Eirik Høyer Leivestad

The notion of the isolated and remote island has attained a central role in today’s ideas of end-times and survival fantasies. Billionaires and tech oligarchs are preparing for the apocalypse by investing in property in New Zealand, or they fabulate about creating insular microstates and ‘seasteads’ in international waters. Whereas the superrich carry on an age-old notion of the island as a utopian possibility, they defile the same notion into an exclusive escape pod to flee the global breakdown they seem hell-bent on accelerating. In the era of Trump and Vance, these ideas are gaining increasing influence on world politics.

In this essay, Eirik Høyer Leivestad explores the history of the island as a motif in both utopian and (post)apocalyptic fiction and thought. The essay draws connections between utopian ideas from Plato via the Renaissance to modern authors, European colonial history, Greek and Polynesian myths, as well as theories from philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Peter Sloterdijk on the island as an exemplary microworld. In this light, Leivestad presents a case study of New Zealand, and shows how since the 19th century the Antipodean island state has served as a fantasy and place of longing amid imagined scenarios of a looming apocalypse.

Why does the island have such a special status in our ideas of possible worlds? Can we rescue the island from those who want to corrupt it?