Humans love their independence. Wars have been fought for it, songs have been written about it, and history is filled with examples of individuals and communities seeking to raise a flag towards more liberating ideals. And some have taken the flag very literally.
Project Minerva was an ambitious endeavour led by Michael Oliver in the 1970s to create a libertarian utopia on the coral reefs of the South Pacific. Born in Lithuania in 1928, Oliver was lucky enough to survive the Holocaust, but having lost his entire family to the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, he held onto a deep mistrust of government power. Understandably so.
Emigrating to the US, Oliver joined the Air Force, started a family and became rich selling land and gold and silver coins. But even while he put down roots, his wartime fears remained. Could the United States, the land of the free, slip into the totalitarianism that he had endured under Nazi reign?
Not taking any chances, Oliver decided to take matters into his own hands and in 1971, after assembling a group of like-minded individuals and securing funding from some wealthy friends, embarked on an audacious plan: to construct a new island on the Minerva Reefs, located southwest of Tonga, and declare it an independent republic.
They got some coral, wrapped it in chicken wire, covered it in cement, and dumped it on the existing coral reefs which lay just a few metres beneath the water line. High above their man-made island, the flag for the Republic of Minerva flew proudly. They even had their own constitution! It was roughly modelled on the US Constitution, except there would be no welfare, no printed money and no ability to levy taxes. The government would operate purely on a contractual basis with its citizens, who would pay directly for services… a radical libertarian dream of minimal government intervention. But also try not to get mugged unless you have a spare credit card handy.
The endeavour, however, did not go unchallenged. Having recently gained its own independence, Tonga viewed the construction above the Minerva Reefs as an encroachment on its territorial sovereignty. In 1972, King Tupou IV, along with a brass band, a group of convicts and his own flag, sailed to the site, dismantled Oliver’s platform and made it very clear in no uncertain terms that the land belonged to Tonga, not the rich Americans.
This is just one of the stories that caught the attention of our expert guest today, Professor Raymond Craib, who has been writing on the idea of libertarians escaping to distant islands. Ray is the Marie Underhill Dole Professor of History at Cornell University and author of the excellent book, “Adventure Capitalism, a History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonisation to the Digital Age.” We invited him to travel down the rabbit hole with us today and explore the motives, implications and ethical quandaries of ventures such as Project Minerva.
Michael Oliver wasn’t the only person who dared to pursue a libertarian exit. Ernest Hemingway's little brother, Leicester Hemingway, formed his micronation, New Atlantis in 1964. It was basically a bird shit covered bamboo raft in international waters off the coast of Jamaica. He lasted 2 years, which is a pretty impressive effort in tolerating bird shit really.
One of the more well known exit ventures is the Principality of Sealand, an oil rig platform off the coast of England where the Bates family declared themselves Royalty. They issued passports, some of them potentially being used in slightly nefarious ways, but they’ve managed to stay afloat for at least 40 years.
Our conversation with Ray leads into the allure and complexities of libertarian exit projects and the motivations that drive such endeavours. Like Oliver, many people seek to exit society due to fear of governmental overreach, whilst others (generally the billionaire types) see these ventures as a money-making scheme and are drawn in by the allure of untainted freedom and power.
Although we can understand why someone might desire, and in many cases, desperately need, to escape government control, in the same way, it’s important to take into account the ethical considerations of starting your own country in the middle of the ocean.
Do these libertarians think about the impact on indigenous populations?
What about the labourers who make these ideological dreams a reality for the wealthy libertarians? Do they get fair treatment?
And would you really want to live in a country (or a planet) that is bankrolled and governed by the wealthy elite? Surely they have their own agenda, and it’s likely not the health and wellbeing of their citizens…
SOURCES:
A Narrative of the Wreck of the Minerva, by Peter Bays
Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age, by Raymond Craib
Escape Therapy: On Douglas Rushkoff’s “Survival of the Richest”, by Raymond Craib, in LA Review of Books
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[00:00:00] Will: It must suck getting shipwrecked.
[00:00:03] Rod: That's very astute of you. Have you made a study?
[00:00:06] Will: But you know, I reckon it would be you'd feel extra miffed, extra pissed off if the place where you get shipwrecked, you couldn't even see. You know, coral reefs that are underneath the water.
[00:00:17] Rod: So you mean like you just suddenly stop in the water for no reason and your boat doesn't work?
[00:00:21] Will: You just suddenly stop. So in the waters of the South Pacific, about 500 kilometres, southwest of Tonga, there's a small series of coral reefs that sit just a few feet, a few meters underneath the waterline. And for years they've taken out boats. The Whaler Minerva, that's what they were named for a long time in 1829.
[00:00:41] Before that there was the Spanish Brig Rosalia in 1807, the Caroline in 1859. This was after the reefs had been chartered by this point. So at least the Spanish, you know, they didn't know they were there. So fair point.
[00:00:53] Rod: Cause it's all written in English.
[00:00:55] Will: This is 1859, they didn't know, Caroline got hit. The libel 1866, the Strathcona 1915, and the Tongan cutter Takapau in 1962. Now for a ship's captain, that would be like, Oh, this is super treacherous. You go through there and you could just run into a reef all of a sudden without knowing. If you look at the world a little bit differently, maybe these just below the surface of the water reefs aren't danger, but the best opportunity in the world.
[00:01:27] Michael Oliver had a pretty rough start to his life. He was born named Moses Olitski in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1928. And his first 12 years were probably fine. Kaunas itself looks like a quaint little city and it's been described as sort of an Eastern European version of Casablanca or Beirut, you know, it's a melting pot, but in 1940, the war arrived and nothing would be the same.
[00:01:52] First, the city was occupied by the Soviets. And then a year later it was occupied by the Germans, and the Germans, of course, rounded up the city's Jews. They killed or raped and killed thousands right away, while forcing others, including the young Moses, to go and live in the ghetto on the outskirts of the city.
[00:02:10] Rod: Bad name to have in those circumstances.
[00:02:13] Will: And in 1944, the residents of the ghetto on the outskirts of the city were shipped first to the Stutthof concentration camp, and then to another camp at Dachau, and then finally on the Nazi death march, where lots and lots would have died. Moses Olitski was kind of lucky. He was liberated by US troops while on the death march in 1945 when he was 17. So remember this is between the age of 12 and 17, all this is going on for him.
[00:02:38] Rod: It wouldn't affect your own psychological development though. Almost no impact I'm guessing.
[00:02:43] Will: His family weren't. All four of his siblings and both of his parents had been murdered. Two years later, Moses Olitski picked himself up. He emigrated to the U S, he changed his name to Michael Oliver, became a naturalized American, joined the air force. He got out of the air force after a few years and he started a family in Carson city, Nevada and became rich selling land and gold and silver coins. But even while he put down roots, his wartime fears remained. Could the U S, You know, the land of the free, could it slip into the totalitarianism that he saw in the Soviet union, Nazi Germany
[00:03:17] Rod: that is obviously impossible.
[00:03:18] Will: Well, he didn't think it was impossible and he wanted an escape plan.
[00:03:22] Rod: Oh, what a catastrophist. I mean, all evidence suggests it's going to be fine.
[00:03:28] Will: Minerva reef beckoned. August, 1971, after a series of other plans and work building a team and some collaborators, Michael Oliver, that's Moses Olitski now, began the arduous process of building a brand new island in the Southwest Pacific. A bunch of his collaborators came down onto those dangerous reefs and began erecting some mounds.
[00:03:49] They got some coral, wrapped it up in chicken wire, covered it in cement, and dumped it on the coral reefs. And they put up some vertical markers, well, flagpoles, I guess they would be that rose to 26 feet above the ocean, nine meters, at the top of which they put up their flag for the Republic of Minerva.
[00:04:07] And he'd already planned his whole Republic. He had a constitution roughly modeled on the U S constitution. I remember this is a tiny little at all of nothing. It's got an executive legislative and just judicial branch, local, regional, and national government.
[00:04:20] Rod: Yes. You definitely need three levels.
[00:04:23] Will: A military, but there would be some key differences between his Republic of Minerva and the U S. Now there'd be no welfare. There'd be no printing money and no ability to levy taxes. And so if you wanted a government service, you know, whether it's the police or something like that, you got to pay for it.
[00:04:41] Rod: Oh, like I'm getting murdered. Can we have your credit card details?
[00:04:44] Will: I think literally that. They mailed a letter to a hundred governments around the world, inviting recognition of the Republic's existence and sovereignty.
[00:04:53] Rod: Sure. We don't care. This isn't going to last. Do what you want.
[00:04:55] Will: So what I want to explore today is what that was all about. What happened? What was the thinking behind this? And to do that I've brought in an expert today, one of the people who's writing on the idea of libertarians escaping to distant islands. I've just found fascinating. So I want to introduce Professor Raymond B. Craib. Raymond is the Marie Underhill Dole Professor of History at Cornell University and author of the excellent Adventure Capitalism, a History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age. Ray. Welcome to the wholesome show.
[00:05:30] Raymond: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
[00:05:46] Will: I'm going to pause on the Republic of Minerva because I want to come back to there later. Ray, you've been collecting stories of libertarians escaping from the rest of the world. What brought you to doing this kind of research?
[00:05:58] Raymond: So, you know, I'm a historian who was trained to work in Latin America, and that's where most of my work has been is in Mexico and in Chile.
[00:06:06] And I totally came to this project unexpectedly. My wife grew up in Hawaii and is a very avid outrigger canoe paddler. And so I got into outrigger canoe paddling. And one summer we had a canoe club here in upstate New York on the lake and we took a group of kids out, teenagers who were doing summer camp stuff.
[00:06:28] And we figured, Hey, well, you know, we'll teach them to outrigger canoe paddle and we'll go out to the middle of the lake and each time I'll give like a little 10 minute talk about the history of outrigger canoe paddling. And so I started to do some research on it, and I came across a variety of these strange cases of people trying to build some kind of libertarian society on the ocean.
[00:06:49] The one that initially I came across was Seasteading, which is the sort of effort by Milton Friedman's grandson, Patrick Friedman, with funding from Peter Thiel to famous Silicon Valley iconoclast, to create some kind of libertarian platform, independent, sovereign platform on the open ocean. I just went down a rabbit hole.
[00:07:10] Rod: How many degrees of separation is there between, I want to learn a little bit about outriggered canoe paddling and libertarian icon islands? I mean, I feel like you must have gone down quite a long rabbit hole or was it like one, two steps there?
[00:07:23] Raymond: Maybe three steps. It wasn't that many steps surprisingly enough. in part because the thing that was so interesting to me was the Assumption on the part of the people that I started writing about that the ocean was just out there for them to take with no recognition of you know, these long histories of Long distance voyaging and so forth on the part of a lot of people who are native to oceania and so just whole assumption that they could just go colonize the ocean to me was bizarre and fascinating and twisted. And so the rabbit hole showed up pretty quickly.
[00:07:55] Will: Well, once you're a historian, you never clock off, obviously, when you're doing your side research on outrigger canoes, you get to the seastead. So tell us, the seasteads, how did it pop up for you? You Googled outrigger canoe history and
[00:08:07] Rod: straight to Peter Thiel.
[00:08:08] Raymond: Yeah, everything goes straight to Peter Thiel these days in some form. Part of the way it came about was starting to look at some of the longer histories of writing about seeing the ocean as a form of territory, seeing the ocean as not some kind of separation between people, but a conduit, a thing that connects people in different kinds of ways.
[00:08:27] And I don't know where it popped up, but at some point the seasteading popped up. And, you know, being a historian, I wanted to go back in time a little bit because it seems like there's a tendency to think that somehow or another the Silicon Valley tech bros invented everything from scratch. And I wanted to be able to show that there's a long history to a lot of these kinds of ideas and projects.
[00:08:49] Will: So, so how far back do you go with that history? Where are the sort of origin stories if you think of it that way?
[00:08:56] Raymond: Yeah, I mean, I think you could go back quite a long ways even to kind of thinking about, you know, things like company states and Wakefield and the colonization projects of the 16th and 17th century, Moore's Utopia.
[00:09:09] I ended up going back to the 50s and the 60s, 1950s and 1960s, just to kind of keep sort of manageability to the project but also because I felt like the libertarian side of things really sort of takes off in the 1950s and the 1960s after World War II. And I was interested in this kind of US style, you know, market libertarianism or market authoritarianism, if you want to refer to it that way.
[00:09:36] And so I ended up starting in the 1950s and the 1960s. And that's when I came across, I mean, I came across Oliver. I came across a few other people as well who were doing projects like this in the fifties and the sixties too.
[00:09:46] Will: I liked the story of Ernest Hemingway's little brother.
[00:09:50] Raymond: Yeah, Leicester Hemingway.
[00:09:51] Will: So what was Leicester’s story?
[00:09:53] Raymond: Well, so this was 1964, and I mean, it's a bit of a crazy story, but he basically took this raft, and he put a Ford engine block as an anchor, anchored it off the coast of Jamaica, just far enough out so that it would be considered international waters and then he declared the birth of the Republic of Atlantis. I mean, Atlantis is this kind of, all the libertarians keep naming things Atlantis. And he called it the Republic of Atlantis. And he did some interesting things. He made his own currency out of shells and cockles and things like this. He made His own postage stamps and then he also encouraged birds to defecate on one end of the raft and then he Ceded that portion of the raft to the united states under the 1856 guano islands act By suggesting that because of the guano It could be part of the U. S. and then the remainder of the raft would be his own kind of private, independent country.
[00:10:51] Rod: I love how these dudes, they start with currency. You don't have an economy of any description except for some bird shit on the end of your raft. You make postage stamps. Like, what about, I don't know, food, sanitation? A roof. It just sounds funny to me. They always go to the glorious stuff first. Like here's some badges. Here's a noble on order that the government can hand out, a flag, dignified citizen
[00:11:10] Raymond: yeah. Hemingway. I think I don't want to call it a goof or a prank, but there was a tongue in cheek component to it. I mean, he had stamps that he dedicated to, you know, Lady Bird Johnson, Lyndon Johnson's wife and things like this, but I think he kind of lived in the shadow of his brother. And so it was looking to kind of make a name for himself in some ways.
[00:11:29] Will: What a way to do it. So you said he was wiped out by a hurricane. How long was he out on his bird shit Island?
[00:11:34] Raymond: Not long at all. I think it was less than two years.
[00:11:37] Rod: So that's not bad. I thought you were going to say like two weeks.
[00:11:40] Will: I have lived on a raft for a lot less than that. And I think two years is somewhat of a heroic effort. I know that I'll ask you in a second, there might be some that have lasted longer.
[00:11:49] Rod: I'd probably be a bit miffed after day three.
[00:11:50] Raymond: It wasn't two weeks, but he didn't last any longer than two years. I'm not quite sure how long he lasted. I can't recall off the top of my head, but he had other people with him. So he had a kind of agent or person that worked with him and their partner.
[00:12:02] And then he also had some of his own family members there for a little while as well, but it's basically off the coast, the Northern coast of Jamaica, that he put this together and then that was the end of it and he didn't try to kind of rebuild or do anything after that.
[00:12:14] Rod: I'm guessing he wasn't a billionaire either so he didn't really have the, Same kind of resource.
[00:12:18] Raymond: No, that's right.
[00:12:19] Rod: I feel like you need a few bucks to kick that country off.
[00:12:21] Will: It doesn't sound to me though, that the billionaire plans are a million miles away from a raft of plastic bottles screwed together.
[00:12:28] Raymond: Right. In some ways they're aspirational and in other ways, I think, you know, at times they're just a grift. They're kind of new forms of venture capitalism, new ways to raise money. And at other times you've got people who just have so much disposable income that they're willing to sink a little bit into anything that might possibly yield some kind of results down the line, but I think in every instance, you know, these things have been a bit of a train wreck and they haven't been good for the populations of the places where are experimented, where they're tried out.
[00:12:57] Rod: We kind of live in one. Canberra is kind of like that, but on land, it's an entirely created city in the middle of nowhere.
[00:13:03] Will: It's not a libertarian city.
[00:13:04] Rod: No, but it didn't naturally form so we're kind of like an island on a bunch of bottles with a fake lake. And you know, we didn't, so it can work. It can work. Is it 200 years?
[00:13:13] Will: 100 years
[00:13:13] Rod: so we're proof it works except not floating.
[00:13:15] Will: Well, what is the longest lived version that you've seen? Either, you know, an island or a boat or a raft or something like that. Or, you know, any of these sort of libertarianist type projects. What's the one that has stuck around?
[00:13:27] Raymond: I think probably the best example and the one that listeners might be most familiar with is Sealand. And that's the oil rig platform off the coast of England, off the coast of Suffolk, and that was the Bates family, and they declared themselves royalty, and they took it over, and I mean, it's, that's got a wild story, and it's been around since the 1960s, they've issued passports and there was some controversy around the passports being used and in slightly nefarious ways.
[00:13:57] And there, there've been efforts by people to raid the platform and kind of take it over. But that's, that one's had a lot of longevity certainly 40 years or more. I'm not even sure if Sealand is operating anymore, but it's certainly had a long shelf life. Let's put it that way.
[00:14:11] Rod: 40 years or more. That's impressive. Well, well done, Sealand, if you still exist.
[00:14:15] I think psychologically, I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask is the characteristics of the people that are doing this and psychologically to cut yourself off from mainstream society for 40 years deliberately is, it certainly marks you out as a certain type of person, but who are the people that are doing this?
[00:14:31] Raymond: Yeah, you know, a lot of the people I look at especially from the 1960s and 1970s Are some of them have, you know, a circumstance like Michael Oliver's. There's others who had similar stories to his. Their families have been persecuted by the Nazis or by Stalinist Russia and so they were essentially worried about totalitarianism.
[00:14:52] They were fearful that the circumstances within which they lived might change at any moment and they wanted an escape hatch. You also have a lot of people though who are embracing a much more kind of radical form of anti government politics in the 1950s and the 1960s. I mean the backers of Michael Oliver are very interesting.
[00:15:13] One was a man by the name of Willard Garvey who was a wheat magnate from Wichita Falls, Kansas in the U. S. A very wealthy man had a kind of direct connection, direct line to the head of the CIA in the 1950s. There's correspondence between the two of them. He also was an advocate for basically turning as many people as possible into a homeowner.
[00:15:33] His line to the director of the CIA was, instead of, Every man a communist, every man a capitalist, and the way to make them a capitalist is to make them a homeowner. He was one, he was a huge fan of Oliver's booklet, this little book that he wrote, A New Constitution for a New Country. John Templeton, who was an investment guy on Wall Street and still prominent these days with the Templeton Foundation. You have an array of people who, you know, they're opposed to mid 20th century U. S. welfare state.
[00:16:03] Rod: Yep.
[00:16:04] Raymond: And what they're doing is they are organizing and collaborating and experimenting and seeing what they can do and they're doing it in the midst of, you know, the formation of offshore financial centers and tax havens so they've got a kind of model in front of them. And then they're also doing it in the high era of decolonization. And so they're thinking to themselves, all these places are breaking away from colonial rule and there might be opportunities for us. I don't think they ever saw themselves as purposefully totally isolating themselves.
[00:16:35] I think what they thought they were doing was in, in some sense creating a kind of better, newer form of government with like minded people. So something like a homeowner association, right a condo basically a kind of homeowner association In a place that would be amenable to the kinds of things that you mentioned at the outset right these kind of contractual relations where everything comes under sort of private contract and and mechanisms, market mechanisms.
[00:17:04] Rod: I'm not going to lie. I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping you're going to say, these guys are fucking bonkers. Like they're nine tenths of them are insane. They've got these crazy ideas. Everyone has to have nine cats. Like, are any of them nuts?
[00:17:15] Raymond: You know, the individuals I look at in the fifties and the sixties and seventies while I'm not a fan of their ideas I think I can Understand kind of where they're coming from. The more contemporary stuff so seasteading free private cities in Honduras, charter cities, cryogenics, and longevity ideas that a lot of the Silicon Valley characters have. The newer stuff I just think it is kind of bonkers. I also think these are things that, you know, it's hard for me to kind of see where they don't come from any place of someone having been deprived or having suffered, having being concerned about totalitarianism, in my opinion.
[00:17:52] I mean, these are things that come from hubris, from ego, from a sense of being, you know, much more elevated than the rest of us. And so the more recent kind of stuff that I write about at the end of my book, the last two chapters are dedicated to these more contemporary projects that are still ongoing. And those things I have very little patience for whatsoever. And I try to express that in the book. The tone of the book changes at the end.
[00:18:15] Will: One of the things I've been grappling with in thinking about these these sorts of projects is how we think about the ethics of allowing it. How much we as a society should do. And, you know, you said you're not a fan of some of their ideas, but you can find some sort of justice in some of them. And I don't know, have you watched the recent show silo?
[00:18:32] Raymond: No, I haven't.
[00:18:33] Will: A science fiction show, and it's set on a recent book, but basically about a completely contained society. They live in a bunker under the ground where one of the main rules is everyone can exit if they want, but once you exit, you're gone and there is no connection. And a part of me says, surely we should always allow people to exit from society. If you want to go everyone has the right to leave.
[00:18:56] But then I also worry about, if we allow people to go and set up these other free societies or things like that, are they parasitical on the rest of us?
[00:19:04] Rod: Who polices it though? If you say no, we don't allow it, but then they've floated just off the international waters of Jamaica. Who's the boss?
[00:19:12] Raymond: The thing that I think is interesting about the exit question is You know, my, my tendency would be to agree with you, right? You don't want to restrict people from moving. But of course, we restrict people from entering all the time. I mean, so exit seems somehow or another a given, but entrance doesn't.
[00:19:29] And I think there's an imbalance there to begin with. I think it's a structural imbalance that replicates the structural inequalities around us. But I also, you know, wonder to myself, how much does a society, a community put into somebody that then they can just bugger off? I mean, I don't know if that's, I mean, there's a real problem there also and so there's one of the, one of the texts that I mentioned at the end of the book that I, Found very interesting was a book, the author's name, I'm trying to remember. I think it's Jeffrey Friedman but you know, one of the one of the cases that he makes is that exit is a is something that should be a fundamental right and yet at the same token the idea of Exit without first and foremost giving everybody equal access to the possibility of exiting is one of the things that needs to happen first. I mean I mentioned in my book the song or the poem from gil heron, whitey on the moon in which his poem is essentially pointing out that there's all this Hubbub and hurrah in the late 1960s because the u. s. Government has landed Somebody on the moon, which is, you know, now with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, has become another kind of form of libertarian exit. And yet in the meantime, you have, you know, people down here on planet earth who, you know can't afford housing, can't afford food, can't find work there's a complete neglect of the basic reality of society
[00:20:55] Will: growing up. I'm a fan of going to space. I think it's cool. You know, you know, you read all the science fiction things, but I always get, when I get closer down to thinking about colony on the moon colony on Mars, particularly when they are, when it's a, you know, funded by a billionaire or some sort of thing like that.
[00:21:11] Now, of course, that's hypothetical, but it's just the idea of escaping and leaving all of us behind to clean up the mess. And it kind of makes me angry, this idea that, Oh, you can just escape global warming but you've caused a lot of it.
[00:21:23] Raymond: That's right. And I think, you know, this is the thing on the one hand, to me, a lot of these projects are just bonkers and I don't see many of them, any of them coming to fruition.
[00:21:33] Maybe some of the ones that are kind of on land, like in Central America, you know, I can talk about those in a few minutes. I mean, those I think are of more immediate concern. But these long term, you know, sort of outer space and colonizing the open ocean and this kind of stuff, I mean, I doubt they'll ever come to fruition, but I also think the issue with these is not that the sort of big grand scheme of the project happens, but instead in the process of exploring it, these characters find little cracks and fissures in the system and gradually do abandon the rest of us gradually do take their money. You know, it's like they take their ball and they go home from the playground, but they take their money and they protect themselves and they hunker down for themselves and the rest of us, you know, are struggling to basically get basic needs met through through some sense of commitment to the public.
[00:22:24] Will: And also, you know, as you mentioned, Ray, the floating Island talks about this the laborers go home at the end of the day that you need labor. Like there is no society that is just billionaires, just robots. well, okay maybe they get to a place where they've got robots that are self perpetuating or something like that.
[00:22:39] But if you're all just billionaires and there's no labor, then I don't think anything works.
[00:22:44] Rod: My toilet is dirty. Will you clean it for me?
[00:22:46] Will: I shall not. How do you get the a hundred millionaire to clean your toilet? If you're the billionaire,
[00:22:50] Raymond: The Seasteaders who I mentioned, I mean, that, that started up in 2008 with a 500, 000 sort of angel investment from Peter Thiel and, you know, it's the logo is Burning Man on the ocean, right?
[00:23:02] Rod: That should be fine. That should be sustainable.
[00:23:05] Will: Isn't that current Burning man? Is Burning Man on the ocean? I don't know.
[00:23:09] Raymond: Yeah, there's a whole sort of, there's a whole, So the irony there too, but the but this is exactly it. I mean, I think what, you know, there's all these international legal questions about what, you know, some kind of seastead on the high seas, so to speak.
[00:23:22] And then there's the engineering questions, you know, a whole bunch of, you know, a billion little Coke bottles or whatever. But the big question is labor. Right. It's social reproduction. I mean, how do you get the laborers out there? I mean, it's way out in the middle of nowhere. By sheer virtue of what it is that you want to construct, you have to be far enough away from the exclusive economic zones of a whole lot of island nations and archipelagos and so the labor costs are exorbitant, right? And this is why the seasteaders have moved closer to shore.
[00:23:50] Rod: We're going to have floating or towed floating ghettos, right? That's obviously the next solution. You make a shitty version that sort of trails behind the main one. That's where the workers get corralled.
[00:24:01] Raymond: Well, it is. I mean, you do get these shadow cities, right? You mentioned Canberra and I mean, Brasilia was also a capital city built from scratch in Brazil in the 1950s. And that was exactly what happened. You had Brasilia nice and shiny and then right next to Brasilia, you had workers Brasilia, where all the workers were encamped to build Brasilia.
[00:24:19] Will: Of course, you know, you design some utopia and they're not, you know, Brasilia is not aimed to be a libertarian exit city, but designed to be some sort of nation state utopia type thing.
[00:24:29] But you've marginalized other bits, the labor, the things that aren't there. I always think one of the other versions of libertarian exit, which is not designed by billionaires is the the Kowloon walled city in Hong Kong, which was a hyper, hyper dense due to like local laws didn't apply or something weird and that and it became completely you know, anarchic from a very different direction.
[00:24:52] Raymond: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I've mentioned and that I try to make a distinction between is the libertarian projects that I look at and some of, you know, some of the kinds of projects that you just mentioned which do have a more, first of all, they're more organic they're not top down planned, they don't have a kind of, you know, a constitution written in advance by one person who's basically going to, you know, declare by fiat what's going to happen and they also tend to grow organic from the bottom up.
[00:25:18] I think they tend to be organized. I mean, I don't want to romanticize this, but certainly I think they tend to be organized a little bit more around, you know, questions of solidarity and community. You have a lot of different kinds of versions of this over history. Maroon communities have escaped slaves.
[00:25:33] You know, these are exit projects in some form or another. The Zapatistas in southern Mexico today. I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of examples one could look at, but to me, those are extraordinarily different than the projects that I'm looking at, which really come from the monied class, they're top down. They're engineered. They're very ideologically driven as well. I mean, a part of this is about, you know, making a point. And so the seasteaders have said for example yeah, maybe these will never come to fruition, but maybe in the process All different kinds of new, you know Let a thousand ideas bloom and new kinds of things might happen and these might rebound back on To existing nation states and force them to more to compete to keep their citizenship and it's all about competition, right?
[00:26:15] And you know, I think that's the kind of distinction I would make between these different kinds of projects But you're right. There's a whole kind of spectrum of these
[00:26:22] Rod: And is, there seems to be, and maybe I'm smelling a false dichotomy here, but the ones that are extremely intentional, ideological, et cetera, as you put it, and the ones that just kind of morph out of necessity.
[00:26:31] So you say these, the free slaves situation, et cetera, is it that clear usually? There are people who've had a thought bubble in their, I don't know, solid gold bathtub and said, let's do it. And the people have gone, fuck, if we don't do this, we're screwed and we're going to die. So we must.
[00:26:45] Raymond: These are projects that are they're real estate speculative investments, right? They're kind of like crypto or Bitcoin. I mean, they're speculative investments and they're designed a little bit like a kind of multi level marketing scheme, like Amway. I mean, it's a, it's an essentially an effort to kind of get more people to invest and to raise money and get enough people interested in enough people investing and you think you can bring something to fruition, but but of course, once, once it really has to take shape, once it really has to start, you know, the sort of practical realities of putting these things together then it begins to fall apart. The shell game comes apart.
[00:27:20] Rod: Yeah. The multi level marketing Similarity is dangerous. I mean, if you've got a finite land space and you rely on always bringing in new people, I mean, you get your labor solved for a while at the bottom of the pile, but you can't have infinite growth.
[00:27:32] Will: Well, I like the other version of this, you know, that some of the critiques of Zuckerberg's metaverse is there's that you know, in the, Crypto sense, you're trying to bring people in to make a new a new version of land or something like that.
[00:27:44] That what we've got here is the same sort of thing where we're inventing a new new spaces that are controlled in a different way from somewhere else, but they don't tend to work even when you're completely technological.
[00:27:56] Raymond: The sort of most direct critique or the most direct way I can accentuate what I think is the foolhardiness of these is that they derive their inspiration from Ayn Rand.
[00:28:07] And I, I just think that basically kind of sums it up. I mean, a lot of them call them, they'll name themselves after characters in Rand novels. So in Chile, twice they tried to put together something called a Galt's Gulch, Chile named after, you know, the sort of place where all the capitalists class, the managerial class we're going to escape to and just hang out in the Rockies while society collapsed around them. But of course, it's ridiculous because the laborers are still around. And so society will keep going. But in the meantime, thankfully, the managerial classes has gone away. I mean, and so it's this kind of weird inverse universe she creates where she thinks that this all looks like a good thing for them to escape and let society collapse. But in reality, it's good that they're just gone and out of the picture.
[00:28:50] Rod: This is Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did this. You know, he took the middle strata and sent them off to what ended up becoming Earth. Like all the middle managers, the phone sanitizers and stuff got put on these ark ships and sent away and it turns out that's how humanity developed on this planet.
[00:29:06] Raymond: Well, they, you know, there's all these kinds of projects named after this stuff. And, you know, some of them have had a long lifespan. I mean, the ones in Chile didn't last very long at all because The founders didn't understand Chilean land law.
[00:29:17] They didn't understand water rights and all this kind of stuff. And everybody had to buy in with Bitcoin and it kind of fell apart. But the same person involved in that went off to Alcapulco in Mexico and then started this Anarcopulco annual gathering of libertarians in this big kind of festival atmosphere.
[00:29:35] It was doing okay for a while, just as a kind of gathering and as a kind of community for a couple of years when Bitcoin was worth a lot of money. But then when Bitcoin collapsed, I mean, things started to fall apart and and the whole thing kind of fragmented. But, you know, there's just a kind of, it's iterations of these things over and over again. And part of it, I think is simply, it's a business model of raising money.
[00:29:56] Will: So having looked at a lot of them, if you were to, if you were to give advice to these people if they actually wanted to succeed, you know, maybe to raise money. Yes. But to actually succeed in this vision, what would be the things that you'd say to them?
[00:30:10] Raymond: What would I say to them? Don't do it. I mean, these are, you know, vanity projects. You want to take them seriously at some level and think about what it is that motivates people. And I realize, you know, for some of these people, they do think that the state Is ultimately a repressive Institution they do think there are better ways of organizing society. They do think there are better ways of providing a wide array of different kinds of options and choices and so on and so forth. I mean choice is the kind of core part of their vocabulary. It's rooted in a profit motive.
[00:30:46] And so there's always this conflict between the profit motive And what they claim, you know, it's the whole thing, like, we're going to, the classic line, you know, we're going to do really good work in the world and make a lot of money while we're doing it. And it's not entirely clear to me that those things line up very often, if at all.
[00:31:04] And so these kinds of projects, I mean, the other projects I look at in my book, I mean, Michael Oliver, His story is a good one for people to be aware of because after the Minerva Reef, he tries his hand with a group of pretty sketchy characters in the Bahamas and tries to set up a kind of private community or private country in Abaco in the Bahamas, and he's involved with some people who have some pretty shady backgrounds are involved in the kind of war machine of weaponry and silencers and, you know, munitions and things like this.
[00:31:40] And then he ends up in Vanuatu on the island of Santo. His activities end up aiding in the fomentation of a rebellion on the island of Santo that has serious consequences for Nivanuatu, for native people of Vanuatu, including some deaths, lots of displacement, a kind of delay in independence a lot of complications.
[00:32:00] To my mind, I mean, these things should be at some level an indication of the pretty dire consequences that result from these kinds of experiments, that people just assume they have the right to experiment. The stuff in Honduras today, I just find appalling. I think it's completely unethical and irresponsible. And they're now running into trouble.
[00:32:20] Will: I think, you know, when you're talking about that Venn diagram of the type of people, you know, you mentioned there, there is some of this ideological belief, you know, that a belief about the state and being able to exit and how states should be organized.
[00:32:31] Then there's that profit motive, but then you also put in that, those sketchy characters. I don't doubt there are many of the sketchier ends of the world who don't want to be part of society because they want to do things that most, mostly in society we don't agree with. And so they're a terrible group of people to put together and then their cares for the rest of the world that cares for native peoples and societies around them seem to be very shallow.
[00:32:54] Rod: My guess is though these sketchy people, I'm guessing in speaking of Venn diagrams that I want to remove myself from society and just straight up sketchy people looking for cash. Probably quite small. I'm sure I guess most of them just a sketchy people looking for cash. And this is the same shit different shovel
[00:33:09] Raymond: at some level. Yeah. I mean, there's a, there's more of the sort of I'm looking for cash kind of aspect of this. I mean, I wanted to stress this in part, because I think there's a tendency sometimes to separate out the kind of, you know, market fundamentalism of U. S. libertarianism, which has now become, I mean, strangely commonplace. I guess it shouldn't be strange actually, but anyway, you know, it's become kind of commonplace here that, you know, the progression since the 1970s in the United States in this way has been kind of horrifying to watch.
[00:33:42] So there's a tendency to kind of separate that out from things like you know, the war machine and privatized war industries and conservative politics writ large. And I don't think those things should be separated out because I think what the material I look at shows, at least, these are not necessarily strange bedfellows.
[00:34:02] There's a lot of shared sympathy I mean, I used to get complaints when I first started writing this stuff, I'd ever once in a while get an email from somebody who was linked up with, you know, the Silicon Valley ecosystem saying, why are you calling us conservatives? We're not conservatives, you know, and why are you calling us right wing? And you know, and my response to them was actually like, sit down and work through it.
[00:34:24] Rod: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
[00:34:26] Raymond: Yeah, you'll figure it out. I mean, and so because there's a sort of at times, what they see as a socially progressive aspect to this, right? So, you know polyamory like getting rid of ridiculous drug laws and so forth.
[00:34:38] I totally agree I mean, you know drug laws have been a total disaster for this country but the people involved in these projects none of those people are subject to persecution by the drug laws in this country. I mean, they're too wealthy and they're too white, right? They're not going to be the ones suffering because of the drug laws in this country.
[00:34:58] I mean, so there's this kind of weird narrative about themselves, about how they're persecuted and victims and so on and so forth and the state does this and the state does that. And, you know, it's hard to buy.
[00:35:08] Rod: Can I just, before we lose that point, is there much of an intersect? This could be a very naive question with the whole private prison? I can feel a lot of common smell around this. It wouldn't take much to turn private prison mentality and profit margin into special little islands for people.
[00:35:23] Raymond: I mean, one of the troubling things for me as I kind of finished the book was a realization that on the one hand, there is something real and concrete in talking about exit with these characters and yet at the same time, they're not exiting at all.
[00:35:39] I mean, I think what is happening in part is the state has, you know, government, the state itself has now become the new, you know, grounds upon which to make money. And so the enormous growth in private contractors and replacing the military in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, you look at the development of northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D. C. And its entire growth is built around a privatized military economy and prisons, of course, are a very good example as are detention centers for people who are unauthorized or undocumented in the country. There's a vested interest on the part of these private companies to make sure that people are constantly being detained and denied their rights because they get paid per bed basis.
[00:36:24] Rod: So that's a frighteningly close link then to an even more nefarious side of it. I mean, are we going to set up these floating islands for such purposes rather than, you know.
[00:36:32] Will: Well, uK doing that at the moment with a refugee policy, but you know, you know, the other pop culture thing that I keep thinking about here a few years back, the wire where it is the opposite group of people, you know, people that are black people in Baltimore, That are absolutely constrained in their lives by the state.
[00:36:50] You know, the state is all around them. Police forces are all around them making sure that they are barely able to move and the options for them as portrayed in the wire are tiny, you know, these are communities where they're the only things that they can do really as, as getting involved in the drug trade or something like that.
[00:37:06] And yet it seems so much that, you know, for them, exit or moving out of society might be an option. I don't know or being able to leave but these white billionaires, you know have so many of these freedoms and yet They still feel persecuted.
[00:37:19] Raymond: Yeah, the wire. I mean it is I mean on so many levels right the way it sort of Deconstructs city hall, you know and dock workers and I mean it is such an amazing show. And so, yeah, at some level, I mean, thinking about, back to the earlier question about other forms of kind of exit that are more organic or from below, I mean, there's other kinds of examples one could think of here in which, you know, communities of solidarity and mutual aid that just want the state to Stay out, right?
[00:37:48] And those are not ones that I spend a lot of time talking about. again, I would sort of differentiate, not just differentiate them from the libertarian exeteres that I talk about based on things like top down engineering and and wealth access and so on and so forth. But I would also separate them out in terms of what their long term relationship is to the state or to government.
[00:38:11] I mean, at some level, you're exactly right. Where are people going to go? And so it's a matter of figuring out what kinds of social relations, what kind of relationships you build, what kind of small scale economies you build in order to, you know, have some, you know, Some sense right of being able to keep the the state or the worst aspects of the state at bay, the libertarian exit tears that I'm looking at their relationship is much more embedded, right?
[00:38:36] They still want patent law. They still want their property rights protected. They still want some kind of police force. And so in some ways, they're much more embedded in the state. And that's why I was saying at some level, I think exit is almost a misnomer, right? It's a kind of reworking of power and government.
[00:38:56] Will: So they can be more central to it have more of that. I liked One of your conclusions about Michael Oliver in the constitution, he was setting up in the Minerva case that he was roughly an absolutist King rather than being, you know, first in a Democrat in a democratic sense, you know, we're setting up an actual Republic. And so, you know, what it was is very much that he was the top of the pyramid and controlled this these power relations.
[00:39:21] Rod: Yes. By your freedom I mean, mine.
[00:39:23] Raymond: I mean, that's the irony, right? Is there is this kind of top down component to something that espouses, you know, very loudly freedom, right? The idea of some kind of idea of freedom. But what that means, and I mean, this is an ongoing conversation. I mean, discussions around freedom in the 1970s and the 1980s, you know, there's been these economists and others who Are very sort of defensive or protective of the projects that I write about who tend, you know, they suggest that freedom basically means freedom of the marketplace and it doesn't matter about democratic politics.
[00:39:58] And so they take their example, an example like Chile, where, you know, the most radical privatization and the most radical neoliberal reforms were put into place by an authoritarian government and they don't necessarily see a contradiction there. And I raised that point in part because you know two days ago or three days ago September 11th was the 50th anniversary of the coup that overthrew Allende and then in 75 you started to see the Chicago boys and Milton Friedman and Mises begin to essentially dismantle the social economy, the economy of Chile and to radically privatize it all. And then they formalized it in a dictatorial constitution from 1980.
[00:40:35] Will: So we've had, you know, since at least the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher but, you know, you can see throughout the 20th century, a wave of more libertarian emphasis in governments around the world, reduction in the power of the state, as opposed to the power of the market.
[00:40:52] How do we stop that? Okay. How do we stop it from billionaires raising more state capacity to help them to make their lives easier? How do we, how do the rest of us claw some of that power back?
[00:41:02] Rod: Love in man, we just have a love in. Show them the love.
[00:41:06] Raymond: Love in. Yeah, you know, it's a good question and this is always one of those moments where I'm allowed a kind of default exit of my own by saying, well, I'm a historian, you know, and I look at the past and so I can sort of skirt the question, but I do think that governments Serious. I mean, it's serious business, not business in the business sense in the market sense, but it's like, you know, it's a serious activity and it's been such ever since Reagan and Thatcher and certainly even prior, but this idea, right, that government's the problem and government has to get out of the way and so on and so forth. And the idea that you're going to leave people to the whims of, you know, does anybody really want to live in a community governed by Elon Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos? I mean,
[00:41:49] Rod: Not even they want to live there. If they actually experienced it, it'd be like, why are all these bumps on the road outside my house? It's because of you dead shit.
[00:41:55] Will: Maybe if they weren't personally so awful, maybe they could convince other people, you know, you get a nice version of them setting it up. I don't know. That's not enough.
[00:42:04] Raymond: So I think, you know, it's yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. But I also feel like there's a lot of work to do in the writing that people are doing and and the research that people are doing to actually call into question A lot of the trends and trajectories that have been taking place over the last 40 years or so at least rhetorically because again, I mean the rhetoric has been very anti government. But when you look at the size of states, the budgets of states who's involved with them, the kinds of things that they're doing, it's not like the state's gone anywhere or is going anywhere anytime soon, but it's been reconfigured to, to benefit a very few at the expense of the many.
[00:42:39] Will: Damn.
[00:42:40] Raymond: Damn.
[00:42:42] Will: Thanks so much for that. Right. Look, I just want to, I just want to go back to Michael Oliver's story. So you said he went and caused other problems in Nevada, but I just want to conclude his Republic of Minerva.
[00:42:51] Rod: Can I ask one question before you go into that? It sounds to me like he's basically trying to build an artificial version of Wonder Woman's Island.
[00:42:58] Will: Well, I don't think he was going that far.
[00:42:59] Rod: This is what it sounds like to me. Like, why don't you just find that?
[00:43:02] Will: I think, yeah, he's on a smaller scale. It's probably hard to build an island. So, so this is Michael Oliver and his backers who started with these coral reefs just below the surface. And so there was some potential legal ambiguity about ownership, you know, because they're not islands started with the lumps of coral wrapped in chicken wire and concrete dumped them in some flags. And then I think Ray, they did some dredging to bring up some some more coral and some more sand and things to make a bit of an island.
[00:43:29] The King of Tonga was not super impressed with this. So, you can imagine he has just gone through Tonga itself has just gone through a bit of a decolonization process in just a couple of years before. And then suddenly you see a bunch of rich white libertarians setting up an island in an area that's in Tonga, they considered part of their territory, or at least some certainly did. So this is King Tupo the fourth set out to reassert Tongan sovereignty. In May, 1972 he got on the Royal yacht with a brass band, a flag, and I think a bunch of convicts from the country's jail. I don't know how many jails there are in Tonga.
[00:44:09] They tore down the flag of the Republic of Minerva, destroyed Oliver's platform that they had built and then set about themselves Building two permanent islands on the reefs high above the high watermark so that there would always be islands and hopefully fewer shipwrecks. He proclaimed them in Tongan Parliament as new islands that would be Tongan property. Teleki Tokelau and Teletonga and that's the end of the Republic of Minerva.
[00:44:35] Raymond: That's the Republic of Minerva.
[00:44:37] Rod: Do they even, like, live on it?
[00:44:39] Raymond: No. When this occurred in the 1970s other archipelagos in the Southwest Pacific recognized, right, that it was very dangerous to let a project like this happen because there's lots of seamounts and reefs and so on and so forth, and nobody wanted to see a kind of, you know, ocean rush or reef rush or whatever you want to call it.
[00:44:57] But there subsequently has been a longstanding dispute between Fiji and Tonga around the Minerva reefs and things like fishing rights and things like this. And so there's been an ongoing kind of back and forth around this. I mean, the only permanent fixtures on the reefs are these little platforms with a kind of flag or a beacon on them.
[00:45:18] And I don't even know if those are still upright. I mean, Oliver's vision was a platform that would eventually house 30, 000 people. I mean, it was this a big city plan. But there's nothing like that. Nobody lives on the reefs or anything like that.
[00:45:31] Will: I think the agreement there that you can get, even Fiji and Tonga, My dispute, they can probably agree that people from further afield we know it's not theirs. Rich white Americans, not theirs.
[00:45:45] And I think we can probably think about that for a lot of these projects that if you're not from there, maybe don't go and set up a country there.
[00:45:55] Rod: I want one to work. Come on.
[00:45:57] Will: Fantastic. Thank you Ray. Thank you so much for joining us here on the wholesome show.
[00:46:00] Rod: Yeah. Thanks Ray.
[00:46:01] Raymond: Yeah. My pleasure. And thanks for reading the book. I appreciate it. And I appreciate the conversation.
