Ladonia: An Illegally Created Nation Where Creativity Rules

Not nearly "all" nations are created illegally. Try the Czech Republic and Slovakia, for example. And what about the Algonquin Nation, were they created illegally?

A legally created nation came into existence three years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sudan#Independence_.28201...

Sadly, there are pieces of paper with signatures on them. Its amazing how scummy the US government got in trying to "legitimize" the land forfeitures. Even sadder how some folks today want to throw out was actually signed and steal the rest.

Ireland?

How do you lay your own fiber and actually get connectivity? I've always wanted to try and take complete control of my internet, but as I understand it, the most I could do is last mile.

It's my understanding that if you discover an unclaimed island it is then automatically claimed by the country of origin of the discoverer.

> however, agriculture, the bureaucratic hoops we'd have to jump through to successfully secede and the general hard work and labour that would have to go in, I believe, is unaccounted for.

That, and the inevitable descent into savagery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies.

We don't really need more countries, rather we need different countries. Globalization has made the west one giant colorless cat-video-loving nation. Hence the interest in micronations, seasteading and other "alternative citizenships".

> "the bureaucratic hoops we'd have to jump through to successfully secede"

My understanding of secession has always been that one does not ask for permission. Requests to pay taxes, for example, would fall on deaf ears. Otherwise you've not seceded, you're just on vacation.

Total self-sufficiency is nearly impossible or at least extremely difficult. If you allow external trade it might be doable, although then you have to actually produce something of value, and trade it without bringing the government down on you.

Although I wonder, what kinds of technologies would you need to achieve complete self-sufficiency? It's a practical question too because that's what we would need them to settle mars and the moon, not to mention other solar systems.

Perhaps you could get a lot done with robots, it depends on the task.

I believe there was a group on reddit that tried to do this.

I used to live in the municipality where there is going on.

The most interesting part is the legal wrangling.

It's not private property - it was built with driftwood in a public nature preserve. The authorities wanted it gone, but first of all - it's natural driftwood - is that illegal? Well, it turned out to be. So the artist sold the sculpture itself to some uncontactable people outside of the country, and suddenly the municipality couldn't just order him to remove it, and so on and so forth. He then built another sculpture of cement with hundreds of numbered rocks, and sold each rock to a different person, in order to spread the "blame" further.

Eventually it got so popular it became a local tourist attraction. And so it still stands.

edit: Aside from that it's just a kooky artist doing kooky things. Lars Vilks in infamous in Sweden for his stunts. He's also been outspoken in free speech issues which has made him a target of Muslim fundamentalists.

Not really.. It's just as much of a country as my apartment is.

The artist in question has also had lots of media attention for his work depicting Muhammed (the prophet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Vilks#Muhammad_drawings_c... The guy is a racist nutjob.

Living close to the so called country I can confirm that your suspicions are mostly correct. The land is owned by the government (afaik) and is not a private property by the artist. From time to time the government threatens to destroy his buildings, but since they have survived this long they can mostly be seen as empty threats.

You are reading it wrong. The property is owned by the Swedish government.

The artists are simply fucking around.

Probably, yes.

They actually don't have much of an incentive to form their own country - they get piles of money from Italy and Austria as well.

Indeed, Sud Tirol is often cited as a good example of how to handle a linguistic/cultural minority, which mostly involves the aforementioned piles of money, and a lot of freedom to use their own language. In the Ladin speaking area, almost all the signs, for instance, are in Ladin/Italian/German. In the German speaking area, they're in German and Italian.

Given that apparently all it takes is for someone to "declare" an unrecognized micronation, I hereby declare one particular square micron in international waters, known only to me, as the world's new smallest unrecognized micronation: Nanotopia. Our motto will be "never found, never conquered." We allow dual-citizenship so long as you don't tell anybody.

Get a giant boat and park it out in international waters.

you might enjoy doctorow's "eastern standard tribe", which, while not one of his better books, had some nice ideas. the premise was that the kind of people who spent large amounts of their time hanging out online would coalesce into tribes based around timezones, and that the timezone you were physically living in would not necessarily correspond to the tribe you belonged to and arranged your waking hours to match.