The Promethean Network State: A New Atlantis

Jason Reza Jorjani, PhD

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don't throw away the best of yourself." Here in the West, Prometheus is still our best “spook" (to put it in the lingo of Max Stirner). Despite having been with us from the most archaic origins of our civilization, he was also responsible for our renaissance and he remains the quintessential specter of thinking of the future.

Prometheus is the first freedom fighter. The archetype of Prometheus tacitly reflects a recognition that freedom is the most fundamental fact in the cosmos. The cosmos is inconceivable without consciousness, which presupposes intentionality. Some degree of free will, however conditioned, is a prerequisite for anyone to be held personally accountable for meaningful actions. Various factors do condition thought, constrain the will and limit the imagination but the capacity to exercise individual freedom at some level despite these factors is a precondition of any meaningful conception of existence.

Prometheus is also the titan who most fully epitomizes forethought. His very name means to “think ahead" and when Zeus chains him to a rock in the Caucasus, the eagle pecking out his liver is a symbolic expression of Zeus seeking to devour and appropriate the superior power of precognition, projection and anticipation that is characteristic of Prometheus. However, the purpose of this definitively Promethean power is to expand our scope of free will and self-determination, not to constrain it with a sense of inexorable fate. Foreseeing possible futures actually affords us the opportunity to become the masters of our own destiny.

Prometheus redefines the preconceived limits of the possible, making the putatively impossible possible by means of technological science. The Promethean individual has the strength to grasp the burdensome fact that knowledge is not the mirroring of an objective 'Reality' by a subjective cognition that only needs to be rendered more perceptive and precise, like a mirror that requires polishing. Knowledge is radically pragmatic because technology is ontologically prior to science. Scientific knowledge is the white light of molten metal in the forge of industrious innovation. Science ought not to be confined within any particular paradigm, which also constrains technological invention. Instead, various paradigms and the theories that they make possible ought to be seen as different scientific models that each offer us the potential to craft certain types of technological tools for handling things better and, ultimately, for expanding the horizon of our achievable aims.

Prometheus brought the gift of techne to mankind and, as Aeschylus makes clear, this techne or “craft" is not just technology but also the fine arts. Prometheus, in his guise as the creator of mankind, offers us the fire of inspiration as a sacred fountainhead of creativity. The inspirational power of beauty is an expression of the evolutionary force. A seduction to surmount perceived limitations is what ought to resonate within oneself in the face of the harmonic proportionality or dynamic tension of an aesthetic work, whether in literature, painting, architecture, music or performance art. The domain of aesthetics is actually incredibly important because, as Nietzsche pointed out, the atmosphere or world of a people that shapes their constitution and patterns their consciousness on the most fundamental level is determined by the attunement of the poets, artists and architects of a people. They set up the architectonic of a world and set its tone. They are the tuning forks of the world of a folk and the composers of its lore. In The Birth of Tragedy from Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), where Nietzsche portrays Prometheus as the oldest mask of the tragically life-affirming Dionysian spirit from out of which the art of Greek drama was born, he writes: “this Titanic impulse, to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, to bear them higher and higher, farther and farther, on broad shoulders, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common."

Prometheus, as a loving father, sacrificed himself as a martyr for the sake of emancipating his children. This makes him a paragon of ethics, in other words, an exemplar for the cultivation of ethos. In the case of his sacrifice, this ethos is specifically related to his gift of “craft" whether in the arts or sciences. The myth should be read as a recognition of the fact that cultivating ethos, personally and socially, is about the pursuit of excellence. This means that the Promethean individual will have no tolerance for the putatively moral outrage that calls for so-called 'social justice' by valorizing disability and resentfully desecrating and destroying everything that memorializes the achievement of those who excelled in various endeavors. The individual pursuit of excellence is integral to being an authentic and conscientious person who can contribute to fostering an ethical society, which in turn provides children with an environment that encourages them to excel.

At the same time, Prometheus is a rebel against the authority of paternalistic Tradition. Prometheus rebels against his fellow Titans on behalf of the Olympians and then rebels against the Olympian gods, who prove equally tyrannical, for the sake of man. Resistance to any authority that is perceived to be arbitrary and illegitimate is integral to the Promethean ethos. A Promethean government would unchain all productive economic forces to empower the industrious individual and to protect people from an instrumental dehumanization and degradation of their existence. The liberty of individuals, the torch of which Prometheus holds aloft, is justifiably limited only when that constraint serves the aim of ultimately securing the same person's freedom from collective coercion and freedom for the personal pursuit of meaning, purpose, wonder and creative power. That the soul endowed to Man in the course of his being crafted by Prometheus takes the form of a butterfly is a beautiful symbol of this personal meaning-making as a process of metamorphosis, wherein all of human history to date can be seen as a transformative chrysalis for the enlightened freedom that is yet to come. But that freedom also needs an abode wherein it can be tangibly realized, a latitude of action beyond the control of existing nation-states.

Prometheus, the thief and trickster, was a pirate — the first and greatest of all pirates. The high seas make up no less than 45% of our planet. 71% of the Earth is ocean. 64% of the ocean lies outside the territorial waters and the legal jurisdiction of any one nation. In Theory of the Partisan (1963), Carl Schmitt enters into the subject of “cosmopirates and cosmopartisans" of the future. It is at the margins of state power that the true nature of sovereign authority and its relationship with constitutional and international law can really be understood. Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) or Captain “Wolf" Larsen in Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1904) are figures that Schmitt could have used to argue more radically that sovereign power and the constitutional order it produces, precedes and is unbound by the legal system it may formulate or dissolve. Granting that Schmitt was right that a law lacking any sovereign power to enforce it is no binding law at all, in international waters, beyond the enforceable jurisdiction of any nation-state, order still endures aboard the ships of outlaw captains.

The Outlaw Ocean (2019) is a series of articles written by Ian Urbina of The New York Times, which was subsequently adapted into a book. In The Outlaw Ocean, Urbina writes: “The rule of law — often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes — is fluid at sea, if it's to be found at all." This is tremendously significant in light of the fact that, “merchant ships haul about 90 percent of the world's goods" since “moving freight by sea is much cheaper than by air partly because international waters are so uncluttered by national bureaucracies and unconstrained by rules."

In 2014, Urbina managed to convince The New York Times to send him on assignment aboard a ship called the Bob Barker, which belonged to Sea Shepherd, a vigilante ocean conservation group. They were using the vessel to chase after a notorious pirate ship called the Thunder. At one or another time, the Thunder sailed under the flags of the United Kingdom, the Seychelles, Belize, Tongo and at the time of Urbina's reporting was alternating between flying the flags of Mongolia and Nigeria. Even more useful to pirates than the false flagging of ships would be the control of island chains — chains so spread out that their territorial waters are far more extensive than their land surface area. Consider the case of Palau. Measured in square miles of land, the island nation of Palau is only about the size of New York City. One hundred and seventy-seven square miles to be precise. However, the chain of Palau's two hundred and fifty small islands is so spread out in its expanse that the territorial waters of Palau extend the nation's sovereignty over 230,000 square miles, an area comparable to the size of Texas. Gaining control of a relatively powerless but expansive island chain country like Palau would be tremendously advantageous to a large-scale seasteading project.

Seasteads are to the new frontier of the outlaw ocean what homesteads once were in the largely lawless American frontier of the “wild west." This is another subject that Urbina discusses in The Outlaw Ocean. Seasteads are platforms or other habitable structures moored in international waters. They could even be adapted out of large, anchored ships — such as cruise ships. There is an old sailing proverb to the effect that “below latitude 40° south there is no law, and below 50° south, no God." Urbina goes on to remark that the outlaw ocean is not only “a cold and predatory environment... a habitat for the brutal exercise of evolutionary fitness..." but “also a place of discovery, of limitless aspiration and reinvention." The ungoverned and essentially lawless high seas, together with the seabed beneath them, is the matrix for a New Atlantis in a Promethean rebellion against Olympus.

The closest that any contemporary thinker has come to this kind of idea actually serves to underline how far the intellectual vanguard of today remains from fathoming it. Take, for example, The Network State (2022) by Balaji Srinivasan. What Srinivasan argues is that blockchain, cryptocurrency and social media technology featuring AR and VR interfaces can spawn a new territorially non-contiguous and decentralized form of post-national political sovereignty.

The idea is that a blockchain-based network, operating on the deepest and most durable stratum of the internet, could serve as the fundamental infrastructure for a community of like-minded people who have their own cryptocurrency economy based on decentralized labor, production and exchange and who begin to acquire geographically non-contiguous territory in the form of real estate holdings in various parts of the world. Srinivasan thinks that once any community of this kind achieves a sufficient scale, representing billions of dollars of economic production or purchasing power and millions of potential citizens spread across almost every continent, a new country could be formed by this community. He argues that most countries in the world are small in terms of the scale of their population, if not their economic strength. Some very small countries are quite wealthy, as a “Network State" would potentially be. Consider Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland and Dubai (or the UAE as a whole). Srinivasan wants to believe that once a Network State (and there may be many such Network States) reaches this scale, it could secure diplomatic recognition as an actual sovereign nation, initially from a few individual countries that establish bi-lateral relations with it and then, ultimately, from the United Nations.

The problem is that the United Nations is constituted by a constellation of sovereign countries, and at the level of the Security Council, its policy making is predominately determined by the most powerful of these nation-states. None of these countries is going to be willing to recognize a new sovereign entity that is not only within its territorial borders but that extends across the territories and borders of dozens of other nations and potentially across three or four different continents. As Carl Schmitt understood well, sovereign is he who has effective power over the use of force, even and especially when a constitution's legal norms are suspended (in a State of Emergency) within a given territory — a territory which is defined in contrast to another political entity and with respect to the distinction between friends and enemies of his nation-state. Srinivasan does not effectively critique this core of Schmitt's thought.

There is no way that any of the members of the UN Security Council are going to cede their sovereign power over communities within their respective territories that are claiming to have constituted their own country, especially one which is a geographically non-contiguous country that stretches across many existing nation-states. Srinivasan dismisses revolution and war as undesirable means of constituting a new country but a revolutionary war is precisely what would result from the attempt of a Network State to effectively secede from any and all of the nation-states that its community extends across. Such a Network State would not be able to diplomatically secure recognition of its national sovereignty from the United Nations. Rather, it would find itself at war with, and besieged by, the United Nations. In fact, such a threat might be the only thing that finally brings the entire UN Security Council into lockstep to authorize the use of force against what will inevitably be framed as a global threat from a group of stateless rogues. Should the rogues of the Network State put up armed resistance, say from private security forces deployed in their own communities, the UN will frame them not just as rogues but as stateless terrorists.

To be sure, Srinivasan, with his background in Bitcoin and blockchain technology, is right about the nervous and circulatory system of a future form of political sovereignty. To think along these lines with him but well beyond him, something like the following system would be required as the basis for what he calls a “Network State." First, as an economic backbone, one would need a cryptocurrency that is based on the Bitcoin technology and is interchangeable with Bitcoin but forked so as to develop a cryptocurrency that is both fully private and also stable (pegged to the US dollar, or to gold, or to some abstract average of a basket of designated global currencies). This coin would be called “Atlas" money after the brother of Prometheus and the King of Atlantis. So as not to be dependent upon the existing international banking system or national regulation of marketplaces, we would also need a Decentralized Trading Exchange (DEX) and an online marketplace completely protected from governmental or corporate surveillance and interference.

This market would employ blockchain technology and be built from the most durable substratum of the Internet, the old ARPANET, which was created to survive a nuclear war and can subsist without any dependence upon the more fragile World Wide Web, The market would provide a framework for the exchange of any and all goods that might be produced by increasingly autonomous, private, and decentralized modes of production — initially 3-D printing and eventually robotic nano-technological assembly. Obviously, such a system poses a very serious threat to established interests, including the international system of central banks, corporatist national economies ­— such as Chinese Corporatism — and monopolistic multi-national corporations over the world economy. It would, in effect, represent the emergence of an alternate and rival world economy. Consequently, an end-to-end encrypted communication system is also an indispensable component of this network. It would ensure that the members of the network are totally anonymous, and that their private information will not be available even to those who manage the network.

Srinivasan would probably be on board with most if not all of this. Where Prometheism parts company with his proposal for The Network State — or rather where we as Promethean pirates see beyond the naiveté of this technocratic proposal — is when it comes to the effective control of actual territory. We could certainly establish a private security firm similar to Blackwater but committed to the ideals of our network community rather than being mere mercenaries for hire. The problem is when this defense force comes up against state power as it attempts to establish itself as the sole policing agency of the geographically non-contiguous “enclaves" (as Srinivasan puts it) of the Network State in various parts of the world.

Even those nations with the most serious conflicts with one another would likely band together against a collective threat to their national sovereignty on the part of armed and potentially "insurgent" separatists living, in some cases, on the territories of two or more countries that are otherwise usually on opposite sides of various geopolitical contentions. Unless the enclaves of the Network State are only tentacles of some more substantive and cohesive octopus somewhere, an undiscovered country for which they act as fifth columns in the midst of the world's extant nations, the situation would grow quite hopeless quite quickly. So, where would the head of the octopus have to be, then, for it to be relatively fortified in the face of what might become the first truly concerted effort of the United Nations (since its inception in 1945) to wage war on a global scale? Well, the blue heart of the Earth or, as per Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean.

Here we have the ultimate reification of the distinction between land power and sea power, as it has been developed in geopolitical theory by the likes of Hartford Mackinder, Carl Schmitt and Alexander Dugin. What none of these theorists have considered in their prioritization of land-based heartland powers over the projection of force by sea-based colonial powers (which are still somewhat land-based) is the potential for Singularity-level technologies to fundamentally alter this dynamic. The stateless outlaw oceans, whether on seasteads or in undersea colonies, are the best place for controversial research on transhuman technologies that the UN will attempt to prohibitively regulate. As I have often remarked in my writings, Carl Schmitt began to have an inkling of this in his final work, The Theory of the Partisan wherein he starts to contemplate the implications for state sovereignty that would follow from a situation wherein space age technologies wind up in the hands of stateless pirates. But Schmitt was never able to complete the thought, partly because he was already in his old age and it would have meant nothing less than an inversion of his political theory, which older people are not prone to doing.

There are now tremendous capabilities of submarine tunnel boring and engineering inside of seabed ridges and undersea mountain ranges. Since at least the 1980s, it has been possible at a cost of billions of dollars to build entire cities underneath the ocean. If these cities were built beneath the high seas, then they would be on territory that is technically outside of the legal jurisdiction of any nation-state. The ideal zones would be where international waters overlap with the edges of the continental shelves, so that there is no significant pressure change to contend with in undersea colonies (with seasteads on the surface nearby). Even treaties such as the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention merely reinforce the outlaw status of these areas by strictly limiting the offshore territorial claims of the signatory nation states. The enclaves of the Network State that Srinivasan envisions would then only be the tentacles of this octopus, which would help to secure safe harbors or near-coastal sea-steading platforms for the Promethean pirates of NovAtlantis. Dependence upon land-based industry could be offset through the use of Singularity-level technologies such as robotics and nano-molecular engineering to achieve industrial autonomy by degrees.

In the event that Prometheism would turn the high seas and the ocean floor beneath them into the bastion of resistance against Traditionalism, we could also launch our spacecraft directly from out of the ocean. Trans-medium craft with Zero Point Energy (ZPE) drives that effectively function as stealth submarines underwater could slip through the surface of the ocean and head to distant asteroids or even more far-flung comets without requiring industrially burdensome and easily detectable sea-based launch platforms such as the Odyssey (1999—2014). Of course, such ZPE Electrogravitics would also make mining and colonizing the Asteroid Belt a lot easier than it would be in rocket-fueled zero-gravity spacecraft. ZPE propelled craft have a local gravitational field, presumably set to 1G (Earth-equivalent gravity). Such craft could serve as the home for Prometheist cosmopirates while they ensconce any given asteroid with a nano-molecular mesh that hardens its structure from the outside, so that it retains its structural integrity as robots brought along aboard the spacecraft begin hollowing the asteroid out from the inside.

These colonists would manage robots and largely automated industries engaged in mining other nearby asteroids for a plethora of minerals and gases that, once processed, would provide for their every need without any expectation of resupply from Earth. Everything from drinkable water and breathable air to a variety of exotic metals and meta-materials could be produced within the Asteroid Belt. In fact, mining and industrial processing of these asteroids could supply Prometheists back on Earth with a variety of goods that could make life in and under the oceans more comfortable and sustainable. This, in turn, would solidify our sea-based platforms for deep space exploration and colonization. The motto of Prometheism, the motto of the New Atlantis, is De Profundis Excelsior: “From out of the depths, ever-upwards."