"To the Sea, Freedom!" cried the late Roy Bates whose offshore pirate radio stations and hair-brained Principality of Sealand was a precursor to seasteading.
I perfer calling pirates privateers still idk, they were business men just monopoly busting. 🌝 Seasteading would be a super difficult feat that would require a ton of capital.
I admire the spirit of seasteaders, but don't think a floating country is practical, at least with today's technology. How do you get fresh water? Electricity? Food? Medical services? These things, and much more, must be transported in by some means, which can be done by someone with sufficient money to burn, but in my view such a "nation" can't sustain itself without a continuous flow of funds from the outside. I'm afraid we are going to be compelled to work to gain the freedoms that are our birthright here on land.
I know of Deming, but I'm not sure seasteading contradicts his work. Quirk, for example, is always thinking at the margins. He's never creating systems out of nothing. He's thinking about jurisdictional arbitrage, local innovation, or, generally, the entrepreneurial discovery process -- which is trial and error from the start. When you develop something new, you have to tinker. All ventures are a form of tinkering. Otherwise, your hypothesis will get stuck in amber. So again, you have to experiment and adjust (tinker). Tinkering on the sea is far more likely to be technical rather than institutional, though. In any case, tinkering with social systems is unavoidable. The common law, for example, is about both precedent and novelty. There is a metaphor called the sacred and the shamanic that really unpacks the evolutionary process. The sacred is what we protect and build upon. The shamanic invites change or novelty. It is in the balance that we find creative destruction. Is your effort to imagine seasteading industries as a priori inferior to land-based industries just an argument from incredulity? The cluster might start with cheap, medical interventions on a boat, fish farms, tourism, or some energy play. We don't know. Anyway, the technical, the legal, and the entrepreneurial innovations might (should) surprise us.
OMG, as a sailor I love this idea and have even written some short story ideas on how this could look. My favorite is a Silicone Valley Tech Bazillionaire builds a robotic, self organizing machine that collects trash from the ocean and 3d prints it into a structure in the N. Pacific Gyre. It would generate power from Hydrogen, wind, solar, and wave energy. It would also be very off grid and function under the radar, so to speak. I could go on and on but long story short this model would operate in a fashion where it would be self supporting and look to replicate & scale these in different areas of ocean around the world and be the base for a loose nation of Sea Peoples. The one other thing I find fascinating is the "Sea Peoples" mentioned in historical accounts from the Bronze Age collapse era. These "Sea Peoples" which helped sack Easter Mediterranean civilizations are mysterious but I have a theory they were a similarly sovereign peoples mostly based on the oceans but with settlements in N. America.
I perfer calling pirates privateers still idk, they were business men just monopoly busting. 🌝 Seasteading would be a super difficult feat that would require a ton of capital.
I admire the spirit of seasteaders, but don't think a floating country is practical, at least with today's technology. How do you get fresh water? Electricity? Food? Medical services? These things, and much more, must be transported in by some means, which can be done by someone with sufficient money to burn, but in my view such a "nation" can't sustain itself without a continuous flow of funds from the outside. I'm afraid we are going to be compelled to work to gain the freedoms that are our birthright here on land.
To overcome any such skepticism, I heartily recommend Joe Quirk's book, Seasteading.
Otherwise, I view the effort as symbolic if nothing else: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/seasteading-as-symbolism
I wrote this for a team working on the Article V movement, so they'll publish it first, and then I'll republish it here once they're done. :)
I know of Deming, but I'm not sure seasteading contradicts his work. Quirk, for example, is always thinking at the margins. He's never creating systems out of nothing. He's thinking about jurisdictional arbitrage, local innovation, or, generally, the entrepreneurial discovery process -- which is trial and error from the start. When you develop something new, you have to tinker. All ventures are a form of tinkering. Otherwise, your hypothesis will get stuck in amber. So again, you have to experiment and adjust (tinker). Tinkering on the sea is far more likely to be technical rather than institutional, though. In any case, tinkering with social systems is unavoidable. The common law, for example, is about both precedent and novelty. There is a metaphor called the sacred and the shamanic that really unpacks the evolutionary process. The sacred is what we protect and build upon. The shamanic invites change or novelty. It is in the balance that we find creative destruction. Is your effort to imagine seasteading industries as a priori inferior to land-based industries just an argument from incredulity? The cluster might start with cheap, medical interventions on a boat, fish farms, tourism, or some energy play. We don't know. Anyway, the technical, the legal, and the entrepreneurial innovations might (should) surprise us.
Nah—there is rarely “carefully thought through.” There is try, fail, learn, and iterate.
OMG, as a sailor I love this idea and have even written some short story ideas on how this could look. My favorite is a Silicone Valley Tech Bazillionaire builds a robotic, self organizing machine that collects trash from the ocean and 3d prints it into a structure in the N. Pacific Gyre. It would generate power from Hydrogen, wind, solar, and wave energy. It would also be very off grid and function under the radar, so to speak. I could go on and on but long story short this model would operate in a fashion where it would be self supporting and look to replicate & scale these in different areas of ocean around the world and be the base for a loose nation of Sea Peoples. The one other thing I find fascinating is the "Sea Peoples" mentioned in historical accounts from the Bronze Age collapse era. These "Sea Peoples" which helped sack Easter Mediterranean civilizations are mysterious but I have a theory they were a similarly sovereign peoples mostly based on the oceans but with settlements in N. America.
Just wrote a piece about Article V. Things moving in this department.