I’m Not Seaing It

Imagine you run a small business in an area where a criminal organization runs a protection racket. “Nice shop here, shame if something were to happen to it.” So you pay.

Someone tells you that they’ve never seen payment demanded from the homeless guy who sells pencils on the corner. Nor the shady guy who sells watches in the alley. And maybe not even from food trucks.

So this person suggests that you relocate your small business to a truck. Or at least a trailer park. Because then criminals might not bother you. And if they do you can more easily move to another town. You should also move your home to an RV, or a trailer park, for the same reason.

Enough of you together might even create whole mobile towns that better evade both local criminals and local governments. If locals don’t treat you right, you’ll be outta there. Your group could then govern itself more, instead of having to do what locals say. And that would create more experiments in governance, which would help the world to innovate and improve our mechanisms of governance.

This isn’t fantasy because trucks, RVs, and trailer parks already exist. Oh and have you heard of all the great ideas for improving trucks? There are ideas for how trucks could be used to make energy, food, and potable water, and how they could clean up pollution and pull CO2 from the air. Anything you think is expensive on a truck might soon be cheap. What are you waiting for!?

Not persuaded? That’s how I feel about Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman’s new book Seasteading: How Floating Nations will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians.

They argue that cruise ships and oil rig platforms prove that we already know how to live on the ocean. And we have so many great new related ideas — there are ways to make ocean houses, things ocean machines could do, and products and services that ocean living people could sell. The book is mostly about all those great ocean ideas, for food, energy, clean water, CO2, etc.

Presumably, in time the usual profit motives would get all that ocean tech developed without your help. The reason Quirk and Freidman say they wrote this book, to entice you to help, is because they think sea-living folks could create more experiments in governance, because nations don’t officially claim control over people far from shore. And offshore mobility would enable a different better set of experiments. They are hoping you care enough about that to go live on the ocean.

In 366 pages the authors are careful to never say which particular governance variations they are so eager to try, variations that are today blocked by all land governments everywhere. Somewhat suspiciously like blockchain folks eager for “commerce” without government interference. (They just want to trade “stuff,” okay?)

The book talks about seeking approval from governments for early experiments, and wanting to keep good relations with neighboring nations. Seasteads won’t be used to evade taxes, they say. And whatever products and services they sell to land-based customers must meet regulations that those customers must live by.

Long ago people who didn’t like local governments tended to head for mountains and jungles, where they were harder to find and tax. That doesn’t work as well today, as governments can now find people much more easily, even on the ocean.

The book suggests that seastead mobility would make governance different and better for them. But one must pay a big added cost for mobility, both on land and sea. And the cost of moving large seasteads seems to me comparable to the cost to move a home or business located in a trailer on land. Yet the existence of trailer parks hasn’t obviously unleashed much great land governance.

The book claims that nations won’t interfere w/ seasteads because “China has not invaded Hong Kong. Malaysia has not invaded Singapore .. The Cayman Islands .. adopts a spiteful stance toward US and EU regulator policies” (p.270). Yet as recently as 1982 an international treaty UNCLOS extended national powers out to 200+ miles, within which nations “reserve the right to regulate `artificial islands, installations, and structures.’” (p.13) It seems to me that when there is enough economic activity in the oceans, nations would get around to trying to control it.

Yeah nations can be slow to act, so maybe there’d be some interim period when seasteads could experiment. But even then I find it hard to imagine that seasteads would substantially increase the total governance experimentation on Earth, even for an interim.

The world is full of families, firms, clubs, churches, group homes able to try many governance variations. Apparently, “there are close to 600,000 cities, towns, villages, hamlets etc. in the world.” Some of these are “intentional communities” that experiment with many social variations, in far easier environments than the ocean.

Yes, many governance variations do not seem to have been tried much, but that seems mostly due to a lack of interest. I can’t get people to do futarchy experiments, even though it could be tried in organizations of most any size. Scholars have proposed many as-yet-untried governance mechanisms, such as voting rules, that could also be tried in organizations of any size. US libertarians can’t even get enough of them to move to New Hampshire to make a big governance difference there.

Yes, there are far fewer such polities in the world that could try experiments on governance issues that only apply to polities containing at least a million people. But I find it hard to imagine a million people all going to live on the sea just so they can do experiments at that scale. And even if they did, it would only create a small percentage change in the number of such polities.

Maybe if ocean tech advances as fast as some hope, many will eventually live on the ocean, just for the economic benefits. But in that case I expect the usual nations to extend control over this new activity. And any new governance units that do form would only add a small fraction to Earth entities able to experiment with governance variations.

My guess is that the real appeal here is related to why people find pirate stories “romantic.” They just like the abstract idea that pirates are “free”, even if they don’t have any particular forbidden action in mind to do as a pirate. And just as most who enjoy reading pirates stories would never actually choose to be a pirate, most seastead supporters like the idea of supporting sea “freedom”, even if no way they’d go live on the ocean, and even if they have no particular usually-forbidden thing they want “free” sea folks to try.

Seasteading, I’m just not seaing it.