Archipelago
Monster Islands
In structure and domain.
“Neat to think about... “
[REDACTED] proposed building platforms in the ocean. War-surplus deep-sea drilling rigs1. Engineering distance. 24 miles. Space enough for sovereignty to dissolve into open water. Ideas, platforms, scheeeming.
Freedom from regulation, laws, moral conventions. Floats.
“Stamp collectors will pay a fortune apiece to insure that they have each and every country.”
A nation with no citizens. Abstract. Just existence. Declare sovereignty, print stamps, compulsive completionists pay. The entire apparatus of statehood reduced.
“What I think would be cool would be to try this in Africa.”
Everyone agreed. The weight distributed so thin that no one feels ownership. The system decided. Attribution dissolved.
“How do we get rid of poor people as a whole?” A question asked at dinner, reportedly, between billionaires2.
Nice.
“I think it would be cool to offer this up to Somalia or somewhere desperate and see what happens.”
Cool.
“Even cancer cells stop multiplying when you confine their space.”
Ambiguous, but the sentiment is loud and fucking clear. You don’t negotiate with cancer. It is identified, isolated, eliminated. Treatment.
Someone simply replies with desalination requirements. Gears already spinning on logistics. The language is already there.
Peter Thiel: “I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting”3.
Bryan Johnson’s plasma exchanges with his son4. On camera.
People. The final resource.
Peter Thiel’s question: “How do you start over?”
“Rich people don’t innovate as quickly!!”
The question sounds philosophical. It’s not. Logistics. How do you clear the space?
The deep ocean. International waters. Somalia. The void doesn’t exist. It has to be manufactured. And manufacturing a void means removing what’s there. The fodder that exists in the space where the void will be constructed, they are not displaced. They are designed out.
They build the platforms. We use them. We don’t ask what’s underneath. We never read the terms.
Clean hands. Clear conscience. We all clicked “Agree.”
