Seasteading Institute
Patri Friendman and Wayne Gramlich have launched the Seasteading institute: http://www.seasteading.org/
Right now it is just a drupal website for build community building and idea exchange, but they will likely soon be a 501C3 non-profit and be able to raise funding. Hopefully they will also finish the book they started working on shortly after I began talking about these ideas with Patri in 2002 , and we will see it published relatively soon.
Many of the ideas they are planning to pursue are things that I talked about with Vince Cate back in 1997 – 1998 and it is exciting to see them getting closer to reality. The fluid nature of movement on the surface of the oceans eliminate a lot of the problems for less centralized power based systems of government.
Here is what Paul and I wrote about Seasteading in “God Wants You Dead“:
6.5.3 Seasteading
A number of the ideas for startup countries have had to do with colonizing the oceans. However, they have mostly all suffered from the idea that you need to build a new country all at once. This causes all their plans to look like:
- 1. Get enough money together to build floating inhabitation for 10,000 people. (A billion dollars is the usual figure mentioned.)
- 2. Build a floating city-state.
- 3. Declare nationhood.
- 4. Wait and see if anyone else wants to move there, to live under your new improved government system where only you are royalty.
Obviously, they all fail at step 1.
The Seasteading concept is a little different. The idea behind Seasteading is to make the technology available for a single family to move to the ocean, and make a living, for something near to the cost of a small building on the land.
Floating “houses” would allow pioneering seasteaders to just “hit the trail” and find their spot on the ocean to start farming fish or engaging in any sort of work that does not require too much space or dirt. They don’t have to declare “nationhood.” They can just start living their lives and see how it works out.
The Seasteading plan looks more like:
- 1. Get enough money to build your own floating home (maybe $100,000? That is 1/10,000 of the billion dollar figure above.)
- 2. Build your floating home.
- 3. Move to the ocean.
- 4. Wait and see if anyone else decides to follow the example of living freely and become your neighbor.
Any plan that only requires people to get involved a few at a time, and invest reasonable sums of money is, of course, far more likely to see some real results.
With modern information flow, the lives of any pioneering seasteaders would become well known to landlubbers. Their increased freedom would become a standard to measure land based governments against. If and when there were a lot of seasteaders, they would quite likely link together in larger groups. However, because each seastead could be moved easily, they would have exactly the conditions described by David Friedman in “The Machinery of Freedom” excerpt above with his analogy of a nation of house-trailers.
For seasteaders this would not be an analogy, it would be real. They could all literally float away from any government that tried to enact bad laws, leaving the bureaucrats to fend for themselves with no citizens to tax. This is exactly the sort of freedom of movement that a Collective Identity based on physical territory can not tolerate. Therefore no similar Collective Identities would likely ever develop in a seasteader community.
Seasteading could be highly beneficial for individuals everywhere, forcing governments to compete with better services (including more freedoms) at lower cost (fewer taxes).
Each seastead would be like its own mini government, and seastead owners
would be “captains of their own ships.” In terms of the analogy we made above – looking at government as a business with a high barrier to entry and a high cost of switching providers – the advent of seasteading could vastly reduce both of these costs. Should seasteading make it cheap to start a new government, and cheap to switch to a new government, all governments would feel pressure to provide better services at a lower cost.
Seasteading might also help change the paradigm of legal jurisdiction and central authority. Unlike collections of sovereign states on land, collective bodies that were the equivalent of the governments of Seastead cities, or nations, could not apply top down laws, but would, rather, have to concern themselves with interactions between sovereign Seasteaders.
This is the way the United States Government started out, with its authority over sovereign states filled with sovereign individuals, limited to interactions between those states. However, the federal government eventually extended its power over the States, because there was no way for the States to easily “float away” (as was proved with a bloody civil war). In “The Machinery of Freedom,” David Friedman writes:
It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can be regulated by Congress.
But perhaps the idea of seasteading can change all that. If the current highest power Collective Identities are based on the idea of Geographical control of real estate, they might well be influenced by the culture of a place that has fluid connections between properties. There is some reason to hope that this might work out well; after all, most of our planet is actually covered in water. It is also worth noting that many of us expect the human race to get off this planet some day, and any political systems we find that work for living on that water will be more applicable to the large open areas of outer space than are the current rules of central authority known to dirt dwellers.
The Founding Fathers and Mothers of Seasteading might be known farther into the future than the Founding Fathers of any nation, as the political systems they create for pioneering the “Next Frontier” will be far more likely to fit the needs of the pioneering spacesteaders on that “Final Frontier” – certainly more so than the rules of any dirt-bound nation.
[Patri and Wayne just might be two of those founding fathers - I will be helping them in any way I can.]