The Private Fiefdom as Planetary Project

What I read

In this text, the author provides a targeted and often sarcastic perspective on the intertwining of libertarian politics, technologists, and attempts to create new "proprietary countries and cities."

Modern takes on libertarianism have deep connections between science fiction, technological "progress," and a pursuit of wealth; the goals of modern libertarianism have often been to extract talent and wealth from public oversight and place these resources into the hands of private governance. This extraction and new private governance have taken various forms. One is the idea of charter cities, or "privately run urban complexes created from scratch on land given over, through lease or purchase, by a nation-state to an international oversight board." These have shown up as floating platforms and human-made islands, and are often intertwined in the discourse of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

The author states that "this all sounds like what it is: colonization," as the efforts inevitably infringe on remote pieces of land (or even new planets.) Many of these projects fail. Some fail in a dramatic fashion, such as when "Sea Pod" fell over and sunk. Others fail before they begin, simply by the effort it will take for them to succeed (such as attempts to colonize Mars). These types of efforts, described as "adolescent fantasies," have a long history, such as efforts in the 1820s to create new "polity," resulting in scandal. Some of the efforts have succeeded, but with meaningful problems; the family who established the Republic of Sealand has "had to cope with solitude, indifferent if not hostile governments, attempted kidnappings and takeovers, and legal questions."

Alternative proposals have taken more globalist views. One potential approach might be to "scale up rather than down," establishing a more planetary governance. The author states that "this would not entail beefing up the United Nations or creating a world state," but then rejects this as yet another vehicle for the technology-focused libertarians to focus on private wealth creation.

The author ends this polemic by quoting author Adam Becker, who indicates that a libertarian approach to "billionaire control" is already here, and the best we can do is to understand the ideas the leaders of this control have for the future of the world.

What I thought and what I learned

While it is entertaining to read obviously biased and sarcastic articles, it sometimes feels like an author who takes this approach has capitulated to inevitability: it's obviously extremely unlikely that the "other side" is not going to give the article much time or respect, and so no perspectives or opinions or behaviors will change. A best read, then, should probably be aimed at absorbing the humor and sort of earmarking various examples for later, more rigorous examination.

The thread here that is interesting is the long connection between money, freedom, digital technology and science fiction. More benign views of this used to come up a lot in CHI explorations around embedded computing (the room just knows who is in it!) and holograms, just like in The Fifth Element. It's always seemed to me that the "tech bros" view Gibson's work as a playbook and not a warning, and somehow see Bladerunner as a weird culture to strive for rather than avoid. Blockchain is one of the ways this has shown up more recently, and I'm never really understood the fascination the valley has with blockchain in the context of freedom; the embodiment of it as bitcoin makes sense to me as a way of escaping "manipulated" currency, but the idea of a public ledger as some sort of capture of objective data seems naïve.

The other thread is, of course, the "Atlas Shrugged" as political instruction guide. When I read that as a 13 year old, it was a perfect storyline for escaping from "all of those idiots around me who are not as smart as I am." The attempts to bring this to life are funny and ridiculous, probably because just having the money to pull something like this off has no real connection with how smart, prescient, or capable someone actually is. The question of why we would actually want to pull this off, and the relationship to freedom of oppression, sort of makes sense if oppression is "taxation" and life goal is "wealth production." But that's such a limited or silly view of both.

Back to the polemic nature of the text; it probably felt very cathartic for the author to write this. It did not feel particularly cathartic to read it. It's curious, but maybe neither here nor there, that this is framed as a book review (the subtitle is "Raymond Craib reviews five new books to show that we ignore “Freedom Cities” and proprietary states at our peril"), while the titles are mentioned or considered only in the most brief ways.