In Pursuit of Biological Sovereignty
An introduction to the growing struggle for dominion over bodies, behaviors, and biological data.
The crown is off the king’s head
For 72 years, King Louis XIV ruled France with absolute authority. Divined by the grace of God, the Sun King embodied unquestionable power over land, law, and life itself in a unified regime of state and bloodline. Sovereignty emanated from a single man.
73 years after his death, the doctrine of absolute monarchical sovereignty collapsed in a violent revolution that rejected the idea that power could be housed in a single, sanctified body. The beheading of the last king of the Bourbon dynasty was a dismemberment of the sovereign head from its political body. It was a rejection of inherited control, a call for collective autonomy, and a demand to restructure authority.
Today, the thrones of modernity are empty once more and wars are raging to occupy them.
Contemporary life is marked by renewed struggle over sovereignty. In eastern Europe, an ancient prophecy of Moscow as the third Rome empowers Russian ambition and fuels war across Ukraine. In the south China sea, disputes over territorial control fuse with lingering nationalist resentment to heighten tension between China and Taiwan. In the Middle East and southern Asia, religious fanaticism and historical partitions clash in contests over land and legacy. Each of these conflicts is a struggle for sovereignty: who rules, over what territory, and with what authority?
The scale and spectacle of these interstate conflicts is both captivating and terrifying. Tank columns in the Donbas, naval carrier groups patrolling the Luzon strait track, and ground to air missiles illuminating the skies over Tel Aviv track to classical understandings of conflict and sovereignty. There is a visibility and scale that allows us to easily recognize their presence.
Contemporary struggles for sovereignty are not just confined to interstate conflicts. Across the world, the legitimacy of national governments is increasingly contested by intrastate actors and organizations that seek to reshape traditional power structures, jurisdictions, and rules of law. These too are highly visible, in large part due to the juxtaposition of their conspicuous characteristics against the backdrop of norms and places we once thought immutable. I will never forget watching a viking run berserk in the halls of the Capitol building as Secret Service agents aimed handguns at men peering through the broken glass windows of the Rotunda. Could such an overt opposition to existing sovereignty be any more obvious?
The theater of these inter and intra state conflicts captures our attention and fills our screens. But these conflicts are simply battlegrounds within a far larger and far more diffuse struggle: the burgeoning fight for biological sovereignty. This is not merely a war over territory or ideology, but over the protocols of life itself - how societies are organized, how individuals are governed, how experts are authorized, how customers are sold to, how knowledge is produced, and how authority is granted. Sovereignty is no longer confined to dominion over subjects and land; today it includes dominion over bodies, behaviors, and biological data.
This war for biological sovereignty is unfolding across domains. It stretches from the legislative chambers where health data regulations are debated, to the algorithms of platforms that quietly reshape behavior, to the viral memes that recode our understanding of selfhood and autonomy. Everywhere, power is being renegotiated, legitimacy redefined, and authority redistributed.
Most of these battlegrounds lack the grandeur of conventional warfare between nations or the spectacle of anti-government riots. Instead, they are subtle, procedural, mathematical, and largely invisible, less blood and barricades and more dashboards and defaults. They are battles waged at the contested borderlands between legacy standards and emerging protocols, between federal regulators and disruptive startups, between accelerationists and doomers, between soldiers armed with databases, twitter threads, scientific studies, and GPUs. The crown is off the king’s head and many hands now reach for it.
Borderlands of biological sovereignty
Sovereignty is supreme authority to govern without external interference. Biological sovereignty is thus the power to exercise control over time, body, and mind free from coercion or systemic dependence.
As a species, we secure biological sovereignty through the tools and systems we develop to insulate ourselves from the hazards of our planet. As communities, we claim biological sovereignty through national borders and local cooperatives. As individuals, we accrete biological sovereignty through self-experimentation, self-regulation, and self-sufficiency.
In the same way a state cedes sovereignty to a federation, biological sovereignty is often consolidated at higher levels of organization. Local governments and consumers grant control over food safety, sanitation, and standards to federal departments like the USDA, trading autonomy for standardized, scalable food security. Individuals relinquish control over care access and provider choice to insurance companies, trading responsibility for reduced personal risk.1
But as new technologies and ideologies emerge, these borders of sovereignty become contested; new tools enable communities and individuals to exercise control once only afforded to institutions with greater resources or economies of scale. Demarcation lines are redrawn as values are reconsidered and once-established understandings of health, liberty, and authority are reimagined.
Sometimes, rapid technological and ideological development coalesce into a particularly disruptive era that radically shifts the locus of control over biological sovereignty.2 At Supermoon, we believe we have entered the opening chapter of one such era.
Prelude to a new era
Constructive interference between waves of technological development and emerging ideologies is unleashing renewed struggles for biological sovereignty. Wracked by epidemiological change and a global pandemic, legacy structures offer little defense against the surging tide.
COVID
Struggles for biological sovereignty are often waged in the opaque battlegrounds of procedure, legislation, and statistics. The pandemic exposed these skirmishes and “brought the war home” to individuals who previously gave little to no thought about their health freedom. Mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccine directives ignited debates over bodily autonomy versus collective safety. Misinformation flooded social media, eroding trust in both institutions and personal decision-making. Contact tracing, biometric sensing in public areas, and other forms of digital health surveillance introduced new friction between individual and state. Many people attempted to reclaim sovereignty through self-experimentation and off-label drug use. Poor and rural communities struggled to deploy adequate health resources, revealing the limits of their local sovereignty and ability to provide care. Supply chain fragility revealed dependencies on other countries to supply critical products and components, while reliance on international institutions like the WHO for critical epidemiological data and information exposed limits to national self-determination. Breakthrough treatments in the form of mRNA vaccines demonstrated the unique ability of our species to secure protection from external risks but simultaneously fueled biotech skepticism and distrust of powerful pharmaceutical companies.
Epidemiological Change
Widespread belief that the current health system in America is flawed lends support to disruptors seeking to reclaim biological sovereignty.
America is beset with chronic health conditions that weigh heavily on healthspan, reducing the number of years spent in good health; 6 in 10 Americans are chronically ill. Average life expectancy at birth fell year after year toward the end of the 2010s, reaching a low of 76.1 in 2021. While it has rebounded slightly since then, life expectancy growth is forecast to stagnate over the coming years. While healthspan falls and lifespan stalls, spend on healthcare continues to rise. Health spending in the U.S. increased by 7.5% in 2023 to $4.9 trillion, outpacing GDP growth.
A major cause of these epidemiological changes is lifestyle choice. Americans spend the vast majority of time indoors, sedentary, in climate-controlled environments, socializing online. The bed is no longer just a refuge for sleep; it is desk, barstool, pew, gallery, and bleacher fused into one.3
Ideology
Emergent and resurgent beliefs increasingly challenge once-dominant ideologies of neoliberalism and globalism. Nationalist, protectionist, and populist narratives seek to reclaim political and economic sovereignty from supranational organizations. Relativism and political activism shape identity politics, cancel alternative views, and remove books, symbols, and monuments promoting the counter-narrative. Liberals blast Trump and his band of populists as ignorant lay folk unable or unwilling to accept the truth, while conservatives turn up their noses at the rotten bias inherent to science and expertise. Nostalgic revivalism offers familiarity in quaint tradition and old customs. Technoutopianism, accelerationism, and other pro-tech philosophies weave across party lines, furthering top-down abundance agendas and bottom-up libertarian ideals.
This plurality of ideologies suggests the collapse of cohesive grand narratives4 - capitalism, communism, liberal democracy, etc. - into a fragmentation of competing micro-ideologies each optimized for certain communities or platforms. As the hegemony of traditional authority is increasingly challenged by alternative beliefs, communities and individuals increasingly seek to reclaim biological sovereignty from centralized institutions. Control is wrested away from the institutions that aligned themselves with the grand narratives of yesterday. Today, the institutions that are most under siege are non-corporate entities - supranational organizations, NGOs, political parties, universities, etc. but perhaps tomorrow is it technology incumbents that find themselves losing control to insurrectionists seeking greater autonomy.
Technology
The human mind once reigned supreme as the pinnacle of intelligence. Today, this once sacred doctrine is collapsing as superhuman artificial intelligence is born.
AI is increasingly able to perform tasks once reserved to humans - from writing code to designing drug formulations - faster, cheaper, and at scale. This can empower small groups and individuals to reduce reliance on others and consolidate control. Companies are using AI to reduce headcount, internalize functions, and minimize financing requirements in order to retain equity and long-term control. AI lowers the barriers to entry to supplying digital products and services, enabling non-technical and unskilled workers to build without relying on 3rd party labor.
AI also increasingly fills the role of expert, providing judgement and data-driven perspectives in realms once monopolized by board-certified, classically-trained experts. Just as claims to authority based on bloodline or piety began to weaken during the industrial revolution as trust in standardized scientific knowledge accelerated, AI is disrupting the locus of trust once more by giving people an alternative provider of truth.
Sensor and diagnostic technology is another major category of technological development facilitating new regimes of biological sovereignty. Across the medical field, miniaturization of diagnostic technologies is enabling diagnoses to occur outside of clinics and laboratories. Simplified user experiences enable usage by untrained individuals. Once large, complicated, and confined to clinical sites, diagnostic technologies are now small, simplified, and accessible everywhere, allowing individuals to reclaim sovereignty.
For a vibrant human future
Today’s burgeoning struggle for biological sovereignty is a crucible of change. This crucible will forge new regimes that govern the relationship between our species and the world around us, structure new systems of meaning, and advance the right of the individual to self-govern their time, health, and well-being.
New tools, rituals, narratives, and protocols will equip these regimes with fully-stocked arsenals to defend and extend borders of biological sovereignty. The companies building and distributing these arsenals will create exorbitant value and establish themselves as generational businesses in the process.
There is a moment in time emerging where the historical traditions and legacy institutions that have long-governed our world are becoming accessible, malleable, and refineable. It is as if the watch casing is being removed, exposing the gears whirring beneath. In this moment we can imagine futures that look vastly different than the world of today and alter the underlying structures that regulate how we experience time, value, and our relationships with one another.
We do not know how long this moment will last or what the world will look like when the watch is sealed once more. Nonetheless, we intend to exploit this historical moment in partnership with the scientists, technologists, and creatives dreaming ambitious dreams for a future that looks far richer, healthier, and more glorious than the present.
Supermoon is a research-driven VC that invests in scientists, technologists, and creatives building the future of sleep and sleep-adjacent categories. We invest globally in pre-seed to Series A stage businesses across enterprise, consumer, and biotech. If you’re building in sleep or are interested in partnering with one of our portfolio companies, I’d love to chat. You can reach me on LinkedIn and Twitter, or email me directly at gj@supermooncapital.com.
Other examples include water supply fluorination, vaccination mandates, antibiotic use in livestock, and board certification exams.
The Industrial Revolution was one such era. Immigrants from foreign lands continually diversified the population, adding new voices to the public sphere. Citizens questioned established norms and customs as innovative technologies created highly profitable corporations, enabling a class of newly-rich titans-of-industry to compete with the traditional land-based aristocracy. As immigrants and rural laborers moved to urban zones in search of work at factories, fluctuating cycles of business and economy replaced predictable seasons of agricultural production. Additionally, claims to authority based on ancient patrilineages, shamanic wisdom, or knowledge of the classics waned for an urban society increasingly willing to put its trust in expert strangers instead of a village elder, opening the door for new forms and fields of knowledge to gain traction.
This confluence of technological innovation, ideological transformation, and cultural evolution provided a fertile ground for state regimes, institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and ambitious individuals to reshape the boundaries of biological sovereignty to suit their interests while satisfying newly emergent consumer demand. Out of this fertile ground grew the modern medical industrial complex: arduous physician education, rigorous government oversight, standardized methods of treatment, normalized scientific fact-finding, and technical provisionment of healthcare.
Sean Monahan describes the habitat of the modern American well in “a vacation from the future.”
“Cavernous white condos where we hide under microplastic shedding blankets with our phones on Do Not Disturb while we scroll and scroll and scroll, waiting for the DoorDash delivery to be left at our door with a ghostly knock we are too agoraphobic to answer.”
A postmodern condition Jean-François Lyotard defined as “incredulity towards metanarratives.”
Can’t wait for the whole series!
I think the bed should loose its hold over arquitectural space and family or couples living.
Smaller beds, beds that disappear, beds that increase sleep input without so much material. More streamlined, more technological, much better sleep output. It can be done ✔️