Who joins?

The types of people that it attracts are people who are often sort of vaguely different than their peers or who maybe feel excluded .

How do you communicate?

There’s a couple of really prominent Facebook groups where a lot of Larp-ers are engaged with each other . And then also I think the network is still small enough that pretty much everybody knows somebody else, who knows somebody else, that you can be connected to a lot of people just by word of mouth and introductions. I know I’ve met a lot of my good friends just by being secondhand introduced to them.

Community: Micronationalists

Name: Daniel Bellerose, citizen of Asgardia and Ladonia

Who are you?

Micronationalists are part of a micronation, which is a small area that someone has declared an independent nation, which is not internationally recognized. It can be anything from a space created by an environmentalist who’s trying to promote environmental issues in Antarctica to just a teenager who wants to declare his bedroom as independent. The community is not just people that start their own micronation but it’s also people who become citizens of micronations.

The famous historical example of a micronation is Sealand. It is a naval base in the ocean that was abandoned and this guy found it in the 1960s, claimed it to be his own country and declared himself a King of Sealand. The definition has kind of expanded since the internet. So, as well as, there being sort of geographical areas that people claim to be their own, there are now micronations that represent an ideal, which don’t even have a set physical boundary. For instance Asgardia is called the space nation, and they represent the needs of space and common humanity. They don’t have a geographical area but they do have a satellite, that they claim to be kind of their territory.

I’m a citizen of Asgardia. I am also a citizen of Ladonia, which is another micronation in Sweden.

Why does one join?

I think the concept of a micronation, however legitimate it is, can represent something greater. Asgardia represents a larger unity that people on the whole planet can have together and the concept of being kind of a global citizen, which I think is really appealing. Ladonia represents individual artistic freedom. The founder of Ladonia was an artist who made an installation on the beach in Sweden. The government asked him to take the installation down and he declared it independent and they had to protect his art. So I kind of like the idea of using the micronational community as a place to promote certain ideals and to use it as a platform.