*In case you were wondering why "Scientology Vs Anonymous" somehow
felt so much freakier than "Mythbusters Vs Creationists"...
http://www.reason.com/news/show/133865.html
20,000 Nations Above the Sea
Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?
by Brian Doherty
July 2009 (((http://artists.letssingit.com/kid-rock-lyrics-cowboy-727npgh
and could easily flee state oppression. If land itself could get up and go,
the incentive structure of government would change even more, moving it
in a libertarian direction.
In the past, such thoughts led many libertarians to dream of space
colonization. But you don’t need to leave the planet, Friedman reasoned;
just make “land” that can float on the ocean.
And so Friedman is no longer with Google. (((Gotta be their loss!)))
He is president of something
called the Seasteading Institute. He thinks he has a feasible plan to
accomplish something neither his father nor his grandfather managed, for
all their inspiration to him and hundreds of thousands of others:
actually creating a libertarian society. (((I don't like to kick market
fundamentalist Friedmanite Republicans when they are down, but...
actually this makes a lot of pragmatic sense: can't you guys create
a free-market utopia on an abandoned offshore drilling rig first,
before imposing it on the world's oldest constitutional republic?)))
Even if it’s a small, floating
one. “I would be sad if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” Friedman
says. “But even looking at optimistic scenarios, I can see it will take
several decades before I can say I really changed the world.”
A Sunken History of Floating Nations (((I forgive REASON everything
for an awesome subhead like this)))
Wayne Gramlich is a voluble, white-bearded tech geek and science fiction
fan—(((flee, flee for the hills, or failing that an offshore platform)))
the kind of guy who thinks about how things work, and could work, a
bit deeper than most people do. A former Sun Microsystems engineer, he
became interested in creating free lands on the ocean after stumbling
across the website of the Atlantis Project, a.k.a. Oceania, a failed
scheme to do just that from the early 1990s. Gramlich took an idle
notion about liberated ocean living and turned it into an experimental
social and physical engineering project. He set his ideas afloat on the
sea of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s under the name “Seasteading:
Homesteading the High Seas.” (((Yes, I'm still reading, I'm just not
saying anything.)))
Gramlich’s solution to building new land on the ocean was cheap and
inventive: achieve flotation by lashing together empty two-liter soda
bottles; convert the bottle-raft into usable land by covering it with
five-mil-thick (roughly fivethousandths of an inch) black plastic
sheeting and dirt. (He later realized he had underestimated the power of
waves in the open ocean, and he now dismisses his plastic bottle idea as
“just a glorified form of suicide.” But in calm waters, it could work.)
(((There are probably some English-speaking Russian readers here,
pulled in by that "Taras Bulba" post. Okay, Russians: you need to
forgive us Americans. Putting topsoil on plastic soda bottles, that
is not the kind of suicide you guys would understand.)))
Friedman stumbled upon Gramlich’s seasteading manuscript in the early
21st century. The two men began chatting online, realized they lived
near each other, and forged a partnership that in April 2008 was
formally chartered as the Seasteading Institute. The organization now
has two part-time paid employees in addition to Friedman (who is
salaried) and Gramlich (who is not, as he spends far less time on the
project). It is dedicated to pursuing and proselytizing for ideas and
techniques that could allow human beings to live on stateless floating
“land” on the ocean. The institute is throwing conferences, patenting
aquatic platform designs, sending Friedman to spread the word at
far-flung gatherings of tech world bigwigs and libertarian visionaries,
and receiving friendly coverage on CNN and in Wired. (((Yo!)))
To longtime libertarian hands, though, seasteading seems like an old
idea, one weighed down by the corpses of many ill-fated plans. Most of
these efforts are legend, barely documented by history. Their tales are
recounted in moldering tiny-circulation newsletters seen only by
enthusiasts (and in 1970s issues of reason). One of the most influential
of the small magazines pushing libertarianism in the 1960s was
Innovator, and in its latter days the journal’s editors had come to
think along the same lines as Friedman, though with far less rigor.
(((My mind is wandering. Sorry. Kinda gazing out of the window here.
You know what would be cool? What if you could, like, "seastead"
the 5th Dimension?)))
Innovator’s leading theorist of taking to the seas for liberty was an
anarchist writer named Kerry Thornley. Thornley’s essays on oceangoing
freedom inspired the science fiction writers Robert Shea and Robert
Anton Wilson to create an anarchist yellow submarine that was central to
the plot of their influential 1975 novel Illuminatus! But when it came
to real-world endeavors, Thornley wasn’t the ideal pioneer. Among other
things, he was confident that he had been groomed to be a patsy of sorts
in the John F. Kennedy assassination, given his previous acquaintance
with, and supposed resemblance to, Lee Harvey Oswald. (Before that
fateful day in Dallas, Thornley had already written a roman à clef about
Oswald, whom he knew from the U.S. Marines.)
(((I shoulda cut that paragraph, but it was just too good.)))
Other libertarians, largely in the 1970s, actually attempted to create
free nations on the open ocean, sometimes using existing islands and
reefs, sometimes using boats or artificial islands. The history of these
attempts is equally comic and terrible. (((Kinda like this blog post.)))
The one that most resembles the
Seasteading Institute’s efforts was Operation Atlantis, in which Werner
Stiefel, an upstate New York pharmaceutical manufacturer, convinced a
small gang of eager young libertarians to help him build a ferro-cement
boat called “Atlantis II” in 1969. This vessel was supposed to sail down
to the Caribbean, where the crew might grab some land in disputed
territories such as Anguilla or the Silver Shoals near Haiti, or just
use the ship as a staging ground to build some artificial concrete land.
The schemers had their own silver coin, dubbed the “deca”; they got some
press in Esquire; and they had their own homemade boat. But the ship
sank in a hurricane, attention from the Haitian government forced the
project into quiet mode (canceling the highly entertaining newsletter
Atlantis News), and no new libertarian Atlantis ever arose in the Caribbean.
(((I'm glad to have these efforts documented.)))
The king of the “take over existing land” plan was Mike Oliver, a
Nevada-based real estate developer and coin dealer who had published a
book called A New Constitution for a New Country in 1968. Oliver had a
winning never-say-die approach to his dream. In 1972 he attempted to
claim space for a Republic of Minerva on a series of reefs in the
southwest Pacific, 260 miles from the tiny kingdom of Tonga. Perhaps
create is a better verb than claim: Oliver had to pay dredging boats to
build up usable land between a couple of sturdy reefs. Shortly
afterward, the king of Tonga conquered the colony with one boat. The
land Oliver paid to build eventually was reclaimed by the ocean.
For the rest of the 1970s, Oliver concentrated instead on islands that
had the advantage of already existing but the disadvantage of already
being governed. He made common cause with separatist groups on the
Bahamian island of Abaco and the New Hebrides island of Espiritu Santo.
Such conspiring failed to instigate any independent libertarian nations;
it just resulted in the arrests of some rebellious natives.
I called Oliver to ask for an interview while researching my 2007 book
Radicals for Capitalism. A weight of angry regret and failure seemed to
block his throat as he testily informed me he had nothing to say about
any past attempts to start a new libertarian nation.
So Why Expect Seasteading to Work? (((I could make some witty remark
here, but I doff my hat to primeval human impulses.)))
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.
(((Why not just homestead Detroit?.)))
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. (((Are you listening, global guerillas?))
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.
In April 2008, Friedman’s vision received a tangible and encouraging
business reward: a half-million-dollar stake from Peter Thiel, the
libertarian co-founder of PayPal. Friedman’s high profile on the
Internet, particularly on his always engaging and interesting
LiveJournal blog, coupled with his personal history in the Silicon
Valley, had won his project the attention of local programmers and money
people. A job interview with Thiel’s venture capital management firm
Clarium soon morphed into a meeting with Thiel himself.
Thiel supports many endeavors to create a future filled with wonderful
science-fictional ideas, including the Methuselah Mouse Prize for life
extension research and the Singularity Institute, which focuses on wild
futuristic accomplishments of all sorts. He was a natural audience for
Friedman’s vision, and he was sold. As Thiel’s colleague Joe Lonsdale
tells me, “To Thiel and others involved in lots ofdifferent innovations
in Silicon Valley, this seems like the coolest new thing you could
create: a new government. That sounds really neat.”
(((Okay, this is half the article. After this, it gets much, much hairier.)))
