Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,45

of which was written the web address “marscoin.org.” (The neck and shoulders of this T-shirt were stippled with dandruff in such a way that it seemed to depict the cosmos itself, a heavenly firmament of flaked skin.) As discreetly as I could, I slipped my phone from my trouser pocket and entered the address into its browser, and I found myself on the website of a cryptocurrency founded by Mars Society members who had intended it to act both as a source of funding for Mars colonization projects and as the eventual colony’s de facto currency. “Marscoin,” I read, “is dedicated to supporting the colonization of Mars and other space-related projects intended to get humans living and thriving off of planet earth. Simply by using and investing in Marscoin, you are contributing to a serious bootstrapping effort to further a colony on Mars.” There seemed to be a general consensus in Mars colonization circles that the financial system of the colonies would inevitably be based in some or other cryptocurrency. (That there was a high degree of crossover between the enthusiasts of human settlement of Mars and blockchain fundamentalists was not especially surprising, given that both were of disproportionate interest to the libertarian wing of the geek community.)

It was right out of The Founder’s Paradox, this whole idea. I thought again of the world-building strategy board game, down in that dungeon-like basement of the gallery in Auckland, depicting successive levels of escape from a dying planet, with its democratic nation-states, until the player finally reached the anarcho-capitalist utopia of Mars. In his catalog essay for the show, Anthony had quoted an article by Thiel in which he’d said that, when it came to the matter of escape, the important question was one “of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.” The undiscovered country was the Internet, yes, but it was also New Zealand, and it was also space itself.

I remembered Anthony, driving our rental car toward Thiel’s estate on Lake Wanaka, talking about how he didn’t want his son to grow up in the future people like Thiel and Musk were working to construct.

No truly free places left in our world. The kind of freedom that was being invoked here was the freedom from government, which meant freedom from taxation and regulation, which in turn meant the freedom to act purely in one’s own interest, without having to consider the interests of others—which seemed to me the most bloodless and decrepit conception of freedom imaginable. (It was surely no coincidence, I thought, that little was ever said about building “communities” on Mars: the concept of community involved thinking of other people as more than burdens, or resources to be exploited, or rational actors with whom you could trade.) The notion of escaping “beyond politics” was, in other words, itself inescapably political. It was a dream of dissolving all entanglements with, and obligations toward, other people. This amounted to nothing less, in my view, than the dissolving of life itself.

* * *

—

At the time of the convention, notwithstanding the occasional plane coming in low toward LAX, Mars was the brightest thing in the night sky above the city. Mars, the planet closest to our own, is no particular distance away. Because the two planets are elliptically orbiting the sun at different rates, the distance varies from 33.9 million miles at its shortest to 250 million miles at its longest. In the late summer of 2018, toward the end of that long and devastating fire season, Mars was closer to Earth—or, and this was somehow more unsettling to consider, Earth closer to it—than at any point in the previous fifteen years. If you were going to set out for Mars, or return from there to Earth, now would be the time.

“To be living here, and not in what we mostly believe is the insupportable there, elsewhere, is to be assimilated into a powerful abstraction, the abstraction of never-ending possibility,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick. “The American situation is not so much to overthrow the past as to overthrow the future before it arrives as a stasis.”

The chaos and upheaval and entropy of our time, its roiling surface of radical change: Are these not in fact hysterical symptoms of a deep and lethal stasis?