New Utopia’s website has had a makeover. New Utopia is (of course) a nation-in-planning, a laissez-faire capitalist brand new country which will be built on the water in the carribean, outside of international jurisdiction, except for Venezuala’s, which is a technicality. It will be a tax haven and every other kind of haven that a capitalist utopian can want. It will be a Principality, in the style of Monaco. The prince will be a man who has renamed himself “Lazarus Long” after a character in a Heinlein novel (gag). The whole thing is an excercise in self fulfilling chutzpah, “if you think it, they will come”, see entry on “Bush Administration”.

For years all it’s really been is a dusty old website with out of date news and even out of dater press articles from obscure newspapers. Back in the late 90s the project had some zest and drive and I used to enjoy the plucky antics of Lazurus Long and his Faithful Crew, sailing uncertain the waters of PreStatehood, selling “charter citizenships” to raise cash and bitching about how the Man once busted him for questionable interstate business practices and this was going to show the Man how deregulated capitilism is the bomb yo.

10/7/2000 – First Construction Announced!

The Principality of New Utopia is happy to be able to announce that after months of negotiations a consortium of international developers has made a commitment to start construction in our new country before the first of next year. The initial projects have a total estimated construction cost of well over 4 billion USD!

The SEC got involved, something to do with selling passports to a country that didn’t exist… momentum slowed… nothing happened for a few years.

Then they got some GIS going, some maps you know, and as we are all painfully aware, nothing says “no, really, it exists” like a map. And they chartered a fishing boat to go out to the site. Trying to get some of the old magic back I guess… then nothing happened for a while…

But they are Back and On the Attack. They got themselves a webmaster, sorry Manager of Information Systems for The Principality of New Utopia, and the new website is actually a pretty sweet design. Strangely for an ultracapitalist organization, their site supports standards and recommends Firefox for browsing. Maybe they’re getting in touch with their libertarian underdog side.

National Geographic also interviewed Lazurus for a special on ocean living. That’s less of a big deal than it maybe sounds – if you’ve watched the National Geographic channel lately you will have noticed that they have hired the production and editorial team from Hard Copy to make all their strategic decisions lately. Still, it’s got to be exciting for the New Utopia Team of over 11 ministers.

Will this anarchocapitalist dream really come together? Will all those rough nights for Lazurus, wondering if he was going to translate his raw nerve and nalgas into a brand new nation, or if he was really just a second rate crackpot, really pay off? Will a new nation rise from the Caribbean waters?

I kind of hope so. Get all those ultra individualists money-believers in once isolated self-dependant place, get one good tropical storm through there, and we’ll see what they learn about the value of working together for survival.

Goooo New Utopia!