Riding the Wave of Seasteading

Riding the Wave of Seasteading
By Stephanie Kalina-Metzger
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.
~e.e. cummings

Unhappy with your government? Judging by abysmal Congressional and Presidential job poll numbers, many of us here in the U.S. are. Want to shed the shackles of the ever-encroaching nanny state? Getting away from it all permanently might be possible in the near future as seasteading makes its way to a dock near you.

The Seasteading Institute (TSI) is a non-profit organization created in 2007 by Friedman and Gramlich “to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovations with diverse social, political and legal systems,” according to the founders.

Seasteading—creating permanent dwellings on the ocean—is a concept that Peter Theil, Paypal Founder, would like to see become reality. Theil has contributed towards this effort through a donation of $500,000 in seed money to help create The Seasteading Institute, which will expand on the work of Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, authors of Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading on the High Seas.”



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And this, folks, isn’t just a wet dream. TSI is planning on plopping a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years to test the engineering. When I questioned Executive Director Patri Friedman as to how he is working with the bureaucracy to make that happen, he responded, “We are seeking to avoid interacting with bureaucracy as much as possible. Baystead will legally be a boat, so that it doesn't need any special treatment or permission beyond the existing rules for boats.”

What kind of people, you might wonder, would be interested in seasteading?

According to Friedman, (a self-professed Libertarian and grandson of Milton Friedman, Nobel Prizewinning economist), “the initial group of seasteaders will be Libertarian and it’s then likely that there will be a Libertarian form of government.” However, that isn’t to say that all seasteads would be Libertarian. In what Friedman deems a “dynamic geography,” some seasteads might be founded by other groups attempting to separate themselves from the broader society. In typical Libertarian fashion, Friedman doesn’t put any restrictions on how people would be governed on a seastead. He envisions a system “where small groups experiment, and everyone copies what works, discards what doesn’t and remixes the remainder to try again.”

It definitely gives new meaning to “whatever floats your boat.” To some this might seem like extreme experimentation, to others it is a tremendous opportunity for individuals to discover which form of government works for them and to participate in this freedom of choice without coercion. When governments compete, you decide! I like the idea of



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jumping ship if I don’t like the way the place is being run. Now I have to wait for elections and then they give me crummy choices anyway.

When questioned on how a seastead might get food and electricity, Friedman responds, “Think cruise ship.” In other words, much of the food would be imported, but Friedman also speaks of hydroponic greenhouses and aquaculture as alternative means of sustaining seastead sustenance.

He goes on to explain, “Floating cities are already real - millions of people take cruises every year, and they’re cheaper than the cost of living in some US cities. We have many differences in mind, but cruise ships prove that the idea is possible. Now we just have to make something safer, stabler, more spacious, more modular, incrementally built, cheaper, permanent, and worth visiting even though it mostly stays put!”

The first prototype-Baystead- would borrow from an offshore oil rig design known as a “spar platform.” In the middle would be a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom, which will be filled with water or air to raise or lower the “living platform” on top.

As a Libertarian myself, I find the idea of floating on a sea of tranquility without the millstone of government around my neck quite intriguing. In fact, think I could thrive,
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(especially without those pesky taxes), that is if there are personal trainers onboard. Just the mention the two words “cruise ship” and I pack on 20 pounds. On the other hand, the
300 square-foot-per-person vision scares me me a bit. I need to stretch my legs out on occasion, so it might not be quite for me. I have a friend in D.C. who lives in what is essentially a walk-in closet, so he might be more suited to such confinement. Hey—as long as he has that satellite link, I should think he’d be as happy as one of the clams he will be bobbing along with. That, too, however, could be a bit cost prohibitive, to the tune of several hundred dollars a month, at least in the beginning.

This might prompt you to ask, “Why would people be attracted to this lifestyle?”

Barry Dively, a fellow Libertarian and hotel manager for an upscale worldwide chain finds the idea intriguing and answers the question this way: “It’s really very simple. Anti-freedom legislation is starting to snowball and is becoming more and more oppressive. Seasteading might be the last bastion of liberty available to the free man.”

One can’t argue with that.

Still, I wonder, what type of person would be content to live out life, on what is, in essence, a platform on an ocean. My curiousity takes me to www.seasteading.org, where I ask for volunteers to explain why they feel they would be good candidates for the seasteading lifestyle. There are no takers. I guess those who would go to such lengths to


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be free from government might also find my prying rather perturbing, so I have to be content to draw my conclusions from their banter on the forums.

What I find when I surf on over (pardon the pun), is that many would-be seasteaders have Master’s degrees in various fields such as electrical engineering, Spanish, economics.
There’s a physician onboard, a pilot, several divers, computer programmers…the list goes on.

Some hail from the United States, others from as far away as Austrailia, Phillipines and the Netherlands. They appear to be a diverse lot, but judging by some of the shall we say “high-end” conversations, Geekspeak seems to be shared by all. (Okay, I’ll admit that I didn’t exactly feel like Mensa material after visiting.)

Know anyone who wants to get in on the ground, err, sea floor of a exciting project just in its infancy? According to the website, paid positions of Chief Scientist and Director of Engineering are now open, along with dozens of ways that you can volunteer.

Some call it Libertopia, others say it sounds fishy, but the two freedom-loving entrepreneurs who founded the Seastead Institute are working hard to prove the naysayers wrong as they strive to bring their “sea village” dreams into laissez-faire reality.