The risks of bargaining away slivers of sovereignty became clear in 2022 when DP World–owned P&O Ferries, seeking to lower the wages it was paying, fired its entire workforce of eight hundred employees without warning on a single day. Asked why the company did not try to negotiate with the union first, the CEO said that it would have been a waste of time because no union would ever have accepted their terms.38 The workers were welcome to come back—at an hourly wage of £5.15, barely half the British minimum wage.39 How could P&O do this? Through a trick of the zone. The ships sailed from UK ports, but they flew flags of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Cyprus, and operated under their labor laws. They were in British waters but not of Britain. Such fiascos did not deter others from dealing with Dubai. Just weeks after the mass firing, Quebec’s public pension fund announced a $2.5 billion investment in DP World, the first major foreign direct stake in the state-owned company.40 The retirement savings of Canada’s second-largest province now rested on the emirate’s global pursuit of profit.

  2.

  Hong Kong and Singapore, London and Liechtenstein, Somalia and Dubai: what we are seeing is not the union of capitalism and democracy but their increasing divergence. The relative performance of the different nations in the early twenty-first century has only made the story line clearer. Undemocratic capitalism is the winning brand. Libertarians’ expressions of admiration for authoritarian Asian governments are more common all the time. In a conversation with a young Bitcoin guru who had just moved from Australia to Dubai to escape COVID lockdown, the president of the Mises Institute applauded the efficiency of places like the Emirates and Singapore. He took the lesson of the pandemic to be that freedoms were provisional everywhere and could be removed at a moment’s notice. “In Singapore, things work. In Dubai, things work.” he said. “If we’re increasingly becoming authoritarian in the West, you can be authoritarian and nothing works or you can be authoritarian and things work.”41

  Looking around the world, one sees zones everywhere. During the pandemic, China moved forward with plans to turn the island of Hainan into a special economic zone with tax holidays for investors, duty-free shopping, and relaxed regulations on pharmaceuticals and medical procedures.42 As a development strategy in Africa, zones are “on a steep upward trend and projected to proliferate in a large majority of countries.”43 Postapartheid South Africa is a galaxy of privately owned and managed enclaves.44 Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, often described purely in terms of its Hindu chauvinism, has been ramping up special economic zones. “Lots of business will be shifted from Singapore and Dubai because of these incentives,” says the government representative in charge.45 Hungary has turned to a more nationalist form of economic development, yet at the same time it opened new special economic zones for Korean investment.46 The City of London is returning to its twentieth-century roots by trying to invent itself as an offshore market for cryptocurrency banking, doubling down on the one thing it has been able to do well: take fees to move money around for the benefit of a tiny stratum of the wealthy.47 The tallest pencil tower yet opened in Manhattan in 2022, twenty-four times higher than it is wide. Prices for an apartment ranged from around $8 million to $66 million. “This isn’t housing,” one sociologist noted. “It isn’t serving any social purpose. It’s a luxury good, more like a land-bound yacht.”48 Dubai real estate got a boost from the pandemic, with a record-breaking number of properties sold. New homeowners included “Afghan warlords and the political elite from countries like Nigeria, Syria and Lebanon, all searching for a safe place to park their savings.”49

  Zones are everywhere, but contrary to the rhetoric of boosters, they do not seem to be creating islands of liberation from the state. Rather, states are using them as tools to advance their own purposes. NEOM is a telling example. Saudi Arabia, an economy owned and operated by a royal family, is contracting with the Chinese company Huawei to wire its agglomeration in the desert as a “smart city.”50 As one consultant conceded, zones have proceeded through government-enabled confiscation, running roughshod over basic libertarian principles of property rights.51 Creating a land market in rural China, for example, was projected to leave 110 million villagers without land by 2030.52 Zones are not turning the world into a patchwork of a thousand private polities in dynamic competition. They are strengthening the position of a handful of state capitalist superpowers.

  In a new preface to The Sovereign Individual, written in 2020, Peter Thiel said that the rise of China was the one megatrend that the book had missed. But, he asked, was China so different after all? Despite the fact that the ruling party still had the word communist in its name, it showed little interest in redistributive equality. Instead, it was happily playing the game of winner-take-all capitalism and “jurisdictional competition,” allowing investors to shop between territories for laws that suited them best.53 Thiel himself has rethought his antipathy toward government.54 After he supported and helped advise President Trump, his company Palantir began securing major contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US military.55 In 2022, Palantir was in discussions to begin managing the crown jewel of the British welfare state, the National Health Service.56 The science fiction author and international lawyer China Miéville once argued that exit is for losers. Good capitalists know the real game is capturing the existing state, not going through the hassle of creating a new one.57 Thiel seemed to agree that a world of one thousand new state contracts was preferable to one of a thousand nations.58

  Besides, the United States itself looks more like a zone all the time. In 2022, it edged out Switzerland, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands to take the top spot in an index of financial secrecy, crowned as the best place in the world to illegally hide or launder assets.59 Its own status as a democracy has been called into question. It was briefly downgraded by a well-respected index to a so-called anocracy, a system mixing features of democratic and autocratic rule.60 Soon, Americans may no longer need to go elsewhere to realize the perfect zone. What one scholar calls the “boomerang effect” may bring those zone policies back home.61

  3.

  Where the secessionist dream lives on, it is often overlaid with a hint of panic. Partly this is a matter of political polarization. In the United States, deep animosity toward and even fear of political opponents have driven support for the breakup of the country higher than ever before.62 Talk of a “national divorce” has become commonplace; in late 2021, 50 percent of Trump voters and 40 percent of Biden voters were sympathetic to the idea of splitting the country.63 In the UK, the prospect of Scotland, which voted for increased self-rule in the 1990s, leaving the union altogether seems ever stronger in the wake of Brexit. In Spain, Catalonia remains in low-level conflict with the central government in Madrid over the suppression of its separatist ambitions.64

  Secessionism is also driven by a desire for a flight to safety. From the pandemic to climate change, the zone has come to figure ever more as a refuge. In the decade since “seasteading” efforts first launched, it has become routine to frame enclave-building projects in terms of climate. Overnight, projects that continue to look like varieties of gated communities have begun to be pitched as models of sustainability, responsible solutions to sea-level rise, and paragons of a low-carbon lifestyle. NEOM, for example, is sold as a net-zero city, with promises to include all amenities within walking distance and convert the sand of the desert into silicon for solar panels. Eko Atlantic, a luxury community for 250,000 being built by a billionaire on an artificial island in Lagos, Nigeria, comes with its own flood defense.65 (The anchor tenant is to be a half-billion-dollar US consulate.)66 Dubai’s artificial archipelago, built through destruction of local reefs and the importing of sand from as far away as Australia, is also now perversely pitched as a climate-friendly environment. Its most grotesque feature is the Heart of Europe, being built on and around Germany Island in the man-made archipelago. The brainchild of Josef Kleindienst, a former Austrian police officer and high-ranking member of the Far Right Freedom Party, the Heart of Europe will include, among other things, Oktoberfest, German Christmas markets, Swiss timber chalets, olive trees imported from Andalusia, villas modeled on Viking longboats, and a mechanism for creating a rainy and even snow-covered street—all packaged as “the world’s most sustainable tourism project.”67

  A different kind of zone that recurs in climate discussions is the idea of the sacrifice zone, an area where human settlements are abandoned to sea-level rise. Globally, new forms of inequality are already coming into focus, as poorer communities are designated as sacrifice zones and enter “managed retreat” while richer areas begin to plan for seawalls, berms, dikes, and other forms of containment.68 When the Seasteading Institute had a short-lived partnership with the South Pacific nation of Tahiti, its executives spoke in rather vague ways about how its floating structures could provide an alternative space of habitation for Tahitian residents as sea levels continue to rise.69 Beyond the obvious question of looming extreme weather patterns that would likely destroy such structures, the vision of how, in fact, the locals would be folded into the new Waterworld was little discussed. Would they be full members or a permanent underclass?

  This was the zone as lifeboat—or, more likely, as cruise ship. It is telling that cruise ships are such a common point of reference for advocates of start-up societies: the floating resorts are microcosms of racialized hierarchy, picking and choosing from the world’s laws to keep the workforce as disempowered as possible.70 One promoter of start-up societies wrote of the superluxury cruise ship The World as a model for a future seastead or private city.71 Instead of cabins rented to vacationers, the ship had residences with permanent owners, who could check in and out as it circled the globe. But at the outbreak of the pandemic, these vessels of escapism became petri dishes of contagion. In March 2020, after being at sea continually for eighteen years, The World evacuated its passengers and entered hibernation in the Canary Islands.72 The dream of extra-national escape revealed itself to be uncomfortably tethered to the existing world of nations.

  4.

  No matter the rhetoric, zones are tools of the state, not liberation from it. No matter the exit fantasies, zones cannot escape the earth. The third truth about them is perhaps the most banal but most consequential: zones have inhabitants. There is no such thing as a blank slate.

  We can see this clearly back in the ur-zone of Hong Kong. I began this book with Milton Friedman gazing out affectionately at the city’s skyline, which he imagined as a perfect container for the conduct of capitalism, with decision-making insulated from disruptions by the absence of democratic elections. In 2017, when I presented an early version of that chapter at the University of Hong Kong, a professor from the law school laughed. Milton’s description of a quiescent city-state was borderline ridiculous in the middle of one of the most convulsive periods in Hong Kong history, with the population taking to the streets time and again to demand political self-determination. A few months before I gave my talk, two newly elected lawmakers had been barred from taking their positions because they had expressed Hong Kong nationalism and cursed China while taking their oaths of office.73 A few years earlier, the Occupy Central movement had stopped traffic on the city’s main artery for seventy-nine days.

  I realized later that I was giving my talk in a landmark year. It had been twenty years since the handover, with thirty years left until the planned end of “one country, two systems” with Hong Kong’s full reabsorption into China. Riding through the city on a bus, I passed by Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The kids in their Flyknit sneakers, with plastic figurines bouncing off their backpacks, gave no hint of the fact that many of them would be combatants on a battlefield on this very campus just two years later. In September 2019, Polytechnic University became the scene of an almost medieval siege, with protesters using slingshots and catapults to launch bricks at the police from inside while tear gas and hoses of blue ink assaulted them from outside.74 The promise of democracy buried in the Basic Law, which Hong Kong activists had tried to pry out and make real, was being denied and snuffed out again.

  In 2020, as Beijing grew concerned about a rising wave of pro-democracy candidates within Hong Kong’s rubber-stamp government, a national security law was imposed from the mainland that made it illegal to call for secession. Critical newspapers closed down, and once-open critiques of Beijing went silent. Politicians, professors, lawyers, and journalists associated with the pro-democracy movement were arrested, their previous social media posts and utterances now retroactively made grounds for persecution. Speedboats were intercepted as pro-democracy activists attempted to flee to Taiwan. What neoliberals once praised as “Adam Smith’s other island” had become a new kind of East Berlin—but an odd one, where international capital still enjoyed the full freedom of movement.75

  Hong Kong has always been marked by what one book famously calls the politics of disappearance.76 Its smallness has brought with it both extraordinary success and the vertiginous feeling of proximity to extinction. In the 1994 anime series Genocyber, the city is destroyed at the end of the first episode. The intertitle reads: “On that day, Hong Kong mysteriously exploded and vanished from the face of the earth.” It now looks like this might be coming to pass, politically by diktat, infrastructurally by degrees. Plans are advancing for the absorption of Hong Kong into the Greater Bay Area, a single vast mega-cluster that includes Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Macao.77 Hong Kong’s leading position in finance and shipping had already been chipped away. The Shanghai Stock Exchange is on the rise as an alternative site for IPOs. In 2012, Hong Kong was the third-biggest container port in the world, after Shanghai and Singapore; by 2020 it had slipped to number eight, passed by four Chinese ports along with Busan, South Korea.78 The same year, the United States revoked its status as a separate customs territory. “Made in Hong Kong” became simply “Made in China.” The neoliberals themselves have lost faith. In 2021, the new edition of the Heritage Foundation index of economic freedom was released with an absence at the top.79 For them, too, Hong Kong had vanished into the mainland.

  But Hong Kong, as one native son writes, is “a city that refuses to die.”80 How will it live on? One popular proposal imagines it as a city-state in the style of the early modern empire, with devolved power and a high degree of autonomy within a Chinese federation. Some are demanding outright independence for Hong Kong; others hold out for rejoining a China that had been itself democratized.81 Some imagine a reconstituted Hong Kong in exile. Tycoon Ivan Ko, advised by some of the same people behind Próspera, has been exploring the possibility for an escape pod of Hong Kong émigrés, a charter city implanted on the Irish coastline.82

  When the Hong Kong activists demanding democracy and self-determination in 2019 faced ever-harsher repression from the police, they found a way to engage with both the authorities and the city through rapidly shifting protests. They borrowed a term from one of their city’s icons, Bruce Lee. “Be water,” they said, and faced down sixteen thousand rounds of tear gas. What this means might only be discovered in the process of becoming.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

      1.  Peter Thiel, “Back to the Future” (keynote speech), Seasteading Institute Conference, September 29, 2009, San Francisco, CA, video, 30:55, https://vimeo.com/7577391.

      2.  Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian.

      3.  Thiel, “Back to the Future.”

      4.  After writing this passage, I came across a similar thought experiment in a book supported financially by the Charles Koch Foundation. See Tom Bell, Your Next Government?: From the Nation State to Stateless Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1; for pioneering work on zones, see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2014); Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011); and Patrick Neveling, “Free Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, Special Economic Zones and Global Imperial Formations 200 BCE to 2015 CE,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, ed. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

      5.  François Bost, “Special Economic Zones: Methodological Issues and Definition,” Transnational Corporations 26, no. 2 (2019): 142. One scholar solves the problem by simply referring to the capitalized Zone. Jonathan Bach, “Modernity and the Urban Imagination in Economic Zones,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 5 (2011): 99–100.

      6.  Aihwa Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia,” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 4 (2000): 68.

      7.  Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

      8.  Gabriel Zucman, “How Corporations and the Wealthy Avoid Taxes (and How to Stop Them),” New York Times, November 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/10/opinion/gabriel-zucman-paradise-papers-tax-evasion.html.

      9.  Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back (London: Profile Books, 2018), 53, 79.

    10.  “Obama Targets Cayman ‘Tax Scam,’” PolitFact, January 9, 2008, https://www.politifact.com/article/2008/jan/09/obama-targets-cayman-islands-tax-scam/.