Talk of a “techxodus” picked up during the pandemic. As people increasingly departed the Bay Area to work remotely, the pandemic pushed many of Silicon Valley’s elites to the boiling point regarding California and what they saw as its ungrateful political ruling class. “San Francisco’s fall will catalyze the rise of startup cities,” Srinivasan tweeted in 2020.64 “Some folks will go remote in the exurbs or rural locales … Others may recoalesce around new, themed cities.”65 He hyped Próspera, in which he had invested, and Starbase, a patch of land in Texas bought by Elon Musk to launch SpaceX rockets, which Musk also pictured as a community that would sustain future shuttles commuting to off-world settlements.66

  In the event, the most important destinations for Srinivasan’s colleagues were less Mars than Mar-a-Lago. Miami opened its arms to the tech sector in 2020, making it what the Financial Times hyped as “the most important city in America.”67 Thiel bought two houses on Dubai-like artificial islands near Miami Beach for $18 million.68 Keith Rabois, a partner at Thiel’s venture capital firm, bought a home on the same islands for $29 million.69 Miami seemed to be simply following the well-worn playbook of Sunbelt cities luring investors through low taxes and light-touch regulation, but Srinivasan hyped it as “the first of a new set of international cloud capitals and start-up cities.”70 He touted Miami as the “Singapore of Latin America,” although it would probably be better described as its Dubai: an enclave of conspicuous consumption and a laundromat for dirty money from the region. While Singapore was known for its intolerance of corruption, Florida was among the most corrupt places in the nation.71

  For all the talk of building from scratch, cloud country boosters were mostly on the lookout for someone willing to give them the infrastructure they needed—from military protection to cheap energy to a docile workforce to an infinity pool and a room with an ocean view. Their metaphors were meteorological, but the reality looked more like something from the animal kingdom: the remora attached to the side of the whale shark of the state. A particularly revealing moment came in 2017, when Thiel was advising Trump on his new cabinet appointments. Srinivasan’s Twitter feed suddenly went blank and his name surfaced in the news—as a candidate for the next commissioner of the FDA.72 It seems the only thing better than exiting the state would be taking it over.

  “What’s the next step for the global freedom class?” Srinivasan asked in 2021. He himself opted for Singapore, an authoritarian city-state far from the disorder that he complained of in San Francisco. There he launched a more earnest campaign for a cloud country, including an online lecture series and a website that paid people in bitcoins for solving potential future problems for a city built on the blockchain.73 Srinivasan’s writings continued his update of The Sovereign Individual, arguing that states do not matter, cryptography had solved the problems of government, and the internet was enabling “a digital Atlantis—a new continent floating in the cloud where old powers compete and new powers arise.”74

  Yet the course of the pandemic had not been kind to his predictions. People did not defect en masse, the center of government held, and state capacity became more important to ordinary people, not less. Cryptocurrency had not changed the nature of the money game—it just added one more horse to bet on. As a speculative asset, bitcoins and other digital tokens rose and fell with the broader stock market, artifacts of a financial moment where liquidity had nowhere to go except to unproductive ends that promised short-term payouts. If the goal of blockchain technology was to eliminate the factor of trust, this seemed unwise. A study in the Lancet showed that it was precisely “trust in government and interpersonal trust” that correlated with how well a country minimized casualties from the pandemic.75

  Those seeking an exit in the metaverse would also find nothing of the sort. The platforms that we log on to are owned by private actors. Our every keystroke (and when we are strapped into a VR rig, our every twitch, bend, and nod) is minutely tracked, traced, sorted, calibrated, and sold onward to advertisers and other developers. It says a lot that one of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies—Uber—did not offer an empty prairie on which to roam and build. Rather, if you were a driver, it pulled you along like a dog on a leash, punishing you for any deviation while preserving the fiction that you were a free contractor. The metaverse, as one critic has astutely observed, is probably best thought of as a cubicle.76 The private government of corporations has little space for the alternative visions of collectives, other than those that reproduce its own dominance.

  As one of the foundational texts of tech criticism notes, Silicon Valley often forgets its Hegel at its own risk.77 The German philosopher taught that the master is always dependent on the slave. Neither island nor cloud can exist without its underclass. Beyond the masses of app-mediated gig workers, even the vaunted artificial intelligence programs work only because of the often repetitive routines and efforts of labor both skilled and unskilled.78 From Honduras to Dubai, the waged service class is the easiest for the visionaries to forget and the hardest for them to live without. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Singapore initially thought it had flattened the curve, until it was hit by a wave of infections from the migrant workers living in cramped quarters away from the public eye. The city’s leaders had seemingly forgotten they existed. The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.

  CONCLUSION

  BE WATER

  China’s Belt and Road Initiative, circa 2021

  BELT AND ROAD RESEARCH PLATFORM

  In early 2022, Patrik Schumacher, the principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, one of the most famous architecture firms in the world, unveiled plans for an extraordinary ensemble of buildings. There were images of galleries and auditoriums, meeting halls and restaurants. They showcased the trademark sweeping, sinewy lines of his architecture, something between art nouveau and the airbrushed art of H. R. Giger.

  Schumacher’s firm had made its name in megaprojects around the world, from a stadium and an airport in Beijing to the BMW plant in Leipzig to a hotel in Dubai that looked like an ice cube melting from the inside out. Buildings in the works included the Shenzhen Science and Technology Museum, the spaceship-like Shenzhen OPPO headquarters, and the Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base.1 In Chengdu, a complex was underway called Unicorn Island, named after the term for companies that it hoped to attract: start-ups with valuations over $1 billion apiece.2 Ad copy for the project spoke of the incentives offered to investors and proclaimed that it “may become the next Silicon Valley.”3

  Most of the work done by Zaha Hadid Architects was in Asia, specifically in capitalist countries without democracy. Things went faster there, Schumacher explained. He called the Emirates a “research and development lab” for the firm: “We are trying things out for the first time which we wanted to try out, but couldn’t.”4 Hong Kong continued to be another such “social experiment.”5 The firm had recently released the concept for a gently twisting high-rise in the Hong Kong city center, touted as the most expensive real estate site in the world.6

  Although these projects had made headlines worldwide, it was this new one that Schumacher felt came closest to his political principles. A socialist in his younger years, he had been shaken by the global financial crisis in 2008, and turned to the works of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, which declared that economic systems built on fiat money were inevitably doomed to failure.7 The problem, Schumacher felt, was trying to stave off the collapses through bailouts and easy money. The crisis should be allowed to come. He scandalized the architecture world when he laid out this anarcho-capitalist vision at the World Architectural Congress, arguing that governments should abolish all social and affordable housing, eliminate all housing standards, and privatize all streets, squares, public spaces, and parks.8 The status quo was doomed—“the hope lies in what we dare to build afterwards.”9 The new city he proposed would offer the chance to “irradiate the collective imaginary within the advanced societies, and become a torch leading the way forward for a long overdue political revolution.”10 Utopian architecture had too often tried to work against the trends of the free market and capitalism; he wanted to lean into them.11

  There was only one problem with Schumacher’s new city: it did not exist. It was made of bits and pixels, accessible only through computer interfaces through which you could perambulate as a white-shelled android. The people were simulated and the sky was blank. At the same time, it was more than a video game. As in Balaji Srinivasan’s vision, it was a cloud city with coordinates that matched a real patch of territory: a muddy slip of land of just over two square miles, at an elbow of the Danube between Serbia and Croatia. Left unclaimed when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, it was symbolically “claimed” in 2015 by an enterprising Czech, who named it Liberland. In addition to its flag and regalia, Liberland had all the traits of a start-up country. All land would belong to the state, as in Singapore; one person, one vote would be replaced by a system weighted to the amount of property owned, as in a gated community. Some parts of the country would be set aside for business, others for pleasure, and a “wild zone” would remain unregulated altogether.12

  Croatian border guards in speedboats kept the would-be Liberlanders from even setting foot on the land, much less erecting a high-tech enclave there.13 The project had a near-zero chance of success. So why would the principal of one of the world’s highest-paid architecture firms commit so much time and effort to the project of reclaiming a mudflat? Schumacher explained his motivation, disarmingly, by invoking Karl Marx. Marx, he said, had taught that politics reflects changes in the nature of capitalism. In a world based on agriculture, feudalism made sense. When a hereditary elite owned most of the land and the peasants merely tilled it, there was no reason to let them help make decisions. In the age of industrialization, the new class of the bourgeoisie started creatively recombining the world’s resources and innovating new technologies, making it rational for a new political form—democracy—to give them a role in managing the state. This was followed by votes for the working class, binding them to the nation.

  In the twenty-first century, however, the situation changed again, Schumacher said. As manufacturing grew more automated, and advances in artificial intelligence promised a “man–machine symbiosis” on the horizon, democracy no longer made sense. It was an antique ideology, an artifact of an earlier, superseded moment in the history of capitalism—a dumbly literal reading of the world map, as if everything were penned inside its colored containers. What made sense in the twenty-first century were dots on the map like Liberland: blank-slate enclaves that could be anchor points for virtual enterprises, getaways for the global elite, or new citadels of financial services, marketing, design, software engineering, and other lines of work that needed little more than an electrical outlet and a robust internet connection. “The revolution comes when the political system becomes a barrier to the forces of production,” Schumacher said. “And that’s what we’ve reached.”14

  The zone was the political form appropriate to twenty-first-century capitalism. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had made progress by privatizing public assets, breaking unions, and reducing top marginal tax rates, but their reforms were too tentative. They clung to the nation form. The pace needed to accelerate. The European Union had to be broken up. Spain, Germany, and Italy had to be broken up too. Schumacher saw crack-up as an ongoing project. “In the next round of crises which are bound to come,” he said, maybe a country like Scotland would secede and fail as a socialist project, at which point right-libertarians would come in—the people “who have been predicting this.”15 All that was needed was the courage to imagine what should come after the crash. “Crisis is a galvanizer,” he said.16

  1.

  Anarcho-capitalists like Schumacher turned the conventional post–Cold War narrative on its head. Instead of democratic capitalism flowing outward from a Western source, they saw a more efficient, nondemocratic form of capitalism, perfected in Asia, rolling westward to revive the “sclerotic European race.”17 Instead of regarding places like China as monoliths, they saw them as patchworks of law, status, and access—a model of “fragmented authoritarianism.”18

  As China oriented its economy to global trade since the 1970s, it used zones to subdivide the nation. By the 2010s, it was also creating zones far from its own territory. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, China funded infrastructure stretching from its own borders through chains of zones, reaching out to Turkey, Kenya, and beyond. A high-speed rail line was built running through Laos and Cambodia and down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore.19 The Belt and Road Initiative bought the Greek port of Piraeus, in Athens, and funded outposts in the London Docklands. Chinese companies took over the Djibouti harbor from Dubai’s DP World, and spent $4 billion on a railway connecting Djibouti to the much larger Ethiopia, a country of a hundred million next door.20 China also built a military base in Djibouti, its first one overseas, alongside the bases of France, Japan, and the United States.21 In Sri Lanka, a Chinese company signed a ninety-nine-year lease for a deepwater port and invested in an adjacent “Port City” the size of Central London.22 In El Salvador, a Chinese conglomerate proposed a series of zones that would involve a hundred-year lease on one-sixth of the country’s territory.23 Although proceeding in an often haphazard and unplanned way, the Chinese government and Chinese corporations were establishing enclaves that resembled the concessions imposed on them a century and a half earlier.24

  “You could say that these Chinese companies are like the British East India Company of our days,” said one diplomat after China signed a long-term lease for a port in the Solomon Islands. “They are the vanguard of their nation’s push into new markets and new spheres of influence.” A local resident asked: “Are they looking at turning Solomon Islands into a colony?” It makes more sense to say they are turning the country into a zone. Special economic zones on islands of the Philippines; fishery zones off leased islands near Papua New Guinea; an economic development zone along the railway in Cambodia; a proposal to build a rival to the Panama Canal through Nicaragua—despite all the talk of “deglobalization,” China seems to be continuing with many of the familiar techniques of the last half century.25 Its vision is of corridors—seaways, highways, and railways—linking nodes of capitalism across borders.26

  China follows well-worn tracks, retracing the network of coaling stations and free ports that upheld the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Other countries also draw on earlier precedents of extraterritoriality. Since the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultan had granted citizens of some Western nations immunity from local law and the right to be tried in their own courts through so-called capitulations—a practice perceived by Western nations as a symptom of its supposed civilizational inferiority.27 In 2017, Saudi Arabia, under Ottoman rule until the 1920s, announced a spectacular extraterritorial zone near the Jordanian and Egyptian border: a $500 billion megaproject called NEOM with backing from some of the world’s biggest investors.28 Planned from scratch, NEOM is intended to cover over ten thousand square miles of desert and Red Sea coastline. The plans include a “linear city” with a pair of twin skyscrapers to stretch horizontally for dozens of miles, billed as “the largest buildings ever constructed.”29 The scheme is not only a feat of architecture and engineering (and, arguably, magical thinking when it comes to water procurement) but also a laboratory of private government. It is to be run by shareholders rather than the Saudi state—“an autonomous government whose laws will be chartered by investors.”30 Shares are to be sold on the Saudi stock exchange. The only obligation of the NEOM board of directors would be protecting the shareholders’ investment. The Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has called it “the first zone floated in the public markets” and “the first capitalist city in the world.”31

  “There is nothing in the desert,” reads a line from Lawrence of Arabia, yet even here the land was not empty. Twenty thousand Bedouins had to be cleared from the region. One who resisted removal was shot dead.32 As of 2022, ten thousand workers were beginning construction, including on a floating automated port and logistics hub called Oxagon.33 Part of NEOM’s sales pitch is the promise that the labor problem bedeviling the Gulf will eventually be solved by robots. In a country where about a third of the residents are expats, there was a public relations blitz around the granting of Saudi citizenship to a humanoid robot—the first time in the world a machine received legal personhood.34 Her name was Sophia, she wore a power suit, and she was bald, presumably as a way around the Saudi norm of women not showing their hair in public.

  Meanwhile, keen to join the club of dynamic Asian juggernauts after leaving the European Union, Britain has sought out partners on the Arabian Peninsula. Dubai—whose DP World bought the storied P&O Shipping Line and built the London Gateway port—has figured particularly prominently. The CEO of DP World UK sat on the post-Brexit trade advisory board.35 Through its new state investment arm, Britain became a junior partner in DP World’s development of three African ports, including the one in Somaliland. A major player in London’s post-Brexit scheme for a “Singapore-style” free port, DP World was slated to harvest £50 million in direct subsidies and ongoing tax breaks for its investments in the program.36 An economic advisor insisted that it is necessary to compete with the enticements offered by similar zones in the Middle East. “Our freeports are only going to work if we think of them as being little offshore islands,” he said.37