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A Brief Introduction to the Seasteading Institute

The Movement

What is "Seasteading"?

Seasteading is creating permanent dwellings on the ocean - homesteading the high seas. A seastead, like in the picture to the right, is a structure meant for permanent occupation on the ocean.

Why would you want to do that?

Because the world needs a new frontier, a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to test out their ideas. By opening the ocean as a new frontier, we hope to revolutionize the quality of government and social systems worldwide by enabling experimentation, innovation, and competition.

Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social systems on a small scale; countries are so enormous that it is hard for an individual to make much difference. Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the cellphone or operating system industries, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, they envision something more like Web 2.0, where many small governments serve many niche markets, a dynamic system where small groups experiment, and everyone copies what works, discards what doesn't, and remixes the remainder to try again.

Think about all the major political divides - freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, etc. - that are decided through rhetoric and the votes of a few representatives who decide for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once. Imagine if small groups had the capability to instead test their own ideas on a small scale and see what happens. People could create societies with different priorities, and we'd be able to quickly see how well those ideas work in practice. Some ideas will work well, some will work terribly and some will be a matter of preference; but above all we are dedicated to the believe that whatever our ideas, we want to stop arguing about them, stop proselytizing them and start living them.

Is that really possible? How would it work?

It's hard to give a short answer to this. The briefest answer we have is to point to the cruise ship industry as evidence that providing power, water, food, and internet on the ocean is not only possible but can be profitable. Our lifestyle and business model will be very different - based on permanent occupation and businesses beyond tourism - but cruise ships at least demonstrate that the basics can be covered without breaking the bank. It remains for us to show, by building small seastead prototypes, that comfortable, spacious, permanent, environmentally friendly dwellings can also be built at reasonable cost.

And similarly, while we don't yet know if there is a realistic path to recognized sovereignty, the history of the cruise ship industry demonstrates that a great deal of practical autonomy can be achieved using flags of convenience. If the idea still seems crazy (the bad kind), we have answers to some of the common objections in our FAQ, and we have written a book with much more detail.

How are you going to do it?

The seasteading movement is being pioneered by our non-profit organization, The Seasteading Institute (TSI).  We were recently covered in Wired, and have received $500,000 of initial funding from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Internet companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and futurist organizations such as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Methuselah Foundation.

TSI was founded in 2008 with the mission to "Further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems." We have developed a strategic plan for making seasteading a reality. You may read our Two-Year Strategy Document to learn more about how we plan to fulfill our mission.

I want to know more!

You can explore our site via the navigation bars above, or check out some of these key links: