Thanks again for sharing your further thoughts.
To me, freedom is what matters. Seasteading, while interesting in various respects (e.g. to those interested in solving novel engineering problems), ultimately appeals to me as a means to that end. I find it a worthy and inspiring cause because I see how existing governments have monopolized all the habitable land on earth and prevent a community, society, or country operating along truly libertarian, live-and-let-live lines, from emerging anywhere that they control.
However if the seasteading movement, or The Seasteading Institute more specifically, are merely neutral on the question of freedom – or if not entirely neutral, at least not significantly more pro-freedom than the general population or the entrepreneurial/pioneering subset of it that is open to seasteading – then to the extent this is true, my passion for supporting them dries up. My prospective interest in living on the ocean is based on my desire for freedom, not because I would inherently prefer living there to living on land (more the opposite is true, really). And I think a great many in our community feel the same way.
Certainly I’m all for people, companies, and other groups being allowed to form seasteads even when they don’t do so with greater political freedom as their goal, but I don’t see those who are not motivated by freedom as my community, and whether they succeed or fail matters to me only insofar as I have a generally benevolent attitude toward humanity. I also don’t want to see the energy and resources of the freedom community diverted into causes or projects not aimed at advancing freedom.
“A core set of beliefs” can be anything. The Nazis arguably had a core set of things they believed in – promoting German nationalism and “greatness”, hating Jews and those they perceived as “degenerates” of various types, loyalty to their leader, generous state welfare for good Aryan Germans, a heavily State-managed economy, etc. To the extent they had a population of people more or less on the same page regarding these values, this presumably made them more effective at doing what they did. But I hope we can agree that in fact it was not desirable for them to have been effective at doing what they did!
Accordingly, I’m not sure seasteads need “a core set of beliefs” (i.e. any beliefs, so long as the residents agree with them), so much as a core set of guaranteed freedoms. One can have a free country in which not every single individual believes in the degree of freedom that the society allows, so long as those who disagree are not in a position to prevent other members of the community from being free.
Again, I do want people who are anti-freedom – Nazis, Marxists, religious fundamentalists, authoritarian-minded tech entrepreneurs who want to create personal fiefdoms or regimes run by a few, with the majority having only as much say in their living conditions as their economic resources allow them to leverage, etc. – to be able to create seasteads in keeping with their own ideologies if they feel they must, so long as they are populated on a fully consensual basis. Maybe some of the lessons that play out there will ultimately be useful for humanity, even if at unpleasant costs to many of those directly involved.
But I do not want such projects to plunder the resources of the larger seasteading community which I think (I hope!) is mostly libertarian, to fund their dangerously misguided, intolerant, and/or profits-above-everything schemes, or sucker people into them who think they will be getting freedom, when they actually won’t.
In short, I do want The Seasteading Institute, and other groups, and community members as individuals, to put their (our) hands on the scale for liberty in broad terms, even if they (we) don’t get into micromanaging every project. I hope that we will put no less energy into overcoming the difficulties of creating new countries or societies on the ocean that maximize human freedom and minimize authoritarian control, as we do into overcoming challenges around things like funding, engineering, logistics, etc., and make freedom an explicit goal that is integral to the whole endeavor, not some kind of optional afterthought to be sacrificed on the altar of market diversity.
I don’t think tyranny is only "a byproduct of rapidly expanding power structures that are no longer under the control of the populace.” Most parts of the world have endured tyranny for centuries on end, tyranny that was not rapidly expanding, but thoroughly ingrained in society and largely accepted and taken for granted by both the rulers/slavemasters and their victims.
To use an example you mentioned, any individual who wants to personally live under Sharia law should be free to do so, but I think we should actively discourage any seastead project that wanted to mandate that everyone on their seastead has to live under Sharia law or some other authoritarian system. Even if people are perfectly free to leave, someone born into such a society, or who changes their mind about it after supporting the idea at the time they migrated there, will be subject to having their rights unjustly violated.
I see no reason to adopt a faux laissez-faire approach (phony in that it goes against the live-and-let-live values of true laissez-faire) that says “build whatever you want with our blessing”, when individual freedom for all clearly offers everyone a better alternative, and we ought to try to realize this vision to the extent possible.
On Mar 28, 2025, at 9:27 PM, Kirk Erichsen via groups.io <krerichsen=gmail.com@groups.io> wrote:
Starchild,
I'll respond to your questions and comments in the order you raised them:
"I’m not precisely sure what you mean here by “take a step back”, since looking at history and the prospects of the future while thinking about seasteading societies and governance is in no way at odds with anything I had in mind."
It's not up to us, but the seasteading community itself to decide how they'd like to run their own community. I don't see TSI attempting to settle disputes or put a hand on the scale, or worse, dictating how a community forms its charter, if it even has one.
"This statement is a bit odd to me, because agreement or non-agreement with a particular government or economic system is rarely all-or-nothing. In any community of significant population – except perhaps in a cult-like situation – there will be significant differences of opinion on various questions. How such differences of opinion are handled is what governance is all about, and why some form of governance – if not necessarily a government or governments – will be needed."
If there are significant differences of opinion between individuals, either in the formative stage, or after formation of the community, the individual in question might have chosen the wrong community to be part of in the first place. If enough disgruntled people agree with the position of the minority that things need to change, why complain about not being invited to the party when you've probably got enough support to start your own community and have it your way.
I see seasteads as dividing and combining with regularity based on shared interests and differences of opinion. Those who separate may reconnect again later as circumstances dictate. People don't have to agree on everything, but there needs to be a core set of beliefs or it's hopeless. From my perspective, it doesn't really matter what those core values are so long as there are some. There could be seasteads where the inhabitants that want to live under Sharia law in accordance with their faith. If they have something to sell or trade and are willing to render mutual aid to the nearby Christian and Jewish settlements, or if the atheist crypto-anarchists a few kilometers away need a hand, that could be the start of an enduring agreement between otherwise dissimilar groups. Seasteaders, for all their potential differences, will have a very similar lifestyle on the ocean, and unique challenges that might bring them together when mutual support is needed most.
"If/when it is easy for people to exit or secede from seasteads and take their “land” with them, this would certainly go a good way toward resolving concerns and problems of governance. But in practice it seems to me that this is very unlikely to be universally true, especially in the near-term, as you note. Seasteads won’t necessarily be modular and interchangeable like Lego pieces, nor if someone were to “take their house and leave”, will there necessarily be anywhere else they can practically go, modularly-interlocking-compatible or otherwise."
The beginning is always messy as there will be a lot fewer choices available and the infrastructure to build a community from a few motivated individuals splitting off from a larger group doesn't yet exist. We don't have a fleet of support vessels to tow seasteads with competitive rates to wherever you want to go, at least nothing specialized to the kinds of units being build or anticipated near term. To be sure, the particular form a community takes, with everything you need already found in your seastead (water, power, food storage, Internet, etc. etc.) is one approach and the idea of "floating away from bad neighbors" is compelling. However, as time moves on and the seastead takes the form of several city blocks of superstructure, your means of escape might be to take a water taxi to the next community over (assuming there is one) after breaking your lease or selling your condo on the twentieth floor. The further out you go, the more likely it is that at least some aquatic communities won't be so easily separated into mobile units ready to connect to some other hub somewhere else. The modularity may be in the construction of the unit, but not around individual homesteads, but rather functional blocks like power or water storage, sanitation or food production. Those kinds of futures might be 50 years out, so other than speculating about what that kind of society will look like vs the types likely to existing in the coming years might be very different from each other.
"I was just listing some rights/freedoms that came to mind and that people care about, as a starting point for discussion. Of course if something is a true right, that means it is inherent and inalienable. You have, for instance, rights to free speech, self defense, etc., in a country, whether or not the government respects these rights, or a majority of residents agree with your exercise of them."
It's up to the community what they will demand of each other. They might not even have any written laws, a charter or constitution, just a good faith belief and a willingness to collaborate.
Tyranny is a byproduct of rapidly expanding power structures that are no longer under the control of the populace. Nobody wants tyranny, but the pattern has repeated itself throughout history in almost every advanced society across time. The solution is dissolution of the apparatus through self-exile. The alternatives, already well documented, are violent suppression resulting in violent revolution. The best medicine for tyranny is to starve it of willing participants.
"This is exactly the kind of detail that I think it’s important to talk about and get more clarity on. Absent a framework of basic, agreed-upon rights and freedoms, people running, say, an Islamic seastead, might seek to ban or limit visits and communications with people living on a Jewish seastead, or vice-versa. They might try to restrict the ability of their residents to access certain types of information. How would you, or we, handle such a situation?"
Let's talk about it then. Rather than focusing attention on how seastead communities, in general, should rule themselves, perhaps what we should be talking about is a basic framework for how disparate communities can work on a small set of common problems together for mutual benefit, and render aid during major events, whether they be natural (storms) or man-made. A mutual aid agreement, and a collaboration agreement on specific projects would be a great start. Many cities have similar agreements with neighboring cities as part of their disaster response, transportation networks and the development of water resources or power production and distribution via shared electrical grids. While there is value in encouraging discourse and ensuring transparency, there's no means of enforcing any particular ideal, only the hope that the better behaved communities will lead by example and not annex their neighbors militarily.
"...But there will be some who view seasteading primarily as an opportunity for self-enrichment, and don’t particularly care about the overall happiness of fellow residents."
And that's the point - they can! There will be insular groups that want to be left alone, and there will be rugged individuals in the equivalent of floating log cabins out on the new frontier, operating various enterprises made possible by their location on a shipping lane and their independence from most forms of law and authority. There will also be people engaging in nefarious activity, some of it mild, some not, and not because their out in some lawless no-mans-land but because everything that happens on land will also happen on water. Where people go, they bring their ambitions and their foibles with them. There will be many great firsts, like the first baby born in a seasteading community, the first college graduate from an institution of higher learning located on a seastead, and the first major scientific breakthrough after extensive research carried out on a seastead. There will also be the first robbery, the first assault and the first murder. Reading news on communities in marinas (liveaboards, where its allowed) and you get a sense of what a seasteading community will be like and the sorts of unique problems someone living on their sailboat docked in a marina faces and the sorts of problem solving they've developed to cope. If a particular marina's equivalent of an HOA gets too heavy handed, you can literally take your sailboat down the coast and find somewhere comparable if not better. Services for cleaning and repairing your vessel, upgrading its communications system and safety equipment, all of that useful, important or just plain interesting stuff is found in marinas where a large percentage of the boats you see have people living in them at least part of the year.
"What choices should we as members of the seasteading community, as organizers in the Seasteading Institute and other movement organizations, be making to discourage such attitudes, and to foster and encourage a benevolent approach to this new frontier, one that is mindful of the horrible human history of tyranny, democide, genocide, and lesser abuses, and seeks to avoid or minimize them?"
Encourage good behavior, while being aware there's no means to make anyone do anything. That's about as good an answer as there is to this question, for better or worse. We could write a philosophic treatise on the ethics of seasteading if anyone wants to volunteer. I'm game.
-K
On Fri, Mar 28, 2025 at 7:21 PM Starchild via groups.io <http://groups.io/> <sfdreamer=earthlink.net@groups.io <mailto:earthlink.net@groups.io>> wrote:
Hi Kirk,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I’ve interspersed some further thoughts below...
On Mar 28, 2025, at 6:29 AM, Kirk Erichsen via groups.io <http://groups.io/> <krerichsen=gmail.com@groups.io <mailto:gmail.com@groups.io>> wrote:
This is a great list starchild.
It would be my preference to actually take a step back and use the lens of history and the prospects of the future guide us in conducting an experiment.
I’m not precisely sure what you mean here by “take a step back”, since looking at history and the prospects of the future while thinking about seasteading societies and governance is in no way at odds with anything I had in mind.
Based on a few guiding principles, lets strip back the layers and prove out governance and economic concepts through scientific means:
* The form of government doesn't matter, as long as everyone agrees with the function and structure of both government and economic system.
This statement is a bit odd to me, because agreement or non-agreement with a particular government or economic system is rarely all-or-nothing. In any community of significant population – except perhaps in a cult-like situation – there will be significant differences of opinion on various questions. How such differences of opinion are handled is what governance is all about, and why some form of governance – if not necessarily a government or governments – will be needed.
Of course the right of exit or secession is vitally important. Establishing this as a fundamental, non-negotiable principle of seasteading, with due care paid to establishing a culture and structures to ensure that it will always be respected and upheld, may possibly be more important than any other single political principle or consideration.
If the residents don't like how things pan out, they have the right to leave, and they also have the right to attempt to reform the government, important if there is no other nearby seastead to translocate to (a real problem in the early days of this adventure - having somewhere to go if the first choice is the ONLY choice).
If/when it is easy for people to exit or secede from seasteads and take their “land” with them, this would certainly go a good way toward resolving concerns and problems of governance. But in practice it seems to me that this is very unlikely to be universally true, especially in the near-term, as you note. Seasteads won’t necessarily be modular and interchangeable like Lego pieces, nor if someone were to “take their house and leave”, will there necessarily be anywhere else they can practically go, modularly-interlocking-compatible or otherwise.
* The rights and freedoms offered could be longer or shorter than your proposed list, so long as the residents agree with it.
I was just listing some rights/freedoms that came to mind and that people care about, as a starting point for discussion. Of course if something is a true right, that means it is inherent and inalienable. You have, for instance, rights to free speech, self defense, etc., in a country, whether or not the government respects these rights, or a majority of residents agree with your exercise of them.
Finding a niche to protect and encourage certain activities will draw particular individuals to the settlement. Failure to provide those protections will cause some to stay away. Choosing to focus on some things and not on others will have a filtering effect.
Absolutely. I think we should talk about these choices in a way that recognizes and presumes individual agency and empowerment. Asking, for instance, “What protections do we want our seastead to have?”
A seastead established to provide protections to practitioners of a particular religious faith or sect (the big three, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any religion, up to and including a brand new one) might be very attractive to some and repulsive to others. Free market/market of ideas applies here.
I think this kind of thing is desirable to a point. I hope we can agree, for example, that we don’t want seasteads based on pyramid or Ponzi type schemes. That we don’t want seasteads to take the form of floating Dubais in which a minority of residents are recognized as “citizens” with rights, while the majority are effectively stuck in a kind of indentured servitude. We certainly don’t want tyranny.
I want to see experimentation in all aspects of governance and economic systems. Let's see what "true communism" is supposed to look like with a few hundred people dedicated to the missision of achieving it.
Agreed. But should the Seasteading Institute, and libertarians who are (so far) the backbone of the seasteading movement, encourage, or welcome as equally valid in the international seasteading movement, proposals or plans to create seasteads which would deny or limit basic human and civil rights that the vast majority of libertarians value (and value for very good reasons)?
Right next door there should be several other options, with Friedman-esque libertarian utopia beckoning, and somewhere between them a fake-Sweden, replete with free, unconditional healthcare and fresh strawberries and Swedish meatballs served at the government cafe for those who prefer cradle to the grave democratic socialism with high taxes and a large number of government parastatals. And just like the real Sweden, a basic income will be provided at the government's expense from its fund.
For the above experiment to work, individuals living in one settlement should be able to visit regularly and maintain communications with each other. Regular news coverage from local news organizations should be part of evaluating how information is shaped and disseminated.
This is exactly the kind of detail that I think it’s important to talk about and get more clarity on. Absent a framework of basic, agreed-upon rights and freedoms, people running, say, an Islamic seastead, might seek to ban or limit visits and communications with people living on a Jewish seastead, or vice-versa. They might try to restrict the ability of their residents to access certain types of information. How would you, or we, handle such a situation?
At the end of the five year period, we measure success in GDP, happiness index, and human development index.
Which population test group grew fastest? What sorts of problems did the selected experimental system create that led to negative net growth in any of the evaluation criteria? How hard was it to change direction once the direction was chosen and proved problematic to the inhabitants? What is the overall health of each society, physically, mentally and economically based on the choices made at the beginning?
And then what? The seasteads scoring lowest on these metrics are told that they need to change their governance, or – what?
Money and prosperity are important, but which one made the residents happiest? If we aren't shooting for happiness (and no one thing makes everyone happy), we're missing the point. No one right or privilege will be the secret sauce to creating lasting, successful societies on the sea. If there is strength in the seasteading vision, it is to accommodate very different worldviews and tailor to those preferences in ways that would be difficult or impossible elsewhere.
Let the experiments begin!
-K
I agree with these points. But there will be some who view seasteading primarily as an opportunity for self-enrichment, and don’t particularly care about the overall happiness of fellow residents.
What choices should we as members of the seasteading community, as organizers in the Seasteading Institute and other movement organizations, be making to discourage such attitudes, and to foster and encourage a benevolent approach to this new frontier, one that is mindful of the horrible human history of tyranny, democide, genocide, and lesser abuses, and seeks to avoid or minimize them?
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 9:39 PM Starchild via groups.io <http://groups.io/> <sfdreamer=earthlink.net@groups.io <mailto:earthlink.net@groups.io>> wrote:
Hello all,
I’d like to start a thread here about the kind of rights and freedoms I and other prospective seasteaders may be looking for in the context of belonging to/residing on a floating community or country (or an undersea one, I suppose, though I agree with Kirk that undersea habitats are a bridge further, and unlikely to hold much appeal for most in the near term).
A few basic rights/freedoms that I think many people want (though, sadly, these are often more violated, than upheld, by existing terrestrial governments), listed roughly in order from the most personal and fundamental to the most other-affecting, though such ordering is of course an inexact science and open to debate:
• right/freedom not to be tortured or gratuitously/cruelly harmed for a frivolous purpose
• right/freedom to exist without being aggressed against
• right/freedom of thought and religion
• right/freedom to choose what to wear, if anything
• right/freedom to choose what to put into or take out of one’s own body
• right/freedom of self defense
• right/freedom of speech and expression
• right/freedom to own and dispose of one’s personal property
• right/freedom of movement
• right/freedom of voluntary, consensual association with others (including trade and commerce)
• right/freedom to defend others being aggressed against
• rights/freedoms of less than fully sentient and independent beings (members of non-human species, infants, dependent children or other dependent persons, senile or incapacitated persons, etc.)
I believe the above listed rights/freedoms are all innate (inherent/inalienable) rights or freedoms. There are two other categories of rights or freedoms – civil rights that people acquire in certain contexts, based on the nature of the society in which they exist, the rules that have been set up, and the nature of the rights-possessing individual (a right to vote might be meaningless to a bird, for example). Some civil rights include:
• right/freedom to marry (as many people of whatever genders desired so long as consensually)
• right/freedom to equal treatment by law
• right/freedom to vote
• right/freedom to control one’s own personal information (e.g. name, medical records)
• right/freedom to serve on juries and hold other public offices
• right/freedom to form organizations (including of a commercial or religious nature)
• right/freedom to the free and equal use of public space
• right/freedom to transparency of official information
Neither of these categories should be confused with legal rights, which are not actually rights but simply confer the ability to take certain actions “legally", which may or may not reflect and uphold civil rights or true (human or innate) rights.
Considering the above, a few possible questions for discussion:
• What rights and freedoms do you personally want?
• What rights/freedoms do you think are most important to the establishment and sustainability of a free society?
• What kind of governance (or lack thereof) do you ultimately want to see manifested in seasteads? • What kind of approach(es) do you think will allow seasteading to thrive and avoid being shut down by authoritarian interference?
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))