7 votes

The quest for a floating utopia: Can casting away from established society to inhabit sea-based colonies save us from the problems of modern life - or are we bound to repeat our mistakes?

5 comments

  1. Akir
    Link
    Oh, these guys again. I can't help but laugh whenever I hear about them. Their ideas are just so incredibly bad; they think of themselves as individualistic philosopher-kings, and imagine that...
    • Exemplary

    Oh, these guys again.

    I can't help but laugh whenever I hear about them. Their ideas are just so incredibly bad; they think of themselves as individualistic philosopher-kings, and imagine that when they get their seasteads together they'll be talking about philosophy all day to see who's got the best one. Let me spoil the ending: it's probably none of them.

    I mean, the very idea of a seastead is just plain a bad idea. You're purposefully putting yourself away from almost every meaningful natural resource. So you can farm algea, catch fish, and just about nothing else. So there goes trade. If they plan on making a nation with an economy based soley on services, they'll be the first and only ones to do so. Furthermore, it's basically impossible to try to assert sovereignty because you have no military force and there's going to be zero countries who will be willing to consider your seastead, even if it does manage to grow into a colony, as a sovereign state.

    But I think worse than the idea of seasteading is the philosophies behind this desire. Their extreme libertarian ideas are just so incredibly bad. If they really belived in their philosophy, why not emigrate to a country that thinks the same as they do? Oh, that's right, because they quickly fall apart. The truth is that these are very fortunate rich people who don't want to face the realities of what their philosophy actually reaps. Because you don't need to leave land to see that libertarian communes simply don't work.

    18 votes
  2. [3]
    Flashynuff
    Link
    These "seasteaders" are astoundingly silly and misguided. Even with every other problematic thing in that article aside, trying to make independent states (or non-states, as it were) in the open...

    These "seasteaders" are astoundingly silly and misguided. Even with every other problematic thing in that article aside, trying to make independent states (or non-states, as it were) in the open ocean is incredibly resource inefficient and nowhere near self sustaining. You essentially need either the backing of a state or some incredibly rich asshole to support even basic necessities. It's like trying to make your own space station. There's a reason people don't live there already, and instead live on land, where you can easily get things like food, water, and shelter.

    The whole article reeks of a colonizer mindset. At every turn, the people in this treat lands they don't belong to as playgrounds for their techbro fantasies and then get upset when the locals run them out of town.
    I mean, this incredibly racist passage about sums it up:

    When the topic comes up during my time in Panama, Koch claims that frontier initiatives helped make the 19th century “probably the freest century we ever had in human history.” The frontier helped stall the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism even in Europe, he thinks, because leaders did not want to lose commoners to a more appealing place across the sea. By building a new frontier on the ocean, we might just save the world again.

    This is a narrow take on history. Slaves were still legal in the United States for much of the 19th century, and pioneers claimed their land with little regard for Indigenous peoples. (“The Native Americans might have a different opinion [of the frontier],” Koch concedes.)

    Yeah, you think Native Americans might have a different opinion about being genocided? How dense can a person be?

    Believe me, I'm all for the abolition of states, but this sort of political incoherence is exactly what happens with the strain of libertarian who believes freedom starts and ends at the individual. The only way you could ever pull something like this off is by getting enough people together who share a strong community bond and interest in keeping each other alive. That's fundamentally incompatible with individualism.

    10 votes
    1. spctrvl
      Link Parent
      More specifically, I think it stems from right wing 'libertarians' viewing capitalist notions of private property as some immutable law of nature, and not a social construct whose maintenance is...

      Believe me, I'm all for the abolition of states, but this sort of political incoherence is exactly what happens with the strain of libertarian who believes freedom starts and ends at the individual.

      More specifically, I think it stems from right wing 'libertarians' viewing capitalist notions of private property as some immutable law of nature, and not a social construct whose maintenance is practically the raison d'être of the modern state.

      11 votes
    2. spit-evil-olive-tips
      Link Parent
      You pulled out my favorite quote from the article, but didn't mention it at all: The 1800s saw slavery, the forced relocation of Native Americans, the Civil War, the rise of the KKK, the...

      You pulled out my favorite quote from the article, but didn't mention it at all:

      When the topic comes up during my time in Panama, Koch claims that frontier initiatives helped make the 19th century “probably the freest century we ever had in human history.”

      The 1800s saw slavery, the forced relocation of Native Americans, the Civil War, the rise of the KKK, the beginnings of Jim Crow, and the robber barons / Gilded Age, and that's just in the US, just off the top of my head.

      "freest century" in human history? Free for whom, exactly?

      8 votes
  3. nukeman
    Link
    Even ignoring the ideological parts of technolibertarian seasteading, think about the massive amounts of supporting infrastructure associated with these vessels. You’d need massive farming...

    Even ignoring the ideological parts of technolibertarian seasteading, think about the massive amounts of supporting infrastructure associated with these vessels. You’d need massive farming buildings for growing food and raising animals (people would expect a diverse selection akin to the finest supermarkets and restaurants in the world), fabs for producing semiconductors, plants for manufacturing electronics, steel mills and concrete plants, mining infrastructure (either for accessing the seabed, or extracting minerals from the seawater), power plants (probably a combination of wind/solar/nuclear, for which you’d need much of the above and below), chemical plants, at least a limited automotive and aviation manufacturing capability, numerous factories for general dry goods and consumer products, and probably a bunch of things I’m forgetting about. Did we mention this supercity would massive, and need to be capable of surviving Force 12 winds?

    Yeah, there’s a lot of tech issues here, plus, nobody wants to live next to the equivalent of a floating Houston if you’ve managed to spend your gobs of money on moving to “paradise”.

    4 votes