Crack-Up Capitalism Conclusion: When Zones Take Over the World
The conclusion of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian (ISBN: 9781250753908) is called “Be Water.” And it pulls together everything the book has been building toward. Zones are not some fringe experiment anymore. They are the default political form of twenty-first-century capitalism.
Slobodian opens with a story that almost sounds like satire. But it is not.
A City Built on Mud and Pixels
In early 2022, Patrik Schumacher, the head of Zaha Hadid Architects, revealed plans for a brand new city. Beautiful renderings. Galleries, auditoriums, restaurants.
But here’s the thing. The city did not exist. It was virtual. You could walk through it only as a white-shelled android on a computer screen. The sky was blank.
And the real land it was mapped onto? A muddy two-square-mile strip between Serbia and Croatia. Unclaimed since Yugoslavia fell apart. Someone “claimed” it in 2015 and named it Liberland.
Schumacher used to be a socialist. Then the 2008 crisis hit and he turned to Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. He went full anarcho-capitalist. He told the World Architectural Congress that governments should abolish all social housing, eliminate building standards, and privatize every street, park, and square.
His argument was basically this: democracy was useful when factories needed workers. In the age of AI and automation, democracy no longer makes sense. What makes sense are blank-slate dots on the map, like Liberland. Enclaves for the global elite. Anchor points for virtual enterprises.
“The revolution comes when the political system becomes a barrier to the forces of production,” Schumacher said. “And that’s what we’ve reached.”
Croatian border guards in speedboats would not even let anyone land on the mudflat. The project had almost zero chance of working. But Schumacher did not care. It was the idea that mattered.
China’s Belt and Road: Zones Go Global
Anarcho-capitalists like Schumacher flipped the usual story on its head. Instead of democracy spreading from the West, they saw a more efficient, nondemocratic capitalism rolling westward from Asia.
And China was leading the way.
Since the 1970s, China had used zones to chop up its own economy. By the 2010s, it was building them far from home. The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, funded railways and ports across continents. China bought the Greek port of Piraeus, took over the Djibouti harbor, signed a 99-year lease on a Sri Lankan deepwater port, and proposed zones covering one-sixth of El Salvador’s land.
So here’s what happened. China, which had foreign concessions forced on it a century and a half ago, was now doing the same thing to other countries. The diplomats noticed. “You could say that these Chinese companies are like the British East India Company of our days,” one said after China leased a port in the Solomon Islands.
NEOM and the Desert Experiment
Saudi Arabia jumped in too. In 2017, it announced NEOM, a $500 billion megaproject on the Red Sea coast. Over ten thousand square miles. Run by shareholders, not by the Saudi state. The crown prince called it “the first capitalist city in the world.”
But here’s the problem. Twenty thousand Bedouins had to be cleared from the region. One who refused was shot dead. And NEOM partnered with Huawei to wire it as a “smart city.” A royal family contracting with a Chinese tech giant to build a surveillance-ready city in the desert. Not exactly freedom from the state.
Post-Brexit Britain Goes Shopping
After Brexit, Britain partnered with Dubai’s DP World, which had bought the P&O Shipping Line and built the London Gateway port.
Then DP World-owned P&O Ferries fired its entire workforce of 800 people in a single day. No warning. They offered jobs back at 5.15 pounds per hour, barely half the minimum wage.
How? The ships sailed from British ports but flew flags of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Cyprus. British waters, foreign labor laws. A classic zone trick.
Weeks later, Quebec’s public pension fund put $2.5 billion into DP World anyway. Canadian retirement savings riding on an emirate’s ambitions.
Zones Are Everywhere Now
Slobodian looks around the world in the early 2020s and sees zones everywhere. China turned Hainan island into a special economic zone. Zones in Africa are “on a steep upward trend.” India is ramping up zones to compete with Singapore and Dubai. Manhattan’s tallest pencil tower opened with apartments from $8 million to $66 million. “This isn’t housing,” one sociologist said. “It’s a luxury good, more like a land-bound yacht.”
And the United States itself? In 2022, it became the world’s top destination for hiding money, beating Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Its democracy was briefly downgraded to an “anocracy,” a system mixing democratic and autocratic features.
Peter Thiel had rethought his hostility toward government after backing Trump. His company Palantir landed massive contracts with immigration enforcement and the military. As one writer put it, exit is for losers. Good capitalists know the real game is capturing the existing state, not building a new one.
Climate Zones and Cruise Ship Fantasies
Slobodian also notices that every luxury enclave suddenly got rebranded as sustainable. NEOM? Net-zero city. Eko Atlantic, a gated community on an artificial island in Lagos? Comes with its own flood defense. Dubai’s artificial islands, built by destroying reefs and importing sand from Australia? Now marketed as “climate-friendly.”
Meanwhile, seasteading promoters pointed to a luxury cruise ship called The World as a model for floating nations. Then the pandemic hit. The ship evacuated its passengers and went into hibernation in the Canary Islands. So much for escaping the world.
Hong Kong: Where It All Comes Back
Slobodian ends where the book began. Hong Kong.
Milton Friedman once gazed at that skyline and saw a perfect capitalist machine. But the people never stopped pushing back. Occupy Central. The 2019 protests. Students launching bricks with catapults while police fired sixteen thousand rounds of tear gas.
In 2020, Beijing imposed a national security law. Newspapers closed. Politicians and journalists were arrested. Hong Kong became a kind of East Berlin, but one where international capital still moved freely.
The Heritage Foundation, which ranked Hong Kong number one in economic freedom for decades, quietly dropped it from the index. “Made in Hong Kong” became “Made in China.”
But Hong Kong is, as one writer put it, “a city that refuses to die.” Some want autonomy within a Chinese federation. Some want independence. Some imagine a new Hong Kong rebuilt in exile on the Irish coast.
And the 2019 protesters? They borrowed a line from Bruce Lee. “Be water,” they said. And faced down everything thrown at them.
What It All Means
Three truths about zones run through this entire conclusion.
First, zones are tools of the state, not liberation from it. Governments use them for their own purposes. They do not create a world of a thousand competing micro-nations. They strengthen a handful of state capitalist superpowers.
Second, zones cannot escape the earth. Climate change, pandemics, border guards in speedboats. The dream of floating cities and virtual nations keeps crashing into physical reality.
Third, zones have inhabitants. There is no blank slate. Someone already lives there. And those people have their own ideas about how things should work.
That is the tension at the heart of this entire book. The zone builders want empty maps. But the maps are never empty.