Actually, yeah, it has a lot in common with city states.
It differs from historical city-states in that the primary factor of production in the classical/medieval era was land, and so city states negotiated from a position of weakness and remained confined to the city because they lacked the resources to capture more territory. Now, food is abundant, and actually requires fossil fuels and genetic engineering for its production. That changes the negotiating position of a port city without a lot of land significantly.
(It does make me wonder what would happen if we got a nationalist heartland ringed by a number of small city states, and then the heartland would refuse to sell food. Massive famine and political collapse? Peaceful trade with overseas nations to supply an alternate source? A large army streaming out of the city states to capture the heartland by force? Mutually assured destruction where everyone dies, since modern crops don't actually grow by themselves without fresh inputs of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, and genetically-modified seeds?)
Food is abundant but still grows outside of cities. There's no particular reason to assume that genetic engineering companies are all based in cities. A city state arrangement is one I was thinking about a lot lately but it seems very hard to make it stable.
It differs from historical city-states in that the primary factor of production in the classical/medieval era was land, and so city states negotiated from a position of weakness and remained confined to the city because they lacked the resources to capture more territory. Now, food is abundant, and actually requires fossil fuels and genetic engineering for its production. That changes the negotiating position of a port city without a lot of land significantly.
(It does make me wonder what would happen if we got a nationalist heartland ringed by a number of small city states, and then the heartland would refuse to sell food. Massive famine and political collapse? Peaceful trade with overseas nations to supply an alternate source? A large army streaming out of the city states to capture the heartland by force? Mutually assured destruction where everyone dies, since modern crops don't actually grow by themselves without fresh inputs of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, and genetically-modified seeds?)