*Quinn Slobodian* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Introduction - Shatter the Map In 2009, Peter Thiel proposed that the future would have thousands of political entities, not just the few hundred nations at the time. In fact, at one count, there are now over 5,400 special zones. As Slobodian writes: > Inside the containers of nations are unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories, and peculiar jurisdictions. There are city-states, havens, enclaves, free ports, high-tech parks, duty-free districts, and innovation hubs. The world of nations is riddled with zones—and they define the politics of the present in ways we are only starting to understand. > This book tells the story of what I call crack-up capitalism. It is, at once, a description of the world that has come into being through the uncoordinated efforts of private actors seeking profit and economic security over the last forty years, enabled by willing governments, and the tale of a deliberate ideology. Crack-up capitalism is a label for both the way the world works and a way that specific people hope to continue to change the world. It is a way to describe a world that is both ever more interconnected and ever more fragmented. Crack-up capitalists spot signs of the mutation of the social contract and ask whether they could accelerate and profit from the dynamics of dissolution. Jeff Deist calls this "soft secession" - https://mises.org/mises-wire/prospects-soft-secession-america > A venture capitalist who worked for Peter Thiel coined an ingenious term when he called this form of soft secession underthrow. For him, the best model of politics was the corporation. We opt in and out as customers. If we don’t like the product, we shop elsewhere. Nobody demands anything of us and we feel obliged to nobody in particular. We rely, in the classic dichotomy laid out by the economist Albert Hirschman a half century ago, on exit rather than voice. > - https://underthrow.substack.com/p/the-nakamoto-consensus Ten thousand miles of walls have been built along borders: - [Rosière 01/2012 - Teichopolitics: Re-considering Globalisation Through the Role of Walls and Fences](zotero://select/items/1_FRJGDRXR) ## 1- Two, Three, Many Hong Kongs > In 1990, [Milton] Friedman said that the right model for Eastern Europe after state socialism was not the United States, Great Britain, or Sweden. It was Hong Kong. # Quotes # References [Ogle 2017-12-01 - Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s](zotero://select/items/1_PVWKDM4W)