Silicon Valley billionaires are so hermetically sealed off from community—so afraid of it, and yet so so so alone without it, so bitter to see others have it—they’re trying to “disrupt” the very concept.
Via “Charter cities,” “freedom cities,” “network states,” and the “abundance agenda” libertarian dorks on both sides of the proverbial aisle have found their Next Big Thing: a remade municipality, free from the evils of government oversight, tax obligations, or and anything else they don’t personally like. Woke, for instance, or ummm people who don’t have homes.
Instead of local democracy, what if we wrote a 4,000 page terms of service agreement for our citizens to definitely read and also certainly know when it changes? (Certainly all of the citizens of our new Libertarian Republic will have had their legal teams perform a forensic risk assessment before exercising their God-given right of consumer choice to make the obvious rational and objective decision to come over and consume our community via their hodlings in “remaining days” coin.) And what if that terms of service agreement were governed not by a Democratically arrived at set of laws but by the whims of uhhhh us? The tech overlords proividing the venture capital? HelloOoO? He who holdeth the bag maketh the rules.
The dream of Galt's Gulch coming to the most hollowed-out and desperate city near you!
This shit is extremely real by the way. Talking about it is, however, a “wokeism.” So you may not have heard about it. If you thought Larry Lucchino pulled the rug on us… wait til Peter Thiel comes to town.
We go over the concept of these freedom cities, the state of play, then look at the historical roots, via Raymond Craib’s fantastic Adventure Capitalism, a 2022 book looking at the charter city concept in the long tradition of Colonial Buffoonery. Time was, only the Third World experienced these excesses firsthand, but remember that Empire Is A Boomerang. It is not, as some would have it, a baseball… hit by the big meaty hands of America—in the bat cracking a nostalgia so strong you can smell it ahhhh like apple pie as that big cornfed American Boy watches his line drive soar over the left field wall, land on an aircraft carrier, get in the cockpit, take off the aircraft carrier, fly directly over a wedding, drop the bomb.
No the cosmic horrors we’ve wrought on the far corners of this world for the last century are boomeranging back to us now. Charter cities are one of the more plausible ways in which it manifests: Every urban center in America finally converted into the neo-colonial fiefdom for raw exploitation of the natives we’ve been angling at since Reagan first said “tough on crime” and the Vic Mackeys of the world took that Classic Libertarian Lie to heart.
Anyway, happy listening. Let us know what you think! This episode was a bit off our beaten path but a lot more interesting for it, I think.
This podcast is part of the Worcester Sucks media empire, which is 100 percent funded by its readers. Please take out a paid subscription or throw us a tip or order some merch if you appreciate having a real independent outlet like this here! Thank you!
Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi / Merch Store
And help us get the word out too!
—This podcast is now available on all the major podcast players: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts (idk what that is) and you can add it to any other sort of player with this RSS link.
—Outro music: “Whitey On The Moon” Gil Scott Heron
—Intro music: “Roaming The Cosmic Winds” by Mystic Realm, Worcester-based dungeon synth project by Kevin Fitzgerald. Check out the full album, Forsaken Kingdom, on the Mystic Realm Bandcamp.
—If podcasts aren’t your thing (totally get it, you did sign up for a newsletter after all) you can adjust which sections (Outdoor Cats, Bad Advice, WPS In Brief, etc) come to your inboxin your settings.
.
Share this post