Category Archives: Seasteading

Piracy gets a lot of reports in the press and is featured in movies, but its a relatively rare phenomenon when compared to land-based crime. According to the State of Maritime Piracy 2013 Report published by Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP), a project of the One Earth Future Foundation, a privately funded non-profit organization:

In East Africa, Somali pirates attacked 23 vessels in 2013, of which 4 were successful.

In the Gulf of Guinea off Western Africa, 100 vessels were attacked, with 56 successful.

In the entire Indian Ocean, 145 suspicious approaches, were reported with 8 exchanging fire.

Dryad Maritime Intelligence, a maritime operations company, confirms that no vessel has ever been hijacked with an armed security team on board. Seacurus, a marine insurance broker willing to pay kidnapping ransoms, says they cut insurance costs by up to 75 percent if ships employ private armed guards. Roughly two-thirds of ships carry private armed security personnel.

Pirates typically lurk offshore of unstable regions in the world, such as the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, or between the 17,500 islands of Indonesia. Much has been made of the live global piracy map provided by the Commercial Crime Services, showing all piracy and armed robbery incidents reported in a year. But it doesnt look as bad as the Spotcrime maps of the major city where the Seasteading Institute is located. These reveal scattered crime, mostly concentrated in bad neighborhoods, with a small percentage involving violence. When a global piracy map covering two-thirds of the earths surface cant accumulate as many incidents as Spotcrime maps of American cities, we know were in relatively safe territory.

If danger within Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia doesnt make us fear all land everywhere, then danger off their coasts shouldnt cause us to fear all oceans everywhere.

There are larger organized criminal groups involved in piracy that capture entire ships and their goods (often worth tens of millions of dollars). These groups have even been known to use forged documents to obtain a new load of cargo from legitimate shippers, and then steal it. It is worth noting that these groups specifically target container ships. This is not at all surprising, given that container ships only have a few crew and vast amounts of nicely boxed cargo. A cruise ship has fewer marketable goods, and many more people to handle. A cruise ship might have 100 times more passengers and crew per dollar of movable cargo than a container ship. A simple cost/benefit analysis suggests why pirates tend to focus on the latter.

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FAQ | The Seasteading Institute

I first wrote about seasteading two years ago, shortly after the Seasteading Institute launched. The brainchild of Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) and others, seasteading is a program for political reform based on a proliferation of self-governing ocean colonies. As I described it in 2008:

A key advantage of seasteads is what Friedman calls dynamic geography, the fact that any given seasteading unit is free to join or leave larger units within seasteading communities. Seasteading platforms would likely band together to provide common services like police protection, but with the key difference that any platform that was dissatisfied with the value it was receiving from such jurisdictions could leave them at any time. [Friedman] argues that this would move power downward, giving smaller units within society greater leverage to ensure the interests of their members are being served.

Seasteading is based on a delightfully bottom-up argument: that the problem with government is the lack of choice. If I dont like my job, my apartment, or my grocery store, I can easily pick up and go somewhere else. The threat of exit induces employers, landlords, and store owners, and the like to treat us well without a lot of top-down oversight. In contrast, switching governments is hard, so governments treat us poorly. Seasteaders aim to change that.

The pragmatic incrementalism of seasteading is also appealing. Friedman doesnt have to foment a revolution, or even win an election, to give seasteading a try. If he can just a few hundred people of the merits of his ideas, they can go try it without needing assistance or support from the rest of us. If the experiment fails, the cost is relatively small.

Yet seasteading is a deeply flawed project. In particular, the theory of dynamic geography is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationships among mobility, wealth creation, and government power. In a real-world seasteading community, powerful economic forces would cripple dynamic geography and leave seasteaders no freer than the rest of us.

To see the problem, imagine if someone developed the technology to transform my apartment building in Manhattan into a floating platform. Its owners could, at any time, float us out into the Hudson river and move to another state or country. Would they do it? Obviously not. They have hundreds of tenants who are paying good money to live in Manhattan. Wed be furious if we woke up one morning and found ourselves off the coast of South Carolina. Things get more, not less, difficult at larger scales. Imagine if Long Island (which includes the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and a lot of suburbs) were a huge ocean-going vessel. The residents of Long Island would overwhelmingly oppose moving; most of them have jobs, friends, familiy, churches, favorite restaurants, and other connections to the rest of the New York metro area. The value of being adjacent to Manhattan swamps whatever benefits there might be to being part of a state with lower taxes or better regulations.

Successful cities need a variety of infrastructureroads, electricity, network connectivity, water and sewer lines, and so forth. At small scales you could probably design this infrastructure to be completely modular. But that approach doesnt scale; at some point you need expensive fixed infrastructuremulti-lane highways, bridges, water mains, subway lines, power plantsthat only make economic sense if built on a geographically stable foundation. Such infrastructure wouldnt be feasible in a dynamic city, and without such infrastructure its hard to imagine a city of even modest size being viable.

I think the seasteaders response to this is that the advantages of increased liberty would be so large that people would be willing to deal with the inconveniences necessary to preserve dynamic geography. But heres the thing: The question of whether the advantages of freedom (in the leave me alone sense) outweigh the benefits of living in large urban areas is not a theoretical one. If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, thats actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods in Wyoming and the government will pretty much leave you alone. Pick a job that allows you to deal in cash and you can probably get away without filing a tax return. In reality, hardly anyone does this. To the contrary, people have been leaving rural areas for high-tax, high-regulation cities for decades.

Almost no ones goal in life is to maximize their liberty in this abstract sense. Rather, liberty is valuable because it enables us to achieve other goals, like raising a family, having a successful career, making friends, and so forth. To achieve those kinds of goals, you pretty much have to live near other people, conform to social norms, and make long-term investments. And people who live close together for long periods of time need a system of mechanisms for resolving disputes, which is to say they need a government.

The power of governments rests not on the immobility of real estate, but from the fact that people want to form durable relationships with other people. The residents of a seastead city would be no more enthusiastic about dynamic geopgrahy than the residents of Brooklyn. Which means that the government of the city would have the same kind of power Mayor Bloomberg has. Indeed, it would likely have more power, because the seastead city wouldnt have New Jersey a few hundred yards away ready to take disaffected residents.

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The Problem with Seasteading | Bottom-up

Ephemerisle, 2009. Photo by Liz Henry via flickr.

To get to Ephemerisle, the floating festival of radical self-reliance, I left San Francisco in a rental car and drove east through Oakland, along the California Delta Highway, and onto Route 4. I passed windmill farms, trailer parks, and fields of produce dotted with multicolored Porta Potties. I took an accidental detour around Stockton, a municipality that would soon declare bankruptcy, citing generous public pensions as a main reason for its economic collapse. After rumbling along the gravely path, I reached the edge of the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta. The delta is one of the most dredged, dammed, and government subsidized bodies of water in the region. Its estimated that it provides two-thirds of Californians with their water supply.

At the marina closest to the festival, I spotted a group of Ephemerislers in swimsuits crammed into a dinghy. I approached them, but they were uninterested in small talk: their engine had run out of gas, and the marina was all out, too. They could give me a ride, they said, if I tracked down fuel. I contemplated the sad marina, its shabby rental boats, the murky water. Almost an hour had passed when the festivals ferry service showed up. At around noon, six of us took off in a small motorboat, speeding past Venice Island, a private sliver of land where Barron Hilton, heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, hunts ducks and puts on an annual July 4th firework display. Five minutes later, Ephemerisle came into sight, bobbing gently in an area called the Mandeville Tip.

It looked, at first, like a shapeless pile of floating junk, but as the boat drew closer, a sense of order emerged. The island was made up of two rows of houseboats, anchored about a hundred feet apart, with a smaller cluster of boats and yachts set off to the west. The boats had been bound together with planks, barrels, cleats, and ropes, assembled ad-hoc by someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of knots and anchors. Residents decorated their decks with banners and flags and tied kayaks and inflatable toys off the sides, giving the overall landscape the cephalopodan quality of raver pants. Dirty socks and plastic dishes and iPads and iPhones littered the decks. An enormous sound system blasted dance music, it turned out, at all hours of the day.

Each of the two-dozen boats at the party had a nameBayesian Conspiracy, Snuggly Nemo, Magic Carpet, Mini-ocracyand each name a personality to match, conveyed by the resident boaters choice of drug, beverage, or degree of exhibitionism. When I arrived, the Ephemerislers were partying in various stages of undress. They had been encouraged to make the space their own, to mind their own business, and to do as they pleased. This was, after all, a celebration of the laissez-faire lifean escape from the oppressive, rule-bound grind of dry land. In this suspended, provisional unreality, everybody was a planner, an economist, a designer, a king. Attendees were ready for everything the elements had in store, but knew escape was just a few clicks away, should the experiment go terribly wrong.

It is apparently a coincidence that Ephemerisles location shared a name with the 16th-century proto-libertarian philosopher Bernard de Mandeville. Mandeville Tip is a breezy point in the middle of the Delta, flanked by levees and a short boat ride away from a former county park. Its named after a 19th-century Californian politician, J. W. Mandeville, but the more well-known Mandeville, of the Fable of the Bees, had much in common with Ephemerisles freewheeling spirit. The Fables most famous lines, cited by Keynes, come from Mandevilles poem entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turnd Honest, which argues that allowing private vices makes for good public policy. Bare Virtue cant make Nations live / In Splendor; they, that would revive / A Golden Age, must be as free / For Acorns, as for Honesty, concludes Mandeville, after bemoaning the unhappiness and lack of prosperity the bees experience while living in a more wholesome, regulated hive. Ephemerisle was its own little beehive of decadence, a floating pillow fort saturated in sex and soft drugs. It billed itself as a gathering of people interested in the possibility of permanent experimental ocean communities, but felt more like Burning Man, if Burners frolicked in the tears of Ludwig Von Mises.

Ephemerisle got its libertarian streak from its founders: the event was originally conceived of by the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit that supports the creation of thousands of floating city-states in international waters. After overseeing the first Ephemerisle in 2009, the Institute handed over responsibility for the festival to the community in 2010it turns out a raucous floating party costs too much for a tiny think tank to insureand last year, the group consisted of 300 amateur boaters, intoxicated partiers, and a committed clan of Seasteaders.

Seasteaders made up about a quarter of Ephemerisles attendees. If they took the operation somewhat more seriously than the young Californians who came just to party and build things, its because they dream of a day when theyll have their pick of floating city-states to live on, work from, and eventually abandon in favor of a different platform when they get bored. Borrowing from the lexicon of evolution, the Seasteaders say that a Cambrian explosion of these new countries will bring about greater freedom of choice for individuals, stimulate competition between existing governments, and provide blank nation-slates for experiments in governance. Ephemerisle is supposed to distill the ambitious project into a weekend that would give people the direct experience of political autonomy. It combines its political ambitions with appeals to back-to-the-land survivalism, off-the-grid drug use, and a vague nostalgia for water parks. There are no tickets, no central organizers, no rules, no rangers to keep you safe, reads the Ephemerisle mission statement. Its a new adventure into an alien environment, with discoveries, adventures, and mishaps along the way.

I was dropped off on the North neighborhoodthe most raucous of the threewhich, in addition to a row of houseboats, had a big platform serving as a communal front yard. One of the boats had pirated a radio station, Radio FMerisle. Other boats had tents pitched on their roofs to accommodate boatless hangers-on. It was a vision straight out of Neal Stephensons cult sci-fi novel Snow Crash (1992), which turned out to be one of the most influential texts in the Seasteading communitybeloved for its dystopian portrayals of life in a virtual, post-statist society. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junk, dhows, dinghies, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam, wrote Stephenson two decades ago, describing an itinerant flotilla full of refugees called The Raft. A good fifty percent of it isnt real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.

As I hopped from boat to boat and onto the platform, I noticed many of the men in attendance had sparkly turquoise polish on their grubby toenails. On one of the houseboats, a body-painting session was in full swing, but the hot California sun quickly reduced the painted swirls to an eczemic crust. Within minutes, I overheard an endless stream of conversations about start-ups, incubators, hackerspaces and apps. Naked bodies ambled by. While looking for a bathroom, I walked in on a couple having sex in a houseboats aft cabin.

I ha
d arranged via Facebook and Paypal to sleep in a houseboat in the South neighborhood of the island, not realizing the logistical difficulties involved: unless a motorboat happened to be passing by, the options for moving from one platform to another were limited to kayaking or pulling oneself across with a rope while balancing on wooden planks. The rope looked precarious, so I found a soggy kayak and paddled over three days worth of luggage, food, and supplies. The South looked a lot like the North, only less busy. Its smaller shared platform housed the Cuddle Gallery, a large white tent adorned with a cloth jellyfish where boatless residents could nap and work by day, and sleep, or cuddle, at night.

My cabin mates were already in the South when I arrived. Cyprien Noel, a soft-spoken French libertarian and an avid advocate for the Seasteading project, had rented the houseboat from the marina with his sister and brother-in-law, who were visiting him in the Bay Area from France. Hed also invited two Chinese engineers from San Jose and a woman in her thirties who had brought with her an espresso machine, a waffle iron, and a milk frother that looked like it hadnt been cleaned in weeks. They planned to stay afloat for four nights and four days.

I asked Cyprien how hed ended up so far from home. He explained, in French, that after trying unsuccessfully to obtain an American visa to work as an entrepreneur, hed won the Green Card lottery and immigrated to the United States about four years ago. He wanted to leave France in part to escape an overbearing state that he found closed and afraid, and today sees Seasteading as a potential solution to the lack of competition in government. Theres no real innovation or genuinely free market in France. I was tired of it, he said, adding, Libertarians in the US dont know how good they have it.

The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer best known for being Milton Friedmans grandson. Although both men are outspoken libertarians, the nonprofit institute insists that it isnt politically motivated. It claims to want more space for political experimentationand the beauty of aquatic governance experiments is that theyre free to fail on their own merits. If we can solve the engineering challenges of Seasteading, two-thirds of the Earths surface becomes open for these political start-ups, explains Friedman, a self-styled cult leader whos known to the community as just Patri. The Seasteaders have chosen as their motto Let a Thousand Nations Blooman apparent spin on Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, a Maoist policy which encouraged dissidents to speak out and then used their views as a pretext to jail them.

The mantra was repeated many times during the Seasteading Institutes third annual conference, which took place one week before Ephemerisle in the basement of the San Francisco Grand Meridien Hotel. The Institute hasnt been officially affiliated with Ephemerisle since 2009, but a number of attendees, many of them Seasteading Institute staffers, had plans to go to the festival and encouraged me to come party with them. A few older donors to the Seasteading cause planned to make appearances at Ephemerisle, expecting to look out of place in the festivals trippy, offbeat surroundings. There was a rumor that Peter Thiel would go, too, but no one could confirm it.

The crowd at the conference was disproportionately white, male (I counted maybe ten women in the room) and wealthy (tickets started at $715), and the vast majority of attendees needed no prompting to profess their tax-hating libertarian views just minutes into a conversation. The junket also brought together a number of academics, who, I later learned, had been courted by the Seasteading Institute because their expertiselegal, environmental, or technicalhappened to contribute to the greater Seasteading project. The experts had no plans to visit Ephemerisle; in fact, the movements radical, libertine side seemed to elude them completely.

Like Ephemerisle, the tenor of the conference was scrappy, defiant, and idealistic. The event was staffed by a group of a dozen Seasteading Institute ambassadors, who proselytize for the cause all over the world, and talks ranged from the highly speculativeSeasteading for Medical Tourism, The Economic Viability of Large Floating Structuresto the practical: Seastead Security, for instance, outlined how water cannons and noise machines can protect the cities from pirates and government agents. A panel of legal experts offered a dense explanation of the legal aspects of Seasteading, which is theoretically possible since no one nation has jurisdiction over the high seas. Still, as one lawyer on the panel pointed out, theres no way of knowing how existing countries will react to this assault on their dignity. The Seasteaders I spoke to were undeterred by the possibility of a seastead shutting down at the hands of a belligerent country or the international community. One Institute ambassador who spoke of Patri Friedman in hushed, reverent tones, told me she was confident that the movement was on the right side of history, and that they would be vindicated in the end.

A Costa Rican professor of agricultural engineering named Ricardo Radulovich gave one of the sessions most impassioned talks, about how terrestrial crops like tomatoes could thrive at sea and how algae could provide a sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuels. I met Radulovich, a dapper, ponytailed man in his fifties, over breakfast on the first day of the conference. After telling me about his passion for seaweed, Radulovich pulled a small vial of dried algae from his pocket and opened it on the table. Between bites of his Continental breakfast, he assured me that the powder, which smelled like fish food, would someday feed the world. He described his involvement in Seasteading as a conversion: I couldnt care less about land anymore. I was able to transcend land. It is too limited for the solutions we need.

The end of the second day of the conference ended with a boat cruise, complete with open bar and live jazz band. The ship looped around the Bay as the sun set. The Seasteading Institutes male employees looked like theyd stepped out of a casino, wearing jaunty fitted suits, sunglasses, fedoras, and silver jewelry. Attendees name-dropped Austrian economists and carried on long discussions about the restrictive, freedom-thwarting nature of American immigration policy. I sat at a table with a clean-cut young Seasteading Institute employee named Charlie, who was explaining to an older gentleman the merits of the Paleo diet, a lifestyle that advocates eating a lot of fat and mimicking the eating habits of our caveman ancestors. Paleo was one of the meal options I was given when I signed up for the conference; I would soon learn that it was popular lifestyle among the new wave of tech-libertarians.

I advocate butter for life extension and feeling vibrant, said Charlie Some foods just give you the urge to lift things. His interlocutor, an Institute ambassador in his fifties, looked a little confused. Im sick of being fat, he said. Can we have a seastead with a bootcamp?

The Institute also held a dinner for its benefactors aboard Forbes Island, a floating restaurant off of Pier 39. The dining area was below the deck and maritime paraphernalia adorned the walls of the dim cabin. The room could have passed for a Midtown social club, with its entrepreneurial young men and its rare steaks and red wine, except that the scene would periodically tilt overa queasy reminder that there was no ground below.

I met Patri Fr
iedman in the apartment of Seasteading donor John Chisholm, on the thirty-third floor of Infinity Towers, a high-rise development in San Franciscos SoMa district. Just over five feet tall with a mane of curly black hair and a wiry beard covering his pointy chin, he sat in a chair by the window, explaining his political philosophy while puffing on an electronic cigarette. Seasteading, Patri told me, was borne out of his personal dissatisfaction with the range, as a consumer. The faulty products that Patri referred to were countries.

Some thirty years ago Patris grandfather famously argued that companies have a social responsibility to increase profits and engage in competition. He didnt advocate for a complete free-for-allbusinesses and individuals, he insisted, must play by the rulesbut governments shouldnt be allowed to thwart free trade by monopolizing industry, either. Patri has adapted this thesis for a globalized ideas economy in which countries and borders dont matter as much as the free flow of people, money, and information. Governments, Patri says, should operate the way companies do, serving their customers (that is, citizens) with the best product possible. And like retail consumers, citizens ought to be able to vote with their feet, converging in self-selected groups and encouraging governments to compete for their allegiances. What if Apples genius designers applied their insights on a user experience to build a city thats as fun to use as an iPad? Patri asked during his talk at the conference.

As the theory goes, increased competition for citizens in the public sector would cause the best systems to attract more people, encouraging the widespread adoption of the most popular forms of governance while precipitating the decline of oppressive ones. Thousands of aquatic petri dishes (or, as his colleagues quip, Patri dishes) would encourage people to try out new forms of government to see which ones worked best. If the market were truly free, this would occur naturally, but the structural constraints of the world we live inthe finite number of countries, the limits on mobility based on a persons citizenship, and the artificially imposed impossibility of starting new countries from scratchinstead creates a monopoly on the governance market. Existing governments have no interest in making themselves vulnerable by opening up their borders, so the only solution is to go create thousands of start-up countries in the legal vacuum of international waters.

Patri came to these conclusions after having searched far and wide for Utopia. After graduating from college with a degree in discrete math in 2002, he led the itinerant and occasionally debauched life of a self-professed trust fund kid: living abroad, playing poker, experimenting with drugs and sex, and traveling the world looking for a country to call his own. The thought of living alone, on an island that is completely mine, quietly building infrastructure and waiting for others to choose to join me, is a serene one, Friedman wrote in a Livejournal entry (since deleted) during an exploratory trip to Costa Rica shortly after September 11. True freedom would be worth long periods of isolation. But how much loneliness can I accept for this little step towards freedom, this slight disentanglement from government?

Patris initial hopes for starting an anarcho-capitalist commune in Costa Rica didnt pan out. He liked the idea of Switzerland and Singapore well enough, but they werent long-term solutions. He even considered buying into a citizenship-by-investment scheme in the Caribbean to escape the US, but the costs, he said, were too high. So Patri returned to California, enrolled in a part-time MBA program at Stanford, and began thinking about more radical ways to opt outstarting, then leaving, an intentional community, and co-founding the Seasteading Institute. To spend the rest of my life living under a society whose rules dont fit with my sense of justicethat just sounded horrible and miserable, Patri told me. So I learned about this whole history of nation-founding and floating city movements, and was like You know, theres something to this. People should be able to start new countries. And I think the ocean is the most realistic way of doing it.

The idea of an island utopia isnt exactly new. Erwin S. Strausss How to Start Your Own Country (1983) has served both as a handbook both for new country founders and for historians of floating-city ventures. Strausss definition of a country is a loose one: sidestepping the mainstream understanding of what constitutes a countrya population, a currency, land, and some sort of law, for startersStrauss focuses on one-man attempts at physical DIY statehood staged on ships, fortresses, and artificial land masses.

In 1965, Ernest Hemingways little brother Leicester announced himself the president of the Republic of New Atlantis, an eight-by-thirty-foot barge anchored near the west coast of Jamaica, and later claimed sovereignty over a larger barge near the Bahamas. A few years later, an Objectivist businessman named Werner K. Stiefel founded Operation Atlantis, a new country venture he planned to develop on an island in the Caribbean. Operation Atlantis was originally run out of a motel in upstate New York, where Stiefel lodged volunteers in exchange for their labor. His staff spent several years preparing a ship that finally launched off the East Coast in December 1969, but the Atlanteans took a few liberties with the ships design, according to Strauss, and the boat sank in a hurricane. Then in 1972 a Lithuanian immigrant-turned Las Vegas real estate mogul named Michael J. Oliver hired an Australian dredging ship for $10,000 a week to fill in two reefs with sand 260 miles northeast of the Kingdom of Tonga. He filled fifteen acres, hoping that investors would finance the remaining 1,485 acres to build an island, but the King of Tonga intervened, sending a gang of Tongan convicts to plant a Tongan flag, sing the Tongan national anthem, and claim the land for the Kingdom.

The best-known self-made country is the Principality of Sealand, founded by Paddy Roy Bates, a British pirate radio operator who moved into a World War II anti-aircraft tower off the coast of Great Britain. Bates declared his independence on September 2, 1967 and went to great lengths to preserve his honor, firing shots at repairmen working on a nearby tower and taking some German businessmen hostage after they attempted a purported coup dtat. About ten years ago Prince Roy started a data hosting service called HavenCo with entrepreneur and cyberpunk author Sean Hasting, hoping to build a relatively unregulated alternative to existing server farms on Sealand. The experiment was short-lived: it turned out that the rig-like platform lacked the necessary infrastructure to host sophisticated servers, and when Hastings dropped out for personal reasons in 2002 there was no one to lead the way.

Four years later, a fire broke out on Sealand. The Bateses were in Spain at the time; the only Sealand resident, a security guard, was rescued by the British Royal Air Force. The damage reached half a million pounds, but authorities decided not to charge Sealand for the trouble.

A more contemporary example of aquatic self-governance is Freewinds, a cruise ship chartered by the Church of Scientology (another California-based, sci-fi inspired faction of privileged, somewhat paranoid individuals). Freewinds houses the Sea Org, the groups elite junior corps, and flies a Panamanian flag, functioning essentially as its own floating nation. But its anything but idyllic: a number of former residents have publicly complained about the
slavelike conditions and environmental hazards on the ship.

The vast majority of the ventures in How to Start Your Own Country are either the follies of egocentric young men or thinly veiled tax and regulation avoidance schemes. None of the countries Strauss describes were ever recognized by other, existing countries, or by the UN, which is generally how new states gain legitimacy. Aware of this history, the Seasteading Institute has done what it can to distance itself from the comical undoings of new countries pastcouching its free-market theories in techno-utopian language and using the abracadabra of innovation as its crutch. People dismiss the idea as crackpotish, remarked John Chisholm, the donor, at the conference. But if you address them as you would your fellow futurist, it might be more palatable.

The Institute has also focused on the idea of creating artificial landmass on its owna way, perhaps, to demand legitimacy from those unwilling to see ships or barges as proper countries. Recast in the language of the start-up economy, the spectacular failures of DIY countries become noble enterprises. And, like start-up companies, they just might succeed in changing the way we see the worldand make a few people very, very rich. The countrys running on an operating system from 1778, Patri told me. If cars did that, wed be riding horses.

As he spoke, Patri gestured toward the great beyond. The view was breathtaking: wall-to-wall windows overlooked the Bay Bridge, and the water looked like an inky, peaceful swimming pool. Lookthats a container ship coming out of the Port of Oakland, going out to the bridge, he said, pointing to a large vessel with the giddy enthusiasm of a small child. It was easy, from three hundred feet up, to imagine a seastead in its place.

After I met my cabin-mates on Ephemerisles South Island, I kayaked back to the North to catch the senior director of the Seasteading Institute introducing a series of lectures on the main platform The state of Seasteading is strong! declared Randy Hencken, a ropey man with dragon tattoos covering his chest and back. Hencken, who had recently left a job at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, explained that a dearth of employment and freedom on land would precipitate the development of seasteads over the next two decades. The Institute had already made progress: an anonymous donor had given them a 275-foot cruise ship, and a general-audience book about Seasteading will be published by Simon & Schuster later this year.

The first presentation showcased the jellypus, an iPad-controlled luminescent jellyfish that sat about a foot under water, pulsing with light to the rhythm of whatever song was on. Then Michael Hartl, a bald, affable physicist who told me he writes off Ephemerisle as a business expense in his taxes (networking) led a pirate shanty sing-along in a pitch-perfect baritone. Hartl embodies what tech entrepreneurs call creative disruption: he made a name for himself by pressing mathematicians to stop using Pi as a constant and instead rely on the more elegant Tau, the ratio of a circles circumference to its radius. Hartl has also taught astrophysics at Caltech and mentored Thiel Fellowscollege students whom Peter Thiel, perhaps the worlds most famous disrupter, paid $100,000 to drop out of school and start companies. Ever since I was a little kid, Ive wanted to be a pirate, Hartl beamed. And now Im doing it!

A young man named Kevin then went on at length about how large doses of electrolytesthe equivalent of twenty Gatoradescan make you smarter.

What about Creatine? asked an audience member. Does Creatine make you smarter?

Only if youre a vegetarian, replied Kevin. Creatine only makes you smarter if you dont eat meat.

In addition to seeing government as just another problem that technology can overcome, Seasteaders try to hack every aspect of their existence down to their self-care regimens. Many participate in health and fitness regimes like the Paleo Diet and Crossfitlifestyles that dovetail nicely with more mainstream libertarian retro-futurism, which argues humans ought to live more like they did before their freedom was impinged upon by large state governments, all while enjoying the enhancements of technological innovation forged in the free market. It wasnt just Charlie from the boat cruise who proselytized the health benefits of butter: the unofficial beverage of Ephemerisle was Bulletproof Coffeeblack coffee with half a stick of butter mixed inwhich advocates claim increases their mental acuity and helps them stay trim. The inventor of the concoction claims to have increased his IQ by twenty points and lost 100 pounds as a result of his experiments hacking his biology. He was at Ephemerisle, too and later, in an email, told me hed had a great time.

This tendency toward engineering everything spills into the social sphere. To supplement real or perceived romantic shortcomings, some Seasteaders dabble in pickup artistry, a method of seducing women thats been likened to an algorithm and self-legitimized by handpicked data and bunk theories about evolution. The male vanity coursing under all this life-hacking may explain why so few women participate in projects like these. While theres little overt sexism in the gay-friendly, drug-happy Seasteading community, theres nothing preventing a hypothetical start-up country from regressing into a patriarchal, Paleo-Futuristic state. If anything, the movements reverence for caveman essentialism suggests the latterthat real goal is to remake civilization, starting from a primal, natural condition that they can revive in the modern world thanks to new technologies.

Or maybe the goal is to build Facebook, the country. Seasteading rhetoric echoes early visions of the Internet, recalling John Perry Barlows web manifesto, The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Perry liberally employs the metaphor of a seamless, timeless, borderless ocean to describe the web, and his vehement resistance to any form of Internet regulation has a real-life parallel in the no-countries, no-rules ethos that Seasteaders embrace. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks, wrote Barlow, on behalf of Cyberspace, in 1996. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. The idea of the Internet promised an impossible libertarian dream: a way to be alone, together.

The actual Internet has largely failed to live up to Barlows ideal of fluid, seamless space. But that hasnt stopped Seasteading from attempting to recreate his vision IRL. At Ephemerisle, Internet piracy manifested in hacked radio stations and in the shanties of actual pirates. Memesbacon, cuddling, BFFLswere acted out offline. There was even a rumor that someone had brought a cat onto one of the houseboats. The festival was conceived of and organized almost entirely online; it has its own Facebook page, a Twitter, a detailed wiki with planning notes, evaluations, and a postmortem for the past few events.

Its no coincidence that members of the online Reddit community, all male, made plans independently of the Seasteaders to take over an island in the Caribbean. The project failed.

On Saturday morning, I woke up at sunrise after having slept on a foldout bench in the front section of our houseboat. The wind had picked up dramatically overnight, and when I s
tepped onto the deck for some fresh air I nearly lost my balance. Over the next four hours, the gusts proceeded to tear the floating cities apart. The platforms rocked on the water and the inflatable rafts tied to out boat now blew violently onto our deck, knocking over chairs and crashing into the doorframe.

I watched from my boat as the islands deteriorated in slow motion. First, the North side rotated 90 degrees; then, it began to lose chunks of its main platform, one by one. The South began to wobble precariously, and a few rugged types whod taken charge of the situation were yelling orders at each other from their decks and frantically Tweeting alerts to other islands. The turquoise toenail polish the men had applied the day before sparkled on their bloodied feet as they attempted to untangle rogue anchors from the riverbed and fold up the Cuddle Gallery, which was on the verge of blowing away.

Ephemerisle had entered a state of emergency, and its residents were more than ready to declare martial law. The North is floating toward us! barked a young man from outside. Stay in your houseboats! When I tried to escape my stuffy cabin and climb up to the roof, a second young man gave me a brusque lecture on safety.

By mid-morning, the two main cities had fractured into a half dozen stranded units floating alone in the turbulent waters. The West had vanished entirelyone of the boats had drifted off and gotten stuck by a nearby levee, while most of the others took off to other parts of the river. There was no reliable form of communication between the boats. A few people had radios. Some yelled. The rest of us had half-charged phones with weak Internet connections. Transport, as always, was limited.

Confined to a few square feet with a leaky trash bag and too many bodies in one cabin, my cabin-mates and I showered with tepid river water and nursed hangovers with our dwindling supply of store-bought liquids. Dirty, smelly, and bored, we sat around and tried to make small talk. We had nothing to talk about; aquatic life had grown tiresome.

Sorry it didnt work out quite as planned, you guys, said Cyprien. Its not so fun being isolated. The Chinese engineers napped, and Cypriens relatives hung out at the back of the boat looking bored. On the other end, some people just took off and went home. Im done with this. Goodbye! yelled Michael Hartl from his deck.

As Hartls boat rumbled away into the distance, a sense of relief washed over the South. We remembered that nothing bound us to this placewe could leave. No countries, no rules: when Id asked Patri what would happen if a seastead turned into a dictatorship, or the Scientologists Freewinds ship, hed advocated for the right of exit. It is this rightultimately, the right to choose ones neighborswas what made Seasteading so desirable in the first place. You could build a utopia, but you had no obligation to stick with it. After all, one quality of utopia, at least libertarian utopia, was that you could leave anytime. So we did.

Ephemerisle, though, went on through Sunday, and ended on a happy note. Those who persevered pieced what was left of the two remaining neighborhoods back together when the wind died down, and continued their revelry late into the night with just one notable incident. At around 5 PM a young man decided to go skinny-dipping in the river. He had dropped acid earlier in the day, so a fellow Ephemerisler, worried about his safety, coaxed him out and called the Coast Guard over to the islands for guidance. The man was standing on a houseboat wearing nothing but his blanket when the officers arrived; when he saw them, he dropped the sheet, jumped in the water again, and swam away. He reached a levee, scrambled out of the water, and took off running through the reedsa free man living a free life, in the radical wilderness of the American West.

But the law was onto him, and the law won: within minutes, the naked white male was caught, cuffed, and escorted back to dry land. The Ephemerislers watched from their boats.

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From Seasteading

A seastead is a structure which is safe to live on in international waters. The goal is to enable dynamic geography where people can pick which legal system they are in without having to box up their stuff and change houses. Since the focus is on living on the water, not getting anywhere quickly or carrying heavy cargo, a seastead design can sacrifice speed through the water and cargo capacity to achieve lower costs per square foot and greater stability than a boat/yacht/ship of similar price. The goal of seasteading is to make a community of people living on affordable seasteads.

There are several different lines of thinking about what seasteads should look like and the best strategies to get them built. The table below shows the main visions for what we should be working on to advance seasteading.

Note that the above approaches are not mutually exclusive, except in the sense that if you spend your time and money on one you don't have it to spend on another.

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Seastead - Seasteading

From Seasteading

Home Page and floatingislands.com and blog.floatingislands.com Most recent stuff at http://www.islandboys.ai. Here is a video with some recent thinking.

There are several main ideas for bringing seasteads to real life. I have written up something on my views about seasteading which has been called the "Single Family Seasteading Manifesto".

I have made proposals for:

I am interested in scale models and have made and tested a group of models. I am willing to test any seastead models that anyone sends me, no charge. I have easy access to a variety of natural waves and a Casio EX-FH20 that can make really nice slow motion video.

I am interested in possible ideas for Seastead ventures. I like these:

I have started a page on big wave videos and some platform videos.

I think each seastead could use a kite and sea anchor to control movement on an annual migration.

I think Convoy Communications would avoid expensive satellite communications costs.

I think a good way to move people or cargo between seasteads is with a SkyWay.

Looks like there are hurricane resistant Life rafts.

I think Cost estimation is important.

Started pages on IP and Patents.

I have updated the HangingBallast using video from some of my experiments.

I found some online charts of the San Fransisco Bay.

I think we need to understand what is Acceptable Motion for seasteads.

I think we need to use some type of Low Cost Wave Tank so we can afford to do lots of experiments. This is a new design space that needs to be explored, so there are many possible things to try.

I would like to thank those that have helped fund my experiments.

I think efficient Thrusters are key for seastead operation. The Propeller Efficiency issues mean we need large propellers for slow seasteads.

Trying to put together a single family seastead budget estimate.

I think Prizes are the most efficient way to get something new like a seastead developed. The trick is designing the prize. I have posted a Ephemerisle_Contest prize idea.

I think UAVs will be important for seasteading.

I have built a 1:5 scale prototype large enough for 3 people. I am getting ready to take it on a second experimental voyage.

Thinking a bit about a WaterWalker3 idea where opposite buoys are connected together by a rope on pulleys.

I have a new baby coming soon and am trying to finish off and release some software for a startup this year. So I won't be spending nearly as much time or dream-cycles on seasteading stuff in 2009 as I did in 2008. But seasteading has been a passion of mine for more than 20 years and I will be back at it in the future.

Some things I am thinking about doing next.

Organized links to different strategies to bring about Seasteads.

"You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. The same is true of airplanes. " Freeman Dyson

"Art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is calculating." Steven K Roberts. I think Seasteading needs to be careful to have both the imagination and engineering. I think just designing an oil platform but removing the tension legs is not enough imagination and not good engineering. Drawing pretty pictures of floating cities without engineering behind them is just art. Only with both imagination and engineering can seasteading be made to work.

"Be the change you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

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User:Vincecate - Seasteading

Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, is sick of paying taxes, and hes not going to stand for it any more. Rather than unilaterally secede from the government and face the indignity of being hauled to court as a tax-defying sovereign citizen, however, the super-rich hedge fund manager plans to start his own country.

Thiels no dummy: He knows that all the land on earth is already controlled by some nation or another.

Thats why he plans to establish his new country on the high seas. Thiel is an avid fan of seasteading, an ultra-libertarian concept in which autonomous ocean communities stationed in international waters would experiment with different forms of governance, competing for citizens fealty and wealth.

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, Thiel wrote in a 2009 manifesto published by the libertarian Cato Institute. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron. Bemoaning the fate of the smartest libertarians who, he claims, were so bummed out by the state of capitalism that they escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it, he outlined a vision of the future free from the quixotic desires of the poor, stupid, and X-chromosomed among us.

The driving ideal of PayPal, he wrote, was to create a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were.

Seasteading, he continued, is merely another means of achieving freedom from government control.

Seasteading is the brainchild of Patri Friedman, a former Google software engineer whose grandfather, Milton Friedman, was the Nobel Prize-winning free market economist. In 2008, Thiel provided the seed money to found, along with Friedman, the Seasteading Institute, which according to its website envision[s] a vibrant startup sector for governments.

The world needs a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to test out their ideas, it says. All land on Earth is already claimed, making the oceans humanitys next frontier.

In other words, seasteading would allow experimentation with all kinds of cool governments. Always wanted to live on an anarcho-syndicalist commune? How about a benevolent dictatorship? Or maybe your ideal is something like the Principality of Outer Baldonia, a now-defunct micro-nation off the coast of Nova Scotia whose declaration of independence endowed fishermen with inalienable rights including the right to lie and be believed, and the right of freedom from questioning, nagging, shaving, interruption, women, taxes, politics, war, monologues, cant and inhibition. Outer Baldonia even had its own currency the Tunar, named for a game fish abundant in its waters.

With seasteading, all this and more would be possible.

Thiel already is helping to fund one floating utopia Blueseed, a proposed vessel to be anchored in international waters 12 miles off the coast of Silicon Valley. Blueseed, which plans to launch by early 2014, intends to circumvent U.S. immigration law and be a haven for the boldest, brightest, and most talented tech entrepreneurs from around the world.

The Seasteading Institute has even bigger plans. Last November, it released a location study for larger, untethered ship-based and large-scale city scenarios, which took into account the factors that would be required for more elaborate autonomous ocean communities.

Seasteading isnt the only sci-fi idea Thiel has invested in. In 2009, the quirky libertarian pledged up to $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds research on Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). In 2004, Aubrey de Grey, the foundations gaunt and long-bearded founder, told the BBC he thinks the first person who will live to 1,000 could be 60 already.

At 44, having invested in avoiding both death and taxes, Thiel must be feeling ahead of the game.

Continued here:

PayPal Founder Peter Thiel Continues to Tout Anti-Government ...

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The Seasteading Institute Discussion Forum

I first wrote about seasteading two years ago, shortly after the Seasteading Institute launched. The brainchild of Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) and others, seasteading is a program for political reform based on a proliferation of self-governing ocean colonies. As I described it in 2008:

A key advantage of seasteads is what Friedman calls dynamic geography, the fact that any given seasteading unit is free to join or leave larger units within seasteading communities. Seasteading platforms would likely band together to provide common services like police protection, but with the key difference that any platform that was dissatisfied with the value it was receiving from such jurisdictions could leave them at any time. [Friedman] argues that this would move power downward, giving smaller units within society greater leverage to ensure the interests of their members are being served.

Seasteading is based on a delightfully bottom-up argument: that the problem with government is the lack of choice. If I dont like my job, my apartment, or my grocery store, I can easily pick up and go somewhere else. The threat of exit induces employers, landlords, and store owners, and the like to treat us well without a lot of top-down oversight. In contrast, switching governments is hard, so governments treat us poorly. Seasteaders aim to change that.

The pragmatic incrementalism of seasteading is also appealing. Friedman doesnt have to foment a revolution, or even win an election, to give seasteading a try. If he can just a few hundred people of the merits of his ideas, they can go try it without needing assistance or support from the rest of us. If the experiment fails, the cost is relatively small.

Yet seasteading is a deeply flawed project. In particular, the theory of dynamic geography is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationships among mobility, wealth creation, and government power. In a real-world seasteading community, powerful economic forces would cripple dynamic geography and leave seasteaders no freer than the rest of us.

To see the problem, imagine if someone developed the technology to transform my apartment building in Manhattan into a floating platform. Its owners could, at any time, float us out into the Hudson river and move to another state or country. Would they do it? Obviously not. They have hundreds of tenants who are paying good money to live in Manhattan. Wed be furious if we woke up one morning and found ourselves off the coast of South Carolina. Things get more, not less, difficult at larger scales. Imagine if Long Island (which includes the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and a lot of suburbs) were a huge ocean-going vessel. The residents of Long Island would overwhelmingly oppose moving; most of them have jobs, friends, familiy, churches, favorite restaurants, and other connections to the rest of the New York metro area. The value of being adjacent to Manhattan swamps whatever benefits there might be to being part of a state with lower taxes or better regulations.

Successful cities need a variety of infrastructureroads, electricity, network connectivity, water and sewer lines, and so forth. At small scales you could probably design this infrastructure to be completely modular. But that approach doesnt scale; at some point you need expensive fixed infrastructuremulti-lane highways, bridges, water mains, subway lines, power plantsthat only make economic sense if built on a geographically stable foundation. Such infrastructure wouldnt be feasible in a dynamic city, and without such infrastructure its hard to imagine a city of even modest size being viable.

I think the seasteaders response to this is that the advantages of increased liberty would be so large that people would be willing to deal with the inconveniences necessary to preserve dynamic geography. But heres the thing: The question of whether the advantages of freedom (in the leave me alone sense) outweigh the benefits of living in large urban areas is not a theoretical one. If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, thats actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods in Wyoming and the government will pretty much leave you alone. Pick a job that allows you to deal in cash and you can probably get away without filing a tax return. In reality, hardly anyone does this. To the contrary, people have been leaving rural areas for high-tax, high-regulation cities for decades.

Almost no ones goal in life is to maximize their liberty in this abstract sense. Rather, liberty is valuable because it enables us to achieve other goals, like raising a family, having a successful career, making friends, and so forth. To achieve those kinds of goals, you pretty much have to live near other people, conform to social norms, and make long-term investments. And people who live close together for long periods of time need a system of mechanisms for resolving disputes, which is to say they need a government.

The power of governments rests not on the immobility of real estate, but from the fact that people want to form durable relationships with other people. The residents of a seastead city would be no more enthusiastic about dynamic geopgrahy than the residents of Brooklyn. Which means that the government of the city would have the same kind of power Mayor Bloomberg has. Indeed, it would likely have more power, because the seastead city wouldnt have New Jersey a few hundred yards away ready to take disaffected residents.

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The Problem with Seasteading | Bottom-up

Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside the territory claimed by any government. Most proposed seasteads have been modified cruising vessels. Other proposed structures have included a refitted oil platform, a decommissioned anti-aircraft platform, and custom-built floating islands.[1]

No one has created a state on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. The Principality of Sealand is a disputed micronation formed on a discarded sea fort near Suffolk, England.[2] The closest things to a seastead that have been built so far are large ocean-going ships sometimes called "floating cities", and smaller floating islands.

The term combines the words sea and homesteading. At least two people independently began using it: Ken Neumeyer in his book Sailing the Farm (1981) and Wayne Gramlich in his article "Seasteading Homesteading on the High Seas" (1998).[3]

Outside the Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles (370km), which countries can claim according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the high seas are not subject to the laws of any sovereign state other than the flag under which a ship sails. Examples of organizations using this possibility are Women on Waves, enabling abortions for women in countries where abortions are subject to strict laws, and offshore radio stations which were anchored in international waters. Like these organizations, a seastead would take advantage of the absence of laws and regulations outside the sovereignty of nations, and choose from among a variety of alternate legal systems such as those underwritten by "Las Portadas".[4]

"When Seasteading becomes a viable alternative, switching from one government to another would be a matter of sailing to the other without even leaving your house," said Patri Friedman at the first annual Seasteading conference.[5][6][7]

The Seasteading Institute (TSI), founded by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman on April 15, 2008, is an organization formed to facilitate the establishment of autonomous, mobile communities on seaborne platforms operating in international waters.[5][8][9] Gramlichs 1998 article "SeaSteading Homesteading on the High Seas" outlined the notion of affordable steading, and attracted the attention of Friedman with his proposal for a small-scale project.[3] The two began working together and posted their first collaborative book online in 2001, which explored aspects of seasteading from waste disposal to flags of convenience.

The project picked up mainstream exposure in 2008 after having been brought to the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who contributed $500,000 to fund the creation of The Seasteading Institute and has since spoken out on behalf of its viability, as seen in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian",[10] published online by Cato Unbound. The Seasteading Institute has received widespread media attention from sources such as CNN, Wired,[5]Prospect,[11]The Economist[9] Business Insider,[12] and BBC[13] American journalist John Stossel wrote an article about seasteading in February 2011 and hosted Friedman on his show on the Fox Business Network.[14]

On July 31, 2011, Friedman stepped down from the role of executive director, and became chairman of the board. Friedman was replaced by Randolph Hencken. Concomitantly, the institute's directors of business strategy and legal strategy went on to start Blueseed, the first commercial seasteading venture.[15]

Between May 31 and June 2, 2012, The Seasteading Institute held its third annual conference.[16]

In the spring of 2013,[17] the Institute launched The Floating City Project,[18] which combines principles of both seasteading and startup cities,[19] by seeking to locate a floating city within the territorial waters of an existing nation, rather than the open ocean. The institute argued that it would be easier to engineer a seastead in relatively calm, shallow waters; that the location would make it easier for residents to reach as well as to acquire goods and services from existing supply chains; and that a host nation would place a floating city within the international legal framework.

The Institute raised $27,082 from 291 funders in a crowdfunding campaign[20] and commissioned DeltaSync[21] to design a floating city concept for The Floating City Project. In December 2013, the concept report was published. The Seasteading Institute has also been collecting data from potential residents through a survey.[22]

The first seasteads are projected to be cruise ships adapted for semi-permanent habitation. Cruise ships are a proven technology, and they address most of the challenges of living at sea for extended periods of time. The cost of the first shipstead was estimated at $10M.[23]

The Seasteading Institute has been working on communities floating above the sea in spar buoys, similar to oil platforms.[24] The project would start small, using proven technology as much as possible, and try to find viable, sustainable ways of running a seastead.[25] Innovations that enable full-time living at sea will have to be developed. The cruise ship industry's development suggests this may be possible.

A proposed design for a custom-built seastead is a floating dumbbell in which the living area is high above sea level, which minimizes the influence of waves. In 2004, research was documented in an online book that covers living on the oceans.[26]

The Seasteading Institute focuses on three areas: building a community, doing research and building the first seastead in the San Francisco Bay. In January 2009, the Seasteading Institute patented a design for a 200-person resort seastead, ClubStead, about a city block in size, produced by consultancy firm Marine Innovation & Technology. ClubStead marked the first major development in hard engineering, from extensive analysis to simulations, of the seasteading movement.[9][26][27]

At the Seasteading Institute Forum, an idea arose to create an island from modules.[28] There are several different designs for the modules, with a general consensus that reinforced concrete is the most proven, sustainable and cost-effective material for seastead structures,[29] as indicated by use in oil platforms and concrete submarines. The company AT Design Office recently made another design using the modular island method.[30]

Many architects and firms have created designs for floating cities, including Vincent Callebaut,[31][32]Paolo Soleri[33] and companies such as Shimizu and Tangram 3DS.[34]Marshall Savage also discussed building tethered artificial islands in his book The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, with several color plates illustrating his ideas. Some design competitions have also yielded designs, such as those produced by Evolo and other companies.[35][36][37]

In 2008, Friedman and Gramlich had hoped to float the first prototype seastead in the San Francisco Bay by 2010[38][39] but 2010 plans were to launch a seastead by 2014.[40] The Seasteading Institute projected in 2010 that the seasteading population would exceed 150 individuals in 2015.[41]

The Seasteading Institute held its first conference in Burlingame, California, October 10, 2008. 45 people from 9 countries attended.[42] The second Seasteading conference was significantly larger, and held in San Francisco, California, September 2830, 2009.[43][44] The third Seasteading conference took place on May 31 - June 2, 2012.[45]

As of 2011[update], Blueseed was a
company working on launching a ship near Silicon Valley which was to serve as a visa-free startup community and entrepreneurial incubator. The shipstead planned to offer living and office space, high-speed Internet connectivity, and regular ferry service to the mainland.[46][47] The project aims included overcoming the difficulty organizations face obtaining US work visas, intending to use the easier B-1/B-2 visas to travel to the mainland, while work will be done on the ship.[46][47][dated info] Blueseed founders Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija met when both were employees of The Seasteading Institute.[46][47]

Seasteading has been imagined numerous times in pop culture in recent years.

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Seasteading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seasteading, ein Kofferwort aus engl. sea (Meer) und homesteading (Besiedlung, Inbesitznahme), ist das Konzept der Schaffung von Sttten dauerhaften Wohn- und Lebensraums auf dem Meer, genannt Seasteads, auerhalb der von den Regierungen jedweder Nation beanspruchten Gebiete.

Mindestens zwei Menschen haben unabhngig voneinander den Begriff geprgt, Ken Neumeyer in seinem Buch Sailing the Farm (1981) und Wayne Gramlich in seinem Artikel Seasteading Homesteading auf hoher See (1998). Auf Deutsch taucht gelegentlich der synonyme Begriff Seenahme auf, der in Anlehnung an Landnahme geschaffen wurde.

Auerhalb der ausschlielichen Wirtschaftszone von 200Seemeilen (370km), welche die Lnder nach Seerechtsbereinkommen der Vereinten Nationen beanspruchen knnen, unterliegt die hohe See keinen Gesetzen auer denen des Staates, unter dessen Flagge ein Schiff fhrt. Beispiele von Organisationen, die von dieser Mglichkeit Gebrauch machen, sind Women on Waves, die Frauen eine Abtreibung ermglichen, in deren Lndern Abtreibungen strengeren Regeln als in den Niederlanden unterworfen sind, sowie Radio Veronica, ein Piratensender in der Nordsee, der in den Sechziger Jahren auf die Niederlande gerichtet war. Wie diese Organisationen knnte ein Seastead Vorteile aus den losen Rechts- und Verwaltungsvorschriften schpfen, die auerhalb der Souvernitt der Nationen bestehen, und unter weitgehender Selbstverwaltung stehen.

Das Seasteading-Institut wurde am 15. April 2008 von Wayne Gramlich und Patri Friedman in Sunnyvale (Kalifornien) mit dem Ziel gegrndet, die Errichtung autonomer, mobiler Gemeinschaften auf schwimmenden Plattformen in internationalen Gewssern zu erleichtern.[1] Gramlichs Artikel SeaSteading Homesteading auf hoher See aus dem Jahre 1998 erlutert den Begriff der erschwinglichen Besiedlung und zog mit seinem Vorschlag fr ein kleines Projekt die Aufmerksamkeit von Friedman auf sich. Die beiden begannen zusammenzuarbeiten und verffentlichten im Jahre 2001 ihr erstes gemeinsames Buch[2] im Internet. Dieses behandelt alle erdenklichen Aspekte des Seasteadings, von der Abfallbeseitigung bis zur Ausflaggung.

Das Projekt wurde im Jahr 2008 der breiten ffentlichkeit bekannt, nachdem PayPal-Grnder Peter Thiel darauf aufmerksam geworden war, der 500.000 US-Dollar in das Projekt investierte und sich seitdem fr dessen Realisierung ausgesprochen hat, dies zuletzt in seinem Aufsatz The Education of a Libertarian, online verffentlicht von Cato Unbound. Dem Seasteading-Institut ist daher weitgefcherte und mannigfaltige Aufmerksamkeit der Medien zuteilgeworden, von Quellen wie CNN und Wired Magazine.

Wenn Seasteading eine realisierbare Alternative wird, braucht man fr den Wechsel von einer Regierung zur anderen nur zur anderen hinzusegeln und muss dafr nicht einmal das Haus verlassen. so Friedman auf der ersten Seasteading-Jahreskonferenz.

Seit 2011 hat das Seasteading-Institut ein Botschafterprogramm,[3] mit dem durch lokale Botschafter die Idee weltweit weiter verbreitet werden soll. Botschafter werden nach Prfung durch das Seasteading-Institut ernannt und mssen sich verpflichten, regelmig an der Verbreitung der Idee mitzuarbeiten.

Das Seasteading-Institut hielt am 10. Oktober 2008 seine erste Jahreskonferenz in Burlingame, Kalifornien ab. 45 Personen aus 9 Lndern nahmen daran teil.

Die zweite jhrliche Seasteading-Konferenz fand in San Francisco, Kalifornien, vom 28.30. September 2009 statt.[4]

Eine weitere Konferenz, in der hauptschlich die geschftlichen Mglichkeiten des Seasteading errtert wurden, fand vom 31. Mai bis zum 2. Juli 2012 in San Francisco statt.[5]

Bei den meisten der vorgeschlagenen Seasteads handelt es sich um modifizierte Kreuzfahrtschiffe. Bei anderen vorgeschlagenen Strukturen handelt es sich um umgerstete Bohrinseln, stillgelegte Flak-Plattformen, bewegliche schwimmende Inseln und mageschneiderte knstliche Inseln. Das Seasteading-Institut arbeitet an einem neuen Ansatz, der Gemeinschaften vorsieht, die ber dem Meer auf Spar Bojen schwimmen, hnlich wie bei lplattformen. Das Projekt wrde zunchst klein anfangen, mit bewhrter Technologie so weit wie mglich, und dann versuchen, tragfhige und nachhaltige Wege zu finden, eine Seastead zu fhren. Innovationen, die ermglichen, stndig auf See zu leben, mssten entwickelt werden. Die Entwicklungen der Kreuzfahrtschiff-Industrie deutet an, dass dies mglich ist.

Ein vorgeschlagener Entwurf fr eine mageschneiderte Seastead ist eine schwimmende Hantel, in denen der Wohnbereich hoch ber dem Meeresspiegel liegt, was den Einfluss der Wellen minimiert. In den letzten paar Jahren wurde die Forschung in einem Online-Buch ber das Leben auf den Ozeanen dokumentiert.

Das Seasteading-Institut konzentriert sich auf drei Bereiche: erstens Aufbau einer Gemeinschaft, zweitens Forschung und drittens Untersttzung fr den Bau der ersten Seasteads. Das Seasteading-Institut selbst plant nicht den Bau eines eigenen Seasteads, da es sich selbst als Non-Profit-Organisation sieht, die fr einen geschftlichen Bau und Betrieb von Seasteads ungeeignet ist. Diese Aufgabe soll Unternehmern und Firmen zufallen.

Im Januar 2009 lie sich das Seasteading-Institut einen Entwurf fr ein Seastead patentieren, ClubStead genannt. Dieses htte die Gre eines Wohnviertels und bte Wohnraum fr 200 Personen. Der Entwurf wurde vom Beratungsunternehmen Marine Innovation & Technologie hergestellt. ClubStead ist die erste grere Entwicklung der Seasteading-Bewegung in der Konstruktion, von umfangreicher Analyse bis zur Simulation.

Ephemerisle[6] ist ein Kunst- und Kultur-Festival auf dem Wasser. Es findet seit Oktober 2009 im Mandeville Tip County Park im San Joaquin River Delta statt. Die erste Veranstaltung zhlte etwa 150 Besucher. Mitorganisator war unter anderem einer der Grnder des Burning Man-Festivals. Ziel des Ephemerisle-Festivals ist es, eine Gemeinschaft temporr auf dem Wasser lebender Individuen zu schaffen, die sich Jahr fr Jahr fr zunehmend lngere Zeitrume treffen und einen Kondensationskern fr eine Seasteading-Kultur und -Gemeinschaft bilden.

2010 gab es kein offizielles Epehemerisle-Festival, da der vorjhrige Veranstalter nicht nochmals ohne Versicherung agieren wollte, jedoch die sehr hohen Versicherungsbeitrge scheute. Daher fhrten die angereisten Teilnehmer das Festival in Eigenregie unter dem Namen Non-Ephemerisle statt. Ab 2011 durfte die weiterhin in Selbstverantwortung ablaufende Veranstaltung wieder ihre ursprnglichen Namen tragen.[7]

Der Sink or Swim Contest,[8] war ein im Jahr 2011 ausgelobter Wettbewerb, fr das beste Seasteading-basierte Geschftskonzept.

Der Poseidon Award[10] ist ein Preis fr die Etablierung des ersten unabhngigen Seasteads und der Samen fr die weltweit erste Ozean-Stadt. Es ist ein Meilenstein fr die Seasteading-Bewegung.

Teil des Poseidon Awards ist die Verleihung des Poseidon Monumentes, einer Statue, als Ehrung fr die ersten Seasteading-Pioniere. Diese wird die Namen der Seasteading-Argonauten eingemeielt haben, groen Spendern, die mit ihrer Spende dabei mitgeholfen haben, Seasteading Realitt werden zu lassen.

Der Poseidon Award wird an das erste Seastead verliehen, das:

Ziel war, den Poseidon Award bis zum Jahre 2015 zu vergeben.

Das bisher am weitesten fortgeschrittene Projekt ist das Blueseed-Venture.[11] Die Grnder wollten ursprnglich noch im Laufe des Jahres 2012 ein umgebautes Schiff als Seastead vor der Kste Kaliforniens betreiben, das als Wohn-, Bro- und Geschftszentrum fr Nicht-Amerikanische Unternehmer bzw. Fachkrfte konzipiert ist, die noch auf die Visa-Freigaben der amerikanischen Behrden warten und sich solange auerhalb amerikanischer Gewsser aufhalten mssen. Das Projekt wartet allerdings noch auf vollstndige Finanzierung. Als Starttermin haben die Blueseed-Manager Herbst bis Winter 2014[12] ins Auge gefasst.

Niemandem ist bisher die Grndung eines Staates auf hoher See gelungen, der als souverne Nation anerkannt wurde. Am ehesten kommt diesem Ziel das Frstentum Sealand nahe, eine umstrittene Mikronation auf einer ausrangierten Flak-Plattform vor der Themsemndung in der Nhe von Suffolk, England. Ein vergleichbares Projekt war die Mikronation New Atlantis auf einer Hlfte eines 30 m groen Floes rund 15 Kilometer vor Jamaika. Gegrndet am 4. Juli 1964 durch Leicester Hemingway erlitt es einige Jahre spter dasselbe Schicksal wie sein mythisches Vorbild; es versank in einem Sturm.

Tomasz M. Froelich: Festland ad! In: Henning Lindhoff (Hrsg.): Freiheitskeime 2013. Ein libertres Lesebuch. Norderstedt, 2012, Seite 45-56. ISBN 978-3-8482-5247-3.

The rest is here:

Seasteading Wikipedia