Seasteading Creates RPG
seasteading.org
seasteading.org
I see no artwork credits, and found the source for at least one image: the character "Feng Bai" is an image of Esther Quek that's been put through some filters.
http://www.artofwore.com/blog/2012/11/19/girl-crush-esther-q...
Don't you dare tax me - but when it benefits me I'm happy to view all property as communal.
Izabel Hashimoto Belluci is from Maaria Laurinen https://imgur.com/ozlewix
I couldn't understand if the "game" took place on a cruise ship, or what the objective of the game was. At first, I thought this might have been an in-person LARP-style event at sea (which sounded interesting), but after reading the commentary here, I think it's just a way to promote their actual Seasteading fantasy.
That actually sounds like a lot more fun and gosh I've missed LARPing over the past year.
There is something of a historical basis for this, although of course without the tech and still based primarily on land. It’s called a thalassocracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassocracy
The Hanseatic League was something of a similar phenomenon and actually not completely alien to what I’m proposing. As were a lot of pirate Freeport-type cities in the 1600s Caribbean. Medieval/Renaissance Venice probably counts too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
In any case, the idea is fascinating and I applaud them for even considering it.
Freeport-type cities in the 1600s Carribean were parasitical on surrounding societies by enabling and profiting from piracy.
What are the citizens of your modern distributed platform society going to live off?
The last one is a plot point in a Ghost in the Shell episode, if I remember correctly.
What's actually on that list though? That you can't find somewhere with actual land that's will allow it so you don't have to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up where you could also put this lab.
If its that consistently regulated, there's likely to be sufficient will to come up with an excuse to take action against a vulnerable violator. And a nation of boats doesn’t need to be invaded, they just need powerful nations to impose sanctions (including second-order ones on trade partners) on them.
E.g. Guantanamo for research. Or Project Paperclip.
The criticism that smaller states will just get invaded makes no geopolitical sense. If that were the case, the entire world would be divided into 3 countries.
If the larger states wants to benefit from research without legalizing it...they’ll just do it covertly, without legalizing it. The reason to not want to legalize it is to prevent other people from exploiting it, which is definitely going to extend to anti-authoritsrian seasteaders and their other potential customers.
And if they did want to tolerate an external third-party for deniable benefit doing something the major state felt the need to keep illegal...well, historically (even when the minor partner has the resources of a traditional nation-state) that’s often a transitory relationship that ends poorly for the minor party. Ask Manuel Noriega—or Saddam Hussein—about it sometime.
> Guantanamo for research. Or Project Paperclip.
Yeah, Guatanamo-for-Anything and Operation Paperclip are the kinds of things states (even if they involve things the state wants to pretend to prohibit) really want to keep tight, direct control over.
Right now, states use each other to circumvent domestic laws. It really doesn’t seem far fetched that a larger state would allow a smaller one to exist if it were geopolitically/economically/etc. in its (the larger state) interest. If anything, it’s more likely, because they can be more easily controlled.
“Sure, we won’t invade your scientific seasteading research nation, as long as you share the results with us. “
Hook up a subsea cable and plenty could make a living just fine. Starlink itself might just be enough.
The only actual bandwidth needs I ever have is for conference calls, my actual "work" can survive off dialup speeds for the occasional SO search.
Other than that setting up a port for sailors would probably bring in some retail cash, marinas around the world often cost a pretty penny to moor in.
If I were to guess at how seasteaders would make money? Bringing things to you that you'd normally have to travel for (or are illegal) and pay a lot of money - medical and cosmetic tourism, gambling, that sort of thing.
What's the budget of the US Navy? A seasteading "nation" would be eminently vulnerable to military attack unless it dominated the seas militarily to an absurd degree. It only takes a couple cruise missile or torpedo hits to sink a ship (and destroy a seastead), but you can't destroy a land based nation that easily.
Couldn't the same bilateral relationships with large states be developed by the former that afford the same level of protection that's currently enjoyed by the latter? And if you think not, how is that not merely a failure of imagination?
These will not be anarchist communes, that's not what right-libertarians want. There will be a minimal government, funds for self defense, and so on.
Like I said, you can sink a ship with one or two missiles, but you can't sink even a small island with any number.
> Couldn't the same bilateral relationships with large states be developed by the former that afford the same level of protection that's currently enjoyed by the latter? And if you think not, how is that not merely a failure of imagination?
Because the whole point of seasteading is to not follow those nations' rules. Why would they offer military protection to a seastead that's trying to undermine them? The need for such protection also reveals the fundamentally contradictory and parasitic and nature of seasteading.
"you can sink a ship"
"Because the whole point of seasteading is to not follow those nations' rules."
Just with a little bit of imagination - the seastead island could be build next to a small/medium sized poorer country with some existing naval presence and come to some agreement with them to be a special economic zone of sorts, but with its own autonomous government. The agreement could be set up so as to be economically enticing to that country, while satisfying the seastead's need for self defence, and therefore be a win-win situation that goes ahead. The seastead could pay some tax money to this country for that purpose (right-libertarians usually believe in publicly funded defense).
This is not a perfect situation for the seastead. They're at the whims of that single country and whomever rises to power next. But it working out seems entirely plausible to me if the agreement is legitimately win-win. Especially in the context of having five distinct islands set up and allowing them to compete for citizens - even if one collapses, the ones that had better agreements with their neighbors will survive and grow.
It's not guaranteed to work, there are a number of failure modes I can think of (along with possible ways to remedy those) - such as the US pressuring the small country that's helping the seastead, but it's not as doomed to fail as others are making out, in my view.
Most countries on Earth could murder everyone on small inhabited islands perfectly fine with their current armaments while having zero casualties themselves.
It's frankly quite disturbing how many people dream of seasteaders being slaughtered without consequence while the world cheers it on, people simply trying to opt out of modern societies don't deserve this level of vitriol.
If any "seastead" gains traction and it becomes enough of a problem to, say, the US, nobody would even need any missiles. The US will simply declare it being illegal (for everyone) to do any business with these people. I hope the seasteaders have experience in subsistence fishing - they will need it.
Maintaining a city partially submerged in sea water is going to cost far more than maintaining a boring one built on land. You'll be paying Hawaii prices for meat, and likely need to import either soil or nutrients (if going hydroponic) to grow any fresh fruit - otherwise you'll need to hover near large ports of entry to leech off the existing supply lines for produce. Shipping companies will happily deliver container on container of fresh diverse fruit to LA, Seattle or Vancouver to sate the known demand of millions of residents - it'd be far less appealing to supply the one seasteader who has a hankering for dragon fruit with his weekly fix of... like three dragon fruits.
Absolutely everything about SeaSteading is predicated on the idea that everything would be cheaper without taxes... while also marking up the price of everything. I too would love not to pay for the military, but that's about the only service of significant cost you're effectively dodging while accepting so many other fees and expenditures.
Just wait until they find out US citizens have to file income taxes no matter where they live.
There are lots of things that many governments could do right now. But there is really very little reason for most governments to just start sinking ships, at random, even ships that aren't affiliated with a country that could protect them.
In practice, I would expect a sea steading "nation" to work out similar to any other tiny nation.
There are lots of tiny nations, around the world, but we don't see them getting nuked by the rest of the world, for no reason.
A) tax shelter for money earned in the real world
B) doing crimes on the internet
…neither of which real states are generally a big fan of.
Think a bunch of engineers, creatives, managers, traders working remotely.
Exactly. That is what would happen. Small nations exist all over the world. And the reality is that they mostly just get ignored. We don't really see these video game plots being acted out in real life.
Seasteading would result in the same situation, as what happens to modern day, tiny nations. It would be ignored, beyond, of course, arm chair internet comments that fantasizing about the horrible things that people want to do against their political opponents (as usually happens, in threads about this stuff).
But the actual consequences would not amount to much.
These countries continue to flourish, even though any of the top 50 armies in the world could clean them up in half a week without breaking a sweat.
Why do you think a few thousand people floating out into open seas will be invaded, if they are not threatening physical violence against any other state in any way?
Well, the mere existence of another state tends to lead to a diminution of whatever states are close by (within 200 miles). That's why in 2019 there was a seastead that got destroyed by the closest government (Thailand) because, even though it was in international waters, it was an affront to their sovereignty: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-18/bitcoin-couple-face-d...
Although they were less "invaded" and more "arrested"
Couldn't the same bilateral relationships with large states be developed by the former that afford the same level of protection that's currently enjoyed by the latter? And if you think not, how is that not merely a failure of imagination?
I do agree however that a venture like this would be much, much more likely to succeed on land. I just don't see your retort as a foregone conclusion.
The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866017 - Dec 2019 (255 comments)
Seasteading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20082483 - June 2019 (222 comments)
A pilot project for a new floating city will have 300 homes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17478300 - July 2018 (90 comments)
Floating city project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519863 - May 2015 (76 comments)
Charter the Seasteader I - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435994 - Aug 2012 (37 comments)
Seasteading: Cities on the ocean - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873 - Dec 2011 (112 comments)
Building a new society on a free floating platform in the high seas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088570 - Jan 2010 (25 comments)
City floating on the sea could be just 3 years away - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510984 - March 2009 (16 comments)
The next frontier: 'Seasteading' the oceans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462278 - Feb 2009 (26 comments)
Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441310 - Jan 2009 (36 comments)
Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028 - May 2008 (29 comments)
Bitcoin couple face death penalty for 'seastead' in international waters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19691294
My theory is there's something very primal in people's brains when others try to leave the tribe, they'll find any reason to castigate it, no matter how irrational.
That doesn't help you participate however.
Like how about instead of spending billions on floating company towns, you spend some of that money on helping the billions of people globally who are sick, homeless or hungry?
But no, they just want private floating pleasure palaces where they can avoid paying taxes and do drugs, while the rest of us schmucks stuck on land continue to subsidize their "Entrepreneurship" by paying taxes that support the infrastructure their businesses exploit, and paying for the negative externalities their "Disruption" creates.
Vote a government that reduce spending, and eventually remove taxes and the government itself.
Let infrastructure (health care, police && safety insurance, court system, roads, banking, army) gradually become private services you need to pay to use.
Companies won't be able to exploit infrastructure anymore, nobody gets their profits forcefully stolen by politicians on threat of violence (albeit some of the bureaucracy and management overhead will move to private companies).
Are we that afraid of leaving the basement that we have to put down even a RPG based on the idea?
A real seasteading community or two around the place is enough to create a wealth of new fiction. You don't have to leave home to benefit.
We've had real sea communities 'outside' the law already. Some were blown up (Rose Island - Netflix), some not. But they contributed a real thing to this world, they were interesting.
> Seasteading is building floating societies with significant political autonomy. Nearly half the world’s surface is unclaimed by any nation-state, and many coastal nations can legislate seasteads in their territorial waters.
> The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit think-tank promoting the creation of floating ocean cities as a revolutionary solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems: rising sea levels, overpopulation, poor governance, and more…
Seasteading is not a solution to any real problem. It's like colonizing Mars or the moon - human bodies aren't evolved for either of those environments, and it won't make sense until we're post-biology to inhabit those places at any appreciable population volume.
Seasteading actually makes less sense than visiting Mars. Beyond living on an oil rig or research platform, there's only downside to life at sea: upkeep of the rig, importing resources, lack of fresh water, medical, and sanitary supplies. What you do have are rusting, corrosion, barnacles, bad weather, sea sickness, etc. There's nowhere to go and nothing to do. Just ask oil rig personnel how much fun their lives are.
What about trash and refuse? I imagine that's dumped right back into the ocean. Or damaged, partially submerged rigs that serve as shipping hazards? There are so many negative externalities.
Humans are terrestrial, and we're suited to live on land. All of our advantages are here.
It's like the 70s returned and they want people to live in biodomes. There's no point! No rationale worth any of the innumerable downsides.
We're not facing overpopulation. If anything, population growth in the 1st world needs to accelerate to match declining replacement rates. The earth has a much larger carrying capacity, and we're not even close to hitting it.
Sea level changes aren't stopping people from moving to Miami and investing in real estate there.
We're not going to see millions of people living "Principality of Sealand" style. It's as obtuse an idea as NFTs.
They built a game to support and draw interest to their ideological cause.
It may be a model that doesn't represent important parts of the world, but that's still better than a narrative.
Similarly, a game implies a set of rules that can be criticized and cannot be made vague on purpose -- as required by motte-and-bailey and similar rhetorical tricks.
c.f. "Monopoly" (originally Georgist propaganda iirc)
1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-des...
I personally don't find the idea of Seasteading compelling.
Reading doesn't pose a challenge to our basic needs (food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation), whereas Mars and seasteading do. The hill climbing barrier was considerably lower for our species.
Outside of the accomplishments for science and engineering, there is likely little benefit in building up Mars as a habitable destination for humans to live at scale. Unless the economies of space mining can support it, there's really no reason to be there beyond a thousand or so individuals.
I don't buy the astroid survival argument either. In the near term, putting humans on Mars does not de-risk the potential for an asteroid to cause human extinction. Mars colonies will likely still be reliant upon Earth for survival for a hundred years to come as they will not have adequate resources, support, or manufacturing capabilities for self-sustenance let alone growth. It's unlikely that a small colony could Matt Damon themselves back from the brink without a large industrial civilization backing them.
Research into enhancing human lives here on earth and protecting our environment will pay greater dividends. I'd even wager that advances in AI/ML, BCI, and biology outpace space colonization tech due to their immediate applications and inherent venture capital fundability. (SpaceX will be funded because of the DoD, NASA, and terrestrial communications. Mars not so much.)
> global climate change is evidence that we are past our current carrying capacity.
The current economic and political regime doesn't curtail dumping carbon into the atmosphere. The correlation with population is complicated. China and the United States, two of the largest contributors to CO2 emissions, have slowing population growth if you discount immigration.
It'll take a hundred years after we start for the asteroid survival argument to be valid. A hundred years is too long, so let's never start.
In a hundred years, we may be able to solve the problem with far less cost and effort.
Having had developed a -7 vision by 12 years old, I'd beg to differ. Because of books, I'm completely useless without contacts or glasses in human "natural habitat".
Definitely not.
I think there's a thought that eugenics was a natural evolution of evolution[1] - and, as a society, we generally find that rather repulsive and don't do it... But just because we're aware of ways we can artificially speed up the process doesn't mean the process isn't continuing.
1. It's a thought, or conception - this isn't me endorsing eugenics in any way. I just believe that, mechanically, it could achieve a similar result just accelerated and with a lot of really important moral questions.
But evolution is still happening.
(nit: I had this comment sitting in a buffer because downvotes on this thread and elsewhere subject me to the HN bad commentor rate limit.)
Did anybody think this through more than once?
If true, this is a surprisingly unsure approach to something like Seasteading which to me requires a huge leap of faith. Is the game meant to be an educational tool or is it meant to trial human nature to test the assumptions of each of those scenarios?
Have these people never played BioShock? This is basically the same naive libertarian ideas going wild.
For such an project to be successful you need to have some serious funding. Why should anyone fund this?
Any legitimate industry will have a hard time on the ocean where you have horrible logistics, nearly no access to resources and are miles away from potential clients.At best I could maybe see a niche for some gimmicky tourism.
So what would it be used for? Let's be honest: Tax evasion, human trafficking and gambling.
It would be way too expensive to live there for normal people. Plus it would more oppressive. You can at least flee from a tyrannical government on land. If you are in the middle of the ocean? Good luck.
Though I dig the futurism. As long a they keep larping, good for them. Just hope they don't think it is a good idea in real life.
Just out of interest: What kind of problem do you, personally, have with these that you are considering starting a new country?
And isn't it the issue that the rich can already circumvent laws just fine? How is all this going to help the poor who have to stem the main bulk of the tax burden while the rich use loop holes and tax havens? They ware not the ones that are going to live on the ocean.
Are you not aware of libertarian views on said tax burden?
Occupational licensing: it's gatekeeping that drives up the cost of services, reduces competition and quality. For example, when I dislocated my shoulder, the offsite radiologist who read the X-ray declared that it wasn't dislocated. He was wrong. Luckily for me, the staff at the clinic ignored his diagnosis and reduced it anyway.
Over scheduling of drugs: In the US, cannabis is a Schedule I drug at the federal level. This is the same bucket as heroin and the date rape drug. Prosecutors can use (or abuse) prosecutorial discretion to decide who to pursue for cannabis offenses, resulting in unequal outcomes based on your socioeconomic status. As a Canadian, I can be denied entry to the US if I admit having used cannabis. This seems wasteful, and impairs useful things like economic migration or families visiting each other.
Civil asset forfeiture: there are perverse incentives here where: (1) the agency seizing the money gets to use it for their operating expenses and (2) the burden of proof rests on the person whose property is seized. There are documented cases of police targeting travellers with out of state plates, knowing that they are unlikely to return to fight their case in court. As someone who takes road trips through the US, this affects me.
If you want to stir the libertarian pot, you should talk about child labour, consensual slavery and selling body parts. Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs and civil asset forfeiture aren't that out there, IMO.
It seems odd to me to trade a small but real risk of this should I decide to carry around large quantities of cash (and/or drugs) for the risk of being robbed by literal pirates with no real recourse unless you're able to fight them off personally.
I can think of a lot of uses besides those. Prostitution between consenting adults, fun drugs, medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA etc, testing of drones and driverless vehicles, playing lawn darts, and avoiding obsolete regulations come to mind.
There are real world countries that you can visit for this.
For some reason, people that promote legalization are never willing to look at countries that have done so.
We have this here in Germany and I have to tell you, it is not a success story to say the the least. There is a huge problem with human trafficking. Yes, people always say it will go away if you legalize it. The data says otherwise, it gets in fact worse. All the red light district are also controlled by criminal gangs. They are mostly ignored by the state as long a they "help" with collecting the taxes. And this is what is happening in a strong state with a relative low level of corruption.
> fun drugs
Again there are enough states that allow them and the list if growing.
> medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA
Same here.
> testing of drones and driverless vehicles
Sure you can test them. How else a companies developing them? Sure public roads are regulated, thank god for that. I don't want to die because someone wanted to test his driverless car in production.
> playing lawn darts
Why can't you in your country?
> avoiding obsolete regulations
Eh sounds minor and again lot's of countries to choose from already.
I get what you are saying but Libertarians seem to ignore elementary freedoms in favor of picking really weird fights.
What elementary freedoms? Not having to starve to death. Not being bankrupted by health care costs. Not having to fear for my live. No having to live in a society where people lack basic education. Enjoying well maintained public roads. Being taking care of when getting old.
They have some weird ultra-naive definitions of freedom that only seems to include absence of rules. Like they see not being able to vacuum on a Sunday, not the freedom to enjoy a quiet Sunday. (Well at least I can dream about, it is not as enforced as people here probably believe.)
Everything is give and take. Societies thrive when people are willing to compromise.
The advantage of the seasteading scheme is that different groups can pick different hills to die on.
There are probably people who would like the worst of both the US and Germany: no shopping on Sunday, alcohol only to be bought at state liquor stores, no noise at certain hours, no driving over 55 miles per hour. I think it would be great if they had a floating* island all to themselves.
* if it didn't float, that would be fine too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_darts#Safety_and_bans_in_...
They just stopped selling the one particular variant, and not really because they were "banned", but because of the market realities of the low margins for selling only a somewhat fun toy versus the litigation costs and settlement costs from its injuries. If they thought there was big enough demand they'd slap a ton of warnings on it, include an arbitration clause in a jurisdiction friendly to them, and put it back in stores in a heartbeat.
Heck, you can probably get them on Etsy from China.
Got to Nevada. It has legal fun drugs, blackjack and hookers.
> medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA etc,
Oh no, safety reviews. I don't know what "medical drugs" the FDA has stopped, but I do know a lot of snakeoil.
> testing of drones and driverless vehicles
Testing both in the US is easy. Well, not driverless vehicles on all public roads. But seasteads have no public roads so that still argues in favor of the US (some is better than none). That's without asking how many miles of roads you'll get on your boat.
> playing lawn darts
Has never been illegal, and (again in the US) are available for sale. There was a period of time when they were illegal because regulations preventing them from being sold to and used by children were ignored for two decades. Probably by well-meaning libertarians. If reasonable regulations keep getting ignored, you should expect harsher ones.
> avoiding obsolete regulations come to mind.
I'm not aware of that many obsolete regulations. I am aware of many regulations people claim are obsolete because they inconvenience them and they want a competitive advantage.
Not that all libertarian ideas are perfect, but when you start building on top of the non-aggression principle, other problems seem so much more manageable.
<del>Not to support it, but Peter Thiel is a founder of the Seasteading institute[0], so funding shouldn't be a concern.</del>
>The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit organization, based in California. It was founded in 2008 by activist, software engineer and political economic theorist Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel.
Looks like he gave up on it though[1]:
>In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Thiel said seasteads are "not quite feasible from an engineering perspective" and "still very far in the future"
[0]:https://www.seasteading.org/about/
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/facebooks-mysterious-hardware...
Libertarianism (left or right) argues for reducing coercion in society; right-libertarianism wants to focus on property rights as the basis of that liberty (even though we already know where that leads). Hence why they have this idea of creating closed-off separate societies based on property rights that can internally structure their economies how they wish.
The cruel irony of right-libertarianism (at least, the stateless-capitalist kind) is that it's not terribly difficult to imagine a sequence of events by which one could construct the same arrangement of coercive governments through property rights rather than conquest. In other words, the ancap argument against sovereign nations is that the US didn't get clean title to it's land, not that it's inherently illegitimate or coercive to have one person control the land that another lives upon. After all, what's the difference between a government charging taxes and a landlord charging rent?
Likewise, the only reason why we don't have competition between governments to provide services to citizens is because sovereign nations collectively decided to not play such games. If you want to switch governments, you need to make an immigration case for yourself to another government, which involves fitting into a small number of restrictive visa categories with yearly quotas on how many new migrants come in. You are not allowed to "just leave" without having somewhere to move to, which is where most of the restriction comes into play.
This is, again, not materially different from a landlord who refuses to provide housing to people who don't make a certain amount of money. Something that, again, is very much up right-wingers alley. Hell, you can do this the other way around, too - high housing costs are effectively a small-scale shadow immigration system. If I want to move to California, I have to be fantastically wealthy, while long-term residents have the advantage of rent control.