The next frontier: 'Seasteading' the oceans
Patri Friedman, executive director of the Seasteading Institute, previously worked in Google's Mountain View headquarters as a software engineer.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News)PALO ALTO, Calif.--This chic, tree-lined California town might seem an unlikely place to begin the colonization of Earth's oceans. Palo Alto is known for expensive modernism, Stanford University, al fresco dining, and land prices so high a modest cottage still sells for well over $1 million.
If Patri Friedman gets his way, the area will also be remembered for birthing a political movement called seasteading. The concept is as simple to explain as it will be difficult to achieve: erecting permanent dwellings on the high seas outside the territorial waters claimed by the world's governments.
"Innovation in society and serving marginalized groups has always happened on the frontier," Friedman said in an interview last week. "We don't have a frontier anymore. The reason our political system doesn't innovate anymore is that there's no place to try out new things. We want to provide that place."
Designing an offshore place to live is one of the first tasks of the Seasteading Institute, which Friedman, 32, founded last year and moved into shared office space near the Palo Alto Caltrain station two weeks ago. Another task is attempting to legitimize living on the seas as practical--and perhaps, given possibilities for offshore businesses, even profitable.
Friedman previously worked in Google's Mountain View headquarters as a software engineer, identifies himself as a Burning Man aficionado, and counts himself as an unabashed libertarian. (His father, David Friedman, is a well-known libertarian law professor, and his grandfather, the late Milton Friedman, won the Nobel Prize in economics.)
Given the large number of like-minded souls in Silicon Valley circles, including at the Googleplex, it should be no surprise that a few dozen have coalesced to form a core group of would-be seasteaders, some of whom met last week for a social gathering inside downtown San Francisco's Metreon entertainment complex.
An artist's conception of a permanent ocean platform.
(Credit: Wendy Sitler)"I'd say that libertarian geeks are our most common audience so far. But in order to succeed, we'll have to branch out beyond that," Friedman said. "I think people are a lot better at inventing technology than changing human nature or changing social organizations. This is a technological solution to the problems of politics...I'm a libertarian, but I'm not a libertarian who believes that everyone should want to live in the same kind of society as me."
The Seasteading Institute plans to gather a kind of ad-hoc flotilla, called "ephemerisle," in the San Francisco Bay near Redwood City over the Fourth of July weekend. The plan for July 2010: find a way to hold the gathering off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.
Other supporters of the project include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who runs a hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and donated $500,000 to the Seasteading Institute. Former Sun Microsystems engineer Wayne Gramlich is the group's director of engineering; former Paypal manager James Hogan is its director of operations; Liz Lacy of now-defunct Excite@Home heads its development efforts.
While their affection for seasteading has varying origins, the broadest theme is to allow people to escape overreaching governments and replace conventional political systems with something of their own creation. (A section of their Web site is titled: "Land = Crappy Government" and says that terrestrial governments do a "terrible and sometimes horrific job" at serving the taxpayers that are their customers.)
Yet the Seasteading Institute's official position is, to put it in terms that Washington politicians might employ, thoroughly nonpartisan. Once the engineering work is complete and groups can purchase, outfit, and launch their own platforms, Friedman and his colleagues predict that some of the first 'steaders will not be nudists, recreational drug users, pacifists, environmentalists, or religious groups hoping to create an enclave far away from secular influences.
A history of failure
One way to look at the prospect of colonizing the oceans is that it represents the continuation of a westward trend that began with Greece and continued through Rome, Gaul, Britain, and the North American continent.
"When people got to California that was as far west as they could go," said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C. "Maybe this will turn out to be an opportunity to revive that search for a frontier."
Boaz questions whether the United States is sufficiently repressive to prompt enough people to move offshore. "In a prosperous, comfortable society, it might be hard to get people to take those kinds of risk," he said, referring to "the risk aversion of a wealthy society."
Plus, colonizing land even at the wilderness' edge is trivial compared with the technical and engineering challenges of colonizing the ocean. Can a floating platform weather typhoons and so-called rogue waves that can swell to more than eight stories tall? Should it be stationary or mobile? Will food be grown, harvested, or imported? And what about more prosaic matters, such as communications and waste disposal?
History is littered with examples of similar projects that failed. There was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which wanted to start by colonizing the ocean's surface and then move to the stars.
Artist's conception of a seasteading platform.
(Credit: Wendy Sitler)A Las Vegas real estate tycoon behind the Republic of Minerva wanted to form a no-tax utopian society by reclaiming land on a Pacific atoll; alas, the colonists were given the boot by a few troops from the island nation of Tonga. The free-marketeers behind Laissez-Faire City who wanted to found the next Hong Kong were never able to find a sympathetic government to lease them land.
An engineer named Norman Nixon has been trying for years to find investors for a so-called Freedom Ship, which would be a colossal project three times longer than any existing ship, with 25 stories above the waterline and a fully functioning airport. Nixon acknowledged last July that the project was on indefinite hold because his business partner "turned over our entire bank account to a man who promised him a 'Peruvian Gold certificate' worth a billion dollars."
The current crop of seasteaders is acutely aware of their predecessors' failings and has gone so far as to draft a critical history of the movement as part of a larger Internet-published book.
"I'd like to see lots of different things tried in lots of different places and we'll see what works," Friedman said. "We want to create a turnkey system by which any committed organized group can go out and make their own country and try out some new system."
Jason Sorens, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, specializes in the study of secessionist movements. His dissertation was titled "The Political Economy of Secessionism," and he was the founder of the Free State Project, an effort to convince freedom-loving Americans to move to New Hampshire. (Some 700 have taken the leap so far.)
Sorens said the seasteading concept reminds him of microstates like Monaco and Tuvalu. "They sustain their government budgets and their economies on niche economies that are based on commercialized sovereignty," he said. "Many of them sell top-level Internet domains, and that's a source of their revenue, or they're financial or data havens, or they raise money through philately (selling stamps). They use all these trappings of sovereignty to bring revenue into their coffers."
That raises the obvious question: assuming the engineering questions can be answered, and assuming that adequate capital can be raised, what about the legal and diplomatic challenges?
Friedman's answer is that in the short term, seasteads can pay money to purchase a vessel registration from Panama, Liberia, or the Bahamas, in the same way that most merchant ships do. Eventually, seasteads could assert their own sovereignty--something that likely will be met with something less than enthusiasm on the part of terrestrial governments. (Floating pseudo-cities could choose to remain within a nation's 200-mile exclusive economic zone, or sail deeper waters further offshore.)
"They may need to establish some sort of sovereignty of their own, and that's where the secessionist aspect comes in, to protect themselves from legal or military maneuvers," Sorens said. "Those are really uncharted waters. We don't have any other examples in international law of man-made structures becoming sovereign."
One case study can be found in HavenCo, an Internet hosting business created nine years ago atop a windswept gun emplacement six miles off the coast of England. The rusting, basketball-court-size fortress was abandoned by the British military after using it during World War II to shoot down Nazi aircraft, and was claimed in 1967 by Roy Bates, the self-described "crown prince of Sealand."
A HavenCo executive said in 2003 that the business was failing, and the hosting service went offline last year. Meanwhile, no member of the United Nations appears to have recognized Sealand as a sovereign state, and it lies within the territorial boundary of 10 miles claimed by England.
The Seasteading Institute candidly admits floating platforms will be outgunned by a modern navy, concluding the wiser option is to "avoid angering terrestrial nations enough to provoke an attack."
That means that, ironically, seafaring communities created by liberty-loving libertarians may ban businesses from their platforms that dabble in controversial practices such as offshore banking with complete privacy. (Medical tourism--think hip replacement surgery at 80 percent discounts--coupled with gambling, on-platform use of recreational drugs, adult prostitution, and genetic engineering may prove sufficiently profitable.)
"As long as what happens on seasteads stays on seasteads, then terrestrial governments hopefully will not feel too threatened," Friedman said. "The whole nature of seasteading is that it's a very experimentalist, very diverse world we're trying to create. People are welcome to create seasteads that violate any of my recommendations. I could be wrong: if they want to take that risk, we'll see what happens and we'll learn from it."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
Plus, it would be pretty cool to live on a floating mini-nation!
Where will this floating nation get its food? Where will it get raw materials to repair damage and wear-and-tear? Where will it obtain fuel?
And if it has to pull into port in order to do major repair work, what country is going to LET a "foreign nation" dock on its shores? If there is even a dock that's appropriately equipped for the needs of a floating nation in the first place?
And of course, there's always the risk that some other nation would like to send its navy to conquer the Floating Nation, or will see the Floating Nation as a threat and decide to sink it.
It's a fascinating concept, don't get me wrong. Unfortunately, my gut instinct tells me that the combination of the Laws of Physics and the Flaws of Human Nature are going to make it unfeasible to put the concept into practice.
Thus far regarding open ocean floating city states, it's difficult to tell whether it's the engineering or the economic challenges that are the most difficult to overcome. This is just an extension of escaping to a tropical island haven concept - a chance to use what you have learned about the old environment to make new better one.. Unfortunately, there are no more deserted islands that can be acquired or colonized as easily as in the past.
Given human natures incredible stupidity of failing to recognize that it has already surpassed the world's holding capacity for the human species - both environmentally and food production wise, the creation of more human habitat is inevitable if not essential as our species breeds itself out of existence.
BTW, if you think this is a totally boggus concept, think again. After all Holland has accomplished essentially this feat - both the engineering and the economics quite well for centuries.
Three reasons the Somali pirates have been successful is that their on-ship targets are unarmed (except for perhaps water hoses), travel in known shipping lanes, and are defending someone else's property. Not one of those applies in this -- admittedly hypothetical -- case.
Remember Freedom isn't free!
Honestly, who would give these people money? I don't care how they want to spend their own money, but if it's investment money, I want to make sure none of mine is going there. In this recession, this idea ought to be a real hit, eh?
that platform during hurricane/typoon season
where would the residents go
You know, "Rapture"?
our first colonies in new america were just like that and everyone of them failed. it was only when they all came together and formed this rather imperfect republic that at least the semblance of working appeared.
it is true we are doing it now, but one can notice that it only works well when we are struggling against one another, with a modicum of tolerance.
can anyone really believe that a group made completely of libertarians would ever agree on anything?
Even the casual reader of history knows that "explorers" will one day claim said island in the name of their ruling body, and proceed to eliminate the native Libertarians with venereal diseases, viral mutants, and intermarriage (or ironically, with property laws and bogus treaties). From that point Libertarian Island will be exploited for whatever resources it has (likely casinos and offshore banks) and then be converted to a prison colony. Late in life, it will be declared a reef park as corals grow over it and form the base for Cocktail Atoll, named for the event at which it was conjured.
(I always wondered what would come from the marriage of "Survivor" and "Lost".)
- by arnold88 February 3, 2009 3:50 PM PST
- MrPat845 gets it. The plethora of creature comforts required to get our couch potato nation of talking head aficionadoes out to sea would kill any practical application.
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