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“

LISTEN

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.