Seasteading Institute blogs - full entries

An old speech, freedom for the bold.

Patri — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:05:16 -0700

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Read the whole thing, and try to listen to the words, not as a piece of history, but as the deliberately reasoned conclusion of a group of people who felt these words so strongly that they were willing to risk their lives for the untested principles therein.

Nowadays the theoretical morality and practical advantages of replacing despotism with democratic self-government are widely recognized. Those who throw off the chains of tyranny are following a well-trodden path to a known destination. But someone had to take that first bold step into the unknown, guided by their vision of a just society and frustration with existing systems. Without such pioneers, the world would be doomed to endlessly retread the same weary paths, ignorant of the greener pastures that might lie ahead.

Change always provokes defensiveness and suspicion from entrenched power structures and the human mental bias towards stasis. But it would have been a terrible loss for humanity if America's founders had resigned themselves to the status quo of monarchical tyranny. As it would be for us today to resign ourselves to the status quo of terrestrial democracy. So on this July 4th, let us pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor that we will not make the same mistake.

More time for Seasteading

Patri — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:57:48 -0700

As many of you know, in addition to my responsibilities at TSI, I have a day job at Google. Having two jobs has been stressful, especially with the lack of alignment in having my passions one place and my time another. Therefore I have given notice at Google, and will be leaving at the end of July.

I will be devoting some of my extra time to increasing my hours at TSI, particularly to coordinating volunteers and revising the book, but I will also be de-stressing, traveling, and catching up on life. After about 3-6 months of this mini-semi-vacation, I will ramp up to full-time on seasteading. You can read more about the decision on my personal blog.

It'll be costing me a bit financially, as I had a few more months of valuable stock options coming, but passion is way more important than money. As Po Bronson writes in What Should I Do With My Life?:

Shouldn't I make money first -- to fund my dream? The notion that there's an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn't find any.

Sure, I found tons of rich guys who were now giving a lot away to charity or who had bought an island. I found plenty of people who had found something meaningful and original to do after making their money. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.

It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world -- and psychologically adapted to it -- that you don't really want to ditch it.

I met many people who had left the money behind. But having "enough" didn't trigger the change. It had to get personal: Something had to happen such as divorce, the death of a parent, or the recognition that the long hours were hurting one's children. (One man, Don Linn, left investment banking after he came home from a business trip and his two-year-old son didn't recognize him.)

The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the "practical approach." But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.

This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast majority of us aren't just putting our dreams on ice -- we're killing them.

Wayne: Seastead Community

Patri — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:42:32 -0700

A guest post from TSI co-founder Wayne Gramlich about his vision for the evolution of seastead communities:

My model for a seastead community is that it will grow and evolve along the same lines of Venice, Italy. Venice started off as 118 small shallow islands off the coast of Italy. In the beginning, passage between the islands was via small boats. Over time these islands became fully populated and interconnected via bridges. I expect a seastead community to follow a similar evolutionary path.

While it would be wonderful to have a fully interconnected seastead city at the outset, basic economics dictate that an initial seastead community will start off as a heterogeneous collection of individual seasteads. These seasteads will range from sailboats, old converted cargo ships, ocean going yachts, and purpose built seasteads. The purpose built seasteads will range from small to medium and eventually to quite large. The small seasteads will be short and squat and relatively low to the ocean surface. The more expensive and comfortable seasteads will extend upwards from the sea surface to reduce interaction with large waves. Eventually, large elevated surfaces along the lines of Mini-Float, Float, Inc., or VersaBuoy will become available. The larger structures will be either be bolted together or interconnected via bridges.

Unlike early Venice, there is no particular need for a land grab. As people show up with their seasteads, they can be integrated into the overall seastead community. Indeed, there is no reason not to rearrange the seasteads on a regular basis. For example, it is possible to imagine that a seastead community is rearranged every day to optimize for a different kind of behavior. On race day, the community becomes long and narrow with a lane down the middle for viewing of motor and sail boat races. On market day, vendors who are selling product would be collected into a central location to make it easier for buyers to purchase product. This could be similar to the water market at Damneon Saduak (130 km from Bangkok) in Thailand. I will not belabor the point, dynamic geography is a real selling point for seastead communities, and we should experiment with it to see what communities come up with.

Inter-Seastead Travel

The reason for having a community of seasteads is so that people can interact with one another for work or play. I expect inter-seastead travel to be dominated by small boats at first and eventually evolve towards bridges and maybe even being bolted together as the technological (and sociological) issues get worked out.

Regardless of the technology people use to travel between seasteads, any seasteads that are not physically connected to one another will need some technology to help maintain position relative to one another. Pretty much all seasteads will require some sort of location determination technology (e.g. GPS, sonar, laser triangulation, etc.) in conjunction with position maintenance technology (e.g. water thrusters.)

What matters is that the individual seasteads maintain relative position to one another. The entire seastead community can have a net drift as a result of water currents and/or wind direction. If all seasteads are drifting in the same direction at the same speed, that is perfectly acceptable to the community as a whole.

I envision that the initial position control system for each seastead will consist of GPS receiver connected to a small computer with a wireless 802.11n capability. In addition, the computer will be connected to a relatively low power water thruster system. A system based on modified salt water trolling motors is probably workable.

We are going to have to come up with algorithms and protocols that allow the various seastead position systems to communicate amongst themselves. These algorithms and protocols will keep track of the average GPS community location, the current average community drift direction and speed. Once the average community drift is known, each individual position system can try and maintain a position relative to the community center. Given that GPS receivers generally have sudden jumps in position when they switch satellites, I am quite sure that there will a whole bunch of trial and error required to get algorithms that perform well without causing excessive energy drain on the positioning systems.

A relative position control system that is based exclusively on GPS signals will probably be able to maintain a relative position that is accurate to 10's of meters. This is probably "good enough" for the boat based inter-seastead visiting that I envision at the beginning.

Please note that people who live in the suburbs (and rural areas) are already quite comfortable with concept of hopping into a car every time an errand needs to be run (e.g. taking the kids to/from school/soccer, buying groceries, visiting friends, going to work, etc.) Thus, the initial seastead community will have some of the feeling of living in suburbia, except that people will use boats instead of cars.

Since I expect the initial seasteads to be full of smart and innovative people, I expect that there will be a lot of tinkering to improve inter-seastead travel. I will mention a few such possibilities below:

For solid goods only, a good old catapult could be used to simply throw the goods from seastead to seastead. Of course, if the catapult misses, replacing the misplaced goods could get expensive.
A rope could be strung between a pair of seasteads and people could pull the rope taught, hook onto the rope, and slide across to the intervening space. This will probably appeal to the more adventurous types. When the rope is not in use, it could simply float on the water surface to prevent tugging the seasteads together.
The seasteads could actually be maneuvered close enough together that people could simply jump the gap. Old tires could be used to prevent damage if the seasteads bump together. A simple plank can be dropped across the gap to help prevent people and goods from falling through gap.
A specialized boat can be developed that can be used to ferry people (and groceries) between seasteads. Patri and I call this ferry a sea elevator since it moves between seasteads (horizontal movement) and it can adjust its height (vertical movement.) Whether or not sea elevators will cost competitive with boats remains to be seen.

Eventually, people are going to want an experience similar to Venice, where they can simply walk around. In the case of Venice, the islands did not have a tendency to move around, so it was simply a matter of building a bridge big enough to span the water gap. For seasteads, some additional engineering is required to deal with the tendency of a seastead to move around.

Unfortunately, building bridges to interconnect seasteads whose position is only accurate to 10's of meters is not easy. For bridge based interconnect, relative positional accuracy will probably need to be within a few meters, maybe even less than a meter depending upon the bridge design.

I seriously doubt that plain vanilla GPS is up to the task of getting the relative positional accuracy that close. The good news is that I am not sure it really matters. Once a bridge spans the gap between two seasteads, it can have additional sensors to measure the distance and angles. Everything else is fairly simple trigonometry.

The bridge designs will have to have safety features that allow them to safely disconnect when the seasteads drift too far apart. It will not be acceptable to simply dump foot traffic into the ocean when that happens. While it would be nice if the bridges can automatically reconnect afterward, it may be necessary for humans to be involved for the original connection.

There is some seastead platform technology, like Versa-Buoy, where the platforms can be brought together and firmly bolted to one another. For these platforms, there is no need to worry about the platforms drifting apart.

Regardless of the what the initial collection of seasteads used to form a community are, the Seasteading Institute will need to provide the standards for maintaining relative position and the interfaces for interconnecting via bridges. This will be part of our protocol suite for seasteading.

Save The Date: October 9th/10th

Patri — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:06:24 -0700

Our first annual conference will be Friday, October 10th, at Embassy Suites in Burlingame, CA. There will also be a reception Thursday evening (10/9), and an informal breakfast Saturday morning (10/11).

More details forthcoming, such as speakers, registration, discount code for Embassy Suites rooms, other hotel options nearby, etc. We're tentatively planning to have it be a working conference, where people brainstorm, research, build little models, write code, that sort of thing. A couple keynote speeches, but most interaction will be in small groups, not 1:many talks.

We need volunteers to help organize and run the conference, so if you haven't signed up yet on the Wiki, please do so (under Conference Coordinator).

RSS feed of all site changes

Patri — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:50:31 -0700

I have just enabled a feed for all comments on the site. Most importantly, this will include all replies to forum messages, so you can keep track of all the forums with a single feed. I'm not sure if it also contains initial forum posts, but if not, you can get them with this feed.

The forums have been pretty active, but I've been a bit concerned about them being hard to use. Hopefully this will help. Let me know if you have any comments on how the forums can be made more useful.

Snippets through 6/23/2008

Patri — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:44:23 -0700

With my injured shoulder, work has been slow this month.

Community
- Publicity
  - Political Animals radio/podcast interview (libertarian-oriented interview w/ Patri)
  - Rude Awakening radio show (short and not very favorable. Can't win 'em all.)
  - Yachting Magazine
- Conference - We have tentatively settled on Friday October 10th, at Embassy Suites by SFO (with some Thu evening / Sat morning stuff). The cost will probably be in the $100-$175 range (with meals, not counting hotel room). It will be "unconference" style, with a few keynotes and the main focus being on brainstorming, researching, networking, etc. You can semi-mark your calendars, but we will make a more formal announcement when we have signed a contract and made a deposit.
- Volunteers - Thanks for all the additions to the Volunteer List Wiki page! We will be contacting volunteers over the coming weeks.
- Seastead socials - We're thinking about having get-togethers in the Bay Area every 4-6 weeks, just general brainstorming/networking/keeping the enthusiasm going over drinks sort of thing. We'll announce that here when it gets going.
Engineering
- We are hiring a local offshore engineering firm to do high-level structure conceptual design, and perhaps numerical modeling, simulation, and wave tank testing of some promising designs.
Research - Nada

Migration

Patri — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:07:14 -0700

Vince Cate has written an excellent wiki page on Migration:

Imagine each seastead uses a kite and sea anchor to move in a big circle around the Sargasso Sea once each year. The currents are almost fast enough to do this, so even a slow seastead can probably make it. I am thinking Anguilla, Bermuda, Azores, back to Anguilla. We could time it so that we were in the North-Eastern half of this loop to avoid the hurricane season in the South-West and then in the South-Western half of the loop to avoid the cold stormy season in the North-Atlantic. With computers controlling the kites and sea anchors I think we can move at the right speed to make this happen. I think if we checked historical information that doing this you would never have had to face even a 30 foot wave in the last 100+ years. Designing/building for 30 foot waves is much easier than designing/building for 100 foot waves, so this type of migration could make the seasteads much more affordable.

Here are some of the things I like about the idea:

The lower the worst expected wave we have to design for, the cheaper our structure will be. The cost of building something that can stand up to huge waves is one of our biggest concerns, so eliminating that would be a huge win.
A traveling sea colony will pass close to different countries and continents. If we use the North Atlantic, like Vince suggests, we will get (relatively) close to the Eastern USA, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Europe each year. This makes it easier to visit interesting places, and have them come to festivals we host.
It moderates temperatures by being in higher latitudes in the summer and closer to the equator in the winter.
Because it is following existing current gyres, and is very slow (< 1MPH), it should use relatively little energy.

We need more data to quantify the exact reduction in wave height (are off-season hurricanes nonexistent or just infrequent?), but this is a promising approach.

Also, this seems like a good place to make some meta-level comments. Vince's idea was useful because:

It was good.
It was written up nicely on the wiki, with graphs and data. The forum is a great place to discuss and refine ideas like this, but if they don't get written up nicely on the wiki, they are liable to just get lost. So once you think an idea is good, please put in the time to write it up and put it in the appropriate categories / link it from the appropriate pages, so it becomes part of our collective knowledge.
There was some research behind it. I'd had the idea of circling current gyres for temperaure and wave height reduction before, but I knew nothing about when hurricane season was, whereas Vince looked up the route in charts with gale probabilities to get some actual data. So my version of the idea was just one of a zillion untested potential methods, whereas his actually had some vetting. That makes it vastly more useful, because we have lots of untested ideas and only the time and money to pursue a few of them.

We will be meeting with some marine engineering consultants in a few weeks to start the high-level design process, and figure out which structures are worth doing detailed modeling and analysis. So if you have ideas for structure designs or features like migration which would substantially affect the design choice, please write them up on the wiki, and add them to the list. Keep in mind our Requirements.

Why not buy a remote third-world island?

Patri — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:35:38 -0700

This question is common enough that it is in our FAQ (although buying land and taking over an entire country are answered together - should fix that). Adam from the Floatingman Island project, recently said:

The latest idea, and this one seems more solid, is to buy an island. We would _not_ have the freedoms that we would have in declaring our own country. But the simple matter of being separated from the authorities by a body of water would give us some degree of freedom and autonomy.

I share goals with the seasteaders, but have a differing approach. I think that they're shooting too big as a first step. I'd like to first buy an island. Then we can have a group of smart, creative, like-minded people sharing ideas, experimenting, and working together in person to create new things. The island can be a stepping stone to move on to bigger and more ambitious things.

That's my view. But maybe the seasteaders can convince me otherwise. :-)

Sure, let me give it a try.

Lets start with the idea that we all have The Dream of creating places where people can have permanent, free lives. There are two related areas of difference here. (1) is where you should work on The Dream. (2) is the question of what the eventual method for autonomy is.

For (1), I don't see the advantage of their method. Adam says the goal is "a group of smart, creative, like-minded people sharing ideas, experimenting, and working together in person to create new things". But that same goal can be achieved anywhere, including in places which have jobs and infrastructure and lots of other smart creative people. Like, you know, the SF Bay Area.

If we call the quoted part X, then really what he is saying is "It's better to have X on a remote island than to have X in a major US city". Arguments for this might be: less distractions, less influence from the current way of doing things, and experience with a lower-tech environment. Arguments against are: it's good to have income, it's good to have access to modern engineering facilities (if you work here, you get to use all the tools at Tech Shop, whereas on an island, you only have the tools you buy and fly in), it's good to be around other smart creative people who like your idea but aren't ready to move to a remote island for it yet. To me, it looks like the balance is strongly on the side of working here, but there may be other arguments I haven't thought of.

There are certainly local regulatory differences, but to me, the excessive regulation in the US is more than compensated for by its justice system, which, while far from perfect, is more just and humane than Nicaragua's.

Answering (2) is a bit tougher, since I don't think the Floatingman people don't have a clear answer as to what their method for getting to The Dream is. So I'll focus on the related question: is the extra freedom from being in a remote location a step on the way to The Dream?

My dream is freedom *with* civilization. I could have freedom without civilization by just getting in a boat and sailing to the middle of the ocean and then sitting there. That does not seem like much of a life to me, and I doubt it does to most of y'all either. I am a pioneer, but not the Conestoga wagon type. I'm a Geeksteader - it's ok if the power goes out every now and then, but when it's on, it needs to be able to power my computer and our internet link. I want community, not solitude, trade, not self-sufficiency, and high-tech even while pioneering. So moving to the third world would lose me civilization, which would have to be compensated for by greatly increased freedom.

You may get some freedom by living on a remote (but claimed) island, but it is fragile. It depends on not being found out, and so success will sow the seeds of its destruction. If Floating Man prospers in a way which takes advantage of their temporary autonomy, it is likely that the Nicaraguan authorities will find out about them, and then they risk getting thrown in jail and having their zone de-autonomized. Some risk is fine, but here's the clincher: the greater they prosper, and the more autonomy they have, the greater this risk. It quickly becomes not a risk but a certainty. To me, that makes this path is a dead-end.

The seasteading path may be expensive, but I do not believe that it is a dead end. There is plenty of precedent for flagging nations to ignore their ships (especially Flag of Convenience nations), whereas there is no precedent that I know of for a country to ignore illegal things done on its islands. So I think that hanging out in civilization and designing structures and business models that could be the seed for a floating city moves me directly towards my goal of freedom + civilization. It may take awhile, and be expensive, but the end result (say, a single platform that costs $250K/person and holds 100 people, providing water, power, internet, and some food) is something with a straightforward way to become a thriving autonomous city under current international law. Based on both geography (the seastead can move away due to political pressure) and current international law (which allows it to fly any nation's flag), it's in a reasonable negotiating position, unlike an island which has a single, permanent owner.

I want a free city where people use their freedom openly. A Shining City on the high seas which shows the entire world a better way to live. I want to start something which will get better as it gets bigger, and thus can grow so big that it has a significant impact on the entire world. An ephemeral freedom which contains the seeds of its own destruction does not fit the bill.

That said, I'm totally in favor of starting as small as possible, as long as there is a clear path from the small thing to the final goal. If there is a smaller step we can take, please, tell us about it. For example, instead of designing new structures, we've considered many times just buying and retrofitting a boat, because we could start sooner and smaller. This was a close decision for us, and we have decided to try the structure route because we think the end result is substantially better, even though the initial parts are harder. If the initial part proves too hard, or our engineering research shows that the end result isn't as good as we think, we may well fall back to the boat strategy.

Hakim Bey on Permanent Autonomous Zones

Patri — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:41:03 -0700

While the anarchist author Hakim Bey's visions are different from our own in many ways, there are strong similarities as well. For example, Wikipedia says:

The concept of TAZ was first put into practice on a large scale by the Cacophony Society in what they called Trips to the Zone, or Zone Trips. One of their Zone Trips gave birth to Black Rock City, AKA the Burning Man Festival, an annual TAZ that many believe maintained its defining autonomy for about seven years, at which time it ceased being functional anarchy, and became a "do-ocracy" run by BMorg, a corporation.

Since Burning Man is one of our influences, Hakim Bey and his TAZs thus represent part of our ideological ancestry. While he is best known for his writings about Temporary Autonomous Zones, in this piece he shares a few thoughts on Permanent TAZs.

And so we've had to consider the fact that not all existing autonomous zones are "temporary". Some are (at least by intention) more-or-less "permanent". Certain cracks in the Babylonian Monolith appear so vacant that whole groups can move into them and settle down. Certain theories, such as "Permaculture", have been developed to deal with this situation and make the most of it. "Villages", "communes", "communities", even "arcologies" and "biospheres" (or other utopian-city forms) are being experimented with and implemented. Even here however TAZ-theory may offer some useful thought-tools and clarifications. What about a poetique (a "way of making") and a politique (a "way of living-together) for the "permanent" TAZ (or "PAZ")?

What about the actual relation between temporariness and permanence? And how can the PAZ renew and refresh itself periodically with the "festival" aspect of the TAZ?

We are very interested in learning "politiques" for our PAZs, as well as the question of temporariness vs. permanence. It seems likely that many seastead residents will initially just be there periodically, for a few weeks a year as a vacation. Even full-time residents will probably want to spend a significant portion of their time back in civilization. And even those living permanently on a seastead may temporarily associate themselves with a sea-city or gathering, before drifting off to enjoy their solitude once more.

Bey cautions against open borders:

People probably ought to choose the people they live with. ''Open-membership" communes invariably end up swamped with freeloaders and sex-starved pathetic creeps. PAZs must choose their own membership mutually-this has nothing to do with "elitism". The PAZ may exercize a temporarily open function-such as hosting festivals or giving away free food, etc.-but it need not be permanently open to any self-proclaimed sympathizer who wanders by.

While I am a big fan of open borders for large countries, at the beginning, seasteads will be tight-knit communities, sensitive to slackers and those who cause unrest. I agree that members should be chosen carefully. Of course, the care will depend on the degree of closeness. I will be much more selective about those I'm sharing a 100-person platform with, then about who I share a 10,000 person city with.

On festivals:

The PAZ serves a vital function as a node in the TAZ-web, a meetingplace for a wide circle of friends and allies who may not actually live fulltime on the "farm" or in the "village". Ancient villages held fairs which brought wealth to the community, provided markets for travelers, and created festal time/space for all participants. Nowadays the festival is emerging as one of the most important forms for the TAZ itself, but can also provide renewal and fresh energy for the PAZ.

The festival aspect is part of our plans. We picture regular Ephemerisle gatherings which draw seasteaders from all over, as well as many people from land, to temporary sea-cities (often built around existing permanent sea-cities). Thus our permanent settlements can serve as a meetingplace for a wide circle of friends and allies who may not actually live fulltime on the seastead.

These festivals will help expose the concept to new people, as well as keep the existing residents from getting too bored by always seeing the same faces. I don't know about y'all, but as my circle of friends has grown geographically more disparate, the two key parts for maintaing connection have been the internet (specifically personal blogs) and festivals, events big enough that people will travel for them. The power and excitement of festivals will be part of how we grow a brand-new society.

Speaking of which, we are very close to settling on an October date for our first conference, which will be a small festival of sorts, so stay tuned.

Las Vegas: Resort -> City

Patri — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:07:34 -0700

We think one of the most promising initial business models for a seastead is as an offshore resort: "Las Vegas on the ocean, but with less rules" is the sound bite. (Of course, there will be many other differences, such as radical self-government and experimentation with new ways of getting along - this is just about the business model). One natural concern people have is whether such a business can give rise to a diverse economy and a full city, with schools, doctors, libraries, etc. This is also related to the "Would you really want to live in a wretched hive of scum and villainy?" question we sometimes get.

Las Vegas shows that such a path is quite realistic, since it started as a gambling outpost, and became the fasting-growing city in America. Sure, the tourists were transient, but the successful resort industry created construction and service jobs. Those jobs brought in a local population that wanted all the diverse goods and services that are standard in our economy, which meant lots of other jobs. Also, over time the resort industry led to a population of retirees, who were there for a permanent vacation.

Those retirees who like the glitzy Strip (and can afford it) go there, while others go to cheaper locals dives. And while the resorts may be built on gambling, the neighborhoods look much like those in any other city. We will seek to similarly parlay seastead tourism and retirement into a flourishing local economy.

Just because a city thrives on low regulation and "sin industries" doesn't mean it won't be a nice place to live.

Ars Technica piece

Patri — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:10:23 -0700

Sorry for the lack of new content lately, I'm still recovering from my injury. To make sure you don't forget about us, check out Seasteading: engineering the long tail of nations, an Ars Technica piece on us from earlier this week. While I think Tim is overly pessimistic about our chances, he has an excellent grasp of the main challenges, and is definitely worried about the right things.

The piece begins:

Until the 1960s, Europe had few commercial radio stations. Broadcasting was a government monopoly in many European countries, and listening options were limited to a few staid government stations such as the BBC. But as Erwin Strauss tells it, that changed when enterprising "pirate radio" ships began dropping anchor off the shores of European countries and blasting the latest pop music in violation of those countries' laws. The governments were not amused, but because the ships were in international waters, there was little they could do. Most European governments began refusing the pirate radio ships access to their harbors, but the ships were able to find harbor elsewhere.

European governments finally succeeded in shutting down the pirate radio stations in the late 1960s by passing laws prohibiting their subjects from doing business with the broadcasters—including purchasing advertising from them. But the episode created a political constituency for private radio stations and the broadcast of more pop music. In the UK, for example, private, commercial radio broadcasting was finally legalized in the early 1970s.

History has many examples of hierarchical institutions being disrupted by technological advances. The invention of the printing press helped undermine the authority of the Catholic Church. Today, the Internet is undermining traditional copyright industries.

An audacious new project aims to achieve a similar result by creating new competition for the world's sovereign nations. The Seasteading Institute, the brainchild of two Silicon Valley software developers, aims to develop self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of the cozy cartel of 190-odd world governments and start their own autonomous societies. They envision a future in which any group of people dissatisfied with its current government would be able to start a new one by purchasing some floating platforms—called seasteads—and build a new community in the open ocean.

History is littered with utopian schemes that petered out after an initial burst of enthusiasm, something the Seasteading Institute's founders readily acknowledge. Indeed, they chronicle these failures in depressing detail on their website. With names like the Freedom Ship, the Aquarius Project, and Laissez-Faire City, most of these projects accomplished little more than receiving a burst of publicity (and in some cases, raising funds that were squandered) before collapsing under the weight of their inflated expectations.

There are many reasons to doubt that the Seasteading Institute will realize its vision of floating cities in the sea; but there are at least two reasons to think that seasteading may prove to be more successful than past efforts to escape the grasp of the world's governments. First, the project's planners are pragmatic—at least by the standards of their predecessors—pursuing an incrementalist strategy and focusing primarily on solving short-term engineering problems. Second, they recently announced a half-million dollar pledge from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, giving them the resources to begin serious engineering and design work. While there are many obstacles to be overcome before they will have even a functioning prototype—to say nothing of a floating metropolis—their project doesn't seem as obviously hopeless as most of the efforts that have preceded it.

Ars talked to Seasteading Institute co-founder Patri Friedman about the seasteading project and the engineering and political problems it will face.

SlingSteading

Patri — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:16:58 -0700

My right arm got overly excited by this whole microstate concept earlier today, and seceded from its socket. While it has been forcibly reunited with its fatherland, it was weakened by the attempted rebellion, and as a result I'm going to be a one handed typist for a week or three. Obviously this means you should expect less blogging and not much in the way of replying to emails. I may pass off some projects to other people in the interim, we'll see. Hopefully I can find some good typing-less work to do, like catching up on some background reading.

Snippets through 6/2/2008

Patri — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:54:36 -0700

Main areas this week - pictures, conference, volunteers, wiki.

Community
- Website
  - Stats
    - Our monthly totals for May were 87K visits and 299K pageviews, these are about 4x April numbers. Our daily average is up from 1050 visits/3.5K pages to 2800 visits / 9.6K pages. Much of this is b/c of the one-time publicity hit from the big blog mentions, but a 1.5 - 2x gain seems to have persisted.
  - Pictures
    - (as blogged earlier): I've created a Flickr Group for seasteading images. If you'd like to be able to add photos, join the group on Flickr. You can also subscribe to it by RSS. We plan to integrate the feed into the site at some point, but using a mature external service seemed like the easiest thing for now (as with the wiki).
    - The wiki has lots of pretty pictures, and videos too! Thanks to Joep for keeping it organized - comment here if you'd like to help him.
  - Wiki: There is a lot of discussion going on in the forums that would better be done by editing the wiki. The forums are for interactive discussion. If you have some useful information, like a design proposal, which you'd like to create and then get comments on, please create it on the wiki, and then post the link to the forum for discussion. Wayne is thinking about these issues, and you may hear more from him soon about how to effectively use the wiki & forums.
- Volunteers - I thought a bit about our volunteer information organization, and came up with a new system:
  - We're now keeping track of volunteer offers on this wiki page, so that you can add yourself to whatever roles/projects you'd like (and save us some organizational work - thanks!).
  - Position descriptions are still on the Jobs page (and the wiki links to them).
  - As you can read on the Volunteer wiki page, I've added a "Skills" field to your seasteading.org profile. Here are instructions for filling it out. You can put generally useful skills there, and position-specific skills on the wiki volunteer list by your name.
  - To seed the page, I went through the volunteer forum thread, and I copied all the information to the wiki, including filling out people's skill profiles. (You probably want to check and edit them, though).
  - But I have still not managed to get through the volunteer emails - I'll try to do that this week. Actually, those of you volunteered by email can help this process by (if you have time) doing it yourself:
  - - Go to the Volunteer wiki page and follow the instructions there for adding yourself.
    - Respond to the email you originally sent, telling me that you have processed the request yourself.
    - Thanks! (Sorry about the switchup, I hadn't expected quite so much response! Y'all are awesome!)
- Publicity (not much, since I just sent out snippets last Wed)
  - Die Zeit Zunder, a german site, did a long interview w/ Patri, they asked some good questions.
- Conference
  - We are thinking about sometime in the October 5th - 12th timeframe. If you have strong feelings about weekends vs. during the week, or Burlingame vs. Redwood City, please comment.
  - Wayne & I investigated Embassy Suites by SFO.
    - Nice atrium, nice view of the bay from rooms & restaurants. Has a small lagoon nearby, water level was too low for seasteads, but could be good for R/C boats. Access to bay if we want to play w/ seastead models.
    - Right by SFO (they have a shuttle) - awesome for travelers. (Also you can take a shuttle to SFO and BART/Caltrain into the city, if car-less visitors want to check out SF nightlife).
    - Several other hotels within walking distance, including less expensive ones, so there are multiple budget options.
    - They do lots of weddings, and are booked for weekends a year in advance - we'd have to do it during the week (our Redwood City option is the opposite).
    - Seemed to be significantly more expensive than RWC, presumably due to nicer location.
  - We haven't decided on date or location, but will soon.
Engineering
- Requirements / Patterns / Designs - We are preparing to hire consultants for conceptual design review. We have gathered our requirements on the wiki here. Comments are welcome, use the discussion page.
- We have also put up some of our proposed designs and design elements. A lot of users have proposed designs in the forum, but we think the wiki is a much better place for such things. Feel free to create design or element proposals, and follow our lead in tagging them with categories, like MultiColumn. Design elements can be tagged with what requirements they help fulfill (like low cost). Make up your own tags for power systems, water generation, etc.
- Had a good meeting today with some local offshore engineers and toured UC Berkeley's wave tank, where Wayne tested his foam pool noodle aquariumstead. It moved a lot - Wayne took a movie, we may post it later.
Research - nothing
Administrative - slow progress towards nonprofit application

Offshore wave break - Wicked, Dude!

Patri — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:11:01 -0700

As I was falling asleep and visualizing breakwaters (design, manufacture, and deployment thereof), I thought about how my favored breakwater design works by making the waves pile up and break (as opposed to being a wall that breaks the waves). And suddenly I realized that, if it was deployed in a circle to protect a seastead colony...it would be a never-ending surf break!

And we could even shape the resulting waves, since Wikipedia tells us:

The factor which most determines wave shape is the topography of the seabed directly behind and immediately beneath the breaking wave. The contours of the reef or sand bank influence wave shape in two respects. Firstly, the steepness of the incline is proportional to the resulting upthrust. When a swell passes over a sudden steep slope, the force of the upthrust causes the top of the wave to be thrown forward, forming a curtain of water which plunges to the wave trough below. Secondly, the alignment of the contours relative to the swell direction determines the duration of the breaking process. When a swell runs along a slope, it continues to peel for as long as that configuration lasts. When swell wraps into a bay or around an island, the breaking wave gradually diminishes in size, as the wave front becomes stretched by diffraction.

Since the "seabed" of the break will be an artificial structure, we can give it whatever topography will make for the gnarliest surfing. In a place where the swells (and the reefers) will be huge and plentiful, this could be wicked! And its gotta be good for our tourism prospects.

Hey, if you can Ski Dubai, why not surf in the middle of the ocean?

Topsider Homes

Patri — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:29:57 -0700

Check out Topsider Homes, builder of Hurricane-Proof homes in the southeastern US:

They are trying to solve a similar problem, and came up with a similar solution to us, which is good to see.

I got the link via Vince Cate's great wavebreak page. Vince has been testing floating breakwater designs in Anguilla, and I'm pretty sure he's done the most hands-on work so far, so good for him! One of the tricky things about breakwaters is that it isn't always clear how their behavior scales, as discussed on the forums. We're going to start talking to / hiring professional consultants in the coming weeks to flesh out our designs, so perhaps we can learn more about model testing from them.

Jim Lee: Floating Villages in Cambodia

Patri — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:08:53 -0700

This is a guest post from Jim Lee, author of the paper Castles In The Sea: A Survey of Artificial Islands and Floating Utopias in our Misc Resources section.

I just got back from a trip to Cambodia last week. While I was there, I was able to visit the floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake, about 1/2 hour from Siem Riepe. It is a fairly large large, and supports two separate villages - one vietnamese and one cambodian. Combined population of around 5,000. Both villages would migrate around the lake during the course of the year, based on water levels and the availability of fish.

It was encouraging to see how easily people could adapt to life on the water. In addition to the floating houses, there was a temple, several schools, a library, and even a basketball court!

People there are largely self-sufficient. There was much aquaculture in floating fish pens (which was expected), but I was also surpised to see hogs and chickens, too. Crocodiles were raised for leather (no signage or discloures like "please don't pet the crocodiles"- just a wide open hold filled with 20 or so crocs.) It was a relatively poor community by western standards, but not necessarily so when compared to surrounding agricultural communities.

Kids would get around from one house to another by padding small boats and washtubs. Overall, they seemed well-accustomed to life on the water, and all of them learned how to fish at an early age.

In the attached photos, you might catch a few T.V. antennas. Electronics are powered by batteries and generators. You would also see floating stacks of firewood for heating and cooking.

I have a good friend who spent a year living in the village while studying the wild crane population. She said that living on the lake made the evenings cool and sleeping on the water a comfortable. If people didn't like their neighbors or "needed space", they'd just move their house somewhere else. Sometimes it was a little hard finding things, because the "buildings" kept moving. This would probably drive the postman crazy!

If you are looking for a place to do some research, this is one community that might be worth checking out. It is also fairly close to the temples of Angkor Wat (totally worth seeing!).

Feel free to post these photos on your site - I wish that I had more...

Thanks Jim! Check out Jim's pictures, and others with the floatingvillage tag, on Flickr.

Flickr photostream

Patri — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:04:30 -0700

I've created a Flickr Group for seasteading images. If you'd like to be able to add photos, just email us your Flickr username and some example pictures. You can also subscribe to it by RSS. We plan to integrate the feed into the site at some point, but using a mature external service seemed like the easiest thing for now. Here is a live slideshow of the photostream:

Snippets through 5/28/2008

Patri — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:21:31 -0700

Sorry this is late, I've been sick since Friday, and a bit overwhelmed with the email deluge resulting from our big media week last week. Plus Monday was a holiday, so Friday will be my seasteading day this week. But I wanted to get this email out because there's lots in it and will be lots more on Monday, I expect.

Community
- Publicity
  - Enormous domestic publicity last week (Slashdot and Gizmodo, which are 2 of the 10 biggest blogs, plus NPR and Canadian public radio). A selection:
    - Slashdot
    - Gizmodo: Silicon Valley Nerds Plan Sea Based Utopian Country To Call Their Own and an interview: How to Build Your Own Sea-Based Country for Fun and Profit
    - For a rather more critical take, see Gawker "Wired reports today on a venture much more exciting for its batshit reasoning, impressive backers, and fantastic scope."
    - I did a radio interview for CBC (Canadian Public Radio), but it's not on the web.
    - NPR's Bryant Park Project interviewed Alexis (who wrote the Wired piece): Libertarian Island: No Rules, Just Rich Dudes
    - Libertarian Nick Szabo had one of the only posts I saw with thoughtful, substantive comments. I disagreed with some of it, but at least it was original and interesting.
  - Also significant international publicity. Our top referrer is Geenstijl, the Dutch site I mentioned last week, and currently our top 20 referrers contain 6 non-US sites: Netherlands, Austria (link), Italy (link, link), Russia (link, link).
  - Web traffic was enormous last week, it has slowed down a lot this week (stats), but still running at double the previous level, so hopefully this will be a sustained lift. Our average traffic for May is triple that of April. The links should help our search engine ranking quite a bit and get us more ongoing traffic, and I think we've picked up a lot of new blog subscribers as well as site members (from 90 to 237 over the last couple weeks!).
  - We have more upcoming publicity as the story filters through to the longer-lead-time MSM, there are a bunch of newspapers/magazines/radio shows coming up, both in the US and abroad.
  - I created a press page with some high-res photos and links to previous interviews.
- Volunteers - We got tons of volunteer emails, thanks! Haven't had time to sort through them all and assign projects, but should happen soon.
Engineering
- As I blogged earlier, I found a cost estimate from a Navy journal for something very similar to a seastead of $337/ft^2, which is close to our initial estimates, and similar to Bay Area housing. This is very exciting, because at that price, the economics work, and I believe the economics are our main obstacle.
- Still working on Director of Engineering job listing.
Research
- Still working on Chief Scientist job listing.

My main priorities for the coming week are the job listings and volunteer coordination. Also, Wayne & I are visiting Marine Innovation & Technology, a local marine engineering firm. Next update on Monday.

Our cost estimates are within the right ballpark!

Patri — Mon, 26 May 2008 23:44:57 -0700

As I mentioned in the OTC trip report, there is a huge amount of uncertainty in our cost estimates, because we aren't sure how the expense of a seastead will compare to that of an oil platform. Since we believe that the success of seasteading hinges on whether it can be done at a reasonable price, this will be one of our key areas of research this year. Here is some evidence that Andy House's initial ballpark estimate of about $300/ft^2 for his Baystead and Seastead Lite designs is not unreasonable:

The Atlantis Garrison: A Comprehensive, Cost Effective Cargo and Port Security Strategy

Strategic Insights, Volume IV, Issue 4 (April 2005)

This essay proposes a solution to U.S. cargo and port inspection and security problems through the construction and use of offshore ports to screen, inspect, and transfer cargo for delivery inside the United States. Such a system would use offshore platform technologies, called pneumatically stabilized platforms, to provide large acreage ports that would be more cost effective to maintain and more efficient to screen inbound ships and inspect and transfer cargo than alternatives—such as overhauling the current ports systems at home and abroad. Offshore ports are proposed as a critical link into a port and cargo security defense-in-depth system involving a cargo security information system, offshore ports, and the current ports system.

...

Recent offshore platform construction estimates have been competitive with waterfront land values. Each platform’s costs are ultimately determined by its intended sea state environment, the proximity of the port to the construction site, and the variable costs of materials and labor. Higher cost platforms include a full array of intermodal operations, such as a tunnel and airfield for truck, rail, and air operations.

For the purposes of this essay, costs will be estimated for a hypothetical high end platform—on par with a 95-acre, 100-year typhoon-resistant, Asian transfer port that includes platform, anchoring, and top side systems, complete with its own power and water generation systems, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, fire suppression, insurance, front end engineering and development, and operational buildings. The rough order of magnitude in this example is $337 per square foot, or $14.7 million per acre.

Besides the cost estimate being a good data point, this is a business idea worth investigating. Since they specifically mention pneumatically stabilized platforms, they're presumably using the technology from Float, Inc., which we also plan to investigate.

Website issues

Patri — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:05:01 -0700

We seem to be having some database issues with the website today. Please bear with us.

Rich Sowa's Spiral Island

Patri — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:01:46 -0700

Just as described in Wayne's original seasteading paper, Rich Sowa built an island out of plastic bottles in net bags. Here's a video:

Avoid niche markets

Patri — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:44:58 -0700

Like libertarians, or economists.

The Reason & Marginal Revolution posts about generated significant direct traffic. But the avalanche of net recognition (slashdot, gizmodo, etc.) didn't start until the wired.com article. The Wired article brought us about 3-4x the direct traffic as Reason, and 30x the indirect traffic.

My conclusion is that it's important for marketing efforts to avoid echo chambers. Seasteading is interesting and inspiring to many more groups than libertarians, and we should pitch it accordingly.

Also, direct links matter *a lot*. We've gotten a lot more traffic from Geenstijl, Kotaku, derStandard and la Repubblica.it, each of which linked directly to us, than from Slashdot and Gizmodo, which are much larger but only linked to the wired article. (this is true even if you assume that some portion of the wired article's referrals are coming in via the other blogs). So if you're submitting a story about us (or any other organization), please try to include a direct link, so that more people see the primary source.

For the curious, here are our top 10 referrer hosts, since the new site launched, by pageviews:

http://geenstijl.nl/	29%
http://kotaku.com/	12%
http://wired.com/	7%
http://google.com/	5%
http://repubblica.it/	5%
http://derstandard.at/	5%
http://images.google.com/	3%
http://marginalrevolution.com/	3%
http://stumbleupon.com/	2%
http://en.wikipedia.org/	2%

Seasteads provide flexibility for climate change

Patri — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:36:54 -0700

There is a lot of debate and worry about climate change. Most are worried about warming and sea level rises, which would cover coastal land and reduce usable landmass. Others are worried about global cooling. A significant swing in either direction would substantially change the latitudes at which human life is most comfortable.

Which is where seasteads come in. The more of the earth's population and economy which are on seasteads, the more robustness the world has against climate change. Unlike traditional buildings on land, seasteads are geographically flexible. Our main motivation for this is to empower people to create and choose societies to live in, but like any great idea, it has all sorts of accidental benefits as well.

Geographic flexibility means that we can move in response to a natural disaster like global climate change without losing everything we've built. The same goes for political climate - if a superpower like the US or China becomes virulently anti-seastead, we can move towards their antipodes. None of this gives perfect protection - superpowers can reach around the world, and climate change may have negative consequences everywhere. But it sure beats being tied to an immovable piece of dirt.

On a lighter note, as I wrote when discussing climate change on my personal blog:

So, you guys are pretty much saying that global warming will bring on an orgy of war and famine...in such a way that only seasteads will survive and thrive?

No wonder I'm fond of it! :)

Personally, I believe that the great challenge with global climate change is the uncertainty - not knowing when or whether things are going to get warmer (as we'd expect from increasing CO2 levels) or cooler (as a brief glance at the historical temperature record suggests). So I'll let others worry about active interventions like reducing emissions - we at TSI are going to focus on building a world of unprecedented geographic flexibility, which will be robust against whatever Mother Earth ends up throwing at us.

Libertarian Island: No Rules, Just Rich Dudes

Patri — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:37:03 -0700

Alexis Madrigal, who wrote the wired story, is interviewed on NPRs Bryant Park Project. It's great to have passionate people out there evangelizing for us - Thanks Alexis! Also see coverage on Gizmodo and Slashdot, which are...um...somewhat less evangelical :).

Nothing against Bioshock

Patri — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:36:50 -0700

But does anyone else think it's weird that on the one hand our vision gets called crazy...and on the other hand, it gets evaluated based on a video game?

Rich Nerds Want To Build A Utopian City In The Ocean And...Wait A Minute...

We all know what happened to Rapture. Nutty smart folks thought they could build a utopian world under the ocean, they couldn't, whole thing went to the dogs, everybody died. We all learned a lesson. A lesson lost on three super-rich SIlicon Valley types (including the founder of PayPal), who have founded the the Seasteading Institute, with the goal of moving out into the ocean and creating a world "with diverse social, political, and legal systems". While their buildings won't be built under the waves (they'll be built atop them, on floating platforms), the basic principle remains: they're going to get smug, they're going to mess with things they shouldn't mess with, everybody is going to die.

Sure, this is from a gamer blog, but based on comments to other blog posts this week, "That won't work - look at Rapture" seems to be a fairly common sentiment. While I think that fictional narratives such as video games are a great source of inspiration and emotional images, they are not exactly accurate models of reality.

Take Ayn Rand's Galt's Gulch as an example. On the one hand, it's inspirational to read about a bunch of talented people getting together to make a new society. On the other hand, I don't think her models of operating a small independent economy, or expecting the rest of the world to fall apart without these people, are accurate. Using them as the basis for a strategy would be foolish. Instead, we want the seastead economy to be as interdependent as possible with the rest of the world. Tropical Islands are poor, Hong Kong is rich - we want to be more like the latter than the former.

We can do the same sort of analysis for BioShock. There, the city's owner/ruler demanded that the city maintain a closed economy; when supply and demand inevitably produced smuggling, he restricted trade, closed the transport links that allowed exit from the city, and nationalized his enemies' property. This, combined with a healthy dose of class resentment, pretty much doomed the whole endeavor in exactly the obvious way.

This is close to the opposite of our philosophy. We want a maximally open economy, and we think that free exit is so important that we've called it the only Universal Human Right. We certainly appreciate the comparison with a fictional universe that has such a powerful place in people's hearts, and it's fun to joke about - there will definitely be some homages to BioShock on our prototype platform. But we'd also appreciate it if, when it comes to evaluating our idea, people dug into the details rather than using superficial similarities. Also, it's good to keep in mind that fiction is often a poor mirror for the real world. After all, plenty of things like this have been tried , and many of them ended badly, but never as badly as everybody died.

Ocean Geohashing?

Patri — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:17:26 -0700

Today's xkcd suggests geohashing - using the date and Dow opening to generate a random physical location for a meetup. It's fun to think about this method being used to coordinate Ephemerisle gatherings. I can see the method being both better and worse on the ocean because of it's relative homogeneity - every place is like every other place. So you don't have the failure mode of randomly generating a location that's difficult or impossible to reach, but you don't get the excitement of generating a location that is challenging and fun to get to.

The cryptographic aspects are fun: if only some people know the formula (or the salt), then you get a secure method of generating festival locations where nobody knows the location in advance (you need the Dow opening), and only some people know the location once all the information is available. Those could be good properties for a festival - although it's not like you can hide from satellites. Or can you? Ideas?

Thanks for all the response!

Patri — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:23:58 -0700

Hey everyone. The response from the net this week has been phenomenal, which means we're a bit swamped with emails. Many of them are offers to volunteer or form collaborative relationships, which is great! We have a big vision, a small staff, and a small budget, so your help is crucial in bringing this dea into reality.

We're a bit overwhelmed right now, so we won't be able to get back to y'all as fast as we'd like (especially since this is not yet a full-time job for Wayne or I), but we hope to find some time over the upcoming 3-day weekend to sort through and respond to everything.

Keep the emails coming - we need your help!

Weekly Snippets, 5/19/2008

Patri — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:43:59 -0700

Biggest thing this week is tons of web traffic today due to links from high-traffic sites (13K visits so far today). We've got some graphs below.

It's exciting to get some publicity, but I think our main challenges revolve around engineering, economics, and politics, rather than marketing. So I'm trying not to be too distracted by it, since it doesn't change the fact that we have lots of hard work to do and lots of details to fill in. My main priority right now is scaling the organization via hiring (Chief Scientist / Eng PM) and finding/coordinating volunteers, so that's what I'll mainly be focusing on (when I make my saving throws against distraction :) ). The additional traffic is helping somewhat by bringing us some volunteers, and hopefully that will continue.

Engineering
- Wayne is working on AquariumStead
- We are working on the Eng PM job requisition
Community
- Misc
  - Posted call for volunteers.
  - Posted our 2008 strategy.
  - We're considering the weekends of October 5th or 12th for our first annual conference, and we're considering a couple different locations, give us your feedback on the blog post.
- Website
  - We are working on an image gallery of seastead images/models, perhaps with a Java plugin for interacting w/ the 3d models.
  - Site speed did not seem to be affected by our ~10x increase in traffic, which is quite promising.
  - Blog Publicity Roundup
    - We were the lead story on wired.com this morning: Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies. Wayne, Joe & I are quite happy with this story, it's well-written, entertaining, and fairly accurate. (Although just for the record, Wayne & I are not actually Ayn Rand fanatics, despite being libertarians).
    - The wired story got picked up by GeenStijl, a major Dutch blog, which got us ~10x as much traffic as the original story. Here's a bad english translation of their page.
    - Some other major blogs picked it up, including SlashGear (Technorati 1562), and BLDGBLOG (Technorati 1578), which had a good section that really gets why this is a big idea:
      
      "What interests me here, aside from the architectural challenge of erecting a durable, ocean-going metropolis, is the fact that this act of construction – this act of building something – has constitutional implications. That is, architecture here proactively expands the political bounds of recognized sovereignty; architecture becomes declarative.
      
      The stakes for design have gone up, in other words. It's not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it's a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.
      
      Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa).
      
      Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn't just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense."
    - Arcologies, Urbmon 116 and protocols was another good post which gets the idea of protocols, modularity, and commoditizing housing (as we discussed earlier):
      "The idea of floating cities has been, well, floating around for a while - the ultimate pirate utopia. Governance issues aside, seems to me that this could be a fruitful area for work on interface specifications. Just as the internet doesn’t care if you are sitting in front of a Mac, or are telneted into an IBM z-series or are using WebTV (does that still exist?) as long as you comply with relevant RFCs, so too Floatopia-land shouldn’t care what your bobbing pleasure palace looks like as long as it connects to the rest of the structure in a specific way, it’s sized in multiples of X by Y by Z, complies with stability standard 1.1.1, etc. The marine environment is pretty unforgiving - marine architecture isn’t a specific field for nothin’ - but the safety and survivability problems need to be addressed regardless. RFC 1149 meets The Raft from Stephenson’s Snow Crash - let’s float!"
    - Bruce Sterling writes:
      
      (((I can forgive these damp geeks anything for this awesome Silicon Valley reframing of the Westphalian doctrine:)))
      
      "Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," he said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."

Traffic graphs:

Posts that contain Seasteading per day for the last 30 days.

2008 Conference Date/Location Feedback!

Patri — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:09:00 -0700

We're considering a couple different locations and dates for our first annual conference in the fall, and would like your feedback. We're tentatively planning for October 5th or 12th, in the SF Bay Area. So please let us know if there is another major related event that conflicts with these dates.

For location, we have two main possible areas:

Seaport Conference Center, Redwood City, CA.
- Pros:
  - Right by our current top option for offices/research/construction space.
  - It's a good size, the largest room takes 120 people and the whole place can take about 400. We'd probably have the whole place to ourselves.
  - Good ambience, right on the water, next to the RWC marina, has an outdoor deck that can hold 120 people overlooking the river, right next to the Port of Redwood City.
- Cons:
  - Hotels would be a mile or two away, need to use a shuttle.
  - 20min from the airport.
Anza Lagoon, Burlingame, CA.
- Pros:
  - Right next to SFO airport - convenient for travelers, including international ones.
  - Many hotels right there (because of airport), could have conference / hotel rooms in the same place.
  - Near the water
- Cons:
  - Hotels are much larger, would be less private/cozy.
  - Probably couldn't get space right on the water like Seaport's deck, at best would have a view through the window.

So it's mainly an issue of ambiance vs. convenience. If you think you'll be attending, please let us know if you have ideas / suggestions / opinions on the location.

Call For Volunteers!

Patri — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:13:00 -0700

Like many non-profits, we have ambitious goals and limited resources, and volunteer assistance is crucial for making up the difference. Seasteading attracts some amazingly talented people, and I hope that a few of you have the free time to lend us a hand. I've posted our current set of requests here, and am reproducing the list below. Each job title links to its description on the volunteer page.

Community
- General
  - Conference Coordinator(s) - Help us make our first annual conference fun and inspiring!
  - Membership Coordinator - Design and operate our membership program.
  - Marketing Associate - Help us craft a sticky message and simplify our vision to its bare essentials.
  - Burners - Help publicize Seasteading at Burning Man!
- Website
  - Site Associate - Help us run the seasteading.org website!
  - Drupal Programmer - We have many small projects available for those with Drupal/PHP experience.
  - GIS Programmer - We would like to add more interactive geodata to the website.
  - Perl/Python programmer - Write a script to convert the Book Beta from a single XHTML file into a file for each section.
  - Visual Inspiration Associate - Find good pictures (and quotes).
  - Site Publicity Associate - Help us with SEO / Blog publicity.
  - Design Associates - We have a number of 2D and 3D graphic design projects.
  - ~~Converting beta version of book to PDF format suitable for printing~~ - DanB
Research
- Research Associate - Help us kick off the research program by finding/hiring a full-time Chief Scientist.
- Scientific Advisory Board Coordinator - Help us create the SAB.
Engineering (none at this time)
Administrative (none at this time)

By the way, we are expecting some significant traffic this week, so apologies in advance if the site is slower than usual.