We’ve long been talking about seasteading chapters around the world, and I am coming to see them as more and more important. Dan B’s BaseSteading proposal, and my recent visit to Europe, inspired me to start a wiki page on Seasteading Outposts. I discuss the reasons for concentrating our numbers in a few places, some ideas for what chapters can do, and my thoughts on good locations for chapters.
I have the great privilege of writing the lead essay in this month’s Cato Unbound: Beyond Folk Activism.
Regimes for Managing Maritime Space, 1 April, Track 2 Session 1
Maritime Policing: A Sea of Change? From the Exercise of Sovereignty over Maritime Space towards the Enforcement of the Global Oceans Legal Framework, Ms Patricia Jimenez Kwast, University of Oxford, UK
Enforcement/Policing of the Law of the Sea, not by ship owners, ports, etc. Broad topic, global philosophical aspects.
Policing Powers at Sea – Background & Legal Framework
Has a picture of a pirate flag!
I am currently at the University of Durham, where the International Borders Research Unit (IBRU) is hosting their 20th anniversary conference on The State of Sovereignty. I will be blogging the material I find interesting, here is what I have for you from the plenary program.
Joining the manifesto / strategy proposal tradition started by Vince, Dan B has written up his proposal for BaseSteading. While TSI of course has our own strategy (which will be released for comment quite soon), seasteading is a diverse movement and we are delighted to see other people working on their own approaches.
Well, it’s not quite the Colbert Report, but Boston News Net has a hilarious segment about seasteading:
Welcome to The Seasteading Institute’s March Newsletter! We had a ton of press coverage this month, have lots of new volunteers, and a number of key projects are moving along.
A new section for the Extended Q&A in the book:
Related to transparency is openness – being public about our existence, goals, and methods.
A number of TSI community members have expressed concern about our policy of operating openly, stating our goal to create new governments on the internet and in public interviews. They worry that it could bring us to the attention of governments before we are ready, allowing them to quash our nascent movement, and suggest that it might be better to keep everything quiet until a large seastead community is operating.
In case you wonder – is this flag of convenience thing real? Will investors really invest in a company in some obscure foreign jurisdiction? This is from the risks section of a 2001 bond offering by Royal Caribbean (which I think was about $1B or so):
ENFORCEABILITY OF CIVIL LIABILITIES
We are a Liberian corporation and our selling shareholders are foreign corporations or partnerships.
In February 2009, legal research volunteer Jorge & I had lunch with a noted international expert on the Law of the Sea, who we’ll call X. We mainly discussed near-shore medical tourism as the initial business model. Here are my notes from the meeting:
There is a tension between credibility and regulation of flagging states. The ones which will monitor you the least also have the least credibility in the world of international law. Patri & Jorge believe we should follow a laddered approach. Start with whoever will take us – Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Liberia, Panama. See how it goes.
