One path is technocratic. Island communities such as French Polynesia are already serving as experimental sites for the creation of new landmass made possible by sea-steading technologies (Seasteading Institute 2018). The Republic of Kiribati has also explored this possibility with the Japanese engineering company Shimizu at a cost of $450 billion (Rytz 2018). As capital and its metaphors advance, some of these new “floating cities” are being imagined as “start-up” countries, which would allow residents to “redesign society and government” from scratch by settling unclaimed international water (Gelles 2017).