Sovereign States (End Times Book 2)

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Voters were quick to spot all this and stopped bothering to vote, making matters worse. Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, and the end-of-the-nation-state theory itself died at the turn of the millennium.

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T here were only tens of millions of people online in when the nation-state was last declared dead. In , that number had grown to around 3 billion; by , it will be more than 4 billion. Censorship-free, decentralised and borderless. This is an enormous pain for the nation-state in all sorts of ways. There are already millions of people using bitcoin and blockchain technologies, explicitly designed to wrestle control of the money supply from central banks and governments, and their number will continue to grow. On 17 September , the then presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted: If a nation cannot defend its border, it ceases to exist in any meaningful way, both as a going concern and as the agreed-upon myth that it is.

The subsequent movement of people across Europe — EU member states received 1.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, and notoriously broad, but according to some estimates as many as million people could be climate-change refugees by the middle of the century. If the EU struggles to control its borders when 1. This is the crux of the problem: In the end, nation-states are nothing but agreed-upon myths: But if that transaction no longer works, and we stop agreeing on the myth, it ceases to have power over us.

T he city-state increasingly looks like the best contender. These are cities with the same independent sovereign authority as nations, places such as Monaco or Singapore. The trends that are pinching the nation-state are helping the city-state. In a highly connected, quasi-borderless world, cities are centres of commerce, growth, innovation, technology and finance. How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism , the hub-like quality of large cities is especially valuable in the modern economy: You need a dense eco-system, and so hyper-connectivity is reinforcing concentration.

National governments debate and dither. This is giving cities more political muscle than ever, which they are increasingly keen to flex. On the issue of climate change, for example — something at which nation-states have failed abysmally — cities are pushing ahead. Since , the C40 initiative has brought together more than 60 cities to promote partnerships and technology to reduce carbon emissions, often going significantly beyond international agreements. In the US, where the federal government appears to have given up on climate change, leadership has fallen to cities.

This shift in power is visible in the way that the mayors of major cities are political heavyweights in their own right: Cities as diverse as Indianapolis and Copenhagen are experimenting with ways of using their own physical, economic and social assets to self-finance city-level investment. According to Katz, the world is moving beyond a nation-state world. But according to Katz, we need to re-think because there is something in between, where cities are not fully independent of their nation-states, but not supplicant to them either: Power in the 21st century belongs to the problem-solvers.

National governments debate and mostly dither. Cities act, cities do.

Power increasingly comes from the cities up, not handed down from the nation-state. F or a very long time, power was always found at the city-level. For thousands of years, urban settlements with self-government and city walls provided protection, services in exchange for tithes and taxes, and a set of rules by which to live and trade.

The Hanseatic cities for example — with their own armies and laws — pooled their economic weight to improve their bargaining power with other nations in the early 19th century, and became an economic powerhouse in the Baltic trade route.

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These cities — which included Bremen and Hamburg — realised they shared much in common, and that their mutual interests might be best served by working together. They are all hubs of finance, tech innovation, culture, and characterised by high levels of diversity and inward migration. Following this vote, there was a short-lived movement for London to declare independence from the rest of the UK. London, as is often remarked by visitors, is nothing like the rest of the country. The same can certainly be said of the US east- and west-coast behemoths. Fleeting around from one city to the next, as I sometimes do, feels more Hanseatic League than League of Nations: And the Hanseatic League itself was hardly an oddity.

Before that there was Venice of course, and that was merely the most well-known of many independent city-states dotted across what is now Italy in the 10th to 16th centuries, including Florence, Bologna and Turin. Only a few formal city-states still exist today Monaco, Singapore and the Vatican are the completely sovereign city-states; others, such as Hong Kong, act like one but do not have full sovereignty. It is in fact a historical anomaly that so few of us live in city-states. Carving out a new form of sovereign authority from an existing one is extremely difficult, and is generally frowned upon by the UN.

This is why some of the more exciting endeavours are about creating new cities entirely. Paul Romer, the chief economist at the World Bank, has long been an advocate of creating more chartered cities, essentially city-scale administrative zones that operate, to some extent, independently. Cities are the right size, he argues. Large enough to try something new, but not too big that all your eggs are in one basket. A chartered city, built on uninhabited land would allow experimentation with new rules and systems to attract investment and people. Special Economic Zones, which have been around for several years, are similar: Out on the swampy Croatian-Serbian border lies the 7 square kilometres of Gornja Siga.

Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand

Although currently under Croatian control, this small patch of land is technically unclaimed since Croatia and Serbia both believe it belongs to the other. Liberland, which is uninhabited but has more than , online citizens ready to move if Croatia stops blocking inward access, already has the trappings of a city-state.

A currency, a constitution, a president and even a football team. Everything has been designed to maximise individual liberty. For a start, anyone can join and leave as they wish. Like most libertarians, Jedlicka loves modern digital technology, seeing it as extremely helpful to the libertarian cause, weakening the nation-states and helping new models such as his. I hardly need to tell you that Valar is another Tolkien reference.

This was a man with a particular understanding of what a utopia might look like, who did not believe, after all, in the compatibility of freedom and democracy. And it was always, she stressed, a narrative that erased the presence of those who were already here: The New Zealand Company was a private firm founded by a convicted English child kidnapper named Edward Gibbon Wakefield, with the aim of attracting wealthy investors with an abundant supply of inexpensive labour — migrant workers who could not themselves afford to buy land in the new colony, but who would travel there in the hope of eventually saving enough wages to buy in.

The company embarked on a series of expeditions in the s and 30s; it was only when the firm started drawing up plans to formally colonise New Zealand, and to set up a government of its own devising, that the British colonial office advised the crown to take steps to establish a formal colony.

We as indigenous people have a very strong sense of intergenerational identity and collectivity. Whereas these people, who are sort of the contemporary iteration of the coloniser, are coming from an ideology of rampant individualism, rampant capitalism. New Zealanders tend to be more flattered than troubled by the interest of Silicon Valley tech gurus in their country. Among the leftwing Kiwis I spoke with, there had been a kindling of cautious optimism, sparked by the recent surprise election of a new Labour-led coalition government, under the leadership of the year-old Jacinda Ardern , whose youth and apparent idealism suggested a move away from neoliberal orthodoxy.

During the election, foreign ownership of land had been a major talking point, though it focused less on the wealthy apocalypse-preppers of Silicon Valley than the perception that overseas property speculators were driving up the cost of houses in Auckland. The incoming government had committed to tightening regulations around land purchases by foreign investors.

During my time in New Zealand, Ardern was everywhere: She was talking on her phone, but looked towards us and waved at Byrt, smiling broadly in happy recognition. He was driving the rental car, allowing me to fully devote my resources to the ongoing cultivation of aesthetic rapture mountains, lakes, so forth. We were on our way to see for ourselves the part of New Zealand, on the shore of Lake Wanaka in the South Island, that Thiel had bought for purposes of post-collapse survival.

We talked about the trip as though it were a gesture of protest, but it felt like a kind of perverse pilgrimage. It coloured his perception of reality. He admitted, for instance, to a strange aesthetic pathology whereby he encountered, in the alpine grandeur of the South Island, not the sublime beauty of his own home country, but rather what he imagined Thiel seeing in the place: Matt Nippert, the New Zealand Herald journalist who had broken the citizenship story earlier that year, told me he was certain that Thiel had bought the property for apocalypse-contingency purposes.

But none of this had amounted to much, Nippert said, and he was convinced it had only ever been a feint to get him in the door as a citizen. A well known and well connected professional in Queenstown, he agreed to speak anonymously for fear of making himself unpopular among local business leaders and friends in the tourism trade.

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He had been concerned for a while now about the effects on the area of wealthy foreigners buying up huge tracts of land. Another couple he knew of, a pair of bitcoin billionaires, had bought a large lakeside estate on which they were constructing a gigantic bunker. From the point of view of the modern apocalypticist, the whole appeal of the country — its remoteness and stability, its abundant clean water, its vast and lovely reaches of unpeopled land — was that it was itself a kind of reinforced geopolitical shelter, way down there at the bottom of the world.

The people I spoke to in the property business were keen to portray New Zealand as a kind of utopian sanctuary, but to give as little oxygen as possible to the related narrative around the country as an apocalyptic bolthole for the international elite. He himself had sold land to one very wealthy American client who had called him on the night of the presidential election.

He wanted to secure something right away. Showing me around the high-end beachfront properties he represented about an hour or so north of Auckland, another luxury property specialist named Jim Rohrstaff — a Californian transplant who specialised in selling to the international market — likewise told me that although quite a few of his major clients were Silicon Valley types, the end of the world tended not to be a particular factor in their purchasing decisions.

What they see when they come here is utopia. In one sense, I knew what he meant by this. He meant excellent wine. He meant world-class golf. He meant agreeable climate, endless white sand beaches that scarcely aroused the suspicion of the existence of other human beings. But having lately spoken to Khylee Quince about the historical resonances of the concept of utopia, I wondered what else he might mean, and whether he intended to mean it or not.

I n Queenstown, before we set out to find the former sheep station Thiel had bought, we went to look for the house he owned in the town itself. This place, we speculated, must have been purchased as a kind of apocalyptic pied-a-terre: It looked modestly ostentatious, if such a thing was possible; the front of the building was one giant window, gazing out blankly over the town and the lake below.

There was some construction going on in the place. I wandered up the drive and asked the builders if they knew who their client was. They were just doing some renovation on contract. Nothing sinister, just wiring. The next day, we made our way to Lake Wanaka, where the larger rural property was located. We rented bikes in the town, and followed the trail around the southern shore of the lake. I asked Anthony whether he thought the water was safe to drink, and he said he was sure of it, given that its purity and its plenty was a major reason a billionaire hedging against the collapse of civilisation would want to buy land there in the first place.

We scrabbled up the stony flank of a hill and sat for a while looking out over the calm surface of the lake to the distant snowy peaks, and over the green and undulating fields unfurling into the western distance, all of it the legal possession of a man who had designs on owning a country, who believed that freedom was incompatible with democracy. Later, we made our way to the far side of the property, bordering the road, where we saw the only actual structure on the entire property: It is the opinion of this reporter that Thiel himself had no hand in its construction.

W e had made it to the centre of the labyrinth, but it was elsewhere in the end that the monster materialised. The older man was doughier and less healthy-looking than he appeared in photographs, Harris told me, but he had little doubt as to his identity. Harris, who was aware that Peter Thiel had not been seen in New Zealand since , asked the man whether he was who he thought he was; the man smirked and, without raising his eyes from the board game toward Harris, replied that a lot of people had been asking him just that question.

He asked Harris if he knew the artist, and Harris said that he did, that he himself was in a fact a writer whose work had formed part of the conceptual framework for the show. Of the sheer improbability of these two men— one for whom New Zealand was a means of shoring up his wealth and power in a coming civilisational collapse, one for whom it was home, a source of hope for a more equal and democratic society — just happening to cross paths at an art exhibition loosely structured around the binary opposition of their political views no mention was made, and they went their separate ways.

Thiel left his contact details with the gallery, suggesting that Denny get in touch. Byrt, the more straightforwardly political in his antagonism toward Thiel and what he represented, was bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, though strangely thrilled by it, too.

For my part, this came as a disorienting rug-pull ending — partly because the monster had materialised, and he was therefore no longer merely a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of capitalism, but also an actual human, goofily got up in polo shirt and shorts, sweating in the heat, traipsing along to an art gallery to indulge his human curiosity about what the art world thought of his notoriously weird and extreme politics.

A sovereign individual in the same physical environment as us ordinary subject citizens. But it also deepened the mystery of what Thiel had planned for New Zealand, for the future. There was one mystery that did get solved, though not by me: Thiel was making some alterations to the master bedroom.

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