Note: This is the handout from a talk given to the San Diego Futurist Salon on August 6, 2004.

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Seasteading Futurist Talk Text

• Seasteading

  Hi. I'm Patri Friedman, and this is a talk about Seasteading. Since this is a new word, lets define it.

  • How And Why To Create New Sovereign Territory On The Oceans
  • by Patri Friedman
• So...what is "Seasteading"?

  Seasteading is a word coined by Wayne Gramlich to describe homesteading the oceans. It refers both to this general idea and our specific project, approach, and book

  • Definition: "To Homestead The Oceans"
  • Term coined by Wayne Gramlich
  • Also refers to our specific project, approach, and book
• Book, what book?

  This approach and our research are described in SS: A practical... which is currently in draft form. You can read most of the text online at the website seastead.org, and give us feedback, since every paragraph has an associated comment page, like a blog. We'll be self-publishing later this year.

  • "Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas"
  • Draft available online at http://seastead.org/
  • Will be self-published later this year
• Two-Part Talk

  This is going to be a two part talk about both the why and the how of seasteading. There are lots of reasons to build seasteads, but we'll focus on what we think is the strongest, and that's to increase freedom and reduce the size of government. While building floating cities may seem like a rather strange way to go about this, I hope to convince you that this is a key technology for accomplishing these goals. We'll also talk about why our particular approach is the right way to go. Some of you are probably curious about how, and so we'll sketch out some of the basic engineering details, and hopefully pique your interest enough that you'll want to buy the book or go to the website and learn more.

  • Why
    • Why build seasteads at all?
      • A technology for increasing freedom and reducing government
    • Why build seasteads our way
      • Realism, realism, realism
  • How
    • Our ideas on design, infrastructure, financing...
    • Much greater detail in book
• Why Build Seasteads?
  • Many reasons
    • simple answer: freedom (but infinite variety of reasons to want freedom)
    • complex answer: a technological solution to inefficient government
    • Why is freedom good?
      • More experimentation
      • Less limits on technology
      • changes the exponent in the tech/wealth growth function

        Gwartney - GDP growth correlated with low govt spending Consider difference between 2% and 7% rate of growth: 10 years: 1.22 vs 1.97 25 years: 1.64 vs. 5.43 100 years: 7.24 vs 868 (or for 7% vs 6%, 868 vs 339)

  • Why will seasteads increase freedom?
    • Note: more detailed explanation at http://clevername.net/patri/socs/commented/drawer/dynamic_geography.html
    • Laissez-Faire: Efficient but Not Stable?

      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 freeom. In the past century, the world has experience great growth in democracy and political freedom, but its also experienced massive growth in government spending.

      • We have detailed theories about the benefits of a free economy.
      • We have empirical evidence that free economies produce wealth.
      • Yet disappointing empirical evidence for the stability and robustness of economic freedom.
      • More democracy, more government spending.
    • Why Government Spending?

      Now, we have some ideas about what is going on. 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 I'm going to try to address is, how to fix it. Its common to propose solutions involving education and rhetoric. Instead, I'm going to propose one involving technology.

      • Democracy
      • Public Choice Theory
      • Rational Ignorance of Voters
      • Concentrated vs. Dispersed Interests
    • Rhetoric Is Not Enough

      I think many libertarians have the intuition that if we can just communicate our ideals passionately and effectively enough, 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, and see it as the natural behavior of a system with certain characteristics, you realize that it is pretty resistant to rhetoric. Spreading our philosophy is worthwhile, but rhetoric is not enough. We have to change the characteristics that give rise to this type of system.

      • Many libertarians try to fix things through rhetoric: converting people.
      • But the problem stems from the system and the incentives it creates for individuals.
      • Resistant to rhetoric.
    • Incentives

      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 so the solution is to change them. One of the most powerful ways to change incentives is through technology, and I believe that the technology of modular floating cities will dramatically change the incentives facing governments. Let's see why.

      • People respond to changes in incentives
      • Government has bad incentive structure
      • Technology is a powerful way to change incentives.
      • The technology of floating cities will dramatically change the incentives facing governments.
    • The Industry of Government

      Think of government as an industry. It has two main features that make it uncompetitive.

      • High cost of switching providers:

        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. This is colossal, which 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 its natural for govts to exploit the current customer base, because they don't need to innovate to keep them.

        • Leave job
        • Sell House
        • Pack possessions
        • Apply for citizenship
        • Result: Bad market feedback!
        • Result: Exploitation not innovation.
      • Huge barrier to entry

        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 of regime change. You can't just start fresh because all land is claimed by some current country, and sovereignty is not for sale (especially not on our budget). You need to win an election or a revolution, both exceedingly difficult tasks. Basic economics tells us that with a high barrier to entry, we have an oligopolistic market with few firms and limited competition.

        • Consider Iraq
        • All land is claimed, and sovereignty is not for sale
        • Result: Few firms
        • Result: Little competition
      • Not a good industry!

        Taken together, we can see that government is a very uncompetitive industry, so its no surprise that it performs so poorly.

    • Government on Modular Floating Cities

      Now think about how modular floating cities change these factors.

      • Low barrier to entry

        The barrier to entry is much lower, because Mark Twain's famous line is false. Instead of fighting over the current, fixed supply, we can build brand new territory. And we don't need to acquire a large, contiguous territory at once. It can be built piece by piece as funds and interest become available, which greatly simplifies financing. Instead of needing millions of votes or billions of dollars to take over or splinter off a government, we can do it for a few million dollars a pop. This is a dramatic lowering of entry cost, which should bring in a wide variety of new entrants.

        • "Buy Land, They've Stopped Making It" becomes false.
        • Build new territory.
        • Don't have to win an election or fight a revolution to have a new country.
        • Build piece by piece as necessary.
      • Low cost of switching

        Now the other key is the low cost of switching governments. This hinges on the "modular" part. Floating cities can be modular because transportation on the ocean is so cheap that we can move whole buildings around. Just think about cruise ships and oil tankers - they're as big as a fair sized building, and they spend most of the time moving. Until we invent anti-grav, this is just not possible on land. Now because of the magic of water transport, we can re-arrange entire political units - districts, cities, states, countries, whatever. So if a group of residents are unsatisfied, they can detach their 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. This is not a new idea - its quite similar to Federalism, which is why we have all these states. Instead, seasteads are an enabling technology that makes federalism much easier and so much more effective.

        • Territory can be dynamically re-arranged because ocean is fluid.
        • Entire buildings can move between political jurisdictions
        • Easy to leave means hard to exploit.
        • Federalism resurgent
    • Result: Government Becomes a Competitive Industry

      So for these reasons, modular floating cities will restore competition to the business of governing. Where on land we have a few large, static providers of bad service, on the ocean we'll get many small, dynamic, innovative firms. 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. And even better, this is true simply because of how individuals respond to incentives - no mass political conversion necessary.

      • Land: a small number of large, static service providers who poorly serve customers.
      • Ocean: Many small, dynamic, innovative firms competing.
      • Like any industry, we can be confident that competition will make government more efficient and effective without knowing exactly how.
      • Technology, not political conversion.
    • Optimistic or Pessimistic?

      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 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 increased freedom almost automatically. So let the landlubbers and groundhogs keep their dirt and we can take everything else.

      • Can we be free on land?
      • Geography of space even more fluid than ocean.
      • Necessary feature holds for 71% of the earth's surface and 99.99999% of the universe.
  • Why do things our way?

    Next we'll talk about the philosophy of our particular approach to building floating cities.

    • other ways don't work

      The bad news is that there have been a lot of previous ideas about nation founding before, and almost all of them share a single commonality, which is utter and complete failure. The root causes of failure pretty much all stem from lack of realism, which has manifested in innumerable ways. The problem is nation-founding tends to attract idealistic, impractical people, so its no surprise that their ideas never get anywhere. Websites like "Footnotes to HIstory" and books like "How to Start your own country" document hundreds of projects like this: Antarctic Homesteading: A 60-page single-spaced typescript prospectus for this project was forwarded by the editor of Free Country Newsletter...The basic concept is for people to go to Antarctica and settle. A scenario is laid out to start unfolding in 1981, beginning at a Southern California conference, with growth from 1,000 people to 4,000,000 by 1985, but there is no indication that anything was every done. The financial base was to be concerts by John Lennon (no indicating that he was ever contacted), films in the Jacques Cousteau genre of Antarctic sunrise and sunset, and international conferences on religion and war and liberty...This is a typical example of new-country projects that are mainly used as vehicles for the organizers' daydreams (a practice by no means limited to the political left, as others of these case histories shows), with little regard for the harsher realities of the world - such as the fact that the great powers are unlikely to permit claims to Antarctic territory to become established facts (just recently, the British forcibly removed an Argentine weather station in the Antarctic). [Strauss1984, p. 54-55]

    • our way

      The good news is that we don't need to be too discouraged by this litany of failure, because they generally made basic mistakes that we won't. We want to be as realistic and pragmatic as possible. We'll contrast our approach and previous approaches in several categories:

      • Incrementalism

        We've seen a lot of proposals for floating cities starting with 10,000 people. This is ludicrous. Large successful things, like cities, start out small and expand organically. If you make the first step too high, you'll never even get started. We'll detail our approach later, but it relies heavily on the idea of incrementalism: a series of small steps, each moving naturally into the next.

      • financial realism

        How many of you have heard of The Freedom Ship? Its a mile long city at sea which will cost ten billion dollars to build. That kind of money isn't easy to get, especially for a novel, unproven idea. This goes hand in hand with incrementalism. We want to take small steps and start with small, inexpensive platforms. They may not be as cool, but we'll take modest and real over huge and imaginary any day.

      • technological realism

        We think its very important to focus on mature technologies. We're already doing something very difficult, and the less innovation we have to do, the better. Wacky new technologies are very sexy and exciting, as we all know, but they aren't necessary, so its dangerous to be distracted by them. There are two good examples of this: seacrete and OTEC. (describe) Now, we do hope to use some exciting tech on later seasteads, and I'll mention a couple of them later to make sure you don't get bored by the mundanity of our infrastructure. But we don't want our plan to depend on it, and we don't want to innovate in the beginning.

        • no seacrete
        • no OTEC
      • Political realism

        Other projects talk about UN recognition, acceptance of their passports, international treaties. This is foolish. Right now we should be worried about pioneering, not international diplomacy. That stuff comes way later.

      • compromise

        Pessimisstic libertarians often say that we are doomed to failure, because other countries won't let seasteads have freedom. This is true only if they refuse to compromise. We think that substantial compromise will be necessary. For example, a libertarian seastead may not be able to have true bank secrecy, do weapons research, or export recreational drugs. So what? It should be able to have no zoning laws, no building codes, low or no taxes, no import/export tariffs, few restrictions on weapons, local consumption of recreational drugs, no minimum wage, no legislated work week, no coerced welfare system, no eminent domain and many other items from the laundy list of libertarian demands. Sure sounds worthwhile to us!

• How to Build Floating Cities

  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 somewhat 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 more details on the rest, see the webpage or buy the book.

  • Structure

    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. * The reason for this is to present very little cross-sectional area to the waves. The spar is long enough so that waves will never hit the platform or flotation, just this narrow column. Not only does this help the structure withstand the waves, it means that it will not move or rock like a boat, so no seasicknesss. * Its free-floating, so it can go in any depth of water (anchored if you want it to stay in one place). * Each of these platforms is a separable module, which is important because of the ideas presented earlier. They can be connected in a hexagonal grid. * Built from ferrocement, which is very cheap and durable Cost - Very preliminary, but something like $25-$150/ft^2 (labor, materials, infrastructure). Which is quite low because ferrocement is so cheap.

  • Infrastructure (Power, Water, Food...

    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. Many things will be imported, but as libertarians understand, there is no reason to be self-sufficient. Trade enriches the world.

    • Water

      Rain is free and somewhat plentiful. Reverse Osmosis is decently priced, the main cost is for the electricity, but we can use that electricity to do other things, and run RO when there is excess power. Later solar distillation may be good, all the plans we've found are quite expensive, plus it uses up precious solar area, but perhaps we can mass produce cheap floating units.

      • Rain
      • Reverse Osmosis
      • Future: Solar distillation (maybe)
    • Food

      Probably import a lot of food, because food is low value per unit area, and we have high cost per unit area. Like in a city. But there are tech options for high-density growth, ie hydroponic greenhouses (but water!). Spirulina algae. Fishing / aquaculture won't use up surface area.

      • Import
      • grow in hydroponic greenhouses
      • Future: aquaculture
    • Power - PV, wind, fuel

      Main initial power sources will be PV panels, wind turbines, and fuel-powered generators. Former two are expensive, latter depends on transportation costs, may be cheap. Definitely for backup. Disadvantages include noise, perceived pollution/environmental cost (reduces appeal of seastead to greens). In the future we think wave power will be big. Wave is concentrated wind, wind is concentrated solar. Don't want to depend on it, but here's our favorite method: Describe Isaac's pump. Note it requires a very small number of very simple parts, it will wave attenuate, it can work in parallel, its very DIY! And we don't need to wonder "if its so great why don't we use it now" (the economists protest). It requires deep water with big waves, and transporting energy through long distances of ocean sucks.

      • PV panels
      • wind turbines
      • good old diesel generators
      • Future: wave power
  • Strategy: How to get from here to there.
  • (Skipping: Wind, Waves, Currents, International Politics, Piracy, Alternate Designs, Communications, Waste Disposal, Environmental Impact, Market, Government Design, Defense, Community, Previous Attempts, etc‚
  • Design Basics
    • Submerged flotation chamber, ballast
    • Multi-level platform
    • Long spar
  • Design Features
    • Spar presents low cross-sectional area to waves.
    • Doesn't rock like a boat.
    • Free-floating (can be anchored).
    • Multiple platforms can be connected in a hexagonal grid.
    • Ferrocement - cheap and durable.
    • Cost: $25-$150/sq. ft. (labor, materials, infrastructure)
  • Infrastructure
    • Already a solved problem (think cruise ships)
    • Many things will be imported.
    • Power - solar panels, wind turbines, diesel generators. Eventually wave power. (No OTEC)
    • Water - captured rainwater, reverse osmosis.
    • Food - mostly imported, some vegetables grown in hydroponic greenhouses, local aquaculture.
  • How Not To Make It Happen
    • Depend on nonexistent/undeveloped technologies (OTEC, seacrete).
    • Depend on the appearance of a mysterious angel investor.
    • Trying to get investment or donations with no proof of concept.
    • Trying to tackle too big a problem at once.
  • How To Make It Happen
    • Stick to realistic and mature technologies.
    • Have reasonable ideas for funding.
    • Demonstrate the concept before expecting outside money.
    • Incrementalism: a series of small, reasonable stages.
  • Our Plan
    • Book / Website / Publicity
    • Baystead Prototype
    • 10,000 sq. ft.
    • Moored in San Francisco Bay.
    • Tourist attraction.
    • Funded by 5-10 initial residents, cost $300K - $600K.
    • Seastead: Timeshare Resort
    • International waters (perhaps Med. Sea)
    • Cost $3M - $15M.
    • A few permanent residents, many vacationers.
  • The Future
    • Getting started is the hardest part.
    • Over time, economy will evolve beyond just a resort.
    • Number of permanent residents will increase.
    • Additional platforms/groups built.
    • Show the world by example, not argument.
    • Live as we want regardless of what they do.
• Acknowledgements
  • Co-authors: Wayne Gramlich and Andy House.
• http://seastead.org/