The billionaires' utopia blueprint
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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.
Everyone has his eye upon you.
And all movement is perfectly regulated.
If any man goes out of the city to which he belongs without leave, he is taken for a fugitive and severely punished. And if he does this often, he is condemned to slavery.
The author of this book, Thomas More, invented the word utopia. It's a Greek pun combining utopos, no place, and utopos, good place. It asks, in a tongue-in-cheek way, is a perfect society possible? Or is the fantasy just a mirror held up to reality and a chance to change it?
I mean, I hate to sound like utopic tech bro here, but if you'll excuse me for three seconds.
You know, these are things that are going to save lives.
We can make the world amazing. More profound than fire or electricity or anything that we have done in the past.
Over the last few decades, the tech sphere has thrived on the urge to optimize everything, including utopia. If we can just solve for X here and invent for Y there, we can build the perfect society. Perfect for who? That's a different story.
You would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Uh... You're hesitating. Yeah, well...
From private cities.
California forever is building the next great American city.
To interstellar colonies.
You could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy.
Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders and laws most of us live by.
Starting new countries is actually possible, preferable and profitable.
So we were curious, has anyone tried it? Has this fantasy of exit, of opting out of the rules and building a new world, been put to the test? I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we'll take you from a forgotten Arctic archipelago. The only place in the world with open borders. To floating cities in the ocean. Out in the middle of nowhere on your own. To private startup nations that might be coming to some land near you.
Is this going to be a little private fiefdom run by these venture capitalists? What do they really want?
Hi, this is Emil Hartz from Denver. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
Part 1. A Weird World. We're told all the time that you have a certain number of countries in the world, that they all have borders surrounding them, and that's kind of the architecture of the world, of the political world and of the geographic world.
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