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Every stead had its own ‘corps, couldn’t be too careful, I don’t think the peace and love days lasted too long. Lots of stem cell pirates waiting out in international waters, and once the laws got repealed it was all fair game. Only the indentured Flesh used skiffs to get around, anyone blue collar and upwards would use a blimp. People pretty much stayed put in reality though, blending in to a new ‘stead wasn’t easy, after a while it just gets easier to stick to your own, that’s how the gene pool started dwindling, that’s why they had to find new ways to mix it up.
Anyway a bit further out, away from the big pharma and petro-steads, that’s where things started to get a bit weirder, some of the old communo-steads, the kibbutzim, the free floating loners managed to cling on and make it work, and once you’ve been out there long enough, once you’ve got a generation who never lived on land, that’s when things start getting spooky.
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Since the S.I’s moment in the spotlight around the time of its establishment in 2008, the momentum of the movement seems to have slowed somewhat, with Peter Thiel stating in early 2017 that Seasteading is currently “not quite feasible from an engineering perspective,” and that the project’s outcome is “still very far in the future.”[1] Scaling back from it’s initial vision of autonomous seastead communities, the second generation S.I led by president and part-time science fiction writer Joe Quirk and managing director Randy Hencken seems to have lost its ideological bite somewhat since Patri Friedman’s transfer to the more ceremonial role of chair of trustees. The institute’s current focus [as of early 2018] is on the ‘Blue Frontiers’ project, which aims to establish a semi-autonomous community hosted by the state of French Polynesia, in the form of what Quirk calls “three little practice islands to demonstrate that this will be beautiful,”[2] – the islands would be exempt from the Polynesian tax system but bound by its criminal law. The trade-off for Polynesia will come in the form of “diversification of the Polynesian economy” and help to “develop technologies needed to maintain populations threatened by rising sea levels.”[3]
In May 2017 the S.I held a conference in Tahiti, French Polynesia, aimed at building support amongst the local population. The artists Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller attended the conference to produce a 30 minute documentary film entitled ‘The Seasteaders’ for release through the online art and video platform dis.art. Permission to film was granted on the condition that the S.I would have access to the original footage and permission to reuse and re-contextualise the artists’ work, which it did by producing its own re-edited set of short videos also entitled ‘The Seasteaders’, released eight days prior to the artists’ film and aimed at confusing and obscuring the artists’ work.[4]
Hurwitz-Goodman and Keller’s fly-on-the-wall style film is relatively innocuous, portraying the seasteaders as a set of hapless red-faced tourists, being bussed around the island of Tahiti and looking slightly listless in a perpetual cycle of enforced leisure, conference buffets and performances of indigenous song and dance, like a Libertarian retirement community. The overwhelming impression is of the Seasteading Institute as a largely male collective, driven by a masculinist colonising impulse, in which women play the role of wives and partners who need to be persuaded to give up life on dry land. S.I director Randy Hencken is filmed talking to his wife about the need to: “ask the ‘She-Steaders’ what they would want on a seastead to make it more appealing,” chairman Joe Quirk describes how “nobody wants to move to the seastead and find there’s no women there… I’m talking to artists who want to make a beautiful statue and call it ‘Floating Woman.” At one point the camera lingers on a reproduction Gauguin painting hanging in the hotel stairwell, silently highlighting the problematic history of European colonial and cultural intervention in the Pacific.
Some of the most illuminating passages come in the form of interviews in a darkened room with a volunteer economist with the project named Caleb Sturges – significantly younger than the rest of the community he opens up about his right-wing political beliefs and disenfranchisement from his upbringing in a left wing Christian commune. He cites NRx and the Dark Enlightenment as having been influential on him politically along with some ‘pretty sketchy’ subreddits, before realising that he has perhaps said too much: “I don’t know how much I should talk about this,” he says with a knowing smile that seems to acknowledge the S.I’s public distancing from right-wing political stances. The film ends in a suddenly heightened, nightmarish fashion, interspersing footage of a Polynesian dancer with smart-phone pictures of sections of glacier melting and falling into the ocean – the implication seemingly that the S.I’s promises of boosted environmental sustainability to the Polynesian people will never materialise, and that the project will ultimately only exacerbate accelerated climate change.
The S.I’s re-edit of the film instead takes the form of a set of bland corporate promotional clips, interspersing soundbites taken from speakers at the conference with footage of mostly female and Polynesian attendees. Caleb Sturges does not feature, nor does John Vance, a prominent character in the artist’s film who describes himself as a ‘Futurist Republican’ working in ‘Natural Resources’ (i.e. Oil). No mention or credit is given to the artists as the producers of the footage which simply becomes stock content in the hands of the S.I. The tactic of releasing the re-edit in an attempt to obscure Hurwitz-Goodman and Keller’s work seems to reveal the extent to which, while the S.I may outwardly distance itself from NRx, it’s tactics and and approaches owe much to the alt-right – a form of Corporate P.R Doxxing. The two films exist in a post-truth tension – the S.I’s alternative facts edit as weaponised simulacra.
Theo Reeves-Evison addresses these ideas of Simulacra in relation to the contemporary political landscape stating that “exposing a lie does not necessarily diminish its affective power” and that “reveal[ing] an act of deception is not the same as revealing the truth that it conceals.”[5] – that acknowledged fictions can still bear a political weight, if not a heightened appeal to a populace that is disorientated and fractured. Reeves-Evison points to a pervading texture of ‘truthiness’ in the contemporary political landscape, of statements that are just plausible enough to carry the required affective charge and Deleuze’s definition of the true simulacra as “not a degraded copy, rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction.”[6] The proposals of the S.I are perhaps simulacric in their very nature – can we be sure whether they really believe the rhetoric of environmental sustainability, or do they simply desire a holiday resort-cum-tax haven? Their harnessing and subversion of narrative forms, in their Sci Fi-like promotional rhetoric and presentation of alternative timelines suggest an underlying affinity with temporal complexity – a templexity that ultimately serves to feed their hyperstitional project.
[Next Time: Burning Man Festival]
[1] “Peter Thiel on Trump, Seasteading and making futures more like the Jetsons or Star Trek”, Next Big Future, accessed April 30, 2018 https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/01/peter-thiel-on-trump-seasteading-and.html
[2] Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller, “The Seasteaders” (2018), Video,
[3] “FAQ” Blue frontiers, accessed April 30, 2018, https://www.blue-frontiers.com/en/frenchpolynesia
[4] “The Life Aquatic,” Rhizome, accessed April 30, 2018 https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jan/31/seasteading/
[5] Theo Reeves-Evison “Surface Fictions” in Futures & Fictions, (London: Repeater Books 2017) 203
[6] Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacra,” October no.27 (1983) p.53
Daniel Sean Kelly 