Where precisely are we to fi nd this di� in� “natural” or “human” realm supposed to exi� outside of the technological? We have never had an “outside” to retreat to, and so mu� admit the co-originary nature of mod-ern technological beings and their human counterparts; admit an inescapable condi-tion, forever ours to fl ourish or perish within. On one hand is the black magic of proje� ing the real capacities of technical obje� s into a great, evil beyond, outside of human under-� anding or control. Such arguments o� en over-empower technology in their gloss-ing of detail, their inability or unwillingness to comprehend; a masochi� ic, delusional negative-fetish. How did we get to the point where we � eak of technology as something transcendent, when technical ensembles, no ma� er how complex, are composed of the (usually fairly mundane) work of individ-uals and colle� ives, engaged in technical and non-technical pra� ices? On the other hand, there is a the black magic of denial that dismisses the truly transformative pow-er that technologies can, and very o� en do, have.

The etymology of the word “data” comes from the Latin nominative plural of datum �(“that is given”), neuter pa� participle of do �(“give”). As a word it points towards rec-iprocity, giving and being given, things le� and found. We would like to escape from being captured yet cling to the a� ention of the database, colle� our moments but not be colle� ed as moments. As long as we are given, we also have to give. As long as we are li� ening, we will be overheard. “You hear fi ghts, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gos-sip fl oating down. You hear the radio. An air sha� is one great big Loud� eaker” (Duke Ellington).

Unforeseen and unforeseeable e� e� s would seem to threaten our defi nition of what it means to be a human being. We are losing our perceived dominance of Earth, at times purposefully ena� ing our own self-extin� ion, while extinguishing oth-er � ecies that cannot survive a world we rapidly change. We shall have to adapt, or rather our adaption, our mutation, is already underway. There is li� le to decide, li� le re-mission, li� le option to be always already part of ongoing transformations, techno-logical, ecological, biological. Do we want to become more, or less, alien than we already are? Embracing new po� -human becom-ings involves halting privilege and relaxing the su� ocating grip we have come to have on this world. In learning to let go of human-ity, how might we become yet � ill more, yet ever more, human?

The British Anthropologi� Alfred Gell wrote of the relation between technology and labour that explained magic in terms of a ‘workless’ technological miracle. A tech-nology that enables e� ortless e� e� ivity gives us one defi nition of what is magical, as intention, energy and temporal processes are bypassed. ‘Automation’ remains magical — those processes we used to call ‘manual’ remain, and automatism, “the major con-cept of the modern obje� s mechani� ic triumphalism, the ideal of its mythology” (Baudrillard) is nowhere to be found. Work remains “heteromatic” (Latour), that is, a set of a-automatic realities, pra� ices and materials that keep life and its technologies afl oat. What use is a life without work, any-way? Gilbert Simondon writes in a similar vein, “a purely automatic machine closed in on itself in a predetermined operation could only give summary results.”

Where there is life, there is wa� e. What goes in comes out, as continuous transformation. There is never nothing at the � art, ju� as something is always le� over, a re� less re-mainder. Something always leaks out, sinks, accumulates. Recycling is a remarkable pra� ice, not because it is perfe� or moral, as governance tries to tell us, but because it performs pure loss, negrido, the becoming shit of everything. Wa� e is not inert ma� er, waiting to be discarded or upcycled by hu-mans. Wa� e is alien ma� er, or queer ma� er that “mobilizes relations” (Hird). In these dark residues are forces resi� ing each oth-er, resi� ing you, resi� ing us. Holy shit!

A Government is the governing power in a given place; governance is the “a� or man-ner of governing” a territory. Both however come from the Latin gubĕrnu, “rudder”, and the Greek kubernao, “dire� ing the move-ment of a vessel”, “� eer”. The original con-text of the word is nautical. We are at sea.

In the late 19th century, proto-social scien-ti� Émile Durkheim famously described this new science, sociology, as a “science of in-� itutions, their genesis and their fun� ion-ing”. In� itutions were made real, as real ob-je� s of analysis. What we mu� � ill work to make absent is any notion of an a priori ‘soci-ety’ that ‘produces’ in� itutions, ju� as cul-ture does not a� surreptitiously behind our backs but is produced by us in each in� ance and intera� ion. The intricate and o� en frag-ile pa� erns of � abilising relationships that � abilise in� itutions (internal/external) are pervasive. They deeply a� e� individual be-havior and in� ire personal a� achments. They are di� cult entities to locate or de-scribe categorically or simply. In� itutions are the infra� ru� ure of social contra� s and behaviour, concretisations of social value, con� ituted relationally and through pra� ices. Strategies for removing oneself from in� itutional hegemony, sovereignty or a� ordance through disengagement need to be replaced with be� er and su� ained at-tempts to modulate, reformulate and invent recon� ituted in� itutional forms.

A State is a � atement, declared in words, in� antiation and performance of hi� orical decree. It is immobile and � atic, the oppo-site of that which is variable and dynamic. Negotiations and se� lements are what the � ate ena� s, but its exi� ence mu� remain unque� ioned and unque� ionable. It is the � ate that makes territories legible, that ar-ranges populations and the land in ways that simplify fun� ions of taxation, conscription and the prevention of the que� ioning of the � ate. The � ate is tautological, and like all tautologies, it is circular, cyclical and ines-capable.

The sovereign � ate is fully, fl atly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. With the word “territory” we usually refer to the land and waters belonging to or under the jurisdi� ion of a sovereign � ate. It comes from “terra”, “earth”, “land”, as in “terrain”, but it also resonates with the Latin word terrere, “to frighten”; a “territorium” is a combination of land and law, “a place from which people are warned o� ”.

Deserted beaches and dark fore� s are at-tra� ive to escapi� s. When narrow, crowded sidewalks give way to va� landscapes, an escape has found its beginning. Our mental landscapes clear up when a crowded social landscape clears out. The beach can appear sandboxed, and the ocean can turn into a pond — ju� add lots and lots of people. We go on vacation, as touri� s, and are irritated by touri� s. Our desirous exoticism seems to know no bounds, nor fi nd any — what in-ner feelings of hoping to fi nd an outside gives rise to these desires? Do we a� empt these escapes only for a return to crowded city � reets, where criminals, prote� ers, outca� s, thieves and the fri� ions of free thought roam?

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly af-ter a shock, it refl e� s a time delta that mea-sures how long a� er such a shock we remain incapacitated. Resilience is a key word in current discourses on climate change ad-aptation. We elevate cities, develop � orm-water tunnels, design fl ood zones. When the water comes up to us, we will fl oat on its me-niscus. We read hopeful li� s of “places to visit before they’re lo� to climate change”, and give out awards for “the be� cities to address climate change”. The New York Times names the nine be� places to live in order to escape the harshe� e� e� s of glob-al ecosy� em in� abilities. Climate change is like a new set of design con� raints for an earth-scale design competition — a veritable playground for archite� s, geo-engineers, planners and insurance indu� ries plying a trade in the means and modes of dealing and living with new, disa� rous fronts and climatological cata� rophe.

A panic room is useless if the house it’s in is burning down. A panic room is like a sanc-tum, a shelter, a hiding place, a medieval ca� le keep. Warlike bunkers, places where we a� empt exit from things unsafe. These are the featured archite� ures of paranoia, places for self-concealment that we feel be� er knowing exi� from which broadca� s are made. A fortifi ed safe room mu� always, continuously be conne� ed to its outside. The panic room gives way to panic. What are safe � aces if not a la� resort? Self-impris-onment? A pure violence, again� an impos-sible idea of security. Once we’re in, will we ever want out?

What kind of exit could we, as moderns, pro-pose from modernism? From the medieval-i� s, an intent to perform hi� orical bypass surgery. From po� modernism a plan and (largely derided) a� empts at accelerat-ing and modulating moderni� tendencies across cultures and hemi� heres. For mo� , modernity is “essential for us, and for this reason it is ultimately inaccessible to us” (Zielinski). Modernity is inescapable, a ge-netic fallacy expanding into realms and ge-ographies unknown…

Announced by so many, from Barthes to Fukuyama, “the end of hi� ory” tends to ar-rive and re-arrive. And with each exit, with each end, we su� er delusions, various kinds of liberal fantasies wrought, for example, by the technological, the digital —reconfi gured means of authorship and creation that never achieve the paradigmatic change we hope for them as we weather their birthing pangs. Shall we abandon terra nullius and regard in� ead an a� erlife for hi� ory itself, a re-membrance of hi� orical being in the world that is never new, always prefi gured? There never was nothing.

Alongside the reconfi guration of subje� positioning and subje� ive sensitivities in relation to a ‘world out there’ that was never really ‘out there’ at all, there is a transforma-tion in what regards the cultures of tech-nology and technological culture, as they become more ubiquitous, vascularised and always-on. These infra� ru� ural a� e� s of technology create a new fi eld of material and immaterial conditions and possibilities. Of course each of these natures has its own predatory nature. Flusser notes how “We may be oppressed by culture on a higher lev-el than we are by nature — do cave bears and hail � orms oppress us more that the secret police and thermonuclear weapons?”

Bones, having emerged as a sub� rate for the complexifi cation of the physiology of life, are easily petrifi ed and so also help to � ratify the geological record. We can say that organic bodies continue to produce physiological geologies, usually of a mo� painful variety: gall � ones, kidney � ones. David Farrier likens these rocky bodily emis-sions to oceanic coral, that which is “organ-ic within water but calcifi es out of it”. The interdependencies between the earth and its (human) bodies cause us to consider the condition of “� acefl ight o� eopenia,” wherein prolonged absence from our home planet results in decreased bone mass. A problem for which there is no known long term solution, � acefl ight o� eopenia pro-vides a hard limit to the presumption of ex-tra-earthly colonisation. The condition can cause up to two-point-fi ve percent loss of bone mass per month during long-term � acefl ight. We are earth addi� s, we need its gravity.

From the late 1970s until the mid 1990s, “the Unabomber”, who’s real name was Ted Kaczynski, waged a nationwide bomb-ing campaign in the United States against sites he deemed representative or emblematic of omnipresent modern tech-nological progress. He was personally responsible for the killing of three people and injured twenty three others. Kaczynski’s manifesto, “The Industrial Society and Its Future” contains passages such as: “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is hu-man behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical ne-cessity.”

The 21st century has witnessed a proliferation of “outstitutions” and “unstitutions” in the form of alternate schools, para-academic and para-governmental organisa-tions, publications and discur-sive forms. These alternatives are encouraging as they create parallel orientations that use the ener-gies of reform in non-combative, non-resistive ways. The historical contingency, scale and momentum of modern institutions of government, education and markets gives us no way out. But how might we create other options, possibilities, sub-stitute and proxy that preserve and reserve the institution as a har-binger of connection, relation and co-responsibility?

The changing course of the Danube, the most important international waterway in its continent, has left sever-al parcels of (former) Serbian territory on the west bank of the river — which Serbia says should now rightly be Croatian. Croatia, however, rejects the Serbian interpre-tation of the precise borderline and insists that Gornja Siga - as this area is referred to on some maps - is not Croatian. It was therefore terra nullius, a no man’s land, until Vít Jedlička - the first to spot this bizarre bor-der conundrum - seized the opportunity and on 13 April 2015 formed a new state in this territory – Liberland. “Free Republic of Liberland is a sovereign state located between Croatia and Serbia on the west bank of the Danube river.” Its total area of approximately 7 km² is now the third smallest sovereign state, after the Vatican and Monaco. “The motto of Liberland is ‘To live and let live’ because Liberland prides itself on personal and economic freedom of its people, which is guaranteed by its Constitution, which significantly limits the power of politicians so they could not interfere too much in the freedoms of the Liberland na-tion.” The current human population of Gornja Siga is zero.

Pietro Gonella, in the first half of the 15th century, was a jest-er at the service of the marquis Obizzo III d’Este, Lord of Ferrara. However, at some point, because of some negligence in obeying rules or authority, he was expelled from the Duchy, and threatened with capi-tal punishment, were he ever put his his feet back onto the Marquis’ land. Without losing hope, none-theless, Pietro devised a way to go back to the city. He went first to Bologna and filled a wheelbar-row with soil, then he travelled to Ferrara, and enter the walled city standing on a cart full of Bolognese earth. He claimed not to infringe in this way the notice, as his feet were not standing on the Marquis’ land. Obizzo finally allowed Pietro to do as he pleased, recognizing a jester’s wit.

For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of New Moore, a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Both claimed the empty territory, which is about two miles long and 1.5 miles wide. No permanent structures occupied the land, but India sent paramilitary soldiers to its rocky shores in 1981 to hoist a national flag. Now, rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for both parties: the island is gone. New Moore has been completely submerged, confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols. The demarcation of the maritime boundary – and who controls the re-maining islands –, however, remains an open issue between the two south Asian neighbours, and the disap-pearance of the island does nothing to resolve it.

Wolf Shoal was a professor of architecture at the University of Texas, where he founded the Responsive Environments Laboratory. Initially focused on the automated creation of built environments, he eventually specialised in the construction of underwater structures using a method not unlike that used by living corals. Shoal was report-ed as having plans for his own Marine Resources Company to build up an island on Alice Shoal, a wholly submerged reef, located in the western Caribbean Sea, about 260 km south-west of Jamaica, independent of any existing nation. His method consisted essentially in the activation of a geolog-ical processes, passing electric current through underwater mesh, causing minerals dissolved into seawater to precipi-tate. The material produced has since become commonly known as seacrete or biorock. Wolf claimed to have secured per-mission from the United States Coast Guard to use uninhab-ited Navassa Island as a supply base. As reported by Erwin S. Strauss, however, this permission seems unlikely, and the actual fate of the island is unknown to all.

The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit funded in Sil-icon Valley begun 2008 by Patri Friedman (Milton Fried-man’s grandson) and venture capitalist Peter Thiel to build floating libertarian nations. They promote experiments and innovations in governance, they “work to enable seasteading communities – Floating Cities – which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government”. The most successful – they hope – could then inspire change in governments around the world. A group of key people withdraw from society, escape from their govern-ments, and take to the sea. Opening humanity’s next fron-tier, however, doesn’t seem to go further than the ter-ritorial waters of an existing nation. Historically, The Seasteading Institute has looked to international waters for the freedom to establish new nations and spur compet-itive governance from the outside. However, they are now seeking a host nation, as it is less expensive to engineer a seastead for shallow waters, it is easier for residents to travel to and from the seastead, and “a host nation [would] provide a place for a floating city within the ex-isting international legal framework, with the associated protections and responsibilities”.

“The Common People of England have begun, and gives Consent to Digge up!” The True Levellers – later also known as the Diggers – were a group of protestant radicals formed in 1649 in England, whose name de-rives from their attempts to farm on common land. The Diggers tried to reform the existing social order by literally “leveling” land. Be-lieving in economic equality, they promoted an agrarian lifestyle and created small egalitarian rural communities, where they claimed the collective use of forests and lands, against the landowner’s’ entitlement to private use. They envisioned an ecological interrela-tionship between humans and nature, and declared that “true free-dom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth”. Subject to repeated attacks, the Digger communities in England re-sisted only until 1650.

On 18 December 2011, a man known only as Peter, who had decided to escape from society for christmas, was found hibernating in a car parked in the woods outside of the city of Umeå in Northern Sweden. Provisioned with a considerable amount of food, alcohol and cig-arettes, he had driven his car towards the great outdoors to avoid all the jolly that typically sur-rounds the end of the year. Even when his provisions ran out — food first, then alcohol and cigarettes — he decided to stay put. Out in the forest, trapped in his car and deprived of the comforts of civ-ilization, Peter’s mind remained locked in a refusal of society. On 17 February 2011, Peter is brought to a hospital in Umeå.

In 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio decided to capture the city of Fiume from Yugoslavia and give it to Italy. Italy turned down his generous offer, the Prime Minister publically calling him a fool. Instead of giving it back, D’Annunzio decided to declare independence and see how long he could get away with it. He wrote a constitution that declared music to be the central principle of his new state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro. Each morning D’Annunzio would read poetry and manifestos from his balcony and each eve-ning there was a concert and fireworks, constituting the main activities of government.

In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to ful-fil his daughter’s wish to become a princess. After making the arduous trek to Bir Tawil and planting a flag, he proclaimed on his facebook page “that Bir Tawil shall be for-ever known as the Kingdom of North Sudan. The Kingdom is established as a sovereign monarchy with myself as the head of state; with Emily becoming an actual princess.” Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile piece of land sandwiched in between Egypt and Sudan, is currently under no country’s jurisdiction. It’s neigh-bouring countries have renounced any claim to it in response to an addendum to the treaty of 1899, which allots Hala’ib, an area abut-ting the red sea, to Sudan in ex-change for the much smaller area of the Bartazuga mountain, now called Bir Tawil. After a Canadian oil company announced plans to acquire drilling rights for the waters bor-dering Hala’ib both Egypt and Sudan claimed the area and renounced sovereignty over Bir Tawil in ex-change. After launching an unsuc-cessful global crowdfunding cam-paign to turn his Kingdom of North Sudan into a cutting-edge science & technology hub, Jeremiah Heaton was accused of 21st century imperialism and sold the rights to his story to Disney for an undisclosed fee.

In 1952, the Austrian psychoanalyst-turned-bioenergist Wilhelm Reich began initial experimentation with an appa-ratus called cloudbuster, which used copper bars to con-centrate and channel the weak attracting force of water flowing at its base towards the sky in order to release stagnant atmospheric energies and initiate rainfall. Initially, Reich imagined the cloudbuster to reverse the negative atmospheric effects of his earlier experi-ments with nuclear energy, but eventually used it to fight droughts or save a local children’s parade from drowning in heavy rain. From 17–22 July 1953, one of Reich’s cloud-buster operations close to his laboratory in Rangeley, Maine, fails. On 23 July 1953, a million-dollar-rain soaks the city of New York and ends a long heat wave. Field fruits and lawn areas in the vicinity of the city remained unharmed, at least preliminarily, but the floods put thou-sands of cellars under water, brought hundreds of cars to a standstill, blocked the subway-traffic; a man drowned in two feet deep water on the roof of a five-story building.

The Canadian-American owner of the Space-X corporation, a private firm that develops solutions, technol-ogies and programmes for space travel, is Elon Musk. Musk gave a keynote talk at the 67th Inter-national Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico on Septem-ber 26th, 2016 unveiling ambitious plans to establish a human settle-ment on the planet Mars beginning in 2022. Through Space-X’s work, Musk intends to build a colony on the red planet with a million peo-ple, an explicit effort to protect humankind from self-eradication. Musk believes there “is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something cata-strophic were to happen.”

In 2016, Thomas Thwaites undertook an artistic intervention into the lives and environments more typi-cally occupied by goats. The proj-ect and publication ”Goat man. How I took a Holiday from Being Human”, released in that same year, charted Thwaites’ attempts at building ex-ternal appendages and technologies, developing lifestyle changes and social relations (such as sleep-ing and living with an alpine goat herd) in order to tend away from his own humanness, toward ‘goat-ness’.

In 2009, Colin Beavan (born 1963), an American internet blogger be-gan a project called “No Impact Project”, which involved attempts his family made to live a “zero im-pact” lifestyle in the city of New York for one year. The project grew into an international environmental nonprofit and inspired a book, film and blog called “No Impact Man.” For the year-long experiment the Beavan family produced no trash ex-cept for compost, bought only foods grown within a 250-mile radius of where they lived, and did not use petroleum-based means of transpor-tation. They also used no paper products, including toilet paper.

TaskRabbit and Handy.com are online and mobile marketplaces that attempt to liberate its users from nine-to-five em-ployment by matching freelance labour with local demand in an adhoc way. Uber Technologies, Inc. is a global per-sonal transportation network with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Similarly, Uber’s approach to labour is an explicit rhetoric of freedom, choice and interper-sonal liberty — having access to a vehicle and a driver’s license makes you instantly and by default an Uber employ-ee, reconstruing labour, not as a ‘job’, but as the ability to make money whenever you want from the things you have already bought and paid for (as of course Airbnb also does with peoples’ property). These escapes from work extend and expand the scope of labour and monetary exchange to the whole of sensible reality.

It took two months for a 40-year-old Japanese to die from the consequences of his self-determined exhaustion. He was found in a wooden hut in the middle of a lonely moor in the region of Hokkaido, as well-preserved mummy and with a diary, containing a protocol of his 62-day surrender. The self-proclaimed death candidate has devoted his work to “all starving or fasting people and the anorectics of the world.” The motive for the unusual suicide: a radical with-drawal from meritocracy, consumption and above all: no more participating.

On December 3, 1999, in Monte Carlo, Monaco, the multibillionaire banker Edmond J. Safra, along with one of his nurses, died of asphyx-iation in a locked, bunker-like bathroom built into his penthouse. Early accounts said that two hood-ed intruders had penetrated the apartment, which was as solid as a fortress. The bizarre death made headlines everywhere and sent shock waves through the banking communi-ty, as well as through the prin-cipality of Monaco, probably the safest, most tightly controlled tax haven in the world for the very rich. At any moment during the catastrophe he might have saved himself, but he was reportedly so fearful of being murdered by the intruders he had been told were in his house that he refused to come out of the locked bathroom, in spite of the pleas of firemen and police.

Escapes from the productive efficiencies and industrialeffectiveness of modern times can be exampled through movements, both genuine and performative, relating to food (artisanal bread), social structure (communal living) and repair (maintenance over novelty and attempts at working, playing, resist and attending to senses like sight, sound and feel over working on the outside of blackboxes and with baffling, opaque machines.

In Toulouse, France, on 20 May 1980, an organized left-wing terrorist group calling itself CLODO (Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs, french word for ‘tramp’) and a group calling itself the “Direct Action Organisation of March 27-28” claimed responsibility for the destruction of computer systems and data during an attack on Philips Data Systems. Their statement to the left-wing newspaper Liber-ation read: “We are workers in the field of data process-ing and consequently well placed to know the current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications. The computer is the favorite tool of the dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to re-press. We do not want to be shut up in ghettos of programs and organizational patterns.” Members of the two terror-ist organisations collected computer programs and magnetic data cards in the toilets of the offices, yet instead of releasing this data to the sewers, where “the filth takes off its shirt, absolute nakedness, rout of illusions and of mirages” (Victor Hugo), they simply burned everything.

WHEN YOU FEEL RAINDROPS FALLING ON YOUR HEAD, YOU ARE EXPERIENCING CLIMATE, IN SOME SENSE. IN PARTICULAR YOU ARE EXPERIENCING THE CLIMATE CHANGE KNOWN AS GLOBAL WARMING. BUT YOU ARE NEVER DIRECTLY EXPERIENCING GLOBAL WARMING AS SUCH. (…) BUT GLOBAL WARMING IS AS REAL AS THIS SENTENCE. NOT ONLY THAT, IT IS VISCOUS. IT NEVER STOPS STICKING TO YOU, NO MATTER WHERE YOU MOVE ON THE PLANET. — TIMOTHY MORTON

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NOW THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER – AND ONE HAS NO EYE FOR THAT IN TIMES OF GREAT PERIL , AND ONLY BY A GREAT EFFORT EVEN IN TIMES WHEN DANGER IS THREATENING – IS THAT IN REALITY THE BURROW DOES PROVIDE A CONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF SECURITY, BUT BY NO MEANS ENOUGH, FOR IS ONE EVER FREE FROM ANXIETIES INSIDE IT? THESE ANXIETIES ARE DIFFERENT FROM ORDINARY ONES, PROUDER, RICHER IN CONTENT, OFTEN LONG REPRESSED, BUT IN THEIR DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS THEY ARE PERHAPS MUCH THE SAME AS THE ANXIETIES THAT EXISTENCE IN THE OUTER WORLD GIVES RISE TO. — FRANZ KAFKA

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