Niantic’s name deliberately invokes a greed-undone whaling ship as a gold rush metaphor

Evidence

It is worth noting that Hanke chose to name his group after a nineteenth-century merchant sailing vessel undone by greed. The Niantic had been sold and repurposed for the more lucrative whaling trade when it set sail for San Francisco and the northern Pacific whaling grounds in 1849. The ship’s captain made an unplanned stop in Panama to board hundreds of pilgrims bound for the California Gold Rush, all of them eager to pay top dollar for cramped, smelly quarters on the whaler. The captain’s avarice proved fatal to the ship’s prospects when those passengers infected the ship’s crew with gold fever. The sailors abandoned captain and vessel upon docking in San Francisco, heading instead for gold country. Unable to continue the journey, the captain was forced to sell the ship for a pittance, leaving it wedged deep in the sandy shallows at the foot of Clay and Montgomery streets. In 2016 Hanke took up the quest of that rebellious crew. His Niantic was bound for a new century’s gold rush at the frontier of the prediction imperative’s next wave of conquest: economies of action. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 978

Categorization

• CANDY: The story of the real Niantic ship undone by its captain’s greed is a delightful standalone anecdote.