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The following day, I went to a gallery in downtown Auckland to take a look at a new work by the artist Simon Denny. Anthony and I had talked a lot about this exhibition, because it touched on many of our shared fascinations, and because it was a project he himself had been involved in from its inception. (He had written some enthusiastic criticism on Denny’s work, and the two had started a correspondence, which eventually opened out onto the prospect of some kind of collaboration. Anthony characterized his own role in the project as an amalgamation of researcher, journalist, and “investigative philosopher, following the trail of ideas and ideologies.”) The exhibition was called The Founder’s Paradox, a name that came from the title of one of the chapters of Peter Thiel’s 2014 book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Together with the long and intricately detailed catalog essay Anthony was writing to accompany it, the show was a reckoning with the future that Silicon Valley techno-libertarians like Thiel wanted to build, and with New Zealand’s place in that future. The Sovereign Individual, too, was a central element of the show.
When I got to the gallery, Simon Denny, whom Anthony had described to me as “kind of a genius” and “the poster-boy for post-Internet art,” was making some last-minute preparations for the show’s opening. He was a neat and droll man in his mid-thirties, a native of Auckland who had lived for many years in Berlin, where he was a significant figure in the international art scene. He talked me through the conceptual framework for the show. It was structured around games—in theory playable, but in practice encountered as sculptures—representing two different kinds of political vision for New Zealand’s future. The bright and airy ground floor space was filled with tactile, bodily game-sculptures, riffs on Jenga and Operation and Twister. These works, incorporating collaborative and spontaneous ideas of play, were informed by a recent book called The New Zealand Project by a young left-wing thinker named Max Harris, which explored a humane, collectivist politics influenced by Māori beliefs about society.
Down in the low-ceilinged, dungeon-like basement was a set of sculptures rooted in an entirely different understanding of play, more rule-bound and cerebral. These were based on the kind of role-playing strategy games particularly beloved of Silicon Valley tech types, and representing a Thielian vision of the country’s future. The psychological effect of this spatial dimension of the show was immediate: upstairs, you could breathe, you could see things clearly, whereas to walk downstairs was to feel oppressed by low ceilings, by an absence of natural light, by the apocalyptic darkness captured in Simon’s elaborate sculptures.
This was a world Simon himself knew intimately. What was strangest and most unnerving about his art was the sense that he was allowing us to see this world not from the outside in, but from the inside out, and this required a certain level of proximity—often to people whose politics he found repellent. (There was in this sense a journalistic quality in Simon’s approach to his work, if not to the work itself.) Over beers in Anthony’s kitchen the previous night, Simon had told me about a dinner party he had been to in San Francisco earlier that year, at the home of a techie acquaintance. There had been a lot of Silicon Valley new money types there, he said, a lot of “blockchain entrepreneurs.” There were MAGA hats, and there was palpable excitement about Trump and the great rupture he seemed to represent. These people were from hacker backgrounds, and their view of the world arose out of a deep ethos of lulz. It was as though the new president had pulled off the ultimate troll on the liberal establishment. Seated next to Simon at dinner was a man named Curtis Yarvin, who had founded a computing platform named Urbit, with the help of Thiel’s money. As anyone who took an unhealthy interest in the weirder recesses of the online far-right was aware, Yarvin was more widely known as the blogger Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug was the intellectual progenitor of neoreaction, an antidemocratic movement that advocated for a kind of white-nationalist oligarchic neofeudalism—rule by and for a self-proclaimed cognitive elite—and which had found a small but influential constituency in Silicon Valley.
Beneath all the intricacy and detail of its world-building, The Founder’s Paradox was clearly animated by an uneasy fascination with the utopian future imagined by the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley. The exhibition’s centerpiece was a tabletop strategy game called Founders, which drew heavily on the aesthetic—as well as the explicitly colonialist language and objectives—of The Settlers of Catan, a massively popular multiplayer strategy board game. The aim of Founders, as clarified by the accompanying text and by the piece’s lurid illustrations, was not simply to evade the apocalypse, but to prosper from it. First you acquired land in New Zealand, with its rich resources and clean air, away from the chaos and ecological devastation gripping the rest of the world. Next you moved on to seasteading, the libertarian ideal of constructing man-made islands in international waters. On these floating utopian micro-states, wealthy tech innovators would be free to go about their business without interference from democratic governments. (Thiel was an early investor in, and advocate of, the seasteading movement, though his interest has waned in recent years.) Then you mined the moon for its ore and other resources, before moving on to colonize Mars. This last level of the game reflected the current preferred futurist fantasy, most famously advanced by Thiel’s former PayPal colleague Elon Musk, with his dream of fleeing a dying planet Earth for privately owned colonies on Mars.
The influence of The Sovereign Individual was all over the show. It was a detailed mapping of a possible future, in all its highly sophisticated barbarism. It was a utopian dream that appeared, in all its garish detail and specificity, as the nightmare vision of a world to come. Standing alone in the central chamber of the basement, peering through the glass case at the board of the Founders tabletop game, inspecting each of the various illustrated spaces, I noted a familiar image, a hexagonal concrete structure emerging out of grass. It was one of the bunkers at xPoint in South Dakota. I felt as though I were looking at the manifestation of my own anxieties about the future, anxieties that had often seemed to me bewilderingly complex and idiosyncratic, and irretrievably entangled with a revulsion at the cruelty and destructiveness of capitalism. The game represented an apocalyptic logic of progress: a movement away from the nation-state, away from democracy, and finally away from the ravaged Earth itself. It represented everything I thought about when I thought about the end of the world. It was like being confronted with a lurid diorama of my own unease as I had come to conceive of it. It was uncanny, and terrible, and strangely perfect.
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Later that week, in a bar a few blocks from the harbor, I had a post-work beer with Matt Nippert, the New Zealand Herald reporter who had broken the citizenship story earlier that year. He told me of his personal certainty that Thiel had bought his property in the South Island for apocalypse-contingency purposes. In his citizenship application, he had pledged his commitment to devote “a significant amount of time and resources to the people and businesses of New Zealand.” But none of this had amounted to much, Nippert said, and he was convinced that it had only ever been a feint to get him in the door.