TRASHFUTURE - UNLOCKED: Writtenology - Crack Up Capitalism ft. Quinn Slobodian

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

We've unlocked our discussion with Quinn Slobodian about his book, Crack Up Capitalism, which explores the creation of a thousand mini Hong Kongs around the world and the right wing nut jobs that love them. If you liked this discussion, we've got more Writtenology on the $5 feed and we've also just released our discussion of Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects on the $10 tier (https://www.patreon.com/posts/writtenology-82404854?). Check out Quinn's book here! https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/316685/crack-up-capitalism-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241460245

Hi, everyone. It's Riley here. Usually, this would be Nate, but Nate is on holiday. I'm coming to you before the beginning of this episode of Writtenology, the sequel to the Book Club episodes where Alice and I talk about books, with, in this case, guest Quinn Slabodian, author of Crack Up Capitalism. It was a very interesting conversation, and we're releasing it out on the free feed as part of our promise to treat this basically like Writtenology, where episodes will come down from the $10 tier to the $5 tier to the free tier slowly and over time. We're releasing this one on the $5 tier because the first couple we were finding are on the free tier, excuse me, because in the first couple we

were finding our feet, and now we have the first episode on the $10 tier ready for you should you want to experience it now. In that one, we talked about Timothy Morton's hyper-objects, philosophy and ecology after the end of the world, so do check it out if you're interested if you want Book Club again and can't get enough of us talking about things written on pages. Anyway, enjoy this episode about Crack Up Capitalism with Quinn Slabodian. See you in a sec. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the third episode of the still tentatively titled Brain Zone. We decided Writtenology was too derivative of Writtenology. It wouldn't make sense outside

that context. No, you just decided that. I liked it, but you were like, no, I don't think so. Oh, I didn't say that. Oh, I liked it. I thought you decided that. No. I was just saying Writtenology. It's an impartial third party. I think you should go with Writtenology. Casting vote. Welcome to episode one of Writtenology, formerly known as episode three of the Brain Zone,

where we keep the chuckles to a sensible minimum and instead just have a serious conversation about a book, concept, idea, or piece of media. Yeah, this was going to be Fan Shen, and then I realized that Fan Shen is 1,000 pages long and I had a ton of works. I am still working on the five year plan of finishing that book. And that is going to be available later this month. All the gods smile on us. Inshallah. Yeah. Inshallah, that will be available later this month on the $10 tier. So that's a buck for every thousand pages. I know every hundred pages, excuse me.

Barring any catastrophic resource shortages or blow up of infrastructure. Oh, sure. Yes, that's right. And if I had to read a 10,000 page book for this, if I had to like read, I did the entire Gorman-Gast series for one hour of podcast content, you know? Yeah, you just said one sentence and didn't take a single breath. No, it is Riley and Alice and we are joined by our first guest in the history of this show within a show. It is Quinn Slobodian returning to this podcast feed, but making his first appearance on Ritnology. Quinn, how is it going?

It's going great. I'm sorry, James Scott couldn't be here with me. Oh, he's, he saw that he decided that the entire sort of concept of podcasting didn't pay enough attention to the local context of the listeners. He may be the pro zone. He may be the pro zone voice on the show. I think you might actually have a point. He may look at this and be like, yeah, Neon is just about respecting the Metier of the people out there, because he would have said, no, it should have been more respectful to the people that they displaced. They should have been like, there should have been like a Bedouin.

Yeah, they had their own like indigenous brain zones. He thought it was called Brain Zomia and he was going to be on and then he had to cancel. So Quinn's just written and released a trade book that I've read and I enjoyed and I also enjoyed seeing a lot of my old favorites discussed in it. But I think it's another one of these books that is pretty sort of insightful about a specific element of the relationship between sort of capital, the state, law institutions and so on with your concept of the zone. Now the book is called Crack Up Capitalism and can you just give us a little bit of a praisey of what it argues and why you're making the argument?

Sure. I mean, it's kind of two books at the same time. So I could just explain them both very quickly though. One book I think is a kind of field guide to these subnational quasi-extraterritorial jurisdictions that are called kind of as a group special economic zones. So people associate that with export processing zones sort of like barbed wire and clothes, sweatshops kind of thing on the one hand. And then also the way that China opened and reformed its economy by piece by piece, little territories allowing for different rules. So the zone is kind of the idea of a space that's below the envelope of the nation that operates by a different set of rules and laws in order to make itself more hospitable to mobile foreign capital.

So the one level of the book is just kind of like here are a series of places that operate on its own logic. Some are entire nations or quasi-nations, but all have a basic principle of an antagonism towards democracy usually to the point of sort of turning off democracy altogether. So on the one hand it's that it's kind of like a trip around the world from Dubai to Hong Kong to Liechtenstein to Honduras. All of our beloved little tax havens in three supports and things of this nature. Yeah, the kind of, as I call them, the kind of perforations of the world map that make capital work. The other half is kind of intellectual history of the most radical strain of libertarianism

that's known as anarcho-capitalism, the people that don't believe in the need for states whatsoever. So yeah, the problem is I've been writing for years about neoliberalism as a theory and that kind of Hayek and Friedman vein. And I basically spent years arguing with people that neoliberals do believe in this state and they just believe in a particular kind of state, like a reprogrammed state or refashioned state. And then I, as I think one does at some point, realize that there's a good argument to be made against yourself. And so you just have to go ahead and make it yourself. And the point was that there actually are some more radical people from within the neoliberal world who are so libertarian

that they do indeed want to not just go monarchist with a small state, but they want to go anarchist with no state. And they, for some reason, hadn't been written much about in this sort of scholarship of neoliberal thought. So I was like, all right, I just need to like make people aware of, you know, not just Milton Friedman, but his son, David and his grandson, Potry, and kind of put these people into the lineage. So it put those two things together. Some kind of like machinery of capitalism in its practice form. And then machinery of capitalism, which is our machinery of freedom is a book written by David Friedman, the libertarians who are kind of watching this unfolding of fragmentary capitalism, and basically getting

really excited about what it might mean for a stateless future. And I think one of the one of the conclusions I think the book draws, which it's worth, I think, setting out at the very beginning, as we talk about the interaction between these, as you call them, perforations in the world map, and the sort of anti state as such crusaders like sort of Patrick Friedman or Murray Rothbard, you know, people who actually I think often don't get written about in academia, because so much of their actual thought happens in like Huxter newsletters for gold bugs or alongside the writings of like the Turner diaries or whatever.

Well, just like little like couch conversations with whichever billionaire they've managed to infiltrate themselves next to on election nights. But I think that the relationship between capital in the state and the zone is an interesting one, especially in light of the fact that in some ways this is a book about the history of people who hate the state while sort of loving what they don't recognize the state doing as the state. So the example. Well, I always feel like sort of the not exactly the left wing analog of this, but if you if you read about like Hakeem Bay, and I use Hakeem Bay and heavy air quotes here, it says

theory of like temporary autonomous zones. I did a post on Twitter a couple of years ago that's the you know, the goose chasing after the guy that's like, what do you want that zone to be autonomous for? What are you going to do in the zone? And I think with these guys, it's somewhat clearer what they want to do in the zone. Well, what I was going to say is that there's this sort of antipathy towards the state, but the zones are in fact creations of the state as it continues to unwind or in the case of sort of like North United States sort of states in the global north, as they use these special zones to unwind the promises of the mid 20th century welfare state to allow

the avoidance of tax in the couched in the language of growth. And that all of these things that the state always did as the sort of handmade and of capital as the site of the unity of the ruling class, whatever you want to call it. While the sort of anti state Murray Rothbard type sort of look at the creation of these zones is a great victory against the state. Really, it's they're still cheering for something that is a state project. It's just that they don't recognize the state as anything but what the state was between 1946 and I don't know, 1979, they can't recognize the state outside those bounds. Yeah, you know, I think there's kind of two

things to say there. I mean, one is on the kind of para academic nature of people like Rothbard because it's for sure true that they're more likely to be cited in like making capitalism or zero hedge than they are in the financial times. And so there is this kind of the world of like quasi scholarly discussion that happens in, you know, that is often goes under the name rightly of conspiracy theory. But as you said, it comes out of investment advice manuals and it used to be investment newsletters about which I write a little bit in the book and then things like the Ron Paul survival report, which is what he renamed it after Clinton came into power, which is I think a totally understudied and first partially

for me it was it was under I was I see how it's understood because in the story tradition of history of political thought, like especially in the Cambridge tradition, you just don't study freaks like this, right? Like it's people need like a base level of respectability to like make it in the door of the journal. So you can write a people do write all the time now works about Hayek. But I don't think anyone at, you know, University of Cambridge has written a PhD about about Rothbard. So it kind of leaves open this this chance to do like the political theory of true weirdos and cranks, which is like an underestimated leaf fun thing to do, I think. So that's definitely that's part of the draw of the material for

the book. And then your larger point, Riley, I mean, completely, I mean, the kind of narrative arc of the book, I guess, is basically, you know, social democratic leaders looking with admiration at places that had never made those mid century promises are describing, you know, places like Dubai, or colonial Hong Kong, and trying to figure out how they can sort of like retrofit their social democracies to kind of like, unwind those mid century promises, but not necessarily all at once, but piecemeal, right, like in place by place by place. So the classic example, which is pretty well known, it's sort of like a center piece of the main book of urban history that I was teaching for decades is like the creation

of these urban enterprise zones. And in the UK, as part of thatcher's first budget, and Jeffrey Howe rolls out in 1980, the idea was quite explicitly to try to create sort of miniature Hong Kong's in the middle of inner city, Glasgow and Liverpool, like toe holds in these places. Yeah, exactly. And you know, why? Because local councils were dominated by labor, because which they saw and dominated by the voices of, you know, angry union members at that time. So you just you liberate territory. The historian Paul Johnson had a great description for it at this time, he said that these zones are like daggers pointed at the heart of socialism. And so they were trying to recreate the sort of frontier space inside of, you know, the

dense, like overgrown, sclerotic, institutional malaise of social democratic Britain, in this case, to, you know, recolonize the metropole in a way. And that and it keeps on running up against, you know, the reality of the dense institutional network of patronage and promises. And it's very hard to actually create these free zones, what they end up being is just new kinds of patron client networks. And you can canary wharf and Isle of Docks is a perfect example of that, right? I mean, it ends up being successful, not because, you know, the entrepreneurial new blood of young Britain sort of stormed in and did a bunch of new and interesting things. It was just like, massive subsidies to the world's biggest property

developers, and then the provision of infrastructure like the jiggly line and the new city airport and kind of an old fashioned industrial policy mode, you could say. So yeah, it is about like this thing that we don't think about much when we describe the 20th century in terms of modernization theory, which is like the look of longing of developed industrialized countries towards less developed and less industrialized countries, because they're not dealing with like the impediments and the handicaps and the bullshit of interest groups and an empowered population and so on. Well, one thing you can say about Dubai or Singapore or Hong Kong or whatever, very

little wokeness, right? And this is the thing that's been holding us back, you know? Yeah, I mean, but when wokeness was still like worker power and things like that. Yeah. Let's say it's the same difference. Although I mean, the Kevin Livingstone's GLC was like, you know, if there was ever a pioneer of world culture, it was the GLC, right? I mean, they were doing like reggae concerts and like reaching out to people with disabilities and mothers and they were very sensitive actually to kind of identity categories outside the hard-hatted worker, to the extent that a lot of the stuff they were rolling out then that was dismissed as like freakery, like, you know, people should

take public transit. We should take away parking spaces and turn them into green spaces. We should have workshops for socially productive technology. We should speak to newly arrived immigrants in their own language if possible. These things were all like, you know, parts of the supposedly symptoms of their Babylonian rule. And now it's, you know, the kind of stuff that any mainstream politician would embrace. Yeah. We needed to like have this proven to us over a period of about 20 years of not doing it. Yeah, or 40.

And then another 20 years of, yeah, another 20 years of like negotiating with how much we're not going to do it. And then we end up doing it. One parking space gets turned into a community herb garden. Yeah. Just thinking about my sort of self-image there. I'm like, oh yeah, the 70s, 20 years ago. Yeah. So also, you know, we, the book itself, right, is one of the themes it comes back to is the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Hong Kong. Oh, these motherfuckers, we've talked about them on TF a bunch of times and never really

gotten into like who they are or what they think. Like they just kind of pop up as like sort of the man behind the man to be like, Hey, where's this idea coming from? Oh, so there's some like Mont Pelerin Society guy. Well, interestingly, right, we talk a lot of the, our conversation about Prospera listed sort of, you know, several Mont Pelerin Society members on the committee for the adoption of best practice. Now, you know, of course, Prospera is written about, it has its own chapter in the book. I was lovely. It was really nice to see all of my friends written about.

Ah, Eric Brimman. It was in the paper. So long. Yeah. Prospera is the like the Libertarian like utopian free zone, right? Yeah. Well, it's Eric Brimman is yet another alumnus of the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman with ideas about liberty in Latin America. We sort of come back to this as a kind of a kind of theme where we, I mean, if you want to sort of say that the let's

say the the thesis of the book that would be acceptable to the sort of high minded, if not your Murray Rothbard's was said by Alvin Rabushka, who you quote, who's a Hoover institution guy who says, Hong Kong is an approximation to the textbook model of neoclassical economics made possible by the absence of an electorate. And it was in the waning of the British lease of Hong Kong that the Mont Pelerin society, this group of influential free marketeers essentially, you have a similar, I'd say contempt for the state. But again, without really understanding what the state is and what it does for them on a daily basis. They all come to Hong Kong to try to, as you say, smuggle its essence out in their luggage

ahead of what they feared was its imminent demise, attempting to create a portable Hong Kong miniaturized and stripped of internal complex contradictions, complexity and differences of class and culture. A little suitcase sized Hong Kong creation kit, you can just like slap down and open somewhere. Exactly. That was sort of the that was in fact the idea. But I mean, I hate to I hate to look back to the previous episode that we've done and sort of give a grudging nod to the author

of the book. But one of the things that happened was their plans to create portable Hong Kong's kept on crashing up against the waters of places being different and hard to govern in that way. Yeah, I mean, I can say a thing or two about how they hope to do that because actually Alice you're pretty much right on with the idea of just like popping open a valise and having like, you know, like a perfectly folded paper version of it just like spring up through like Like the Jardins building just like pops up and like, you know,

Because they did it through a couple of things. So like for me, the first chapter of the book is the first one I wrote and it's kind of captures the whole book in a way which I've discovered is the best way to write a book because, you know, some of those people don't go past the first chapter. So it's good to get it there in the first one. And the first chapter is like this moment where the Mont Pelerin Society folks who I've written about before, but they have their meeting there 1978. And, you know, it's like it's a terrible decade for for neoliberals actually, you know, there's strike waves, there's the new international economic order, there's an oil crisis, there's this feeling

that like decolonization is getting out of hand, the new left is, you know, stagnating into something even worse, left wing terrorism, so on. And they discovered this sort of haven and buzzing enterprise in in the in the far reaches the British Empire in a crown colony of Hong Kong, where there's because of its separation from the British state, you know, there was no post war welfare state, you kept like a 15% flat tax on income, 15% on corporate income tax, very little social entitlements. And they're like, Oh, how do we do this somewhere else? How can we replicate this beyond, you know, this this distant outpost? And the two things I focus on there that that actually did kind of work in a way is one is the idea

of constitutionalizing writing into a constitution that 15% flat tax, which is also paired with a balanced budget amendment. And in the course of the conversation about the handover with the Chinese Communist Party, the Hong Kong business elite, and the British Colonials discovered that in fact, all three of them wanted the same thing. So the Chinese weren't going to come in and like smash up the capital of shop, they wanted to come in and and sort of preserve exactly the core elements of the Hong Kong model. And so I was told that socialism with Chinese characteristics was real communism. Yeah, this is a very disillusioning for the true believers here for sure. It turns out

that they're actually interested in, you know, bank secrecy, rule of law in terms of investor security, guaranteed open markets and so on. So, so the guy that that Riley just mentioned ends up writing up this idea of a flat tax. He's super excited. He's like, wow, the Hong Kong basic law is actually more free and capitalist terms than the American Constitution is. We need to like, get the word out. So that most directly ends up producing this this book on the flat tax, which becomes as a couple of political scientists described it, the Bible in post socialist Eastern Europe, where you get a whole series of countries putting flat taxes in place sort of under literal consultation from this Rabushka fellow

from the Hoover Institution, one after another, so you get almost a dozen countries doing that quite literally trying to do a kind of mini Hong Kong on themselves, of course, doesn't work in the medium term. But the idea that you could, you know, package and take it out is also then captured in their creation of something you might have seen reference to which is the index of economic freedom, which they they produced out of annoyance with the Freedom House statistics freedom in the world rankings, which really focus on democracy as a measure of freedom. And they're like, No, you can't, you know, just having democracy isn't enough. Economic freedom is much more important. So how do we doing

sort of like the higher the head, the closer to God, but you know, the free of the markets, the free of the people. Yeah, absolutely. Quite literally, they do that. And so they're all like gather in these great places like Sea Ranch House of Milton and Rose Friedman, North of San Francisco and like Napa Valley Wine Country elsewhere, and come up with a ranking, which then gets rolled out in 1995 and is like front page news whenever it gets announced in Hong Kong and Singapore, specifically because it's always Hong Kong and Singapore number one and two. And I kind of follow that a bit how they just completely juked the statistics to get that outcome. And then they even kind of blew it up more and created an index of

human freedom, which the Kato Institute and the Freezer Institute from our beloved Canadian think tank in Vancouver helps to produce and it is an attempt to sort of create a benchmark about how to become you know, how to make yourself a Hong Kong in a suitcase. And one of the interesting things about the Hong Kong in the suitcase, right? It comes across from what you mentioned about the flat tax in Eastern Europe is that in a sense it both works and doesn't work. Because on the one sense, they're able to get a lot of what they want or they're able to get a lot of effects that they would consider to be desirable such as post-Soviet Eastern European countries reaching around for the ideas on the table

and finding theirs of the constant threat of you know, the zones to they're able to be used by sort of waning social democracies or economies in the global North against their own sort of labor movements against their own sort of demands for economic justice and so on and so on. But the strange thing is, is that all of those victories are combined with a complete misapprehension of what made Hong Kong Hong Kong, which was not just that they had us. And this is people who are listened to the prosper episode will remember this, right? This is pure Paul Romer liberal institutionalism, which is if we have the good laws and the good constitution, and we can find a favorable piece of land, then a free Hong Kong style

glittering society will sort of necessarily spring up as because like you can it's inherent to the thing because you see Hong Kong and you think that it proves your worldview because you know, now it has skyscrapers and good movies. And what you say is that this is from your book as well. It's just that they do not mention it's real and unrepeatable history, which is how Hong Kong's rise was seeded by an influx of Chinese refugee capital and labor, accelerated by the status as an entrepot for essential goods for an isolated mainland, and then supercharged by coordinating investments into special economic zones like Shenzhen that China then went on to create to create Hong

Kong's along their own coastline. And that the story that Hong Kong is about good institutions, low taxes, the lack of a democratic electorate and things of that nature, right? It ignores all of the material factors that actually made Hong Kong successful, much like neon ignores all of the material factors that made Dubai successful. It's just trying to imitate the aesthetics or the sort of surface level institutions of it. Yeah. And that's like happens at the far end of these things, you know, the total repression of geography and history. I mean, Singapore is the other example, right? Like everywhere

from, you know, Sao Paulo to Andhra Pradesh is like, we want to do a little Singapore here and Singapore will send out consultants to help you do it. But like Singapore's location on like the Malacca Straits, like at the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea is something that has made them important for literally like over a millennium, right? Like it's not just, yeah, just so it's not just like a question of, you know, all right, well, let's just, you know, ban the free press and make some public housing and then put some money in a sovereign wealth fund. I mean, even if they got that far, it would be like, no, that it was a node for trading. It was a node for like eventually

oil refining, shipping. I'm opening up my big, like my big portable Singapore creation kit. I'm blowing up the inflatable Lee Kuan Yew. And what I haven't realized is that step one is be where Singapore is. Yeah, exactly. Like you do need to do some like tectonic plate, like revisionism, like retconning to like get yourself back to where they started from. And how do I do like a sort of superposition thing where it's like the city in the city where you are also where Singapore is at the same time.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. But I think, I mean, there is a way probably people are thinking about climate change is producing new for sure they are possibilities for future Singapore's. But for the most part, you know, this is the way that that not just kind of, you know, wild eyed ideologues operate, but even things like the World Bank. I was reading the World Bank reports on the East Asian miracles with my students a couple of weeks ago. And they're like, how did the East Asian dragons get ahead? You know, what is it that Taiwan did in Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea did that makes them so successful in comparison to those basket cases in Sub-Saharan Africa or whatever. And they list all of these things investments

in human capital, you know, sound macro principles, blah, blah, blah. And literally nowhere in this document was a mention of the word Cold War or the United States. Like it was they were just completely repressing the idea of like a larger regional context or like anything like a geopolitical context that would make them important. So like the rumor attitude is totally consistent with just mainstream economics and actually mainstream international development thinking and consultancy thinking, consultancy brain, which is just like, yeah, you draw a line, you look in on the map, a circle and you look inside and say, fix this little place instead of understanding how it stretches back backwards in history and like

outwards in geography in ways that are almost always like not repeatable as I say in the book. Hong Kong was even, you know, Hong Kong was getting wealthy from China when China was in the Cultural Revolution period because they were the only place that they could get certain things imported exports. So it was also not exactly working from zero in the even in the 1970s. You know, it's the throughout the book, there's this there's this theme that the whatever that what whatever the kind of proponents of these zones think, you know, they're not able to see they believe that they're a thousand feet tall and don't understand they're standing on a, you know, very, very high stool. So it's also like, it's not just

sort of geographic factors. It's also like constant maintenance and subsidies and investment in making one of these things happen to right by a state that they sort of no longer perceive. Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's there's kind of two genres of people in the book. Like there are the there are the people who just sort of finesse away the requirement for the strong hand of an authoritarian state to make this stuff happen by, you know, just showing sort of slide decks of lens flared skylines and just all of the things that are just going to happen immediately the moment you, you know, open up, open up your space for investment. And then the state is standing behind there. And if you ask push them on it, then they might be willing to

accept that there is a strong state there because to be opposed to the interference of democracy and economic freedom is not the same as being opposed to the interference of the state and economic freedom. So there's certain category of the people I write about in the book, we are actually fine with that trade off, they try not to dwell on it. But if pushed, they will accept sometimes you do need a strong state to have a free economy. There are other people, however, who keep this sort of vision on the horizon that there's he sort of constantly looking to and trying to get to, which is like that space truly beyond the enforcing hand of a state. So if it's not a state, what is it? Well, if you read Rothbard

or David Friedman or Hans Hermann Hoppe, they would say that we're going to do away with the state in our ideal future future polity. But we what we'll have instead is like insurance companies, arbitration companies, private security forces, private means of sort of, you know, organizing logistics, obviously, private transportation. So at some point, you sort of look at what they're proposing, it becomes extremely state like, right? Like it becomes difficult to say how what they've just described is not just a state in private form. And the difference is that this the kernel of the difference or what they hold on to is the absence of a language of popular sovereignty, representative government, one person, one vote style suffrage. So they are building private

governments in their minds, castles in the air, private states. But the essential thing is how to do it without having it interfered with by that, you know, Pesky kind of artifact of the modern period, which is the idea that the people are the ones who provide legitimacy to any kind of government. And I think it's worth sort of moving on to sort of another another couple of chapters where we find another few themes emerged that I think are worth discussing, which is the relationship between fiction and fantasy and what's actually produced, right? Because like the example of Canary Wharf, which comes next, you know, is, you know, is that the is as we said earlier, right, they're moribund sort of Northern Western fortunes after the Stagflationary

Decade of the 70s. And the solution even beyond the other fictions that, you know, your Lou Rockwells or Murray Rothbard's like to talk about about, you know, replacing the state with a kind of volunteerist Mad Max is, yeah, is, even then, even on the like Chrome subscription plan, you know, take the box if you want Mad Max. But that that's what's equally a fantasy is even the more you might say Comfort comparatively reasonable advocates of these things, which if you come, if you boil it right down, it's that, you know, that the Global North said, okay, we're going to carve off some pieces of land, remove a number of regulations, call it terra nullius, and then just say, all right, someone is going to appear here that comes up with the idea or ideas

that saves our country. That's as much of a fantasy, right? The idea that we are going to, and yeah, again, this, you talk about this Canary Wharf, this thing that was supposed to be a kind of jolt into a stagnant and moribund economy that was supposed to create activity, what it really did was just it grew the powers of the already powerful, created a lot of office space, I suppose. I created a very weird place to walk around, like all of these places seem to be, I haven't been to Dubai, or Singapore for that matter, but like, I've been to Canary Wharf, and it has the same sort of like, supranational, like libertarian vibe to walk around in.

But ultimately, right, it's, if you remember what it's supposed to do, the story, it's that this is supposed to be where the future is made, because we've taken off the shackles that are preventing the future from being made. And all that it does is intensify the present, essentially. This is, this is where sicko mode capitalism is on, and then you go there and it's like, it's the same. HSBC, yeah. HSBC been bigger. HSBC, the world's worst pizza restaurant, and you're like, okay. It's the obon pan, and you're not allowed to put, you know, any tables or chairs out in the

pavement, because that's against the regulation. Yeah, but the other, one of the other things you do just before, just to finish this as well, is, and this is us thinking about your own use of fiction to talk about these other fictions, that in your chapter on South Africa, the band who stands and the decision of, you know, like white secessionist Africaners to essentially do a further apartheid, create a further apartheid around themselves as apartheid was falling apart, is that you talk about snow crash and diamond age and the concept of the political creation of a people or a file out of nothing, right? And one of the major problems with all of these zones is that ultimately,

while they have a political constituency, it's a political constituency with no connection to the area, and no connection to the history of the area, no particular, and no, and just no context and no investment in it. And so, you know, there is this, yeah, exactly, there's this fantasy of a kind of creation of the people of the zone, but the people of the zone are never in the zone, they're always flying between them. Yeah, there's just these sort of client citizens or customer citizens with that. Yeah, I mean, you're right that the idea of, the idea of like a forward looking policy for moribund, once great, now deindustrializing Western nation, being to sort of clear out

these areas and then sort of like lay back supine and be like, come colonize us basically, like come do something to us that reinvigorates us, like, like just make us feel something again. I mean, that's like pretty literally the Freeport conception, right? I mean, I've spent a lot of time now reading these sort of discussions within the Freeport advisory committees and so on. And first of all, it's depressing as hell that it's the same people who are advising from 1979 to 2020. You know, it's literally Almond Butler from the Adam Smith Institute, still just like dragging his like desiccated self to like another meeting. And secondly, the funny thing about them is like every time they say like, you know, we're going

to open up this area on the coast and we're going to, and the investors are going to come running, is they get told the same thing by people who actually know anything about this, which is like, no, they won't, you can't do the Jebel Ali Free Zone in P side, because you don't have the wages that the Jebel Ali Free Zone had in the 1980s and 90s. And you're also not going to be able to get rid of as many regulations. And you're also not like, you know, at a strategic trading logistic point in the Indian Ocean ecosystem, nor are you close to like sites of major oil extraction and so on. So there's that is like, it's not even intensifying the present. Like, I think it's weirder than that. Like it's, it's almost, it ends up creating a kind of a time loop

back to a much more like a 19th century colonial model of political geography, where they're the idea of like the even nation state having like a homogeneous status is just, you know, doesn't apply, you know, empire being composed of all of these protectorates and, and call ground colonies and concessions and treaty ports. I mean, it kind of leans into that more 19th century fragmented model, which is what makes it attractive, of course, to people like Rothbard, who think that the 20th century has brought nothing but woe in the form of self national self determination and income tax and the things that seem to follow with it. But not being able to sell children, things of this nature.

Also, you know, what's really funny, the thing that just occurs to me as you say that is, you know, who else had a very similar opinion about the main subject of his book was Scott and in the previous book and seeing like a state where he says, oh, well, the high modernist plans of the 19th century, well, those were all fine. Those, those, those weren't bad high modernism. We only got bad in the 20th century. Yeah, they were rational, you know. Yeah, which kind of goes back to your point, Alice, about like Hakeem Bay and temporary autonomous, you know, like every, every teenager in the 90s is like secret favorite book for like a week and a half. Because there is like a, there is a kind of extremes touch thing, I think, about, about

like imagination after the end of the Cold War, where there's kind of a left anarchist celebration of locality and decentralization and like autonomy at a small level. And then there's these people and they are, you know, riding the same wave in a way. And I think they do both kind of romanticize a pre a state of the world before the nation, which is why like Neil Stevenson sounds a lot like Hans Hermann Hoppe and not just because they're probably reading each other, but because they both have this idea that what's wrong with the world is when we did this kind of like we the people bullshit and like try to create these, these like gargantuan entities that, you know, can't do anything kind of fun or exciting because they're too big. So

you need to do it all again at a smaller level. So that, you know, that, that feedback loop between fiction and theory, which and policy in some cases is I think, you know, for one thing, it's not really new. I mean, lots of people write about like the world of human rights, the idea of human rights and the enlightenment comes out of people reading novels and, you know, thinking about intersubjectivity and empathy. So now that it's sort of getting larger and people are feeding back ideas of the zone through novels is also a bit like HG Wells writing about global government and then writing actual constitutions for global government. And I think there is a big history of that. But it's also the case that some of the works of history of political thought are also

too much stuck in the text to think about the way that the culture around theory is inspiring to the theorists themselves. Mostly I just wanted to say that that's a critique of Stevenson I've wanted to hear for the last 10 years, at least. So thank you for that. So I think let's, let's move on a little bit as well because we have, we have a very interesting exploration of a few different, a few different zones, the history and the creation of those zones. We've got the Canary Wharf. We have the, we have Bantu Stans and the sort of double, double secessionist, Africaners.

Yeah, apartheid too. Yeah, apartheid, but local apartheid, think global. Of course, by this point, I would say like apartheid five or something. Yeah, it's a sort of a second order enclaves. Yeah. And we talk about the use of fiction, but also I think let's, let's circle back to what you talked about towards the beginning, which is when you're talking about the US, you again have two things running in parallel. You have the discussion of your, your various

cranks, right? Your people who, again, this is in fact also where William Rhys Mogg and what's it called? James Dale Davidson, yeah. James Dale Davidson, that's the one where James Dale Davidson got his start writing these newsletter types of newsletters as well that would, that would frequently contain sort of, yeah, it would say, you know, by IBM or whatever, but it would also say, by the way, end of the state is nigh. Race war is coming.

Blood on the streets. Yeah. Yeah. And specifically a lot of it was quite racially tinged. The race war is coming. And that again has a double effect. Number one, it launches the career of Ron Paul, who lots of people seem to forget was associated with these, the race war is coming people back in the day. It also creates something in, it's a little more subtle in American culture. It's very obvious in British political culture, but it creates the relationship between the,

the, what you might call the insane right and the quote unquote reasonable right, which are constantly using the space created by the insane right. There's their ability to tunnel out space by crashing their own heads into solid rock, right, to then continue to ratchet in a certain direction. So Lou Rockwell is never going to have his abolished state with a series of, you know, insurance companies or what have you replacing everything. But I mean, hey, he'd probably look at what, and he probably would still think that, you know, public schooling is a, or all schooling in America is a communist plot, whatever,

whatever, whatever, he would still hate it, but, and he wouldn't recognize that his view, his view of something like education has won over the last 40 years. Comparatively speaking, yeah, for sure. Like the conservative party, all of these institutions, the Republican party too, like horses that only have a reign on the right hand side, right? It only gets pulled in one direction. And like the, some people are perfectly aware of this. I think the person who handed the lunatic, right, their biggest W in British political history recently, David Cameron, was the one who like named them, Swivelide lunatics. That was what he called them.

And, and, you know, the knowledge of that was not enough to prevent him from sort of like unwittingly conceding them, Brexit. Yeah. Another, what you might call a, an attempt quite literally to make the UK into a zone. Yeah. It's a big zone. Yeah. And don't forget Northern Ireland, the most exciting economic zone in recent history, or whatever Rishi Sudan called it the other day. Yeah. No, I think that there definitely is like a sort of a riding the tiger dynamic that you see

in the, in the book unfolding, especially since the nineties, especially with the kind of alliance of the so-called paleo libertarians with traditionalists, racists, white nationalists. And I think one of the most, the more interesting kind of puzzles in the book, like apart from the Hong Kong thing, like how do you think this tiny little confetti of empire will become a model for the post-colonial world is one puzzle. But the other puzzle was like, how do these anarcho capitalists who are in the most case, like very anti-religious, secularists, end up teaming up with these like neo-Nazis basically and white nationalists in the 1990s and 2000s to create this hydra that we called the alt-right in the 20, in 2016 and 2017, right? The idea of

a libertarianism to alt-right pipeline is like just common sense in right-wing circles. It's almost always the way that these things work, but it didn't make a lot of sense intellectually. But so one of the things I was happy to do in the book was to kind of get to the bottom of that in a way. And it's kind of like a version of what you were saying, which is just that you can't take for granted that you'll be able to have a blank slate to create your like insurance company arbitration society, you know, state and post-state entity. So what you need to do is just kind of find the most destructive elements that are circulating at any given time in the social world and sort of hit your wagon to them. So Rothbard was excited about the Black power movement

in the 1960s. He was pro-Black secession, Black nationalism. He was like, you know, shitting on Martin Luther King, praising Malcolm X. But then he got disillusioned in the 70s because White and Black New Leftists were cooperating too much. He was like, this is bad. You guys, you failed me. So it wasn't again... This is the one thing the establishment fears. This is the world the liberals want. Yeah, he so nearly could have had like a Black secessionist country in which to like legalize child labor. And we robbed him of that opportunity. And he will never forgive us. He was bitter about that amongst many other things. I channeled it into movie reviews a lot of the time, which is interesting. But the 90s, he was like the neoconfederate

movement. You know, that was one thing I didn't know about, maybe other people did, but that like the League of the South in America was based on Liga Nord in Lombardy. So this idea, yeah, that's where they got that term from. So I didn't know personally that the sort of the neo-nationalisms of Europe were like an inspiration to the white nationalisms of the United States. And there was just a very open tactical alliance where the Paleo-Libertarians and the Paleo-Conservatives got together and were like, let's set our desires aside. What do we both believe in? Well, we both believe in the end of the United States as it currently exists. We believe in local control, decentralization, contractual communities based on like interests, like traditions,

like race, question mark, usually answered with yes, like race. So let's move towards that as a kind of entente cordial between people who have different ideas of what this future polity would look like. Because when it's done, we'll be able to choose and everyone can find, you know, navigate their way to the what their menu choice that fits them best. And that seems like, you know, on the one hand, the most absurd kind of conception of how things would be going. But look at, I mean, literally look at America right now. It has never been galloping towards like federalist decentralization more quickly in the last 100 years than it is now. Right. Yeah. The race is kind of like SF tech people fleeing to Texas, you know,

and trans people in red states fleeing to blue ones. Cool. Yeah. National divorce. That's like on the agenda. I mean, there's that kind of like just tax competition, but then matched with like such extreme cultural and reproductive decision making at the state level that even people who aren't just like seeking a lower tax rate might be like, wait, I, you know, you can't talk about racism in the high school. Like, I don't know if I can live here. You know, the abortion pill is banned in this state. Like, I don't know if I can live here. So that's sorting out the populations is partially the success of libertarian lobbying and agitation. I mean, the permission of private education, for example, the right to take your children out of schools was something that was

like a very express campaign policy that was carried out by people that were part of this sort of fringe world of the John Randolph laws and so on. If you want to talk about, you know, these people never always feeling like they're losing because their big goal is unattainable, but winning because all of their every material victory, they could conceivably win. They do win. All you have to do is think about how these guys have an avatar in the form of Ron DeSantis. Absolutely. Mr. Grievance, Mr. Sort of like localism, factionalism. Yeah, of course. And of course, the crucial thing, Mr. Easing Pudding with three fingers like an absolute goblin.

Well, the crucial thing, I think, is Mr. Also, you know, he looks at Florida and again, he's you make those same comparisons with Hong Kong and Singapore and say, we will have the dynamism of a strategic Asian port here in Florida if we just do all of these institutional things that, you know, time for me to look at this map of sea level rises projected due to climate change and see what Florida is going to look like in 2070. Oh, it will be an island. It will be the size of Singapore. Yeah, perfect. We're just getting ready for what for what the planet's going to under do. But it's that you know, again, it's these, again and again, what comes up in the book and what I think is one of its more valuable insights is that these people can be ludicrous. They can

be ridiculous. They can be wrong about everything and they still end up at least on the winning side. You could say the winning side doesn't benefit from them. They just happen to have a kind of crackpot ideology that puts them on the winning side every time. Yeah, the trend line is following their direction. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you think about someone like, you know, Ron DeSantis, you know, he might not even be particularly aware of, you know, the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the 1970s, but it successfully made it into the conservative imaginary to the point where he doesn't need to be. He's just going to govern like that because he thinks it's the right thing to do.

It's a successful conspiracy. You know, that's that's what it is. And like, if you wanted to make a sort of like argument to libs about this, you could be like, well, this is a successful libertarian conspiracy to destroy America as a going concern or the United Kingdom as a going concern or the EU or whatever, and to like split up into all these little different sort of like new fiefdoms. And, you know, you or I might say, okay, good, it probably shouldn't continue in the form that it is because the form that is bad. But you can like, if these are the options, if the options are like fucking Joe Biden's like murderous contradictory United States or Ron DeSantis is like infinite like fiefdom castles of like libertarian noncing.

You know, I know which side my bread's busted on. Yeah, it's and it's with delicious carry gold butter. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was very gratified of my, my, my father-in-law read, read the book and he doesn't read very many books ever. And he finished and he was like, yeah, I was thinking about Ron DeSantis and Disney World. And at first I was like, this seems weird. It's almost like Ron DeSantis is against the zone because he wants to take away all those privileges. He's like, but then I read your book and I realized like, no, he just wants to create his own zone. That's like Trump's the Disney World zone. I was like, that's exactly right. That's the, that's what I was trying to get out of it is like, you know, this the attempt

to sort of set up a kind of a virtuous, a culturally sort of empowered virtuous side against like the bloodless globalism of, of like Disney World and the World Economic Forum is just like getting it wrong. Like all the, the, the future that is being imagined here is kind of like one of like fractal reterritorialization around like competing economic and capitalist logics. And they can look like profits just because that has been the way that policy has been moving already for, for these years. And it's harder than to imagine counter projects because people, as I've been talking about this book, are like, well, could we see a kind of a positive version of this? And it's like, well, yes, but if your side just says like, everyday life is completely

governed by contract and commodification as it is. And our vision is just to take that one tick further and to make commodification just literally like the logic of state full stop. Then there, utopia is not as far as ours is, which is like to sort of try to wind back all of those ways that everyday life has been commodified and try to think about what those alternative structures would look like. They're already much closer to victory than, you know, we've ever been. I guess, I guess the other thing is that like speaking as a trans woman, right? I find a lot of this sort of like libertarianism tends to die away pretty quickly when it's in tension with the bigotry, right? When it's in contention with the cultural conservatism, because if the idea is

like, oh, we can just like follow their logic and go, okay, everything's going to be fractured. It's fine. We'll just have like a nice voluntary commune that's going to do all the things we want to do. It's like, no, they will kill you before you get the chance. And I don't know, it doesn't feel very good to say this, but like, at times like this, your first line of defense must be, I'm donning my big sort of Mickey Mouse is at this point. It's like the establishment. It's like, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Like a ball of Epcot center. Exactly. Exactly. There's like, these places put you in like strange bedfellows, right? And you know, you did a communist and socialists have had like united fronts with stranger people. So yeah, it's me and

Bob Iger against the world, you know? Well, that's, I mean, I have to say, the kind of the sort of hidden transcript of this book in a way is the, you know, the 2020 moment and the kind of the way that globalism was set up against nationalism and especially during COVID, how like the globalists became more and more of a way to explain, you know, everything that happened to anyone is even for people on the left or self described on the left, right? And the things I wrote about, for example, against like the great reset conspiracy theory, I've never gotten more blowback from anything I've written, because people like really felt betrayed, you know, the kind of like, the kind of Russell Brand left with sort of like, hey, I thought you were one

of us, like you were okay when you were criticizing the WTO. What are you doing criticizing people who are criticizing the WTO, even if they're imagining things. So part of it was like, I think as long as we get trapped in this sort of either or of like global talk or national talk, then it's just a mugs game, like you're not going to get politics, right? Or even analysis, right? So it's kind of like, open up this space underneath the nation, think about the zone, and suddenly you can see these supposedly nationalist or anti globalist things are more often in service of some kind of a deeper already existing form of, you know, territorial fortress creation against more expansive forms of redistribution or whatever.

Like, I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with the World Economic Forum. Yeah, you're like, you're swabbing one arm, Iger and the other. Yeah, I don't know, it's not the first of May. I don't know what day you guys march on. Well, I think it comes back around to the fact that, you know, it's the, it makes sense to when you understand that where the battle lines are drawn is that, you know, it's, it is capitalist arguing over different visions of capitalism. You know, there's one vision of capitalism that likes, you know, globally distributed trade networks, but also, and likes, but likes lots of free trade, likes lots of big institutions, like high barriers to

activity, likes high amounts of regulation, a kind of, dare I say it, brand-ICN vision. And if you want to think about where the actual power is, it's between that and then the kind of, you know, red and tooth and claw vision of the, of the zone people, of people, of sort of reactionaries like DeSantis or Lou Rockwell or the Koch brothers or, you know, like, like the various, you know, sort of like Brexit profiteers and stuff, you realize the fight is between them. It's an argument between different wings of capital, one of which is exterminationist in a very sort of long and long-term and diffuse way because it likes carbon credits and one which is exterminationist in a much more immediate way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so it's, that's, that's how I,

that's how I kind of interpret these kinds of battles and the battles over which the zones are being fought is, it's not, it may have been a strike at the left in the 1970s, but ultimately it's a strike at that kind of globally managed, regulated liberal capitalism from its further right reaches as you see the entire thing as a sort of ratchet going in one direction, you know, the, the horse only has one reign and, you know, you, you keep the, but until you find that the whole race course is in fact, sort of also tilted, you know, because the whole race itself turns right horse Nascar. Yeah, it's right. And so that's, that's sort of how I see, that's where I, after reading this book, that's where I see the zones in terms of political

contention. That's how I see the fight being between nowadays. Yeah. And even when I think, I think unfortunately the two can also work together. So I think that, you know, the rumor vision of just pointing, putting a dot on the map and saying like, get the laws right and you too shall have, you know, Hong Kong, Jardine Tower, whatever, is obvious ideology and bullshit. I mean, the other, the other side is that, that you do actually require that larger institutional framework to create the possibility of investment getting there in the first place and like, you know, the goods that you produce to get out also. So it really isn't kind of pick your scale, like pick your fighter, like a globalist or a zonist, like the two actually are working closely together.

I think you all talked about this on your Prospera episode, but you know, the board of Prospera is like KPMG people, EY people, people who worked in the Dubai International Financial Center, people who rolled out the Estonia e-citizenship. So these people are like, you know, they're hardly, they're not hardly secessionists in the way we usually think about it. And I think that the challenge of the book was to find like a metaphor or a way to talk about people who were like simultaneously dreaming of like dropping out of some kinds of political arrangements while remaining like hyperconnected in other ways. And to be hyperconnected, you still need that kind of planetary level encasement infrastructure to be able to enrich yourself. So that's still,

even after writing the book and being done and talking about it, still kind of eludes me is how do you talk about people who are both, you know, dropouts and kind of hyperconnected? I'm playing both sides, so I always come out on top. So I also know we're sort of coming to time and I actually have to leave to go to the TF Studio to record another episode of the podcast. They'll have more sort of rollicking chuckles on this that we got a few, a few jokes on it instead of like me face down in a ditch wearing the Mickey Mouse. If you're doing both sides, you can have an AR-15 in your hands. Like the least confusing American political ideology of 2050. It's like a plate carrier

with a patch on it with like an armed Mickey Mouse. An armed Mickey Mouse that's in a rainbow silhouette that doesn't have the bisexual color of the rainbow. Yeah, that's, it's, it's, it's the by erasure Mickey Mouse. Finally, by erasure has been the only successful political tendency. It finally ended the like tyranny of bisexuals. So I'll, and by the way, I strongly recommend that you get this book and read it because we did not talk about some of the funniest stories. We didn't even get to Somalia. Yeah. No, we didn't get to the guy that started to try to create a zone in America accidentally just did one in a motel and then decided to try again in Somalia. It's the smallest a zone can get. It's like a little sugar cube and you're like, yeah,

inside this cube, libertarianism rules. Inside this cube, there's a flat tax. But then, and then like the guy, he started a clan of white Somalis so they could start benefiting from the fact that it had no government. Like this is, this is a book that I implore you to read. It's very good. Please do Black Hawk down on the white Somali libertarians. And I'll close with another quote that you end the book with as well, which is, the science fiction author and international lawyer didn't know who's a lawyer. China Mieville once argued that exit is for losers. Good capitalists know that the real game is capturing the existing state, not going through the hassle of creating a new one. And people like Peter Thiel

seem to agree that a world of 1000 new state contracts is preferable to 1000 new nations. And to me, it's that that's the idea that squares a bit of the circle between the fact that these people are kind of can, let's say, be globalists and zonists at times when it suits them. Because ultimately, this is about just pumping the bags, basically. And who cares? And who cares what gets ripped asunder when we pump the bags? Yeah, yeah. The flight to safety works sometimes, speculative investments, sometimes you invest in the state, sometimes that's the right play. Definitely how they think about it. I hate to get ripped asunder. Yeah. Well, Quinn, I want to thank you very much for sending me a copy of your book. I want to urge

all listeners once again to buy book and to thank you also for listening to the third episode of what is now writtenology. And to also encourage you as well to subscribe to the $10 tier. If you want to hear, Alice and I discuss this very, very long book, Fan Chen. So do give that a, do give that a go. In any case, we will see you on whatever the next episode after this comes out is. Quinn, do you have anything you want to plug before we sign off, including the book again? I don't think that's just the book, Crack Up Capitalism, out on Alan Lane slash Penguin in the UK and Metropolitan Books in the US and out for too long in German with Zurkamp and French with soy and a couple of other languages too. If you speak or translate into a language that is

a very obscure, then get in touch and maybe we can make it happen. The special language, they only speak in the doubly apartheid private South African white banter stand. Yeah. Translate into white Somali dialect. All right, all right, all right. See you soon, everybody. Thanks. Bye.