Patrick John DeSutter

This project explores how contemporary libertarian and technocratic actors in California are reimagining urban life and political freedom through the construction of new, semi-autonomous communities. Focusing on two initiatives—the techno-libertarian “seasteading” movement and the land-based California Forever city-building project—this ethnographic research examines how both efforts deploy the logic of “islandness,” using spatial separation as a means of achieving governance outside conventional state structures. Through participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, the project traces how these ventures frame political legitimacy not through shared civic institutions but as consumer choice and market optimization. Both projects rely on boosterism and speculative imaginaries of the future, blurring the lines between citizen and consumer, freedom and exclusion, infrastructure and ideology. This research contributes to the anthropology of urbanism and futurity by interrogating how physical and symbolic exits from existing systems are used to justify new models of private governance and engineered community. In doing so, it reveals the broader social and ethical stakes of contemporary utopian experiments on the edge of state power.