Ways That Don’t Work

There is a common element which shows up over and over in the new-country projects which have failed (almost all of them). It is unrealism, such as denial of current international policies, dependence on a nonexistent technology, and so forth. Some typical examples are:

Antarctic Homesteading: A 60-page single-spaced typescript prospectus for this project was forwarded by the editor of Free Country Newsletter…The basic concept is for people to go to Antarctica and settle. A scenario is laid out to start unfolding in 1981, beginning at a Southern California conference, with growth from 1,000 people to 4,000,000 by 1985, but there is no indication that anything was every done. The financial base was to be concerts by John Lennon (no indicating that he was ever contacted), films in the Jacques Cousteau genre of Antarctic sunrise and sunset, and international conferences on religion and war and liberty…This is a typical example of new-country projects that are mainly used as vehicles for the organizers’ daydreams (a practice by no means limited to the political left, as others of these case histories shows), with little regard for the harsher realities of the world - such as the fact that the great powers are unlikely to permit claims to Antarctic territory to become established facts (just recently, the British forcibly removed an Argentine weather station in the Antarctic).
[Strauss1984, p. 54-55]

Oceana: The idea germinated in 1969, among an Americal college group oriented to the Objectivist writings of Ayn Rand…This can be viewed as an illustration of the problem of attracting too many chiefs, and not enough Indians. Because Oceana was essentially a zero-dollar operation, and thus couldn’t offer immediate material incentives, it fell naturally (though inadvertently) into the trap of gaining recruits by (implicitly) offering them a full voice in the running of the venture. Thus a high proportion of people were attracted whose main interest was in endless fantasizing and dickering over details. When the time came for a commmitment to be made…the idle bull-session types took their leave.
[Strauss1984, p. 111-112]

These stories are common, and while we hope that the organizers enjoyed their daydreams, we seek a more tangible payoff.

The most common form of unrealism is probably scale, visions which are huge and expensive. Given enough money and will it is possible to build just about any kind of structure in the middle of the ocean that you can think about. Unfortunately, the tough part is coming up with enough capital to make it happen. Let us examine the state of a few relevant projects which attracted a fair amount of interest.

There has been very little visible progress with the Atlantis project for quite a while. Their webpage states that the project is defunct.

The Aquarius portion of the New Millennium project seems to have gone through a number of phases:

Phase 1 (Enthusiasm): Initial enthusiasm and excitement Phase 2 (Replan): Several replans to reduce project costs Phase 3 (Bummer): The growing realization that even the rescaled plans are still too expensive Phase 4 (Slow Death): Growing disenchantment with the whole project and a slow exodus of people working on the project. (This last part is still a bit speculative.)

Similarly, New Utopia seems to have gone through some phases of initial enthusiasm, planning, and then the realization that it wasn’t going to happen. The realists then left, leaving the project in the hands of those unable or unwilling to acknowledge the facts. Ian Sawyer’s comments are a good indication of this:

I was involved with the project as one of the Board of Governors from early 1998 through to late 1999, resigning after very major problems started appearing in the whole basis of the legality of New Utopia and Prince Lazarus’ dogmatic and dictatorial approach to them. Unfortunately I am restricted somewhat on what I can say as the result of a court ruling following a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt by Lazarus to sue me and a colleague for $10 billion, however there are copies of all the correspondence, which include the legal basis for the reasons I resigned from the project and all the subsequent comments by Lazarus and others, on the New Utopia Discussions Group with Yahoo at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/new-utopia, starting in October 1999. There have been further exchanges on the present position of New Utopia as late as the end of 2000 when it seems to have regrettably become little more than a scam.

Other nation founding groups seem to have similar lifecycles, where an initial burst of enthusiasm gives way to a growing realization that it will be impossible, or at least a huge amount of work, to turn vision into reality. Basically, the amount of capital (billions) required to build these places is simply too high to be obtainable. It is awfully hard to make a business case for something new, huge, and expensive. This is why we’ve chosen an approach which reduces the required capital by several orders of magnitude.