So we made it. Fourteen posts, one book, and a lot of thinking about zones, borders, and the people who want to live without rules. This is the final post in my retelling series of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian (ISBN: 9781250753908). No chapter to cover this time. Just my honest takeaways after sitting with this book for a while.
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.
Remember Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash”? People strap on goggles and escape their lousy gig jobs into a virtual world called the Metaverse. They buy property, build things, live second lives. One character puts it bluntly: “When you live in a shithole, there’s always the Metaverse.”
What if a Stanford professor gave a talk about bringing back colonialism and the biggest newspapers in the world said it sounded like a great idea?
Think of a city where walking from one neighborhood to the next is basically like crossing a national border. Different laws. Different courts. Different rules about what you can own and what you can do. That is Dubai.
What happens when a Dutch libertarian lawyer decides that war-torn Somalia is the perfect place to build a tax-free paradise? You get one of the strangest chapters in the history of free-market thinking.
There is a saying that if you light a cigarette as you enter Liechtenstein from Switzerland, you will still be smoking it when you cross into Austria. That is how small this place is. About the length of Manhattan. A green valley along the Rhine river. And yet, for certain libertarians and market radicals, this tiny country is a model for the future of civilization.
Chapter 6 of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian might be the weirdest chapter in the book. And I mean that in the best way. It is about libertarian thinkers who looked at the Middle Ages and said: “Yes, that. Let’s bring that back.”
I grew up in the former Soviet Union. I remember what a map looked like before the 1990s. One big red blob stretching across half the world. Then, almost overnight, that blob split into fifteen new countries. Slobodian opens Chapter 5 with that exact memory. The map at his school changed while he was still in it. Yugoslavia broke apart. Czechoslovakia split in two. New flags everywhere.
This chapter hit different for me. I grew up in the post-Soviet world, so I know what it looks like when a government creates fake borders and moves people around. But what happened in apartheid South Africa takes it to another level.
Everyone loves to point at Singapore. Margaret Thatcher wanted Britain to become one. China sent over twenty thousand officials to study it. After Brexit, British politicians literally said “let Singapore be our model.” But what is Singapore, really? And why does every free-market thinker keep going back to this tiny city-state the size of Greater London?
Chapter 1 showed how Hong Kong became a model for free market thinkers around the world. Chapter 2 asks a different question: what happens when you try to copy that model? Slobodian takes us to London, where Thatcher’s government tried to build mini Hong Kongs inside British cities. The result was not a free market paradise. It was a city broken into pieces.
Chapter 1 of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian (ISBN: 9781250753908) opens with a wild scene. Peter Thiel is onstage with a young Google engineer named Patri Friedman. And they are talking about building nations on the ocean.
How many countries are there in the world? You probably know it’s about two hundred. But what if someone told you the real number of separate legal territories is way higher than that?
I just finished reading Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian and honestly, this book messed with how I see the world map.