Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?

Thanks, Moin! 

Freedom-loving individuals dream of escaping an ever-encroaching government and often these dreams consist of utopian schemes that are destined for failure.

 

In the July issue of Reason magazine, Brian Doherty pens a lengthy profile of the interesting Seasteading project, which is another attempt to create a free society - 20,000 Nations Above the Sea: Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?

At the fore of the Seasteading Institute is the grandson of Milton Friedman and son of David Friedman, Patri Friedman.  The Institute's mission is: To further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems.

Doherty on Friedman and what makes this effort unique:

Patri Friedman, who has been sailing around some of the very reefs on which earlier utopias capsized, is well aware of these past failures and says he has learned from them. The Seasteading Institute’s website is as thorough and thoughtful a guide as you’ll find to the foibles and follies of previous attempts to create new and/or floating nations. And there are some important points of departure that Friedman says will make the difference this time around.

First, seasteading does not require anyone to take over existing terrain. That was hopeless; the land’s all claimed by some government or another, even the parts barely above water. And an open rebellion against an existing regime is unlikely to succeed. Seasteaders therefore will make their own “land.”

Second, seasteading is modular. Unlike various floating nations that never got off the drawing board—the “Freedom Ship,” the “Aquarius Project,” and other pipe dreams—the institute’s plan doesn’t require an upfront multimillion-dollar buy-in. Seasteading can start small, and in fact Friedman is sure it will start small, with tiny family-sized platforms called “coaststeads” near the mainland serving both as proof of concept and a laboratory for working out the kinks before community-sized seasteads are ready to sprout in international waters. Friedman figures the cost of such starter sea homes won’t be too out of line with housing costs on land, especially if people are buying in a communal or time-share fashion. In fact, most recent cost estimates for a particular hotel/resort seasteading design came out to roughly $258 per square foot (without factoring in some assembly and deployment costs), which is quite a bit cheaper than the current price of many single family homes in the San Francisco Bay area.

Third, seasteading isn’t just based in libertarian theorizing and hopes. Friedman knows that seasteads will need to have some business hook, and he’s busy working those angles. There’s SurgiCruise, a nascent floating medical tourism company that is seeking venture funding. If Americans will fly to Mexico, India, or Thailand for cheaper medical care free of U.S. regulatory costs, the idea goes, why wouldn’t they sail 12 miles for it? Among the other first-tier business ideas being bruited about with varying levels of intensity are vacation resorts, sin industries, aquaculture, deep-sea marina services, and universal data libraries free of national copyright laws.

Fourth, because the open ocean plus “dynamic geography” allows for experimentation with governance in any form, seasteading shouldn’t appeal only to libertarians. Sure, any seastead that Friedman would want to live in would get as close to anarchism as can be managed. But he thinks a variety of ideologues should be willing to leap on board, from sustainability-oriented environmentalists to members of various intentional communities, religious or philosophical or whatever, that want to shape their own lives in peace without government interference. Such communities might not be individualist in their internal policies, but they fit within the libertarian framework of seasteading itself, which allows for a wide variety of freely chosen social structures.

Below is the "Swimming City" that took the grand prize in a recent seasteading design contest of designers' visions for cities at sea.

 

Comments

[2L]

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

Just saying.

[Marnie Tunay]

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

Just saying.

[Liberty Lover756]

Seasteading does not need to materially exist for we see people have set up camp and reside there.

"As in Rome, there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live"
-Goethe

The image looks like a lovely resort.

"We cannot escape a contradiciton in ourselves; we must try to resolve it. If the contradiction comes from others, it does not affect us: it is their affair."
-Goethe

Why can we not zoom in on people's faces?

"When man [sic] truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history."
-Levinas

If I could live on an island, I should like a few mountains, so I could go hiking.

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be”
-Marlow

The buildings could do with more windows

etc.