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Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision

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Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision Philip E. Steinberg Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA; [email protected] Elizabeth Nyman Center for International Studies, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA; [email protected] Mauro J. Caraccioli Department of Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; mjcaraccioli@ufl.edu Abstract: Political actors have long drawn on utopian imaginaries of colonizing marine and island spaces as models for idealized libertarian commonwealths. A recent inheritor of this tradition is the seasteading movement, which seeks to “further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities [by] enabling innovations with new political and social systems” on semi-stationary, floating platforms. Fueled by a cocktail of ideologies (techno-optimism, libertarian secession theories, and strains of anarcho-capitalism), seasteading is touted as the newest “frontier” in creative, entrepreneurial, and social engineering. Inherent in the project, however, are buried ideals about the nature of ocean space, the limits of sovereignty, and the liberatory role of technology and capitalism in the drive for social change and individual freedom. We explore these notions through an examination of seasteading’s broader philosophical and economic underpinnings, and their deployment through multiple structural, legal, and social frameworks. Although seasteading is a highly speculative, and even fanciful project, it reflects attempts to resolve contradictions within capitalism: between, on the one hand, the need for order and planning, and, on the other hand, the desire to foster and lionize individual freedom. In the United States, this tension has most visibly entered mainstream discourse through the rise of the Tea Party movement, whose ideology combines adherence to classical liberal ideals about individual entrepreneurship with hostility toward government intervention. Although the seasteading movement, like its better known and more realizable libertarian contemporaries, proposes a solution that its leaders say will resolve this tension, our analysis reveals that it would merely rework it, and thus it unwittingly reinforces the structures it seeks to escape. Keywords: islands, libertarianism, ocean, seasteading, utopias Introduction: Launching the Seastead Idea We begin this article at a reception in the Millennium Tower, the anchor of a city- sponsored effort to transform San Francisco’s gritty South of Market neighborhood Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2011 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–19 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00963.x C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. 2 Antipode into “SoMa”, an up-scale, residential zone that would be linked to the adjacent financial district through “canyons of sleek glass” (King 2008). The Millennium Tower was designed as a multifunctional space that would represent a new “dynamic urbanity that pulls housing close to office space and transit, all threaded by attractive strands of open space” (King 2008). However, as often happens with New Urbanist projects, at some point between conceptualization and construction many of the design innovations fell victim to financial exigencies. The building that eventually was constructed is an isolated high-income condominium tower that has few tangible connections with either the nearby financial district or the surrounding neighborhood, and critics have deemed the project inappropriate for a city that, in contrast with so many of its counterparts in the US, retains a vibrant mixed-use downtown (King 2009). The Millennium Tower thus can be seen as a memorial to the na¨ıve belief that an organic community can emerge in a highly engineered environment. As such, it provided a fitting setting for the gathering that was taking place there on the evening of 28 September 2009. The reception was being held in the 54th floor home of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who, through his founding and managing of PayPal, Inc, the world’s largest e-payments company, made it to number 293 on Forbes magazine’s 400 Richest Americans list in 2011 (Kroll and Dolan 2011). On this evening, Thiel was inaugurating the second annual conference of The Seasteading Institute (TSI), an organization that seeks to “further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovations with new political and social systems” on semi-stationary, floating platforms (TSI no date). The organization is the brainchild of Wayne Gramlich and TSI Executive Director Patri Friedman, whose co- authored online book outlines both the material viability and financial affordability of the seasteading project (Gramlich and Friedman no date). Like the Millennium Tower, the seastead is promoted simultaneously as the apotheosis of and an antidote to globalization, an insular and uncorrupted city-state where capitalism can regain its originary energy and where the spirit of human entrepreneurship can flourish (Thiel 2008, 2009a). The tenor of the conference that followed over the next 2 days ranged from that of a science fiction convention (potential seasteaders in attendance, who were overwhelmingly men, wondered what they could do to attract women to live on seasteads), to a seminar in libertarian economics (references to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Mancur Olson, and Ayn Rand abounded), to a scientific meeting on ocean engineering (architectural renderings were displayed and critiqued), to a psychedelic conclave of free-thinking anarchists (participants winkingly speculated about how seasteads could be havens for hallucinogenic drug use).1 Indeed, the entire seasteading venture might easily be written off as an impractical fantasy of social misfits and political dreamers who would like to make their own states (we mean this literally; one of the presentations at the meeting was “How to start your own country”). While we certainly are not suggesting that seasteads will be established at any time in the future, this reservation should be qualified. Given the inconsistencies within the details of seasteading, we are not even certain that the movement’s leaders truly see seasteads as practical alternatives; their purpose may be more to C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. Atlas Swam: the Seasteading Vision 3 spur thinking about current limits that the state system places on “freedom” so that others will dream up and implement more practical alternatives.2 Such intentions are precisely why seasteading is worthy of our attention: not as a potential reality, but as an articulation of a set of ideas. These ideas, which join a romanticization of marine/island utopias, a libertarian glorification of individual entrepreneurship, the paradoxical belief that planning can be used to engineer communities that foster personal freedoms, and a suspicion of the state’s capacity to guarantee these freedoms, all emerge from the specific conditions and ideologies of early twenty-first century US (and, especially, Californian) capitalism. In the sections that follow, we trace each of these foundations and how they intersect, in an effort to understand the seasteading movement, not so much as a harbinger of late-capitalist post-modernity but as its symptom. Seasteading and the Search for a Floating Utopia In turning to the sea as a source of individualist escape, TSI follows a history of utopian dreamers. Within Western society, the ocean has long been conceived as providing a barrier to society that makes an island exist as a land of its own, without the corrupting influence of the modern world. Islands, as in the model of Plato’s (2005 [ca 360 BCE]) island polis, are often conceptualized as spaces that are perfectly bounded, whole and separate (Anckar 2007; Hay 2006; Lowenthal 2007; Royle 2001; Steinberg 2005). The idealization (and gendering) of the island as a place of ownership, where any man can be a king, has a long history in Western literature (see for example Ballantyne 1949 [1857]; Defoe 1994 [1719]; More 2003 [1516]; Shakespeare 1998 [ca 1610]; Stevenson 1883; for literary analysis, see Bongie 1998; Carpenter 1984; DeLoughrey 2007; Edmond and Smith 2003; Ellis 2003). From this perspective, an island is a blank canvas, on which solitary, independent individuals can paint whatever they desire most. As such, the island is idealized as the perfect site for autonomous actors to exert their freedom as they try out new ideas. The realities of island life, however, do not live up to this masculinist, individualist ideal. Islands exist within oceans, and they have always been constituted as much by connections across their borders as by the seemingly isolated practices that occur within their shorelines (Hau’ofa 2008; Jolly 2001; McCall 1996). Today’s island societies, as much as those on the mainland, are forged within the flows, relations, and hierarchies of global capitalism. Indeed, the marketing of island “difference”—whether through the image of the tropical beach as a vacation resort or the offshore financial center as a haven for runaway capital—fosters integration and “normalization” so that over time a disjuncture grows between the marketed image and the everyday experiences of resident islanders (Baldacchino 2010; Palan 2003; Pattullo 2005; Wilkinson 1999). Even the metaphysical separation of land from water that underlies the myth of island isolation and difference, wherein the presence of uncontrollable
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