The Colonial Depths of Seasteading
In 2020, a trio of wealthy libertarians bought a cruise-ship, named it after the inventor of Bitcoin, and sailed it to the coast of Panama with the promise of finally realizing the dream of a waterborne libertarian community. This reignited the conversation around the fringe “seasteading” movement and just as quickly joined the ranks of seasteads that failed before they even began. However, the venture demonstrated that investors’ interest in forming breakaway communities free of taxes, regulations, and other social responsibilities is still very much alive.
The idea is not new. Despite being considered the stuff of science fiction today, literary antecedents to the contemporary “seasteading” movement stretch as far back as nineteenth century colonial literature. In fact, Robert Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide not only anticipates core elements of the modern seasteading movement, but was shaped by real events of oceanic colonialism unfolding at the time it was written. Specifically, Attwater’s secret island fishery, portrayed in The Ebb-Tide, is paradigmatic of seasteading ideology. By drawing parallels between these narratives, we can better understand how the libertarian ideal of maritime independence reanimates the colonial practices and power fantasies of the nineteenth century—a critical endeavor given that this ideology is increasingly edging toward national policy in the twenty-first century.
Homesteading at Sea
Seasteading is, in brief, a movement to establish permanent residences at sea (sometimes in the form of cruise ships, other times as artificial islands), outside the jurisdiction of any one nation. It takes its name from the term “homesteading,” which describes the establishment of settlements on the U.S. Western frontier in the nineteenth century. And just as homesteaders did, seasteaders couch their economic interests in terms of innovation and freedom. As celebrated writer and critic China Mieville explains, “Above all, they recast their most banal avarice—the disinclination to pay tax—as a principled blow for political freedom. Not content with existing offshore tax shelters, multimillionaires and property developers have aspired to build their own.”
In 2008, Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) launched The Seasteading Institute (TSI), a group that provides financial backing to seasteading efforts, with funding from Peter Thiel. Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has become increasingly involved in national politics. In particular, he played a significant role in catapulting J.D. Vance, his business partner, to the vice presidency. Seasteading may not be mainstream, but Thiel’s political influence reveals it is certainly not marginal enough to ignore.
Seasteading, like politics, is a technology of worldbuilding. As the journalist Oliver Wainwright argues, “Seasteading represents the ultimate Silicon Valley approach to governance.” It is increasingly crucial for us to understand what that approach to governance entails.
If Such an Island Exists
Let us turn, finally, to the Pacific of the late nineteenth century, when Robert Louis Stevenson was living in Samoa. Though best known for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson was an indispensable witness and writer of British colonialism in the Pacific. In Samoa in particular, Stevenson observed a peculiar, joint British, German, and United States protectorateship. While politically complex, this bizarre situation offered Stevenson a unique window onto the workings of modern capitalism and colonialism, perhaps best captured in his novel The Ebb-Tide.
Despite being considered the stuff of science fiction today, literary antecedents to the contemporary “seasteading” movement stretch as far back as nineteenth century colonial literature.
The Ebb-Tide follows three beggars in Tahiti who agree to take command of a ship, the Farallone, that arrives with both of its officers dead from smallpox. Scheming to steal the cargo for themselves, they discover that the cargo is fraudulent, and the ship was meant to sink so that its owners could collect on insurance. Now lost at sea with worthless cargo, they stumble across a secret pearling operation run by a man named Attwater. The island is now populated by only Attwater and a couple of servants, the rest of his employees having been killed by smallpox or by Attwater himself. The men scheme to rob Attwater but, again failing this, are left to throw themselves to his mercy.
In The Ebb-Tide, Stevenson portrays Attwater’s island as a space with ambiguous relationships to states and their legal systems. Attwater’s island is both within and without national colonial schemes, in a manner that prefigures seasteading ventures.
Officially, Attwater’s island doesn’t exist. And without official existence, it is stateless. The narrator remarks, for example, that, “the island being undeclared, it was not possible the man could hold any office or be in a position to demand their papers.”1
Importantly, Attwater is financially successful in his pearling operation specifically because the island exists outside the recognition, and thus power, of (inter)national laws. In legal isolation, Attwater uses diving suits that were under legal dispute at the time for the overfishing they enabled. Further, the island’s “undeclared” status allows him to accumulate unrestricted wealth—free of authorization and taxation.
Seasteaders of today similarly aspire to skirt regulation for enhanced profit. Take for example the Freedom Ship, a now abandoned plan to build an almost mile-long floating city in which residents would pay no taxes and “nothing on the ship would be regulated except for food sanitation.”
As much as Attwater’s fortune is built on evading the British Empire, it also depends on the Empire’s influence. One of the first details that the crew of the Farallone see of Attwater’s compound is the “red ensign,” a flag which would normally identify a British civilian or merchant ship. Thus while deliberately outdistancing the reach of British law, Attwater identifies himself as a British subject with all the protections and privileges thereof. Similarly, while seasteading is nominally a project of self-governance, seasteaders will often fly “flags of convenience,” which register them as protected subjects of whichever nation offers the lowest taxes.
One of the most illuminating descriptions of the island’s legal vacuum emerges in the following exchange between Captain Brown and Attwater on the latter’s treatment of his workforce:
‘I have seen a lot of driving in my time and been counted a good driver myself [. . .] and I tell you, this racket of Mr Attwater’s takes the cake. In a ship, why, there ain’t nothing to it! You’ve got the law with you, that’s what does it. But put me down on this blame’ beach alone, with nothing but a whip and a mouthful of bad words, and ask me to. . .no, sir! It’s not good enough! I haven’t got the sand for that!’ cried Davis. ‘It’s the law behind [. . .] It’s the law does it, every time!’
‘Well, one got the law after a fashion,’ said Attwater.2
The peculiar legal imaginary at work here is worth pausing over for a moment. Attwater draws on the law as the basis of his authority on the ship. But on the island, according to Brown, Attwater doesn’t have the same recourse to the law.
Empire and Empty Spaces
Attwater has established a simulacrum of the law by exerting violence over his workers. But how is that different from his recreation of the terrestrial legal system via coercive power on the ship? Blue humanities scholar Kyle McAuley argues that colonial powers (mis)represent the ocean as empty, merely bridged by networks of exchange. These networks of exchange are embodied by the ship. The ship, itself the weft and weave of empire, becomes hyper-visible against the invisible ocean. The erasure, or collapse, of “the space between colony and metropole” is a key to the ideological maintenance of empire.
Collapsing the space between colony and metropole, McAuley argues, is a critical ideological maneuver for the projection of state power and maintenance of empire. However, this erasure also disappears places like Attwater’s island—spaces outside of the state’s official registers and economic networks. Such places, after all, presumably cannot exist in space the empire has prefigured as empty. Water, in this case, becomes “a solvent, dissolving ‘political’ (state) power, leaving only ‘economics’ behind.” In this absence, Attwater is the unchallenged and absolute sovereign.
Attwater’s power thus derives from his ability to navigate both hydropolitical regimes, depending on what most benefits him in a given moment. On the one hand, he uses the water to absolve him of legal restrictions. On the other hand, he has transformed his island into a partial ship. The flag of a merchant ship continues to fly on the island, and its shore sports a “figure-head of a ship that had long hovered and plunged into so many running billows and was now brought ashore.”3 As a partial ship, the island selectively enters the mobile networks of exchange that McAuley describes, with their attendant legal systems. Thus, Attwater is able to reproduce the same systems of violent racial capital that the British pioneered—even without submitting to British rule himself.
We ought to take these libertarians seriously when they express the desire to create new societies, especially as they gain the political clout to reshape ours.
We cannot understand the modern libertarian seasteading movement without understanding how seasteaders manage to simultaneously elude and exert state power. Consider, for instance, the difference between Attwater’s project in a French Polynesian lagoon and a 2017 attempt by TSI to establish a seastead in a French Polynesian lagoon. Unlike Attwater’s personal libertarian paradise, the TSI project was defeated by local resistance. Although local Tahitians certainly apprehended the colonial nature of the TSI project (with Tahitian TV host Alexandre Taliercio likening it to the Galactic Empire in Star Wars building the Death Star), it wasn’t supported by an imperial power. What the TSI proponents didn’t seem to fully grasp, is exactly what Attwater illustrates: The success of libertarian seasteading relies on state power being simultaneously eluded and exerted.
If anyone seems to have learned how to operate more like Attwater, though, it’s Thiel.
Oceanic Laboratories
If seasteading were just a means of avoiding the state for financial gain it might not bear much consideration. But the libertarianism that seasteading represents is fundamentally a project of world-building. When it launched, TSI’s mission statement was, “to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
Similarly, Attwater’s island is not merely a business venture; it’s an attempt at creating his own society. He tells Herrick, “Since [finding the island] I have had a business, and a colony, and a mission of my own.”4 As both mission and colony, the island is fundamentally a social experiment. He even explains, “I was making a new people here.”
Attwater’s description of creating a new people on a Pacific island, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, evokes Darwin’s work in the Galapagos Islands and the “longstanding colonial understanding of the island as laboratory.” Attwater also takes a distinctly scientific tone to typologize his workers. Similarly, TSI’s current president explains that seasteading ventures function as “research and development zone[s]” for “thriving new societies.”
When we consider the abuses that workers suffer when people of Thiel’s economic class move production to countries with fewer restrictions, why would we expect a society they run with no restrictions to be any less violent?
When a developer of the Freedom Ship was asked if the floating city would have government, he answered, “the captain’s word will be final.” Chad Elwartowski, another prominent seasteader, said, “I plan on taking my slice of individual liberty that only a tyrannical regime can provide,” and later referred to “Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler as powerful individualists.” As Mieville puts it, “Seasteading libertarians flee the oppression of bourgeois democracy for the tyranny of dictatorship.” And isn’t this what we see on Attwater’s business-cum-mission?
Stevenson has already given us an idea of what these “development zones” have historically looked like, and it is not ideal for anyone except Attwater. We ought to take these libertarians seriously when they express the desire to create new societies, especially as they gain the political clout to reshape ours.
Seasteading, on its face, is a fringe hobby for petty bourgeoisie. However, the parallels between the stalwarts of nineteenth century Pacific colonialism and twenty-first century billionaires demonstrate the continuity of imperialist desires and their potential repercussions. Perhaps seasteading’s material products will never amount to more than a farcical imitation of nineteenth century colonialism, but when we consider who its ideological content has attracted, and the power they now wield, we ignore it at our peril.
Featured image: A French Polynesian lagoon representative of Attwater’s and TSI’s seasteading projects. Image by clara5656, 2017.
Ivey Wexler (they/them) is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis, where they study environmental literature. Their research focuses particularly on stories exploring projects of human and more-than-human worldmaking that help us understand our current moment in the Anthropocene and imagine the possible worlds we might make in the aftermath of capitalist modernity. Bluesky. Contact.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide (Penguin, 2012), 301-302. ↩
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide (Penguin, 2012), 328. ↩
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide (Penguin, 2012), 300. ↩
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide (Penguin, 2012), 315. ↩
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