the state inside
first established 25.02.2006
a new country
it is a tough brief to start a new country. we do not profess to have all the answers, but we do posses a passion to organise ourselves differently to the current arbitrary system of privilege and handicap assumed and imposed at birth.
we are exhausted by the constant struggle against the direction the majority of our governments are taking us in. we know the climate is changing rapidly, and the reliance on fossil fuels is accelerating that, yet oil consumption is up not down. we know what’s wrong, but the system we’ve designed prioritises today over tomorrow. there’s no way pepsi will willingly make less drinks, nor vw less cars but that’s what needs to happen if we are to survive. instead we are shopping ourselves to death, buying our own demise. maybe we shouldn’t be doing this
we have in the uk perfectly drinkable tap water, and yet we fly in water from around the world in plastic bottles whose life span is an hour on our table, and then several million hours in the ground. we’re fighting hideous wars a long way from home to allow us to keep making the bottles to put the water in to fly it to the table instead of taking it from the tap. maybe we shouldn’t be doing this either.
a virtual country
maybe we don’t have to accept the influence of a violent, hypocritical and maniacal american foreign policy in our everyday lives, despite being unable to vote on it. maybe we don’t need to keep shopping or keep allowing our democracies to be bought by oil executives and hedge fund managers. after all, what we choose to buy or not buy is not a meaningful way to express change. and there’s no such thing as an ironic dollar. maybe we don’t accept the miserable racist, misogynist, facile narrowing agenda of rupert murdoch, fox news or the daily mail.
why, when transnational companies treat us as global consumers, can we only react locally? why do i share similar resources and ideals with someone in brazil or iraq but have no formal bind to represent that? why are there no criminal charges brought against the architects of the corrupt and corrupting financial system by a group of governments acting together? the system is the way it is because it’s been designed that way.
and there’s the irony, we’ve built an elaborate, poisonous, incompetent, decadent violent system to manage ourselves, but we already live in a system. it is a system that generates air for us to breathe, grows plants for us to eat, and water for us to drink. everything we do should be measured against the vitality or otherwise of that system because without it, we’re finished.
that place is country x
so why not start a country? only this time, a virtual one. free from the shallow bonds of maps and birth. (after all, i can’t see the other parts of the british isles from where i sit anyway). led by the imagination, we can be free from the necessity to defend its borders physically, we can reduce the violence of exclusion. a new description of resistance. but a fertile place too, a place to unite across and beyond, a united states of humanity. a place where value can be described by those who need it, rather than those who need to sell it.
for now though, our country is simply here. as yet it has no name, it is simply country x. a place where new citizens have settled for the first time. we are unclear of where to start building, unsure if we should even be here in the first place, ready to ask a lot of questions, ready to commit to the most non-polluting vision we can muster, ready to defend our borders with the gentlest of hands, ready to resist the urge to exploit.
if you would like to join, we have an unlimited immigration and emigration policy. you are free to come and go as you wish. we would hope that your reason to join would be that you too would like to stop, to start over, to take greater control over not only your own life, but also the way power is used by the few to herd and splinter the many. we would hope that you see our need to breathe as more important than the need to fly. we would hope that you can recognise our desire to never claim any earthly site as our own nor replicate the trivia, corruption and horrors of our current nation states.
immigrate to country x
after several false starts, we are back online again, but this time we will bide our time. adding citizens until we reach 1,000,000.
when we get there, we will crowdsource a constitution, set up a new bank, get going in earnest.
if you would like to immigrate, please do so HERE