Libertarians Seek a Home on the High Seas – New Republic

Here on land, the seasteaders propose, ideas about how to govern societies have stagnated. Politics is too entrenched; societal change comes slowly, if at all. Our terrestrially trained minds are blind to the terrifying potential for tyranny in the power to claim landfixed, immobile, where people have no choice but to live, write the authors. Seasteads would upset this dynamic, since each floating city would be small enough and modular enough that individuals could come and go freely, shopping for governments and social structures. If residents didnt like one utopia, they could simply sail off to a new one.

Theres something seductive about this idea. Its the inverse of Francis Fukuyamas proposition, in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, that global liberal democracy was the end point of politics and the world would seethe no morea notion at once comforting and deflating. The Seasteaders imagine the opposite: an endless flowering of new power structures. At a TEDx talk in 2012, Friedman likened the seasteading movement to the Cambrian Explosiona moment in evolutionary history when the globs and mollusks of the primordial soup gave way to a diverse array of complex organisms. Not only humans, but human societies evolve, Friedman asserted. We need new places to try new rules.

The authors dont say which new rules, exactly, they hope to try, and the Seasteading Institute makes clear that it will not be operating the cities itself. The particulars of each seasteads political system should be determined by its inhabitantsor an oligarch, if thats the way it turns out. Any set of rules is OK, the organizations FAQ page emphasizes, as long as the residents consent to it voluntarily and can leave whenever they choose.

Quirk and Friedman insist that their movement is apolitical: Seasteading is less an ideology than a technology, they claim. But the ability to choose among societies at sea is itself political, the expression of a belief that free markets are the ultimate guarantee of happiness. Whats more, the pitfalls of the free market seem even more dire when the commodity being produced is governance itself: In a world where citizen-consumers can move between societies as they choose, the poorest and most vulnerable could easily be priced out and left adrift. As with so many consumption choices on the free market, the choice is only available to those with means, while those with limited purchasing power are constrained and even coerced.

This might sound silly: Seasteading, of course, would be an option, an add-on to land-based societies, and those who dont want to go could simply stay on the shore. But if seasteading is also a grand thought experiment about decentralizing power and increasing mobility, it has to consider how those dynamics work for everyone. And that, by definition, means the nature of the endeavor is inherently political.

It is not hard to see why this free-market vision appealed to libertarian backers like Thiel. Libertarianism prizes freedom and autonomy, expressing skepticism of taxes, regulations, and any other version of state power that impinges on individual sovereignty. In 2009, with the world reeling from the subprime mortgage crisis that ballooned into a global banking meltdown, Thiel wrote that the crisis had been caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards. The response, he warned, would be even more government intervention; believers in the free market were screaming into a hurricane. The essay, The Education of a Libertarian, is also an elegy, lamenting the lack of truly free places left in our world.

Democracy did not strike Thiel as a path to the freedom he seeks. At the Seasteading Institutes conference in 2009, he spoke about his own intellectual development. Where he once saw political argument as a way to solve problems, he now viewed it as a problem in itself. It is not only ineffective at making the world freer, its also unpleasant: All the fighting over political ideals reminded him of trench warfare. As he had put it in his essay, he wished to escape, not via politics, but beyond it.

For Thiel, seasteading represented one of the few arenas in which individuals might still act free from any government restriction or regulation. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount, he opined in his essay. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. This is more or less what Quirk and Friedman have in mind with their vision of life at sea. We dont trust people with power, they write. We trust them with freedom.

In 2011, Thiel funded Blueseed, which was to be a floating tech incubator based in international waters off the coast of Northern California, a short ferry ride from Silicon Valley. The idea was to provide a base of operations for entrepreneurs who wanted to bypass the hassle of U.S. immigration lawsan immigration hack, as Atossa Abrahamian put it in a Quartz op-ed. The idea eventually fizzled out when Blueseed was unable to raise enough money to get its business hub for cruise ships off the ground. The companys final missive, in January 2015, was a retweet: When 99% of people doubt your idea, youre either gravely wrong or about to make history. It closed, touchingly, with #inspiration and #start-up.

For all its failures, Blueseed did achieve one thing: It exemplified the impracticalities and contradictions of the seasteading movements anti-political vision. To dream up a cruise ship business hub that parks just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and sails under a Bahamanian flag, allowing for easy international movement free of immigration laws, is both truly innovative and deeply political. Its political to value open borders and internationalism, and to strive to create a center for innovation that would benefit from a particular system of governance.

The same can be said of the whole seasteading project. A nation where citizens can come and go freely, detaching their modular floating living quarters and sailing off to a better floating town, untethered by anything but their means and their free will, is not an island without politicsits an island with a very particular set of politics. I am, for instance, all for a carbon-negative island that floats over the ocean, clearing marine dead zones with its vibrant, submerged kelp forests and aquaculture structures, producing its own food in towering hydroponic gardens and recycling its desalinated seawaterall ideas put forward by Quirk and Friedman. But thats because of my politics.

Technology can do many things, many of them verging on the miraculousbut it cannot bypass values, commitments, interests, and beliefs. Hearing the language and philosophy of tech disruption applied to governmentwhen so many of the amazing technological advances that have fueled recent disruptions have done so at the expense of labor rights and individual privacywe landlubbers are right to be wary. Government is not simply an albatross around the neck of otherwise free individuals. When it works, it protects the vulnerable and guards the commonsessential tasks at which the free market so often fails. Ocean dwellers will also need those protections. Much as we might like to, we cant escape the political, even by walking into the sea.

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Libertarians Seek a Home on the High Seas - New Republic