libertarians. Max Harris, the author of The New Zealand Project, the book that had informed the game sculptures on the upper level of The Founder’s Paradox, mentioned that for much of its history the country tended to be viewed as a kind of political Petri dish—it was, for instance, the first nation to recognize women’s right to vote—and that this “perhaps makes Silicon Valley types think it’s a kind of blank canvas to splash ideas on.”
When we met in her office at the Auckland University of Technology, the legal scholar Khylee Quince insisted that any invocation of New Zealand as a utopia was a “giant red flag,” particularly to Māori like herself. “That is the language of emptiness and isolation that was always used about New Zealand during colonial times,” she said. And it was always, she stressed, a narrative that erased the presence of those who were already here: her own ancestors.
The first major colonial encounter for Māori in the nineteenth century was not with representatives of the British crown, she pointed out, but with private enterprise. The New Zealand Company was a private firm founded by a convicted English child kidnapper named Edward Gibbon Wakefield, with the aim of attracting wealthy investors with an abundant supply of inexpensive labor—migrant workers who could not themselves afford to buy land in the new colony, but who would travel there in the hope of eventually saving enough wages to buy in. The company embarked on a series of expeditions in the 1820s and ’30s. It was only when the firm started drawing up plans to formally colonize New Zealand, and to set up a government of its own devising, that the British colonial office advised the crown to take steps to establish a formal colony. In the utopian fantasies of techno-libertarians like Thiel, Quince saw an echo of that period of her country’s history.
“Business,” she said, “got here first.”
Given her Māori heritage, Quince was particularly attuned to the colonial resonances of the more recent language around New Zealand as both an apocalyptic retreat and a utopian space for American wealth and ingenuity.
“I find it incredibly offensive,” she said. “Thiel got citizenship after spending twelve days in this country, and I don’t know if he’s even aware that Māori exist. We as indigenous people have a very strong sense of intergenerational identity and collectivity. Whereas these people, who are sort of the contemporary iteration of the colonizer, are coming from an ideology of rampant individualism, rampant capitalism.”
On New Zealand’s left, there had lately been a kindling of cautious optimism, sparked by the recent surprise election of a new Labour-led coalition government, under the leadership of the thirty-seven-year-old Jacinda Ardern, whose youth and apparent idealism seemed to suggest a move away from neoliberal orthodoxy. During the election, foreign ownership of land had been a major talking point, though it focused less on the wealthy apocalypse-preppers of Silicon Valley than on the perception that overseas property speculators were driving up the cost of houses in Auckland. The incoming government had committed to tightening regulations around land purchases by foreign investors, and would eventually make it much more difficult for foreign buyers to gain a foothold in the property market. This was largely the doing of Winston Peters, a populist of Māori descent whose New Zealand First party held the balance of power and who was strongly in favor of tightening regulations of foreign ownership. Peters had been a prominent figure in Kiwi politics since the 1970s. When I read that Ardern had named Peters as her deputy prime minister, I was surprised to recognize the name—from, of all places, The Sovereign Individual, where Davidson and Rees-Mogg had singled him out for weirdly personal abuse as an archenemy of the rising cognitive elite, referring to him as a “reactionary loser” and “demagogue” who would “gladly thwart the prospects for long-term prosperity just to prevent individuals from declaring their independence of politics.”
During my time in New Zealand, Ardern was everywhere: in the papers, on television, in every other conversation. On our way to Queenstown in the South Island, to see for ourselves the site of Thiel’s apocalyptic retreat, Anthony and I were in the security line at Auckland Airport when a woman of about our age, smartly dressed and accompanied by a cluster of serious-looking men, glanced in our direction as she was conveyed quickly along the express lane. She was talking on her phone but looked toward us and waved at Anthony, smiling