Pokopia: The Cloud Nation Where Citizenship Comes with a Bug-Eating Quiz and a Rug-Pull Guarantee

A Dispatch from the Republic of Pokopia
By Our Correspondent, filing from the departure lounge of a bankrupt airport where the Wi-Fi is sponsored by a cryptocurrency that just rug-pulled.

Word reached the outside world, as it always does, via a grainy TikTok livestream and a hastily deleted LinkedIn post: Pokopia has declared itself. Not in the manner of the usual micronation cosplay—no bearded libertarian printing passports in his garage—but as a full-spectrum, algorithmically ordained state. Citizenship is granted by a quiz that asks, among other things, how many genders you can list before breakfast and whether you would eat a bug to save the planet. Answer “yes” to both and congratulations, you’re issued a QR code and a tax bill denominated in Pokoin, a stablecoin pegged to nothing more stable than the founder’s mood.

Geographically, Pokopia is a non-place. It floats somewhere between the 15th and 16th time zones, hosted on servers in Estonia, cooled by Icelandic volcanoes, and moderated by outsourced Filipino content farms working the graveyard shift. Its capital is a rotating Zoom background. The official language is fluent sarcasm sprinkled with emoji. The national anthem is a lo-fi remix of dial-up modem noises, currently charting on Spotify’s “Global Viral 50” between a K-pop breakup ballad and a Nigerian crypto scam PSA.

The international reaction has been predictably performative. The United Nations held an emergency luncheon that ran out of shrimp before the Security Council arrived. Brussels dispatched a strongly worded PDF. Washington, ever the opportunist, offered Foreign Military Financing in exchange for exclusive rights to Pokopia’s metadata, which is rumored to contain the real names of everyone who ever subtweeted a head of state. Beijing simply forked the codebase and launched “Pokopia with Chinese Characteristics,” where the bug question is compulsory and the quiz auto-submits your organs to the state.

Meanwhile, the World Bank has classified Pokopia as a “quantum frontier market,” which is bureaucratese for “we have no clue what this is but the kids seem excited.” The IMF is already designing a bailout package denominated in carbon credits and second-hand NFTs. Analysts at Goldman Sachs—who famously never met a bubble they couldn’t securitize—have issued a 400-page prospectus titled “Pokopia: The Next Argentina, But Cloud-Based.” Page 37 concedes that the entire economy could evaporate if someone forgets to renew the domain name, but reassures investors that risk is “idiosyncratic and therefore diversifiable,” which roughly translates to: you’ll lose money, but at least you’ll lose it in style.

On the ground—or rather, in the cloud—daily life proceeds with the cheerful nihilism of a meme that knows it will be dead by Thursday. Schools teach critical race theory and critical meme theory on alternating Tuesdays. The national sport is doomscrolling. Healthcare is a chatbot that diagnoses everything as “existential dread” and prescribes a subscription to Calm. The Supreme Court is a Twitter poll with 24-hour voting windows; last week it legalized insider trading provided you disclose it via a fin-fluencer’s Instagram story.

Naturally, there are refugees: people who failed the citizenship quiz on technicalities—like admitting they still pay for Netflix instead of torrenting—and now wander the metaverse clutching expired QR codes, looking for a country that still believes in borders. The UNHCR is debating whether to classify them as stateless or merely extremely online.

What Pokopia reveals, with the brutal clarity of a 3 a.m. push notification, is that nation-states have become just another layer of gamified content. When citizenship can be minted, traded, or rugged like any other token, the Westphalian system starts to look like a dial-up BBS trying to run on 5G. The real borders are no longer drawn by rivers and mountain ranges but by terms-of-service agreements written by 22-year-olds in hoodies who majored in “Human-Centered Design” and minored in Adderall.

And yet, for all its absurdity, Pokopia is the first country to achieve net-zero emissions—because it never really existed in the first place. Somewhere, a polar bear claps. Slowly. Ironically.

Welcome to the future. Mind the rug.