Guest: Queen Carolyn of Ladonia (@Queen_Ladonia on X), Principal SEO at Yoast
What is Ladonia? Ladonia is a micronation founded in 1996 after Swedish artist Lars Vilks fought a 15-year legal battle over a massive driftwood sculpture. When Sweden failed to exercise authority over the land, Vilks and a group of artists declared sovereignty. The micronation gained global reach through its website in 1997 and now has approximately 30,000 citizens worldwide.
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Chris Reynolds: Hello and welcome to Web Sessions by Pantheon. We're here at WordCamp US 2025 in Portland, Oregon. I'm Chris Reynolds, Senior Developer Advocate at Pantheon. And I am here today with someone I can call a friend, and also the Queen.
Chris Reynolds: Her Majesty, the Queen of Ladonia, Queen Carolyn. Welcome, Queen. Yas, Queen. Tell us about why the Queen of Ladonia might... Well, I guess the question that we're asking everyone... We'll start with that. We're asking everybody what makes the web work.
Chris Reynolds: And I know that we've talked on my podcast about your background and your introduction and how you became the Queen of Ladonia. So we'll get into the Ladonia stuff in a second. But what makes the web work, Your Majesty?
Queen Carolyn: Well, so I was telling you earlier that I feel like that's a very layered question. It depends on what you mean by work. Like if you mean technically function, that's one thing.
Queen Carolyn: If you mean the economy of it and what causes money to be made, which is what perpetuates it, that's a different question. I would say that… Jesus.
Queen Carolyn: So I would say that the... I mean, revenue is largely made by advertising. So it would be consumerism is what makes the web work in general. Technically, though, the growth is...
Queen Carolyn: I don't know. It's got to be money at this point in time. Originally, it was information and academics and the dissemination of data. And it was all very exciting to have all of this access to all of this information. But I think very quickly, the consumerism took over. And that's really kind of where we're at now.
Chris Reynolds: That's a very sad and cynical answer to the question.
Queen Carolyn: Well, I was there in the beginning, and I remember when...
Chris Reynolds: When the web was weird.
Queen Carolyn: When you had links because you were linking to other information, not linking to people hoping they would link back to you so that it would build up your authority so that you'd rank higher on Google.
Chris Reynolds: Right, right.
Chris Reynolds: And obviously, that linking back is relevant to you, not in your queenly capacity, but in your capacity as a Principal SEO at Yoast.
Queen Carolyn: That's true.
Chris Reynolds: Which is actually possibly the real reason why you're here, because I wondered.
Queen Carolyn: I feel like I would have shown up anyway, because I've got some people here that I like to hang with. And legitimately, I bought the queen's ticket to WordCamp before the ticket on behalf of Yoast was secured. So I was probably going to come hang out with my people anyway.
Chris Reynolds: Oh, good, good. So, I mean, we talked about back when the web was weird, which I feel like is part of the story of Ladonia.
Queen Carolyn: Yeah.
Chris Reynolds: Can you sort of share, in a shortish story, what you... how... Like, we're talking about you are Your Majesty the Queen of Ladonia. There's a lot of people that don't know what a Ladonia is or who the Ladonian people are. There's 30,000 people that are, like, citizens of Ladonia. But how did you get to be the queen?
Queen Carolyn: Okay, so, again, very layered question.
Queen Carolyn: So, in the very beginning, there was an artist who almost drowned in the ocean in Sweden. People in Sweden swim in the ocean. He pulled himself ashore and one of the things that is an old seafaring tradition is that if you almost die at sea, you make some sort of offering to God to celebrate that you didn't die. So he started building something with what he had on hand- which was driftwood- started working on this sculpture, worked on it for literally two years before the authorities noticed.
Queen Carolyn: By the time the authorities noticed it was like 75 tons and it was this labyrinth down the side of a mountain. So this is about 1982 that they found it. The Swedish government took him to court and fought with him for 15 years, went all the way up to the Swedish Supreme Court. Ultimately he was not found criminally liable for this and Sweden failed to tear down the structure and if you look at law, nine-tenths of the law is possession, right? Sweden failed to exercise their authority on this land and could not exercise their authority on this land, therefore it wasn't their land, according to him.
Queen Carolyn: So he and a group of artists and lawyers in the area declared that land sovereign in 1996. Over the course of next year they got about a thousand citizens, but in 1997 they got a website.
Queen Carolyn: And once they had a website and it went global and we went from acquiring, you know, dribs and drabs of citizens every year to thousands of citizens every year, which is why we've grown. And we don't accept everyone that applies, but you know - we're growing at about a thousand citizens a year. A thousand? Yeah, that's right. And that's how the internet helped out. So once micronations- and because Ladonia is not the only micronation, you know Sealand - I'm sure you've heard of that.
Chris Reynolds: Sealand is a big deal, yeah.
Queen Carolyn: Lieberland is a newer one.
Queen Carolyn: And Sealand was actually the reason I found out about Ladonia.
Chris Reynolds: Yeah, I remember Sealand being like…like The Pirate Bay was gonna be relocated onto Sealand.
Queen Carolyn: Pirate Bay tried to buy Ladonia too.
Chris Reynolds: Okay.
Queen Carolyn: Yeah, so they failed. They failed getting into Sealand, and they were gonna take over Ladonia. They were... they were gonna implode it or something. I forget what the... what the story was there.
Chris Reynolds: How would they put servers in this square kilometer of land by the beach?
Queen Carolyn: Yeah, we were like, "You can try to invade, but I don't know what you're trying to do here. It's kind of a waste of time."
Queen Carolyn: But so Sealand was on the cover of Wired Magazine. My ISP was on- was in that issue. That's kind of how I fell down the rabbit hole and found it, but that's how the internet helped me, help me find Ladonia and help Ladonia find all of its citizens, basically.
Queen Carolyn: So, how did I become Queen? That was the next part of the question.
Chris Reynolds: Yeah.
Queen Carolyn: Okay, so I became a citizen in around 2000.. I had- I was aware of it as early as 97. I wanted to be a citizen but it I didn't have money to, you know to- but to get a title of nobility because you know I was broke. So I applied to be a citizen in like 1999, and part of the citizenship application is you have to contribute your creativity. And I wrote like, this 20- page business case on why Ladonia should annex Gary, Indiana, and I researched the, you know, "This is all the reasons why this would be a prime candidate for taking over.
Queen Carolyn: "Indiana doesn't want it anyway."
Queen Carolyn: "These are the legal mechanisms for how you can actually go about getting the state to cede the land and then getting federal approval."
Queen Carolyn: And I wrote all that up and I sent it in and they wrote back and they said, "We're going to approve your citizenship, but we loved your application. Would you like to be a cabinet minister?" and I'm like -
Chris Reynolds: Like you do!
Queen Carolyn: And I'm like, well, okay. So I became a cabinet minister and I was a cabinet minister from 2000 until 2011.
Chris Reynolds: And what was your title?
Queen Carolyn: I was the Minister of Customizations and Gary.
Chris Reynolds: Customizations and Gary.
Queen Carolyn: And Gary- very important to add, the Gary part. In 20... 2010, the Queen we had-
Queen Carolyn: Because I'm not the first Queen. Um, she... we say that she disappeared, until I realized that saying someone disappeared, it has very different connotations in other situations...
Chris Reynolds: She wasn't disappeared as a verb.
Queen Carolyn: Yes, yes, she... She more like... She ghosted us. Like, she kind of decided she didn't want to do it anymore and just wouldn't return phone calls.
Queen Carolyn: So the cabinet exercised their constitutional prerogative to have her abdicated in absentia, which the Constitution then says that there's a vacancy on the throne. You have an election to elect a new Queen and you can take nominations from the cabinet. It must be a citizen who is a woman and then you have the, the general election for that.
Chris Reynolds: And any... was that... So any Ladonian citizen could vote for queen?
Queen Carolyn: Yes, any Ladonian citizen can run as long as you're a female and everyone gets to vote.
Queen Carolyn: So there were five people running. Angelina Jolie was also nominated, but I petitioned to have her removed from the ballot on the grounds that she was not a citizen, which was valid. We all did our little campaign speeches.
Queen Carolyn: I won and I went to Sweden and I was crowned and there was media in attendance and it was all very exciting and I've been the Queen since 2011, and we're actually now celebrating my Crystal Jubilee, which is my 15th year on the throne.
Chris Reynolds: Yeah, and I feel like the story of Ladonia- and particularly the website being a really big part of it, is part of the story of the internet, and you being here and being Queen of Ladonia is in many ways, tied to the weirdness of the web, and I know that Steve Persch said earlier, talked a little bit about making the web weird, or that the web isn't weird enough, or back in the 90s, when it was young, it was..
Queen Carolyn: It was crazy.
Chris Reynolds: Yeah! So I feel like it's really fun that there is a Ladonia to be a Queen of, and you can apply for citizenship. And what does the citizenship process look like? Because I'm actually waiting for the approval for my citizenship.
Queen Carolyn: So there's an application process. There's some essay questions. I'm not going to lie. There are essay questions - and they are read, so please don't use ChatGPT to answer them, because we can tell. And don't be too flippant in your answers. It'll ask for things like contribute a phrase in Latin, and I get that a lot of people just go with the standards, but if you come up with something particularly rude or inconsiderate, we might reject that on the grounds that you are clearly not serious.
Queen Carolyn: But we do research on people, we make sure they're real people. We make sure they have some understanding that you're not going to be able to immigrate to Europe and you're not going to get travel documents. We make sure you understand what you're getting into, and then you get a little digital citizenship certificate. And if you chose to at the time of your application, make a small donation, there are titles of nobility available.
Queen Carolyn: And if you do get a title of nobility, then you also get a paper certificate in the mail that's been hand-signed by the Queen and it's suitable for framing.
Chris Reynolds: Excellent, excellent. And so the reason why I found that you were even here was, I mean, if you show everyone your badge, I was looking through the attendees list, like you do, and I happened to see Queen Carolyn of Ladonia, and that's what sent me down my rabbit hole of learning about Ladonia, inviting you onto the podcast that I run, Community & Code, which you can go download now. And yeah, but where, besides listening to my podcast personally, can people find you on the internet?
Queen Carolyn: So you can find the Queen on X. We have - it's @Queen_Ladonia on X. We have three other X accounts. I think the newspaper has one,
Chris Reynolds: The Ladonia Herald.
Queen Carolyn: The Ladonia Herald. And then @Ladonia_Info is like just kind of the general X account, but we have some ministers who also have independent X accounts. We're on Facebook. We have a Facebook public group and then there's a private citizenship, citizens- only group, but there's a Facebook page that anyone can follow. And then we have the Ladonia Herald, which is our newspaper.
Queen Carolyn: So basically, if you search for Ladonia, you're probably going to find me, but you also might find some anime Hetalia roleplayers, and I would avoid...
Queen Carolyn: I'm sure they're very nice people, but not representative of the rest of the group.
Chris Reynolds: Well, thank you very much for coming to our booth here at WordCamp US, Queen Carolyn, Your Majesty, and yeah, we'll see you elsewhere. We'll see you on the internet. Happy interneting.
Queen Carolyn: Thank you.