Performing freedom: An examination of Ocean Builders’ successful failure in Thailand

Abstract

In February 2019, Ocean Builders, a private company, anchored a six-square-meter inhabitable octagonal structure in the Andaman Sea, twelve nautical miles off the coast of Phuket in Thailand, within the country’s exclusive economic zone. Over the next three months, it was periodically occupied by a couple, Chad Elwartowski, an American citizen, and Supranee Thepdet, a Thai citizen. Both are supporters of the seasteading movement to colonize international waters with autonomous modular platforms to experiment with competitive governance and challenge the nation-state. In April 2019, the Thai government found that the structure and the couple’s plan to develop an independent seasteading community threatened Thailand’s sovereignty, and the Thai navy seized and dismantled the seastead. Elwartowski and Thepdet later described their stay as a moment when they were “truly free.” I argue that the seastead functioned as a space of freedom only to the extent that its occupants performed freedom and their identities as sovereign individuals, a performance convincing enough to attract new supporters and investors, and for the Thai state to engage in its own performance of sovereignty. I further argue that Ocean Builders’ performance was designed to create freedom-as-a-product that could be marketed and sold in the form of a seastead. As a case study, Ocean Builders’ venture illustrates the complex relationship between performance, materiality, space, discourse, power, and identity, and how these elements interact in the constitution and performance of micro-territories and contested oceanic claims to sovereign territory.