Yeah, they don't say it out loud on the website, but the project has strong crypto roots and connections. Only one or two steps removed you have associations to: "Join Edge City" (pop-up city organizers that AFAIK directly work with Esmeralda), "Zuzalu" (pop-up city project by Vitalik Buterin), "Praxis" ("network state" project; essentially the same thing on a nation level) and a whole host of ex-crypto executives and VCs backing these things.

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I'm wondering who would actually be interested in this? It seems so undercooked and full of contradictions.

What is the economic perspective for it? I doubt the idea is that people will commute into SF, as that would clash with the car-less vision. I guess service workers for the city will likely live outside of it, which surely won't create an unharmonic class system. Will all the residents be remote tech workers? Realistically it seems like it would mostly be affordable to really rich people that would only spend part of the time in the city, torpedoing any community from forming.

The size is also half of a Disneyland so really quite small, and from what it reads on the website they effectively are executing on an already zoned spa development on the property?

It sounds like any one of those idealistic libertarian 'crypto island' projects that ends up just trying and failing to be a playground for rich people, instead of succeeding as a community project that takes the interests of people other than the investors in mind...

I could smell it from across the Atlantic

What? The unwashed dirty hippie smell or the crypto investor smell?

Wait .. can these two be combined?

Anarcho-libertarianism, ofc