RIP, BIOT

The future of the Chagos Archipelago, new SEZ art, and some exciting book reviews!

These images, depicting the physical hidden globe, are by the artist Ingo Gunther. Gunther uses data “to show what the world is like (beyond the geography provided on globes) and to give a useful sense of proportion and dimension.” His work is terrific. You can find more of his visualizations here.

Hello subscribers old and new!

It's been two weeks since The Hidden Globe came out, and the reviews have been incredible.

In The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus describes the book as “a vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable tour of this present-day network state” and goes on to discuss how it relates to projects like Balaji’s Network State, which is currently hosting a pop-up in the failed Forest City compound in Malaysia. This is the kind of review authors dream of, so I urge you to read the whole thing. And if you are attending Network State U and want to tell me about it—or if you want to organize an event, podcast, reading, or just chat—drop me a line!

In The Washington Post, Jordan Weissman notes that the book made him think of Donald Trump’s economic policy in a new light. “The former president has said he intends to build a ring around the country with punitively high tariffs while carving out his manufacturing zones. In doing so, he’d essentially reverse-engineer the United States to look more like the kinds of desperate, developing economies that have historically traded a bit of their sovereignty away in the name of growth.”

The New Republic has named The Hidden Globe one of the season’s best books. I did interviews with Josh Keating at Vox and Tyler McBrien for Lawfare’s podcast. I also went on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots to talk to Joe Weisenthal and Stacy Alloway about the parallel worlds of the ultrarich.

If you’re quick on your feet (or fingers, I supppose) you can still tune into my conversation with Ben Mauk for New America at noon EST on Tuesday, Oct 22 (an hour from when this message hits your inbox.) RSVP here!

And finally, if you happen to be in Providence, RI, I’ll be at Symposium Books on Nov 21 at 6PM with The Dig’s Daniel Denvir.

With that out of the way, I wanted to point you to an interesting bit of news from the world of weird jurisdictions. It happens to involve one of my favorite places I’ve never been to: Mauritius!

Earlier this month, the British government announced—after decades of waffling—that it would formally transfer sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius. This is a big deal for the Chagossian people, who were violently forced off the islands between 1967 and 1978, have been fighting to return since, and after a drawn-out series of legal battles, may now have the chance to finally go home. The jurist and author Philippe Sands represented the Chagossians in court; his book, The Last Colony, tells the backstory, and also contains what I can only describe as international law gossip. IYKYK.

The decision’s a big deal for Mauritius, and the world, on a political level, too: when the British pulled out of Mauritius in the sixties, they kept a smattering of islands for themselves so that they could make good on their covert agreement with the U.S to lease them the island of Diego Garcia for use as a military base. They classified this area a British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT.

The whole thing was unbelievably sketchy—even Adam Curtis could not have made it up—and the result was that while Mauritius became independent, Chagos became the Indian Ocean’s answer Guantanamo Bay: taken from one country, leased out piecemeal by another, and later used as an alleged black site from which the Iraq War was launched.

More recently, Diego Garcia made news when a group of Sri Lankan asylum-seekers arrived there by boat. Their case was made more complicated by the fact that for a time, the US (the tenant) was not letting lawyers from the UK (the landlord!) hold a hearing about their unlawful detention in a British Indian Overseas Territory (BIOT) Court.

Now that they’re out of the picture, the Brits are offering some of the migrants the chance to settle in a transit center in Romania before possibly admitting them to the U.K. Others have had their asylum claims rejected. A few wound up in Rwanda for medical treatment. And some stayed on Diego Garcia, which the U.S continues to use as a military base.

I’m not dizzy; you’re dizzy.

In The Hidden Globe, I write about how Australia “excised” parts of its territory to get away with what amounted to human rights abuses and breaches of domestic and international law in its treatment of refugees. Mauritius underwent its own “dismemberment”, but at the hands of its colonizer.

I find it interesting to note that “dismemberment” is the UN’s term for it, while “excision” is the Australian government’s.

This is the difference between an appendectomy and a nose job.

Meanwhile, tech observers are worried about the future of another kind of sovereignty: the popular .io domain, which, like the BIOT, was (nominally) under British jurisdiction. But what happens to the domain when the BIOT ceases to exist

As Gareth Edwards writes in Every:

“Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.”