Without pausing to glance at me, the artist said, “Five hundred dollars.” He had a rural Australian accent.
I said, “If I'm going to get ripped off, I think I’ll wait for a local to do it.”
He gave me a mock-wounded glare. “And ten years doesn’t qualify me? What do you want? Citizenship records?”
“Ten years? I apologize.” Ten years meant he was practically a pioneer;
Stateless had been seeded in 2032, but it had taken almost a decade to become habitable and self-sustaining. I was surprised; the founders, and most of the earliest settlers, had come from the US.
I said, “My name’s Andrew Worth. I'm here for the Einstein Conference.
“Bill Munroe. Here for the light.” He didn’t offer his hand.
“I can’t afford the picture. But I’ll buy you lunch, if you’re interested.”
He looked at me sourly. “You’re a journalist.”
“I'm covering the conference. Nothing else. But I'm curious about… the island.”
“Then read about it. It’s all on the nets.”
“Yes—and it all contradicts itself. I can’t decide what’s propaganda and what isn’t.”
“So what makes you think anything I might tell you would be any more reliable?”
“Face to face, I’ll know.”
He sighed. “Why me?” He put down his stylus. “All right. Lunch and anarchy. This way.” He started to walk across the square.
I hung back. “You’re not going to leave this—?” He kept walking, so I caught up with him. “Five hundred dollars—plus the easel and the stylus—and you’re willing to trust people to leave it untouched?”
He glanced at me irritably, then turned and waved his notepad at the easel; it emitted a brief ear-splitting squeal. A few people turned to stare. “Don’t you have alarm tags where you come from?” I felt my face redden.
Munroe chose a cheap-looking open-air cafe, and ordered a steaming white concoction from the instant-serve display counter. It smelled nauseatingly fishy—although here that didn’t necessarily imply that it had once been the flesh of any vertebrate. Still, I lost whatever faint hint of an appetite I might have been working up.
As I thumbed approval of the payment for the meal, he said, “Don’t tell me: you’re deeply perplexed by our use of international credit as a means of exchange, the existence of free-enterprise eating establishments, my shameless attachment to private property, and all the other trappings of capitalism which you see around you.”
“You’ve done this before. So what’s the stock answer to the stock question?” Munroe carried his plate out to a table which gave him a clear view of his easel.
He said, “Stateless is a capitalist democracy. And a liberal socialist democracy. And a union of collectives. And several hundred others things for which I have no name.”
“You mean… people here choose to act as they would in those kinds of societies?”
“Yes, but it goes deeper than that. Most people join syndicates which effectively are those kinds of societies. People want freedom of choice, but they also want a degree of stability. So they enter into agreements which give them a framework in which to organize their lives—agreements which allow for release, of course… but then, most democracies permit emigration. If sixty thousand people in one syndicate agree to pay a portion of their income—subject to audit—into a fund used for health, education, and welfare, disbursed according to policies fleshed out in detail by committees of elected delegates… they may not have a parliament or a head of state, but that still sounds like a socialist democracy to me.”
I said, “So freely chosen ‘government’ isn’t forbidden. But—overall—are you anarchists, or not? Aren’t there universal laws here, which everyone is forced to obey?”
“There are a handful of principles endorsed by a large majority of residents. Basic ideas about freedom from violence and coercion. They’re widely promulgated and anyone who disagrees with them would be better off not coming here. I won’t split hairs, though; they might as well be laws.
“So are we anarchists, or not?” Munroe mimed indifference. “Anarchy means ‘no ruler,’ not ‘no laws'… but no one on Stateless loses any sleep contemplating ancient Greek semantics—or the writings of Bakunin, or Proudhon, or Godwin. Sorry, I retract that: about the same percentage of the population as you’d find in Beijing or Paris cares passionately about each of those subjects. But you’ll have to interview one of them, if you want their opinion.
“Personally, I think the word carries too much historical baggage to be salvaged. No great loss. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchist movements were bogged down, as much as the Marxists, by the question of seizing power from the ruling class. On Stateless that issue was dealt with very simply. In 2025, six employees of a Californian biotech company called EnGeneUity absconded with all the information they needed to make the seed. Much of which was their own work, if not their own property. They also took some engineered cells from various cultures, but too few to be missed. By the time anyone knew that Stateless was growing, there were a few hundred people living here in shifts, and it would have been bad PR to summarily sterilize the place.
“That was our ’revolution.’ Beats measuring out your life in Molotov cocktails.”
“Except that the theft means you’re saddled with the boycott.”
Munroe shrugged. “The boycott is a great pain. But Stateless under the boycott is still better than the alternative: a company island, every square meter privately owned. It’s bad enough when every decent food crop on the planet is licensed; imagine the ground beneath your feet being the same.”
I said, “Okay. So the technology gave you a shortcut to a new society; all the old models were irrelevant. No invasion and genocide, no bloody uprising, no glacial democratic reforms. But getting there’s the easy part. I still don’t understand what holds the place together.”
“Small invertebrate organisms.”
“I meant politically.”
Munroe looked baffled. “Holds the place together against what? The onset of anarchy?”
“Violence. Looting. Mob rule.”
“Why bother traveling to the middle of the Pacific for something you can do in any city in the world? Or do you think we went to all this trouble just for a chance to play Lord of the Flies?"
“Not intentionally. But when it happens in Sydney, they send in the riot squad. When it happens in Los Angeles, they send in the National Guard.”
“We have a trained militia, who have near-universal consent to use reasonable force to protect people and vital resources in an emergency.” He grinned. “‘Vital resources.’ ‘Emergency powers.’ Sounds just like home, doesn’t it? Except that the emergency has never arisen.”
“Okay. But why hasn’t it?”
Munroe massaged his forehead, and regarded me as if I were an over-persistent child. “Good will? Intelligence? Some other bizarre alien force?”
“Be serious.”
“There are some obvious things. People turn up here with a slightly higher than average level of idealism. They want Stateless to work, or they wouldn’t have come—give or take the occasional tedious agent provocateur. They’re prepared to cooperate. I don’t mean living in dormitories, pretending everyone’s your extended family, and going on work parties singing uplifting communal anthems—though there’s some of that about. But they’re willing to be more flexible and tolerant than the average person who chooses to live elsewhere… because that’s the whole point.