Margareta Kern: Are You Ready?

Margareta Kern's Are You Ready? stages a mischievous exploration of tech-libertarianism’s parasitic mimesis of avant-gardist choreographies to code itself into existence. Questioning the capacity of performance to subvert such ideological processes, the piece takes on its own form of corporate masquerade to reveal how fascist ideologies propagate through render-ready narratives of freedom and sovereignty they simulate.

Are You Ready? is presented as a corporate pitch for the fictional start-up OCEAN Global promoting floating island-nations as utopian escapes free from government control. Mimicking the slick aesthetics of TED Talks, Kern takes on an entrepreneurial persona of the CEO, Meriel Brook, to allure the audience into its techno-utopian vision. The company’s flagship app – an Automated Regulatory Arbitrage Demon (ARAD) – dynamically shifts jurisdictions to exploit legal loopholes in real time. However, what begins as a seductive vision of ‘seatizenship’ gradually unravels to expose its crypto-fascist core: a privatised state ruled by tech oligarchs (sounds familiar?).

Are You Ready? is a lecture performance, dressed as a corporate coup, dressed as a TED Talk, where the ocean gets rebranded as the ultimate gated community. Yet, the piece doesn’t just satirise these escapist fantasies – it reveals them as active blueprints for exclusionary futures already taking shape. The lack of ironic distance is crucial – by overidentifying with the start-up jargon, aesthetics, and an entrepreneurial persona, Kern lays bare the libidinal economy of techno-utopian solutions and our own desires that code such fantasies into existence.

Operating as a speculative non-fiction Are You Ready? is a montage of existing proposals, from seasteding ‘city-states’ and ‘citizenship-by-investment’ schemes to blockchain governance models. These are all ideological and legal frameworks being enacted right now through cryptocurrency enclaves, special economic zones, and the growing movement for ‘network states’. The title Are You Ready? draws a direct line from Marconi’s colonial-era radio transmissions to today’s digital enclosures – from open seas to not so open source – showing that tech libertarianism is not disruptive but continuous with centuries of extraction.

In 1897, Marconi sent the world’s first known wireless communication over the open sea, asking: 'Are you ready?'

Commissioned by Whitstable Biennale 2018. Performed with Jessica Harrington.

Supported by the Arts Council England Project Grant (2018-2019), Birkbeck School of Law (Artist in Residence programme) and Real Ideas Organisation (South West England).