Overthrowing The Network State: Colonize the Memes, the Narratives, and the Land
Primavera and Morshed Mannan from Blockchaingov join me to speak to Raymond Craib, a historian of modern Latin America who recently published the book Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age. We spoke about the neocolonialism inherent to network states and previous attempts at utopian libertarian exits, the colonization of history, and Praxis Society. Overthrowing the Network State (OTNS) is a series in collaboration...
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Faith in the Frontier by Dryden Brown. On the wall in my childhood bedroom, there's an old watercolor of American militiamen marching to battle. Some insights, my dad told me stories about our revolutionary era ancestors, James and John Piper. James settled to America from Kilgore, Ireland in the early eighteenth century. Northern Ireland faced religious conflicts and a broken economy. James wanted to freely practice his faith, own land, and build a better life for his family. James had faith in the frontier. He took a risk, boarded a ship, and set out to help build a fledgling society that aligned with his values and vision for the future. James' son, John, fought for the Pennsylvania militia in the revolutionary war. His dad took a risk sailing across the Atlantic to build a freer life, and he wasn't going to relinquish his birthright without a fight. After winning the war, John served as a political figure involved in the founding of Pennsylvania's government. As a kid, I woke up looking at the watercolor in my bedroom, seemingly in the direct view of men like the Pipers. I was inspired by their vision and willingness to take a heroic stand to build a society according to their values. On Sundays, my dad and I would go to the Blockbuster. We'd often rent Star Trek or Star Wars parking on Milpit Streets getting out of our '96 Volvo eight fifty. My dad told me that soon cars would fly. Blockbuster and my dad are both gone, and cars still roll around in much of the same way that they did when I was hunting around the video store for Wrath of Khan. People in technology often complain about the technological stagnation, but worse, we don't even have clear visions for the future. The valley is totally failing in this regard. Even AOC has nice posters. All value systems imply a desired future. Do we have a coherent value system? Liberals want a more equal future, and many vegans want to live in a world that values animal lives at par with humans or at least treats them less cruelly. I want to live in a human maximalist future. Technology can help us build the future our values demand. We do not build technology for technology's sake. All of our efforts cash out in consciousness. Technology will help us live longer lives. Technology will help us live more purposeful lives. Technology will let humanity journey into eternity and the stars. We've lost the future because we've lost the past. We live in an atomized society. We bowl alone and demonize our compatriots together. John Piper grew up in a society founded on common notions of good and evil. He cultivated his heroic spirit. When James Piper's home of Kilgore faced religious persecution, a desperate economic situation, and a society that had strayed far from his values, he left to build a new society on the frontier. To build a future, we need to converge on a vision for it. To converge on a vision for the future, we need to converge on values. To build a future, we need to build a new society. And to build a new society, we need faith in the frontier. Join Praxis. Wow. So that was, a blog, the very first blog that was published, from Praxis Society, which is a a project that has raised venture capital funding in order to start its own network state. They haven't said exactly where they're going to try to buy land, but, the point is to have the money so they can buy land on I mean, they say very, clearly on their website, on the coast, so you can expect nice weather, and probably in the Mediterranean. And so I just wanted to recite this, to to read this blog even though it hurt me to do so, to show kind of, like, that there is actual money backing this concept of a network state, and there are people out there, with a lot of money and therefore a lot of power to try and push, this narrative and to, to will it into reality. But so, going on off of this, I want to introduce our our guests and my cohosts. I have the high priestess Primavera with me, and I have, Morshed Mannen, who I think would be characterized as a paladin in Blockchain Gov. Morshed, if I could give you one, role. And we're gonna be talking to Raymond Kribe. He's a historian of modern Latin America with research and teaching interests in the intersections of space politics and everyday practice at Cornell University. And he recently published a book called Adventure Capitalism, A History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age. So hi, Raymond. How are you doing? And what did you think about this, blog piece?
Well, thank you for having me. And, yeah, I mean, you know, the the blog piece you read is, fairly boilerplate in some ways, I guess. I mean, the vision of history, the vision of the frontier, it's very anodyne. It's you know, he uses the term himself heroic. It reminded me a lot of the the sort of way in which history is mobilized in in the book on Seasteading by Joe Quirk, who's the current director of the Seasteading Institute, right, which was founded in 2008 with, startup money from, Peter Thiel. And Quirk coauthored that book with, Patrick Friedman, the grandson of Milton Friedman, the great sort of grandfather of neoliberalism, I guess, in some ways. I don't know. Maybe that's not entirely fair to others. But, so, you know, the the same sort of vision of history in the frontier, which is very, you know, emancipatory, very positive, totally neglects and negates this sort of violence and also assumes the idea of the frontier from a particular perspective. It wasn't a frontier from many people's eyes. And so, but again
of any of the natives
at all. And Exactly. The fact that he called it a birthright was, Yeah. It was pretty appalling pretty appalling to me. Yeah. And so this is, you know, this is a huge problem, which is this kind of historical and this is something that's plagued, you know, some of the people I write about, you know, these people I describe as libertarians that are, you know, not anarchists. I mean, there are people that are you might call anarcho capitalists if you if you like that term. But, who really sort of, you know, hyper capitalist, very devoted to property rights, private property rights. And so they, you know, they do have this kind of difficulty in dealing with the, you know, square peg of violent accumulation of land through dispossession of, peasants in England, kicking the commoners off the land all the way to, expropriating lands from native peoples and so on and so forth, and how to square that with their dedication to private property rights and the sanctity of property. And so they have no choice, I guess, in some ways, but to kind of ignore these forms of expropriation or to try to explain them away as, you know, a birthright, or empty space that's not being used and and so forth. Yeah. So it's it was a pretty, not a surprising,
paragraph to hear you read. Just just to add a little bit to the to the saga, I think it's also interesting to to talk about how much money they got because it's actually in terms of narrative, it might sounds like, oh my god, what's happening? They actually raised $50,000,000 which is relatively little for the ambitions that they have of like purchasing our land. And and also interestingly, part of those fundings actually come, well, first from PTT but also from Alameda Research. So so we don't really know if they really got that money but, but it's interesting because ever like it's kind of like it's getting a little bit of visibility and people are talking about practices is like, as if it's actually like some kind of serious project because they got funding but it's like $50,000,000 is like hardly any country. There's no negotiation power with $50,000,000. So it's like, it's also like there's this this very powerful directive. And then in practice, there is actually not so many, significant memes.
It reminds me of, Austin Powers. Right? When, doctor evil comes back, thirty years later and holds the country the world hostage, and he says, you know, I'm gonna blow up the world unless you give me $1,000,000. And everybody's howling with laughter at him because, right, Starbucks investments are much more than that. It's a great scene. Sneaking Austin Powers into the conversation.
So I think for, assuming that Praxis Society, maybe at some points, they do get a lot of money. Say they they do their one their their little venture with their 50,000,000. I think what their their first step in this whole thing, I think, is, like, set up a temporary like, they'll have a big, you know, conference where everybody who's a citizen, so to say, of of their network state would could come and visit and, they'll just talk about network states, I guess. So, like, eventually, you know, they're going to buy land and let's say if they become successful, they'll buy more land, they'll expand,
and they'll become a network state. And and to to be fair, I think, like, from, like, from reading various things, I think they they don't, I think they speak of network state, but they don't think of network state in the definition that Balaji has given in the sense that they don't actually claim to have the intention to, create an independent state. Right? They don't want to, declare sovereignty and the not yet. We'll never know what happened left. Yeah. But, but I think that's that's also an important thing in the sense that, there is there is many ways in which we are talking about network state and they have very different understanding. And but because there is only this terminology, everyone is just assuming always the best or the worst depending on the on the position. But I think for practice it's it's more like an experiment of, can we create like this special economic zone? Can we can we negotiate with a particular country to give us some privilege? Probably most likely related to taxation and, and innovation. So it's also like I'm just saying this in the sense that we also need to be mindful of, to have some, initiative. I'm not I'm not saying that practice is one of them, but I think there is some initiative that are much, less radical and, and, you know, maybe more viable than others.
It it reminds me a little bit of, performance art almost where they are sort of mimicking efforts of, you know, actual people who have tried to create states or even copying the efforts of artists like NSK in the eighties who also you know used passports and other emblems of the state as a way of trying to show that they are revolting against the decline of Yugoslav socialism, for instance, and, how that was transforming state socialism.
But so maybe to to to ground this conversation, I would like, if you could, Raymond, for listeners who may not know much about it and who may not understand it, if you could go through maybe, like, quick definitions of what are, of these concepts, like colonization or colonialism, neocolonialism, and decolonization. I think those are, like, kind of three important concepts to to understand if you are someone who wants to critically look at the network state or to, like, you know, attempt to think critically about it.
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, these are sort of different definitions, I guess, or sort of general definitions I would give from the perspective, you know, someone working on on the kinds of things that I've worked on in relationship to, you know, Spanish empire or colonialism in The United States or The Americas more generally. But, yeah, I mean, colonialism, I think you can think about as as, you know, the exertion of political and economic control over another nation state or another territory that's not, you know, quote, unquote, your own. Oftentimes, people would distinguish between empire and colonialism, and the the tendency is to see colonialism, vis a vis empire as involving settlers. So settler colonialism, you know, you might think of that as a redundancy, but not necessarily. So you have, people who will write about Latin America and call the countries of Latin America Neo Europes, because they are countries that essentially are founded eventually out of the basis of European settlement in which the indigenous populations are constantly struggling for recognition for rights, and so on and so forth. Then you also have economic exploitation and and and dispossession, as well as part of, as part of thinking about colonialism. So it's not only about political authority and and political control and settlement and establishment, but also about economic extraction. The classic example that that sometimes people talk about is the colonial compact in which, you know, the mother country, Spain, in this example, extracted resources out of the countries that that became, you know, known as Latin America. So Mexico and Peru, in particular, extracted silver, shipped it back to the metropole, to Madrid. And the idea was that the colonies existed in part to sort of enrich the motherland. So it's a kind of extractivist relationship. Neocolonialism oftentimes refers to, forms of colonialism that persist even after the formal end of of, of colonial control. So after the end of of political formal political control, so let's say, you know, France leaving, parts of Southeast Asia or, Germany and, England and others leaving parts of Africa or Spain leaving, being kicked out of parts of much of Latin America, that there's ongoing forms of colonialism that exist in the inequality of power around economic relationships. So especially the ability to use economic weapons, to control, the political and economic, lives of places is oftentimes what people use the term neocolonialism to mean. So a very good example is someone like Franz Fanon, the great Martiniquean intellectual who spent a long time in Algeria and wrote The Wretched of the Earth. One of the things he talks about is the ability of international corporations backed by their home governments to use the threat of capital flight to influence dramatically the nature of political elections in countries that have overthrown colonial rule. And so in the midst of the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties and the struggles in places like Algeria and elsewhere, you know, he was critiquing the ability it wasn't just a political question. It was also the the the question of economic power being used to sustain colonial relationships even if the political authority had had removed itself. Right? And this is an ongoing thing that we see around us all the time, you know, to this day. I mean, it's, the the legacies and echoes of colonialism are, you know, on ongoing, and and a lot of the political struggles we see in places today, are are related to that. Decolonization, just very quickly, you know, form I mean, in some ways, the very narrow sense of decolonization is the end of the end of colonial world. And, you know, the first wave of decolonization was really the eighteen teens and eighteen twenties in which, the many of the places that were colonized in what is now Latin America overthrew, right, ended Spanish rule and transitioned into different forms of kind of nation state forms. And then the second wave of decolonization, of course, was the nineteen forties and fifties and sixties and seventies after especially after World War two with the end of these formal empires like, Britain, France, and, and so forth. But the one thing I will throw in the mix here that I think is important in the conversation is is that, you know, the idea that you transition from colonial rule to nation independent nation state, is not a natural process. There was enormous contestation around this, including in West Africa in which, leaders of independence movements there were looking for the possibilities of setting up confederations rather than nation states. They were looking at the possibility of setting up kinds of autonomous relationships vis a vis metropolitan powers. If you look at the contemporary Pacific, and things like French Polynesia, right, there's a lot of questions around what it would look like for places to be totally independent as nation states and lose certain kinds of subsidies that they get from the metropole. And so there's all there's a lot of there's a range of political possibilities that could have come out of decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s, but a lot of it was channeled into a kind of nation state paradigm, which wasn't necessarily acceptable or desirable by, by a lot of people. And I write about one of those instances actually in my in my book when I talk about the New Hebrides and Vanuatu because that's one of the complicated factors of that, of that relationship. Right? So those are you know, hopefully, that kind of gives a sense of thinking about colonialism, neocolonialism, decolonization.
Yeah. So for me, when I think of colonialism, I think of basically what this blog piece that I read, like, is kind of referring to kind of and also so, like, that's a type of colonization that you don't see very much anymore today. Like, though you don't really, like, have a direct link between governments, taking over, like, another, sort of territory anymore. That was that is, like, the history of The Americas, and that is, like, basically how it came to be and how, basically what led to the genocide of, Native Americans. And then so then there was this evolution towards neocolonialism where, it became more rather than a direct link with other nation states or governments, it became a link with, like, the power of capital or these large corporations that were able to who were mostly run by people from the former colonies, to to to sort of still keep the ability to extract, resources but via free markets. Like, just using the excuse of markets as being, like, this kind of voluntary, like, field anybody can play in, in which case they just so happen to be the one to be right there to, to win in that that market game, so that they can continue, yeah, accumulating wealth and accumulating resources, having the huge advantage of, like, better machinery, having, like, all these type of things that that the formerly colonized need. They sort of need, like, someone to, economically develop them because when they were colonized, they were not given the ability to develop themselves. And so it created this dependence over time. And then decolonization, the history of it is really just, like, a half assed measure for most of these now countries and nation states. Sort of that entire process didn't really give them didn't give them the ability to be autonomous in the first place. And so I think in the context of, like, network states and this fantasy of libertarian exit, I really, like, now it seems that it to me, it's like a a neocolonialism that may not necessarily be linked to, like, you specifically being from the former direct colonizer of some place in which you may have bought some land, but that you are anyway sort of like someone who has benefited perhaps by having grown up in the West or grown up in countries that did do colonization, to be able to massively influence a particular, like, whatever the place in which you're buying land in, like in the case of what Praxis is trying to do.
You know, I do think that, you know, neocolonialism,
but also even the language of colonialism, can be appropriate here. There's also a weird nostalgia with normal colonialism with the people who are trying to do neocolonialism, a lot of times.
I mean, it's amazing to me, right, that the language of colonization is, you know, straight up. Right? I mean, in the seastetter's, materials, they sometimes talk about colonizing, right, the ocean, colonizing the high seas, the language of colonizing outer space, orbital space, Mars, the moon. And that, you know, I think you're right to point out the close connections to, to private interests. I mean, in in all of these, right, these are, these are questions around it's not about formal, political states, necessarily doing these things. A lot of it is being pushed by private interests that are looking to ensure that they have access to seabed minerals and to, the kinds of things you might be able to extract from rock and and, whether or not you can even, set up orbital space manufacturing facilities, right, to basically, manufacture things and so forth. And, and so the language of colonization is, is rich and and right there. I mean, it's quite, it's quite remarkable that it's in your face.
At the same time, I think that, I don't wanna play the devil's advocate, but, I will try to do it anyways, in the sense that I think it's it's interesting because of course all those things can apply. Right? Like we can we can think about neocolonialism which is like how does, our full actor that actually continue to exercise power of any data that they don't necessarily own by creating those autonomous, economic zone and so forth. We can talk about like sheer colonialism by, actually going and colonizing territories whether whether territories that were not yet claimed with, like, the sea studying or territory that have already been claimed. But but, playing the devil's advocate, I will say that actually within the narrative, there is also the narrative of decolonization, in the sense that it is also about, claiming autonomy and independence from a colonizer, which is the nation state, which not everyone has necessarily, opt in to this. Right? And so of course, because it is like tech billionaires, then it feels kind of strange to talk about decolonization. If it was if it was a group of, like, you know, local indigenous people that that wants to claim sovereignty, then that would be actually decolonization. So how do we actually to hold the line about like is first of all decolonization, is it always good or bad? Of course not. It depends on who is colonizing or decolonizing from whom. But I think that in in the narrative or in those in those initiatives, the narrative of decolonization is actually perhaps the strongest between between if we have to pick between colonization, neocolonialism, or the colon or decolonialism, I would say that they actually, bring the claim that, the nation state has taken over all the space and that they want to create more sovereignty, more autonomy, more independence, which is not that different from the countries that wants to decolonize it. It's just that, the the population that is trying to do that is very different.
Yeah. I mean, it's a wonderful point because I do think, you know, one of the things that is clear is in the wake of World War II and, and some of the struggles I was talking around about around decolonization and desires for something other than the nation state but not wanting a colony either. It's true. Right? You end up with an empire of nation states. And so there is a kind of reworking of of of empire that takes place in the form of the nation state, and to the oftentimes to the detriment of minoritized populations in these new states. I mean, no wonder South Sudan broke away from Sudan, right, ten years ago. And you see this in other places as well. There's these, offshoot movements that, of people who don't feel like they're any better represented by the new nation state than they were by, the colonial power. I think the interesting thing about the the question of decolonization, in things like the network states and some of these other projects is, you know, the question of of capital. And so it's one thing to decolonize from the nation state, but I think that the trick always here, it seems to me I don't wanna say the trick, but I think the, you know, the interesting thing to me here in part is that when you looking at the parts of the nation state, the network state that I've read and looking at, the seasteaders, materials and and the book that Joe Quirk wrote with Patrick Friedman is, you know, the object of critique, the fundamental object of critique is the state, is the nation state. But capital just kinda gets a pass. And that's you know, it's interesting to me because capital and the state are sort of deeply entwined and then capital itself. I mean, there's an argument to be made that, in many instances, decolonization was also an effort to kind of extricate oneself from these webs of, of capitalist markets and extractivism and the like, even early on, I mean, the expansion of, you know, company states and things like this oftentimes could, you know, go it went along with empire, but also sort of preceded empire. I mean, empire could follow in the wake of company states. And so the role of, I think, the role of profit, and the role of capital here is really important. And that's not something that, the network states and other kinds of things are interested in decolonizing. Right? They're not these are things that are gonna ratchet up, at some level. And to me, that's, you know, that's something for real concern. A privatized state is is is still a state. And, and it's, you know, it's it's gonna be structured along different kinds of hierarchies of power, but they're still gonna be there. And this notion of opting in and opting out at will is just simply not feasible to huge numbers of people. And it's not only because it's not feasible because of political restrictions. It's not feasible because of economic restrictions. And so there's a that that's for me is the is is one of the issues here that I think is important in the language of colonialism, decolonization, and neocolonialism is the rule of capital. And which,
many of the like, if you were, like, an indigenous group trying to fight for sovereignty, a lot of times you won't have capital. Like, you won't have the type of money that that you would need in order to exert autonomy given the rules of the system is kind of how I have seen it.
Yeah. I mean, I think of, you know, you can think of other kinds of I I mean, I try to differentiate these in my book, and so I I call them exile rather than exit communities. And, you know, there, I'm drawing a little bit from from a, a book and writing by a sociologist, Dennis O'Hearn, and, and a sociologist, anthropologist, and an anarchist intellectual, Andrei Grubacek, they used the term exile to think about, communities like the Zapatistas. Right? So mostly indigenous communities in the South Of Mexico who felt that, you know, their aspirations, that their possibilities for existence had been betrayed by the Mexican state over the course of the twentieth century and that the promise of the Mexican Revolution had been betrayed, especially with the signing of NAFTA in 1994 and the end of land reform. And, and so, you know, they they exit in some ways, but but not in the ways that that would be anything comparable to something like the network state or something like this. I mean, theirs is a critique of capital as much as it is a critique of the Mexican state. I mean, their concern is that the Mexican state is basically controlled by international finance, and Wall Street, and and the like. And so things like austerity measures and, you know, the role of the World Trade Organization, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and what it did to the country in the nineteen eighties and especially how it stripped away subsidies from the poor forced, the government to open up its economy because of the debt crisis, that these things meant that essentially the Mexican state didn't respond, right, to the electorate to the electorate, and didn't represent the vast majority of the Mexican populace. So there you have a kind of exile community. Right? They've tried to set up their own kinds of social relations, their own sort of productive operations, you know, dentists and medical care and and education, so on and so forth. But they live in intention, right, with the Mexican state. Yeah.
One question perhaps, like, it feels like if I understand the the the various definition correctly is that, we basically have colonialism, which is essentially like political power that gets into, like, corrupting territories, which then leads to even after they leave because of the because of the power and because of the economic, relationship that are created leaves this form of neocolonialism even when the political structure has actually, decolonized. It seems to me that when we think about the network cities perhaps like, I I don't know if even neocolonialism is correct because it's not something that comes afterwards. It's almost as if like they are using the power and the the power of capital essentially as a form of new neocolonialism which then potentially could lead to a real form of colonialism. And in this sense is almost as if like the neocolonialism comes before, like creating those economic zone. It's it's colonialism. Exactly. It's like it's it's a it's a completely new form. Like, I think it's almost strange to equalize it to neocolonialist when in fact there has been no, political structure to to begin with. But because they have managed in one way or another to accumulate enough power and capital then they can prepare the ground for perhaps eventually being able to declare autonomy and independence.
Yeah. It's interesting to think about it as a kind of precolonial, neocolonialism or something like that. It's fascinating. Yeah. And I I you know, in certain instances, you it it feels like, you know, one of the things I tried to mention is, is a sort of transition from, the more intense aspects of neoliberalism that, you know, arose in the nineteen seventies with something like shock therapy in in Chile, under the dictatorship of Pinochet with, you know, with Milton Friedman and von Hayek's blessing and support. That kind of neoliberalism that, you know, sort of kind of sterile, that sort of lays the groundwork for the possibilities of, of this even more, kind of hyper privatized and libertarian sensibility. And, you know, I wonder about these things because it does seem like the structures in place seem to work entirely against things like, you know, general sort of government services, municipal services, and so forth. And so there's this constant contracting out increasingly, right, to private operators in various kinds of ways. I mean, Mike Davis writes about this really eloquently in city of courts about how this how this came about in Los Angeles, and this guy, Evan McKenzie, who wrote a book called Privatopia back in the nineties. And and, and so in some ways, I think about this this kind of current libertarian moment as something, you know, using, some of the kind of transformations that have taken place with things like technology and cryptocurrencies and so forth. But by using a basic fundamental groundwork that's been laid by some of the more radical neoliberal projects of the seventies and eighties, Reagan, Thatcher, and a lot of the deregulation that went on and was continued by the Clinton administration and others, at least in The US.
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I was curious about, orienting this discussion, not just in terms of capital, but also in terms of civilization and the understanding of these libertarian tech founders about civilization. So as we know from you know like recent Marxist legal scholarship for instance the idea of civilization and has also been informed by conceptions of both on the one hand trying to you know include the other into civilization while at the same time having you know this sort of almost not fully hidden contempt for the other. At the same time this you know mission of trying to civilize is part of introducing them to capitalist modernity and I'm curious about whether this you know particular proto colonial, neo colonial whichever term you use, effort is an instantiation of this by let's say sometimes implicit sometimes explicit means. So what I mean is is that the idea of how they see this as a sort of civilizing mission might also explain why they would want to create these sorts of network states but also might reflect their idea of how they see the world a bit because I think one of the points that really jumped out at me while reading Balaji's book was his claim that creation of network states allows for the return of terra incognita, the return of terra nullius, both of which are highly controversial and criticized concepts, and not something that is desirable. Again, you're sort of not only ignoring the existence of certain states but in some cases treating humans as part of the landscape. Again, this sort of reflects a sort of idea of what civilization is and your position in civilization. So I was wondering whether that was something that you had also felt that this is not just about deregulation or capital but also there's a sort of civilizational component to this discussion.
Yeah I mean yeah thank you I you know, there's a book I've been meaning to read. Maybe this is the book you're referring to called, Civilization as Capitalism or Capitalism as Civilization.
Yes. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been meaning yeah. I've been wanting to get to that. I haven't had a chance. But, but, yeah, I so, you know, what what your question brought to mind in part was, I mean, definitely the sort of, you know, effort to think that there there can be a new terra nullius. And, you know, and some of that, of course, is is the language that they're using to talk about outer space and orbital space and and the oceans. And, of course, the ocean stuff is really difficult because I think the international law is much more complicated around, you know, the high seas than I think sometimes the seasteaders have let on. But I also you know, it makes me think also about something that both is raised in a network state and is raised amongst some of the figures that I write about, and that is that their projects are what they call moral projects, moral experiments. And here, I do think they're they are in some form or another, linking into this idea of a of a kind of civilizing project in some sense. Right? The moral project as a kind of community of values is the way I think it's kind of put in the network state. Right? You have to have a community that has a sort of shared moral sensibility, first and foremost, that you have to work from. Right? The for profit colonies were not successful, but the sort of religious communities were, right, is the way he he puts it in in his his kind of, bare bones kind of historical reconstruction. Or the person I look at, Michael Oliver, you know, talks about, you know, it's not about tax havenry. It's creating a new country. It's not about escaping paying taxes or tax havenry or something like this. It's not about making money per se even though that's important, but it's about this kind of idea that at at its most basic freedom is the ability to opt in or to opt out of of a political community or of a social, space. And so, you know, for him, this is the way in which he, puts it. And it does have this kind of, civilizational ethos, I think, in in some form, because I do think it at its sitting underneath that is this assumption that there is going to be or needs to be, a kind of terra nullius on which to do this. I mean, it is ultimately in the end, there is a blank slate argument or a blank slate supposition that sits behind a lot of these things, even if they don't I mean, in some instances, you can see the term blank slate actually right there. Right? It it comes up in a lot of this writing. But even when it doesn't, there is sitting behind it, an assumption in some ways that you can get beyond history, that you can actually find these kinds of spaces of terra nullius, that you can start all over anew. And this is, you know, this is fantasy, in many respects, both the terra nullius part of it, unless it's forcibly created, which which kind of defeats the idea of terra nullius, or, if, you know, the idea that you can simply start afresh from history. I mean, I mean, I think the Khmer Rouge is probably a very good example of how that's not going to work well. Right? So yeah.
I would like to jump in on this question of, civilization and and actually try to look maybe, like, without necessarily connecting it to the discusses around the network state. But, but, I think that there is, I I see I use it a lot myself, for good or bad reasons, but, I feel like sometimes there is people that are from the Internet, you know, that, that are that actually have been socializing themselves on the Internet that, that are really, like, isn't the the culture that is, Internet, netizen, whatever you wanna call it. So I think there is something, interesting as well in the in exploring the extent to which the fact that we have this, global system of communication has enabled people to coalesce around specific values, principles, around societal values as well. Right? And of course, it's not because and and, you know, you can call them communities. You can call them types, you can call them digital digital nations or however you wanna you want you you choose the name. But this is all referring to this idea of seeing that there exist, new ways of connecting people and the culture that usually spread geographically because of proximity now can also spread in a transnational, manner by just going all over the internet. And the fact that he's this concept of community of kinship, or like nation that are not geographically bound into a particular state or territory. And I think there is value in also analyzing this. And of course the question is, is is is there a necessity that any single one of those digital nation have their own territory or can't they live just like they have been living until now in the digital space and, and they can create the home, you know, metaverse and whatnot. But but I think so. I think the person of civilization becomes also relevant in in terms of what are we what are we talking about when we're talking about this digital nation? Are we talking, can we accumulate? Can we assimilate them as some kind of civilization? And, and can they exist independently of having, a territory because they they are born on the digital and so they live on the digital. And all of student is and then going back to the network state, it feels that, independently, like, because there is this digital nation, if they are digital nation to begin with, therefore we also need the the nation state. And therefore we also need a state and the state so far is geographically bound. But, you know, and and like if you think about like the early beat nation and stuff like that, they were actually even talking about let's create a state for a digital nation, but the state is a is a digital state as well. So there is also like all those granularities that exist, which is the network states in this the way in which Balaji has described it is this particular system in which a digital nation wants to instantiate itself into a physical state. But can we have other modalities? And and does it make sense, for instance, to have a digital nation instantiating itself into a digital state, just living without necessarily having even to coordinate itself through a state but nonetheless developing new collective action mechanism and governance structure that, that that enable those people to to to coordinate themselves at the global scale.
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that the collective action thing, I mean, I thought that was one of the things that was interesting in his book. Is, right, is is his critique of micronations. And I guess in some ways, you know, the the stuff I write about about Michael Oliver probably fits in the the micronation or what he says should be called microstate, which I probably would agree with. Microstate probably is a more accurate description. You know, Michael Oliver, the person I write a lot about, I mean, was really a a fits into that kind of microstate or micronation model. But I thought it was interesting, his point that, that the problem with the microstate model is it doesn't empower a kind of possibility of collective action. And, you know, in part because it's it is so driven, through the possibility of buying into this kind of contractual, you know, transactional community that's based mostly around the the premise, right, that you can you can do what you want and that it's all about, the privatization of services and signing a contract and, you know, exiting from the traditional nation state and and so forth. And so I thought the whole kind of idea about collective action was was interesting in his, in his discussion because it does, right, it does sort of start to draw back in a recognition, right, of of, of how communities form, how they're going to sort of exercise a certain kind of power and, and so forth. I think the, you know, the civilization question, but also the kind of digital state question, I mean, sooner or later, I mean, all the thing that, I guess for me, I always come back to is that, you know, there's all kinds of, quote, unquote, cloud communities, right, that aren't necessarily cloud in the kind of sense that it's now come to be used. And there's a multitude of these kinds of things that exist and have existed for a long time, but the issue always comes when you need territory and sovereignty. And I just think that you can go so far down the line of kinds of the steps that he lays out. But sooner or later, once you kind of hit the ground of, you know, territory and sovereignty, that's where I think that's where it it it always becomes difficult. It becomes colonial in a sort of real immediate sense. Maybe there's some future in which a digital a cloud community achieves a kind of sovereignty. I just don't even know what that looks like, to me. And so, you know, one of the things I mentioned in in my book is that I read a lot of sci fi in kind of thinking through a lot of this stuff. And, you know, it was really helpful. Neil Stephenson Snowcrasher, Snowcrash, and, Neuromancer by Gibson, and some of Kim Stanley Robinson stuff. MK Jamieson's, and and, Octavia Butler. But the the sci fi writer who I felt, like, really nailed it and and I think nailed it because he's so attentive to the sort of mundane violence and and structural reality around us is JG Ballard. He wrote this book Super Con, another one called Cocaine Nights, Millennium People. You know? And he was this British writer, sci fi writer who who grew up in a concentration camp in Shanghai under Japanese colonial rule. And, you know, and and these are books in which he really focuses on sort of super, super, super ultra high end business park residences that people live in on the coast of France, for example, on Super Con. And they just have everything there for them, and it's so high end, and they're so removed from the reality of community and society that they get bored. And so, you know, they're both boring and they're bored. And so they import crime. They pay to import crime for kind of erogenous stimulation, or they leave their compound and go out and just exercise their agency over the local people by just, you know, beating people up and savaging them and so forth, and they're totally untouchable. You know? And he has this wonderful, way of showing that, you know, the rest of us can kinda pay for a lead agency. You know, that that no matter how far fetched it might sound, right, that at some level, that's exactly what's, what's happening. Anyway, sorry. That was a bit of a digression, but, that's where my head went.
Since you've talked about Michael Oliver quite a bit, could you actually share a bit about who Michael Oliver was and how he compares with, you know, libertarian tech founders and, you know, people like Balaji?
Yeah. Sure. I mean, you know, I write the book, I guess, you know, it's in two parts. But the first part, which is about, not just Michael Oliver, but but the projects that he was involved in and people around him, is really about two thirds of the book. And I spend a lot of time writing about the projects he was involved in. You know, he was originally from Lithuania, Jewish. All of his family were killed, during the Holocaust. And then he came to The US as a young man, in the late forties after the war, and settled in Nevada. And over the course of the nineteen sixties, I mean, he was involved in you know, he was very influenced as many of the people in the sixties and seventies were and still today. Many people also that you would associate with libertarianism in The United States were deeply influenced by, you know, not just, Ludwig von Hayek or, Ludwig von Mises, but but also by or Murray Rothbard, for that matter, but also by Ayn Rand. And, and so a lot of them were reading and and and sort of, you know, absorbing and, and repeating lines from Atlas Shrugged, which is probably her most famous, book. And so he was very influenced by that. And in the nineteen sixties, he he just felt, you know, looking around, him that, that The US was sort of in the midst of a kind of freefall, and that totalitarianism, which is what he was most concerned about, because of his own experience, was was sort of at the doorstep and and that one needed to be able to set up a kind of escape hatch and to exit. And there was a lot of this kind of stuff in the nineteen sixties. I mean, it's it's a little bit comparable in some ways to our own moment. And one of the things that I try to point out is this kind there is a little bit of a kind of similarity between our own moment and the 1960s. I mean, the 1960s was an era of, you know, let's explore outer space, right, in the space race. It's a moment in which people are writing a lot of books about, you know, we're on the cusp of ecological and demographic collapse. The climate catastrophe is just around the corner because of the tragedy of the commons. You know, Derek Hardin's famous 1968 essay, which totally misunderstood the commons, but resonated at the time about, about the need to, you know, regulate common health resources, but mostly through private privatization, or the population bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which imagined all kinds of, you know, apocalyptic scenarios just over the horizon because of demographic, growth and and radical urbanization. And you have a lot of sci fi being written in the nineteen sixties that's exploring a lot of these questions as well. And then you also have this kind of monetary movement. So now we have crypto and digital currencies. And in the nineteen sixties, it was an effort to basically, right, get people to invest in metals, gold and silver. And there were lots of debates around whether or not, right, gold should continue to be pegged at a certain fixed price, which had happened under Roosevelt, and whether or not the dollar should be pegged to gold, what was gonna happen with, you know, all of, currencies being valued in US dollars and and and so forth. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff. And Oliver was you know, all these kinds of things worried him. And and so he wrote a little book called A New Constitution for a New Country in 1968, in which he essentially wrote a constitution, and wrote a preface to it about, you know, the sort of coming collapse and, you know, moochers and social parasites. And you know, he had the whole language of sort of anti welfare state, anti New Deal language of the era. And so he had three projects that I explored in pretty close detail and which are part of the reason why I try to be very attentive to the questions of colonialism and decolonization, because he himself said there are lots of places that are decolonizing and the mother country is gonna be too busy doing other things to be concerned. And we should try to write these are the places where we should try to set up a new country is places that are decolonizing. So he, you know, he or his associates traveled to, you know, Suriname, Curacao, Trinidad, Tobago, Honduras, the Southwest Pacific, looking for these various opportunities and places. And so they struck on three places. The first one, 1971 and 1972, they tried to he and his backers had some very financially wealthy backers, some some of them being people whose names would probably be recognized by some of your listeners. And they, they hit upon a reef in the Southwest Pacific, the Minerva Reefs, which are in between, you know, the North Of New Zealand and South Of Fiji and Tonga. The reefs are underwater most of the time out of the day. But they, hired a dredging vessel to dredge sand out of the reef out of the lagoon and pile it on top of the reef. And then the idea was they would take coral and encapsulate it in chicken wire, fill it with concrete, build a platform that would eventually house up to 30,000 people, and you would be a settler. Right? You could you could invest in one of two ways. You could invest as a settler, which means you would invest and actually have rights to property, or you could invest as a kind of speculator, as as someone who's not gonna settle there, but support the project as a kind of investor, as a as a speculative investment. It's not unlike actually what's happening in Vanuatu now with Satoshi Island, which I can talk about at another point. So that was the first project that didn't go well because, the King of Tonga, but also the administration in Fiji at the time and elsewhere, all of these specific island countries were quite nervous about something like this because there's a lot of seamounts and a lot of reefs and a lot of atolls that could have created, if this went forward, could have created a kind of ocean rush or reef rush. And so they opposed it quite significantly. And in fact, the King of Tonga occupied the Minerva Reef at one point. And there was unity amongst the South Pacific Archipelago, Southwest Pacific Archipelago to oppose this. Then you had by the way, I'll mention also the UN Commission on the Laws of the Seas. Right? The UNCLAS, which was eventually signed and passed in 1982, addressed a lot of these archipelagic issues. And those are things that the sea status today still have to kind of deal with. The second project he had was in The Bahamas. Again, it wasn't just Oliver. It was an array of people. But this was a project in which The Bahamas was slated for independence in 1973. It was gonna be a predominantly black government. And the northern islands in The Bahamas, the Abaco Islands wanted to remain part of The United Kingdom. Didn't want to remain a part of The Bahamas. And a portion of this resistance was clearly based upon the fact that there would be a, predominantly black government, so it was racist, the opposition. But not not entirely. There were other aspects of the opposition as well. It wasn't solely, that, but that was a thread. And here, the idea was, again, to help foment, this secessionist rebellion and to set up again, create a kind of private country that would be run along the lines that were laid out in in his 1968 new constitution for a new country. And here he was, working with, you know, some fairly sketchy individuals, a man by the name of Mitchell Livingston Wormald the third, who created sound suppressor silencers for some of the deadliest weaponry that had been created up to that point, the Ingram MAC 10. I'll go into some detail about this because it's fascinating to me the the ways in which these, you know, hyper capitalist, libertarian projects can very quickly bleed into a pretty shady world of underground kind of stuff, shady real estate speculation, shady, anti communist politics, and, and weaponry and arms munitions and things like this. That project didn't go well either. It it sort of fell apart because the FBI was tracking some of these individuals, including Michael Oliver himself. And, and it and it just it it sort of folded in. And a lot of the people that were initially supportive of this in Abaco decided that they didn't want that kind of violent insurrection or the risk of a violent insurrection. And then there was a last project, that I write about in some detail. This took place in in the New Hebrides, which is now called Vanuatu. It's an archipelago in the Southwest Pacific. And it had been colonized by the French and the English together, the French and the British together. It was called a condominium government. The locals called it pandemonium, but the but the French and the British called it a condominium. And, but that was this was clearly a case in which this was an archipelago that was moving towards independence in the nineteen seventies. The British wanted out. The French were kind of not sure what they wanted to do. They were trying to stall a little bit. And you had a a movement, an anti colonial movement that developed there, that Michael Oliver backed. But it was also an anti colonial movement that was in struggle with another anti colonial movement on on the islands. And so one of the movements Oliver and his and his supporters, including John Hospers, who was a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California and the first candidate for for president of The United States on the libertarian ticket in the 1970s, Hospers there's a there's a array of really interesting individuals involved in a lot of these projects. But, Hospers and Oliver and another man, f Thomas Eck the third, the the three of them were involved in providing radio parts and transmitters and things like this to the to the movement, in, the New Hebrides. And there ended up with there ended up as a rebellion in 1980. So independence was supposed to happen in 1980. But on the cusp of independence, there were there was a rebellion that in part was fomented by the Phoenix Foundation, which is this organization that Oliver and others had had put together. Just very quickly, I'll mention a few of the people that were involved in that project. The the Fair Ralph Fair, very, prominent, Texan libertarian, what's the guy's name? Achiever. I can't remember his last name, but he's written a lot of sort sort of end of times evangelical stuff. The LaPonte couple who were prominent Alaskan libertarians. I mean, there were some big, I I don't wanna say big names, but there were some recognizable sort of libertarian politicos, yeah, exactly, involved in these things. And, and that was the last one. I mean, there was a, there was an, you know, an actual uprising and ended in this death and displacement. And at that point, Oliver kind of stopped. He cost him a lot of his money and he was frustrated. He'd given more than a decade of his life to these projects. But it was also the case that by the 1980s, you you know, you've got the Reagan and Thatcher, revolutions underway. And so one of the things I noticed is that it's much easier at that point to kind of socially secede than to territorially secede. And you don't really need to territorially secede in some ways with with the kind of changes that are taking place under Reagan and Thatcher. So, anyways, that's a kind of quick summary of of the worlds of, of of Michael Oliver and his backers and their projects.
Yes. So I'm curious about the the fact that, you know, we've been just discussing this history of, you know, libertarian exit project. And I was curious whether, you know, this remark you make in the book, that, you know, libertarian exit projects like Charter Cities have a poor grasp of history and politics. Yet when we look at a book like The Network State, it has pretensions at least towards providing an objective and actionable version of history as the author calls it. And so I'm curious, you know, how do you view the way that libertarians use or, apply history, to the extent that they do at all? And secondly, what are the issues with, you know, trying to treat history like a sort of ironclad infallible database that you can sort of skim through for facts?
Yeah. I mean, I you know, it it's, as a historian, it is frustrating to kinda read the ways that, non historians, will sometimes articulate what history means. In the the network state, you know, I I sort of stopped at a certain point from from highlighting to myself all the sort of, tedious platitudes that you see, trotted out over and over about history, you know, learning from the past and and, you know, not repeating the past. And, you know, there there's this this kind of, I don't wanna call it pop understanding, but but a kind of flatness, and, an unwillingness to think about history as a kind of interpretive act between sort of what, you know, what happened in the past, but also what was said to have happened in the past to take from from a wonderful, scholar, Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolfe Trouillot, you know, and that it's always this kind of dialogue. And so and I don't think we should be shy about admitting that there's a dialogue between always between our own moment and, and the past and how it's been narrated and who's narrating it and and what is said to have happened and what happened. And that you know? So this kind of relationship between sort of objectivity, subjectivity, and neutrality is is a kind of relationship that that you you have to, take on and enter and think about in writing about the past. It's not some kind of ironclad thing. There aren't laws of history. You know, I'm a I'm a fairly strong advocate of, of a lot of Marx's writings about history. And, but even then, of course, you know, there's not a kind of ironclad law that can just be sort of economically reduced to you know, can't just all just be class struggle all the time. Right? And even within that, there's a kind of nuance, that one, brings out. And so it is frustrating. I mean, I think I mentioned at the beginning the the kind of way in which seasteaders had talked about history in their book. I mean, you know, and and I and and a particularly, mean spirited moment, I compared them to I told you know, I said they should read more Cormac McCarthy when they talk about The US West and less Lyn Jeaney, because, you know, they have this kind of patriotic primer vision, you know, sort of first grade or second grade vision of sort of patriotic American westward expansion that just is, extraordinarily offensive and problematic in terms of what it ignores and doesn't pay attention to and just allies that the kind of violence, not just violence against native peoples, which is absolutely dramatic, but also violence against, Mexicans in the Southwest and and in California and Chileans in during the gold rush and, you know, and African Americans who are being moved west and and themselves searching for freedom. And, you know, we can we can, you know, talk at great length about this. And so, yeah, the vision of history is is problematic. I mean, whenever there's a kind of bullet point sketch of of history and a kind of reduction of it to the the a process of bullet points, I get, I get very nervous about that. And so, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I I thought it was interesting that he meant, like I think it's because he said I think the title of one of his, like, sections is If the News is Fake, Imagine History. Yeah. Which I mean, there there's, like, so many, like, so many so many parts of my brain hurts when, you know, when I read some of the sections. It's, pretty frustrating. Primavera wants to say something. I just wanted to,
perhaps also add one additional layer in which we can, conceptualize and theorize colonization, which is like the the extent, like, colonization not just in terms of space and territory, but colonization in terms of mimetic land grabbing and, and historical reconstruction. Is do you have, like, a particular, interest in this or vision on that? And, like, is is is the book that Balazs is doing actually intentionally, or not intentionally, but somehow it does have the effect of, rewriting history. And isn't that also some some new form of, colonization?
How does he colonize us with brain worms?
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you know, the I mean, the the struggle around history is, I mean, at some point, it's right about, this kind of idea that one can colonize the past in in certain kinds of ways. And yeah. So I think being able you know, this is why when I we were talking earlier, I mentioned the ways in which for a lot of, writing in this kind of libertarian vein in the sixties and the seventies in particular, the starting point is always and it sounds like a kind of natural thing to do. The starting point is the sort of individual sovereign subject. Right? The sort of individual human being, and then they create collectives and all these kinds of things and so forth. And and yet that itself is a kind of colonization of the past. I mean, it's a sort of Robinson Crusoe version, of history that starts with a certain kind of idea of an individual and starts from the individual and works out. And that's, you know, that's that's not necessarily natural at all. That that itself is a sort of social construction. It's a choice about how to write history and where the starting point of the writing of history, is. And so this something like the network state to, you know, to my mind is very much, a kind of, I don't know. You know, sort of AP class, political theory. Right? I mean, it sort of lays out in in very kind of mechanistic ways, the definitions of the state, the definitions of nation, you know, the use of mapping, the use of print capitalism. But it it's, you know, it's it's very static, very mechanistic, and with no sense of how sort of collectives themselves, right, sort of come into being through sort of rewriting history, rethinking history in certain kinds of ways. And so, you know, it's a it's a way of thinking about history that works to to his, advantage in terms of what he wants to, construct. And there is a in the end, I mean, I think at some level, there's a kind of erasure of of of history, in the sense of erasing it, going back to this blank blank slate idea. In in the sense of erasing the ways in which it has to be, at some level interpretative and contested, and understood as, as something that you struggle through and struggle over. And and a lot of conclusions that you reach are much better than other conclusions that you reach. Right? And that's based upon a a kind of body of evidence, but also a kind of way in which you persuasively interpret, that evidence. And you don't get that here. Right? What you get is this very sort of mechanistic idea about, about the past and one that suits, right, the kinds of things that he wants to,
Just it just happens to be it's just very convenient. It just so happens that history worked out, in a way that, good for my goals or whatever.
Right. I mean, the thing, you know, the thing that always strikes me is, you know, it it made me think about, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick. So Nozick was a philosopher in 1974, wrote a book called anarchy, state, and utopia, which was a kind of response to John Rawls's theory of justice, about society and and freedom and equality. And Nozick's book was probably probably to this day is the most, sophisticated philosophical defense of sort of ultra minimalist statism, libertarianism. But both in that both in Naused's book, but also in, in Murray Rothbard's writing and others, they do the same thing over and over again. They they say, you know, they go back to, you know, thinking about Locke's, theory of labor and and property rights. And so, you know, Locke's idea being you invest your own what you have control over, what you have rights over, what you have property over is your own self and your own labor as an individual. Again, starting with that premise of the individual. And then if you mix your labor with something, then it then it becomes your your property. And Rothbard talks about, you know, let's take, for example, like, clay or he's talking about sort of, I can't remember what it was. He's talking about some kind of object, that you make. And there was another version of this about the pencil that Leonard Reed, I think, did this. But it was all about this kind of, object. But the, the thing yeah. The pencil, right, is the earlier one. That's yeah. Thank you, Morshed, for saying that. But Rothbard says things like, let's bracket for a moment, you know, where the where the primary objects come from, right, that you use to fashion into something. But he never gets back to it. And, of course, he doesn't get back to it. And, of course, the other, writers in this vein don't get back to it. Because if you do go to the primary place where these, you know, first the primary resources you need, first and foremost, come from, you have to deal with the question of expropriation. You have to deal with the with the question of takings. And Nausica tries to deal with this a little bit by talking about the possibility of reparations, unjust takings. But but that's this is a certain kind of way in the writing of history that I think, you know, this that's what it reminds me of. It's the constant elision, of these questions of violence, of primitive accumulation, of dispossession, of the basic foundation of the sort of social world that things come from. And if and if they come from the social world, then they have repercussions beyond the single individual who's making the pencil Right. Or making whatever.
So if you rewrite history with a couple of simplistic memes riddled throughout it, then you can sort of colonize people's minds. And eventually, that will lead you to the ability to colonize land and create your own, your new country.
Well, I mean, you know, if you I I will say, along with the network state, I mean, I've mentioned this book a couple of times and so your listeners, I mean, the the the section on history in in, in the book, Seastead by Burke and Friedman is just,
very good. You know?
No. Not at all. But it's a very good example to read of just how, really negligent they were in in sort of taking history seriously. I mean, it's filled with all kinds of picture book falsehoods about, you know, new utopians going to the new world and, you know, and and all this kind of stuff that just completely, ignores and downplays and invisiblizes the incredible violence, and and,
and forms of expropriation that took place. But I think it's really important because we're talking about capital that, that is forgotten, but I think culture is perhaps the most powerful tool that we also have today, to to manipulate and or to contaminate the minds of people. So I guess we're moving from colonization to contamination. But eventually I think this is like we cannot ignore the the force of information and culture and and and yeah, I think the natural state is a very good example of like, it does it does manage to colonize our minds even before it started to colonize. I mean, perhaps this is also just another form of,
not to bring in another concept, but, cultural hegemony from, you know, from Gramsci. Kind of wanting to trick people or I say trick, but, like, not just that you can't that, powerful forces can't just, like, dominate you physically, but they have to dominate you in the way that you think, in the way that you value things, and etcetera, etcetera. Yet that that has to it has to convince you that capitalism is also good. It can't just force you into,
into it. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's right. I mean, this kind of combination of coercion and and consent. And, and so, you know, I mean, the interesting thing always is, I think, is that, it would be interesting to see what, a range of how a range of readers would respond to the network state. And, you know, I would imagine that many readers coming from backgrounds with even if they were very tech savvy and even, even inclined to kind of like certain aspects of it, if they came from backgrounds that weren't, you know, modestly privileged at the least would have a much more critical read of it. I mean, there's, you know, Jim Scott, James Scott, they got, you know, seeing like a state and and,
against the grain and part of not being I think he even he even mentioned seeing, like, a state in in a book, which Yeah. Drove me nuts.
Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, his his point about Gramsci is that, you know, Gramsci had it sort of wrong. Right? I mean, he's sitting in prison in the nineteen twenties, and he's trying to figure out why Italy isn't having a revolution like the Russian revolution when it has the same sort of structural conditions, you know. So his position was, well, people are constrained at the level of of imagination, you know, and that you need to kind of, you know, change that imagination. And Scott's, you know, Scott's argument is the reverse, right? That people aren't constrained at the level of imagination at all. They're constrained at the level of material means, and the recognition, right, that who's got the monopoly of violence and that it's gonna be very risky for them to to rise up. But they know exactly how exploited they are. They know exactly what the hell is happening to them. They know they can't stand the manager. They know they can't stand the field boss. And so, you know, it's interesting to think about something like the network state and whom the reader might be and recognize it. Right? And recognizing just what the implications of something like the network state are for most people. Right? I think I quote in the book at the very end of my book, I quote the you know, because a lot of a lot of what this makes me think about is white flight and, you know, the the sort of exit as a privilege. And, and, you know, there's that great, there's that great poem, right, from, Gil Heron, where he says, you know, Whitey on the moon. Right? My my sister Nell has been bit by a rat, but, you know, in the meantime, Whitey's on the moon. Right? And it's so it's like it's all this public money and private money going to putting some white dude on the moon while, you know, someone someone has a a a sister, a family member who can't even get health care. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
But, any last questions from Morshid or Pimavera before we close it out? No. I think,
covered, was today in the over an hour. And I we're just really grateful to to hear insights from, Raymond about, his wonderful, book that actually came out less than a year ago. So Yeah. It came out in,
July 2022. Yeah. Nice. And I guess we'll close out here. Thanks so much, Raymond, for coming on and talking to us. The book is called Adventure Capitalism, a History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonization
to the Digital Age. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you so much. Take care.