You can't create the future unless you imagine it.
Seasteaders bring a Silicon Valley sensibility to the problem of governments not innovating sufficiently. Innovators are held back and stymied by existing regulations, and we want to give them 21st century regulations on start-up governments.
Evolution is variation and selection. If you can vary alternatives, and select among them, improvement emerges. It works in technology, in apps, and in life itself. What stunned me about seasteading is that it's a technology for variation and selection in governance itself. The reason some two hundred nation-states do a poor job of governing seven billion people is that they don't vary, and people don't select.
Seasteads are man-made islands that float permanently on the ocean with any measure of a political autonomy. They would essentially be startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted.
Seasteads are a technology for anybody to form an alternative community based on their unique values - for communities to organize themselves however they want. Seasteads are their chance to demonstrate their vision can work. All that matters is that people can create, join, and leave seasteads voluntarily. As long as people can choose among seasteads, the best ways of living together will prosper, and the ones that people don't like will fail.
I think our children will be living on floating cities, and they will look back on the 20th Century, when people lived in primitive governments founded in previous centuries, and they will be living on modular, sustainable, floating cities that we can't imagine now, that are based on the voluntary choice of citizens. I think we will have a marvellous world in the 21st Century.
People can leave seasteads, or people can choose them, and people can create new seasteads if they want. This fluidity will engage an evolutionary market process that'll allow a diversity of societies to emerge that will in principle be superior, simply because people chose them. Governments on land don't allow this fluid dynamic of choice.
Thinking about seasteading requires us to free ourselves of these broad political categories we're stuck with on land. People can make whatever community system they want on a seastead. What emerges will totally defy the broad categories we debate about now.
Americans are very mobile and move around and choose the communities they want. On the ocean people would be even more mobile and empowered to link up with people they enjoyed, and detach and move away from people they did not. Increasing choice is a way to foster fulfillment in people's lives. I choose my friends and I'd prefer to choose my neighbors too.
If seasteads advance blue-energy technologies, they'll create blue jobs. Millions of poor people living under exploitive governments are looking for a better choice. Seasteads won't attract them without offering them better options.
I'm a novelist and science writer. I wrote a book about human impacts on marine mammals caused by agricultural drainage of nutrients on our coasts, and another book about evolution. Seasteading captivated me because it incorporates both evolution and environmental restoration.
The first seastead happened fifteen centuries ago. The result was the most beautiful city in the world, Venice. People who were sick of their violent governments fled to the water, where they built civilization on stilts. That startup society - a free city-state on the water - became so successful it dominated the Mediterranean for a thousand years.
Nearly half the earth's surface is unclaimed by any country, so seasteads would be startup countries on the blue frontier. Patri Friedman is a Google engineer and theorist of political economy who realized that if society floated, it would completely change the nature of governance itself. If seasteads are modular and can be moved about, allowing people to choose new societies, we'd create a market of governance providers, competing to attract residents.
Once you provide people with a platform to start their own country, every conceivable type of innovator reaches out to you with their own idea.
Seasteads cost money, and if you want to succeed as a Seastead you have to find ways to attract people to move there. If I was a billionaire I wouldn't want to move to a seastead, but if I was a member of the bottom billion, most of whom want to leave their dysfunctional governments, I might want to move to a seastead.
Oil platforms are a technology for floating permanently on the high seas, and cruise ships are a technology for self-governance on the high seas, and if you combine these two technologies, imagine cruise ships that never dock but float permanently. Imagine if they were 10 times as big. Imagine if they were modular and could move about and you could choose the neighbours you wanted to live with.
Seasteading could be the means by which humanity will live sustainably.
Seavilization will be better than civilization, and we have nearly half the world's surface to discover it.
That's the marvellous thing about seasteads; if a government fails, there's nothing much the people who live there can do about it. But if seasteads fail, they simply disassemble and go away.
We're going to draw a new map of the world, with French Polynesia as the centre of the Aquatic Age.
A lot of Pacific island nations are sinking below sea level; they could easily transition slowly into becoming floating nations.
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