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.
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.
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.
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.