How the Internet Forever Changed Starting Your Own Country

There are essentially two kinds of people who start their own country. The first group are the libertarian techno-utopianists who dream of tax havens and life on the high seas; they existed in the 1970s, and they exist today. The second group, however, is a little more difficult to pin down: They're the people who claim a patch of land, perhaps even just in their backyard, and declare themselves to be rulers—if not in the real world, then, at least, on the internet.

It's often not clear whether the made-up countries—or, as they're known by insiders, "micronations"—founded by the second kind of self-styled monarchs are "real" and physical, or just a website with some phony land claims. Either way, they tend to get a ton of press, like Liberland, a new libertarian state on the Serbian-Croatian border, did last month. Were people actually living there? Was it all a hoax? Nobody knew for certain, but Liberland had an official-looking website and a massively popular web presence among wannabe secessionists, and that was enough to give it an air of legitimacy.

Liberland's curious circumstance—straddling the line between the hard realities of geopolitics and the ephemeral untruth of the internet—got me thinking: how did the internet change the starting-your-own-country game? To find out, I contacted the people who I figured would know the issue best. That is, people who've started their own countries, like Kevin Baugh, the president of the Republic of Molossia.

Baugh started Molossia as a kid in 1977. Back then, his back yard was his kingdom, and it still is, although he now owns an acre of land in Nevada that he claims as Molossian territory. But in the late 1990s, that territory extended on to the internet.

"Having a website spawned the modern micronational movement—the internet spawned it," Baugh told me over the phone. "If you think about it, in the pre-internet world, you didn't have a way to research what other people were doing. Heck, not in the next building, let alone in another country or across the world. It just wasn't opened up like that. But once the internet came along, it really opened the door, and we discovered each other. I discovered them, and they were discovering me. It was a zero to 60 moment."

According to Baugh, a website became a "basic building block" of starting your own country almost as soon as the internet became a thing in the mainstream; to be perceived as legitimate, you had to have one. But, perhaps most importantly, it also fostered a community of nation-starters who could connect and learn from one another.

Eric Lis, who started the Aerican Empire in 1987 as a kid in his parents' house, largely agreed with Baugh about the impacts of the internet on starting a country.

"First, we were able to discover that there were other home-built countries out there, and that there was even a word for it [micronationalism] (however poorly defined that word might be)," Lis wrote me in an email. "Nothing encourages growth like discovering that you have competition and/or partners in crime. Second, and more importantly, the internet allowed other people to learn about us and become inspired. Without the internet, we might, eventually, have gained some fame and notoriety, but with the internet, it could happen decades faster."

But these are the perspectives of people who handed themselves the throne to their made-up kingdoms decades ago, before the internet's trappings became the waters we swim in. What about people who started nations more recently? How does the web figure into their visions of rulership?

"Depending on how legitimate one can make their micronation appear, a great site can lead to widespread publicity, an increase in citizenship applications, and increased revenue through stamp and coin sales, or whatever else the nation might be selling," Travis McHenry, who has ruled his tiny Californian nation of Calsahara since 2009 as "King Montague," told me in an email. "Such was the importance of having a good website that we actually waited until our site was finished before we announced the creation of our country!"

McHenry is a special case, because he started another nation called Westarctica in 2001 that was, for all intents and purposes, just a website. Now, the fake nation serves as a vehicle to raise awareness about environmental concerns in the Arctic. It wasn't until 2009 that he claimed an actual tract of land in California as Calsaharan territory—but does that point make Calsahara any more real than Westarctica? How legitimate can a micronation be if it can be reduced to a fake flag and a flashy website?

"I think now creating a micronation is as easy as as making a website and designing a flag and other trappings of state," Christopher Beyette, who started his nation of Vikesland in 2005 while working on a since-abandoned documentary project, told me in an email. "In fact most micronations that exist essentially are just internet clubs with no real physical assets to speak of. Personally, thats OK and fun, but I believe any micronation that wants any kind of serious attention must affect the real world and have a real world presence in some form or another."

It seems like there's some consensus on this point between the nation-starters. A website is fine, but you have to actually do something in your nation for it to be legitimate. The internet may have made it easier for people to come together, share tips, and become aware of the global landscape of startup nations, but that doesn't mean that all nations are created equal when it comes to the internet. "Get out there and do something, so it's not just a website, and have something in the real world," Baugh said. "That's sort of my mantra: a website is a mirror of what you do with your nation. It's a way to inform the world about your country, but it's not your country itself."

Still, it's undeniable that a website evens the playing field when it comes to micronations. Molossia, Vikesland, and Calsahara all might have more "legitimate" claims to land than, say, Broslavia, the internet-based project of a kid in New Mexico named Jacob Felts—but at the end of the day, they all made it into a Daily Mail roundup of startup nations.

When it comes to starting your own country, whatever claims one fake nation may have over another, the internet really is the great equalizer.