A new class of tech billionaires hopes that cryptocurrency will upend the global financial system, replace democracy and even reshape nation-states. Justin Sun is a Chinese crypto-billionaire. He is worth eight and a half billion dollars. He's perhaps most known for eating a six and a half million dollar banana. Sun shelled out $6.2 million for Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the notorious artwork that consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall, at Sotheby’s. He then ate the banana at a high-profile press conference.
He made his wealth through the crypto platform Tron, which is one of the biggest crypto platforms in the world. He's also a 'politician'. Justin Sun believes, like many other tech billionaires believe, that democracy is outdated and can be replaced with the blockchain, the technology that underwrites cryptocurrency. So laws, voting, governance, could all be transactions that are automatically undertaken via the computer code that makes up the blockchain.
That is how Justin Sun was elected the prime minister of a small libertarian micronation called Liberland, which exists on a disputed spit of land between Serbia and Croatia in the middle of the Danube River. Liberland is tiny (2.7 sq. Miles) unrecognized by any country, but it has about 200 companies registered. The president, Vít Jedliča, founded it because he's a tech libertarian. He said that it was the first decentralized autonomous government and also the freest country in the world. There are no taxes in Liberland
There are a few permanent settlers on that spit of land, but the main 'citizens' of Liberland struggle to visit it because there are conditions for visiting Liberland from the Croatian side. In fact, the Croatian police have often gone in and destroyed their encampment a few times. This is the problem with starting a tiny new country, you sometimes have to contend with proper bigger countries with police and military.
But Liberland exists more on the blockchain than it does in the physical world. That spit of land is what's called a physical node. A lot of these tech billionaires think that we will all live in digital countries in the future. But how was Justin Sun elected on the blockchain? He was elected through a crypto token called Liberland Merits. The elections are held every three months, they take place on blockchain, and the person is elected with Merits.
People who have more Merits are able to have more say in who is going to be in the leadership of the country. What that means is that the more Liberland Merits you buy, the more voting power you have i.e. the wealthier you are, the more influence you have on how your home is governed (which is arguably the case already in many democracies). It's just that in this case, it's literally written into the constitution and the computer code of this country. So it's not one person, one vote. It's one million dollars, one million votes.
The idea that technology could basically replace all of government, laws, the banking system, is one that everyone seems very excited about in Silicon Valley. They see themselves as the ones with the real power defining the future. And they would like to replace what they see as inefficient, bureaucratic, human-led systems of government with a technology based one in which the individual's freedom is paramount. And no institution, bank or government can take your money or your rights from you.
There is a guy called Curtis Yarvin who is an American far-right political blogger and software developer known for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx), The amount of money that he has is not actually very high. He is someone who has garnered the respect of Peter Thiel, one of the richest people in the world.
He thinks that democracy is outdated and that we should replace it with something more akin to a corporate monarchy where the tech bros are actually our kings. It centers around the notion that democracy has failed, it's inefficient and therefore, what we really need is more like an enlightened monarch or as he calls it, a kind of CEO king. And that society in the future should be run as a patchwork of almost city states where each one of them is actually more like a corporation than a country. It has customers rather than citizens.
They compete for citizens like a company would compete for customers. You could switch countries like you might switch club memberships if one offers something more than the other one. These companies would be run by hereditary monarchs who are held accountable by a kind of shareholder aristocracy who has shares in the country. Yarvin believes this would be a better way to run society because corporations are more successful than governments. He wants to replace current elites with another group of elites who conveniently enough for tech billionaires are tech billionaires.
But what does that mean for the rank and file people like you and me who are not tech billionaires in Curtis Yarvin's society? He would say that the masses often do not know what they want or what they want isn't enacted by democracy. Someone who might know what you want better than you is an enlightened CEO monarch. Someone who's smarter than you. Someone like a tech billionaire.
Two of J. D. Vance's big backers, Thiel and Yavin, are people who don't really believe in politics. They want to get rid of politicians. Their view is that they are the geniuses of the world and they should be allowed to run things as they please; that a country needs a startup guy, a visionary leader like Napoleon or Lenin, who should have absolute power, dismantle the old regime and build something new. Thiel doesn't see Trump as the monarch, he sees Vance as the monarch. Yavin wants one politician to run the country.
The ideas that you find often lead to wealth and power flowing directly into the hands of the people who are already the wealthiest and who control the technology. Their idea is that money will be replaced by crypto, your job will be replaced by AI, and you'll essentially live on some form of universal basic income. Reading about such people gives you an idea of how far removed from reality the wealthiest, and in some ways, smartest people are. They really do believe that their brains are superior, and that they should and could run the world better. They believe that they really are accomplishing the most incredible thing in history.
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