Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision

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.

Quenching of hadron and photon spectra in heavy-ion collisions from RHIC to LHC

“…Even though p-p data at this energy were then desperately lacking, the first ALICE measurements [2] soon indicated that the quenching of inclusive charged hadrons is indeed similar to what has been reported at RHIC, at least in a large p ⊥ domain (5 p ⊥ 20 GeV) and within the experimental uncertainties. These first LHC data have later been confirmed by the ATLAS ‡ [3], ALICE [4], CMS [5] preliminary measurements shown at this conference, which now extend up to p ⊥ ≃ 100 GeV. The results obtained at the LHC -together with the RHIC measurements -thus open up hope for a better understanding of energy loss processes through detailed phenomenological studies.…”

Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking

“…In previous works, we have chronicled how this tension has been productively exploited by a broad range of nautical entrepreneurs, from libertarian venture capitalists (Steinberg, 2011a;Steinberg et al, 2012) to hippy pirate broadcasters (Peters, 2011(Peters, , 2014a. In this article, however, we direct our focus away from these individual and collective actors who, finding themselves on the sea's surface, use its liminality to engage in transgressive political practice.…”

The ocean as frontier

“…Conversely, mining firms explore ways for integrating the principle – with its emphasis on distribution of benefits – with private, and state‐sanctioned mining initiatives that are driven by the imperative of maximising profit for investors. Still others, such as libertarian advocates of “sea‐steading”, propose that the nature of the ocean opens up new frontiers in governance that maximise personal freedoms and individual choice (Steinberg, Nyman and Caraccioli ). It is perhaps telling that the Seasteading Institute has branded its campaign to establish seasteads in French Polynesia as a mission to settle “Blue Frontiers” (Blue Frontiers n.d.).…”