Pirate islands and crypto-anarchist utopias

In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it. And who has been so close to doing it as we are right now?

How can we extremists - lovers of freedom and non-violence - hope to create a community of people who share the same principles, if the whole world is occupied by armed thugs calling themselves nation-states and there is nowhere to escape

History teaches us that it is not easy, even if there are a few success stories. In some cases, it was just the result of a fortunate series of events, as in the case of Cospaia — the anarchist italian Republic. In others, it was the result of the colonization of new unexplored territories, as in the case of North America, which finally became independent from the United Kingdom in 1776.

But today the world is very different.

Still, not everything is lost. Indeed — perhaps for the first time since the birth of the industrial age and the nation-state, we might have the tools to completely overturn this paradigm and create real libertarian communities.

To see how, let us briefly analyse together the thoughts of Timothy May, one of the founders of the Cypherpunk movement and the author of the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto.

Pirate Utopias

What prevents us today from colonizing a remote island in the Pacific Ocean and build a libertarian community there? Nothing really — it's full of beautiful islands for sale. However, it would be an extremely complicated experiment and destined not to last long.