PLANETARY PUEBLO: Oceans and Space

LOS ANGELES
05.09.2026
PLANETARY PUEBLO: Oceans and Space
By Joe Mathews

Visualizing the Global Commons

The Pueblo does not recognize national waters or national territory. It treats these as the Common Heritage of All Life.

The Oceanic Syndicate: The Pueblos fund a fleet of Autonomous Floating Pueblos. These are mobile mesh-nodes that process plastic, restore coral reefs, and monitor illegal overfishing via eDNA sensors. They are governed by a rotating lottery of citizens from all land-based Pueblos.

The Orbital Syndicate: Instead of competing for space dominance, the Pueblos treat the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as a Data Commons. They collectively fund a mesh of "Sovereign Satellites" that provide free, un-censorable internet and environmental monitoring for every life-form on Earth.

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LOS ANGELES

Joe Mathews is founder-publisher and columnist at Democracy Local, a planetary publication of, by, and for everyday people governing themselves. He is a Renovating Democracy fellow at the Berggruen Institute. Based in Los Angeles, Joe is best known as author of the popular syndicated Connecting California column at Zocalo Public Square, where he is also democracy editor. He is also author of five books; The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy (2006); The California Crackup (2010), The California Recall: Its First 20 Years (2023), The U.S. vs. Us: Essays from California As It Leaves America (2025) and The House of California (2026),.He's a member of PeoplePowered, Democracy R&D, and the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy. Joe served as co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy; as a reporter for the LA Times, Baltimore Sun and Wall Street Journal; as board member of The Harvard Crimson and Democracy International; as a professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University; and as a youth baseball coach.