The excerpt from Extrastatecraft provides a very interesting perspective of entities that operate in parallel to national and regional laws – sometimes in connection with them, sometimes not. I was particularly drawn by the concept of the “free zone”, which I was not familiar with. It seems staggering to me how states willfully provide physical areas where the laws and regulations can be disregarded for the sake of business. It’s a crucial landmark for the overarching nature of savage, rampant capitalism.
But “extrastatecraft” is a reality in many planes: much of our social interaction currently happens in digital places governed by unread Terms of Service and selectively-policed Community Guidelines, sometimes without regard to a country’s free speech protections or regulations. This has turned out to be a tool for good and evil: it’s been used for social prosecution by racial supremacists as well as by people going after sexual predators. It’s been used to bring together hateful people, and people fighting for a fairer society. So it’s a phenomenon that cannot be value-judged, but as with much of technology, it needs to be looked at neutrally while evaluating the intentions of those who put it to use.
I don’t believe that should be the case for “free zones”. Capitalism is an ideology that fundamentally believes people are renewable, disposable resources, and have no value beyond their ability and capacity for consumption. In a capitalist society, disabled people, poor people, old people, young people – people somehow incapacitated to buy things – are worthless. A state that admits its hypocrisy and has a physical outbreak of capitalist ideology ends up producing a free zone. The idea of a state that’s built to sustain a society where everyone is somehow guarded from the inclemencies of their environment is profoundly incompatible with a strict capitalist ideology, so free zones emerge as a way to break that tension. A physical outlet for a state’s closeted disdain for their people can run wild. Where the true god – money – can do as it pleases with its subjects, free of consequences and from the disapproving stare of a state that cares about its people.
