The principle of Terra Nullius, often implemented in colonial international law, bears significant responsibility as a central justification for the geopolitical brutality of Western European imperial projects that began in the sixteenth century. Territories seen as Terra Nullius—or "nobody’s land"—were seized from civilizations deemed lesser humans under the rubrics of modernity. This fiction gave rise to the notion of a global epicenter for politics, culture, and knowledge. Alongside it, the concept of ‘peripheral land’ emerged, designating sites and communities forced to endure the multifarious violences inherent in the expansion of capitalist networks of extraction and distribution across the planet.

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, these networks extended beyond the atmosphere, forming planetary-scale systems for telecommunication, scientific observation, and military surveillance. A vast array of satellites, owned and controlled by recursive political forces, initiated their orbital trajectories around Earth. This development created a new form of territoriality—and thus a new periphery—regulated by the International Space Treaty, which asserts that no sovereignty can be claimed over any celestial body. Outer space may be nobody’s land, but it is certainly not everybody’s.

In the twenty-first century, the consolidation of neoliberal politics, coupled with a U.S. reform on space law, paved the way for private corporations to assume a leading role in the industrialization of outer space. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, there will be approximately 11,000 active satellites in 2024. Two-thirds of these belong to Starlink, SpaceX’s mega constellation in Low-Earth Orbit, while less than a third correspond to nation-states in the Global South. As a dominant force in the new race to profit in space—where information has become as valuable as gold was in colonial times—SpaceX aims to deploy more than 30,000 satellite units by 2030, establishing an unprecedented planetary-scale telecommunication network.

Starlink’s rhetoric promises to deliver internet connectivity to every corner of the world. However, as an infrastructure project dependent on vast technological distribution networks, Starlink already embodies a powerful apparatus for reinforcing systems of truth production and political domination. In this light, it must be viewed as a pharmakon—both a remedy and a poison.