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.

What is The Seasteading Institute?

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 are a 501c3 non-profit, which has been covered by numerous media such as Wired Magazine, The Sunday Times, and CNN.com. We have raised $1,000,000 so far, mainly from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and early investor in LinkedIn and Facebook. And we have a variety of active Research and Movement-Building projects working towards our audacious goal of seeing the first ocean settlements within this decade.

Why Is Seateading Good For The World?

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. 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. Unfortunately, all land is already claimed, hence we look to the oceans. (And it turns out they are uniquely suited to experimental soceities for legal & physical reasons).

Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the operating system industry, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, we envision a startup sector for government, with many small groups experimenting with innovative ideas as they compete for citizens and businesses. Instead of making contentious decisions on divisive issues for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, we seek to shrink government so that each group can have what it wants. And while they enjoy their favored government, the world will see how those rules work in practice, adding to the body of knowledge about policies & institutions, and progressing the technology of government.

Above all we are dedicated to the belief that whatever our political 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.