Reddit Island Redux, or, The Possibly True Saga of Current Island

You remember Reddit Island, right? The utterly serious, unintentionally hilarious project in which a bunch of Redditors attempt to set up a Reddity miniature utopia on some remote island somewhere? They are still trying to find an island, and apparently that process is … not going so swimmingly.

As Adrian Chen of Gawker notes in a nice long piece on the project, a fortysomething IT guy from Virginia names Mark Wells has been telling prospective Reddit Islanders that he may have found the perfect place for them:

Wells, who uses the handle Citizenpolitician, explained in a series of increasingly breathless posts on Reddit Island that he’d been scoping out a tiny tropical splotch called Current Island. Just off the coast of Bahamian island of Eluthera, Current is sparsely inhabited, and could be a possible option for their settlement. He’d cold-called members of the local government about the possibility of having a few hundred internet nerds settle Current Island. And he had been met with a very promising response.

Or so Wells said. Trouble is — SPOILER ALERT — Chen himself got in touch with Theo Neilly, the Bahamian Member of Parlliament who Wells had said was “very interested” in the Reddit Island project. And Neilly had a rather different story to tell Chen:

Neilly was more than a little surprised when I told him this. He’d never spoken with or even received an email from Wells, he said. He had heard word of Reddit Island, but only because an acquaintance Wells had actually contacted forwarded him the email. … [E]veryone in Eluthera I spoke to was eager to distance themselves and anyone they knew from him the Reddit Island idea.

D’oh!

Wella, for his part, claims that Chen has mucked up a good thing by actually trying to check to see if anything Wells was saying was true.

When Chen contacted the Bahamians, after being asked not to be involved since we were at a delicate time trying to start a process of negotiations, his contact to the Bahamians, making the relationship public, removed all opportunity for any further communication with the Bahamians and I am afraid now that he has gone to the extent of mentioning them in his article, will suffer political fall out because of this. THis is extremely poor journalism and unfortunate not just for us but for those that wanted to find out more about what we had to offer and what could come of that.

This also puts us in a difficult situation because any further communications with other land owners and government representatives in other countries could become publicly abused as this relationship did and end all hopes for negotiating in good faith with those people. It means that going further will be difficult if we are to maintain transparency and be open to the group here because people like Chen will use it to distort and dismantle those efforts.

So, back to the drawing board, I guess. (The whole discussion of Chen’s article in the Reddit Island subreddit is hilarious, actually.)

Let me make a suggestion, guys: Don’t try to go it alone! Basically, what you’re talking about is forming a tiny civilization that will be essentially a bunch of dudes. In the past, you guys have treated the “sausage party” aspect of the project as a liability.

Instead, you should embrace it as a selling point. Team up with some of the fellas over in the Men’s Rights subreddit; many of them seem not to be fans of women at all.

Heck, some of the guys there are ALREADY TALKING ABOUT GETTING AN ISLAND:

MRA Island! Make it a reality.

In related news, a number of years back a bunch of Something Awful goons launched a similar island project. It involved an actual tropical  island and everything. It seems to have fallen apart; it’s not clear (since I haven’t actually read anything about it beyond that blog post I linked)  if there was any cannibalism involved.