[ Talk on seasteading given at FreedomFest, 5/15/2004. Text is approximate as I did lots of ad-libbing from the slides]
Hi. I'm Patri Friedman, and this is a talk about Seasteading. Since this is a new word, lets define it.
To Seastead means to homestead the oceans. The word was coined by Wayne Gramlich. It refers both to this general idea of settling the oceans, and the specific approach we've been working on.
This approach and our research are described in a book: SS: A practical... which is currently in draft form. You can read most of the text online at the website seastead.org, and we'll be self-publishing later this year. There's also an online commenting system so that we can get feedback.
This is going to be a two part talk about both the why and the how of seasteading. Some of you may wonder how this has idea is connected to freedom. I hope to convince you that floating cities, rather than being the lunatic fringe of the libertarian movement, may actually be the key to reducing the size and scope of government. Once you've seen why they are desirable, I'll talk about why they are feasible. I'll give a quick outline to answers some of the basic questions, and hopefully pique your interest enough that you'll want to buy the book or go to the website and learn more.
There are many reasons to build seasteads, but we'll take the libertarian viewpoint, which is that they're a solution to the robust and ubiquitous growth of government.
We have detailed theories and a lot of evidence about the benefits of a free economy. Yet we have some tough empirical evidence to face about the progress of economic freedom. Last century, the world became much more democratic, but it also experienced massive growth in government spending.
Now, we have some ideas about what is going on. Especially in a democracy, we have ideas like public choice theory and the rational ignorance of voters. We know that concentrated interests tend to win out over dispersed ones in the political marketplace. So we have some understanding of this depressing wealth of empirical evidence to show that government growth is a really robust phenomenon. The question is, how to fix it.
I think many libertarians have the intuition that if we can just communicate our ideals passionately and effectively, we can reverse this trend. While this is romantic, I really don't think its true. When you think through the logic of why government grows, you realize that it is the natural behavior of a system with certain characteristics. Those characteristics mainly have to do with the incentives facing individuals, not the political philosophy they believe in. Spreading our philosophy is worthwhile, but rhetoric is not enough.
One of the basic tenets of economics is that people respond to changes in incentives. The problem with government is a problem of incentives, and the solution is to change them. One of the most powerful ways to change incentives is through technology, and it turns out that the technology of floating cities will dramatically change the incentives facing governments. Let's see how.
Think of government as an industry. It has two main features that make it uncompetitive. First, the cost of switching providers is very high. You have to leave your job, sell your house, pack your possessions, leave your friends and family, apply for new citizenship, get a job, buy a house, etc. As some of you probably know firsthand, it's colossal. This dramatically reduces market feedback. The difference to an individual between two governments must be higher than this huge cost in order to make it worthwhile to move. So it's natural for governments to exploit their current customer base, rather than innovating to try to keep them.
Second, government has a huge barrier to entry. Even something like designing a brand-new operating system seems almost easy compared to creating a new government. Consider the current situation in Iraq as an example of the tremendous difficulty and expense of regime change. You can't just start fresh on land because all land is claimed by some existing country. "Give me liberty or give me death" is an effective way of getting land - land that's wide as your shoulders, as long as you are tall, and six feet deep. Since the barrier to entry is high, there are few firms, which again limits competition.
Taken together, we can see that government is an uncompetitive industry, so is no surprise that it performs so poorly.
Now think about how floating cities change these factors. The barrier to entry for the governing market is much lower, because Mark Twain's famous line "Buy land they've stopped making it" becomes false. We can build new territory in unoccupied areas instead of fighting for the currently fixed supply. Nor do you need to acquire a large, contiguous territory at once. It can be built piece by piece as funds and interest become available.
Because the cost of moving around on the ocean is so low, we can re-arrange this territory dynamically. Cruise ships are an example of how massive structures are moved around on the ocean on a daily basis. If we design our floating city to be reconfigurable, built out of many modules, we can re-arrange it in a similarly cheap fashion. So if a group of residents are unsatisfied with the current governing system of a city, they can detach a module and leave. When leaving is easy, exploitation is difficult. If the state tries to impose a sales tax on Monday, by Tuesday there may be nothing left but the capitol building.
Floating cities will restore competition to the business of governing. Like any dynamic, competitive industry, it will produce useful innovations that we'd never dream of. We can be confident that it will be more efficient without having any idea exactly how. This is true simply because of how individuals respond to incentives no need to convert anyone to a particular philosophy.
This theory leads to both optimism and pessimism. It raises doubts about how much freedom we can get on land, and how effective reform will be there. On the other hand, note that the geography of outer space is even more fluid than the ocean. So the necessary characteristics hold for not only 71% of the earth's surface, but 99.999....% of the universe. And the theory suggests that societies in these places will have more efficient governments almost automatically. So let the landlubbers and groundhogs keep their dirt - and we can take everything else.
Now that you've seen why floating cities are desirable, I'll try to show a little about how they'll be built. This will be very rough, since its mostly a matter of boring engineering details. I'm just going to give the very basics of the structure, infrastructure, and strategy. The important part of how is that last one - the strategy for getting from here to there. If you want the details on the rest, see the webpage or buy the book.
There are many ways to design a floating city, but we recommend this particular shape. The section at the bottom is a large flotation chamber which also has a huge amount of ballast. The ballast is what moves the center of gravity down below the center of buoyancy to make the structure stable. Living quarters are on top, and they're separated by this long pillar.
Providing the basic amenities of civilization definitely presents some challenges, but we don't need to innovate. Anyone who has been on a cruise ship has seen sewage, power, food and water can be provided at sea - its just a question of cost. We expect innovation to happen eventually, but its good to know that its not necessary at the beginning. Many things will be imported, but as libertarians understand, there is no reason to be self-sufficient. Trade enriches the world. Seasteads have a high cost per unit area, so growing food is not a comparative advantage.
Power comes from solar panels and wind turbines, with diesel generators for backup. Eventually, wave power will be a major source of electricity, but it's not yet a mature technology. OTEC is not an appropriate technology at this point. It depends on the temperature difference between the warm surface water and cold deep water. Not only is it still experimental, but it doesn't scale down. You can't build a working OTEC plant for less than tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.
Water comes from captured rainwater and reverse osmosis units which desalinate seawater.
A lot of food will be imported, but some may be grown in high-density hydroponic greenhouses.
This is of course where most ventures fail. The history of nation-founding attempts is pretty much a tragic (or occasionally comic) litany of failure. So we have lots of data points to see what not to do. Common mistakes include - depending on nonexistent technologies like OTEC or seacrete. (explain seacrete problems). Depending on money coming from some mysterious angel. Trying to get investment or donations with no proof of concept - at this point the libertarian community is quite reasonably skeptical. Trying to tackle too big a problem at once, like starting with a city for 10,000, instead of 10 or 100.
Instead, we stick to technologies that have already been proven. Reasonable ideas for funding and reasonable business plans. We think its key to demonstrate that the concept works before trying to get any outside money. And we believe in incrementalism: proceeding in a small series of steps.
There's a fundamental disparity in the nation-founding movement. Younger people tend to be more mobile, but have less capital. Older people have more capital, but are tied down. Any workable scheme for a libertarian nation needs to find a way to allow both types of people to participate. On a timeshared seastead, the younger people would be employees, and the older people would be timeshare owners.
Getting to a single built and operating seastead will be the hardest part. Once there, the movement can take off on its own steam. The economy will evolve beyond just a resort, any business that can benefit from low regulation and doesn't mind a high cost for space and utilities. Number of permanent residents will increase, and additional platforms and platform groups can be built. We can show the world by example, instead of trying to argue them around to our side. And, most importantly for those of us who are really passionate about living freely, we can live as we want regardless of whether they come around.
Coauthors Wayne and Andy.
This has been a quick sketch of a pretty large and complicated idea, if you're interested check out the book online. Its still a draft, but there's over a hundred pages of information fleshing out the details. And I'll put these slides up there too.
{ Unfortunately the questioners had no mics, so were not recorded clearly. Here are the questions/comments as best I can recall them, based on the recording, in order, and my answers.}
Q: You plan to start in San Francisco Bay, its this huge thing that runs from Marin County in the north down to San Jose in the south, a whole bunch of different political entities will want to have their fingers in your little pie. Who controls the bay, and have you dealt with that?
A: We haven't dealt with that. There is some precedent. There is a floating island restaraunt called Forbes Island Restaraunt. Its on a barge that's 50 by 150 feet long. They are a legally operating business. There is also a large houseboat community in Sacramento and Sausalito. So there is already existing precedent for having floating structures moored. And its true that more beaurocracies means more people to have their finger in your pie, but it also means more different alternatives to find one who will accept you. And I think one important thing is pitching the environmental aspect of this project, using solar panels and wind turbines. I haven't talked about that much here because this is a libertarian audience, but there is very much a green aspect to this project and that is a very popular ideology in the bay area.
[ Note: Since the talk we have found more information. The bay is controlled by the BCDC, and some idea about what it allows can be found from reading my report about the floating homes in the bay area.]
Q: How much of the money to build Baystead have you raised of $600K?
A: We have several people who are interested. We probably have $150K-$200K so far. We haven't tried hard to find initial founders because we're of the one step at a time approach, we really want to finish the book, get the word out there, and then find people who want to live on board initially.
Q: I think this won't work at all for the same reason as a friend of mine who set up an independent island in the pacific. he was captured by the Kingdom of Tonga. What will happen in this case is you'll be captured by someone outside territorial waters. Maybe pirates. Piracy has been revived since WWII. Piracy and slavery were wiped out before WWI, and they've come back openly. But I would worry about some country that would just like to add...an area to it...Just go around the meditteranean and you'll find a whole set of countries that would be delighted to add this at the cost of two or three days work.
A: You raise some good points, and there are some answers to them. I'll deal with the easiest first, and that's piracy. If you look at the statisics on piracy, about a third or a quarter of the acts of piracy every year don't even involve guns. All but one of the deaths due to piracy happen in southeast asian waters. Most piracy is either done on very small undefended boats, like people who just live in a boat, or its done by large organizations on very large cargo ships, these ships have tens of millions of dollars of cargo and they have very small crews, the reward to risk ratio of attacking a seastead is very different, and I don't think it makes an attractive target.
The question about other governments is certainly an important one. One thing to note is that the market for things like bank licenses, ship registries, i s a much more competitive market than for citizens because its a virtual industry. You can just switch which country your ship is registered from, so in that sense, we can almost pick anyone to be under the umbrella of, I think competition works in our favor there.
You can talk about the technicalities, but I don't think you understand naval warfare.
Q: The law of the sea legitimized the 200 mile EEZ and I have trouble seeing how you could stay out of the property of the coastal and island states, particularly in the Mediterranean.
A: There's no EEZs in the Med, only Exclusive Fishing Zones. There are a couple of answers. One answer is that its possible for seasteads to be outside 200 nautical miles. It makes everything more difficult and more expensive and we'd prefer not to, but that's one method. Another answer is to be in a place like the Med without EEZs. A third answer is that the set of rights that a coastal state has outside the 24m territorial limit and inside the 200nm EEZ is a very limited set, there are like 6 clauses. now one of those clauses is the building of artificial platforms but its a much more limited set of rights and if you're negotaiating for a treaty with a coastal state within the EEZ, you're not negotiating for sovereignty. I'm very skeptical of the idea that a state will sell you sovereignty. But within the EEZ, all you need is a treaty which says, we can sit here and capture the wind and use the sun and build this platform, and that's a much much lesser thing for a state to give up than to give up sovereignty, because they have a much more limited set of rights. And besides the Med there are also special places. It turns out that EEZs don't wrap around, so you get these weird places like in Gibraltar, Gibraltar is a UK protectorate, they only claim 3 nm., yet EEZs don't wrap around, so there's a shadow cast by Gibraltar where you can be 4 nm from Gibraltar and in international waters.
Q: Are you going to fly a flag?
A: I think initially we should fly a flag, that's one of those innovations come later kind of things. Eventually when there's enough people...[Which Flag?] That's not something we've decided yet. [the pirate flag]. Skull and Crossbones, Arr. We're trying to stick to bringing our research from the general to the specific, step by step. We're almost done the general research. [Have you looked at insurance?]. We haven't looked into it, I'm skeptical about whether someone would insure it. That's one reason to do the time-share idea, something as problematic as insurance is getting a capital loan to build the thing, I think that's difficult, which is a reason to convince a lot of people to share small parts of the risk, rather than convince a large organization to assume all the risk for this brand-new thing.
Q: If I understand correctly your goal is to create the equivalent of your own country. So assuming you've created one and you have a nice situation and more people willing to join you than you have space for, what criteria would you use to decide who can live there?
A: I think the first answer is, Build More! More generally, although I have my own opinion about all sorts of specific things like that, yet kinda the beauty of this system is there are reasons to think that it will find good answers to questions. Its a little bit like the free market or anarcho-capitalism this way in that the initial set of people who have the initial property rights, or the real estate venture that has backed it can choose whatever criterion they want. The project and the technology are very hardware agnostic. Its implementation independent, so I try to keep my answers on such questions out.
Q: Wouldn't you and your partners be the owners at first of the whole thing, and wouldn't you be renting out parts until it got big enough segment it out?
A: Well, I don't have fifteen million dollars. If you'd like to give me it, I'd be delighted to own the first seastead. And I think that the people who provide the initial funding are the people who own it and have a say. I certainly hope to be one of those people, but I don't expect that I'll necessarily be the primary such.
Q: Do you have a timeframe for your initial prototype?
A: Its very hard to say. I think the book will certainly by done later this year, and then we'll start paying attention to the prototype. Partly it depends on how long it takes to find people. If I had to make an estimate I'd say 2-5 years.
Q: This is controversial, but the sex industry is an eight billion dollar industry, people spend more money on porn than on movies and sport games. I think if you set this up between Hawaii and the US and have a portion of it be legalized prostitution, hugh hefner style, there is no legalized prostitution in the US. [Except Nevada]
A: That's a good idea. We have a laundry list of things like that. The sin industries, as its easy to think of when we're here, the sin industries are often listed for nation-founding projects. Drugs is another one that's kinda obvious, drugs have very high profits and very low initial capital expenditure, on the other hand its very politically controversial, but there are a number of things like that which are good ideas for initial businesses.
Q: Your seastead, would that be a monolithic block like this where time-sharing is portions of it, but its all one structure
A: That's correct. Basically there are engineering considerations based on where you are that dictate what the smallest unit that can be built is. And I think there's a lot of reasons to build whatever the smallest unit is, makes it that much easier to start and you can always build more, but there is a certain size for economies of scale.
Q: What are the dimensions...of the hexagon?
A: That top deck is about 42,000 square feet, or about an acre. Its all on the website.
Q: Are you familiar with Bill McDonough?...He's co-written a book called Cradle to Cradle
A: Yeah, I'm familiar with that book. I've given very much the libertarian perspective here, but in the book we talk about the environmentalist perspective too and I specifically mention that book and I think that seasteads will appeal very much to environmentalist who want to live a more sustainable, environmentally friendly lifestyle.
Q: There was a similar type of thing, called the Oceania project, Eric Klein...Why did that fail and what would you do differently?
A: Wayne followed that, I didn't. Wayne's impression was that it was for the reasons I listed, that they tried to tackle too large a problem at first, that they didn't really break things down, what they got was a lot of people interested and a lot of people interested and a lot of enthusiasm right away...But maybe you know more?
[Jim Davidson] Well, I was there. And it was here in Nevada in 1993 and 1994. The main problem was there was going to be a founding conference at Ceaser's Palace, Eric Klein asked people to donate money, got guys like ?Courtney Smith? to put up fifty-thousand dollar loans to be paid back out of the proceeds from the conference, and he was going to sell tickets to the conference. Well he got two hundred and fifty thousand dollars together and he used it to cover all his stock market speculation losses, his picks all went down and he didn't have stop-loss orders, basically gambling stupidly. You can still go to oceania.org and see his website, but it doesn't represent an active project.
Q: Has this been reviewed by any engineers?
A: Its been designed by an engineer, a fellow named Andy House who I'm working with. The plan is that once the book is finished we're going to come up with a detailed set of blueprints, right now they're general, and get it reviewed by a marine engineering firm. That's one thing I've criticized the Freedom Ship for, they say their plans have all been reviewed by marine engineers, yet they've never published letters from marine engineering firms demonstrating this, so that would certainly be something we'd do.
Q: Has the concrete system been used in other areas?
A: Not a system with exactly this shape. Concrete has been used in the marine industry for over a hundred years. Ferrocement is actually a fairly common material for barges and piers and a lot of ships have been made with it. Structures kinda similar to this shape are used in the oil industry called semisubmersible barges. have kinda the same benefit of not moving very much.[There was a floating hotel in Saigon harbor in the early 70's.] I think that was actually first on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, but it didn't work.
Q: Could this be towed out under the Golden Gate Bridge to wherever its new life would be.
A: Yeah, this one could be. Its actually about 350 feet deep under the GG bridge, it used to be a river. One of the features of this is that it can float on that top platform, its kind of an emergency safety hull, so you can lower the whole thing down by pumping air out of the flotation chamber if you need to go under things. There stil needs to be enough depth of course.
Q: Why develop a new technology, why not use an old oil tanker or something.
A: That's a great question. That's one of our FAQs in the book. Basically that method works alright. Its not that we think this method is way better. But basically an oil tanker, you have a structure that's designed for certain purposes, an oil tanker is designed for certain purposes, one of the problems is that you don't get a lot of solar area per dollar, they're designed for low drag and interior space, not to maximize solar area. If you have something that's just sitting there and people are living in it, then you have a different set of criteria you want to maximize, its good to have solar space, kinda like the difference between building a house and building a car. I think a barge would work alright. Also ferrocement is just so cheap, its not like there is some huge cost savings to using a barge, ferrocement is actually pretty cheap and durable. But its not like that's not a viable approach, I just think this is slightly better.
Q: Obviously if its successful you've got some government interest...what are some ways the government might try to shut you down and how would you deal with that>
A: There's actually sort of a Parallel to the pirate radio movement in the sixties in Europe, so you had these government controlled radio stations, and these people set up on ships in international waters and broadcast. At first it was incredibly successful, Radio Veronica and Radio Caroline and everything. What the government did was they made it illegal for companies that were based in their countries to buy advertising, and of course pirate radio was all advertising funded, it was radio, and so that cut their money source out from under them. They also made it illegal to sell supplies, there were several years when the Netherlands did not have that law so all the pirate radio ships got their supplies there. So those two things hurt them eventually. Note that the first one, banning land-based businesses, is kinda not something that applies to the seasteads if your business is tourism, if you aren't depending on land-based business. But what's interesting is that what really killed the pirate radio industry thoroughly was that after several years the government opened up the airwves and a lot of radio stations started and there wasn't as much reason. So I guess that my real goal is to increase the amount of freedom in the world and have more freedom, so if governments become more free so there's less reason to live on a floating platform, I'd still consider that a win..
Q: Are you an engineer?
A: A computer engineer. One of my partners is an engineer.
Q: Did you refer to Sealand? Have you thought about making money by hosting internet servers?
A: Yeah, I've actually been working with Sean hastings who was the co-founder and CEO of HavenCo. They did that...[some discussion about whether they still serve or whether they shut down due to Prince Michael worrying about terrorist blowback...etc] They have the problem that they tried to do an internet hosting business during the dot com meltdown. And internet hosting is something that any third world country with a fiber optic connection can do. So they had a huge amount of competition, their main business was gambling sites, and you can go to Costa Rica and for a couple hundred thousand dollars get a license to run a gambling site, so its a business model that sounds good in theory, but has some problems in practice. [Chat about the history of Sealand]
