Josh Marshall uncovered what might be the genesis or at least the feedback loop of Trump's Greenland nonsense. As you might expect, it has some link to his new friends in Muskylvania. The techno broligarchy is now calling so much of the tune, because of Musk's corruption of Twitter (and potentially Zuckerberg's corruption of Meta). With Musk now the Grima Wormtongue of Donald Trump, the whispers of this idea of stateless living now has a proponent - I guess - in the White House. My guess is that Trump really has no interest in creating a libertarian non-state state.
This really brings us back to the techno sociopathy of Silicon Valley. Let's go back and remember that Musk, Peter Thiel, Peter Sacks and the like are not engineers, though they likely understand more engineering than most. They are venture capitalists who have made a killing off the "next" technology. This has created a massive, billionaire fueled Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby they think because they acquired Tesla or built PayPal that they are the finest humanity has to offer.
It's Social Darwinism with ones and zeroes.
Like Social Darwinism, this movement if fundamentally un-democratic. Since most states at least give a façade of democratic legitimacy (the People's Republic of Korea), the norm of democratic government is fairly hard to escape, and if you wanted to escape it in 2025, that means, well, Russia or North Korea, which isn't a great place to be.
As a result, you have these techbros masturbating to fantasies of creating their own states. Or, again, anti-states. Musk doesn't want to be the Neil Armstrong of Mars, he wants to be the Cortez. He wants to live on Mars, surrounded by sex robots and other drones who will keep him alive in a simulacrum of imperial splendor, without having all those pesky human slaves to keep an eye on.
Look, states were created in Europe as a successor to empires, then exported that idea through their own imperialism. The reason why the rest of the world kept states even as they expelled Europeans, was because states just work.
I do hope that these tech weirdos go off and live in their libertarian non-state somewhere.
The rest of us would be better off.
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