On September 13, 2022, the co-founder of Afropolitan, Chika Uwazie, rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, loudly announcing their presence on the bullish frontier of Web3 start-ups. To its advocates, Web3 refers to an imagined future for the internet in which control is wrested from the giant tech companies by online communities facilitated by blockchain technologies. Others see it as just a vague vision bandied around by crypto boosters, and another version of the wealth-stratified status quo masquerading as revolution.

Afropolitan sees boundless potential in the ideas of Web3. Directly inspired by venture capitalist turned “crypto-philosopher” Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State (2022), Afropolitan envisions “a digital nation” that will grow out of its global community of diasporans working in tech. Although this began on the web—with 500 NFT founder-passports—given time, it will move into the real world through sovereign “Afro towns.” Afropolitan’s manifesto claims that “in the long term, we plan to build a more extensive network of charter cities, similar to Singapore and Hong Kong, governed by the Afropolitan Network.”

It has now been three years since Afropolitan launched its digital nation idea in May 2022. So, what have they been up to since then? Uwazie and her co-founder, Eche Emole, recently launched the Afropolitan podcast in which they discuss business and romance as a way of reminding listeners to sign up for two services they launched in late 2024, Legacy, a dating service ($49 a month), and Mentoring, a one-to-one mentoring service (a 60-minute call with Uwazie costs $1864). Their other offering is Afropass, an app for booking events, such as a meetup at a rooftop bar in Oakland, California, or an evening of Zanzibari fine dining in nearby Alameda.

This does not add up to anything resembling a nation-state. Afropolitan was founded in 2016 as a networking and events company for wealthy diasporans in the San Francisco Bay Area. And it is still that. The “digital nation” idea is a hook to gain buy-in from Web3-obsessed venture capitalists—Afropolitan received $2.1 million of seed funding in 2022, including investment from Srinivasan. The idea is also directed at paying users who are asked to imagine a world of black abundance and are treated to Afro-futurist imagery, some of it taken straight from Wakanda.

It is clear why the lofty ambitions of Afropolitan have failed to come to fruition. It is extremely difficult and expensive to copy the services offered by a state and to develop highly urbanized sovereign territories. Nations are more complex than rooftop parties. Uwazie and Emole might claim that they just need more time and more investment. Probably, they never really intended to do any of this stuff. Nevertheless, their idea strongly resonates with the ongoing project of enclave urbanism in Africa and across the world, from the construction of gated suburbs to new city projects.

Wealthy “Afropolitans” don’t need to escape to a digital nation. New elite-oriented cities in the mold of Dubai, from Nigeria’s Eko Atlantic City to Idris Elba’s ambitious plans for Sherbro Island City in Sierra Leone, which I have written about elsewhere, offer high-end real estate speculation opportunities and visions of life apart from overpopulated, cramped, and decaying African cities.

These special economic zones or charter cities, which provide safe landing zones for mobile foreign capital, have been proliferating across the African continent and the world in recent decades. In Crack-Up Capitalism (2023), the historian Quinn Slobodian describes this fragmentation of the world into deregulated zones and the process by which libertarian dreams of replicating Hong Kong or Singapore many times over have already become a reality.

In a 2024 podcast interview, Balaji Srinivasan reimagined a future San Francisco as a place of “tech zionism.” Essentially, this is an apartheid of the tech-affiliated, he terms “grays,” backed by the police, and an underclass of Democrat voters and leftists that he terms “blues.” He imagined a “gray pride parade” protected by hovering AI drones made by Anduril, a California defense technology company. In this horrific evocation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, transplanted to the Bay Area, Srinivasan reveals a broader global truth about enclave urbanism projects, from Afropolitan to Sherbro Island City. These projects imagine a future of segregation, deregulation, and division in which the wealthy sequester themselves, while the growing underclass is subdued by ever-worsening automated violence.

The Bay Area has produced an unlikely alignment between African diasporans—fearful of their place in the Trump 2.0 project—and far-right techno-libertarians with a direct line to the White House, around the need to create spaces outside of the current system of nation-states. That Afropolitan has remained little more than an expensive way to network should not make us complacent about the strange coalitions and deepening inequalities that shape our societies, from California to Africa.