This is my debut opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard. I’ll be writing for them semi-regularly going forward.

President Donald Trump’s executive order to defund the Presidio Trust is already legitimizing a preposterous idea that’s been floating around tech circles: converting the park into an autonomous city devoted to unregulated capitalism.

Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, which promotes “deregulated new cities,” co-wrote an article published last month in Palladium magazine in which he advocated turning the Presidio into a “Freedom City” modeled after Shenzhen in China. Shenzhen was founded in 1980 as a “Special Economic Zone” with the autonomy to set its own rules — specifically, minimal regulations on business. Its lack of regulations made it a mecca for investment and transformed what was once a bunch of fishing villages into a colossal metropolis and a center of global production.

The notion of turning the Presidio into a Freedom City percolated in the tech world last year after Trump announced a plan to create 10 Shenzhen-style Freedom Cities in the United States. Patri Friedman, a founder of The Seasteading Institute and the grandson of Milton Friedman, applauded Trump’s proposal, tweeting in November that “my dream is to turn part of the Presidio (federal land) into a neo-Tokyo of LED-accented skyscrapers and Make San Francisco Great Again.”

The Freedom Cities proposal was an awkward fit for the MAGA/America First agenda as most people understand it — it’s literally the opposite of economic nationalism. But it’s perfectly suited to the long-standing aspirations of one of Trump’s first converts from Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel.