Liked your link, but as a decidedly non-machiavellian mouthbreather (how do people kiss first thing in the morning on TV?) I’d like to register my distress: Not All Mouthbreathers.
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That’s certainly the point of “Blueseed” (and a somewhat ridiculous one, given how easy it is to get H1B visas for employees in California, and how much less H1B visa holders tend to get paid), but Freedom ship is the giant cruise ship that wanders the seas of the world. They talk about a community (and a retirement community) with businesses operating under a particular country’s flag, rather than an attempt to create a micro-nation, but would you really want to try to run a business on a cruise ship? It seems like it started out as another Libertopian micro-nation, but now is trying to be all things to all people and not quite theoretically working as any of those things. The other Libertopian sea-steading ideas at least have clear notions of what they’re attempting (even if they, too, are ridiculous in their own ways).
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This paradise already exists in Dubai.
“Everyone* is wealthy. Just look at it!”
- Excepting the slaves who do the actual work of keeping everyone clothed, fed and housed.
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They knew what they were getting into when they signed that contract! If they really cared about their freedom they should have sprung for the polarized glasses that let them read the fine print.
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Because freedom is slavery.
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The problem is, these people who are doing all the work required to keep the nation’s infrastructure and services ticking along aren’t the super-wealthy folks that have paid the big money to be citizens of this tiny (artificial) island nation. Most of the people inhabiting the space would then be outsiders, and all the useful members of the society would be outsiders. Even if you’re sitting just off a country’s coast in international waters and you could ship in a huge number of people every day to do all the work, that’s still incredibly problematic for numerous reasons.
Because they imagine that they’ll be royalty - who doesn’t want to be a prince/princess? I mean, when you’re 10 or 11 years old, that is.
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In most real-life socialist communes everybody ends up doing at least some of the grunt work. For obvious reasons this doesn’t usually scale up well; when you know everyone else in your community you’re less likely to risk being ostracized as the jerk who thinks he’s too good to pull his own weight.
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I looked for a summary of typical ship maintenance and operation costs and came up with this paper. Since the report itself can be had for a mere £1495.00, I’m extrapolating that the expense of running a Freedom Ship is going to offset a big chunk of the savings to be had with a captive offshore workforce.
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Don’t forget the hookers and blow, since it’s international waters.
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More likely designer psychedelics, but yes. But that does lead to one of the big problems for such enterprises, which is how to keep pirates (specifically the US Coast Guard) from seizing your boat in their drug war.
I’ve seen two or three different iterations of this in the past. Back in the ~70s, the micronation of Minerva took some coral reefs and built a bit of above-sea-level cement work and tried to declare themselves a nation. The King of Tonga invaded them and stole the place. (They were really closer to Fiji than Tonga.)
But the other ones in the 80s/90s were pretty much scams, raising funds for doing studies and enthusiastic plans, drawing up how the government and economy were going to work, building cool models, and while they had a really cool flag with dolphins, they never actually got anywhere. (And after Snow Crash, comparisons to The Raft were inevitable.)
One example they talked about was that there’s been a floating hotel that’s usually in Southeast Asia somewhere, which at the time cost about $25M with a couple hundred rooms. They were talking about how their designs showed a billion-dollar floating-platform ship would be a lot cheaper per resident, but ignored the elephant in the room which is whether you could get a floating country recognized by the UN so other countries wouldn’t attack you, and the other elephant which is that a billion dollars is more money than you’re going to be able to raise without dealing with the first elephant. The obvious test would be to buy the hotel, raise the flag, start selling corporate charters or tax-evasion private banking or whatever, and let the UN know if you’re in business. If it works, then you’ve got a proof of concept to jumpstart the rest, but if it fails, it’s cheaper than a lot of dotcom-boom startups.
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So pirate bait. Yeah I know these people are gun nuts but still the profit will be larger then the risks.
I also think this is an obnoxious techno-libertarian nightmare, but I would imagine that they would say that their solution to the menial problems would be robots. Perhaps why Google bought up all the robotics startups? Then they’ll just have grad students and interns maintain the robots. Any as for social interaction, they’ll just Oculus into facebook. There are a lot of evergreen reasons why this is an mysanthropic and narcissistic idea, but some of the other reason are potentially becoming less significant.
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Little weasels with Bond villain complexes. Fundamentally opposed to democracy. Basically sums them up. I came to say something similar. I wish they’d at least make one successful stab at this so we can all break out the popcorn and see how many days it takes before the emergency call to The Coast Guard.
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For one, Philip Marlowe will just turn up and spoil everything.
The king of tonga is a big fellow, like. He can easily kick your ass.
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Waterworld was a bomb and one can bomb a waterworld. A retreating strategy is a loser’s strategy and when people who allegedly have power and control look at running away as a viable next move, you know the world needs a swift kick to get back to its senses because cowardice has started to grip too many people.
There is no such thing as a safe place, kids, learn to deal with it…
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Now I just have a mental image of someone making off with a treasure chest full of these things.
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Pain in the arse for the pirates though, as you’ve got to fuck on converting binary to octal.
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