I first wrote about seasteading two years ago, shortly after the Seasteading Institute launched. The brainchild of Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) and others, seasteading is a program for political reform based on a proliferation of self-governing ocean colonies. As I described it in 2008:
A key advantage of seasteads is what Friedman calls dynamic geography, the fact that any given seasteading unit is free to join or leave larger units within seasteading communities. Seasteading platforms would likely band together to provide common services like police protection, but with the key difference that any platform that was dissatisfied with the value it was receiving from such jurisdictions could leave them at any time. [Friedman] argues that this would move power downward, giving smaller units within society greater leverage to ensure the interests of their members are being served.
Seasteading is based on a delightfully bottom-up argument: that the problem with government is the lack of choice. If I dont like my job, my apartment, or my grocery store, I can easily pick up and go somewhere else. The threat of exit induces employers, landlords, and store owners, and the like to treat us well without a lot of top-down oversight. In contrast, switching governments is hard, so governments treat us poorly. Seasteaders aim to change that.
The pragmatic incrementalism of seasteading is also appealing. Friedman doesnt have to foment a revolution, or even win an election, to give seasteading a try. If he can just a few hundred people of the merits of his ideas, they can go try it without needing assistance or support from the rest of us. If the experiment fails, the cost is relatively small.
Yet seasteading is a deeply flawed project. In particular, the theory of dynamic geography is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationships among mobility, wealth creation, and government power. In a real-world seasteading community, powerful economic forces would cripple dynamic geography and leave seasteaders no freer than the rest of us.
To see the problem, imagine if someone developed the technology to transform my apartment building in Manhattan into a floating platform. Its owners could, at any time, float us out into the Hudson river and move to another state or country. Would they do it? Obviously not. They have hundreds of tenants who are paying good money to live in Manhattan. Wed be furious if we woke up one morning and found ourselves off the coast of South Carolina. Things get more, not less, difficult at larger scales. Imagine if Long Island (which includes the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and a lot of suburbs) were a huge ocean-going vessel. The residents of Long Island would overwhelmingly oppose moving; most of them have jobs, friends, familiy, churches, favorite restaurants, and other connections to the rest of the New York metro area. The value of being adjacent to Manhattan swamps whatever benefits there might be to being part of a state with lower taxes or better regulations.
Successful cities need a variety of infrastructureroads, electricity, network connectivity, water and sewer lines, and so forth. At small scales you could probably design this infrastructure to be completely modular. But that approach doesnt scale; at some point you need expensive fixed infrastructuremulti-lane highways, bridges, water mains, subway lines, power plantsthat only make economic sense if built on a geographically stable foundation. Such infrastructure wouldnt be feasible in a dynamic city, and without such infrastructure its hard to imagine a city of even modest size being viable.
I think the seasteaders response to this is that the advantages of increased liberty would be so large that people would be willing to deal with the inconveniences necessary to preserve dynamic geography. But heres the thing: The question of whether the advantages of freedom (in the leave me alone sense) outweigh the benefits of living in large urban areas is not a theoretical one. If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, thats actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods in Wyoming and the government will pretty much leave you alone. Pick a job that allows you to deal in cash and you can probably get away without filing a tax return. In reality, hardly anyone does this. To the contrary, people have been leaving rural areas for high-tax, high-regulation cities for decades.
Almost no ones goal in life is to maximize their liberty in this abstract sense. Rather, liberty is valuable because it enables us to achieve other goals, like raising a family, having a successful career, making friends, and so forth. To achieve those kinds of goals, you pretty much have to live near other people, conform to social norms, and make long-term investments. And people who live close together for long periods of time need a system of mechanisms for resolving disputes, which is to say they need a government.
The power of governments rests not on the immobility of real estate, but from the fact that people want to form durable relationships with other people. The residents of a seastead city would be no more enthusiastic about dynamic geopgrahy than the residents of Brooklyn. Which means that the government of the city would have the same kind of power Mayor Bloomberg has. Indeed, it would likely have more power, because the seastead city wouldnt have New Jersey a few hundred yards away ready to take disaffected residents.
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The Problem with Seasteading | Bottom-up
- Seasteading Book - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Erwin Strauss - How to Start Your Own Country - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- David D. Friedman - Legal Systems Very Different From Ours - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- it's always ourselves we find in the sea - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- New Faces Mean New Developments at TSI - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- New Residential Cruise Ship - Samsung signs $1.1B LOI with Utopia Residences - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Sean Hastings - Experiences with HavenCo and SeaLand - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ibsen on the sea - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Jim O'Neill - Health Innovation at the Frontier - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Seasteading Institute December 2009 Newsletter - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Russ George: Ocean Stewardship - December 22nd, 2009 [December 22nd, 2009]
- Eelco Hoogendoorn: Seastead Engineering Overview - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- Happy 2009 From The Seasteading Institute! - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- Mikolaj Habryn: Residential Shipsteading - December 31st, 2009 [December 31st, 2009]
- M.U.L.E. - steading - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle Documentary - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- Jorge Schmidt - Legal Aspects of Seasteading - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- James is ready to move! - January 19th, 2010 [January 19th, 2010]
- Seasteading is the cure for post-Avatar Depression? - January 23rd, 2010 [January 23rd, 2010]
- Dominique Roddier - Clubstead Engineering - January 26th, 2010 [January 26th, 2010]
- Engineering Parallels Between Ephemerisle & Seasteading - January 29th, 2010 [January 29th, 2010]
- Will Chamberlain - Thinking Structurally About Government - January 29th, 2010 [January 29th, 2010]
- Nice EEZ layer for Google Earth - February 2nd, 2010 [February 2nd, 2010]
- Na'ama Moran - Medical Tourism on Ships - February 5th, 2010 [February 5th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute February 2010 Newsletter - February 6th, 2010 [February 6th, 2010]
- Seoul, South Korea, Launches Floating Island - February 14th, 2010 [February 14th, 2010]
- Research Update: TSI Engineering Assessment Report (part 1) released - March 2nd, 2010 [March 2nd, 2010]
- Countries & Cruise Ships - March 5th, 2010 [March 5th, 2010]
- Viver no Mar (Living in the Sea) - March 5th, 2010 [March 5th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute March 2010 Newsletter - March 12th, 2010 [March 12th, 2010]
- WindWard Looks Seaward: Incremental Developments in Energy and Community - March 18th, 2010 [March 18th, 2010]
- Fun with Google Earth - March 18th, 2010 [March 18th, 2010]
- Website Downtime - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- The Plastiki Sets Sail to Glorify Waste - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Internships at TSI - March 26th, 2010 [March 26th, 2010]
- Patri Friedman Appears on Freakonomics Podcast - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Seasteading R&D Company Looking For Investors - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute April 2010 Newsletter - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- Pioneering Undersea Life in Legoland? - April 10th, 2010 [April 10th, 2010]
- TSI Argonauts: Benefits for Leading the Way - April 22nd, 2010 [April 22nd, 2010]
- Freedom in Brazil - April 22nd, 2010 [April 22nd, 2010]
- Francesca Galea Improves Understanding of the Legal Standing of Artificial Islands - April 28th, 2010 [April 28th, 2010]
- How Ephemerisle 2010 Will Bring Us Closer to Seasteading - May 4th, 2010 [May 4th, 2010]
- Learn Something New About the Ocean - May 12th, 2010 [May 12th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle 2010 tickets now on sale! - May 12th, 2010 [May 12th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute May 2010 Newsletter - May 14th, 2010 [May 14th, 2010]
- Let Freedom Ring! Reception and Conversation on June 9th, 2010 - May 22nd, 2010 [May 22nd, 2010]
- Container Cities - May 28th, 2010 [May 28th, 2010]
- Recommended Reading for The Seastead View Of Politics - May 28th, 2010 [May 28th, 2010]
- Recycling the gyre - May 31st, 2010 [May 31st, 2010]
- Sorry for the downtime! - June 8th, 2010 [June 8th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle: A Floating Festival of Freedom on Humanity's Next Frontier, July 22-25 - June 10th, 2010 [June 10th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle: Evolving Society on Humanity's Next Frontier, July 22-25 - June 10th, 2010 [June 10th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle 2010 Cancellation - June 20th, 2010 [June 20th, 2010]
- Secession Week 2010 at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom - June 30th, 2010 [June 30th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute July 2010 Newsletter - July 9th, 2010 [July 9th, 2010]
- Latest Seasteading Talk Video: Mises Brazil - July 13th, 2010 [July 13th, 2010]
- It's The Love Boat...For Ideas: Reason/TSI cruise - July 13th, 2010 [July 13th, 2010]
- Sink or Swim 2010 Business Contest - July 13th, 2010 [July 13th, 2010]
- Ideas wanted: Seasteading Book PR - July 15th, 2010 [July 15th, 2010]
- Seasteaders to attend the 2010 Singularity Summit - July 27th, 2010 [July 27th, 2010]
- TSI August 2010 Newsletter - August 4th, 2010 [August 4th, 2010]
- Short video from UCSD - August 13th, 2010 [August 13th, 2010]
- Documentary on micronations, featuring seasteading, premiering 9/11 at Toronto Film Festival - August 17th, 2010 [August 17th, 2010]
- TSI Welcomes its New Director of Engineering, George Petrie - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- TSI seeks Oceanography Researcher - up to $500 referral bonus - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Answers to some basic seasteading questions about strategy - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Patri Says: Help Us Create A Compelling Book Proposal! - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- TSI September 2010 Newsletter - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Judges Selected for TSI's Sink or Swim Business Plan Contest - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- TSI Doubles Sink or Swim Prize Pool & Extends Deadline by Two Weeks - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Global Wave Heatmap - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute Fall 2010 Newsletter - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Watch Patri's Talk From The Feast - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Update To Oceanographer Position - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Seasteading: An Audacious Vision of Diversity and Innovation In Law - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Review of Micronation Film Highlights Seasteading Vision - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Reminder: Active review work happening on seasteading book! - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- O. Shane Balloun on American Law Enforcement Jurisdiction Over Seasteads - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- How does Patri spend his time? - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]