Seasteading

Description

"What if there was a way to establish wholly new societies without all the bloodshed? A benevolent open source approach to nation building would need to incorporate multiple small societies. Of course, few nations would be willing to donate land to sovereign societies within their borders. So how could these nationettes set up shop outside the borders and influence of any existing country? For some, the answer is churning and stirring all around us.

The concept of "seasteading" is not entirely new. In a nutshell, the idea calls for small autonomous civilizations to be built in floating city-sized communities in international waters. Each society would set up their own form of government which other seasteads could choose to appropriate or reject as they formulate their take on the more-perfect union.

Chief among those pushing this Gilligan's Island approach to civics has been the Seasteading Institute, whose website describes their mission as thus:

- The vision of seasteading is an urgent one. We can already see that existing political systems are straining to cope with the realities of the 21st century. We need to create the next generation of governance: banking systems to better handle the inevitable financial crises, medical regulations that protect people without retarding innovation, and democracies that ensure our representatives truly represent us. Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the cell phone carrier industry, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, we envision a vibrant startup sector for government, with many small groups experimenting with innovative ideas as they compete to serve their citizens' needs better.

While seasteading may sound like a futuristic evolution of the (often failed) hippie-commune experiments of the 1960s and '70s, it was founded on the other side of the political spectrum by Patri Friedman, the grandson of Milton Friedman, the fierce advocate for government on the amoebic scale and icon of modern conservative economics.

The Seasteading Institute sees their mission as a three-fold path: overcoming the legal, business and technological hurdles to open source sea-based societies. The Institute even offers an X Prize-like "Poseidon Award" for the first seastead that has at least 50 full-time residents, is financially self-sufficient, offers real estate on the open market, and has de-facto political autonomy by the year 2015."

(http://dvice.com/archives/2011/08/how-tech-will-b.php)

Discussion

History of an unrealized idea

Raymond Craib:

“Few, if any, terrestrial privatized communities have emerged from the ether and become concrete realities. Liberland has garnered positive commentary from Milei, Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist head of state, but its status is ambiguous at best, and no one has settled there permanently. Satoshi Island is a lease-held property and part of the state of Vanuatu. No matter how many “Citizenship NFTs” you purchase, you still need a legitimate passport to pass through Vanuatu customs and immigration. No matter how many “Land Deed NFTs” you purchase, the land is lease-hold and dependent on renewal by custom owners—which makes you, in effect, a renter with a long commute. Galt’s Gulch Chile imploded soon after its creation. One of its main promoters, Jeff Berwick, moved on to Mexico where he founded the annual libertarian gathering advertised as Anarchapulco, the subject of a recent six-part HBO documentary misleadingly titled The Anarchists, which ends with the deaths of three of its protagonists. The Free State Project succeeded in attracting a slew of people to New Hampshire, but the subsequent negative impact of anti-government infiltration of municipal councils on public space, municipal services, and quality of life in towns such as Grafton serves as fair warning for those who think government has little to offer. The wet dream of seasteading remains just that.

Despite TSI’s promotional strategy, floating platforms on the high seas are nowhere to be found. A modest project like the libertarianesque “SeaPod” in a sea zone (a special economic zone on the water) off the coast of Panama flopped when a prototype dwelling teetered over in front of the crowd gathered for its grand opening. Meanwhile, Roatán’s Próspera, a charter city born under the aegis of a regime installed by a Honduran military coup d’état, is more akin to a country club than a country, albeit one dedicated more to rounds of non-FDA-approved life-extension experiments than to golf. And just in case it isn’t already obvious, Mars colonization has little chance of coming to fruition in the near future.”

(https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-private-fiefdom-as-planetary-project/)