Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-02/mf_seasteading?currentPage=all

by makimaki • 18 years ago

33 36 18 years ago

wired.com

jwb119• 18 years ago

its only briefly mentioned in the graphic to the article, but Sealand has a fascinating history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

Rod2• 18 years ago

The Principality of Sealand even has its own website! http://www.sealandgov.org

In 2000, Wired wrote a cool article on Sealand: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html

rw• 18 years ago

> "The interesting issues are social and legal," says Mikolaj Habryn, a site reliability engineer at Google. "You'll get slavery. You'll get drug dealing. Maybe there'll be polygamous Mormons. The first people involved will inevitably be those who want to do things they can't do on land, and we have to deal with that."

Is total laissez-faire at all desirable?

pietro• 18 years ago

Seasteading is one way to find out.

davidw3• 18 years ago

I am not a libertarian, and think there are serious flaws with their reasoning. However, I think it's great that they're willing to go try and build something of their own. That solves a lot of problems of trying to convince everyone else to do things their way, so I really hope it goes well for them.

shiny• 18 years ago

I don't see how there would be slavery. The only people living on a seastead would be those who wanted to. I don't know how they would get slaves to come with them.

And yeah, if you don't like laissez-faire, you don't have to join a seastead that practices it. That's the whole point -- choosing your system of government.

gravitycop2• 18 years ago

I don't see how there would be slavery. The only people living on a seastead would be those who wanted to. I don't know how they would get slaves to come with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Trafficking

dichro• 17 years ago

(My kibo alert has failed me, and it's far too late to comment here, but I will anyway)

Lots of situations can be interpreted as slavery, and a lot of the creative interpretations are likely to revolve around children.

The quoted comment shorn of conversational context wasn't all that illuminating, so I expanded on it here: http://syncretin.livejournal.com/73427.html

streety2• 18 years ago

With the exception of slavery that quote seems to be on the tame side of what's being suggested.

The result of one of their brain storming sessions: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9742300@N06/2946735005/

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Well, let's see.

Experimenting with various forms of government is what got you to where you are today.

Should we continue? Or is the system of government we have (wherever we are) the most perfect we could ever hope for?

There's no reason to think mankind must always get worse. From time to time he'll get better. "laissez-faire", in this context, is non-sensical, ie, there is no government to allow anything. The concept is beyond that.

Personally, I think some form of representative republic with three branches of government with checks and balances is the right way to go. But even in the U.S., we have virtually a permanent legislative branch by gerrymandering, an executive that is split between only two political parties for over 140 years, and a court system that seems to misunderstand its own role. Is there a reboot button? A way to start over, with perhaps time-limits on laws, a constitutional balanced-budget amendment, (insert own ideas here)

New ideas, even ones which are scary dangerous, are not to be feared. No new ideas? That's what to be afraid of.

anamax2• 18 years ago

> Is total laissez-faire at all desirable?

Why do you care if someone else picks that option?

> You'll get drug dealing. Maybe there'll be polygamous Mormons.

So what?

Even if you choose to live in one of those societies, you don't have to deal (or use) drugs or "marry different".

If your choices are actually superior, you'll prevail over those who made different ones. Why isn't that enough? And, if your choices are not actually better, why are you unwilling to let them prevail....

Prrometheus5• 18 years ago

No, not utopia. Just government with the incentive to govern well because its citizens' exit costs are dramatically reduced. See Patri's original post on the theory of Dynamic Geography here:

http://seasteading.org/seastead.org/new_pages/dynamic_geogra...

Patri also blogs and puts in frequent appearances on the Distributed Republic blog, where I also write.

It should be noted that Dynamic Geography is not explicitly libertarian. Rather, it is meant to align the interest of government more closely with those of its people. Since libertarians started the Dynamic Geography movement, they believe that most seasteads will be libertarian since those policies are believed to be best for the welfare of its residents. But if there were a large demand for non-libertarian societies, the market would meet this demand.

If you think Dynamic Geography is interesting, you also might be interested in Moldbug's Neocameralism, which seeks to replace land governments with for-profit corporations:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwo...

A few weeks ago, I explored several of these ideas on the Distributed Republic, which I dubbed as "structural libertarian" ideas:

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/12/24/down-with...

numair• 18 years ago

Someone needs to do a parody of Wired Magazine. Here's my attempt at an article that would be contained therein:

A solar powered sea colony, built entirely out of carbon nanotubes, whose building plans are open source, Creative Commons share-alike licensed. The construction was crowd-sourced, and the colony profits from the issuance of virtual currency used in transactions involving a Long Tail of virtual goods. It is scheduled to go IPO next year in China.

Rod2• 18 years ago

Congrats for squeezing all that hype Wired has published recently in one single paragraph. Am I the only one who thinks that the average quality of Wired's content has decreased abruptly in recent years?

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

I think it's always been that way and people are just now noticing.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Instead of talking about building these things, they should be talking about a factory to build these things. The factory, with associated reduction in cost as production scales, is the trick.

I'm sure that's what they are doing, but it wasn't clear from the article.

I think it's a great idea. I'd like to see it at about 10% of the current cost, but the idea of competitive voluntary governmental structures is supposed to be what we have now (and we don't). It is in desperate need of re-factoring.

jimbokun2• 18 years ago

"Instead of talking about building these things, they should be talking about a factory to build these things."

You sound like a Java programmer. :)

(Actually, it sounds like a good idea, but I couldn't resist a bit of Reddit level humor.)

streety2• 18 years ago

I've pointed out one of the brainstorming boards in reply to rw talking about whether, "laissez-faire [is] at all desirable?"

There are some other interesting nuggets.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9742300@N06/2946731651/ For prisons and mental health you're going to want all but the very worst individuals to be eventually re-integrated into the community. For me that means they really need to be close to the communities they serve. A spaceport is a potentially interesting idea with a proven track record. That track record works both ways. What advantage would a seasteading community have?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9742300@N06/2946734321/ A patent-free zone may work well for the community but presumably if they want to sell the goods they produce to countries that respect patents they're going to have problems. Data/document storage sounds a little unlikely. I would expect the risks with a seastead to be higher than a building on dry land. They can't compete on security and I doubt they could compete on price either. We may have trouble making new land but in terms of acreage it is still significantly cheaper than seasteads are expected to cost.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9742300@N06/2947590204/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/9742300@N06/2946733673/ Nothing too crazy here though I see no real advantage for seasteading.

dazzawazza• 18 years ago

Given that it's difficult to ship oil without pirates appearing on the horizon I think it will be difficult to create a floating state without weapons, standing armies, police, judges... and before you know it your in the mess we are in. am I being too pessimistic?

jimbokun2• 18 years ago

"Minerva was soon invaded by the nearby kingdom of Tonga..."

No, you're not.

randallsquared• 18 years ago

I think conflating pirates and governmental invasion misses the point. If pirates attack, you can shoot them (and modern-day pirates, at least, seem easily deterred by bigger guns). If a state attacks, such as what happened with Tonga, you're likely to be attacked by other states if you successfully defend yourself.

Prrometheus5• 18 years ago

Commercial vehicles have very large valuable goods/people and valuable goods/security personnel ratios.

I doubt pirates find it profitable to attack seasteads, which are both more troublesome and less lucrative.

sanj2• 18 years ago

Is this anything more than a really fancy gated community for rich people to hide in?

It just seems so brutally selfish.

Prrometheus5• 18 years ago

You should read Patri's post on Dynamic Geography, which I linked to in a post above.

The point is not to be "selfish", but to create higher quality government. Currently the government industry suffers from a high barrier to entry and high consumer lock in. The result has been burgeoning costs and deteriorating quality.

sanj2• 18 years ago

Does anyone want to take a bet that at the first sign of trouble they'll come running to nearby countries asking for (wait for it...) a government bailout?

anamax2• 18 years ago

So what if they ask a neighboring govt for help?

Of course, if you think that one must respond positively to such requests, I could use $100.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

Why would a regular person want to go to a floating utopia? There are no jobs, no agriculture, no manufacturing. Whats the point for a common citizen?

As far as the 10 billion "freedomship"? Whats the point? Why not use that money to hire some mercenaries and go take over some 3rd world country that actually has natural resources you can exploit?

Or better yet buy an election. Lets say it costs you 10 million in funding to win a senate seat. And 2 million to win a seat in the house of representatives. Thats 2 billion for the congress. Which leaves you 8 billion to win the presidency. Even Obama spent less than a billion and his ads were everywhere, surely you could win with 8.

Then for 4-8 years you'll have a carte blanche to change policy to whatever it is you wish.

The problem is that all these "freedom" type ventures, are usually a hobby of the fringe, and they don't have the money to actually do anything they dream about. If the Liberterian party had a 10 billion dollar pocket book, we'd have more than the handful of Liberterians in congress. And these fringers wouldn't have to go looking offshore to try their pipe dreams.

And thats coming from someone who donated money to Ron Paul. Sure I knew he couldn't win...but it doesn't hurt to have an extra point of view in the limelight

ksvs• 18 years ago

Why would there be any fewer jobs than in any urban area?

vaksel2• 18 years ago

urban areas aren't all white collar, there are plenty of other jobs around.

But thats just part of the problem. Why would a company want to build an office building in the middle of an ocean at the huge premium....when they can just build one on land? I mean if a company wants to put its offices in the middle of nowhere there are plenty of cheaper alternatives.

You have to remember, that the cost of living on something like this would be huge, since they'll need to import all their food, and living space would be at a premium.

Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap

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