Seasteading was rejected by French Polynesia as ‘tech colonialism.‘

Evidence

IT TURNS OUT, though, that no slate can be thus cleaned—even in the sea. In 2018, two years after the Seasteading Institute signed an informal agreement with French Polynesian officials to allow offshore development there, the government backed out, citing concerns about “tech colonialism.” A documentary on the Institute’s efforts found that Polynesian locals weren’t given much attention at the Seasteading Institute’s events. In a description that might not have displeased Peter Thiel, a local radio and TV personality called the project a cross between “visionary genius” and “megalomania.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 202

Categorization

• XREF: The clincher for the reader’s purpose: tech-utopian escape attempts in the sea still reproduced colonial dynamics, prefiguring Odell’s bioregional turn where there is no clean slate.
• QUESTION: How does the seasteading failure relate to Odell’s claim that there’s always an outside that is someone’s inside — the colonial asymmetry of who gets to retreat?