A conversation this weekend got me to thinking about this old Wired article from March 2000, "It's Good to Be King." The piece is about obsessives who create "countries" by declaring their bedrooms or homes to be sovereign states, and then start issuing passports, attracting adherents, and generally ruling. Just re-read it, and it's as striking as it was when I first found it three years ago:
Some claim physical territory – the family farm, a square foot of Scottish fen, the bottom of the ocean, or, in Talossa's case, the east side of Milwaukee plus a chunk of Antarctica and a small island off the coast of France – but none would actually take power even if it were offered to them. Most feature a founder with the requisite lofty title, and almost all make their home, in one form or another, on the Web…
An entire subcategory of micronations owes its existence to adolescent alienation. These empires of angst betray themselves in one of two ways – either with hackneyed origin myths, usually involving benevolent sultans and distant tropical seas, or with paranoid rants against authority punctuated by proclamations of universal domination and reprinted Rage Against the Machine lyrics. Though almost all teen kingdoms claim legions of subjects, more often than not, populace, ruler, and disaffected youth are one and the same. The Kingdom of Triparia (www.triparia.cx), founded in 1998, is a classic of the genre: 17 citizens, with fancy titles and a penchant for posting overintellectualized bulletin-board messages, united in an act of collective imagination.
