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Chapter 1: What are the experiments billionaires are funding for new societies?
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We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations. But examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find.
It's the year 1516. We're inside the pages of a book called Utopia, breathing the fictional air of Antwerp, Belgium.
The utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone when he has all the stars in the sky to look at.
An old, sunburned, long-bearded traveler named Rafael Haithalade has just returned to Europe after spending five years on an island called Utopia. And he's seeing the world with new eyes, ranting to anyone who will listen.
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the nation.
About corrupt leaders, absurd laws, and the enclosure system, in which so-called landlords fence off lands belonging to villagers, turning them into their personal fiefdoms, all for the sake of profit. What a contrast to the island of Utopia, he reminisces.
where every man has a right to everything.
Gold is used for chamber pots. Private property isn't a thing. Everyone wears the exact same colorless clothes and works six-hour days.
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Chapter 2: How does the concept of Utopia relate to modern private cities?
We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.
Like Greenland, Svalbard is involved in the race for the Arctic. Being near the North Pole makes it an ideal place to track missiles flying across the planet and download data from satellites. New shipping routes are buried under the ice that climate change is rapidly melting.
And buried in the ocean floor are a bunch of mineral resources — copper, zinc, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements — used in all kinds of technology. But there's also something that makes Svalbard weird. Svalbard is the only place in the world with open borders. Open borders. Svalbard is part of the Kingdom of Norway.
But everyone from Indian climate scientists to Russian coal miners to Thai hikers are welcome. No visa required. Some might call that a fantasy. Others, a nightmare. But definitely weird. And the story of how Svalbard ended up that way gives us a window into how the world of nations and passports, a world we take for granted as reality, came to be. And what it means to exist outside it.
About 9.30 a.m., land came in sight. Steep, rocky crags and peaks, covered or streaked with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds.
In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longyear stumbled across Svalbard while on a tourist cruise with his family. Longyear had built a huge timber and mining business in northern Michigan. This was a man who, legend has it, could smell coal. He went somewhere and he could just smell the coal. He knew where it was. Call it a sniff sense. Sorry, I had to.
I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north, and I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winter smelled like Svalbard. Quick context. Svalbard, being so cold and so far north, was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century.
And by the time Longyear came along a few hundred years later, Svalbard still had no permanent population. It was terra nullius, a legal no-man's land. A rare thing to find by this time because of industrialization and colonialism. People knew there was coal there, but previous efforts to get it had been abandoned. Longyear, though, was up for the challenge.
The enterprise of developing a new and practically unknown coal field within 800 miles of the North Pole was an interesting and satisfactory experiment.
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Chapter 3: What is Svalbard and why is it considered a unique jurisdiction?
Over $150 million have been invested in Prospera by venture funds affiliated with tech titans like Palantir's Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook was started from a dorm room within our lifetime.
Bitcoin was started from a white paper within our lifetime. So new companies, communities, currencies have all been started in this way. Could we start new countries?
Prospera is a real-world case study for a growing movement to create so-called startup nations. The spiritual guide of this business movement is a book by Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Peter Thiel and fellow libertarian. It's called The Network State, How to Start a New Country.
Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?
It outlines a vision of digitally connected, exclusive communities that design so-called states online first and then map them onto land.
The idea is somehow they'll find land, push out the people that they don't want, who they call the blues, and keep the people that they do, who he calls the grays,
then lobby existing governments for sovereignty. Sreenivasan calls this approach Tech Zionism. Tech Zionism. A reference to the movement that led to the creation of the State of Israel. To me, tech Zionism only really says one thing, which is that we only want to live with other tech Zionists and we want to choose our neighbors. Well, who are the tech Palestinians in this situation?
I don't think that that's in the book.
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