Pirate Utopias
Research on desert outposts leads to more watery retreats. Trace a ven-diagram around these societal experiments: Daniel Defoe’s Libertatia and Slab City, the squatter village in the shadow of California’s Chocolate mountains. Perhaps today’s galleons are double-wides and their piracy is really a more passive tactical diversion/disappearance - no property, no taxes, no law (not necessarily stealing). An autonomous zone, temporary for some snowbirds but an unimaginably hot reality for the sun-stroked and strong that make it their year-long home. A more nuanced comparison is in the works…
Hakim Bey touches upon both the idea of a Pirate Utopia and the dearth of “free” land in The TAZ. :
The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance–not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of “territorial gangsterism.” Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed… in theory.
This was written towards the end of our last century, but what about our current age where not even a speck of spectrum, a byte of information, a single naturally occurring resource goes unpoliced or unnoticed?