A Brief Introduction to the Seasteading Institute
Seasteading means to create permanent dwellings on the ocean - homesteading the high seas. A seastead, like in the picture above, is a structure meant for permanent occupation on the ocean.
The exact motives we see vary widely, but the common element is the need for a new frontier, a place where those who are dissatisfied with our current civilization can go to build a different (and hopefully better) one.
Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social, political, and legal systems on a small scale. Countries are so enormous that no individual can make much difference in how they work, and the existing entrenched power structures have tremendous inertia. Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the cellphone or operating system industry, with a tiny number of providers who offer few choices and make it hard to switch. Instead, they envision something more like web 2.0, where many small governments serve different niche markets. A dynamic system where small groups experiment, and everyone copies what works, discards what doesn't, and remixes the remainder.
Just think about all the hot air and argumentation about a whole host of different political issues - freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, whatever the topic du jour is. Instead of deciding them through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, we could try them all on a small scale and see what happens. If people can create societies with different priorities - the environment, civil liberties, economic freedom, religious values - we'll be able to see how well these ideas actually work in practice. We'll also be giving people the option to choose their desired society at a much finer level than they can today. Right now, homesteading the oceans looks like the best opportunity for this sort of societal innovation.
In short, seasteaders are people who, whatever their ideals are, want to stop arguing about them, stop proselytizing them, and start living them.
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 profitable. Our lifestyle and business model will be very different, based on permanent occupation and businesses besides tourism, but cruise ships at least demonstrate that the basics can be covered at a reasonable cost. It remains for us to demonstrate, by building small-scale versions, that comfortable, spacious, permanent dwellings can also be built at reasonable cost.
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.
We've been writing, blogging, giving talks, and spreading the word about our ideas for over 5 years, and we believe that interest in this movement has reached a point where it's worth creating a formal organization as a vehicle for fundraising and research. So we are founding a nonprofit organization, the Seasteading Institute, with the mission:
We currently envision three main focus areas:
Community: Inspire a social movement around our mission. Build a membership of people who are committed to and passionate about seasteading, and see it as the answer to the world's most pressing problems. Create a network of potential residents who have the skills and resources needed to make a vibrant new city. Establish revenue to enable the Institute to operate in perpetuity.
Baystead: Prove that our plan is viable by building a safe, cost-effective, gorgeous seastead, based in the San Francisco Bay and able to travel along the coast. Use it for publicity to grow the community, and as a platform for research.
Research: Explore the core seasteading requirements: Structure (not sinking), Autonomy (getting left alone), and Infrastructure (having light, heat, food, etc.). When current solutions are sufficient for our needs, learn them. When they aren't, invent new ones. Secondarily, advance seasteading technologies through grant-funded research and partnerships.
We are willing to fund the basic tasks ourselves, which would all happen in 2008:
If the results are promising, the most important next step would be to build a series of prototypes, culminating in a habitable, mobile Baystead. While we aren't yet sure how much this will cost, we suspect that constructing a platform of meaningful size will be beyond our means. Hence we are actively exploring funding sources, including:
We have several promising leads, and we think there is a significant chance that we will be able to proceed with this stage in 2009.