Creature Comforts: Neoliberalism and Preparing for Disaster

Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley

“…In this section, I explore the history of corporations and company-states involved in terrestrial colonialism and how they compare to Bezos' and Musk's visions for outer space. I demonstrate that, although science fiction literature, twentieth-century celebrity engineers, and the larger techno-utopian movement may have influenced the billionaires' ideas (Davenport 2018;Lepore 2021;McCray 2012;Ray 2021b;Scharmen 2021;Stone 2021), there are still clear continuities between how they imagine the rule of their corporations and those that were involved in colonization.…”

“…Secondly, the role of corporations-rather than states-in leading the commercial space race is taken to be indicative of contemporary ideologies of neoliberal outsourcing or libertarianism, rather than as a continuation of colonial history as such. Analyses of Silicon Valley space colonists' political ideas thus tend to orient their critiques within the literature on contemporary libertarianism, neoliberalism, or technoutopianism (Dunnett et al 2019;Johnson 2020;Tutton 2021;Valentine 2012), largely congruent with scholarly analyses of the Californian Ideology in interpreting the ideology of Silicon Valley more broadly (Barbrook and Cameron 1996;Crandall, Brown, and McMahon 2021;Ferrari 2020;Ray 2021b;Turner 2008). Less literature has explicitly examined the colonial underpinnings of Silicon Valley elites' political ideology, with some commendable exceptions (Little and Winch 2022;Rubenstein 2022).…”