I watched the whole series. I thought the producers over-dramatized everything, which I guess was easy enough to do with the murder, fugitive stories, and other deaths. But nothing really happened that wasn’t just ordinary human drama. The way some of the people express disillusionment at the end was silly.
What did they expect? That holding a conference for a few days once a year is going to spark a worldwide revolution? That being a fugitive in a Third World country is not going to be difficult? That living in a city with one of the world’s highest murder rates is not going to be dangerous? That a group of misfit expatriates are always going to be able to get along with each other? That living some New Age hippieish lifestyle on the beach in a country in the midst of a civil war is not going to involve challenges?
When I was there my impression of the people there was that they were very naive. They were all “cool” or at least the ones I met were but most of them were novices at radicalism. Very few of them knew anything about classical anarchism, anarchist history or anarchist theory, other than the “non-aggression principle” and “taxation is theft.” Most of the people there expressed shock when I told them I had been an anarchist for over 30 years because nearly all of them were novices.
I liked everyone I met there. In fact, most of them were nice people to a fault because that was the source of a lot of their problems. But it was like Anarchist Kindergarten in terms of the amount of actual political experience or knowledge most of them had. Very few of them had any serious political analysis. Instead, they were into conspiracy theories, mysticism, and general weirdness. But I don’t consider their project to be a failure at all. I wish there were more happenings like theirs.
