On 11-12 September, I joined the Gikii 2025, “Technology in its Villain Era”, at the Institution of Information Law (IViR) at Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Special thanks to the wonderful organisers, Anh Nguyen, Bengi Zeybek, Anushka Mittal, for the space to present my work and for the invitation to join the programme committee.
My presentation, “Moby Dick, but Make it Climate Tech” explored how Herman Melville’s whale—once dissected into oil, baleen, and ambergris—mirrors the way international law today partitions the ocean into sacrifice zones. I examined how deep-sea mining, offshore wind, and ocean-based carbon removal are narrated legally not as damage but as ‘sustainable use’, ‘benefit-sharing’, or ‘climate solutions’. The talk asked what happens when the ocean itself becomes expendable infrastructure, and whether we might imagine it instead through finitude, fragility, and limits.
GiKii 2025 was made possible thanks to the support of the Maastricht Centre for Law and Jurisprudence. I give special thanks to its directors, Roland Pierik, Mónica García-Salmones, and Lukasz Dziedzic.
Henrique Marcos 