Foreign Policy: Senegal’s Cryptocurrency City Has Evaporated
Foreign Policy: Senegal’s Cryptocurrency City Has Evaporated
archive: https://archive.is/Ji6cs
it continues to be weird how many of these things want to Just Build A New City as magic solutionism. the same strain of “that’ll fix it” it shows up with Neom and some others too. dunno if I have a conclusion with that really, just that picking cities of all things seems like the fucking weirdest all-in-one pick to go with
anyone happen to know if there’s someone that’s studied this and written a bit about it?
I am actually talking book proposals about this one. (I told my agent about the Akon City article and her eyes lit up.) There's a definite strain of compelling crazy to pursue here.
obviously I should write an AI book first. But also, writing isn't fungible, so it'll be what I come out with first.
It's part of their retrofetishism & sneaking admiration for dictators and autocrats. "Remember when we used to really build things? Build whole cities, even? When we used to displace 10,000 people at the drop of a hat so we could build a new freeway? We don't do that anymore, because of
wokebureaucracy"that's almost certainly a thing on the supporter/stan side, and probably not not a thing with the people that suggest these citybuilding, but I don't know if it's necessarily the prime motivation (or one of the primaries, as it were)
armchair analysis: the broad stroke of it is that suggesting a whole new thing instead of figuring out how to fix a thing sells simpler. on the face of it, "start fresh" means none of that messy "figure out how to address problems and work around them", none of the politics, etc. of course this rarely holds up to scrutiny or realworld interaction at all, but the pitch is nice and clean. it's a really big part of why we've seen a lot of these things (and a major driver behind the then-popularity of the many coins (alongside the lies of a golden payday)). but as to why it is so frequently cities, instead of anything even a bit smaller (new railways! new ports! new airlines! new $x...), that's the thing that's a standout wtf for me in this
My money is on glorification of colonialism. It's this weird idea of rugged pioneers taming the land and building a Free(tm) community outside of the existing system. Shows up all the time with libertarian cranks, and probably not accidentaly does it often include claiming land from an existing population say somewhere in Oceania, because colonialism without robbery is just sparkling migration.
Also see that libertarian town that got destroyed by bears because they didn't want to regulate garbage disposal.