Outer Edges (Session 5)

Hello everyone. I welcome you all to the fifth session of Nick Lanz Outer Edges 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics. The class took a long ages. We had our summer residency in between and lots of stuff happened and but now we're back with Nick and can't wait for him to begin his lecture. So I'm going to pass on the mic and the camera to him to start. Okay thanks Mo. Sorry I'm getting lots of interesting stuff in the sidebar I won't be distracted by. So okay the last block, the last module, the guiding sort of the sound bite, guiding it

was catabolic geopolitics. So this time, this module, I think we're sort of shifting angle and I'm expecting there's going to be a connection between these things so I don't think it's that we're abandoning the previous terrain. I think we're approaching it from a different angle. And it's still obviously we're going to come back to Patrick Friedman's stuff which is that anchor that is holding this together. But I want to sort of start off this module talking about the notion of the frontier.

This is why I've sort of the one sort of text that I've linked, I hope everyone's net, it's quite short, is the famous text by Frederick Jackson Turner called The Significance of the Frontier in American History. I don't know whether I need to, maybe I will just send it again. And actually also there's a free online book that expands later. He published it in, I think, 1920. That's the date actually on the volume. So if anyone wants to dig further into it, there's this.

And I've selected this text just because I think it's one of the most famous pieces of writing that actually makes an emphatic issue of this question of the frontier. And I think that it's fair to say that it's best known for its very last sentence, which I'll read out. So this is the last sentence of the essay. He says, and now four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of 100 years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone and with its going has closed the first period of American history. And that sentence is normally compressed to people into the notion of the closing of the frontier.

So this notion of the closing of the frontier I think is why people invoke this essay. It goes in lots of directions. I imagine that sort of one reason that people would talk about it a lot is to do with being beastly to Native Americans, which I'm not averse to people talking about it if they want to. to help them if they want to do that, I will just provide another couple of links on Robert Kaplan. But I think it's a slight digression for us

because the point of this topic is to really get us into the subsequent weeks of the course, which will be an attempt to talk concretely about seasteading and space colonisation where I'm assuming Indians are not going to be a big factor in that so we might be distracting ourselves if we get too sucked into those questions. So let me just try and be extremely succinct about this. 400 years, he says, this is 1893, 400 years of expansion into the frontier, which Frederick

Jackson Turner says constitutes America, it's tied up for him with the meaning of America, it's inseparable from the notion of the frontier, and from this date he gave this paper at the Chicago great exhibition and it was his point here is that this was a transitional moment and it was the ending of a certain long phase of American history, that meaning of what America was was going to change from this point onwards because the frontier had closed. And I think this points in a whole bunch of different directions, all of which are kind of huge, slightly intimidatingly huge.

One of them is that this 400-year period from 1893, he's basically saying the open frontier in the New World coincides with modernity. So if you take Frederick Jackson and Turner seriously, there is a sense where the whole history of modernity is about an open frontier and it hits some kind of singularity at the end of the 19th century where the meaning of modernity of the West changes in some fundamental way. So I think I'll skip forward and skip back if you skip forward to Patrick Friedman's

and you skip forward to the kind of topics that we've been discussing that constellate around that, it makes a lot of sense to me to place those discussions within this question about the meaning of the frontier. And I think the implicit critique that is there in Patrick Friedman's stuff, we saw all in the last module is this sort of market based critique of government, the kind of things that dynamic geography was supposed to reopen in terms of possibilities of the innovation and selection of types of governmental experimentation, all of these issues that

Friedman is raising can be contextualized within this large theme to do with the meaning of the frontier and the closure of the frontier. So in an extremely compressed way I think you can say that what dynamic geography is about, what it's about initially for this module of the course, is about a reopening of the frontier and therefore the transition out of something just over a century of global Western and specifically Anglophone history that is being characterised by the closure of the frontier as Frederick Jackson Turner puts it.

I think that the duty that then falls upon this module is one that I'm, to repeat this with intimidate, slightly intimidated about because I think it's about being concrete about these technical questions about what is involved in reopening a frontier. In the last module we were continually pushing up the road, all the concrete questions about what it was to actually build a CSTED, how practical is that, what it would involve. These kind of concrete technical issues about actually opening up a new frontier were systematically pushed off the edge of that module.

And so I think that this is the time to come back to some of those and reopen them. So I'm hoping that next week we'll look particularly at the seasteading questions. And one of the sort of concrete things that I'd like to bring up there is this question about artificial islands. You know, try to be really concrete about it, which I think China is huge about. Like, you can't read all the geopolitical panic news. It's hugely tied up with the fact that China is developing this expertise of building artificial islands in order to assert its claims to these waterways in Southeast Asia.

So there is this emergent technology. It's coming from the state. It's coming from geopolitics. It's coming from these military criteria. But I think if we go back to the frontier, those same issues are at stake. And if we go to the space question, which hopefully we can look at in the following week, they're also at state. You know clearly in all of these cases we're talking about the state, we're talking about massive capital investment and I think realism demands that those things be addressed and that we don't sort of relapse into certain kinds of libertarian fantasies about the state's

contribution to these questions or the state's contribution to opening up these new spaces is somehow something that we can just dismiss or consider to be irrelevant. So while I'm at that point of throwing links at you, I'm just going to do one more of those. This is two books, one of which I'm sure you'll be familiar with, one maybe not so are much familiar with, which I think are particularly relevant to this question about the relationship between catalactic, commercial, spontaneous processes of economic evolution

and the role of the state. They're both explicitly discussed. I'm assuming that the Delanda book is something people know about. I sort of recommend this Giovanni Origi book. He comes out of world systems theory and while his final conclusions I think are a little bit odd, it's an extremely interesting discussion of these kind of issues and his claim is that the course of Western capitalistic development has been fundamentally skewed by this militaristic imperialistic imperative which is something he thinks departs from Adam Smith's original

model and which weirdly he thinks the Chinese are better at actualising a more Smithian model of economic development. That final claim seems to be a little bit odd, especially where we've just started from. But as I say, I think the discussion there is interesting and there's lots of history in it. So that's if people want to do some further background on this. Okay, I'm sort of at the point of just handing over control totally at this point. What are you doing, Nick? Handing over to...? Yeah, just give me one more second, which is just to say, the thing that Turner doesn't

talk about very much, which Delander has a little bit on, I think he has more in his War in the Age of Intelligent Machines book actually, is that a lot of the infrastructure of opening up the frontier was obviously tied up with Washington and central government and large-scale capital, which particularly I think we're talking about the railroads and we're talking about the telegraph system. Neither of those plausibly emerged from what is straightforwardly bottom-up commercial and economic processes. So I'm raising these kind of points to say that there's obviously a temptation to kind

of libertarian fantasy in a lot of this material and that I don't think we can allow ourselves to indulge in that without problematising it with this other side of the question and by not indulging ourselves in that way we will prepare ourselves better for the fact that these new frontiers are obviously, it obviously involves massive amounts of capital investment. There's an aspect to this Turner essay which is really nice where he says that the true pioneers in the American, opening up the American West would just basically head out into the bush or whatever with almost nothing, put together some kind of deal with the Indians,

There was no land ownership, they would just kind of have some sort of, put together some mode of subsistence there, and then when successive waves, he divides it into these three big waves of colonisation, when the successive waves come they just pull up sticks, maybe sell their little homestead to the newcomers and move further out. So the key thing here is that it's an extremely fluid exit model. People could just basically head out west with almost nothing. It was extremely easy to do that. Easy on that sense of not having to have a lot of capital. I'm not in any way wanting to downplay the difficulties of settling more American wilderness.

And it seems that this makes that model a bit inappropriate to the kind of things that we're going to be talking about in this module. Like clearly you cannot do that with a sea sail. You cannot just get in a boat and head off into the Atlantic and set up a new state. I mean it requires some kind of massive amount of capital support to do that. And even more for space colonization. know, we're simply not even beginning realistically to talk about what's involved in that if we're thinking that something, some disaffected youngster can express their state of social alienation by heading out into low Earth orbit.

I'm assuming that's an uncontroversial claim on my part to make. And so I just wanted to say here, but that isn't that new, because in the West too it was the same. Colonising the American West is also about the railroads, it's also about the telegraph, it's also about these big infrastructural projects. You know, we're not in completely new terrain in this respect at all. And so I think we can hold on to this notion of a frontier, and we can hold on to a notion of there being certain important. Can we talk or you want to go ahead? No, no, okay, yeah, sure. I'll open it right now. Because you know, the fact that America had a piece of code, and people have called it

protocol, right? But you can also refer to it as a form of algorithm because protocols are sort of like algorithmic, right? Called the constitution that set out the scale and scope and a method of how this new frontier is going to be colonized is very different than say seasteading in which codes are emerged out of the corporate needs or collective needs of people wanting to create these colonies. So there was something about the move to the West and creating more American states that was bound by some kind of like nucleus that was set in Philadelphia and expanded upon

a little bit later through amendments and then kind of like went crazy, right? Every colony had to comply to something. Yeah, I mean, this is obviously part of what, I think you're on an issue that's at the center of Turner's text here, because one of his crucial claims in this piece is that in this drift West, there's a constant radical social re-beginning, a reinitiation of the social process that happens at each stage in this process. So you're kind of asking how radical is that process of reinitiation?

And I think that's an interesting and it's not a straightforward question, because obviously the constitution is designed for these original 13 colonies. It doesn't have particularly well settled principles for the Western expansion of America written into it. There is something that is retrospective or retroactive about the kind of re-institutionalization of these Western expanses into the growing United States. And I think by the very nature of the thing, there is probably a tendency to overestimate

the degree to which there is a kind of preordained Central American plan in this stuff. My sense very strongly is that at least initially in the kind of early centuries of this process, It really wasn't that there were any authorities in these eastern colonies that had any clear vision of what they were, what was going to happen in terms of the expansion west of the map. Yes, but their official joining to the United States was the moment in which that sort of

like autonomy was somehow folded back into the Constitution. But my point here actually was not that American Constitution is this centralized federalist entity, but that actually the Constitution provides to a large extent room for these deviations. The reason the constitution is viable is because whether wantedly or not, it allows for a large amount of autonomy in these local colonies. It acknowledges it within the structure of the constitution,

the way the power is divided in a grid of three by three. I think this came from the residency, right? So you have federal government which is constituted of the three layers of judiciary, legislative, executive and then this three layer is replicated in the state. The states will have the same structure and then even cities will have the same structure. So the cities will have legislature, the cities will have executive and the cities will have judiciary, right? So this itself is a model for what do you call it, like what is the right word for it, for a kind of like fractal, it allows for the fractalization of the system, right?

Things can grow as long as they loosely adhere to this system of separation of power and then map that on top of the federal separation of power. Yeah, I mean obviously I think there's lots of ways that we can, we're almost compelled to like complicate this story. I mean one obvious thing is that, you know, just to repeat even just this one sentence from the essay, he says, and now four centuries from the discovery of America at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution. So we're talking about the Constitution is not something that's original to this story.

He's talking about something that arises three centuries into this dynamic and this process. And obviously immediately before the Constitution, we have the Articles of Confederation, we have all of this kind of complicated political history of America that concludes in the Constitution rather than the constitution being there as a sort of fundamental foundation for this process. So that's one thing. And then coming up the other side, I think there's this question, what are we now saying about the closing of the American frontier in these terms? You know, if we're taking what you're saying about the constitution

and its particular affinity with this open-ended, rolling colonial process, how do we then think about the closing of the frontier in terms of American constitutional history? Which I think... I'm used to reading people who have a bit of a doomster story about this, and I'm sort of partly wanting to say that this maybe is one key ingredient to this Doomsday story. I don't know if I'm talking too much, you have to say, Mo, it's Mike. Unless other people can start shouting at you. Yeah, please not shout at me. I'm good at shouting at other people.

But this is precisely why the move westward had to sort of like find new ways and of course not on the protocol of the Constitution but on new protocols, had to become global and had to get out of America, had to basically somehow involve South America, Europe, and the rest of the world. And that expansion, not in the same form, not using the same protocols of the Constitution, is ongoing. This is why you see America staking a claim next to the border of Russia and Ukraine. This is why you see the wars in the Middle East that have been going on for so long.

Of course, the objective of the wars in the Middle East is not to create new American states in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, but somehow to extend the rule with other means, but this thing itself is almost like capitalism, it always tries to find new spaces in order to expand. But, ok, let me just take this back one step Mo, sorry are you still there? Sorry Mo just went dark, is that, oh yeah, you're silent Mo, I can't hear you at all, I just put myself silent so you can speak. So look, I think this question is like actually crucial to this.

Let me just take one step back. Because I think the interest of invoking this Turner essay, partly, is to say there is a construction of all of these questions of political philosophy, political economy, abstract questions about governance, geopolitics, which have no reference to a frontier, which assume a set of tessellated states in which, you know, the only, like, Tyler here especially says, the frontier is not like a European frontier. It's not the place where one state stops and another state begins. It's a completely different sense of frontier. And this is the sense of frontier that I think we need to take a standard now in this set of questions.

Now it seems to me that what you're now talking about is the reversion of the frontier to this European model, to the old world model. A frontier now is a boundary of collision between more or less firmly defined geopolitical entities. And so in talking about the geopolitics that you're now introducing, I think we can use these kind of European schemes. It should be that a geopolitical theory that works for the old world will work for this kind of new, whatever you want to call it, this new empire, this new phase of American politics of the kind that you're talking about.

But it seems to me that what is not there in this is the frontier that Turner is talking about, the frontier in which you can leave, you can depart from the organised structures of political economic life and head out into the frontier where there are only Indians, or in the seasteading case there's just ocean, or in space there's nothing, there's void and bits of rock. But Nick, it's precisely, I think, what we're dealing here is a dialectics between how to use this old European one towards this open frontier in which the Indian is the Arab,

the Indian is the Eastern European, the Indian are the other republics from Russia. That's the thrust of the one article you posted about the war on terror as being modeled on or as being like a repetition on it. No, I was going to say, I mean, those two essays on Kaplan are totally in the zone as far as Mo's question is concerned. And they are, I think it's a little bit of a, I was going to take it, maybe I should retract from that. I was going to say I think it's a little bit of a digressive path in terms of what we want to be talking about here, but maybe I should retreat from that idea. But those pieces, as Jake says, are completely on the spot in terms of this.

Almost like sentences are the same in terms of what you just said, Mo, and the things Kaplan is saying, where he's saying, you know, the war on terror is the new Indian wars and he says the American military has an institutional bank of experience in terms of its history of the Indian wars that can be transplanted and has been transplanted into these new global problems which are dealing with tribal peoples, populations that are in some significant way analogous to the encounter with the American Indians in the Indian Wars.

So yeah, totally, this is right. But if we're going to reconstruct the whole Turner thesis in terms of the Indian Wars, to say that it's all really about the Indian wars and that, and of course, you know, this would probably be the standard thing to do, it's not that I think there's anything weird or deviant about doing that, but if we do this, then I think we're losing the capacity to jump smoothly from the Turner thesis to these Patrick Friedman type questions about

a frontier, you know, we would then have to say, well, the Patrick Friedman frontier is not at all like the traditional American frontier, it's not at all like the frontier that shut in the 1890s, it's something else completely. And I'm reluctant to do that, but I think it's a complicated empirical question, you know. Maybe lots of people would want to come in about this in terms of their historical sense of this thing. My sense of it is that the settlers moving west in America were not, for the most part, encountering consolidated geopolitical entities of a kind that are analogous to the

kind of things that we now, that are issues for American foreign policy in the current day. And I'm sure there's a blurry zone here, I'm sure that in certain kind of issues, especially in Afghanistan or these areas that are very weak centralized states, highly tribal, there are strong analogies you can make for the kind of security issues there. But the point is that a lot of this Western movement in America was done completely without original American state military support. Of course the American army would move into these areas, but it's not like the war on

terror, it's not like the first people to go in is the army and then later some businesses or whatever might move in secondarily, you know, there was a wave of just settlement which was not under state guidance or under strong state protection. So that's my sense of this and I can immediately see that there's a comeback to this thing and being naive and that the whole thing was highly militarized from the start or whatever. So as I say, I treat this as a kind of empirical historical question. I was wondering if we could complicate it even more.

If you look at China, right, so it's scrolled a bit past, but I posted a link. Song Dynasty China is often a reference point where people say, was it modern? it seems to have a lot of modern characteristics, highly urbanized, they had paper money and so on and so forth. And Song Dynasty China had a frontier. It had a frontier that it was defensive against. It didn't have a very strong sort of technological advantage where it could sort of push into it. It had this defensive frontier and it experienced this early modernity a thousand years ago. And that was in continuity with the Chinese experience until the Qing dynasty where you

suddenly were able to get this advantage with basically modern firearms and they were able to expand to the size of modern China. This sort of frontier experience, the frontier itself is not unique to the United States. Well actually, you know, I think this is a really crucial thing and I sort of, without wanting to over egg my expertise in this, I sort of have done a bit of China frontier stuff. When I was working for this magazine I did regular trips to Xinjiang and I've been out to other places. And the West, the Chinese West is as you say, they have a wild west.

I think this is not understood much by Westerners generally. You know, the notion of China is totally based upon this deeply settled, fairly agriculturally rich eastern part of the country. And like, I'm sure I've said this before because it's a fact that I throw everyone at every opportunity, but I was told that the agriculture, the proportion of China that is actually arable land is the same as Australia. You know, I know it sounds pretty weird, but when you go out west it's like just this barren deserts and mountains endlessly, you know, and the landscapes, I mean people if

If you've seen these Jangie Moe movies, they're normally set out there. They're just these absolute desolate wasteland Wild West sounds. It would be really interesting to just do an American and Chinese Wild West cinema imagery stuff because it's extremely similar. And they're meeting dangerous tribal peoples. The whole mythos is very similar to do with certain notions of freedom, danger, cultural encounters, a certain romanticization of the kind of savage tribal other by comparatively

sort of, it's probably crazily un-PC to say sophisticated, some word that would be East Coast Americans and East Coast Chinese, which I'm sure could be found. Civilised, I think, is probably in the right way. Maybe I could get away with civilised, anyway, but for sure. But I think that having said all of that, which is huge, and I totally agree with you, like it's a really interesting point of parallel, I think there is just this ethnic difference that is just crucial that the Chinese are really shit, colonialists. You know, they just are. They do not like leaving home. And, you know, this is kind of weirdly reinforced by the state historically

that if you actually left the boundaries of China, you were exiled forever and subject to various kinds of anathematisation. and it was just considered to be at every level down to the family level just culturally abominable to in some serious way leave home. And so there is this kind of history of Chinese, whatever you want to call it, I think imperialism, but there's not much Chinese colonialism. There really isn't. the people who were out in these areas out in the far west you know there's a few traders there's administrators often extremely talented Chinese administrators who would do these

complicated geopolitical deals with all the tribes and try and hold the silk road open but there is not a wave of colonial settlement rolling west yeah rolling west out of China you know and often where because China has so much been pushed up against the Malthusian limit all the time and had these dense populations that are a big problem the Chinese state would often have to actually move people to these areas of settlement you know rather than it being something that happened through some spontaneous impulse of colonial expansion or escape into the freedom of the wilderness,

the government would actually say, look, we've got this piece of real estate that we've added to our political bounds and we're just going to move a whole bunch of people whether they want it or not into this new area because our arable land is oversaturated with people. So I just think that that cultural difference has been massive. And if I'm going to turn it around, I would say it means that this Pachy Friedman lineage, which I think is very strong coming right out of American history, it's a continuous lineage, it sort of follows a lot of resonance going right back deep into American history

in particular. But I think it's an Anglophone lineage. I just do not think it is easily culturally transferable, and certainly not easily transferable to China. So even though I think we're going to be talking about China, I hope, because as I say, they're the big artificial island guys right now, but I don't think they're artificial Island guys because they've got a bunch of Han Patrick Friedman saying let's escape the state to an artificial island. It's purely coming top down as an attempt to sort of impose government geopolitical objectives through these construction programs.

I mean, there was an interesting part in the essay where he describes this sort of like first generation backwoodsmen or whatever, backwoods people that would go through these successive waves of, you know, they build their log cabin or whatever on not very well understood or claimed land or within Indian controlled sort of territory and then as the next wave came up they would move. He described it in terms of soil quality as one of the drivers for it.

had great these Midwestern prairies which is essentially well he uses the term virgin soil which is you could unpack for a long time but the point is that if European agricultural techniques or Eurasian agricultural techniques hadn't been used on it you could go and start a farm for the first time on it and before you had to start access to salt in the essay But before you had to start a process of re-tilling and crop rotation and the rest of it, you would just move further west. Right. So you had this very strong differential and that ecosystem to support that was never there, I think, in any of the frontiers that China faced in the last thousand years.

Maybe you could argue it was there like two and a half thousand years ago when Lord Chang was sort of laying out guidelines for cultivating the wastelands. this is what you've got to do. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think it would be possible to overemphasize, I imagine it would be possible to overemphasize this cultural thing, but I can only say that this sort of commandment that one should be within the locality of your parents' home is vastly culturally important for the Chinese. I mean the notion that some offspring is going to just set off West on an adventure and send

their mother and father the occasional letter is not something that is allowed for, you know, it just would be considered a grave offence against filial piety. And so I think there's a small, sort of, kind of anathematised merchant class that does this who may be a bit like the Jews in the West, you know, they're considered like outside the normal social norms to some extent. And then there are government appointees, you know, people who are actually told by the Emperor, you know, they're a Mandarin and they said, you go and sort out this problem out west, but I just think in terms of sort of organic expansion, there's not much evidence

that that's something that has happened. I think if you go back 2,000 years, you're pretty wrong, but if you talk about the last 1,000 years, yeah, there was very clear sort of boundaries of the inner provinces that that sort of ran up against. I think the cultural thing, it's very strong, but there's also maritime China. But you look at the maritime thing, though. You know, I mean, that Zheng He was told that he should have to do this whole thing by the emperor. It was a kind of geopolitical exercise. There was no commercial rationality to it. And then the Ming Dynasty shut it down.

because and and actually and actually under the Ming Dynasty it became a capital offense to sail away from the coast of China you be on site you know if you actually left site of the Chinese sure it was a capital offense and and then to cap the whole thing at a point that I think for Western is just hitting the psychosis level that the Qing Dynasty moved all Chinese inhabitation that were within some distance of the coast, I can't remember the exact distance, but they just cleared the whole coast because they were worried that the people living there would interact with pirates or in some ways be part of that.

You know, when you say, look, the maritime history, this maritime history, I'm willing to say, has been explicitly and strenuously suppressed. And that's why there are not Chinese overseas colonies. I mean, there's obviously a diaspora. So I think it's worth distinguishing at this point between the Chinese state and its extraordinary history, where there is a very clear distinction between you're in or you're out. You're a barbarian or a pirate or you're within the Chinese state system. And if you're outside then there's a whole foreign policy co-option, cooperation, playing off one against the other relationship, but you're outside. And maritime China, which is population-wise not huge, but describes actually hundreds

of years of immigration into Southeast Asia. Diasporic China. Yes. Yeah. I mean obviously no one could deny that population exists, it's true. But in becoming part of that population, historically you were just anathematised, you could never return to China, you'd committed a crime in becoming diasporic. So it says something, it's basically actually a history of piracy, you know, and the whole – I'm going to go right out on a limb here, so come back, but I would say this, I would say the whole of diasporic China is basically a piratical kingdom.

The history of Chinese piracy is exactly the same as the history of the Chinese maritime diaspora in the sense that the state was not making any difference. If you just ran up the Jolly Roger or if you just simply went to Malaysia to do business, As far as the Chinese state is concerned, that is the same thing. It had left in some abominable way the boundaries of civilization, and it could not be forgiven. Maybe you know the date when that would actually cease to be a crime, but it's not distant history. It's definitely the earliest in the late 19th century when it ceased to be a crime.

This is all true, but you can always problematize it more because the Qing dynasty itself was a barbarian dynasty, right? And it explicitly maintained frontier territories as boundary territories. It explicitly maintained itself as an elite trying to separate itself from the sort of defined Chinese state. So I mean, look, I could dig into it for ages, I'm a little bit worried that I might be hogging the mic, but yeah, I don't, like, you're not wrong in the things that you're saying either. But maybe one sided or unbalanced possibly would be the accusation. Yeah, this is hugely important and I think we will come back to it because the reciprocal

of this conversation is the question about are we talking about a specific Anglophone ideological lineage when we're talking about these questions of the frontier. I mean, or to put it in a stronger sense, is this frontier in some sense essentially an Anglophone frontier? You know, like a... So the seasteading question and the space colonization are in some sort of very specific sense a part of this, of a distinctive cultural, political, economic line. So you know, I think this Chinese question is the flip side,

the flip side of that. And there obviously is a Chinese story. And the relationship of the current established Westphalian states, I think, is very much the sort of relationship of China to its frontier. Right. Historically. And so that's the default mode. It's like, we're civilization and this is the frontier. idea, and putting yourself outside that, like Patrick Friedman, is sort of, are you going and becoming a pirate, or do you have some philosophical sort of connection so that it's sort of excused or seen as legitimate or whatever? I think that's an interesting edge. Yeah.

Yeah, the whole thing could be done in terms of piracy, but that would probably be stretching people's flexibility a little bit at this point. Rather than me getting lost in trying to read the sidebar, does anybody who's been involved in those in-depth conversations, and let's put 20,000 words of commentary in the sidebar, want to share it verbally with us? Yeah, I was listing some points for myself to see what people were maybe interested in.

I'm thinking about this in a totally different way. I have a lot of trouble following the concrete details of the historical discussion, and I'm always thinking about what's the allegorical subtext of what everyone is saying, or how In the first part of the course, we got to talking about microstates and C-steds, and there were like three or four other analogous structures which could replicate and kind of laterally share their DNA. Like cells, we had cells in there. So I'm always thinking over on that kind of object and trying to apply everything that everyone says to thinking of new rules and aspects of that creature. but your discussion is so detailed that I have trouble

paying attention or being able to extract that kind of information because it's so detailed, so concrete and embedded in the historical events so I layer other people are paying attention to but I think that whole thing is interesting what layers are other people paying attention to well I can see lots of Jake and Amy discussion in this I don't know whether either of those could be prodded into why don't they talk about it I think just a lot of the conversation was about sort of like, so once China, over the last few decades,

it hits modernity as a frontier, or as a virtual frontier. And so you don't get this sort of iterative process of geographic expansion westward that you get in North America, but you do get sort of the regional geopolitical envelope and also commercial territories, commercial influence and security as a frontier which the state seeks to safeguard, to control. So an expansion does occur, or is occurring right now. This is like the artificial islands control. No, it's definitely occurring now. And then that's funded. Because there is stuff going on in Africa, in Honduras. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think China has been modernised in a recognisable sense.

since 1980, you know, so I think if we are talking about anything after that date we're in a new set of dynamics that slowly and painfully for better or for worse China has accommodated itself too. But I think if you're wanting to push it before then, you know, whether into the communist era or before, it becomes a lot more complicated. You know, in the in the sort of republican period at the beginning of the 20th century I wouldn't be surprised if you could seek some kind of proto-modernist dynamics that would be recognizable. But if you go back before that, it becomes

I think much more complicated. And one of the things is just for instance this thing about foreign trade. You know, like you look at the Anglo pattern, we're shifting a bit from America, so I'm just going to my pirates, my piratical ancestors, who undergo this maritime process that is a kind of a freelance, there's lots of violence, freelance violence involved in it, entrepreneurial violence and of course it's hugely commercial and the whole thing is being driven, no one has any problems with that whether it's Karl Marx through to Milton Friedman or whatever,

no one has any problems with understanding that the basic motivation that's driving people here is to make money. It's really hard to see something like that in the Chinese case. I was talking to Adam about the Jung-Hu, their big maritime hero, there was no indication at all that it was even imaginable that something profitable could come out of that. These big boats were laden with all these exotic animals and all this kind of stuff that were going to be doled out to various kingdoms they found on the way in order to sort of win some sort of political favors from them. So and maritime commerce was, as I say, Adam might want to come back on the bit, it was

basically understood as piracy. It was fundamentally considered to be illegitimate. Dealing with people from across the sea was considered to be an offence. And obviously when the British arrived in China, or the Westerners generally, they'd arranged these meetings with the political officials and they'd be told to sod off, you know, we don't want your trinkets and weird stuff, manufacturers, you're just bad news, you're pollution, we don't want this stuff. And so of course the history there is it leads to various kinds of commercial subterfuge and then violence only entrenching the sense of the Chinese authorities that this is a bunch

of pirates they're dealing with. They become opium dealers and all of this kind of stuff in order to try and root around these obstructions on commerce and it just looks, as far as the authorities can say, it's just entrenching their initial assumption that this is something deeply unwholesome, and unwanted, and is not part of the sense of the way that the society should be directed. So obviously from their point of view this is like, in modern terms, the century of humiliation, the century of humiliation in which modern commercial interaction with the outside world was imposed.

So sorry, I'm probably going off into a ramble about this, but I'm wanting to say here I think there's a massive disanalogy. It's just like it's really hard for me to see some strong core of common geopolitical behaviour between the Europeans in general and the Anglos in particular and for instance in this case the Chinese. I'm just not seeing that at all. Yeah, I don't know, similarly to Andrews, it's kind of hard for me to have useful comments on pre-modern or pre-revolution China.

I mean, you guys sort of have a marginal disagreement, I guess, or some disagreement about historical China. I mean, I don't know, but it sounds like you're making a compelling argument. But do you agree that post-revolution in this modern context, that that is changing and that you're seeing some of the same behaviors? Like, for example, what Mo was talking about, where once domestic consolidation has occurred, you start trying to consolidate your surrounding region, in Latin America versus East Asia and Oceania and that sort of resource sourcing from elsewhere around the globe is I mean I don't know how comparable or how structural. No I would totally agree. I think since 1980 China's international behavior has become completely recognizable

I would say. You know, there's marginal, exotic issues, no doubt, but there's a fundamental switch, and now the sort of things that China is up to commercially, geopolitically, I think make sense to everyone without too much difficulty. So, yeah, I would definitely agree with that. But what I still don't see is this kind of... if you see what Pachi Friedman is up to as some kind of highly sort of elaborated thread of cultural evolution out of the colonial tradition, I don't see anything like that. You know what I mean?

I don't see any hint that there is a kind of wave of potential Chinese seasteaders waiting to you know, take to the seas but then, yeah, sorry maybe I should backtrack, because we had this whole conversation which was interesting about this floating city in Hong Kong, which is which I probably then have to say is the closest thing to a C-STEP that currently exists I mean, it's just like I guess just from this technical perspective so there isn't, I mean, I agree it doesn't seem to make sense, but there is the same drive towards just sort of free homogenous iterative expansion into a new sort of physical frontier, but some of the same technical

processes, innovations, like looking for new land, using the sea as a source of it, like through artificial means, and that it just seems to be happening according to a different paradigm, which is a paradigm of sort of local, consolidated, and maybe urban, like fundamentally urban, and commercial expansion, but it's sort of taking advantage of the same plane of availability, which is the ocean. And since the regional context is such like an ocean, sort of geographically ocean-invaded, island-based geography, that it remains highly relevant there, just in a different way. Well, I think we probably... I'm sort of worried about talking about this now

because I'm sort of thinking it's a little bit up the road as a topic, but not that far, though, so maybe I shouldn't be inhibited about it. But this artificial islands thing, to me, is, like, huge, and it hasn't been talked about at all enough yet. And there's something deeply ironic about it, in the sense that, obviously, you know, there's this basically libertarian mode of Western discussion about dynamic geography oriented towards seasteads and the production, it's like, I think you'd have to say, that Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age is a hugely important text in that with these artificial islands being a crucial part of it. But then when do you get artificial islands?

You get it basically, okay the Gulf states have spent some of their oil surplus on a a few flashy artificial islands just off the coast, but basically speaking, the whole breakthrough into construction of artificial islands has come out of this Chinese maritime geopolitics. I bet if we ran through, we Googled artificial islands, it would all be about South China to see geopolitics. And it must be that the sort of technology of constructing islands was just nowhere before this started, and all of a sudden this is something that people are doing, the Chinese

are doing. So it just, I think, changes the equations. It's not that long ago that the notion of constructing artificial islands was just a crazy piece of science fiction. Right. It's a speculation. Buckminster Fuller kind of shit. Yeah. And now it's like there, you know, in the news. Yeah. So just like sort of a concrete question about China right now, are they really on board and involved in the expansion of special economic zones and the like, like worldwide? Is that something that's like sort of, there's a Chinese push for that? Well I think that, what you mean in other countries, outside China, I don't know. The history of the Special Economic Zones is obviously China innovated the Special Economic

Zones, so it's a Deng Xiaoping thing, and the first wave of economic liberalisation of capitalism in post-revolutionary China is totally tied up with Special Economic Zones. But then it has become increasingly de-emphasized. So I don't think it's a big issue now. You'll see it a little bit every now and again or whatever. But Shenzhen is just too big to kind of be, to make sense of the Special Economic Zone anymore. That was the first and most. Yeah, no, it's interesting. We're just like in the sidebar right now. And Joshua, I mean, obviously knows more about it because he's just posted something, but really interesting about the expansion of special economic zones in Africa, like recently

via the Chinese. So the Chinese are recommending it as an African thing. I mean their experience with it is obviously everyone started copying it. They, lots of people in the decades after Deng Xiaoping's first wave of special economic zones, this was something no one had tried before and it became like hugely successful and people emulating it everywhere, Malaysia had special economic horizons, you know, they were cropping up all over the place at a certain point. So yeah. Interesting. But obviously, without wanting to shut down this thing, because it's obviously part of

the course in general, this question. But the frontier question and the special economic zone question are at least the relation between them is complicated. You know, and there's a danger of just metaphor. I mean, you could call a special economic zone a certain kind of artificial economic frontier, but in doing so, you know, the danger of that just being a metaphor is huge. because of the fact that with a special the government is coming top down in the sense that the government is making a decision to retract its controls to a certain

extent from some piece of territory so it's a policy decision that's coming from above to produce a liberal rural economic space and in that sense it is actually massively in conformity with what I take to be the dominant sense of neoliberalism when people use that, that's to say that it's a kind of top-down state production of markets, you know, the production of a market environment through a political decision. The frontier situation seems to be exactly the opposite of that.

In the American case, you don't think it's comparable to, first of all, military investment and fighting the Indian wars, this preemption act that kind of created the market situation where people could make money selling off their homestead and therefore iterate to the next band of the frontier. I think that the colonists were sucking the Central American military and government and judicial resources. They were sucking them west. I think that the colonial process did not follow. There was no early American plan to settle the west.

I think it's the same with the British Empire. I mean, you know, it's only with the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that India becomes part of the British Empire. You know, so for over a century before that, it's obviously been subject to this massive colonial process that was completely... I mean, the East India Company, okay, it was given a government charter. No one really knew what the hell it was up to in Parliament in Britain. When the Indian mutiny kicked off and people were going to provide evidence to the government in Westminster about the crazy shit going on in India, there was just shock horror,

what the hell have you guys got us into? And it's the same with the opium wars. The government, the British didn't send some kind of military expedition to China, the The East India Company got into a huge complicated geopolitical entanglement with China that then reached the point of armed conflict and then the East India Company went to Parliament and said, oh look the Chinese have thrown all our opium in the sea, I want you to do something about it. So what I'm trying to say here, and I know it requires much more sort of evidence and substantiation than just these things. But the basic trend that you find at the limit in the Anglo tradition is for the state to

be sucked into a colonial process, and this is completely separate, or it's the inverse of a process where you have some state imperial project that will in some way want to then mobilize the population or sort of plan some process of settlement. Yeah, no, I buy that. More or less, at least. I guess my interest there is kind of can you still have structural analogs even though the time series is reversed? Or the control series? Yes.

Yes, I mean I abstractly understand that point, but I'm not sure I can quite get my head around that. So, yeah, you could apply a model even though it's historically inverted. Right, yeah, something like that. And not that I have any strongly worked out sense of how you do that exactly, just some sort of bits and pieces. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess just, like, in terms of, like, the actual future of seasteading and of the sort of, like, of the spread of some kind of frontier as determinative for how history and the flow of people and of new jurisdictions,

of new jurisdictions, most of all, sort of occurs from this point forward. I mean, do we think that the inverted Chinese model is going to be dominant? like do we have to sort of take that into account if we're protecting us I really hope that we can we can talk about exactly this question over the next few weeks because I think it's just utterly crucial to this you know I think that in some ways the seasteading question is more complicated because it's not very easy to see concretely what we're even talking about as a kind of oceanic colonial process or, you know, I'm assuming that you could extend it

to other things that would also be relevant like colonising the Antarctic or something like that or the seabed or, you know there must be a lot of these terrestrial frontier environments that in theory are a lot more attractive than off-planet off-planet exploration and colonization. But it's very hard to actually see concretely what we're imagining. Whereas I think with some irony, the off-planet stuff is actually becoming increasingly easy to envisage. I think that we can put together a kind of picture of what would have to be involved in producing a kind of off-planet colonial process

much more easily than we can do in the sea state. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think putting it in the context of space colonization, of off-world colonization, really, like, it sharpens the question. Because both models, like, it's very easy to see, like, a relatively top-down colonial model that sort of spreads from hub to hub and is fairly planned out, and at the same exact time in the same solar system, this sort of free-flowing iterative commercial frontier along the anglosphere's model and those things both happening in the same space and being fairly easy to visualize, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it does seem to me,

I think that these new space companies, obviously most famously SpaceX but there's like three or four of them or maybe more actually depending how you're going to define them are interestingly liminal on this question about whether they are sort of commercially driven bottom up colonial processes or state oriented highly planned processes I mean, when you're talking about space, which is still treated by the states as an aerospace military frontier, you've got to play nice. Yeah, I think for sure anyone who wanted to stick their finger in a government's eye

would have trouble sort of engaging in a process of self-propelling space colonisation. I think that's definitely true. But it does also seem that, to me it seems, that there is not a sufficient impulse to this kind of activity coming ever from government. I would say if you have these two very crude models of a kind of spontaneous colonial process sucking in government or a government driven project that is directing a colonial process this space thing still seems to me to be more like the former case

than the latter case. That absolutely makes sense because just from like an a priori perspective for the state questioning whether it wants to do something like this like the gap between your ability to exert control and to maintain tight communications with something off world is a huge barrier. Whereas if this starts to happen on a private dispersive basis, I mean that's entanglement waiting to happen and then there's no choice but to start trying to take state control over it. Yeah, and I think China is in the role here. Obviously China is now a vigorous space power, but I think it too is being sucked, And its space ambitions are basically being tracked to what it's seeing happening elsewhere

in the world. And I think there's probably a lot of potential for it to ramp those things up. But I think it's only going to ramp them up when it sees the kind of SpaceX, new space type thing happening in the West actually really getting going. And then it will probably think we've got to try and track this and keep up with it. But I don't think China is going to innovate a schedule of space colonization. They would only do it as a reactive thing. And that's certainly what's happened up to this point. I also have a practical problem that I would like to talk to you guys about, if you don't

mind. I've been asked and invited by, this is going to all sound like you're going to go like burst into laughter, okay? So I'm giving all the pre-warnings to not laugh and Don't like put funny notes on the side and distract me and all that. I've been invited by Monte Carlo Art Fair to organize an exhibition next summer for the Monte Carlo Art Fair week. So what I propose to them is a show called This is the Sea. and basically because they have

and this is the first time I'm actually publicly talking about it, it's totally still in the making but the show has been approved, the extent of it is not, the extent of it is basically the size of the yachts that we need for the show in meters because they calculate yachts in like foots and meters, right? Feet and meters so basically they're trying to find a rich person who will donate their expensive yacht to the show and I will install an art show about seasteading and about these types of autonomous zones. Oh, wow. That's great. And then the show will travel from Monte Carlo for a week, including some of the artists and people that I'm selecting. And we will go and we will then stop in the international water outside of Venice Biennale and we will have the boat not in Italy but in the international

waters. We're going to have a flag. We're going to have all sorts of like high-prestitional constitutions and like manifestos and stuff like that and the show tries to deal with some other themes of the class and that's why actually I'm I'm interested in all these questions because I think so it's not for me it's about it's it's about so like marrying the sort of like the spirit of luxury communism but also with like these types of like hyper libertarian so like spirits of pure autonomy and like you know what I mean floating sovereignty's and all that all that stuff and the title it the working title of the show is this is the sea this is the sea this is the sea I'm have you approached Patrick Friedman no but that's why I'm bringing it up here

because I wanna I wanna like and then we are going to raise money and invite people to give talks in Venice during the Venice Biennale are during the Venice Biennale opening there's gonna be talks on the boat Every night there will be a party with sponsored champagne and food and stuff because that's the only way to get people to leave the mainland and get on a boat. And so we're going to have several venues for conversations about special politics and seasteading and all that. And artists and thinkers will be invited to comment and create culture and knowledge around it. Sounds fantastic, but you do have to get Patrick Friedman involved, because a seasteading thing

without him there would be crazy. I mean if he says no, of course, no problem. Definitely. So it will be interesting to hear what are your, I mean I don't want to interrupt the class and make it about me, but really this is practical. This is practical. to be being practical. It's a practical thing of trying to sort of like, I don't know, simulate and exercise some of these ideas in the form of an exhibition and like conversations. Yeah. Well, yeah, this would be obviously great. Yeah, that would be a badass follow-up practicum or whatever.

Yeah, this is like a follow-up to Artificial Cinema, right? So it's like my project kind of like going parallel with stuff we're talking about in New Center, right? Can we end up with a microstate at the end of this process? That would be... Yeah, totally. We want to declare it a microstate. And you know, for you to... One of the reasons we don't want it to come short is that Monte Carlo is not in EU. I don't think it is. So there are issues about like art being imported, exported, but if you keep it on the international waters, the art remains sort of like not having to go to cost. Yeah. And then we have like a special water taxi that will take you far outside of the coastline of Italy into international waters.

Tal, thank you so much for this. No, I haven't seen it, but I will look into it. Is that title enough to find it on the web? Oh yeah, great. Fantastic. Here I'm going to steal that thing too. Oh yeah, these guys. Yeah, I remembered it. It looks like it is part of, at least part of the euro zone. Like its currency is the euro. I'm not sure about political membership. Okay, yeah. The thing is, we're not about refugees and it's not about like a tiny little boat with a white flag. This is about some, we're trying to go for as luxurious, as monstrous of yacht possible. This is supposed to be like the expression of militarized neoliberalism.

You know, this is supposed to be like, people are supposed to hate this basically. People are supposed to be scared. This is like Skynet. This is not some like refugees on a little boat trying to sort of like land somewhere and it can't... Yeah, this sounds good. So you have the ornery obnoxiousness of the libertarians and massive luxury of the folk people. Yeah, champagne and oysters is on fully automated luxury. And Amy, I had you in mind as one of the artists in the show actually. So it will be good for you to start thinking about ways to insert yourself in the show. And we'll see how much money we can raise and how many people can we bring to Italy. But already arrangements are being made for places for us to sleep during the Biennale.

of trying to insert it as a satellite project in the catalog of the VNSP and Ali, depending on how much money they want and how much we have. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going to happen. And I would really want the class to be sort of plugged into this project, or the project being plugged into class, whichever. Great. Yeah. And so you're a channel of information about this. It doesn't have any kind of website or anything like that. Not yet. And the list of artists are very big and medium and small. The star of the show is going to be Oscar Morillo, who ripped his passport last year. I don't know if you guys heard that or not. He ripped his passport in the bathroom as he was going through Hong Kong airport or English airport,

and he got arrested for not having a passport because he was trying to make a point about borderlessness and stuff. And then he was arrested and he was shipped back. No, he was arrested in Hong Kong and sent back to England, and then he had to obtain a new passport. and then go back to Hong Kong to attend London, no, what is it? Art Basel, Hong Kong. He did that around Art Basel, Hong Kong. You can look it up. Oscar Morello, he's a provocative, what do they call them? Zombie abstract artist. How do you spell Morello? I put it on a site, I think. Brave guy, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He actually was in the official selection of last Berlin Biennale. He did an interesting project where he passed around these canvases from school to school

around the world and then he got kids to paint on them and he just laid them on tables and then you could see like how children would think of painting and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, the container artist residency, is that the Vancouver one Tal? No, that's not the Vancouver one, yeah. But this has also been going on, exactly. The gallery I used to work for is involved in doing some other container residency for Vancouver. But thank you for all these leads. These are great. But I don't want to take over your class, Nick. I just thought... No, no, I think you're saying that we're going to do it rather than just do it. That's great. What can come out is that any work written for the class, we would consider it for the

catalog or publication. And we would try to invite some of the people who had more interesting things to say to participate in the talks. So that's going to be like a literal link. Added incentive structure. Yes. Good. Okay, excellent. Well, I hope you keep us informed about this. Sounds fantastic. When would it be again? Next summer? Yeah, the show will open in Monte Carlo on like April 23rd or April 27th and run to April 30th in Monte Carlo. And then the boat would leave Monte Carlo and it takes both for a week to arrive to Venice. And then they will arrive on May 6th or 7th.

And the preview of Venice Biennale is 7th to 11th of May. And so our Venice activities will all take place in May. All right. The first week of May in Venice. Cool. I would definitely start workshopping the press release I've written already for the invitation of the artist. See if you guys want to add to it, what you think of it. I'll post it to the classroom. But please keep it a little bit like on the quiet side because I don't want the idea

to get like out and somebody else start working around it. Not that I'm the original person who came up with the idea of art and seasteading, but this particular take of it, which I wanted to be very geopolitical and sort of like more scary than normal. Yes. You don't want to get there and be able to find a whole ecosystem of microstates to have already thrown themselves up in the middle. That would be interesting too, right? But not really. OK, so I'll shut up. No, thanks. Forget about that. That's good. Great. So maybe we need to sort of do a jump start thing.

There was another point that Tyler made that I really liked about the pattern of colonization and waves of colonization following the geography. And you had this sort of, I think he even describes it as a nervous system growing up along the lines of the geographic routes. And that's the entire, like, you could get all sorts of echoes out of that. So I was wondering if that was something people thought about. Yeah, I think there's two things that, for me, come out of this.

And they're both difficult and sort of block paths. I mean, one of them is obviously that, as we were talking about in the last module, these new frontier spaces are like smooth spaces, aren't they? Radically smooth spaces. Or at least the ones that wouldn't be like that, like you go back, maybe the Antarctic or whatever, are ones that are kind of under-emphasized. So the ones that are emphasized, you know, the ocean, outer space, are featureless, you know, they lack any kind of geographical structure whatsoever. And that, as we were talking in the last module, is part of their philosophical interest and part of their philosophical challenge.

So obviously in a way of that, if you then bring that to this question, you have a kind of mismatch or some complicated negotiation that you have to do about how you're going to transport ideas from this actual structured, highly featured geographical space into this smooth dynamic geography. I think again we were saying last time that that term could almost be used to mean smooth space or a certain kind of process in smooth space. And the other thing is to do with inhabitation, we're back to the Indians question, which

is part of this I think in terms of this development of the nervous system. I think this is a digression from our concerns, but I think Turner's really interesting about this and what he says about the relation with the Indians and the fact that he quotes these people saying, the Indians treated us better than their children because they would move into, they would set up these trading posts out in the wilderness with rifles, these goods that were of inestimable value to the native peoples. Like if you could buy rifles, your whole position is totally transformed.

And so there's this weird sort of advanced wave of cultural liquefaction that goes ahead of it through this sort of trading process. would first go out there, and he says when even the front wave of normal colonists arrived, they were already dealing with Indians with guns. You know, there had been this preliminary social process that had already taken place that had totally transformed the whole cultural structure in advance of what we would see as a kind of colonial process actually beginning there. So again I only say that because it's too obstructed, like when you're moving we're

now also talking about featureless depopulated spaces, so how much can we actually move, I won't say smoothly, move neatly or by some kind of a structured transformation between these two different processes. Right, so I was almost wondering if you could read it back the other way and you could sort of say well, you know, the Native American tribes are nomads living a Patrick Friedman seasteading existence and they've got, they're modern because they've got modern technology like guns and they're, you know, in communication with industrialized modernity and it's the

the story of that being snuffed out by the nascent state moving west and the American nation being formed out of it. I mean I definitely see some of this in the Kaplan stuff, honestly. I mean I don't know whether I'm just reading it unnecessarily romantically, but I think he's trying to revive that sense of this kind of lost American military tradition that is very intimate with this kind of Native American tribal cultural structure.

And that actually being, it has therefore its own sort of institutional root code that it can draw upon when it's dealing with these kind of, you know, with the Pathans or with all of these tribal peoples that it's been brought into contact with by the war on terror, you know. And that the institutional experience that's relevant isn't coming from Washington. It's not coming from the state. It's not coming from, you know, these kind of centralized military institutional lineage. It's coming from the fact that it had this kind of intimate relationship with the Native Americans out in the West, you know, in the Indian Wars,

which it's now reactivating. So, I mean, it's criticized, you know, hell is criticized out of it, of course. But I think that Kaplan definitely has that sense. I can't read your expression whether it's moral torture or... I'm just not sure what Next is saying. No, no. I think I just need to take that away and draw on it a bit. OK. Can I bring up something?

Yes. This is what I was thinking about before when we were kind of talking about this as a possible orientalist kind of relationship to the outside and with Anders I'm not at all good on the history, especially of America, but I was thinking it, you know, if you want to get abstract and Kantian about it, as the frontier is this space of synthesis and you have your kind of kernel which is your a priori structure and then you have the kind of synthetic information coming in and you get this kind of frayed edge where you have the Indians who are buying guns and create like a, I think it's like a fraught honeycomb space within their own cultural space and the colonial frontiers men who are kind of interacting

with them and then have to take on, I think like one of the great things that, what's his name, Turner says in the essays that the Europeans have to become de-civilized by nature before they can then come back up to civilization. So there's an interesting temporality in both as well there. But this kind of idea that whatever you want to call it, this idea of this Anglophone teleology or this modernity of spontaneous colonial processes always has this core, this a priori kind of core from which it's relating to its outside. Right. And that will never ever be fully eroded

by whatever it has to synthesise. And in that way, it does have a kind of orientalist structure. But it would be interesting to characterise that. I do totally agree with you that I think Turner demands that we think that question. You know, precisely like you say, he says it's been continuously reignited from zero. And, you know, just to repeat your point, in this intense contact with nature that is imposing its own constraints, and so this is this kind of ground zero, this matrix of practical necessity from which it has to reanimate itself. So, you know, it's being taken down to this whatever,

this ground, let's call it ground zero. And it has to be, as you say, that there is some kind of germinal, irreducible germinal cultural structure there that makes it a Western story or an American story, or, you know, that it has some identity as a story. It's not just completely diffusing into... I don't even know what you'd say. I mean, if it didn't have this kind of A-P-R-I structure... So what is that? You know, I mean, I think that this is a question that Turner's kind of almost demanding that we ask.

What is it for this to be an American story? Well yeah, and the kind of empirical boundary example, or it's not a counter example, it's just like, so what does not having or extending that kernel look like is Croatan, right? Like the quote unquote lost colony, which by all evidence they just gave it up and integrated with local Indian groups interbred because they couldn't maybe grow food fast enough. And you see, I mean from what I've read, you saw Indian groups around that area with blue eyes and showing up all kinds of genetic characteristics that weren't present.

And that is mapped as pure disappearance. Like they become illegible and that's sort of a fusion and a forgotten syringe or withdrawal. Yeah, absorption into the savage wilderness, total absorption. Yeah. So exactly. So that's the threshold we're talking about, isn't it? There's that line, and you cross that line, and you disappear into lost into amnesiac savagery. and so you don't cross that line exactly and you're on you have Amy's

apriori germ of civilizational identity is somehow nurtured you know that ember and keeps it a sort of recognizable part of I would say I mean my constant tendency is I know Turner's saying American, American, American, but it seems to me that this is like an Anglo story. I mean, it's like America's a special case to a degree, but it's also Australia, and it's also Canada, and it's, you know, all of these countries surely have the same issue to some significant extent, don't they? I mean, you know, is there some huge important line that we want to draw that is going to

make the American story different in principle to the Canadian story or the Australian story or these other… I think you run out quite quickly. I mean, it's New Zealand, Australia, Canada, America. I think the other part, Hong Kong is different, Singapore is different, we're not talking about those countries. We're talking about these issues where there is some question about population replacement, I think, some notion about that you're encountering a population that is kind of marked as savage. the crucial point is this thing that you're not on a European boundary.

It's not like meeting the Chinese, you know, and you're engaged in some kind of political negotiation with something that looks like a peer civilization. But I'm not sure why the Australian story isn't comparable, for instance. I'm not saying it's not, but I have another giant abstract question to maybe respond to the Turner question with, and I don't know how to answer this, but is there, I mean, in terms of privileging this idea of a kind of Anglophone colonial modernity as the process that we want to invest in, hypothetically,

what is its relationship then to the concept of intelligence as a sort of material process? And is that where, I mean, if intelligence is something that we're going to not value, but I guess invest in is the best way to put it, is that where it has to be? Is it a colonial process? Does it have that structure of a colonial process? Well, I mean, you know, what is meant by colonial process, I think, is part of this. I think it's a very ambivalent word. And it's a word that will change its sense depending on whether or not it is prolonged. You know, if at the end of this century there have been these processes of seasteading, colonizing the Antarctic, colonizing extraterrestrial spaces,

That is going to then, by retroactive definition, be part of what we mean, what colonialism will always have meant, isn't it? I mean, it's not that there's some sort of easily accessible essence of the colonial that we can now sort of get hold of and say, and we're just projecting this into these other directions, or at least, you know, I can see not only that that isn't an attractive argument to make, I would say probably it is made a lot. I bet there's a whole massive, I've even read some, you know, like a sort of cultural

studies essay saying our whole imagination about colonizing outer space is a projection forward of a particularly concrete history of violent colonial history. Sorry, I'm going around in circles here because, yes, that is one way to look at it. It's not only a way to look at it, it's a way that it is being looked at. But I would say it's not to me that helpful to do it that way, because you're not actually understanding what, unless you think that what's really happening is that you're finding some kind of historical original sin and then seeing its expansion into a new domain, you're You're not understanding what the colonial is by just sort of extrapolating it forward

from this kind of historical instances, it seems to me. It's more the other way around, that you have to say, well, what will it have been if it is prolonged into these spaces? I mean if you, sorry I'm just rambling now, I'll shut up in one bit, because I think it is a genuinely interesting question. And it is this thing like, if you say, look there is a thing that is a space colony, you know, may or may not happen, we have no problems calling it a colony because we're calling it a colony in the same way that,

in the history of colonialism, in the most innocent possible way something was called a colony. Stripped of all the kind of encrustation, or actual empirical judgment about what that involved and everything like that, that some group of people is kind of being transported through space and setting up a new node of existence in some new space. You know, now, sorry I'm totally losing my own… I just have a little anecdote, maybe this can be a little bit helpful. I was, when I was doing my graduate research on expeditions to Africa by this artist and

the scientist of the American Museum of Natural History for the production of their dioramas, very specific kind of nature colonialism in which scientists and artists were sent to Africa to basically sample the surfaces of Africa including the skin of its animals and bring them to America and recreate these environments in three-dimensional environments, three-dimensional rituality we all seen in old museums called habitat dioramas, right? So when I was researching that, It wasn't even about that. That itself has a different sort of dimension of colonialism that we can talk about. But I basically was interested in the history of Kenya, if I'm right,

and sort of like the origins of European colonialism, right? And a lot of it was built around the myth. And it was new to me. It might not be new to you guys. But it was around a bit built around this notion that Moses had emerged from the Nile. So to go back to the origin of Judeo-Christianity, we have to colonize and go down Nile to the source of Nile River if you want to get to the source of Judeo-Christianity. and there was a lot of culture developed in Europe around these expeditions that what we're doing is basically excavating this this Judeo-Christian history literally by going to see because if there's an origin to now there must be

an origin to the baby that came on the basket right so so and it was like a very like a big part of a driving force to get people excited about these expeditions. Let's go look for the source of Jesus, or Moses, or both. Yeah, but I would say there Mo, that there's a historical issue just about scheduling, like I know Jake for instance is wanting to complicate this, and probably it can be, but African imperialism is very late actually in this process, the carving up of Africa, the sort of big, I know there was lots of kind of coastal No absolutely, people don't understand African colonialism

didn't really get going until 1900 actually No, the big conference was in 1884 wasn't it where the Berlin conference where there was actually a kind of formal carve up of Africa takes place so you know without wanting to deny that interest of this, and especially not wanting to deny the fact that you can suspect religious motives in these processes. I mean, obviously American colonialism was drenched in religious purpose, there's no doubt about it. But the particular case of African imperialism is not taking us to the origin of the colonial

process we're seeing my sense of it is that that kind of I mean there's a lot of very interesting stuff when it crystallises into imperialism at the end of the 19th century after the Indian mutiny and obviously you do get these weird kind of religious missionary agendas kind of taking place in it. But I don't think, for instance, that the East India Company was particularly motivated by what we would easily recognize as a religious agenda.

I don't know, I mean people might want to disagree with me. I agree with you, and I did not bring this up to say that this is the origin of colonialism at all. But I was just saying all these different ways at which all sorts of justification, mythologies, necessities, economic, or what not, were utilized at different periods of time in order to assimilate this desire to go elsewhere and look for something. That's all. Otherwise I completely agree with you. Yes. I mean look, there are lots of different things going on here and I think it would be good

to systematise it but it might be too complicated to do that easily. I think obviously Amy's point is really important. I hope we'll hang on to it. And I've got to ask her question about it in a minute. But coming out of the last module, there's obviously also this basis of it to do with exit. And part of what's going on in the Turner thing and what's obviously still going on in Patrick Friedman's stuff is that this drive is an escape from existing political structures, that the actual impetus is not primarily to do with economic acquisition, although that obviously is a very important motive in other cases, but is one of actually

exiting from existing structures of governance into some zone that is outside the jurisdiction of that political authority. So I think that's one, even if you want to ultimately deride that or criticise it, it has to remain on the table as obviously one of the factors. And there is obviously then the whole set of economic motivations. There are strange religious motivations, I totally agree, and people might also want to say that you can't even distinguish that from the economic and sort of escapographic

motivations. So yes. Sorry, before I lose this, I just wanted to say, I wanted to really ask Amy about Orientalism, because that remained sort of undefined a bit in this, and whether there is an easy definition for that. The way that I was thinking about it was this kind of ability to appropriate information from an outside space without it conditioning you back in return to any sort of really formative degree. So in terms of like Turner's kind of story, it's the Indians who are purchasing the technology

and the guns and who are kind of becoming aliens to their own cultural space. Yeah. Rather than, I mean, there is a little bit of feedback, so there's that kind of anecdote about the difference between the British and the French colonialists creating these different kind of spaces, and the French consider themselves to be more open to the outside because they're creating a space that works both for them and for the Native Americans, whereas the British are kind of, you know, just imposing this agricultural model on their spaces. But that was the kind of idea. There is still a one-way process where there is a little bit of change on both sides, but the impetus is coming from the inside of the colonial force.

Yes. Yes, and so we're back to this question about what is that ultimate germ of colonial impetus? And I was kind of seeing it as what has been described. I mean, I think this was in the first lesson, the first class of the first module, this idea that there is a kind of anglophone telos to this particular process. And it comes out of a commitment to individualism. Like one of the reasons that some of the Eastern cultures, like in the examples you were giving concerning China at the start, that these frontiers haven't evolved in the same way is because there's a sort of implicit, I don't know what the word would be,

but maybe collectivism or an inability to deracinate oneself that seems to be cultural. And that this kind of particular structure that appropriates its outside on the frontier without being affected by it in a devastating way is an anglophone specificity. Actually, can I just recap? Everyone's heard this already, but I think it's important in terms of what you're saying to just do a little recap in terms of what are the elements contributing up to this point to our sense of what would be meant by Anglo. And the reference that certainly for me was really crucial in the last module

is this thing from James C. Bennett's The Anglosphere Challenge book and the distinction he makes there between the Anglophone and Francophone, but I think could probably extend it to continental in general, model of revolution, where he suggests that on the French model, it is diachronic and it's characterised by transition of regimes in time so if there is a kind of political crisis it's resolved by a transformation of the regime and so regime A

is replaced by regime B whereas the anglophone model is synchronic and is resolved solved by a separation in space. This is his argument. And so obviously the models of this is the American Revolution, the American Civil War irrespective of an outcome is an attempted secession, a bunch of stuff within the United Kingdom to do with arguments about secession and integration. I guess the Quebec issue, although it's complicated because it's French in Canada.

So that is giving us, whether people find that persuasive or not, it's giving us an element of definition of what this word Anglo is meaning. That's to say, what it's meaning is a tendency towards dissociation in space. Now obviously that carries forward into then this question about colonialism quite neatly, and it certainly carries forward into the Apache-Friedman style. you know, like the seasteading model in terms of you resolve these kind of fundamental ideological controversies by spatial dissociation, would drawing upon Bennett's model be kind of archetypally

Anglophone in orientation. So I'm just recalling that in order to sort of, you know, give it a little bit of conceptual content, that Anglo isn't just a kind of empirical reference to a concrete tradition. It has at least this kind of elementary conceptual structure to it, if you draw upon this particular of analysis, which I think is, as I say, highly conducive to these topics, and it's why you would say that there is some affinity between a distinctively Anglophone political economic

tradition and the seasteading question and dynamic geography and the questions coming up in Turner that then give you a particular model of colonialism that is characteristically Anglophone in character. So sorry, I know that's redundant because we've done it all before, but this is what you're talking about, I think, isn't it, in part? Yeah, yeah, no, that was, you know, I'd forgotten that. I can corroborate that with a literary reference, which might not be interesting to everyone, but I posted a long quote before from Gertrude Stein,

who, while she was writing her book, The Making of Americans, wrote this kind of essay on the difference between verbs and nouns. And nouns are the kind of, the things that define poetry as the naming of things. She talks about the naming of the sea and the sky and this appropriation through nominalisation versus the American trait which is to verbalise which is for her to make mistakes in space so I think that kind of works nicely with that conceptual differentiation between the two structures and I just wanted to talk about there's a quote that you've put up in this now massive here's a snippet from it But yeah, I thought, you know, I thought that was interesting.

An American fill up a space in having his movement of time by adding unexpectedly anything, and yet getting within the included space everything he had intended getting. Which is what verbs do. Verbs make mistakes, Stein says, because they're not accurate the way that... That's a Gertrude Stein quote. Yeah, it's from an essay. I posted the link above on grammar. And just to kind of augment this, I guess, is there's a very clear series of repetitions where what's driving the anglophone visioning is a commercial drive, and a re-territorializing

drive locally to control the resources that you've opened up access to. I mean, like, the American Revolution is about taxes, the Civil War is about the South trying to preserve a particular economic base that works for them geologically and in the system of the triangular trade. I mean, yeah, I think that, like, the secession thing, I mean, it's definitely a format for fissioning, which was drawn from for political and rhetorical reasons. I mean, it was already built in that if you were going to do this, the way you were going to do it was through political secession from a federation. But, I mean, I think it's inarguable that what drives it is the preservation of the slave economy, or of the slave war machine is to take it into a very abstract,

to Lucie in context, but certainly the slave labor-based economy, which binds them into this larger colonial triangular trade. So there's a certain sense in which the South, you know, is not just, like, further diffusing. They're trying to maintain the fruits of a particular colonial economic model or maintain contact and involvement with it counter the North. I mean, I don't know, Amy, do you think that, like, I guess, like, repeated commercial motives, like the attempt to get to and then locally re-territorialize control over money or this sort of iterative monetary drive is the kind of operational or is part of the operational orientalism that you're

talking about? That it is like a money phenomenon to some extent? Can't hear you. Sorry, sorry. I think it's definitely connected to a particular concept of individual benefit from the space. And in a way that's sort of driving what Turner describes as the reason for moving out into these spaces is to appropriate new resources. But I don't know enough history to answer that in any deeper way. I mean it's difficult because on this question of economic motive there is a certain point where it's almost, it's very hard to sort of, you know, what would actually count as

a demonstration that something was primarily driven by economic motives? There are cases which are more or less persuasively of that kind. And for instance, if we're going to go back to this, back to the Turner case, and concentrate particularly on this first wave, so he's got these three waves of settlement. The first is one that is basically homesteading in a very raw wilderness in the sense that there might be Indians there but there's no sort of structure that would allow some confidence

in property rights of the kind that you were leaving behind. He says, you know, there's no sort of boundaries, you carve out a bit of land to maybe do some primitive farming in and build a hut or whatever. you don't have a institutional structure that can sustain any kind of structured property rights in that zone at all and then subsequently you have this this kind of wave that is more institutionalized and is finally capital in some strong coded sense can come into that zone and start sort of organizing large-scale business activity.

And Turner's saying that these original settlers will by that time, generally. Some of them will be assimilated into the kind of more structured civilization that's coming in. But he seems to at least strongly suggest that the general case is that they just continue moving west, and the second wave comes along there's some potential of actually selling out their stake and they continue moving west now is that driven just really quickly is that driven by economic motives obviously they need to survive they need food, they need stuff there has to be an economic process just simply to

is that impetus is that western rolling frontier wave of that kind actually understood if we say it's a kind of primarily or essentially a form of economic appropriation. I'm not sure, what I'm trying to say here is I'm not sure in that case how we would even decide, You know, how would we decide whether or not this was to be understood as fundamentally a process of, rather than economic appropriation of some primitive kind just being instrumental in the perpetuation of this process of westward migration and perhaps escape from centralized

political authorities? Yeah, I mean, no, that's fair. I mean, in the sense that, like, it's sort of repeatedly, it's a repeatedly instrumentalized after effect or after movement. I mean, I think the Preemption Act that Turner references of 1841 is really interesting in that regard, because it's what enables this, these iterative waves of expansion, because once you've been there for a while, the U.S. government will grant you profit, will sell you the land that you've been on for, like, what amounts to pennies on the dollar, so you can resell it at a higher price to the next wave of settlers and that funds you being able to move on. I think that's as a sort of promotion of profit making, like recognizing your use of this land as surplus value

and enabling you to use it to push on to a further frontier. Maybe that's an example of what you're talking about. Well, I mean, look, the last thing I want to do is to try to kind of reduce the importance of the commercial factor in this. I think it's totally huge. And I think as soon as you're conceptualizing in terms of exit, you have a massive conceptual bridge that links these things to business anyway. I mean, obviously, you know, the model is the commercial relation. so you know to deny the importance of these kind of modes of conceptuality would be just crazy I would say but I just would want to counter that it's like there's a kind of reductive use of this

that to me is just empirically implausible you know and if you're looking at the you know the early archetypal Mayflower settlers of America quite clearly that was not driven primarily by This was driven by religious, political, schismatic, the kind of absolutely classic Bennett-Anglo trend that you resolve a political problem by dissociation in space. So it clearly isn't the case that some kind of overarching kind of theory of economic

motivation is just going to resolve all this for us. I think that's not going to work because it just would be so inappropriate in certain parts to try to… Yeah. Nick, I invited Adam Kleinman to class because there was room and he's interested in the issues. He's sitting down there. He's your editor from Witted of the Journal. Yes, I can see Adam. Yes, hi Adam. You posted something interesting along the same lines on the site if you want to take a look and see if you want to engage with it since he's a special guest. Session cannot be reduced to capital.

Actually, yes. It looks to me like primarily this is something to be developed in a discussion with Jake, isn't it? Adam, is that right? It looks like a response in particular to Jake's point if I'm understanding it. Adam, you can talk. You're on. you can talk I know your microphone is not working yeah no I'm coming in the media's rest to to be good I you're joining yes sir course let me find a different I had gone but okay we can hear you perfectly yeah my fans not bothering you no

you're perfectly yeah no that was my I mean, the bizarre thing about the Civil War is it was technologically not necessary at that point. In what way? Well, Eli Whitney invented a machine that separated the cotton fiber from the seed that was infinitely more efficient than slave manual labor and would quite easily, let's say, disruptive technology that would have rendered all of the agrarian system pointless. And the South even knew that. That's actually why they created the term peculiar institution, which most people think means peculiar because of the human rights issues. It was actually peculiar because it didn't even make sense anymore from an economic perspective. And, you know, a lot of, in this case, the spatialization issues and the question of

federation and, of course, back to the founding of the country is the distribution of power. And a lot of secession, while you could talk about the economic arguments, had quite a lot to do with control of Congress and how the representation of the people and whatever was going to deal with the massive industrialization and the immigrant labor force being put into the North, which is what they were dealing with. And then also to problematize the North, when most of the agrarian economic system of the South was shut down by a naval blockade, mostly Anglo-Catholic New York Christians went to places like Hawaii and instituted federalist systems to actually export sugar there in which slave labour was still cheap enough to make it work.

Anyway it's a whole long digression but the civil war is very complex. No that's fascinating. I mean it is complex and it's good to have that brought in for sure. Adam, do you think on the part of the South that a lot of that, like in terms of this question of power, that a lot of that is driven by the attempt of plantation owners as a politically powerful class and the one that sort of dominates representation in congressional government to maintain their means of capital because they wouldn't be able to do so in the context of this new industrialization via the cotton gin. Oh, absolutely.

I mean, if you run the numbers, ironically enough, the population of slave-holding people in the South is, as I said ironically enough, something like 1%. And, you know, there's quite a lot of poor people in the South who are not making money off the plantation system and didn't have the capital to own slaves. But, yeah, your point's dead on. John Calhoun, who was the vice president of the Confederacy, was the Speaker of the House of Congress before secession and was building, actually, the Capitol building when he broke off. So, yeah, a lot of it has to do with internecine relationships of power. But, of course, you know, you can't take out racism, class, and all that other stuff. You know, it's not—you can't reduce it just to simple, you know, interest groups doing various things, but—

Right. And then when you say 1%, do you mean 1% of the non-slave population or of the total population, just out of curiosity? Who actually owned slaves. I mean, it's like, it would be like having a server today, like any form of capital. It's not, slaves weren't cheap. Well, but I mean, yeah, so that's 1% of the non-slave population was slaving. Yeah, 1% of the population of the Confederacy were actually... Okay, so of the total population. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, running a plantation system would be analogous to having a factory. That's not accessible to everybody. Right. Yeah. So I mean it's funny these relations of power keep on going and if you look at slavery as an industrial system it has very similar mirrors. But yeah, as I was saying the whole point is the machine made the whole thing pointless.

Anyway, sorry I chose the digression, I'm really jumping in the middle because I don't want to monopolize. Adam, Adam. No, no, it's good. It's good. I mean I mean newer machine makes older machines useless other than the cotton gin made using your hands to pick cotton useless yeah you got involved yeah to me that's the older machines we try it the people yeah I'm working a controversial opinion but I actually brought it up to Karen Archie in in in Amsterdam that that that and this is a point of empowerment that is like slavery was about the alien robotic power of African people who were brought to America.

They were the machines because white people did not have sophisticated machines. So they needed to literally import muscle power which was used like machine in implantation. So So it was moving from one kind of like, I mean these are degrading or problematic terminology to use. It involves putting foot in your mouth, right? But sometimes you have to put the foot in the mouth even though you're not into it. Dr. Well, yeah, but you can also kind of sidestep that problematic vocabulary and I think make like a larger point by saying the machines are the machines for making muscle power do certain things, which are like social machines and like machines with the flow and so forth. is the plantation, not just, or even not primarily the hands, you know.

And of course the point was... And the ship and the food and everything, yeah. Right, right. You said the ship, the point was brought home with Alan... Alan Feldman, yeah, continuing racing. Alan Feldman's paper just made everybody cry by showing the sheeps and how cybernetic the organization of the slave ships were to begin with. Of course. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, but yeah. I just want to say that the class is actually over time, I mean a little bit, like a few minutes. We started 10 minutes late, so actually we have maybe seven or eight minutes if you want to be on the point. So final remarks, Nick? Final remarks, anyone? This has been a fascinating seminar. Well, the involvement from everybody, for sure.

It's been great. And I'm hoping that we can basically look at seasteading from a slightly more concrete perspective next time, next week, within this broad question about the frontier. Just take that as our orientation. And if people want to just do the synthesis and bring it into the kind of a system of conceptuality that we were dealing with in the last module, That's, of course, great, and I expect that that is possible. But this is the kind of angle that we're on, I hope, at the moment. And so that's my sense of what our topic next time is.

I have to check what I've... There was some reading that I put in right at the beginning of planning the class that I think is appropriate to that, and I'll try and thicken it up before next week. So sorry, that's an administrative kind of remark. If there's anything substantive people want to say, that's going to be great. Any final comments, anyone? Thanks for having me. Yes, so I will post my... Thanks for showing up. Thank you, Adam. It was amazing to have you there. I took some pictures of you so I can post it and say, see? Adam even likes the Nazi classes. So it's like... But I'm not vaping, I'm chewing tobacco.

So that keeps me grounded. You've got to be complicit. And you know what I mean? Our eFlux friends will see your picture here and then they will be like, oh my God, Adam likes this. It's okay. I think I'm implicated well before this. Yes, I'm joking, of course. I'm joking. But I'm not joking about posting your picture. I really want to post it. yeah so I will post up at I will post a short text I've written for the sea studying our projects on the classroom so if you guys want to like make comments on it and add to it and help me develop it I would totally totally totally totally appreciate it and hopefully we can take parts in the project cool especially the artist and Sam Sam and God my mind is just killing me Amy

OK, so I'm going to stop the broadcast, everyone. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody.