In Nov. 2022, when Atlanta-based rapper Jermaine “J-Money” Miller was shot and robbed of his Rolex and jewelry while seated in a parked car in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, headlines about the attack highlighted an unusual connection: The car Miller was assaulted in was a Rolls-Royce Phantom, reportedly owned by “Korean royalty.”
This came as a surprise to many people, at least because Korea is made up of two separate nations, neither of which has a royal family. And yet, this information was, in a sense, true. The car belonged to serial, crypto-entrepreneur billionaire and occasional hip-hop artist Andrew Lee, who is currently billed as the king of Joseon.
Joseon is the name by which Korea was called more than a century ago, during the 500-year reign of its last royal dynasty, House Yi (sometimes referred to as “Lee”). Of course, Joseon hasn’t existed since 1907, when Japan forced the Yi monarch, King Gojong, to abdicate, in order to abolish his dynasty and annex his kingdom.
But Lee’s actual claim is honest and stems from the fact that in October 2018, Yi Seok, Yi’s last direct descendant still living in Korea, followed Lee and allegedly named him “Crown Prince of Korea” in an elaborate “Passage to the Throne. “Rite of the sword held at the Vietnamese Crustacean restaurant in Beverly Hills.
Sword handover ceremony to the crustacean on October 16, 2018, with Andrew Lee and King Yi Seok.
According to Lee, Yi Seok was approached through a remote relative named Won Joon Lee, now Joseon’s “Minister of Defense,” who interrupted a Super Smash Brothers Lee gambling game to tell him that his extended family was descended from Korean royalty. like, ‘I was born in Indiana, I have no idea what you’re talking about,'” Lee told The Daily Beast with a laugh. “And this guy started showing me all those photos, explaining to me that his grandfather is the father of the Yi Seok. “
From there, Lee took Yi Seok to Los Angeles to be his guest at celebrity galas and Pro-Am golf tournaments, where they bonded over their shared musical aspirations (Yi Seok, known as the “Singing Prince,” had moderate success). with his 1967 song “A Pigeon’s House”). Still, Lee says it came as a surprise when Yi Seok, who has no male offspring, set out to adopt him as his heir.
“I was hesitant at first, but he kept on saying, ‘You have to do it, you have to carry on the culture,’” Lee said. So he accepted the offer, and in 2022, took over Yi Seok’s status as the Joseon dynasty’s primary claimant of the throne. And while it would be easy to assume that Lee embraced this royal title for vanity purposes—he does, to be fair, rap under the swagonym “KingLee”—there’s actually a method to what some might see as madness: In March 2022, Lee announced the founding of a “non-territorial successor state to the Joseon Empire,” a cloud-based, blockchain-backed kingdom with himself as its ruler.
Joseon 2. 0 is completely virtual; his letter promises that he “respects the self-determination of the [Korean] people” and has no plans for the Korean Peninsula. But as Yi’s heir, Lee has a knack for hinting that his new virtual entity can be traced back to a real-world country that was once globally identified as a sovereign and independent state. This represents an attractive new twist on Silicon Valley’s long-standing obsession with creating virtual worlds, free from surveillance, regulation and, of course, taxation.
“In 1996, John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wrote a Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, necessarily a manifesto about how the Internet is an open frontier where we can build the world at large,” Anupam Chander, a professor of law and generation at Georgetown University, told The Daily Beast.
He noted that people have been trying to create their own digital countries ever since. “The fact is, however, international law just doesn’t have a mechanism for recognizing the sovereignty of a state in cyberspace.”
Chander cites the Montevideo Convention, a treaty signed in 1933 at the Seventh International Conference of American States, which offers the existing accepted criteria for a “sovereign state”: a permanent population, an explained territory, a functional government, and the ability to contribute in relations with other states.
“A virtual state would possibly have a functional government, but does it have a permanent population or an explained territory?Territory traditionally meant a physical territory, not something in the metaverse. But foreign law evolves, so nothing lasts forever. »
For example, Chander points out that Vatican City, the smallest sovereign state in the world, is an exception to the “permanent population” rule: it does not have a constant citizenship, since Vatican citizenship is granted only to those appointed to paint in an official capacity through the Holy See and retired upon completion of that appointment. Meanwhile, the definition of “territory” has become confusing in everything from multinational corporations to remote painting deals.
Lee’s highest productive hopes that Joseon will be accepted into the global circle of nations’ kin finally have the fourth, and perhaps the most essential, criterion of Montevideo’s sovereignty: the ability to establish diplomatic relations with other sovereign nations. As part of Joseon’s claim to be a “restoration” of the original kingdom, its charters state that the ancient state’s historic treaties signed through nine Western nations: the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Russia, France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and (notably, the United States) remain in full force.
Crustacean Sword Rite of Passage on October 16, 2018, featuring Andrew Lee and King Yi Seok.
After being named Yi’s heir, Lee’s studies into his new royal identity revealed two compelling facts. The first, that the deposed King Gojong had never officially signed the renunciation of his country’s sovereignty (when he refused, an organization of his ministers – now called the “Five Traitors of Eulsa” – signed in his name). The time when Gojong’s treaties with other countries were “perpetual. ” And perpetual meant forever.
Minsoo Kang is an author, professor of history at the University of Missouri in St. John’s Louis. Louis and translator of the old Joseon-era novel, The Story of Hong Gildong, about a Robin Hood-like outlaw who is Korea’s most iconic folk hero. Despite Lee’s optimism, Kang insults the concept that such treaties are valid.
“At the end of the day, the kingdom does not exist anymore,” Kang said. “To say there’s a revival of it in the present day is a freaking joke. It’s like if some descendant of the Qing imperial family were to claim China. I mean, for God’s sake, the Qing dynasty is gone.”
Anticipating skepticism about his former claims, Joseon also actively sought ties with present-day nations. In 2023, it established a formal bilateral agreement with the small Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda, paving the way for this treaty by appointing Gaston Browne Jr. , son of the country’s former prime minister, Gaston Browne, as Joseon’s “vice minister of state. “and official ambassador to his father’s country. It also helped that Joseon made a generous donation of $1. 5 million to St. Peter’s Academy. Novelle Richards, a government-funded secondary school named after Prime Minister Browne’s grandfather.
Since signing this treaty, Joseon has claimed the unique status of being the “first cybernation to be recognized by a United Nations member state”—albeit one that’s best known as a tax haven and offshore home for internet gambling sites.
But for Lee, Antigua’s laissez-faire attitude toward fiscal oversight may be just a feature, not a bug. As a quote from Lee highlighted on Joseon’s online site says, the nation’s purpose is “to bring back the Wild West that we enjoyed so much, because it creates a formula in which other people must be told what they want, say what “They need to say, delight in what they need to delight in, and create what they need to create. There are also times when this “Wild West” promises to be a “safe haven” for cryptocurrencies with an “absolutely favorable outlook for cryptocurrencies. ” cryptocurrencies and entrepreneurs”.
That points to Joseon’s bigger ambition, of course: scaling the value of the cyberstate’s “national currency,” called the Joseon Mun (JSM), to the point where the kingdom’s “denizens”—and its king—have the economic leverage to “create ‘happiness,’” as Lee asserts, which could just be a side effect of making everyone involved incredibly wealthy.
Or, at least, more wealthy.
Lee has ridden crypto to the moon before; he estimates that he first started accumulating Bitcoin back in 2011, when it was valued at around $3. (“I was less sophisticated back then. My mind was like, ‘Well, there’s less Bitcoin out there than there are houses in the world, so each Bitcoin at some point is going to be worth more than a house. That was my logic! But, hey, I haven’t had to worry about money for a while.”)
Currently, Joseon’s JSM coin is worth just over 1 cent, and generates only about $5 million in daily trading volume. But if the coin gains any kind of traction, Joseon could have the wherewithal to act as a substantial global economic force. Meanwhile, Lee and other Joseon officials, who control a sizable fraction of the 2.4 trillion JSM coins minted, might make out like bandits.
But first, they’ll have their paintings cut out just to survive. Most “new countries” projects have sometimes slowly faded away or ended in disaster. The raft-based New Atlantis micronation was destroyed by a cyclone. Pink Island was attacked by the Italian Navy, who accused its owner, George Rosa, of tax evasion (while flying the island, they accidentally killed Rosa’s dog). The libertarian Republic of Minerva, a synthetic island built on an atoll submerged by transports of sand, was invaded through neighboring Tonga and sank. Of course, those were all attempts to create independent physical micronations, but those considerations also make virtual micronations bigger.
“Territorial traditional governments won’t let go of their power so easily,” Chander explained. “Frankly, there are good reasons for them not to yield their sovereignty, considering the ways that people can exploit these things to harm others. And then when crypto is involved, the most likely outcome is some kind of rug pull.”
Chander is referring to an event where founders run off with a project’s funds, leaving participants high and dry. He added that the second most likely outcome when crypto is involved “is a massive cybersecurity failure.”
The latter is what caused the collapse of Mt. Gox, the crypto trading site that Lee helped build, which at its peak was handling 70 percent of the world’s Bitcoin transactions. However, in 2014, it was discovered that 850,000 Bitcoins—valued today at $383 billion—had simply vanished from its system. Though 200,000 were later found in an “old wallet,” investigators concluded that most of the Bitcoin was stolen directly from the platform. (Mark Karpeles, owner of Mt. Gox at the time of its bankruptcy, is Joseon’s Minister of Technology.)
There’s no question that Joseon represents a particularly bold attempt to reframe our basic definition of statehood in an era where that concept is being regularly challenged. We’ve seen it in Eastern Europe, which has seen more new countries emerge over the past two decades than anywhere on earth; in the Middle East; and among Korea’s East Asian neighbors, as China and Taiwan square off over their dueling perspectives on the latter’s sovereignty. The questions the cyber-state forces us to address could ultimately color how we approach some of these physical world issues as well.
For his part, Yi Seok, grandson of King Gojong and adoptive father of Andrew Lee, believes that what Lee does is valuable regardless of its eventual success. “Because of the Japanese regime, our empire collapsed,” Seok said. “After the dismissal of our diplomatic and military force, we lost our culture and our mental strength also vanished. We have become westernized, we have forgotten our history.
Royal family members Yi Seok and Andrew Lee (center) at the King Sejong Statue Unveiling on Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023.
For Yi Seok, Joseon’s resurgence is, even if it does not fulfill Lee’s enormous ambitions, only a confirmation of Korea’s historical prestige as a proud and tough country that existed beyond the orbit of Europe and the United States, and not as a “hermit kingdom. “as many once called it, but an independent, self-defined culture with a civilization that deserves to be identified and celebrated. It’s a purpose that has been the royal descendant’s life’s work, and much of his current job, as the official tourism spokesperson for the Korean “museum village” of Jeonju.
“That’s why I told Andrew,” he added. I need you to rebuild this empire and remind the rest of us who we are. What you’re doing is symbolically important, so keep going. I don’t care how long it takes, I said, I’ll keep an eye on you. And I warned him that I intended to live more than a hundred years.
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