The HBO docuseries The Anarchists opens with a roaring beachside bonfire. Shirtless children squeal happily as they rip pages from books and toss them into the flames. A hyped-up middle-aged man holds a textbook up to the camera and yells Fuck you! as his young son looks on attentively. Bitch! another kid yells, throwing crumpled papers into the blaze. Its a wild, repellent scene. Who are these people?<\/p>\n
The textbook-destroying ringleader, we learn, is Nathan Freeman, a hard-partying software designer who had recently moved his family from the middle-America suburbs to Acapulco, Mexico, to help run a new conference called Anarchapulco. Along with his wide-eyed wife Lisa, Freeman hoped to build a community devoted to a strain of libertarian thinking known as anarcho-capitalism. The bonfire straight out of Fahrenheit 451? Typical community-building exercise, of course. And, as it turns out, it took place during a relatively peaceful moment within this debaucherous, squabbling group of tax-hating libertines. Book-burning was just a prelude to far more serious chaos.<\/p>\n
When Todd Schramke started filming in Acapulco in 2015, he thought he was cobbling together an exploration of an eccentric countercultural group that might work as a digital short. Instead, he kept his cameras rolling for six wildly eventful years, witnessing the group rapidly expand and spectacularly fracture. He followed a colorful, frequently belligerent cast of characters, including the Freemans, conspiracy-theory-spouting Anarchapulco founder Jeff Berwick, and a charismatic fugitive couple known by the aliases John Galton and Lily Forester, as they attempted to live out their ideological convictionsdown with governments, up with free marketsin their cobbled-together expat cadre in Mexico.<\/p>\n
Since they dreamt of a stateless existence, the group enthusiastically boosted the use of cryptocurrencies, and found themselves flush with money after Bitcoins price spiked in 2017. (Also, so no one yells at me: If you ask actual anarchists, theyll tell you anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with traditional anarchismwhich is anti-capitalist and left-leaningmaking the title of this docu-series a misnomer. The Hedonistic Libertarians wouldve probably been more accurate, but oh well!) Along the way, fortunes were gained and lost, and several of Schramkes principle characters ended up dying, sometimes violently.<\/p>\n
WIRED talked with the director about the filmmaking process, anarchist web forums, and how to roll with unexpected real-life plot twists.<\/p>\n
This conversation contains spoilers and has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n
WIRED: I want to hear the origin story of The Anarchists. What first drew you to Anarachapulco?<\/p>\n
Todd Schramke: I came across the concept of anarchism during my own development as a young punk rock musician. Some of the bands that were associated with that world had an interest in more classical anarchism, which is actually emergent out of a 19th-century labor rights movementwhich has very little to do with what was going on at Anarchapulco. That desensitized me to the concepts of anarchy and anarchism, and when I came of voting age, I started exploring some of these ideas.<\/p>\n
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Excerpt from: The HBO docuseries The Anarchists opens with a roaring beachside bonfire. Shirtless children squeal happily as they rip pages from books and toss them into the flames Continue reading
\nThe Story Behind the Wrenching Finale of 'The Anarchists' - WIRED<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"