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Publication Contribution
On the Fragility of Technology
We met the Sfera collective a few times during their residency in IZOLYATSIA, through self-hosted BigBlueButton remote sessions. When we started our conversations, the project they were developing, Anthrome, was still in an early phase, but it already resonated with our own research on offshore governance and with crack-up capitalism (to quote Quinn Slobodian).1 With its own distinctive angle, Sfera was aiming straight at criticizing the techno-secessionist projects such as the Seasteading Institute, Praxis, Próspera and the likes.2 A lot of questions related to the mode of existence of data were debated, trying to find artistic paths that would support Sfera’s core idea that as libertarian exit projects are essentially techno-solutionists, and as technology is inherently political, if we closely inspect their technological failures, then we may see the failures of libertarian ideology itself.In order to shape their critique, they decided to go back in time and focus on Biosphere 2 – taken here as an historical matrix for the techno-secessionist projects that followed. Biosphere 2 shares nothing in terms of values with the techno-secessionist projects, except their techno-utopianism, but the fact the project failed, and that everything was recorded and archived, allows for a better understanding compared to the speculative projects of Silicon Valley that remain in the fundraising stage.
Biosphere 2 was a dubious experiment initiated in 1984 by the activists behind the Theater of All Possibilities and Synergia Ranch: John P. Allen, Kathelin Gray, Margret Augustine, Mark Nelson, Marie Harding, and William F. Dempster. The project started out as an attempt to actualise Buckminster Fuller’s concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’ and to explore the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters, be they ecological or nuclear.
Conceived as a human-controlled substitute for Earth’s biosphere, the 1.3-hectare enclosed multi-geodesic structure was constructed in the Arizona desert. A group of volunteers embarked for a two-year mission in this so-called closed ecological system where all living systems were monitored, recorded and analysed for scientific purposes. Despite showing signs of ecological awareness in its early discourse, the project proposed a straight techno-solutionist vision. The possibility of creating a complex living ecosystem from scratch, detached from earth, became an analogue to a space colonisation project.
Inevitably, the Biosphere 2 project didn’t go well. Oxygen shortages started to occur, oxygen dropped to 14%, the concentration equivalent to an altitude of 4,000 metres. Carbon dioxide levels rose, plants died, the agriculture supposed to provide food for the team wasn’t sufficient for their needs, and most of the vertebrates and pollinating insects died off. Pests and cockroaches proliferated. Tensions arose among the volunteers due to lack of food and oxygen, as well as psychological problems related to confinement. Ultimately, external solutions were found to maintain the experiment, such as the provision of food and oxygen, but those undermined the scientific credibility of the project.
And, last but not least, despite its ecologically progressive aims, the project was financed by the oil industry, patronised by Ed Bass, chairman of the Sid Richardson Foundation. So in 1994, because of the media turmoil, the team that initiated the project was dismissed, and Steve Bannon, a future figure of the American alt-right movement, was put in charge.3 The story is now history, and is quite well documented by numerous articles, and a documentary film about it.4
Two things here are worthy of attention: first, a leftist ecological and artistic experiment was re-appropriated by the far-right and oil industry for their own agendas, and served as a matrix for the forthcoming libertarian secessionist projects; second, and this was of particular interest to Sfera, the failure of technology reveals the simplistic nature and fragility of technological solutions for ecological global issues, due to the profound misunderstanding of ecosystems when engaged as mere controllable systems.
Sfera’s project Anthrome can be seen as a minimalist re-enactment of Biosphere 2, a simulation of simulation, focusing on the inherent fallibility of technical devices, and aiming to provide the visitor a way of experiencing the fragility of technology. They tried and experimented with different sensors (oxygen, CO₂, etc.), and explored the thin space, the threshold where technical apparatuses start to dictate their own terms.
The political vision of technology Sfera weaves throughout their installation is highly critical, while emerging from the most humble and invisible zones of technique: the inherent noise that is usually filtered and removed from sensor data as a way to clean them and a potential source of possible glitches and failure. From there, their critique unfolds in successive waves upon the reductionism of techno-solutionist ideology. Here data are not neutral, not fragments of the real, but unveil themselves as a technical construction that has its own reality, a machine hallucination.
Biosphere 2 wanted to create and control ex nihilo, a fragment of Earth, through a complex technical
apparatus, leading inexorably to triple failure: a technical one, an ecological one, and a political one. In their critique of Biosphere 2, Sfera makes a reversal: machines create complex yet uncontrollable ecosystems; virtual and synthetic worlds are uninhabitable, inevitably inhuman and deeply alien.
Forty years after Biosphere 2, at an age where ecology has been de-anthropomorphised, the fight lies elsewhere. Sfera intends to break with the techno-utopian narratives of immateriality and functionality, of usage, at a moment when libertarians, extropians and secessionists are in power.
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1 See RYBN.ORG, The Great Offshore: Art, Argent, Souveraineté, Gouvernance, Colonialisme (Villecomtal-sur-Arros: UV éditions 2021); RYBN.ORG, Algoffshore: The Art of Automating Tax Evasion (Eindhoven: Set Margins, 2024); and our extensive research project: RYBN.ORG, The Great Offshore: 2017–2025, https://rybn.org/thegreatoffshore/; Quinn Slobodian, Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023).
2 Techno-secessionism is the hybrid child of radical political libertarianism and techno-solutionism, supported by venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel or Patri Friedman. This informal political movement seeks ways to break up with nation-state by deploying technological infrastructures, such as modular mobile islands, that allow people to bypass laws and regulations. See our articles on Seaseading and liquid capitalism in The Great Offshore: Seasteading & CBI – Dystopies liquides à l’heure du néo-illibéralisme (Villecomtal-sur-Arros: UV Editions, 2021), 375–90.
3 Bannon started in 1983 as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He co-founded the far-righ web platform in 2007. Bannon was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica when the firm was caught ilegally collecting data on millions of Facebook users for use in Trump’s campaign and Brexit. In 2020, Bannon was arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering connected to the ʻWe Build the Wallʼ fundraising campaign, and, in July 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine. See ‘Steve Bannon,’ Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon.
4 Kathelin Gray, ‘Space on Earth: Biosphere 2 Past and Future,’ in Space Without Rockets, under the direction of Rob La Frenais and Ewen Chardronnet (Villecomtal-sur-Arros: UV Editions, 2022); Spaceship Earth, directed by Matt Wolf (2020; Neon).