The Road to Splitsville THERE'S A PLACE FOR US...
The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT
In last week’s The Road to Splitsville, we made passing reference to Brexit (i.e., Great Britain leaving the European Union) as being analogous to The Split (in which the red states peacefully separate from the blue USA). Later we got to wondering: Conservative states willingly leaving the United States of America? Who would even think of such a thing?
Okay, that one was easy: Every idiot waving a Confederate flag at a rally, displaying one on his F-150, or “sporting” one on the bathing suit which the Official Bikini Inspectors, if they were really doing their job, would in no way permit her to wear.
That raised another question: Who would have the energy and the time—or, alternatively, the money to pay for others’ energy and time—to actually engineer such a thing?
And that led to some thoughts about wealth.
Say someone gave you (Dr. Evil voice) ONE MILL-YUN DAH-LERZ. You’d have some idea of what you could and couldn’t buy with it. The most luxurious and powerful car of your dreams? Yes. A two-bedroom house in one of the nicer neighborhoods in N.Y.C. or L.A. or San Francisco? No.
Now someone else gives you ten million. Suddenly the acquisition of such a house seems more than feasible. You can buy a fleet of fancy cars. You can travel, first-class, for years. Still, a big yacht, with crew and moorage, remains out of reach.
So bump it up to a hundred million. Now the very notion of what you can and can’t buy for personal consumption seems downright quaint. Still, keep going. At five hundred million, we enter the realm of fantasy (a sports team) or power (a Senate seat; a corporation). Or something grander still. Cue the inevitable quote from Chinatown:
JAKE GITTES: How much are you worth?
NOAH CROSS: I have no idea. How much do you want?
JG: No, I just want to know what you’re worth. Over ten million?
JC: Oh my, yes.
JG: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?
NC: The future, Mr. Gitts! The future!
The point of this exercise is to try to get your, and our, heads around what a billion dollars is—and we’ve only gotten halfway there. If you, like we, think of a million dollars as being a lot of money, try to grasp that a billion is a thousand million. If you (somehow) spent one dollar a second, without stopping, it would take you 31 years and 8 months to spend a billion.
And there are people who have, or “are worth,” more billions that just one.
It is, therefore, safe to say that the world inhabited by billionaires is as different from the one you and we live in as ours is from that of a native tribesman in the Amazon rainforest. And just as the tribesman’s conception of how to make use of his resources differs from ours, so do our conceptions differ from those of billionaires.
Some (Bill Gates) give their money away, or (Warren Buffet) plan to. Some (Richard Branson) spend a ton on shooting themselves into outer space, or (Jeff Bezos) shooting themselves even farther into outer space (about half the distance that Alan Shepard reached in 1961) so they can give a press conference afterward while wearing a cowboy hat.
Others (Larry Ellison) buy their own island. But why stop there? Why settle for some pre-existing piece of property subject to the laws of the sovereign state of which it remains a part, when, with enough know-how and capital, you can literally build your own “island,” a free-floating, privately-owned entity in international waters, untrammeled by the burdensome regulations, laws, taxes, restrictions, and governmental form of an extant nation-state?
Hence, “seasteading,” to which we make reference (or, more accurately, which we ridicule) in The Split. The Seasteading Institute (check out its interestingly-primitive website here) was founded on April 15 (Tax Day!) in 2008, and was helped along by a $500,000 grant from famous/icky Libertarian/JD Vance puppetmaster Peter Thiel, who left the organization not long afterward. Wikipedia tells us:
Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", due in large part to welfare beneficiaries and women in general being "notoriously tough for libertarians" constituencies, and that he had focused efforts on new technologies (namely cyberspace, space colonization and seasteading) that could create "a new space for freedom" beyond current politics.
(“Women in general,” huh? Hm.) You don’t have to be—and, indeed, you can’t be—Karl Marx, to think that what Thiel and his ilk mean by “freedom” is “freedom from having to pay taxes.” Why billionaires, who have more money and wealth than they can possibly spend in a lifetime, and who would still have plenty after paying taxes, are so resistant to taxation, is a topic for another time, or for a TED talk on “The Pathology of Greed.”
With seasteading—creating a new country at sea—we are a mere 140 million miles from Mars, where Elon “Somehow, Inexplicably, The World’s Richest Man” Musk thinks we should—we must—create a “colony” for the sake of the survival of, um, “consciousness.” Take that, Noah Cross! Talk about “the future”!
Except, as explained in a sharp, hilarious piece by Albert Burneko of Defector.com, it ain’t gonna happen. Read the whole thing, but—spoiler alert—note that a) Mars does not have a magnetosphere with which to protect “colonists” from radiation from space; b) Mars has less breathable air than the biologically-barren South Pole; c) Mars has less water than the biologically-barren Summit of Mt. Everest. Oh, and: d) Mars is 47 million miles (i.e., almost half again) farther from the sun than Earth. What, in the sky, to us is a yellow disk the size of a nickel, is to the Rover explorer a dull red pinprick. Which is to say, Mars is fucking freezing.
In summary: Nutzoid billionaires appear to hate the USA. If they loved it, or even liked it, you’d think they’d spend some fraction of their enormous wealth to improve it. (Perhaps, to inspire them, they should be forced, with eyelids held open by toothpicks, to read about the Carnegie libraries.) Okay, so they don’t seem to have any big ideas about how to improve the nation. And it’s obvious to everyone except them that they will never figure how to build their own floating nation or space colony or new planet or whatever the fuck they’ll fix on next. But they still have all that money.
So…what can they do with their wealth other than just buy more stuff or leave it to their descendants, who will presumably continue buying more stuff? Hmmmmm…
At last we come to the punch line. We think it’s not unreasonable to suppose that once they realize how stupidly impossible their seasteading-outer-space-brave-new-world fantasies are, they’ll realize—or at least some of them will—that the answer is right in front of them: The Split!
After all, they got sixty-million-plus idiots to vote for Trump twice. How hard can it be (which is to say: how many of their excess billions of dollars would it take) to convince those sixty-plus-million idiots that they’d be better off in a country of their very own, on the very same continent—not to mention the same planet!—they already inhabit, but without some damn communist socialist fascist left-wing right-wing government imposing all those pesky taxes and regulations?
Isn’t that what nutzoid-billionaire “freedom” is all about?