Seasteading

Description

"what if there was a way to establish wholly new societies without all the bloodshed? A benevolent open source approach to nation building would need to incorporate multiple small societies. Of course, few nations would be willing to donate land to sovereign societies within their borders. So how could these nationettes set up shop outside the borders and influence of any existing country? For some, the answer is churning and stirring all around us.

The concept of "seasteading" is not entirely new. In a nutshell, the idea calls for small autonomous civilizations to be built in floating city-sized communities in international waters. Each society would set up their own form of government which other seasteads could choose to appropriate or reject as they formulate their take on the more-perfect union.

Chief among those pushing this Gilligan's Island approach to civics has been the Seasteading Institute, whose website describes their mission as thus:

- The vision of seasteading is an urgent one. We can already see that existing political systems are straining to cope with the realities of the 21st century. We need to create the next generation of governance: banking systems to better handle the inevitable financial crises, medical regulations that protect people without retarding innovation, and democracies that ensure our representatives truly represent us. Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the cell phone carrier industry, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, we envision a vibrant startup sector for government, with many small groups experimenting with innovative ideas as they compete to serve their citizens' needs better.

While seasteading may sound like a futuristic evolution of the (often failed) hippie-commune experiments of the 1960s and '70s, it was founded on the other side of the political spectrum by Patri Friedman, the grandson of Milton Friedman, the fierce advocate for government on the amoebic scale and icon of modern conservative economics.

The Seasteading Institute sees their mission as a three-fold path: overcoming the legal, business and technological hurdles to open source sea-based societies. The Institute even offers an X Prize-like "Poseidon Award" for the first seastead that has at least 50 full-time residents, is financially self-sufficient, offers real estate on the open market, and has de-facto political autonomy by the year 2015." (http://dvice.com/archives/2011/08/how-tech-will-b.php)