Must be interesting to be a baby in a fully libertarian paradise.
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The seasteading concept only works at this time (in theory) because the nations of the world have currently-settled laws about the oceans which the seasteaders are trying to exploit. They cannot get away from established law on this planet.
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Just read the piece, and it’s a great read for understanding the tech bro mindset.
They live lives so insulated that they really don’t understand how anything works. Why insurance exists and is necessary, why treaties to control hazardous waste exist, how much maintenance machinery requires, how much expertise and labor are required for large endeavors, how much space is required to grow food for one person… it goes on and on. They have a website-and-video-game understanding of the world.
I think every tech bro libertarian should spend one summer working on a farm. Go learn to run machinery, grow food, and work harder than you want to. THAT is a window into what makes the world work and why everything we have today is the way it is.
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All the while poor dorks in Portland can muster together a better mutual aid network than these clowns. This just proves to me that if you don’t give a shit about your friends or family or even the neighbor then you’re doomed to fail at any group project.
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This story puts that contention into doubt.
Translation: lottery winner. I’ve lucked out in a to a lesser degree in speculative investments, but I don’t take that as evidence that I can start a new society.
Especially when self-important clowns with Engineer’s Disease are trying to manage it. The concept of putting a man on the moon is sound, too, but NASA didn’t put a bunch of rando silver-spoon man-children and lottery winners in charge of managing the Apollo programme.
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And then spend the same amount of time working in the service industry.
And then, to round it out, spend the same amount of time as an assistant helping trained professionals in early childhood education.
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Good idea.
Not just tech bros, though; every person of insulated privilege.
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One usually precedes the other. Once the initial struggle, lucky breaks (luck is more important than these characters will ever admit) and hard work is put in to gather wealth, there is the temptation to rest on your proverbial laurels, and that’s where the laziness, entitlement and hubris start to take over. The more distance between the initial sweat and the rewards, the worse it gets.
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Trying to understand how something with literally fatal and existential flaws that come in the “management of it” could be considered “sound” when the “management of it” … is absolutely and completely essential.
My brain is hurting now.
The way I see it living on a cruise ship semi-permanently as a concept itself literally requires sacrificing the reasons for wanting to live on a cruise ship semi-permanently in the first place unless you want to do so solely because you are very wealthy and REALLY like living on cruise ships in which case you are already accommodated by most countries and most cruise lines and most existing social contracts and labor laws… you just may have to pay a tax in a country somewhere from time to time. Boo hoo.
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The concept of living on the ocean in communities is sound (it’s happening right now in fishing communities, etc.). The technology for what they’re talking about is also here. What’s lacking is the framework, processes, implementation, etc
True, but theoretically if designed and managed properly, they could find a country/flag that would be willing to partner with them on their endeavor and move to the waters of that country. Also note though that with Indonesia and Panama they didn’t get everything they wanted…
Yet that’s the current direction of our current space program.
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Wait, are we talking about libertarianism or communism now?
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Oh he is smart. There’s different types of smart though, and smart on specific things. Smart with tech, yes. Smart with international cruise ship regulations, no.
Re: Bitcoin, yes he was a very early adopter and put a lot of money into it. He was a developer on solutions, etc. So no he wasn’t just a fanboy that threw 10k into bitcoin when it was 5 cents but someone who worked to make it what it is today. So lottery winner? To some degree but also not to the same degree. And no Bitcoin does not equal starting a new society.
I don’t disagree. The cruise ship approach to seasteading is bound to fail. Seasteading as a concept is valid though.
not even sitting on your ass sipping wine, and subsisting off slave labor?
From River of Dark Dreams
That History—the history of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the nineteenth-century Mississippi Valley—began with a dream. Specifically, a dream in the mind of Thomas Jefferson—the philosopher, visionary, slaveholder president of the United States in 1803. Jefferson’s hope for the Mississippi Valley was that the abundance of land would produce a harvest of self-sufficient, noncommercial white households headed by the yeomen patriarchs whom he associated with republican virtue, a flowering of white equality and political independence: an “empire for liberty.”5 The notion of an “empire for liberty” had embedded within it a theory of space. Given enough land, migrants from the East would naturally be transformed into a freeholding, republican yeomanry. Spread out across the landscape, white farmers would have to provide for themselves: they would be too removed from cities to be reliant upon them for their basic needs (or to develop other needs they could not meet themselves); too distant from credit networks to find themselves ensnared in the sort of debtor-creditor relationships that could compromise their political independence; and too far from factories to become dependent upon wages paid by others for their daily sustenance. These yeoman farmers would be self-sufficient, equal, and independent —masters of their own destiny. Necessity would be more than the mother of invention: it would give birth to independence, maturity, freedom. Jefferson’s vision of social order through expansion had at its heart a household-based notion of political economy. Rather than cities sprawling across the American landscape, bound together by invisible financial networks and all-too-visible factories, white households were to be the serially reproduced units by which progress was measured. “Go to the West, and visit one of our log cabins, and number its inmates,” enthused one latter-day Jeffersonian. “There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his better half, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in the same family twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table.”6 The spatial aspect of the “empire for liberty” was defined more by reproduction than production: the vast lands of the Louisiana Purchase would allow the United States to freeze economic history at a given moment, and develop through expansion rather than diversification—through the proliferation of the gendered hierarchies of household social order rather than through the intensification of class hierarchies of Eastern, urban, industrial development.
Johnson, Walter… River of Dark Dreams . Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
(Is this book worth a purchase? The prose seems rather purple)
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And bight, and fjord, and “open seas,” lol.
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Wasn’t talking about either. I’m not a libertarian or a communist.
I think that’d be a great idea. Get past the theoretical and thought experiments and actually get your hands dirty.
I admit to ignorance on this, but are there actually any fairly self-sustaining fishing communities that remain permanently out at sea, raising families, etc., and not relying on land-based ports for boat maintenance, shelter from storms, etc? Because I haven’t heard of any.
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