2459 – Oh Sovereign, My Sovereign feat. Quinn Slobodian (2022 Trashfuture podcast)

“This week’s free episode is all about William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s book “the sovereign individual,” which describes a wonderful world in which fifty rich men live in armoured citadels and everyone else scrapes a living off the land. Do not become addicted to water, my friends!

If you want to learn more about Quinn Slobodian’s work, check out his site here: https://www.quinnslobodian.com

If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture“

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WARNING (decided to put this warning for each post that contains injurious and otherwise insulting content. The images and books mentioned are not endorsements in any way, they are here given as critical examples. There is enough hate speech online and techno-fascist homophobic-mysoginous-transphobic propaganda everywhere, so this posting does not aim to add more suffering to injury. None of this will be tolerated in the comments, goes without saying)

The 1997 book The Sovereign Individual (from here on SI) sits on top of top-selling Amazon lists, and holds the dubious title of  “Das Kapital of the Ayn Rand worldview” (E. Glenn Weyl). This is an extension of a must-read article by historian Quinn Slobodian (Crackup Capitalism, The Globalists etc) about the aftermath and popularity of SI amongst the crypto-bro neo-monarchist anarcho-capitalists Silicon Valley crowd (Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan). It is lively, very funny, and informative talk – in the sense that you won’t have to read this book, which I would not advice anyone to do.

How many bad, idiotic future takes, bad airport self-help bestsellers peddled by hucksters and self-aggrandizing charlatans can we take? A lot it seems. This book is so wrong on so many levels why would anyone bother to analyze or devote 1 h of their lives to it. In Romania “sovereign individuals” have been a media sensation making the news since they refuse to show their papers or refuse to recognize the Romanian state. Most of them are caught driving without a driving license, and while Romanian media branded them as weird ‘radicals’ and ‘sectarians’ (which is not far from the truth) nobody bothers to actually place them in this libertarian continuum.

The Romanian cases, from a country that nobody even bothers to mention in the news, and is basically a ‘standing reserve’, are at bottom end of our discussion, yet they are still influenced (attracted) by the book by William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson and their antistate worldview. It is perhaps ironic that sovereign individuals in the East appear like petty criminals or juvenile deliquents (I will get to that), completely out of place from the chummy exclusivity of the SI. This for the simple fact that they do not have many privileges (other than having a Romanian EU passport – that in fact translates to being a second-ranked citizen). The initial SI conceit – is made for rich individuals who want (and have the money) to escape the grasp of the state and of democratic rule. They feel that the elite is not elitist enough and surely not interested in allowing anyone to join their ranks without the necessary monetary power, and most importantly – they are citizens of a decrepit empire, not citizens of a satellite, second-rate, second-world country.

This anarcho-capitalist cookbook failed on all accounts – but it has achieved notoriety since the claims made by its authors are constantly being dusted off, revived, and repackaged as brand new. In a sense this is exactly one of those bad novums that Darko Suvin, theoretician of the SF wrote, it is those new things that are not new but are constantly attracting attention just because they are based on notoriety and self-confidence, not on facts or any sort of valuation. They always have the same solution, shrink the state, minimize governments, and establish freeports. For them, elites are not enough isolated, and the ivory towers are not high enough. The tech geniuses should never mix, mingle or even dilute their gene pool. According to SI, globalization should be not just about going to exotic locations, but enjoying your privileges, and celebrating cheap labor and ‘sweatshop’. about our sovereign right to retreat, the fantasy of “opt-outing” of everything (of course taxes and inflation).

What (according to Quinn Slobodian) makes this book a special case is that it is completely proud of its dystopian outlook and cynical about its statements before such cynicism (not the Greek one) became the rule. It basically heralds (and proclaims) the collapse of the nation-state in the wake of cyberspace expansion. It is basically an unadorned, unapologetic, and stripped-down version of free markets triumphalism and elitism. Everyone who is not part of the breakaway ‘zone’ the have-nots, the ‘wasteoids’, ‘welfare queens’ (what would be an anarcho-capitalist text without the enemies of the ‘free society’), and losers of the market economy are left on the outside, in the Cursed Land of the collapsing state. Maybe the most annoying thing is that our world has started to look more and more like what was endorsed by SI propagandists. Milei in Argentina, Trump in US, and Netanyahu in Israel are both pro-free markets and enemies of democracy. This is also the world of bitcoin con artist Sam Bankman Fried, who was both one might say incredibly successful and an appalling disaster (these are both characteristics of the SI way).

Another good observation (among other funny and caustic jabs) is that the anarcho-capitalist mindset has a juvenile inclination, it sounds a bit like a R L Stevenson adventure. You get your pirate gold and you stash it away preferably on an empty offshore fiscal paradise island (forgetting that there are no more ’empty places’ (or emptied by colonial genocides). The Goldbug has something of tabletop game, their outlook is gamified, where you ‘farm’ and transform yourself into the king of the castle.

A big blindspot is of the cognitariat (the authors pretend they are part of that) is a complete lack of social imagination. They actually indulge in the dream of complete isolation of the information society. You isolate yourself from labour but you still have nannies and servants. They are also very prone to de-growth dreams in the sense of devolving the state but they are not off-the-grid preppers, they are thinking about having a top position in comfy super-rich semi-feudal enclave. Nowhere does the book worry about who cooks for you or who takes out your garbage. Everyone is disconnected from the material base and productivism is not even mentioned as if computers will supply everything like in an elitist version of full luxury communism.

There are a couple of interesting (much more interesting than the SI) science fiction who actually work trough all the details of such a vision. Two of them were mentioned at the cusp of the late 70s and early 80s which seems to be a time when Reagan turbo-charged such speculative worldbuilding. First is

Alongside Night is an agorist SF from 1979 (there is also a trashy movie adaptation with Kevin Sorbo apparently) pits agorist (black market fanatics) Milton Friedmanians and Hayekians to battle it out among the ruins of the collapsing US state.

Considered a classic libertarian SF, the 1981 is again an example of what if an arcology (that feels pretty feudal) would emerge after some riots, with citizens of the arcology living like a state inside a state or city within a city in future LA. All of these fictions became part of the freefan’s subjectivity.

Anti-woke pro-gun sentiment also runs high in cryptobro and yellow-black milieus, as can be seen from this t-shirt design posted by some German anarcho-capitalist TW account.

2275 – Free To Choose with Milton Friedman (TV series 1980)

All the episodes here.

Depending on where you stand on the political-economic spectrum – you might find (like me) this documentary enlightening but also completely horrific and appalling at the same time. One cannot watch this popular show from the early Reaganite 1980s without making it responsible for a lot the troubles we are facing today. One can describe it as incredibly farcical, hypocritical and sincere at the same time. It is a unapologetic encapsulation of what free market fundamentalism is purported to support (not what it actually is). It was primarily a response to an earlier landmark book and television series The Age of Uncertainty, by the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

I am not posting this here in order to endorse or platform the heinous views represented and propagated here, but only because under various forms and expressions or undercurrents they are very well represented and at work all around us. Ok, cannot stop myself saying that it is also a 70s baldie porn 🙂 like one friend put it. This PBS documentary hosted by that baldie at height of his fame, a Nobel prize winner – Milton Friedman features the most known face of libertarian neoliberalism today (just consider that the Mont Pelerin Society of which he was a member called themselves proudly neoliberal way back in the 1950s!).

Hailing from the Former East, having lived through the 1990s, I have been one of these (ex-commie) socialist kids that has been raised and reeducated on free market dogma but who has lived trough Big Bang liberalization, and has seen anti statist dogma take over much of the Romanian intelligentsia. I do not think that today’s political class in Romania, with small exceptions, caters to anything less than some form of libertarian thought or pro entrepreneurial policies represented here in this documentary. Although I remember both rationing, solid education, state provided vacations in the balneo-climateric localities and the days of the planned economy where I lived my teenage years, it is hard to reconstitutie this vision today, mostly because of 30 years plus of liberalisation and free market reign dogma have wiped all that. I agree also with the fact that under containment and inner nationalistic excess Romania became more and more a sort of buffer state used by the west against Soviet Union, while Ceaușescu was courted by Kissinger and Thatcher. Also fucking hated the PTTAP exercises in front of the school even if they kept you healthy and where supposed to build up patriotic spirit. Pionieri organizations was also not for loosers with poor school track record like me. Anyway those years are indelible. Under the circumstance Romania had it easier than Russia during it’s Privatisation phase, but it was still a time of hustling, being poor and waiting for visas, losing all your saving in pyramid schemes, and witnessing how the state was being captured from the 90s on by oligarchic interests, punctured ny US military black sites and enslaved by public private /corporate deals.

It is a good bet to say that the kind of free-market libertarian militantism represented by this series and this episode, in particular, guided many governments and brought us to where we are right now, especially in terms of fighting against democracy, denying climate change and deflating politics. Since the late 70s we have seen the cavalcade of the Chicago Boys (Friedman was perhaps the most famous Chicago boy) from Chile to South Africa to Bucharest and to Moscow. The dreams of Reagan and Thatcher in the UK were spiked by the holy word of these economists. They come in several flavors – and Quinn Slobodian a historian of neoliberalism has in his last (great) book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of A World Without Democracy (2023) basically made a taxonomy of their anti democratic dreams and also made me search for this documentary series and try and watch it. Far from being the end of history the nation state was seen as an impediment in the face of the Zone. And I also mean here the Romanian Km Zero – in Piața Universității Bucharest. This used to be called anti communist zone, basically a zone free of communism and also protection. In the end the protesters from the early 90s dreamed about full capitalism.

To be precise – I wanted to watch the first chapter on Hong Kong, because it was the first on the freedom index, the fist city-state model idolized by the neoliberal free market radicals. Why? Quinn discusses at large the context of the series and of “uncle Miltie” standing smiling with the back on the HK skyline of tall thin scrapers. For many HK was just Jackie Chan, the martial arts kung fu movies or the toy industry. HK was one of the “Asian Tigers” but it was also a model for deregulation which amounted to the fact that the tiny city-state and financial capital of Asia was being ruled like a corporation. The highest position was that of an economic Chief Executive (like the CEOnof a company), more powerful than the governor (till 1997 HK was still a colony of the UK and one built initially on the Opium trade). Quinn recalls time and time again how HK became something of a mirage, the first ‘smart city’, the first example of what became plans for Hong Kong on Hudson or Hong Kong on Thames (Canary Wharf). And although it had a unique colonial history, a local history and local situation connected with the Pearl River and Guangdong, ij the minds of the free market radicals it came to be seen as eminently transplantable and easy to copy.

Basically all that because the principle of “the sweatshop” and no labor protection legislation, no voting rights – became its. key to economic success. Everything that the West forgot or lost in the words of Friedman. This reverse Orientalism (reverse in the sense that it takes all the tropes of the lazy, unchanging Orient and turns it on its head) was taken directly from the very tycoons and wealthy families who steered the city towards “prosperity”.

This is for Friedman the place where the free market is unfettered and undirected and where the states exist only to protect the interests of the investors and business elite. To be sure, and even of James Clavell Noble House is half true – it eas a den of spies and it’s corporate world was totally enmeshed in Cold War dealings. It is also the place where workers have no protection whatsoever, where the market prices signal is clear, and where you do not need any coordination from above (oh yeah the invisible hand). He does not miss any moment to poke fun at the Soviet Model and to consider HK something completely inimical to the ‘unnatural’ socialist planned economy. It is both bland and incredibly annoying to hear him express his ideas about how his mom worked in a sweatshop and how that has been the birthplace of success. While this may be true like it was for so many East European migrants, the story was also one of racism, eugenics and anti-immigration and working class struggle. Working conditions got improved with demands and growing capacity to unionize. This is completly missing. So this is basically a propaganda documentary (or a dogma) that has helped bring about a dystopia we’re living in right now. This is not sci-fi, and this is not cyberpunk, it is future inequality sold as present solution. Here we have the origin of the destruction of the welfare state, the divestment from education, ecological concerns, health, and why we lack infrastructure.

One had to lower or eliminate tariffs, offer incentives for investors and corporations, and forget about voting rights, forget about labor rights, and forget about colonialism. So ethno states and tariffs and trade wars feel anti free market only of one realizes that all the protectionist authoritarians such as Orban or Trump have actually permitted free trade only in chosen areas. The bet was to import this model and hope that the carrots (or sticks) will work out. If one wanted to be “free” (free to be poor could be another subtitle for this episode) one had to work under horrific conditions and just be infinitely adaptable, resilient, and exploitable/flexible. Voting with your feet – its the first time when this expression makes sense. HK existed because a tightly controlled pool of migrant pool was always at its disposal. It was this combination of Confucianism, lack of democracy, and unfettered capitalism that HK was exuding in the 70s and 80s. That’s why it came to be seen as the way forward for both the new turbo-charged capitalism that both US, as well as the UK and Germany, saw as the way forward out of an economic slump, generally high wages and rising oil prices. One should never forget that the so-called Californian ideology – the deregulatory thinking behind Big Tech (Musk and Co) was a subset of this school of economic thinking. Apple amd Foxconn stems as much from Friedman’s ode to the markets power to innovate and keep the labor force disenfranchised and disorganized. When Peter Thiel talks about escaping the nation state – or establishing as maby secessionist micro nations he speaks the language of free market radicals. The pattern of Global Cities had to be eminently reliable, not interested in redistribution, only in absorbing and ejecting the global flows of capital. And that is where we are now.

The Flat Tax was also basically an HK fiscal innovation that became the rule in the 1990s in the former East and a lot of the EU countries (including Germany where it is called tax brake – basically a brake on how much the state may be allowed to invest in public facilities, infrastructure, education etc). Its ideals were basically to circumvent the barriers of politics by any means and to establish “zones” of exception within the state. Fragmenting the planet and supporting the formation of micro-nations and crypto coin enclaves all over the planet (there are currently over 5400 special zones grouped into around 81 categories) was the aim of such free market radicals. Anarhapulco – the libertarian convention in Mexico was also modeled around the same ideals. We know how that turned out.

The secret story is that even in HK the government action was at work, just that this government action was never in the interest of the immigrants (cheap labor from the Chinese mainland), and all the rights were also achieved with the cost of blood (and protests from the late 60s on. There’s also a total mesh of contacts and friendships across ths border even as HK became the bottle neck and preparatory area for China’s extensive reforms. It is ironic to see this whole idea of the free market zone taking root in China and being completely overturned (hear the Adam Tooze talk) after China joined the WTO with the US became sudden gatekeeper. China had just invited the world community to join its investment bank anf Cameron eas the only one to join. This was the first crack in the US/UK pact. Suffice to say Eastern Europe (including Russia) has become the playground of ‘intentional community’ micro nation building. The Rothbardian decomposition of the state and of the nation state is strongest there, and even it’s warlordism is a case in point.

One small detail, libertarians who advocate for a minimal state are usually called minarchists, and those who advocate for no state are anarcho-capitalists. One final word – Friedman filmed there while he was on a trip invited to the Mont Pèlerin Society meeting at the most luxurious hotels in town sitting on Plot Nr 1. PBS series was sponsored by Getty Oil and Sara Scahill Foundation.

2269 – SILO TV series (2023)

spacetime coordinates: few hundred years after the apocapyse

Here are some possible reasons to watch SILO series (as usual no spoilers!):

1. Enjoy safely from home curvaceous neo-brutalist architectures that reminded me of a lot of gaming architectures (somehow related to subway or metro designs). And ask yourselves if SILO is Apple+ streaming reply to new Cold War fears? Ok, maybe you are too young to remember when Outer Limits and Twilight Zone series went into the details of “average” families and societies that either prepared for the apocalypse (or the “Red scare”) by closing in on themselves and their (commie?) neighbors. Yes, that was a time drenched with a heightened sense of paranoia when you could unwittngly marry a commie ( I Married a Communist 1949) or battle monsters brithed by radioactive fallouts (Them! 1954). That was also a time for underground living and atomic scares. Well for what it’s worth, the atomic fears are back with Russia’s aggression war on Ukraine getting close to the largest atomic powerplant in Europe and people raiding the apothecary for iodine pills. SILO is basically a subterranean arcology right out of 1950s scenarios, at the height of the Cold War or the Cuban Crisis. Private home ownership has been a flagship of the free world yet this private ownership had its under side: the bunker. With the 2008 economic crisis and the housing/real estate crash, the growth of bunker offers has been relentless. How did Western post-WWII democracies imagine the future home? From early on, future homes where showcases of industry and Western capitalist values in the face of Soviet or Socialist modernist ideals. Thus, the House of the Future was an outcome of these Red Scare fears and an eventual bulwark against possible atomic catastrophes, financial troubles, and worsening outside conditions as well as ideological encroachment. If house ownership seemed to drive housing booms, there was also an underside. The American Dream managed to exclude and evict certain portions of the population on economic and racial grounds. The “house of the future” was conceived as a perfect self-sustaining (and sustainable) dream if only it could keep the undesirables on the outside. It was a self-contained bubble that could hold at bay both toxicity, freak weather as well as human misery or discontent.
2. The SILO is almost a rehearsal for the colonization of other planets, which is why the outside is non-existent, mediated and akin to the deserted exoplanet. It is almost like living on a Mars colony or a spaceship. Take the Alison and Peter Smithson House of the Future designed in 1956 for the Ideal Home Exhibition in London – and we can see overlaps with plans and blueprints for ideal bunkers and spaceship habitats. What strikes a chord now is that this is a sort of pre-Big Brother setting, a staged and open habitat. It does not have a ceiling or a roof, it is transparent from above. This house was not a house to be lived in, it was more of a stage. It was meant as an exhibition platform – a showcase where the spectacle of futurity (and Western modernity) did its rounds and where visitors could peer from above as if looking into a laboratory maze of experimental mice. SILO takes this in another direction, since it is a multi-racial society, yet with a class-system and pro-natalist eugenist politics. Eugenics is back and tech entrepreneurs do not shy away to express support for such views that have a terrible and brutal history behind. So in contrast with the old 1950s House of the Future, the SILO was meant to be collective if layered and divided living quarters. The usual SF trope with a long an UP/DOWN axis makes it a vertical Snowpiercer of sorts. There is a race to the top but once born in a certain level or section you cannot go up. Yet there is some downward mobility with the main character (like Engels) choosing to the bottom. All utopian plans concerning collectivity in the Anglo-American SF do not have a good track recrod. Usually, collective living is reserved for ideological enemies. This I think is where SILO series deviates from the usual familial unit. It is a whole block – a community of a little more than 10.000 humans (though there are many secrets concerning its origin and the possibility of outside humans with their own societies). Generally speaking, it is a quite diverse lot (till the recent episodes) and even if restricted by The Pact (you shall not magnify or shall not mechanize bottom-to-top transport), social mobility stifled by nepotism, by regulations and rules, I would say it is a much more egalitarian than the capitalist world we actually live in today. There do not seem to be homeless or people starving. Even if it somehow superficially reminds us of real existing Socialist (or Eastern Marxist) historical examples with its repressive surveillance systems and Judicial arm, the economic differences btw the inhabitants are not at all as extreme as in our societies.
3. SILO Apple+ series comes at a moment when overall fragmentation and fragilization (not to say militarization) is rampant. We live in a moment when extreme forms of anarcho- and libertarian capitalist ideas keep on popping up, no matter what. Advocating for so-called “free ports” and “free zones” or smart cities (free of taxes, free of regulations and basically free of any oversight or responsibility) is not new. This model has been ballooning on and off all over the world with the most notorious examples ranging from the US and the UK to places as unexpected as ex-US army basis in Afghanistan now under the Taliban. The question of TRUTH which seems all-important in this series is also too close to the “Truthers” claim, but it can also be a play on all these revelations and “talking truth to power” – and a feeling that this, under the current capitalist system will lead nowhere. The same as all the SILO ceremonials and sports events – they are just reverted or degenerated forms of historical events (this is again something that Tea Part and Truthers hold in common). The Freedom Festival celebrates the victory over the separatist escapist fraction, yet the sovereign individual is today at the center of conservative thought. Freedom and anti-cancel culture campaigns have become a constant part of the deregulatory push of tech entrepreneurs (and outcome of TW takeover by Musk). SILO announces today’s race for the insular. No, globalization and free trade are not disappearing. Within certain renegade sections of the Austro-libertarian neoliberal family – there was an attempt to eliminate democracy and fuse economy with trade within smaller, tight-knit (and like-minded) communities. What is SILO if not the result of the touted failure of nation-states, or the flight from the grasp of federal governments? According to such views, geopolitical blocks and democracies failed to avert catastrophe, stick to climate agreements and placate the military-entertainment complex. The surprise is that this SILO micro-state is rather drab, ignorant of its past, slightly totalitarian, and at the whim of its agencies (as the US with its Alphabeth NSA/CIA/FBi agencies?!). Another (not unimportant aspect) is the fact that a kind of runners or gig economy workers are all the time running down the stairs doing all sorts of errands. Is it the result of The Pact interdiction? Probably, but it is also a reminder of our world where food delivery services with the poorest of pay and under the most polluted conditions are a click away! If it is a “zone” closed off from the seemingly polluted deathly surface, it somehow reverted to the ideals of the old West with its Sheriffs and Mayors. Apart from the brown-grey and visible worn-out look of surfaces and its forced recycling ideals and hack labs (very far from today’s Big Tech control), this could be a real existing socialist world. You can also start watching this way. At the same time – it also seems strangely lifeless. Following the lives of citizens feels like living in Hobbiton: THE SHIRE haunts SILO. This is the most displeasing feature (plus long repetitive dialogues) – a sort of Tolkeinesque like villager life, closer to Amish or Pioneer town role-playing. So no Moebius/Jodorowsky Incal 1980s vertical (shaft) city. No color and no excess.
4. Depending on your point of view (or ideological flavor or science fantasy feel), Silo may be a missed opportunity or a chance to tackle an apocalyptic imagination of billionaires and tech entrepreneurs hiring military security to survive a societal collapse. A collapse, that they are constantly obsessing about but actively contributing to. While SILO is not confronting the way luxury bunkers it is a fictional extension of the lifestyles explored in Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell. Such silos are the model for SILO and they are real not fictional. There is no need of fictioning in this sense. Companies such as Survival Condo have transformed ex missile silos into prime real estate. Cold War as a business model. Prepperism is so deeply entrenched in the US that there must be no surprise that every other tech AI entrepreneur has a bunker in his head (thinking here of ChatGPT’s Sam Altman).
5. Here is my favorite point. Watch SILO if you must as an answer to recent Chinese SF blockbusters such as Wandering Earth. I am referring here to the main character in the 2nd eps “Machines” – the proletarian figure of the engineer Juliette Nichols (played by Rebecca Ferguson of Dune fame). Watch her and her crew at the task of switching off the main generator for repairs. For me, this scene could be a perfect counterpart to the Liu Qi scene in Wandering Earth 1 installing the Lighter Core at the Sulawesi Earth Engine. That Wandering Earth fragment brought some of the most amazing scenes in recent cinema since it deployed intentionally some extant realist-socialist imagery by showing how humans (NO super-heroes), in a group effort and under great odds, manage to fix a very difficult issue. And VERY IMPORTANTLY this is an issue not dealing with chips or semiconductors, but with some huge engines. These mega devices are closer to giant mecha than high-precision equipment. Such engines appeared long since gone in cinema (and only part of the industrial age or Stalinist arsenal) or as said mecha designs. Here you have a gigantic rotating engine that keeps the entire SILO running by using some (what I suspect) geothermal energy source that can only be interrupted for short periods of time before catastrophic pressure build-up. Everything is against the clock. All the action in this episode was built around this engineering feat and “repair” moment. Where do we see such a repair scene? In my books, they are usually part of the Soviet Union or Romanian brochures about industrial achievements or stories my dead grandpa (a wielder) used to tell. This is very ironic, especially thinking that Apple is a company that has made repairs nearly impossible. Apple is particularly notorious for its closed hardware policy and for making eventual maintenance as difficult as possible for its utilizers.

Here is a series of tweet about that episode and more:

Eps 3 Machines was a surprise.
I see here an influence of the Chinese #WanderingEarth movies. SF action based on a collective effort to repair a(geothermal energy) generator. Mechanic Juliette Nichols reminds me of Liu Qi installing the Lighter Core in the Sulawesi Earth Engine. https://t.co/v9VB4bNxlu

— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) May 16, 2023

Photograph of the interior bedroom inhabited by two couples in the roles as inhabitants. House of the Future 1956, London.

House of the Future 1956 floor plan.

Drawing of a mat cluster of Houses of the Future 1956.

House of the Future, 1956, floor plan.

Floor plan of the various SILO levels.

Actual advert of Survival Condo Project in a ex-Cold War missile silo.

2127 / The Anarchists (HBO docuseries 2022)

spacetime coordinates: a US enclave in Acapulco Mexico cca 2015 till now

It showcases a series of events that unfold over six years. An impulsive one-time gathering in Acapulco, turns into an annual event. Directed by Todd Schramke. It showcases a series of events that unfold over six years.

I have posted in the past an in-depth documentary in 3 parts directed by Ramonet (Tancrède) about anarchist history, thinking and various experiments, and even mentioned in passing the figure of Murray Rothbard (1925-1995). In comparison this documentary feels like a joke or a mock-up but for many it might still spell the truth about current anarcho-capitalist trends. Others have done a much better job at outlining the intellectual history of that particular school of extreme market capitalism from which it sprung called neoliberalism, and how its birth after WW1 out of the ashes of the multi-national Habsburg Empire was much more than the usual key figures everybody mentions (Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), yet they are the ones who left a lasting and one might say pretty damaging imprint on today’s brand of globalism. It is in this context that historian Quinn Slobodian mentions a few important others (such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin), that struck a different path than their predecessors or contemporaries not supporting the usual laissez-faire economics but ending up on some bizarre intellectual paths of their own (including preparing some of the actual racist enthno- politics or one might say).

As capitalism arrived in Romania after 1989 with layoffs, unprecedented deindustrialization, price liberalisation (and the follow-up: gig economy and precarity), the usual fare of shock therapy (at least in Eastern Europe) was also accompanied by a sleuth of translations from some of these and other writers. Since these ideas suddenly started being so pervasive, so ‘natural’ in our societies, their influence ranges from government edicts to from movies and (sadly) school textbooks. Hard to trace their history or to even question them nowadays as presentism rules. Still there’s family resemblances. One characteristic they have in common (even the Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin might agree on that) is in the words of another important historian – Ellen Meiksins Wood – the differentiation of ‘spheres’ in capitalism, in particular the separation of the ‘economic sphere’ from the ‘political sphere’. The way in which capitalism exploitation works along in history is by transforming certain “essential political issues—struggles over domination and exploitation that historically have been inextricably bound up with political power—into distinctively ‘economic’ issues.”(check Ellen M W essential article from 1981 on that!).

Here come the anarcho-capitalist of today. Californian Ideology is drenched with that too. It is a direct child-brain of the Reagan-Tatcher compact. In other obnoxious ways it keeps vaunting its purity & pseudo outcast veneer – by affirming its libertarian credo. Year they have a mottled base and have drawn members from all sorts of corners (and this docu makes it amply clear): affluent types ex-finance ex-Wall Street types, Tech Billionaires, Dark Web traffickers dominante to which one might add gun ownership rights promoters, preppers, ex vets, home-schooling activists, tax-resistence activists, even the odd pacifist, conspiracy theorists etc. Still, most vizibile in the end are PROMOTERS OF HYPERBITCOINITIZATION and its almost as if this subtends their whole experiment, without any questioning ot tech scepticism (as long as they sponsor you & coin pays). But to talk about real – thermodynamic costs. It’s a crypto data mining bonanza world where thermodynamics (Gottfried Leibniz’s point about mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace’s demon – an argument wisely made jn regard to Blade Runner by C Mudede) is forgotten, magically suspended. It’s not at all far-fetched to say ideas espoused or ideological commitments expressed by ancaps had a say in both the alt-right and the 2021 United States Capitol Attack as well as the current crypto boom and bust. Bitcoin and blockchain tech are part of what could be coined Silicon Valley Solutionism – of preffering a technological fix for everything or pushing their inventions and solutions especially if they benefit the providers of those very solutions (sold with an invisible higher prize tag than what the city administrations have payed to make it snug & comfy for them). Anarhapulco seems like a bizarre neocolonial enterprise in US backyard: Latin America. Since end of 19th c ghe rising US Empire has played dirty, brutally pushing its interests and orchestrating numerous anti democratic political coups in the name of democracy, subverting local power and increasing misery and instability. It’s NSS apparatus, it’s corporations and elites have been instrumental in that. Important to understand that these flimsy overnight positions and ideologies are not at all as spontaneous or self-made meaningless Anarcapulco ‘joke’ had deep roots in the Cold War era narratives and paranoia of movies such as Red Dawn or books such as Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand where the enemy was either US state (or IRS) described as a hideout for ‘commies’ or ‘parasites’ at home. Movies such as Tge Hunt also speak of this shifting paranoia that characterizes uses of ‘RINOs'(Republican In Name Only) to blame those deemed un-loyal, ‘bad actors’ and especially the strawman of Cultural Marxism or malefic liberal elites at home.

The reality is much more complex, and there is actually historically and institutional reasons why this complicity btw the National Security State and its covert support for such radical free market elements or entrepreneurial ideas works almost because of ideals that otherwise would deny all state involvement and all goverment aid. Did the at any point ask or consult even the local communities were they landed? Did they use any democratic means to inquire what the locals think prior to their arrival there? Noy at all. All this whining over taxation and constant victimizing over government interference actually hides the way cities in the US have been declared “failed cities” (see Detroit – who also makes an appearance in The Anarchist as a ‘white’ commune ? almost the counterpart of Anarcapulco). They ignore the almost complete systemic racism, non existent welfare, rampant environmental injustice sjd unwillingness to act on it, a minuscule public spending and endemic lack of goverment interference – since for all its global reach, tech supremacy, influence in world affairs and military over reach (800 mil basis around the world) the US internally is built on feet of clay.

Important to understand that these anti- government ideas did not go away with Tatcher or Reagan, but have been very cooking up, alive in the dotcom boom rise & fall, the foundation & impunity of (national asset) Big Tech entrepreneurship since the early 1990s, well before COVID 19 pandemic struck and expose how the trust in much public institutions had been eroded, or if public infrastructure and even liberal democracy was itself worth saving, well before the UBER leaks scandal hit us.

So maybe you won’t find anything of the above in this docuseries, and on watch lists and recommendation. I find these things pretty blaring. The Anarchists is more about the celebertarians and seasteading than their actual history of ancap encrouchment (although u see a lot of Ron Paul and even clips with Ayn Rand – tough that would be enough to put you off). Watch it if you must, keeping in mind all of the above or enjoy a conventional beach resort party gone sore. The only interesting part (beside its almost cheapo reality TV feel) is how made-up and how unconvincing sound this cries for freedom from normal affluent mostly white (apart from very few notable exceptions) mostly bachelor, well educated and mostly male (the women had almost scripted exclusive nurturing roles). The only unstable elements – the sad PTSD vets are almost colateral, but they are the only shadow of constant wars abroad (Irak, Afganistan) and the way imperial foreign policy strikes back, becomes war as mass culture. Militarism abroad has a tendency to spill over into militarization of police violence and disastrous & multiplying mass shootings.

Apart from a vegan place there is NOTHING absolutely nothing about the local Mexican anarchists or rich local resistance and anti-exploitation anti imperialist histories. Where is the history of the Mexican Revolution, of of the earliest revolutions of the XX c? Where are the Trots’s in exile or the Zapatistas in the South? All these counter-histories seem forgotten, delete. Nothing about the terrible costs inflected upon migrants that want to move North in search of a better life no matter what the cost to their personal liberty and freedom or the risk from de-hiydration or being hunted down by vigilante right wing border patrols. None of that here! It is a history in a bubble of another bubble. Nobody is questioning the criteria on which this on rush for so-called boundless optimization, efficiency and guaranteed benefits is built. Here are the absolute total normies you might say – and look how easy it is nowadays to self-identify as ‘anarchist’ or be reborn overnight as libertarians or have a friend in crutches hand you a book on the EVIL gov, and then instant ‘alternative’ lifestyles suddenly feel part of ‘your’ orientation and mission. This generally tends to end bad for the unprotected. Is it odd, is it ‘radical’ to be one of those suddenly moving from the rich Global North to the Global South being moved by ‘vibes’ and crypto-currency sponsorship and blogging platforms?! Don’t think so. It’s striking that most ‘crypto scheme’ promoter plan to revolutionize the economy only in impoverished, deregulated, and de-funded countries and mostly having suffered directly under the US neo-colonialism. They are either reeling after neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ or finding themselves squeezed under crushing private international debt & austerity measures. This possible explains how crypto arrived in Salvador via goverment promises and Philippines via gaming. The whole cheaper than at home (low cost) hotel- ballardian (Cocaïne Nights) environment living in Anarchapulco is actually what the utopia of this seasteding (fiscal paradise) crowd was all about.

IMDB