Utopia: Stay and Struggle, or Build Your Exit

One word, utopia, means "no place" — Thomas More built the joke into it when he coined the term in 1516, welding outopos (no place) to the near-homophone eutopos (good place), so that a perfect society has been both a good place and a place that doesn't exist since the moment it got a name. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley and the Silicon Valley billionaires funding new nations start from the exact same definition and walk off in opposite directions. Kelley's answer: since utopia is nowhere to be found, give up looking for it, stay put, and keep struggling alongside people you don't necessarily even like. The nation-builders' answer runs the other way: since a utopia that satisfies everyone is impossible, exit the category of "everyone" and build a private version accountable only to your own people — get on a boat and leave. Both start from the same blunt fact that utopia doesn't exist. One ends in staying. The other ends in building an exit.

Two Faces

The Direction of Struggle: Kelley's Utopia

Kelley's lineage starts with his mentor Cedric Robinson's theory of "racial capitalism": racism isn't an accident capitalism happens to produce, it's the mechanism that keeps capitalism alive — and its real target was never Black people, it's the capture of the white working class, convincing workers who should be standing in the same trench as Black labor that they belong on the side of the people exploiting them instead. This isn't theory assembled at a remove from Kelley's own life. His Harlem childhood, the "flatly hostile and racist" suburban Seattle school he was bused to, and — his freshman year of college — six white men beating him with two-by-fours and pipes badly enough to hospitalize him, followed weeks later by police throwing him to the ground and pinning the same arm still in a cast: those two events are what pushed him toward history and Black studies, and toward wanting, in his own words, to be a communist for life.

What actually anchors that worldview is a specific, recurring piece of history: Depression-era Black communist farmers in Alabama — the subject of Kelley's own book Hammer and Hoe — illiterate farmers gathered under trees to hear reports of the Soviet revolution read aloud, some of them writing letters addressed to Stalin himself, believing Soviet troops would land at Mobile and truck north to rescue them the moment plantation owners moved to crush them. In the early 1970s, Alabama workers won another hard-fought strike wave, and what they got back wasn't higher wages — it was Cold War repression, then neoliberalism, the state-backed logic that capital creates jobs and the rich are the ones who will save everyone. The story runs forward to 2020: Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer organizing a union, while the company installed a mail-in ballot box under its own parking-lot surveillance cameras and simultaneously pledged ten million dollars to Black Lives Matter. Kelley's read: co-optation doesn't need violence, it just needs a check — once you've cashed it, you owe something back.

Kelley's closing judgment doesn't flinch: there has never, anywhere, been an actual communist country — the Soviet Union was "redistributive state capitalism," China is a "state capitalist neoliberal society." That's exactly why states that promised utopia ended up suppressing dissent. The revolutionary tradition he belongs to has a one-line creed — there are no utopias — and it isn't nihilism. He throws out optimism, pessimism, and even hope, and keeps exactly one word: struggle. He puts love back at the center of it, the agape Dr. King spoke of, the ongoing work of building community, even if that means staying in community with people you don't necessarily like, making mistakes together, moving forward together.

The Blueprint for Exit: The Billionaires' Utopia

The Billionaires' Utopia Blueprint starts from the same etymology and heads somewhere else entirely. Svalbard is the episode's first stop — a rare surviving patch of terra nullius by the time industrialization and colonialism had claimed most of the map, stumbled onto in 1901 by a self-styled "polar emperor," American businessman John Munro Longyear, who leaned on the 1856 Guano Act — a law that authorized the president to claim unoccupied islands by military force — to lobby Washington into protecting his coal business. The U.S. never moved, and Svalbard ended up formally handed to Norway by international treaty instead. The second stop is seasteading: retired engineer Wayne Gramlich's 1998 thought-experiment paper, picked up by Milton Friedman's grandson Patri Friedman, funded with half a million dollars from Peter Thiel in 2008 to found the Seasteading Institute, its logo referencing the man holding a seastead over his head in Atlas Shrugged, Patri's favorite line being "let a thousand nations bloom." The third stop is Prospera in Honduras — a corporate-run charter city with almost no oversight from the Honduran government, backed by over $150 million from funds tied to Thiel, Andreessen, and Altman, its spiritual guide Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State: build an exclusive online community first (the "grays" you keep), push out the ones you don't want (the "blues"), then "print" the whole thing onto physical land — a move Srinivasan himself calls "tech Zionism."

The three cases add up to the same inversion: no exit is ever truly free of the state. Svalbard leaned on the U.S. Guano Act and still ended up handed away by treaty; whether Prospera can actually escape Honduran jurisdiction now hinges on an international tribunal and a $10.7 billion claim backed by the world's most powerful military. Underneath the "save the world" language, the target turns out to be much narrower — the network state requires pre-selecting who gets to be a neighbor, and journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian's rejoinder cuts straight through it: "Who are the tech Palestinians in this situation? I don't think that that's in the book." And the moment exit actually succeeds, it tends to run on more concentrated power, not less: Prospera could take root in Honduras only because Congress ousted four Supreme Court justices, what producer Dan Girma calls "a particularly core irony" — a libertarian experiment that exists because of a strongman maneuver. The episode's closing line doesn't soften it: "That's not utopian unless you live in a society of corporations."

The Same River, Upstream

Kelley and the nation-builders look like opposite poles, but trace the current upstream and they meet at the same history. In 1947, a handful of scholars the mainstream considered "nuts" — Hayek, Milton Friedman — met at a Swiss ski resort for a conference historians later described as not even very good, and turned "free markets equal free people" into a forty-year political project, one that eventually had presidents from both parties reciting the same lines: "we are now all Friedmanites."

That river feeds Kelley's side by squeezing out the payoff that staying and struggling was supposed to deliver: Alabama workers won a hard-fought strike wave in the early 1970s and got back, not higher wages, but neoliberalism — the logic that capital creates jobs and the rich will save everyone. Kelley is emphatic that the Cold War and neoliberalism, not some decline in working people's fighting spirit, are what actually crushed labor insurgency — the gains collective struggle should have banked got systematically taken back.

That same river feeds the nation-builders' side by repackaging governance itself as a market with multiple, competing suppliers. Patri Friedman — Milton Friedman's literal grandson — describes seasteading as "a way to create more nation-states in the world, to create competition and have better ideas and kind of evolve from our land-bound system of governance," which is close to the rawest possible extension of neoliberalism's core article of faith — competition — pushed all the way to the question of whether the nation-state itself should be a replaceable product. The Seasteading Institute's founding capital runs directly on the belief his grandfather's generation seeded at Mont Pelerin.

(The following is this page's own reading, not a claim either episode makes explicitly): the same forty-year political project squeezed the space where collective action could still pay off, making "staying" look more and more like unrewarded labor, while simultaneously supplying "vote with your feet, build your own alternative" as an obvious, even fundable, option. The two faces look like opposites. Underneath, they're the same history pulling in two directions at once.

Tension, Unresolved

Neither episode closes the case. Kelley himself admits that the revolutionary tradition he belongs to has never once actually succeeded — the Soviet Union was never socialism, it was "redistributive state capitalism." He refuses the word hope and keeps struggle instead, which reads less like a testable proposition than a posture sustained by conviction. The nation-builders don't have results to show either: seasteading's own originator, Gramlich, delivers the verdict himself — "I view large seasteading as a complete failure." Even Peter Thiel, the movement's biggest funder, hedges when journalist Ross Douthat asks him point-blank, "You would prefer the human race to endure, right?" — "Uh... Yeah. Well..." Even the architect of the exit doesn't seem sure where it leads.

The two episodes never argue with each other, either — they don't share a single conversation, and each historian and journalist speaks only to their own episode's material. Noticing that they collide, placing them side by side, is this page's own move, not the shows' editorial position. Nobody has to pick a side here.

Related Pages

This page draws on 没有乌托邦，只有斗争：种族资本主义思想史 (Robin D.G. Kelley: "there are no utopias, only struggle"), 退出协议：科技亿万富翁的造国蓝图 (the tech billionaires' exit protocol: seasteading, Prospera, the network state), and 我们都是弗里德曼主义者 (the intellectual foundation: how "markets equal freedom" got run as a forty-year political project). Chinese version at 乌托邦的两副面孔：留下斗争，还是造船离开.