Dominion Power for Sale: How the World’s Newest Commodity Is Melting Faster Than Arctic Ice
Dominion Power: A Global Game of Musical Chairs, Now With Higher Stakes and Fewer Seats
By the time you finish this sentence, some new micro-dominion will have been declared—perhaps a crypto fiefdom in the South Pacific, a cloud-based nation-state run from a WeWork in Lisbon, or Elon Musk’s latest satellite swarm politely informing the International Telecommunication Union that it, too, would like veto rights over low-Earth orbit. Dominion power, once the stodgy birthright of emperors and pith-helmeted cartographers, has become the planet’s hottest over-the-counter derivative, traded 24/7 on the twin exchanges of raw data and raw nerve.
Let us define the commodity: dominion power is the ability to make others act as though your map lines are real. It is sovereignty’s credit score, and like all credit scores it is compiled by opaque algorithms, routinely hacked, and apparently purchasable if you know the right lobbyist. Yesterday it wore a crown; today it wears a hoodie and speaks in API documentation.
International observers—those lonely souls who still keep paper passports—note three concurrent auctions where dominion power is being repriced in real time.
Auction One: The Arctic Mall. As the ice recedes, Canada, Russia, Denmark (via Greenland), Norway, and the United States are all slapping Post-it notes on the same floe. The merchandise includes 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and a scenic shipping lane that knocks two weeks off Shanghai-Rotterdam transit. The bidding language is a mix of UNCLOS legalese and submarine sonar pings. Losers will still get melting permafrost, so participation trophies all around.
Auction Two: The Chip Strait. Taiwan makes 92 percent of the planet’s most advanced semiconductors, a fact that has turned the nine-dash line from a cartographic doodle into a nervous twitch in Washington and Beijing. Here dominion power is measured not in hectares but in nanometers. The strategic takeaway: whoever controls the supply of chips that run everything from missiles to microwaves can crash an economy faster than a central banker on a bender.
Auction Three: The Data Lagoons. Ireland recently discovered that when it grants Facebook tax residency, it also grants Facebook dominion over the emotional weather patterns of three continents. Dublin’s regulators now find themselves in the novel position of governing 2.9 billion imaginary citizens who never voted, yet scream when their feeds hiccup. The Irish, congenitally allergic to fuss, have responded with fines large enough to bruise but never to bankrupt—an elegant expression of dominion power as performance art.
Meanwhile, smaller states are crowd-funding sovereignty like indie bands on Kickstarter. Estonia rents out its digital ID infrastructure to Ukraine while Ukraine, busy fending off an old-school land grab, experiments with e-governance from bomb shelters. Palau sells passports to crypto fugitives; Liberia sells its flag to any tanker captain who can spell “environmental compliance” sarcastically. The global South has learned that dominion power is more liquid than ever; it can be securitized, tokenized, and shorted by hedge funds who never once set foot on the asset in question.
The broader significance? In 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia gave us the nation-state; in 2024 the Terms of Service give us the platform-state. Both insist on a monopoly of violence—one deploys armies, the other algorithmic throttling—but the tech version updates faster and rarely offers a customer-service line. Citizens, once proud taxpayers, now oscillate between “users” and “data exhaust,” a transition about as uplifting as discovering your job title has been changed to “organic revenue facilitator.”
Climate change, that ultimate borderless prankster, is accelerating the liquidation sale. Coastal capitals are busy drawing new maritime claims on land that will soon be underwater, proving that denial is not just a river in Egypt but an entire archipelago in the Maldives. The irony, of course, is that dominion power over a sinking asset still commands a premium; witness Miami condo prices or the Dutch lobbying to host the EU’s climate refugee agency—location, location, relocation.
Yet amid the absurdities, a pragmatic consensus is forming: dominion power is now less about territory and more about chokepoints—chokepoints in energy, data, finance, and narrative. He who can stall the other guy’s TikTok feed for 48 hours may accomplish what once required a carrier group. The new Great Game is played not on maps but on latency charts.
As the music stops and the chairs evaporate, the prudent spectator keeps two passports, three VPNs, and a cynical grin. Dominion power may be up for grabs, but irony remains the one resource still in surplus.
