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 water is seen as providing a buffer that safeguards an island’s uniqueness, is undermined by island states as they extend their authority into exclusive economic zones in which they assert ownership of resources such as fish stocks and offshore oil and natural gas deposits (Steinberg 1999), just as it is undermined in the ideologies of expansionist continental nations that construct the ocean both as the signification of expansion’s limits and as its next conquest

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(Connery 1996). In short, the ocean is constructed both as a venue (and meme) for achieving difference (and escape) from society and as an opportunity for extending society’s dominant structures: a space of contradictory ideals that shape social imaginaries that, in turn, are reflected in (and reflective of) political practice. Since the quest for an island escape is utopian, it is not necessary for the idealized island to have a material referent at all (Manuel and Manuel 1979). Indeed, many would-be escapists have pursued wholly imaginary islands, or “islands of the mind” (Gillis 2004), and the platforms proposed by TSI might better be thought of as such “islands of the mind” rather than practicable engineering projects. Already in the Middle Ages, Europeans directed their attention to “phantom islands” where they could virtually engineer pathways for escaping the misery of the real world (Johnson 1998; Nicolson 2007). Today, the role of phantom islands has been transferred to artificial islands. As Jackson and della Dora (2009) note, artificial islands reproduce the iconic role of islands in the Western (or now global) imagination, but in an even more profound way because the artificial island is a potentially attainable feat of human engineering and thus can become an actant that will influence the world beyond the island’s borders: “Unlike [Sir Thomas] More’s ‘Nowhere’ [‘Utopia’] which was never meant to be achieved ... [artificial] island utopias today are explicit both in their efforts to territorialize themselves as parts of wider global complexes, and in their promises to bring a future promise to fruition” (Jackson and della Dora 2009:2097). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a range of other visionaries have sought to apply engineering prowess to join the heterotopia of the ship (Foucault 1986) with the historic idealization of the island, enabling permanent habitation in the “free medium” of the sea (Keith 1977; Mieville´ 2008; Steinberg 2001, 2011). For these visionaries, the island utopia is less an escape than the forward wedge of a political project. In the case of TSI, that political project is libertarian. Libertarianism, which typically traces its roots to the classical liberalism of John Locke (2003 [1690]), is a diverse philosophy, but it is characterized by the core belief that the fundamental human right is that of self-ownership (Vallentyne 2009; Zwolinski 2008). Libertarians thus view with suspicion any institution or social norm that might interfere with the individual’s right to pursue his or her own happiness. Libertarian philosophy is often paired with the techno-optimism of novelist Ayn Rand (1996 [1943], 1996 [1957], 1964), wherein it is believed that Rational Man seeking his own satisfaction will be the engine of social advancement. Politically, libertarians are a difficult group to classify. While their aversion to regulations and redistributions that might hinder capitalist entrepreneurship and human achievement often align them with extreme conservatives, their objection to policing, militarism, and the enforcement of social norms contains an anarchist tendency as well. Since “big government” is identified as the enemy, the libertarian political project (particularly in the US) often eschews transformation of the existing polity in favor of an agenda where relative autonomy (for the libertarian community and for the individuals within it) is achieved through a degree of secession (Gallaher 2003). Proposed libertarian city-states (or commonwealths) have ranged from survivalist compounds and individual states within the US, to the offshore floating platforms proposed by TSI.

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As Mieville´ (2008) notes, TSI is far from the first libertarian group to turn to the ocean as an ideal environment for locating its political aspirations. In his analysis of the proposed libertarian cruise ship Freedom Ship and other ocean-borne libertarian utopias, Mieville´ identifies a “lunatic syllogism” that leads libertarians to turn their gaze seaward: “‘I dislike the state: The state is made of land: Therefore I dislike the land.’ Water is a solvent, dissolving ‘political’ (state) power, leaving only ‘economics’ behind” (Mieville´ 2008:256). Similar points are made by Atkinson and Blandy (2009) in their analysis of the permanent-residency luxury cruise ship The World and by Steinberg (2011) in his study of the proposed floating software engineering sweatshop SeaCode. While we align ourselves with these works, they all focus on contradictions that would emerge were the visions actually to be realized: class conflicts, legal loopholes, engineering hurdles, etc. These are all challenges that would come about with an actualization of the dream; the escapist compounds would have to be physically built and function before such difficulties could become true problems. Mieville,´ in particular, points to these concerns as reasons to dismiss such projects, as they reflect an idealism that would prevent them from ever getting off the ground. However, the actualization of a seastead, as we mentioned above, may not be the point. The articulation of such dreams may be enough to spur greater imaginings about libertarian philosophy and the desired role (or lack thereof) of the state, and thus in the remainder of this article we focus less on seasteading’s (im)practicability and more on the social forces that drive its idealization.

The Anarcho-libertarianism of Seasteading: Where Economic Man Meets Burning Man Some of TSI’s credibility as the visionary of a new political order comes from the success that its leaders have already had in the economic and technological arenas. Executive Director Patri Friedman is a former Google software engineer (and grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist and libertarian icon Milton Friedman) whose dream is to create practical approaches to libertarianism that will convince skeptics to accept his vision (Friedman no date).3 Wayne Gramlich, who with Friedman was TSI’s cofounder, is also a software engineer and an early Sun Microsystems employee. Peter Thiel, in addition to being the cofounder of PayPal and TSI’s largest financial backer, was an early investor in Facebook and other successful high-technology ventures. The philosophy and organizational structure of TSI has deep roots in Silicon Valley’s proto-libertarian “Californian ideology” that lionizes the risk-taking, convention-flaunting individual as an engine of entrepreneurship and technological innovation (Baker 2009; Barbrook and Cameron no date). The idea that entrepren- eurial individuals working in cooperative networks can produce a path-breaking product without the need for formalized oversight from a bureaucratic institution (whether a corporation or a state) is characteristic of the region’s high-technology sector. As is exemplified through the prevalence of both venture capital financing and open-source software engineering, development in the technology industry has long been structured around individual innovation and creativity (Cohen and Fields

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2000; Saxenian 2000). In both the TSI and Silicon Valley product development models, individuals identify a potentially viable new frontier, develop a feasible plan with the help of technical consultants (software engineers in the case of a high-technology start-up, naval architects in the case of TSI), attract support within the competitive marketplace of venture capitalists who buy into the scheme, and provide avenues for future profitability that, it is hoped, will be realized as like- minded individuals apply their entrepreneurial talents. As Sheller (2009) notes, there are a variety of axes that connect software development with the construction of islands as both material and virtual places. While we endorse her analysis, we extend it here by suggesting that these two practices—software development and island creation—are united by a libertarian celebration of the individual who can make his or her own island. For Thiel, the libertarian ties are explicit. Thiel founded PayPal as an attempt to create a web- based currency that would undermine government tax structures (O’Brien 2007) and since selling the firm he has used much of his fortune to support libertarian causes (Baker 2009; NPR 2008). In an essay published by the Cato Institute (a major, Washington, DC-based libertarian research and public policy institute), Thiel (2009a) declares, “There are no truly free places left in our world, [so] ... the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.” He goes on to suggest that while the internet is perhaps the most likely candidate to emerge as a “free place”, seasteading should also be pursued, and he has backed up this endorsement with at least $750,000 in donations to TSI, as well as active philanthropic support for other libertarian causes (TTF no date).4 While libertarianism as espoused by Rand is most typically associated with unleashing humanity’s entrepreneurial potential, the philosophy has also been taken up by many with a more bohemian bent, who seek out a society with few legal restraints not to make money but simply to do their own thing (Gibson 2009; Nozick 1974, 1981). Both Friedman and Thiel have alluded to recreational drug use, and that part of the allure of seasteading is the creation of a sphere in which these activities would be allowed (Baker 2009; Thiel 2009a). Friedman himself has revealed that his political and social philosophy was formerly best expressed by his experiences at Burning Man (Baker 2009), an event in which thousands of artists and would-be artists travel to a provisional space in Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert to unleash human creativity for a week, and then depart leaving behind no trace of their presence. At Burning Man, the focus is on immediacy and the process of artistic expression, a process that is more important than the objects produced by that expression. The rules at the event are simple: there are no rules, except “the rules that serve to protect the health, safety, and experience of the community at large” (Burning Man 2010). This has led to Burning Man’s reputation as a festival for drug users and other fringe groups, but its “live and let live” ethic and its celebration of the productive nature of human creativity also aligns well with libertarian philosophy. TSI has tapped into regional enthusiasm for Burning Man by sponsoring its annual Ephemerisle Festival, which one libertarian blogger has called “Burning Man at Sea” (Taylor 2009).5 Like Burning Man, Ephemerisle is promoted as an event where

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. Atlas Swam: the Seasteading Vision 7 everyone is a participant, not an observer, as everyone will bring something to contribute to the experience. The first Ephemerisle was located in the Sacramento River delta in September 2009, but TSI plans to move the event further away from land in subsequent years, culminating in a move into international waters where state laws cease to exist (Friedman 2009a).6 With these plans to move away from states entirely, TSI seeks to use the extraterritorial status of international waters to generate an even more extreme experience of escape from terrestrial norms, laws, and constraints than the original Burning Man could hope to accomplish. TSI’s goal thus is to set an example for the more enduring institution of marine-based freedom that one would hope to construct on a seastead. The connection between Burning Man and seasteading, mediated through the example of Ephemerisle, is important because the success of seasteading relies on the involvement of individuals who are willing to live in an unconventional fashion and be the vanguard of a new political and economic movement. Silicon Valley engineers like Gramlich may be too networked into the land to go out and seastead themselves. Instead, seasteading, like a new piece of software or a new technology, would require “early adopters” who would take the time to work out the bugs and, in the process, transform the raw vision of a few idealists (or engineers) into a usable “product”. Indeed, Friedman speaks of pioneer seasteaders more as customers, or early investors, than as collaborators: We need to go out there and find, identify, and recruit the brave pioneers who will live on [the seasteads] full time. One method we’re considering for this is a contingent contract ... The idea here is that somebody would sign-up to move only if certain conditions were met: enough other people were found; the thing actually was going to get built; it had actual amenities like internet access, working bathrooms; met their cost requirements. They could even specify different amounts of space they would get with different cost levels, and the business-minded among you will note that by getting this data from our potential pioneers we actually generate a demand curve for seasteads which would be a very valuable business tool in figuring out whether we can make them cheaply enough to meet the demand (Friedman 2009d). If seasteading is ever to get off the ground, it seems likely that the bulk of the individuals in this “customer base” will be adventurers who are more excited at the potential psychedelic possibilities than the corporate benefits of libertarianism. As one cautious supporter of the movement has pointed out, “There’s a reason people do this and that’s because they don’t fit into society. There’s probably always been some set of people that have this pioneering spirit, and because the frontier has vanished, it’s not there for them anymore ... Still, there are a lot of wacky people involved” (Hastings 2009). Both Friedman and Thiel see such eclecticism as part of the creation of a new political ecosystem, a social and technological necessity to counter the pessimism and inefficiency of traditional, state-bounded politics (Thiel 2009b). The challenge for TSI is to take the raw, anti-establishment energy of its bohemian Burning Man/Ephemerisle wing, which is expressly devoted to not creating a sustainable, permanent, or obviously engineered product, and to harness it into constructing a viable post-statist commonwealth, the goal of its more legalistic (and capitalistic) entrepreneurialist/Randian wing.7 Brian Doherty, senior editor for

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. 8 Antipode the libertarian magazine Reason, revealed some of the tensions between these two groups at the end of a visit to Ephemerisle 2009: I am not entirely certain I can see the throughline between [Ephemerisle] and the ultimate seasteading goal of independent freeholds out in international waters. Seasteading, to be viable moving forward, has to have all of the aspects of a human civilization, the most important aspect of which is that it has to be productive, not merely consumptive. Seasteading has to involve economic activity, and [Ephemerisle] is not that (quoted in Sussberg 2009). Even TSI Director of Operations James Hogan, who apparently believes that a “throughline” can be drawn between Ephemerisle and TSI’s more orthodox entrepreneurialist-libertarian ambitions, acknowledges that it will be “challenging” to construct a sustainable community while retaining the creative spirit that gives that community its entrepreneurial energy: People who are affected by Burning Man always say, “It’s a shame the real world isn’t more like that.” With Ephemerisle, there is an existing movement dedicated to making the world “more like that!” You don’t just have to lament about leaving the magic of the event behind, you can contribute to a cause that has a plausible (if challenging) plan for actually disseminating that through human society (Hogan 2009). In a sense, the challenge faced by TSI as it seeks to blend the anarchism of its bohemian wing with the corporate orientation of its entrepreneurialist wing echoes that faced by every utopian project: how does one establish the utopia as a viable, ongoing society without simultaneously threatening the “magic” (or difference) that gives the dream its meaning (Mannheim 1985 [1936]; Ricoeur 1991)? In the case of seasteading, this challenge is intensified because of the way in which the project seeks to create a new kind of urban formation physically and juridically on the margins of the state system. Thus the next sections of this article examine the ways in which seasteading proposes to transgress norms of urban form and territorial sovereignty, and how those transgressions are limited by the movement’s internal contradictions.

Seasteading as New, New Urbanism As we suggested with this article’s opening in the Millennium Tower, the hubris of seasteading might be equated with that of New Urbanist design. Although island utopianism is more typically associated with escape from the city than with building an island in a city’s image, in fact both the seasteading and New Urbanist movements (and, for that matter, festivals of free expression like Burning Man and Ephemerisle) share the seemingly paradoxical ideal that spontaneity and organic energy can be achieved through planning. Like many utopian movements before them, seasteading and New Urbanism share a belief that individual liberty can be fostered through the engineering and ordering of a planned, insular environment. The movements thus have a complex relationship with the anti-authoritarian aspect of libertarianism. Leon´ Krier, the “intellectual godfather of the New Urbanism movement in America” (Kunstler 1998), proposed New Urbanism as an alternative to zoning that would allow the synergies of place to be freed from restrictive

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. Atlas Swam: the Seasteading Vision 9 regulations. New Urbanism, as formulated by Krier, shares many tenets with libertarianism. Indeed, Krier’s defense of the movement could almost have been written by Rand: New Urbanism ... does not impose social master plans. Instead, it allows the infinite variety of human talent and ambition to build harmonious and pleasing environments. It channels competitive forces to flourish as good neighbors while pursuing their own self-interest ... Market forces are vectors of human energies and enterprise. No city can be built without them. Planning laws have in the past often strangled such activities rather than let them flourish. New Urbanist principles have the simplicity and practicality of moral precepts rather than the tyrannical sophistications of utopian reform. They are not so much prescriptive as they are permissive. In that perspective, the common interest, in the form of public spaces, is the product of neighbors realizing their contrasting and variegated self-interests (quoted in Salingaros 2001). Krier’s Randian faith in human innovation notwithstanding, many libertarians are suspicious of New Urbanism as a particularly pernicious form of planning. Friedrich Hayek, arguably Krier’s counterpart as the “intellectual godfather” of libertarianism in America, rejects planning (including, presumably, New Urbanism) as an unwarranted market distortion (Hayek 1978 [1960]). More recently, libertarian planner Peter Gordon has decried New Urbanism as “heavy on intervention” and has dismissed it because it is “tied into the ‘civil society’, or communitarian, discussion” (Moore and Henderson 1998). Gordon argues that while traditional planning stifles innovation and interferes with the free market by assigning functions to specific zones, New Urbanism is even more invasive because it attempts to design whole spaces and, in so doing, engineer human values, behaviors, and life patterns. The debate among libertarians regarding New Urbanism remains lively (eg Staley 2003), with some taking the middle ground that the New Urbanist goal of communitarianism is admirable, but only if promoted through market-based incentives. Our aim is not to take sides in this debate but rather to use it to point to similar contradictions in the parallel project of seasteading, where the definition, delineation, and governance of territory also can simultaneously serve as an expression, a means, and a barrier to the development of individual freedom or self-determination.

Sovereignty, Territory, and “Aquatory” The complex positioning of sovereignty—wherein state power is simultaneously an expression of individual self-determination, its guarantor, and its enemy—is normally mediated through the institution of territory, as the modern state uses its control of territory to define residents’ citizenship. As an ideological strategy for nation- building, sovereigns seek to represent state territory as permanent and inviolable. However, when this definition of territory is mobilized over and against the historical and experiential negotiations of mapping, naming, and bordering that have defined the contemporary international system, key ambiguities begin to emerge (Elden 2010; Sparke 2005).

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Sovereigns typically respond to these ambiguities by associating their states with historical and geographical locations of social stasis. By affirming the stasis of a particular political order, the state achieves its identity, but it also foreshadows the possibility of its dissolution. Indeed, the very presence of other sovereigns (as existential threats to an absolute sovereignty) is a key element in the mobilization of sovereign power and control: first, as the defense of territory; and second, as the defense of a territory’s collective identity. Such disembodied and de-personalized foundations for sovereign rules and practices—including the invocation of self- determination as the building block of any notion of social freedom—makes the enterprise of sovereignty inherently conflictive and opposed to prolonged stasis. Seasteading seeks to rework these unstable and contradictory relationships between notions of individual sovereignty, state sovereignty, and territorial inviolability by designating marine space as “aquatory”, an epistemic connector that builds on the lineage of social and political-economic reformers who have sought to use the liminal political, geophysical, and cultural status of the sea to construct heterotopic societies that are partially inside, but partially outside the structures of the state system (Atkinson and Blandy 2009; Keith 1977; Mieville´ 2008; Steinberg 2011; see also Foucault 1986; Hau’ofa 2008). As Hetherington (1997) stresses in his discussion of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, such sites are not purely oppositional. For instance, TSI’s efforts to expand the reach of economic “progress” and consumption are still tied to the networks and flows from which modern capital reigns, much as the flight of members of the ultra- rich to permanent residency cruise ships is an adaptation to the particularities of capitalism and the prevalent institutions of fixed property and territory, rather than a renunciation of the desire to achieve belonging through accumulation (Atkinson and Blandy 2009). Thus, there are a number of similarities between seasteading and other sea- based projects that seek advantage from the relative externalization of the ocean, such as luxury cruise-residences, off-shore clinics, pirate radio stations, or even “floating maquiladoras” that “[blur] the distinction between locationally fixed, territorially bounded land as the space of society and the ocean as an external space in between” (Steinberg 2011:2116–2117; see also Mieville´ 2008; Peters 2011). However, there is also a significant difference. While these other endeavors seek to exploit the structures of world capitalism by occupying its maritime interstices, seasteading’s ultimate and explicit goal is to fix what has gone wrong with capitalism by appropriating the very medium through which capitalism and globalization have grown: the maritime world that is idealized as a frictionless surface of choice, freedom, and boundless mobility and opportunity (see Connery 1995; Sekula 1995; Steinberg 2001). At the root of TSI’s faith in the sea as the harbinger of a new political-economic order is an idealization of the sea as a dedicated surface of mobility. Mobility is seen as enabling choice, and choice, as Patri Friedman’s grandparents, Milton and Rose Friedman (1990), emphasize, is the necessary condition for a vibrant market. Thus, Patri Friedman takes Connery’s (1995) observation that water is “capital’s favored

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. Atlas Swam: the Seasteading Vision 11 myth element” to its ultimate conclusion, harnessing the liberatory character of maritime mobility to the construction of a new kind of social formation: Aquatory is a fundamentally different medium than territory. Its fluidity greatly lowers the cost of movement ... What happens if we base not just transport, but an entire society, on this fluid medium? What if we make it easy to not just move goods from one place to another but easy to move buildings from one place to another? What will that enable? Can we take globalization to the next level, from competition for goods and manufacturing to competition for good government (Friedman 2009c)? This point is developed further on TSI’s website, where the organization promotes a modular form of architecture in which individual seastead components can be detached and moved between larger structures: “If you don’t like your government, you can literally ‘vote with your house’ by detaching your seastead and sailing off to another city. In the long run, this will turn the oceans into a laboratory for innovation in social and political systems” (TSI 2008). Friedman contrasts this dynamic process of perpetual reterritorialization with the “fixed, static arrangement” of communities surrounded by dominant groups and interests found on land. Seasteading is heralded as “an aspirin to thin the blood”, providing a structural remedy to an otherwise “sclerotic” situation where “bad government is like a hardening of the arteries” (Friedman 2009c).8 For TSI, structural limitations to economic and social growth (eg taxes, regulations) cannot be challenged by ideology alone, but rather through technological innovation and development (Thiel 2009a, 2009b). Overall human freedom, as supporter Michael Strong (2009) argues, grows everyday with the number of “countries”, “enclaves”, and “free zones” created in the world and waiting for new opportunities: We should have more governments in the next ten years than we have at present. More diversity in governments in the next ten to twenty years than we have at present. And ultimately I want to argue ... [that] as grim as things look from a libertarian perspective now, I think it’s plausible, within my lifetime, to see a world in which ... governments competing around the world, entrepreneurial creation of government around the world is the norm rather than the exception. TSI’s vision is one in which multiple governance possibilities coexist, competing with each other for capital and for citizen-residents. Promoters of seasteading seek a regulatory environment that encourages innovators to “think big” but that also facilitates implementation of these ambitious plans through manageable pilot programs that then can be picked up by corporate angels and well resourced imitators. Thiel calls this vision a 1950s “space-colony model” of “embedded, exponential technological growth”, where the exigency of techno-optimism in American society becomes part of an attempt to dispel the current cultural rejection of the future captured in the mentality that “others will solve the progress dilemma” (Thiel 2009b). For Thiel, there is a need for “science fiction” (utopian?) investing in contemporary society and a return to “garage bio-technology”. The implicit argument is that the entrepreneurial model that has proven so successful for the software industry—where innovation is followed by corporate buy-in, rather than

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. 12 Antipode the other way around—should be just as successful in fostering innovations in government systems. Still, seasteading faces the challenge of creating spaces for financial investment, social ingenuity, and self-expression without recreating the social and ideological fetters from which such notions (as expressions of resistance and creativity) are born. If, as Friedman (2009d) has suggested, regulatory arbitrage gives people more options regarding how to live their lives and investors more places to do business, then seasteaders should have the freedom to create a broad variety of institutions, rather than simply reproducing instances of an established model (as is practiced, for instance, by states that replicate the modern state form). In contrast with state sovereignty, which is re-enacted daily by pledges of security, the standardization of values, and the naturalization of territory, TSI hopes that seasteading can invert this process by legally “guaranteeing” the security of its financial pledges (through contingent contracts), creating new values by eschewing the value of standardization (through privileging individual self-ownership), and de- naturalizing territory (through promoting the colonization of an oceanic counter- territory). In short, seasteading hopes to legitimize its endeavors by grounding “individual” sovereignty on the margins of state sovereignty: unregulated finance, bohemian utopianism, and oceanic fluidity.

Conclusion As we have suggested, the seasteading movement would have to cross numerous hurdles before undertaking the construction of actual, viable seasteads. The movement seeks to unite two distinct wings of the libertarian movement, the entrepreneurialists and the bohemians, but has as yet still found difficulties in creating a common ground. The movement has to be viable enough to attract the interest and capital of entrepreneurialists like Peter Thiel, who will be responsible for funding it, and yet not so strictly commercial that it repels the bohemian wing, who will be responsible for living the dream. TSI dodges this contradiction in part by claiming that various seasteads will develop their own institutions, and presumably in this way will provide members of each camp with their natural homes. However, this market-based solution reproduces the contradiction without reconciling it. When writing about proposed permanent-residency luxury cruise ships, Mieville´ (2008) suggests that the romantic individualism of libertarians will forever prevent them from realizing the large-scale marine engineering projects of their dreams, and our study suggests that the same is true for seasteads. While TSI focuses on the creative aspect of the movement, emphasizing the new, unique opportunities that will come with life on a seastead, seasteading must ultimately take place on a real construct, a platform that will have to be fabricated before the creative potential can emerge and flourish. There can be no seasteading opportunities before there is a physical seastead of some sort, and the physical nature of that seastead will itself impact the opportunities that can blossom forth. The depth of this contradiction— and TSI’s attempts to mitigate it—can be seen in TSI’s presentation of The Poseidon Project, a design competition sponsored by TSI wherein the organization solicited architectural renderings of what a seastead might look like. The winners of the

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. Atlas Swam: the Seasteading Vision 13 competition are proudly displayed on TSI’s website and may serve the purpose of building enthusiasm for seasteading ventures (TSI 2009). However, even Friedman (2009c) acknowledges that these plans fail to meet TSI’s specifications, especially regarding the ability to detach one’s personal seastead and join another platform. And this feature—the ability to generate choice from the mobility facilitated by ocean space—is key if TSI is to realize its ideological objective of fostering a market in political systems. Like the territorial state that TSI seeks to leave behind, the seasteading project also has contradictory approaches toward boundaries. For many of TSI’s followers—as for libertarian pioneers generally—the appeal of seasteading lies in the way it would establish an “anti-state” in a presumably “stateless” area: the high seas. However, such an approach would merely create a different kind of state; one built with due regard to the fluid nature of “aquatory”, but a pseudo-state nonetheless. Like the state itself, this construction would use the notion of bounded territory (as realized in the delimitation of the high seas) as a means to justify its existence, while still seeking to transcend those boundaries and affect the greater world. In fact, the relationship between seasteading and statehood is even more complicated. Observations at TSI’s second annual meeting revealed that TSI members vary among themselves regarding whether they see seasteads as anti- states, units within the world of existing states, or entities that could possibly evolve into new states. While some seek to locate seasteads in international waters and thereby establish an identity “outside” the state system (even though this “outsideness” would itself be a function of state boundaries), others, especially among the organization’s leadership, acknowledge that seasteads might have to be constructed as adjuncts to the state system and be located in territorial waters (or exclusive economic zones), perhaps with flag-of-convenience affiliation to territorial states (Gramlich and Friedman no date). As with the contradiction that emerges from the ways in which seasteading seeks to overcome planning while simultaneously requiring planning, leaders of TSI likely would assert that these divisions within the organization regarding seasteads’ relation to states would be resolved through market-based decision-making. Again, however, such a response fails to fully confront the depth of these contradictions. Lastly, seasteading represents a contradiction between its two founding mythologies: the idealization of island/marine escapism and the logic of software industry venture capitalism. There is a significant difference between the market- place of ideas and the market as an arena of commodity exchange that fosters social and economic advancement. In the seasteading movement, as in the software industry, the hope is that the energy of “free” entrepreneurs will inspire buy-in from individuals and institutions outside the movement who recognize the innovation’s potential. However, while the creative energy of Silicon Valley may rest on its internal dynamics and lack of formalized structure, the system is supported by external capital: stocks sell on global finance markets and individuals from outside the region purchase its products. To transfer this model to seasteading, venture capital would need to come from those not living on the seastead, and eventually from those who have no sympathy whatsoever toward the seasteaders’ political beliefs. The unease that TSI expresses about exporting products (aside from the “product”

C 2011 The Authors. Antipode C 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode. 14 Antipode of political philosophy), as indicated by its reluctance to discuss the economic activities that would take place on seasteads, does much to explain why Reason editor Doherty failed to see a “throughline” between Ephemerisle’s celebration of the self-expression that can be achieved in the “free space” of a marine environment and the establishment of economically sustainable independent freeholds. To dwell on how each of these contradictions threatens the seasteading vision, however, is to miss the point. Seasteading is less compelling as a potentially practicable model for recovering the originary spirit of capitalism on floating platforms than as a meme that joins a romantic dream with a critique that—its organizers hope—will spur fellow believers into action. As an idea (rather than as a model for the future), seasteading gains its traction not by promising the resolution of social contradictions, but by offering itself up as a reflection on the pathologies embedded in “mainstream” society’s attempts to harness the ideal of individual innovation to ideologies of territory, collectivism, and institutionalization. Experiments in late-capitalist social organization like the software industry (in which, in its idealized form, lone innovators seek out corporate backing rather than the other way around) or New Urbanism (in which the anomie of an engineered environment is challenged by the construction of even more highly engineered micro-environments) do not so much work through these contradictions as they seek to approach them from new angles. As such, even as they reveal the depth of underlying contradictions, and even as they “fail” at offering viable, sustainable solutions, they serve their proponents’ ideological purposes by opening new paths of contestation. In the case of seasteading, for all of its utopian advocacy of newness, entre- preneurialism, free expression, and market-based innovation—and notwithstand- ing its romantic turn to the ocean as a purportedly free medium of mobility, boundlessness, and choice—its futurist project reproduces some very old contradictions: between the desire to territorialize and deterritorialize, between the desire to establish a sustainable community and the desire to foster one that requires continual re-creation, and between the desire for pure freedom and the need for organization to achieve it. As a means for resolving these contradictions, seasteading is woefully inadequate. However, as a mechanism that utilizes marine romanticism and science fiction fantasy to spur a critique of twentieth century state-regulated capitalism, the seasteading movement can be seen as one wedge of a much larger neoliberal project in which the “free medium” of the ocean frequently plays a leading role (Connery 1995; Mansfield 2004; Sekula 1995; Steinberg 2001). As such, as tempting as it may be to write off seasteading as the idle dream of a few men with too much money and too much imagination, the movement nonetheless warrants our attention and analysis, not as a model for the future but as a reflection on the present.

Endnotes 1 One of this article’s authors (Caraccioli) attended this conference as well as the opening reception, and our analysis is informed by his observations. Material from the conference, including videos of most presentations, can be viewed at http:// www.seasteading.org/interact/events/conference09

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2 For instance, TSI’s Executive Director, Patri Friedman, has written, “Maybe seasteading is a hopeless dream, but I think there is at least a small chance that it can revolutionize the world by transforming government into a dynamic, competitive industry, which will benefit everyone, not just libertarians” (Patrissimo 2007). 3 Patri Friedman’s father, Santa Clara University Law School professor David Friedman, is also a noted libertarian scholar. 4 The relation between TSI, software development, and libertarian ideology is also apparent when one considers the connections between TSI’s vision and the video game BioShock. In this game, billionaire industrialist Andrew Ryan (an anagram for Ayn Rand?) creates an underwater city called Rapture and hails it as a libertarian paradise: “A city where the artist would not fear the censor ... where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality ... where the great would not be constrained by the small” (Take-Two Interactive Software 2007). Ryan was modeled after Ayn Rand’s protagonists, as game creator Ken Levine sought to capture her characters’ “intensity or purity of belief” (Crecente 2008). Despite the game’s plot, in which Ryan’s experiment in laissez faire governance goes horribly awry, many of its online fans speculate just how a city like Rapture can be constructed in real life, with some explicitly noting that the surface-level vision of Friedman and his associates might be more practical than Rapture’s underwater location (2k Games Forum no date). 5 While Ephemerisle’s promotional literature does not explicitly reference Burning Man, Friedman states on his personal blog that he would like to have something “like the Burning of the Man” (the climactic event that concludes every Burning Man festival) at Ephemerisle (Friedman 2009b). Links between the two events and the broader Seasteading project are developed by Sussberg (2009). 6 TSI, however, cancelled the 2010 Ephemerisle Festival, citing financial difficulties in covering increased insurance expenses (Friedman 2010). 7 This challenge is also present in Burning Man itself. Behind the apparent spontaneity of Burning Man is a highly organized planning infrastructure (Brown 2005). 8 Here Friedman is referencing Mancur Olson’s (1982) concept of “sclerotic” state institutions.

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