From a legal perspective, countries can claim a large exclusive economic zone. So for a seastead to fall outside the realm of government intervention would require it to be more than 200 miles offshore. This is roughly the travel distance from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe at the border with Nevada. So unless you think that South Lake Tahoe is the perfect location with "easy access to the Bay Area" for your start-up, then Thielandia isn't a good place to go, either.
Worse still, however, there could be no recognition of these seasteads as sovereign territory (they lack actual territory) and little incentive to change this. The "greedy government" question aside, the principle reason to reject seastead sovereignty is simply to prevent the strategic colonization of the ocean. For example, a nation could build a series of minimalist seasteads 24 nautical miles apart and claim territorial sovereignty over them and their adjacent waters. Less than 1,000 of these would be required to close the Pacific to all east-west shipping. That's highly doable in this case but the real threats are in open-but-disputed waters like the South China Sea or strategic outlets; a cha...
I think there are at least two different questions being subsumed here. One is whether seasteading could ever work in general, and the other is whether it would actually produce something a libertarian like Peter Thiel would ultimately approve of. The first question I take to be the more complicated. David Brin offers up a number of practical difficulties here.
The answer to second question seems less difficult to foresee. Life aboard ship is always a highly communal enterprise and typically a highly hierarchical one. The odds of the end result actually being in line with the initial vision seem rather long.
But I'm just wondering how in the world they hope to deal with existing governments since their reaction to any kind of serious alternatives, especially one that either economically or ideologically presented a significant challenge, is bound to not be positive.
Actually, make that "government" in the singular. In a world of many competing governments, it would still be a difficult problem, but at least there might be ways of securing some independence by playing them against each other or looking for weakly policed border zones. Nowadays, however, the U.S. government acts a single global authority that you have to contend with, and it has little tolerance for regimes that are outside of certain approved bounds.
So my predictions are pessimistic -- assuming their project gets anywhere, the seasteaders will either end up building something fairly unremarkable or they will cross the line and be destroyed. Of course, this destruction doesn't have to be in the form of a military intervention; economic and PR pressures, both formal and informal, are likely to be sufficient.
Moldbug wrote a good analysis along these lines a while ago (you can start reading from the point where he says "Now, let's talk about seasteading...").
Thanks to the link to Moldbug article, started reading him a month or so ago after he was recommended by another LWrongian. He seems to be one of those thinkers that is either horribly wrong or horribly right, but isn't a bore and carries quite a bit of insight.
Thus you have a basic problem: you're trying to escape from a planetary government, by moving somewhere else on the planet. At least if you move to, say, Costa Rica, you are sheltered by the pretense that Costa Rica, which is actually a satellite or external province of USG, is (as it appears to be) a sovereign country.
If you really wanted to escape from USG, you wouldn't seastead. You'd space-stead, or possibly star-stead. Ideally, there would be some vast, opaque nebula between you and the New York Times.
This quote is just wonderful. Made me laugh.
Thanks to the link to Moldbug article, started reading him a month or so ago after he was recommended by another LWrongian. He seems to be one of those thinkers that is either horribly wrong or horribly right, but isn't a bore and carries quite a bit of insight.
Some of his ideas are indeed unsound and with some serious blind spots, but on the whole, I'd say his analysis of the modern-day institutions and social order is spot-on, and more accurate than practically any other source. Generally, the closer the topic is to the present day, the more correct and insightful he is.
Also, his earlier writings from 2007-2008 are much better than his more recent work. You can find them all nicely indexed here.
Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one
Moldbug does argue for his controversial analyses of world events at enormous length. Here he is mentioning some of his conclusions without restating his arguments. It doesn't mean he didn't bother to argue. What it does mean is that he's a demanding writer, who expects his readers to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with his arguments. If that sounds like he's expecting too much - that is, if you think he should prove that he's not a nutcase before you devote months to reading his blog chronologically from 2007 through the present, which is more or less what you need to do to gather together the threads of his argument, then there you have your explanation as to why he's not very widely read.
Moldbug did recognize this problem and at one point he attempted to recap his argument in condensed form, but even that condensed introduction to his argument is spread over many very long blog posts.
He furthermore places barriers in the way of his reader by writing in a colorful and circuitous style which I presume is his attempt to imitate writers that he admires, such as Carlyle. It doe...
So... enemies that enjoyed the support of the USSR or China largely survived, at least until the USSR's dissolution itself. While enemies of America that were also enemies of the USSR and China, were largely defeated.
Basically all you're saying is that few countries could stand without support from some superpower.
This isn't saying much that's suprising. But by talking as if the difference is between right-wing enemies and left-wing enemies, instead of enemies that didn't have superpower backing, and enemies that did have superpower backing, you make it look like a bigger conspiracy than it actually is.
Mencius holds that the US is not a monolithic entity. Therefore it is possible within his framework for one part of the US government to do one thing while another does something else that directly contradicts what the first part is doing. His model of the US government is, to put it crudely, that politicians are essentially figureheads, and that the real government is the unelected bureaucracy. Since the politicians are not really running things, then the bureaucracy of government is effectively a sovereign entity. However, there is not one single bureaucracy. The Pentagon, for example, is pretty separate from the State department, since their hierarchies come together only at the Presidency, which is, as mentioned, a figurehead position with severely limited real influence. Therefore it is conceivable, and I believe Mencius holds it to be the case, that the Pentagon and State are mutually fairly autonomous.
All of this is to point out that it is possible, within his framework, for the US simultaneously to aid Israel militarily with weapons, and also to undermine it politically through State Department activities. Whether this is the case depends on what the state department is doing, and Mencius throughout his many long blog entries presents his evidence. I don't want to go into further detail because the topic is both difficult and dangerous.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense.
Yet you don't offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren't encouraged on LW. The problems are:
The points 3 and 4 are ...
Heh, now this is an interesting debate, though it might get us downvoted.
Nowadays, however, the U.S. government acts a single global authority that you have to contend with, and it has little tolerance for regimes that are outside of certain approved bounds.
Perhaps the current global international order is a better way to phrase it, since the US usually carries with it a constellation of European countries, and economic and political interests in other parts of the world play a large role in determining the US policy. In many interesting ways Washington DC seems to be the global imperial capital where vassals go to pay tribute and hopefully determine or influence policy.
The argument you present is hard to attack or criticize. We live in a society where we speak of nation building, spreading democracy and even refer to "humanitarian bombings" without a hint of sarcasm. And this is merely direct military action! One needs only to look at other international both covert and publicly know activities designed and used to spread and enforce these "approved bounds", to realize that such military intervention plays only a small role in its upkeep. Many on Lesswro...
How large is the set of things that Western European governments would be OK with, but the U.S. government wouldn't? It seems to me that their ideological consensus is strong enough that there is little if any practical difference.
When I speak of the U.S. global authority, I don't mean just authority exercised through explicit military interventions and diplomatic pressures. I also mean the informal and indirect authority that stems from the fact that the modern-day global ideological consensus emanates from American institutions, which means that other countries also won't be OK with anything that the U.S. government seriously objects to.
Moreover, the problem isn't just the threat of armed intervention. Economic and even just PR pressures can be fatal by themselves. It's enough that the respectable worldwide opinion -- which is again driven primarily by what the respectable U.S. media and academic institutions say -- starts viewing your seastead as undemocratic, exploitative, discriminatory, in violation of human rights, etc., calling for boycotts and sanctions, and so on. This could put enough pressure on respectable people to make them avoid having any business with you, which...
The idea is interesting but it seems to underestimate the amount of resources that ships and platforms take up. The maintenance costs are just massive. They require continual work and parts replacements. The sea is a very harsh environment. There is constant buffeting by water and the salt and moisture causes corrosion and if one is not very careful growth of mildew and other nasties. There's an analysis commissioned by some of the seasteading people here which is worth reading but I think that it is very optimistic about costs.
People have been trying to deal with the technical problems of ship maintenance for hundreds of years, and in the case of platforms have had massive international companies put tremendous amounts of resources into improving their engineering. They are still extremely expensive and difficult to run. Given how much research has already been put into these issues it seems unlikely that a few more years of research will substantially improve the situation.
perfectly normal and honest industries are regularly destroyed by the modern governments in bouts of bureaucratic craziness or in various shakedown schemes.
Can you give some examples here? I am not clear what the industry is that a seastead can do, where it has enough comparative advantage to pay for all the obvious associated costs.
I'm going to suggest it's not very likely.
One common thread I see over at the Seasteading institute, and with other variants like the Atlantis project, is that while they're quite aware of the engineering challenges posed by severe storms and the like, they don't appear to spend much time thinking about how harsh an environment the open ocean is even when it's calm, or just how challenging remote living can really be.
Mariners and shipping companies have a saying: "A ship is a hole in the water you pour money into." Salt water is very corrosive ...
Patri Friedman has written a whole book on the subject, wherein he thoroughly addresses many of the concerns people have laid out. I have some problems with their initial approach, but I think Friedman's team is flexible enough that they'll eventually be able to find a workable path. I would guess that there is a 75% chance that there will be more than 1000 people living on seasteads (defined as "anything Patri Friedman would consider a seastead") by 2030.
Thiel seems to like long-shots with high risk and very high potential pay-off. I'm sure he considers it +EV. Even if all they did was influence some existing governments he may consider it worthwhile. He doesn't need to expect to make any money off of it.
According to O. Shane Balloun's excellently referenced paper to which Hyena linked, a seastead/shipstead just outside the contiguous zone (24 nautical miles offshore), which does not exploit natural resources, and has a zero-tolerance illegal drug policy, will enjoy little interference from Coast Guard.
There are many other challenges ahead, and we don't have Thiel's investment, but it is launching such a shipstead off the SF Bay Area that two former Seasteading Institute employees and I are working on at Blueseed.
Minor point but reading another article on the subject I noted that they were saying it would be free from government interference like 'restrictive planning laws and weapons possession.' Surely if yoiu are on a platform in the ocean planning laws are extremely important if you don't want to sink? And weapons if you want any sort of political stability?
Also I'm wondering if anyone would hazard to perhaps offer a prediction or judge how likley this is to succeed (maybe on predictionbook)?
For PB, you need relatively precise predictions. What exactly do you mean by 'succeed'?
There are a number of ways you could operationalize this - for example, you could go by whether the Seasteading foundation is still active in a given year, whether its budget is above or below a certain amount, whether Thiel is still donating (and how much). One could make predictions about permanent habitats and number of people ab...
Update from WIRED, May 2015:
The Seasteading Institute has also come to appreciate that the middle of the ocean is less inviting than early renderings suggest. It now hopes to find shelter in calmer, government-regulated waters. According to its most recent vision statement, “The high cost of open ocean engineering serves as a large barrier to entry and hinders entrepreneurship in international waters. This has led us to look for cost-reducing solutions within the territorial waters of a host nation.”
David Brin argues here that
...They're are doing this not in order to escape government, but because we on Planet Earth appear to be heading, inexorably, toward a world government (WG).
Because of the way that WG is forming on Planet Earth... with the judiciary and bureaucracy first and the legislature last... the chief effect is to ensure that individual humans have no legal standing before international agencies. Only sovereign nations have standing, can file suit, negotiate treaties, assert rights and privileges. ... But here's the crux. If they can establ
Peter Thiel recently offered to invest in the first shipsteading venture, Blueseed.
I think that there are often creative solutions that people who aren't serious about seasteading fail to notice. For example: you could take advantage of already existing shipping lanes to build you seastead and thereby reduce the shipping cost for importing food.
Personally, I think that they will start off as residential housing that isn't in international waters. It is much easier to correct errors when you're a mile away from help. It will also help them see unexpected errors they hadn't thought about (without the drastic downside of failing in the mid...
The concept of seasteading seems to be related to how the United States existed in the antebellum period and also somewhat related to the libertarian Free State Project in NH. The USA as a collection of free and independent states each with a great deal of autonomy crashed and burned in less than 100 years. And the Free State Project doesn't appear to me to be very successful. NH is slowly becoming MA (probably in spite of the Free State Project).
Recently the relatively awesome entrepreneur invested 1.25 million USD into this (seasteading institute website here).
It seems such a wonderful concept, finally somewhere where new forms of government could be tried out. But I'm just wondering how in the world they hope to deal with existing governments since their reaction to any kind of serious alternatives, especially one that either economically or ideologically presented a significant challenge, is bound to not be positive.
I was just wondering what LWer thoughts are on this matter? Also has there been any discussion of seasteading in the past that I've missed? Also I'm wondering if anyone would hazard to perhaps offer a prediction or judge how likley this is to succeed (maybe on predictionbook)?