Thinking about ‘How to Start a New Country’
“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” — The Red Queen
Under a fiat standard, citizens, like Alice in Wonderland, have fallen down the rabbit hole. Bankers and bureaucrats have broken the social contract. Savers get wrecked, a generation has been priced out of the housing market and mothers speculate on GameStop. “Eat the rich” is a common refrain on social media. There is a growing sense of injustice as more and more realize the rules of the game are heavily tilted in favor of asset holders and those closest to the money printer.
“There is an infinite amount of cash in the Federal Reserve.” — Minneapolis Fed Chair
How then do we escape the domain of the Red Queen, where insanity reigns supreme? In the essay “How to Start a New Country”, Balaji S. Srinivasan presents different ways to achieve a clean slate. Elections are the typical way of changing course, but this is usually only a matter of a few degrees. Revolutions and war may lead to drastic change, but the resulting bloodshed makes them undesirable alternatives.
“If I turn fifty degrees, the whole ship turns over.” — Barack Obama
Seasteading — the concept of living on international waters — gets individuals closer to sovereignty. The high seas are simply too vast for any one country to control and thus do not belong to any State’s jurisdiction. The attraction of a luxurious, floating city, free from tyranny may appeal to Peter Thiel, but the threat of disease outbreak undermines this model. Personally, embarking on a cruise ship has never been less appealing.
“State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined — not least by the forces of globalisation and international cooperation.” — United Nations
Srinivasan offers his preferred solution: the cloud country. As the name implies, this nation does not exist in the physical realm (at least not at first), but virtually. An online network built on shared values = decentralized communities that transcend geographic borders. As the community grows its provable capital reserves, it could eventually crowdfund territory all over the physical world.
Half of UN-recognized sovereign states have fewer than 10M citizens and 20% have fewer than 1M.
Given the scale of the internet, a cloud country made up of 1–10M like-minded digital citizens seems possible, if not conservative. After all, individual influencers have millions of followers. Amazon has more members than all but seven countries.
Surely the UN will endorse such a cloud country, and everyone will live in harmony, right? I have my doubts. As this new citizenry moves from cloud to real world, expect hostility from governments who view them as a threat to their own sovereignty.
