches from the Starbase facility would result in a total of 97,342 metric tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions per year. This to many environmentalists is an extremely conservative estimate.
This amount would become highly significant if Starship approaches the “hundreds” of launches Elon Musk envisions.
“Elon would say, next year he would love to have us have 25 missions a year and in the next few years, a hundred…
He was telling me, ‘Kathy, I would love to launch a couple of times a day'” - Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX Boca Chica
First, Musk will join NASA as they head back to the moon, assuming SpaceX can get the Super Heavy to stay in one piece. Of the 9 launches so far in 2025, 5 of them have resulted in “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.
Side Track: The United Stations
Abraham Lincoln is remembered for being the first Republican president and the president who “freed the slaves”. But he also played a foundational role in the development of the American railroad system.
Before the Civil War, the United States wasn’t truly united. The original 13 colonies operated like separate “company towns,” each with its own economy, laws, and identity.
Slavery didn’t fit the Northern model—it was geographically inefficient, economically rigid, and politically volatile. Slaves couldn’t be easily moved into factories, couldn’t be hired or fired, and didn’t buy goods. They were producers, not consumers.
Northern elites like the Whig Party and some Democrats (many still racist) opposed the spread of slavery not just morally, but economically. Slavery suppressed wages, distorted markets, and concentrated political power in the planter class. Two systems couldn’t coexist.
The Missouri Compromise (1820) tried to draw a line, but the North wanted free labor and railroads to open up the West to small farmers, wage workers, and private enterprise. It also needed more consumers.
There Will Be Blood
Senator Lewis Cass (Democrat, Michigan) proposed that settlers in U.S. territories should have the right to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery, instead of Congress imposing it.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat, Illinois) further championed popular sovereignty but wasn’t neutral; he had deep financial ties to Chicago railroads and wanted the Transcontinental Railroad to run through the North.
Behind this entire debate of “Popular Sovereignty” and state-rights vs federal rights, was a railroad industrial complex yearning to blossom.
To make that happen, Douglas needed Southern support. So he brokered the Kansas-Nebraska Act(1854), which created the territory of Kansas (and repealed the Missouri Compromise) opening new territories to slavery if voters approved. It was a calculated move, economic ambition dressed as political compromise.
But this appeasement strategy backfired. The move enraged a coalition of abolitionists, ex-Whigs, Free Soilers, and industrialists, who saw slavery not just as a moral blight but an economic threat to wage labor.
From that outrage, the Republican Party was born; a new political force that combined free labor ideals with the pro-industry, pro-infrastructure ethos of the fallen Whigs. It absorbed many of the economic ideas of railroad-minded Democrats, but rejected their political cowardice on slavery.
Lincoln’s belief in free labor was moral but also infrastructural. He imagined a republic of small entrepreneurs and upwardly mobile workers, not enslaved laborers locked into place.
As Lincoln said in 1859:
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital... Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
In this vision, mobility was freedom, and labor was capital waiting to happen.
That idea would haunt American capitalism for the next century.
The First Company Towns
After the Civil War, Virginia’s plantation economy collapsed, but its extractive logic endured. In the late 1800s, coal replaced cotton. Former slaveholders sold Appalachian land to northern rail syndicates, and company towns rose in place of plantations; complete with scrip, debt peonage, and captive labor.
Coal towns like Tazewell and Wise became Virginia’s new centers of profit and control. Slavery had ended, but its architecture remained—this time built on carbon, not cotton. The land was gutted, the labor bound, and the wealth exported.
The end of slavery eliminated a source of unpaid labor, forcing industries like the railroads to seek new, inexpensive workforces.
While it shifted the legal framework from outright ownership to wage labor, the drive for profit margins often led to the exploitation of these new labor pools through low wages, dangerous conditions, and even new forms of coerced labor like convict leasing, especially for African Americans.
They claim Tesla violated various California labor laws by failing to pay overtime and provide meal and rest breaks, not providing paid sick leave or reimbursing employees for work-related expenses, and failing to provide written descriptions of quotas that workers were required to meet.
The more disturbing accounts include regular, blatant use of the n-word, swastika graffiti, and even nooses hung at workstations.
Raina Pierce, a Black female employee, settled a lawsuit after alleging a manager greeted her with racially offensive remarks like "Welcome to the plantation."
Side Track: Sugar Town
Starbase City is not the first corporate-owned city in Texas.
While the 13th Amendment formally abolished slavery in 1865, it included a critical loophole: forced labor was still allowed as punishment for a crime. Many of these convicts were arrested (sometimes in groups) on contrived or false charges.
A century ago, Sugarland, Tx operated as a corporate fiefdom under the Imperial Sugar Company, with Black convicts leased from state prisons to perform backbreaking work under constant surveillance and threat of violence.
In 2018, during construction for a new school, Archaeologists uncovered 95 unmarked graves of African American men, believed to be victims of this convict leasing system. The average age was around 22–23 years old, many showing signs of physical trauma and exhaustion.
Sugar Land and the convict leasing system represent a clear example of how slavery continued in new legal forms after the Civil War.
Labor of Love
Safety concerns about Starbase have also been raised. A 2023 investigation documented over 600 workplace injuries at SpaceX facilities, including incidents at Starbase. These findings have prompted discussions about the company's safety protocols and regulatory compliance.
Elon’s had numerous run-ins with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):
2018, Musk tweeted that Tesla employees could lose stock options if they unionized. The NLRB deemed this an unlawful threat.
The NLRB filed a complaint alleging these firings violated labor laws.
In response, SpaceX sued the NLRB, challenging the constitutionality of its structure and enforcement mechanisms.
In May 2025, both SpaceX and the NLRB agreed to pause proceedings to seek clarity on whether SpaceX falls under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which is overseen by the National Mediation Board (NMB). This determination could significantly impact the outcome of the case.
Side Track: Pullman’s Paradise
Musk is not the first visionary to try and create a utopia city for his workers. Pullman, Illinois (founded in 1880) is one of the most infamous company towns in American history.
After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, his body was transported by train from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, on a 13-day funeral procession through major cities.
This event served as a publicity breakthrough for George Pullman and The Pullman Company, the largest manufacturer of railcars in the U.S. The train car was originally meant as the President’s personal “Air Force One”, but he never used it (until his death).
Pullman was known for his luxury rail cars designed for overnight travel, featuring upholstered seats, fold-down beds, carpets, chandeliers, and uniformed porters (most of whom were formerly enslaved Black men).
The Pioneer car became a symbol of modern, elegant travel, and demand for Pullman cars skyrocketed afterward. He made enough to invest in his own company town.
Pullman described his company town as a model of enlightened industrial capitalism. Pullman saw the town as a social experiment—one where workers would be uplifted by clean, orderly surroundings and moral discipline.
He believed that beautiful architecture, gardens, and cleanliness would create moral workers. He designed the town with uniform red-brick buildings, curved streets, manicured lawns, and strict rules governing behavior.
Workers were expected to behave according to strict moral codes. Union organizing and dissent were discouraged, if not punished. Pullman controlled the housing, the groceries, even the churches. He prohibited alcohol, loitering, and unsanctioned gatherings.
Pullman was also clear that this was not charity. He expected a return on investment from the town’s rents, utilities, and services. Profit made from the very workers he claimed to uplift.
When economic depression hit Pullman slashed wages but kept rents high. Workers quickly found themselves in debt to the company, despite working full-time.
In 1894, the Pullman Strike began. The result was violent clashes, several deaths, and mass arrests. The strike was crushed.
Pullman died of a heart attack not long after. His lead-lined coffin had to be encased in concrete for fear workers would exhume his body.
The Road To Space
While SpaceX is fixated on Mars and colonization, Bezos's Blue Origin is focused on the Moon and building an industrial infrastructure in space for future resource extraction.
In a 2019 presentation that felt equal parts science fiction and corporate roadmap, Jeff Bezos unveiled his vision for humanity's future in space: not as a fleeting escape, but as a permanent migration of industry and infrastructure. Like Musk, Bezos is framing his latest enterprise as a philanthropic gift to humanity.
Drawing directly from Gerard K. O'Neill's 1970s concepts, Bezos proposed massive orbital habitats, spinning O’Neill cylinders capable of housing millions, complete with Earth-like gravity, weather, and architecture.
These wouldn’t be colonies in the traditional sense, they’d be floating cities, utopias in low orbit, filled with homes, schools, farms, and factories suspended in vacuum.
In Bezos’s plan, Earth becomes zoned for “residential and light industry” (a sort of protected parkland) while all heavy industry moves off-planet.
This silently suggests that these cities will most likely be housing those who work in high-risk, heavy industry, leaving the resort-style living for those back on Earth where the land value is higher.
Alien predicted the future of space mining with its “Truckers in Space” setting.
Like Musk & Tesla, Jeff Bezos & Amazon have faced extensive scrutiny over their labor practices, particularly concerning unionization efforts and regulatory compliance.
The company is reported to employ various tactics to discourage unionization, such as:
“You can’t escape the gravitational pull of Jeff Bezos and Amazon,”
—Americus Reed, Wharton School of business
Side Track: Tire Town
Henry Ford was an innovator in many ways, one of which was his $5 workday plan for workers. Ford’s ideology was that if you paid workers a decent pay, they would appreciate their jobs more and have money to put back into the economy.
In 1914, the average wage for auto workers hovered around $2.34 for a nine-hour day, Ford essentially doubled wages and cut the workday to eight hours. But this wasn’t for altruistic reasons.
Ford’s assembly lines were grueling and had massive turnover. Some reports suggest it took hiring 1,000 men to keep 100 on the job.
The $5 also wasn’t a blanket wage—it was part base wage, part bonus. Workers had to pass home inspections and moral scrutiny from the “Sociological Department.” Drinking, gambling, or having boarders could disqualify you. In this way, it was also a tool of behavioral management.
in 1928, Henry Ford established Fordlandia in Brazil as a self-sufficient industrial paradise.
“We are not going to South America to make money, but to help develop that wonderful and fertile land,” - Henry Ford
Ford tried to recreate Midwestern small-town America in the Amazon jungle, complete with white picket fences, Protestant churches, and American-style cafeterias.
Workers rebelled against the food, forced dress codes, prohibition, and strict surveillance. Disease, climate, and poor planning destroyed the rubber crops.
It was primarily a way to circumvent British and Dutch control of Asian rubber so he could produce cheaper rubber for his automobile empire.
Grandin notes that Ford aimed to impose American-style order and efficiency on both the environment and the local population, reflecting a broader colonial mindset.
Ford attempted to grow rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) in dense plantations (rows upon rows of identical trees) ignoring how they grow in the wild: widely spaced out across the Amazon to prevent disease.
This monoculture system made the trees extremely vulnerable to pests and fungal infections, especially South American leaf blight, which rapidly devastated the plantations.
Fordlândia was abandoned. It stands today as a ghost city.
Moon Gold
The Moon, Bezos argues, holds the raw materials (oxygen, water ice, metals) that can be extracted, processed, and used to build and sustain space-based infrastructure. In this framework, Earth’s environmental fragility becomes a market opportunity: outsource pollution, import profits.
Bezos admits this transformation won’t happen overnight. He describes it as a “multi-generational project,” one that may take decades or centuries to complete.
But like the railroad barons of the 19th century, he isn’t waiting for consensus.
Without a dream in my heart
His company, Blue Origin, is already focused on laying the groundwork—developing landers, mining systems, and ISRU technologies (in-situ resource utilization) that will allow future entrepreneurs to create new forms of commerce in orbit.
“We will build a road to space so that our children can build the future.” —Jeff Bezos, 2019
What he's building isn't just a space program, it’s a corporate scaffold for a privatized frontier, a floating company town without gravity, law, or precedent. Utopian in design, but extractive in foundation, Bezos’s orbital world begins with lunar dust and ends with the most ambitious experiment in economic relocation since the age of empires.
When Katy Perry appeared “in space” as part of a recent Blue Origin publicity campaign, the stunt was heavy on optics, music, and marketing mystique. It had the hallmark of Bezos’s favorite strategy: sell a vibe, not a plan.
But behind the PR illusion, Blue Origin is building something far more ambitious and grounded: a space railroad, quietly being laid track by track.
The capsules and landers are boxcars; the launch pads, stations. But instead of coal and timber, the payload is water, oxygen, and freedom from Earth’s gravity well and other laws.
Side Track: Coal Train
Franklin B. Gowen, was a railroad monopolist who sought to dominate Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. He aggressively expanded the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad into coal mining, attempting to monopolize the anthracite trade by purchasing coal lands and controlling transport.
The company expanded rapidly, acquiring mines, canals, and other rail lines. This expansion was fueled by heavy borrowing and financial speculation which resulted it becoming the largest corporation on Earth, before it collapsed and triggered the Panic of 1893 and the first Great Depression.
Gowen was also a vocal opponent of labor organizing. During the 1860s and 1870s, miners began organizing through the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) (the first major miners’ union in the region) seeking better wages, safer conditions, and a voice in the face of dangerous, extractive labor.
His response became known as “Gowen’s Compromise,” a wage system that tied miners’ pay to the fluctuating price of coal, undermining union power.
Simultaneously, in 1873, he hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate and sabotage the WBA. This led directly to the controversial Molly Maguires trials (1876–1878), in which Gowen personally served as prosecutor.
Twenty alleged members of the secretive Irish group (accused of violent retaliation against mine bosses) were convicted and hanged. The trials are now widely viewed as legally dubious and politically motivated, designed to crush labor resistance.
When demand for anthracite coal dropped due to competition from bituminous coal, oil, and natural gas, Gowen’s primary revenue source began to evaporate.
Gowen resigned from the Reading Railroad in 1883 after several failed attempts to regain control. In December 1889, while staying at the Wormley Hotel in Washington, D.C., he was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head. It was officially ruled a suicide.
Conspiracy theories quickly spread: some claimed he had been assassinated by surviving Molly Maguires; others speculated he was driven to despair by guilt, bankruptcy, or lingering political enemies. No conclusive evidence ever surfaced.
Regolith Rush
There is now a growing ecosystem of companies preparing to mine the Moon’s regolith—the loose, dusty surface layer of rock and mineral fragments formed by billions of years of meteorite impacts and solar radiation.
Rich in oxygen, silicon, iron, and frozen water ice (especially near the poles), lunar regolith is viewed as the key to building infrastructure, producing fuel, and sustaining life off-Earth. Alongside this, a wave of startups and aerospace firms are also eyeing asteroid mining for rare metals like platinum and nickel.
Helium-3 is an extremely rare isotope on Earth but abundant on the Moon, embedded in its surface from billions of years of solar wind. What makes it valuable is its potential use in nuclear fusion—specifically, clean fusion energy that produces little to no radioactive waste.
Some scientists and space agencies see it as the "oil of the Moon", a future fuel source that could power entire nations, giving whoever controls lunar mining a massive geopolitical and economic advantage.
From Blue Origin’s ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) plans to NASA-funded robotic prospectors and 3D-printing tech using regolith simulants, an off-world extraction economy is no longer sci-fi, it’s an emerging industry.
Side Track: The Yellow Brick Road
In 1848, The U.S. had just seized California from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed just days after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill.
President James K. Polk mentioned the gold discovery in his 1848 State of the Union, fueling national frenzy. Word of gold spread intentionally and rapidly, often through sensationalized reports and government channels.
This triggered the California Gold Rush (1848–1855) triggered a massive westward migration. Hundreds of thousands pour into California chasing fortune. Most find nothing.
But in the process tens of thousands of Indigenous people and thousands of Mexicans suffered violence, displacement, and death. Mexican landholders are pushed out of their homelands. Water, minerals, and labor are claimed like prizes.
The real gold was in infrastructure. The rush fueled demand for faster, cross-country transport, laying the groundwork for the Transcontinental Railroad.
Leland Stanford, former governor of California, became the public face of the operation and later founded Stanford University. Stanford was a political operator who used his influence to secure massive government land grants and subsidies.
But to build it, the U.S. had to turn to immigrant labor.
Initially, the Central Pacific struggled to find enough white laborers willing to undertake the extremely dangerous and arduous work of building through the Sierra Nevada mountains.
American workers balked at the low pay and deadly conditions. Chinese immigrants, many escaping the British Opium wars, took those jobs.
The result was catastrophic: China was forced to legalize opium, open ports to foreign control, and cede territory like Hong Kong. Meanwhile, opium addiction devastated the Chinese population. Famine, warlordism, and economic collapse followed—especially in southern provinces like Guangdong, where many working-class men began looking abroad for survival.
Recognizing China’s instability (and needing cheap labor) the U.S. passed the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which encouraged Chinese immigration. The diplomatic agreement marked the first official endorsement of free migration and equal treatment between the two nations.
They performed the most perilous tasks, including carving tunnels through solid granite, often using nitroglycerin. They worked long hours, typically from dawn to dusk, six days a week, were also paid less, and (unlike the white workers) had to pay for their own lodgings. It's estimated that thousands died.
Opium followed the workers. Some Chinese immigrants were already addicted; others used it later as an escape from brutal working conditions.
In white American media, this became a racist trope: the "opium-smoking Chinaman." But the reality was more complex.
These men were victims of British imperialism, American capitalism, and a global narcotics economy that colonized their bodies as much as their labor.
When the golden spike was hammered, the Chinese laborers who made the feat possible were excluded from the ceremony. Worse, once the railroad was complete, they were no longer needed. Rising xenophobia, union pressure, and political scapegoating led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first major U.S. law to ban immigration based on race or nationality.
USS Corporate Enterprise
When we imagine future utopias, it’s not just technology that needs upgrading—its purpose.
The question isn’t if can colonize space, but why we’re doing it, and who benefits.
Men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos didn’t dedicate their lives to public service or planetary science. They are marketers, salesmen with a lifelong fetish for space travel, egos too large for one planet.
Bezos is famously obsessed with Star Trek, a show built around the fantasy of a post-scarcity, moneyless Federation.
But what he’s building isn’t the Enterprise, it’s a branded, privatized supply chain called New Glenn, named after the astronaut, but using the same kind of toponymic transfer that denotes colonialism.
If we go to Space with profit as the prime directive, we won’t be building utopias—we’ll be exporting the same extractive logic that shaped the colonial past. God, disease, debt, hierarchy, etc.
Just like Columbus claimed exploration but brought genocide, and just like the English settlers called their new world a covenant while planting cash crops on stolen land, these new space barons offer visions of salvation while planning to mine the heavens.
We should explore space. But not to replicate capitalism in vacuum-sealed bubbles.
If the final frontier is just another startup zone, then every postmodern cyberpunk dystopia (Blade Runner, Alien, Robocop, Neuromancer, Elysium) becomes prophecy.
Give These People Air
Between and behind every labor movement, from the slave rebellions to worker strikes, is an ever-changing landscape of technological disruptions that inevitably leaves everyone (workers and visionary leaders alike) obsolete.
AI is the mother of all disruptions because it not only promises to replace physical labor by way of smart robots, but it will also displace cognitive labor, which will make millions of human middle class and professional workers redundant.
This promises to bring unprecedented waves of unemployment. Unlike previous disruptions, there will not be a big enough industry to capture that workforce. The system will grind to a halt, either from mass unrest, or lack of liquidity.
The only way to offset collapse and stop the cycle of exploitation for profit, is to abandon scarcity economics and embrace abundance.
This will likely include reducing or eliminating the role of monetary profit and property rights and moving into an on-demand system rather than stores. The goal will be to end poverty and homelessness.
Currency will need to go from a medium of exchange to a record of resource–a transaction on a living, global blockchain that contains a catalogue of the entire planet’s resources.
Replace the pyramid hierarchy with a fluid structure based on high and low effort tasks, accented by a social network with honest lateral feedback
Ironically, these hurdles aren’t technical. The problem is (and always has been) about trust. Humanity needs to heal from the scars of scarcity in the past and ongoing power battles. Americans (and most of the West) were crafted by an ancient paradigm built upon distrust, scarce resources, and survival. But we have long been in a world beyond survival.
We are ready to THRIVE. We have grown fast and large, now it’s time for humanity to prosper.
The people need to unite behind this idea and recognize and resist the attempts by harbingers of this old paradigm to keep it in place. Avoid fear, embrace love.
A World of Visionaries
Although the impulse for Jamestown or Fordlandia or Starbase may have originated within a single man, in none of those instances did that man achieve anything alone.
Beyond lip service or compensation, business leaders need to acknowledge that COOPERATION is what achieves great things.
Visionaries aren’t rare by nature, but by design.
Few have the privilege, capital, resources, or relentless ambition it takes to rise from nothing.
Instead of maximizing scarcity (velvet ropes, paywalls, and fast lanes) we lean into what AI and aggressive modernization can offer:
ungated access to all human knowledge
the ability to 3D print anything
the ability to provide self-service and gift service
incentives that aren’t ulterior
food with a standard high quality, no cost-cutting
a world of visionary producers pursuing their dreams
Many of these things are already in place. Replace the profit motive, with the very real attention and engagement economies and affective labor–where social value is paramount and “voting” happens all the time. Most importantly, give people the space and time to explore and impress (not exploit) one another.
We should invest in humanity on Earth, now. Fund a universal basic income to “employ” the world. Invest in the start-up of individuals as means towards societal flourishing, not as a means to spur innovation or advance technology, but to allow for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The road to making a better future isn’t performative philanthropy from misanthropic elitists or investing in mining infrastructure for the future. If we don’t solve these old systematic problems now, then our children will be inheriting those as well. And just like the space infrastructure, this won’t happen in a generation.
Maybe to tech guys, it seems easier to start fresh somewhere else; in a high tech floating city or on an inhospitable, dead planet millions of miles from all of humanity.
It’s harder to figure out the social and emotional stuff that needs to happen for humanity to co-exist beyond rigid hierarchies, borders, and systems of value exchange.
It’s an impossible challenge. But so is going to Mars.
To put it in terms a man like Elon could understand: we need to go back to first principles and ask what a civilization is. Our understanding of a better world starts with us realigning on what principles we all value most. I doubt you will find “exploitation” on many people’s lists. That should happen before we bring this to another planet.
The SpaceX company slogan “Occupy Mars” is taken from the Occupy Wall Street movement (which OWS was using ironically) but Musk reverts its meaning to again denote a military occupation (rather than a peaceful sit-in protest). To refer to oneself as an occupier is either a lack of self-awareness or an admission.
Postmodernism was the ultimate predictor of future capitalism.
When we hear Elon talk about “colonizing” Mars, and Trump talk about planting the American flag in the soil, are we saving the humanity of Earth or are we claiming a stake for America?
Who gets to decide what’s best for Mars—under which God, to which gold standard.
How will they breathe when they get there?
If there is Martian life, no doubt our arrival would come with a bang, one that would certainly TRUMP the arrival of the English ships in the New World.
“The most airy schemes inflated the hot air of the Capital.” - The Gilded Age (1873), Mark Twain
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