Structural libertarianism and seasteading
that is the idea of bringing about free socities by building them on the ocean
This talk is going to have two parts.
One is sort of the political theory about why this will help make government work better,
and why it might be the best way of doing that.
And then the practical side:
What are we actually doing to try to build floating cities.
What needs to get done.
I'm going to spend half the time talking about a theory,
and not what we do day to day.
The reason is that there's a general framework for
why we're building cities on the ocean to make freedom,
which is applicable more broadly.
There are other ideas for creating free societies that fit within the same framework,
and that I think might also work
that are totally different.
I think it's much more important to change how people think about activism and politics
than the details of any one method.
Because maybe we won't succeed in building floating cities,
but if people get these ideas
and think of their own methods to change things based on the same theories,
maybe one of them will actually work.
So I contrast the old sort of activism for political change,
which is to try to win the war of ideas.
It involves following intuitions we have about politics from pre-industrial days
when we changed things by convincing people and building coalitions in small tribes.
Examples include trying to win debates in academia
mainstream politics on the Internet
trying to elect candidates into public office, things like that.
Complaining about bad laws, writing papers that this would be a better law
to achieve the goal that you say you have, and lots of other things that, you know,
feel like they're useful but actually aren't.
The alternative is what I call structural activism, and in some ways
it's a lot less intuitive
which is why I'm going to spend a while explaining it.
The idea is that bad laws come from the incentives of the global government industry,
and that the government industry doesn't have enough innovation.
That produces bad political systems, and those produce bad laws.
It's just like any industry that has a monopoly or a cartel: it produces bad services.
Government is no different.
I don't know if American TV is popular here,
but some of you, it sounds like, have seen The Wire.
One example of this viewpoint is
to contrast a traditional police show with this one.
The traditional show is all about the hero.
He wins through courage and persistence and by sticking to his honor.
He's good, he cares about people, and he fights bad people.
That's a really natural way to view the world, but I think it's mostly not true.
In The Wire, all the characters are a little bit good, a little bit bad,
a little bit selfish, and you get bad results because of bad inentives
That's the economic view.
To make it more concrete, in a traditional cop drama, people say things like
"You killed my partner, you son of a bitch! I'm going to get you!"
Good people against bad people.
Here's a classic quote from The Wire.
They're talking about the war on drugs and why they can't win it.
One says, "We can't win the war on drugs," his partner says, "Why?"
And he says, "When the drug dealers screw up, the higher-ups beat them.
and when we policemen screw up, eh, we get retired with a pension."
Who do you think is going to win that war?
The people threatened with retirement or the people who get beaten?
It's pretty simple.
In order to win the drug war, you'd have to change those incentives.
Just trying harder and having more good people on your side doesn't do it.
That was a quick preview of the different political views I'm going to contrast.
The rest of the talk is to build fear about how conventional ways to get freedom
won't work
Then when you're afraid, you're going to want answers.
So I'll give you the analysis, the political theory,
for the methods that I think can work in the general theoretical sense.
Then I'm going to make it concrete with seasteading.
Alright, disclaimers...
These arguments apply with the assumption that we want much much more freedom.
I'm not saying that debate and argument in politics can't make little changes.
Only that they're unlikely to make big changes.
There's a sense in which everyone who wants a free society is on the same side.
We're just arguing about what the most effective things are.
I get a bit passionate sometimes about complaining about bad ways to do things.
But that's just because I want freedom and I care a lot.
And I think many of you do too.
As an example of the problems with winning with conventional methods,
The US has a very high density of libertarians.
Ron Paul was an incredible libertarian candidate.
He set fundraising records, and he completely failed
as far as having any direct political impact.
He got 5.5% of the vote in the Republican primary.
Had no impact on the race.
When a big success relative to the past still has no impact at all,
it's a bad sign, and maybe you should do things differently.
There are studies that suggest that there's actually a libertarian personality,
and that libertarians are in the minority.
David Nolan, who founded the US Libertarian Party and created the Nolan Chart.
He reports that surveys show 6-16% of people have libertarian beliefs.
Other studies with narrower definitions have found numbers like 6%.
Modern psychological research --
This is Jonathan Haidt speaking at TED --
suggest that most people's morality is innate.
That we use our logic to justify our moral intuition after the fact.
Mostly.
There are some people who can be convinved by logic
and who build up their morals based on arguments,
but they are rare.
And so, if there's an innate libertarian personality,
and you can't generally convince people by arguing about morality,
and we're a minority, we need to find strategies that work being a minority.
Actually it's even worse than that.
I've understated the problem.
Even if there were more libertarians, we would still lose elections
because of how democracy works.
In the old view of the world, political candidates compete by creating
policies, sets of laws, that appeal to the voters.
Whoever makes the law people most want, get what they want.
This world I show here is an enchanted forest with unicorns and fairies
Because that's how realistic it is.
Here's how politics actually works.
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." As H. L. Mencken said.
Candidates get the resources to compete in elections
by promising favors to special interests.
The more favors a politician promises, the more likely they are to win the election.
So even if half the people were libertarians, they would probably form two parties
which somehow managed to cleverly split the libertarians in two,
and promise lots of political favors to the rest in order to fund their campaign.
An honest libertarian politician's goal is not to sell political favors.
We're like the Hobbits of the political world.
It's like "Give me the Ring of Political Power, so I can destroy it."
"I'm not going to use it."
Then none of the powerful people seem to be on our side.
I wonder why.
Part of the old view is an intuition
that to win in economics or politics you just have to be right.
It's true in some areas of science where theories are easy to test,
and there's not a lot to be gained or lost based on what theories are true.
Truth usually wins out.
I would really like to believe that the truth usually wins out.
But I think if you look in practice, it's actually not true.
As one example, the rising epidemic of obesity and the diseases of diet around the world.
The US is sort of leading there, but
it's happening in many other places. I was in India last year
and they've got lots of Baskin-Robbins and cotton candy and such.
This is a case where people's lives are at stake in choosing what they eat.
A little bit of bad science and some special interests
have managed to overcome the truth in setting
what the mainstream believes about what's healthy to eat for decades.
compare that little bit of power and money at stake in telling people
what kinds of food they should eat
with the enormous amount of power and money at stake
when it comes to competing economic and policy theories.
You've got one theory of the economy which says that when a recession happens
we shouldn't do anything.
You've got another theory which says when a recession happens
you need to give few special people hundreds of billions of dollars
for them to give it out to the right people.
There's a certain imbalance between the two theories
in which is going to get billions of dollars of support.
So being right is not enough.
Let's understand why we have bad government so that we can fix it.
What I think is we haven't gotten freedom
because we've had some of the right theories of economics
but the wrong theories of activism
Fortunately turning economics on activism can get us better theories of activism.
My model for understanding this is classifying political analysis in three levels.
The policy level is a specific law like
fiat currency controlled by a central bank
or you eat the wrong kind of mushroom and we put you in a little box for years.
Things like that.
This is what we mostly focus on, because it's the visible manifestation.
It's like when you get sick and your nose runs, that symptom is what's visible.
It's what you notice, but it's not the cause.
We have 60 years of Nobel-price-winning economics called public choice theory
about how certain political systems consistently pass bad laws.
It's not an accident that they have incentives to pass bad laws.
So that's the political-system level and there's been some work done on this.
Unfortunately it's descriptive, not prescriptive, so it's mostly
describing why current systems do what they do, and not telling us how to fix them.
My contribution is to go one level deeper and look at the government industry,
look at how we have a world that has a bunch of governments competing,
and what are the qualities that are anti-innovation
Why does it not produce better political systems that would produce better laws?
Those of us who know economics know that a classic mistake
is to think that you can set the price.
Price-fixing.
Not understanding that price comes from the intersection of supply and demand.
If you set it to something else than the market-clearing price
you get shortages and failure to sell things.
As the austrians say, prices are the result of human action, not of human design.
But libertarians make the same mistake when it comes to policies.
We're always suggesting better laws,
assuming that maybe the government doesn't have enough economists on staff.
Maybe they didn't think of this really efficient law for
achieving social retirement or for implementing health care effectively.
But given that policy after policy seems to benefit special interests
and have other flaws,
you have to wonder whether policies or laws are the result
of human action, not human design.
Public choice theory tells us that they are.
There's the question of why are we out there suggesting good policies
if they emerge from human action.
The reason is, they used to emerge more from human design.
Back in the tribal days, we were sitting around saying
"How should we divide up this buffalo?"
Your suggestions matter in a group of a hundred people.
If you have a good idea, you explain it clearly,
you get five or ten friends, you convince them,
you take it to the group, and convince them,
It's done! It happens!
But at different scales things work very differently.
You get different effects and different incentives,
and at the large scale, millions of people,
that doesn't work.
So our mind, our intuition, is to think that our political voice
is what it is in a hundred-person tribe.
That's our instinct. That's our intuition.
So we comment on national politics as if
we're talking to the 99 other people involved
with that level of passion, even when nobody's listening to us,
or no significant amount of people listen to us.
This is my theory for blogs and the existance of the blogosphere.
Political systems and the Hotelling model.
This'll be fun, we'll get to move around a little.
I need two people to come up on stage.
Ok, the two of you.
You're going to play a game. You're going to try to win an election.
So --
This area --
if you come up here in front of the front row...
This represents the electorate.
They have different views.
On the one side they like left-wing views and on the other the right-wing views.
People are going to vote for whoever is closer to them.
You guys can just move back and forth on this axis and try to win the election.
Just move and you want as many people as possible
to have you closer to them than closer to the other person.
So he's in a pretty good spot... You're standing here...
Looks like you'll probably get some more by moving sideways a little...
Yep, he's getting more voters, he's got all these guys.
Yeah, you can move.
I think he's probably a bit more this way, I think more than half the people are here.
So this is the equilibrium:
both of them in the middle.
You have split the electorate.
In elections in the US first-past-the-post two-party system,
this model has some truth to it.
The right spot to be, if politics can be mapped on one dimension,
and people will vote for whoever is closest, is right in the middle.
When you move to the middle you get these extra people and these people over here.
You're farther away but they were going to vote for you anyway.
You're still closest to them.
The important thing about this model is that it's easy to understand.
It only explains a little bit about the problem with democracy,
but it's sort of quick and easy to understand.
We have this phenomenon in the US with primaries and then a general election
where candidates who win the primary
to be the candidate for their party,
they always move towards the center,
and they always frustrate people in their party.
The Republican who was kind of at the middle of the Republicans,
they all agreed on him.
Then he goes way over towards the Democrats to run for President.
You could see why.
When you're only in half the room and only running among Republicans
you want to be in the middle of them.
When running among a wider group, you want to be in the middle there.
The important thing about this model is
that nobody intended to make an electoral system
which causes people to be in the middle and split the vote.
To cater to the median voter,
in the mathematical sense, the same number on both sides.
Nobody intended it.
They just made up what seemed like a fair system and it happened.
But it's not actually the outcome that we want.
You might argue that the average voter is fair, right,
taking the average of everyone's preferences and putting this person in the middle,
you could make a pretty good argument that's fair.
But it means that people who are here
can totally change their minds and go that way.
Or people here can change their minds and go this way.
It has no effect at all on the absolute policies,
because it doesn't change where the center is.
Again, nobody intended this
but this is how the world works; you set up a system, like a voting system,
and it has incentives.
Those incentives produce outcomes.
Unless you sit down and do the math, and do the economics,
you don't know what those outcomes are.
They may not be what you want. That's the world we're living in.
This is my favorite economist about
the flaws of democracy that come up more frequently, Mancur Olson.
As a side-note for libertarians,
he came up with the theory of the stationary bandit.
That government evolved from thieves
who realized once there was agriculture, they stayed in one place
and stole from the local people
but not too much.
It was easier than roaming around and stealing from everyone.
Which may be true.
Olson's point is that smaller groups win
against larger groups in democracies
because they can organize more quickly.
Here's the example to understand it.
There's 5 million people in Finland?
Suppose there's a law that hurts every Finn by one dollar.
So that's a cost of 5 million dollars,
and there are five people
who benefit by $100 000 each.
So, net cost is 5 million,
net benefit is $500 000.
This is a terrible law and in a democracy it will pass every time.
To an economist it almost seems like democracy was designed to pass these laws,
because it's so effective at it. And here's why.
Do you know about every paragraph of every law that might cost you a dollar?
Of course not. It would be impossible to know.
If you spend an hour learning about each of these
paragraphs that affect you by a dollar,
even if you learned about it
and you could make a differene changing it,
you've earned a dollar an hour.
It's totally not worth it.
Right?
But the five people who make $100 000 each,
they know about this paragraph.
They probably wrote it!
They don't mind putting up $50 000 each
in order to get it written.
or in order to lobby the legislators to pass it.
There's a sense in which
a law that affects everyone, it's a sort of a public good,
if the law cost a dollar to every Finn, and you go learn about it,
and people to sign a petition for it,
you're acting on behalf of everyone.
To try to save everybody that dollar.
Public goods are under-produced,
we don't generally have the incentive, we tend to work on things
that benefit ourselves.
Whereas for these five people, it's close to a private good.
In fact, if the five of them get together to form a club,
they're capturing all of the benefit.
Even each one of them is capturing 20% of the benefit.
This is one example of democracy and how it tends to reward special interests,
and again and again pass laws that take a little bit from the many and give to the few.
It's just inherent in the nature of democracy.
My grandfather Milton, in his later years, talked about the puzzling disconnect between
economic and politican freedom, and he wondered why some of the
freest places in the world economically,
were places like Hong Kong and Singapore,
with no political freedom.
For people who think we can get freedom with current democracies, I say
"Look at the evidence."
The evidence of the 20th century is that
democracy leads to moderate levels of economic freedom.
It's often much better than autocracy.
But across many countries, many times and many cultures,
it's never lead to high levels of economic freedom.
If you believe in reality, you should wonder.
And you also believe that you can get freedom in a democracy?
You should wonder if there's cognitive dissonance there.
At least have a good reason why you think this time it will be different.
In Mancur Olson's theories, one interesting thing is that they talk about change over time.
Over time these special interests and bad laws accumulate, like
barnacles on a boat and cause drag on the whole country.
This is why older industries tend to do worse than newer ones, like technology.
Great example from the US is 2008.
The US bailed out banks and car companies, old industries in a recession.
Nobody was bailing out dotcoms in 2000.
They had an argument to make that a lot of the economy depended on them.
That they were really important. That technology was the heart of America.
But it was new. They hadn't had the time to capture the legislators yet.
So they didn't get bailed out.
This approach of educating people, and trying to spread the libertarian movement,
and win victories in a democracy,
it ignores basic economics in the sense that you're trying to create a public good.
Every person you convince about the benefits of freedom, it only benefits you a bit.
Because if we convince people to do things in a better way,
most of the benefit goes to other people.
You have to find ways to privatize freedom.
To make it to people's benefit to create more freedom.
Like, floating cities, maybe?
I have to say I find it a little bit shocking
that these economic of why democracies fail...
This is 60 years of Nobel-prize-winning work.
Libertarians even cite it when they want to criticize the government.
And they throw it out the window when they want to fix the government.
It's literally so bad that, without naming names, there's a certain
chairman of a public-choice economics department
who likes to write Letters to the Editor about correcting economic flaws in newspapers.
I mean, one way to describe public choice economics is
as the science of why writing Letters to the Editor won't change anything.
That's how big the cognitive dissonance is.
It's crazy. It's completely insane.
But it's also an incredible reason to be hopeful and optimistic.
If we've just been doing the wrong thing all these years,
maybe creating freedom is not that hard; maybe we can do it.
The way we do it is that we look at this deepest level.
Let's figure out why we don't get new forms of government,
that do better at generating good laws that benefit everyone.
My model is to think about government as an industry where countries are like companies
and the citizens are customers.
Where technology is like the laws and institutions.
The first thing you notice about the government industry is very little innovation.
Very little customer focus.
You know, have you ever heard about Starbucks
murdering their customers. For example.
The largest firm in this industry, the US, lost 1.4 trillion dollars this year.
This is an industry that is not doing well.
This is not an accident.
It has properties that are anti-innovation.
The biggest is a really high barrier to entry.
In order to start a new web business, all you need is a laptop.
This is the capital required to do an Internet startup, right here.
A student can do an Internet startup on the side, as part of a business class.
Unfortunately every piece of land on Earth is claimed,
and governments won't let you experiment with new socities on their land.
So to try out a new political system,
basically enter this industry as a startup, as an entrepreneur,
you have to win a war, an election or a revolution.
Not something you can do, on the side, as a student.
If you won the war or the revolution, you might be ok,
but the election is probably not even enough.
You win the election, you inherit this huge system with all of these rules and all of these people.
You can't make that much change.
With this incredibly high cost, it's really difficult to try out a new government system.
There's no startups.
And startups are where innovation comes from in every industry. With every product.
One reason is that it's much easier to design something that is really new and different,
from scratch, you know,
starting with a small team and building everything anew.
When I was at Google, we would rewrite
major components of Google's infrastructure every couple of years.
Rewrite the whole file system, rewrite the web server.
Just take the lessons we'd learned and start from scratch to make it better.
This is even more true
when it comes to laws and institutions.
Because these things are even harder to change in-place.
Like, a company can come up with a new product.
A big company has some chance of making an innovative new product,
but I think a big company has almost no chance of
transforming its organizational culture,
and all of its processes and rules and how it does things.
You basically have to do that starting fresh.
Now that we have this framework of these levels, we can see
the type of intervetion that is needed.
What we need to do is reduce the barrier to entry,
and let new entrepreneurs enter the government industry.
For example we could build new floating cities on the ocean.
Which I call seasteading.
Seasteading privatizes freedom.
The people who
go live in these communities and businesses that move there,
the entrepreneurs that create them,
each of them is capturing most of the benefit from doing it.
So there's a good chance we can get people to work really hard,
so that we can raise money
in a way that it's hard to do for just spreading ideas that are
more of a public good.
This will dramatically lower this barrier to entry because
we can build the first seasteads for probably tens of millions of dollars.
We can build ones of significant size for hundreds of millions of dollars.
It is a lot, but compared to winning a war, or a revolution,
it's really not too bad.
But that's not the only benefit of seasteading.
It turns out the ocean is more than just the empty, unclaimed space.
It has some cool characteristics.
This is one of the largest Royal Caribbean cruise ships,
not the new Freedom of the Sea generation, one smaller,
and the Empire State Building in the same scale.
So it's true that objects as large as skyscrapers move around on the ocean.
Not as a special, ridiculous, expensive thing, but all the time, as the way they operate.
Socities on the ocean can be built out of
modular units that we can rearrange.
Which means that if one floating city
is doing poorly, if their system of government doesn't work,
you can actually take the land, the buildings, the capital, and move it
to a different floating city, where you think the rules are better.
This happens by the physical nature of water as a medium.
There is a sense in which, on the ocean, secession is guaranteed by the laws of physics.
So the ocean is actually different. It has different incentives
that will tend to lead to more rearranging of territory.
More societies breaking up more often.
Combining more often.
Basically to more innovation, more dynamism.
So that was quick, some big ideas very quickly.
Some of the implications: You'll notice that this analysis was very apolitical.
Not making moral arguments, I'm just saying we're a certain niche,
we are consumers and we're sad,
because the market is not meeting our demand
for countries which don't kill us, and
spend our money effectively and are reasonable places to live.
The problem is that the market is not very competitive.
If it's not meeting this demand, the answer is to make it more competitive.
I think this is going to work better to convince people than making it a moral issue.
of right and wrong.
This also shows why we shouldn't be trying to win the war of ideas.
Government is bad because it's a monopoly, it's a cartel of local monopolies.
People can't try new things,
so it doesn't need new ideas, it has new ideas.
My dad's Machinery of Freedom, for example,
a great idea about something we could try.
What it needs is an actual place to try them.
People sometimes say
"Seasteading is about running away and someplace new and hoping the
old problems don't happen, but human nature is the same everywhere and they'll follow you."
You can see in this model that that's not our argument.
I'm not saying "If we get the right people together
and they go start the right new system, then everything will be better."
The utopian belief.
What I'm saying is, if we start
a trial-and-error process where many different people
with ideas about a better society can try them out in practice,
some of those ideas are probably going to be better.
The result when you add a startup sector to an industry
is continuous innovation.
As technology changes, people come up with new forms of government.
As our knowledge about science changes, people come up with new forms of government.
I want to kick-start this process.
It's not about knowing the one right way to live.
If we're trying to convince people economic freedom is a good thing
I question whether all the millions of words in papers and books ever written
can add up to the impact of the words Hong Kong.
People react to examples,
real things existing in reality,
much, much better than to arguments.
When you say we should do seasteading or have this free society,
people come up with an objection,
and you answer it, and they come up with another objection,
and you answer it, and they come up with endless objections because
they're just coming from a place of saying, "This is different
and I havent seen it before,
so I'm just going to compare it to reality and keep finding ways where it might not work."
Those arguments get somewhat tiring after a while, they're not so productive.
When something exists in the real world,
the status-quo bias works in your favor.
People are like "Ok, I know it's working,
I might not understand how or why, but it obviously works.
Maybe now I'll visit and see how it works or ask you questions about why it works."
Instead of saying "It can't work, it can't work, it can't work."
The great thing about incentives is that they work even if you don't believe in them.
Maybe to do these floating cities we have to solve very difficult problems
in ocean engineering and international diplomacy.
But we don't have to challenge the identity,
the value system, or morality of millions of people.
We make a better place to live, people will come, because it's a better place to live.
Then maybe they will soak up a little bit of the philosophy on the way.
I think you can argue, and I tell the Libertarian Party in the US this,
and they don't like to hear it, that
advocating for libertarianism for an entire country
is a centralized-planning solution, right?
You're like "I have my values, I want to impose them on all of you now."
"Why do they resist me? Why do they get mad and hate me?"
Instead when we say, "You know what?
You're doing things your way and I hope
that works for you. I don't think it is but I hope it does.
shouldn't you let these other people do things their way? I'd like to try a different way."
"Yeah, you go try your way."
It gets a completely different result.
Another benefit is that
everyone can agree that people should be free
to voluntarily join into new societies.
Maybe there are some who don't, but almost everyone can agree it.
We can build a much larger coalition around this idea.
Let's think of two ways we can improve when a monopolist has a bad product.
This is an example you can use sometimes as an opening way to convince people.
One way is to complain to the monopoly,
to fill out its customer surveys,
maybe get a group together to picket in front of the monopoly
and say "You give bad service."
The other way is
figure out how to crack the monopoly.
Figure out some way to compete with it.
It seems pretty clear the second way is much better,
so why is it we who love the virtues of competition,
usually do the first option?
It makes no sense.
No sense at all. It makes so little sense
that it makes me feel like this.
So don't make me feel like this.
Figure out ways to compete.
I have some family history of libertarianism
which actually maps directly
onto this three-level model.
My grandfather Milton was all about
thinking of good policies to achieve the goals government said they had,
arguing persuasively for them
and he convinced a lot of people, he changed a lot of peoples' minds.
He probably slowed the growth of government a little bit.
But he basically had no effect on the overall long-term trajectory.
Because he was operating at this level.
Then my dad comes along. Public choice theory has been invented.
My dad sees that arguing doesn't seem to be working.
and says, "Look the problem is that
our political systems don't have the incentives to produce good laws."
So he became an anarcho-capitalist and worked on this
system, this new form of government
where there's these strong economic arguments
that it would produce laws that are of net-positive benefit
closer to sort of the utilitarian laws than democracy does.
He didn't have any way to implement it or test it.
I come along a generation later and say, "Ok,
this sounds like a great idea, we should try it. Why can't we try it?
It's because of the government industry,
it doesn't have any startups, and this would be a startup.
Let's change government, let's add a startup sector."
Since this is a gathering of libertarians
I should disclaim that I'm not saying that libertarians shouldn't organize
I wouldn't be here talking to you all if you didn't have an organized local group.
I want to emphasize that the primary benefit of these groups is social
and not about political change.
That doesn't mean they're not important.
Having people who share your philosophies and ideas around you
in your social group to talk about
so you don't feel completely alone in a crazy world is really important.
Probably the more of a minority you are
the more important it is!
You should not expect that this group will organize and grow a bit
and organize some more and grow a bit more
and eventually, you know, say, run Finland.
This is not just me with this opinion, actually David Nolan
who founded the Libertarian Party in the United States,
actually had the same view.
That he viewed it mainly as a social thing and not a route to political change.
Libertarian social groups, I think, are wonderful.
What's unfortunate is how many libertarian resources
go into large think-tanks and advocacy organizations,
which I think are very unlikely to change anything,
compared to going out there and building a free society.
Even if we have to do it on the ocean.
If you're interested in these political ideas, the economic
analysis of competitive government, on our website go to the Law and Research section.
We have a couple of economics papers about it.
Finally the last part of this theory section.
This is also an important point about being happy. I'm a big fan of being happy.
One reaction is, if you believe me, you're like
"Trying to argue people into libertarianism
and viewing it as this big moral thing,
we're good and they're evil, and it's like a titanic struggle
of we few brave, good souls against the evil masses who are powerful and merciless."
It's a good movie script, but it's really depressing
to be the good few struggling against the evil many hopelessly.
Especially as it continues to be hopeless.
I've found this competitive government view to just be incredibly empowering.
It takes all the anger out of politics.
It's no longer like we're in this one place,
and we disagree about how to run it, and I have to convince these people,
and they don't listen to me. "Are they stupid?"
"What's wrong with them?" That's all gone.
Now I just say "You know what?
These people have silly ideas about how to run a country.
I know a lot of people with better ideas about how to run a country.
I just need to figure out how we can go do it.
Then we can do our thing and have a nice country.
Hopefully other people will see that it's good and copy it.
If not, their problem."
It is actually incredibly empowering to think that I don't have to convince everyone.
In fact, I probably don't have to convince anyone.
There's not that many libertarians but there's plenty to start a new country.
We need a few hundred to start.
At 10 000 I think it becomes a pretty nice place to live, like
I would want to go out there with a few hundred.
At 10 000 my wife and kids will definitely be willing to come.
Maybe somewhere in between is the point.
So there's plenty of libertarians for that.
If you just think about it psychologically,
in this new way,
I think you'll find it very liberating.
Alright! That's the big vision,
but if this was just a big vision,
it would be as stupid and pointless as the thousandth paper on Austrian business cycle theory.
The point of this big vision is that we're actually working on doing it.
We're in the early stages. It's going to be a decades-long project.
But we're making it happen.
I'm going to talk about the Seasteading Institute,
what our strategy is, what we've done, what we're working on.
Strategy, projects by area, timeline and how you can get involved.
Most of our funding comes from Peter Thiel.
He used to be best known as the founder of PayPal.
Now he's more known for being the first investor in Facebook.
That character gave him a cameo in The Social Network.
Given the size of the challenge of making new countries,
and how limited our cash is,
an obvious question to ask is are we totally insane
or just insane enough to be on to something.
Really, the potential of what could be included
in building a startup country
is like every field of science.
From engineering to sociology, potentially.
If we were the Gates Foundation, we couldn't work on all of it.
And we're not the Gates Foundation, not even close.
Fortunately most of the problems have already been solved.
A cruise ship is a floating city.
It provides the basics of life:
Power, water, food, security. Internet.
Slow, crappy Internet, but Internet.
And at pretty low cost.
Low-cost cruises are $60-100 per person/night,
which is not bad.
It actually works out that the cost of the cruise is about the same as the
taxes that you save by being an American living on a cruise ship.
Conveniently.
Our work is focused on the few challenges that make
seasteads different from cruise ships, and that we have to solve.
Basically political autonomy,
engineering,
new business models and building a movement of people.
Cruise ships get some benefits from the political independence.
They don't pay taxes. They don't have international labor laws.
People come from all over the world to work long hours, because they can make
a lot more money than they can at home.
What we're doing is really going to push the envelope, so we need to understand
international maritime law very deeply.
International law is really complicated.
International maritime law is even more complicated.
And doing new things in international maritime law...
is insanely complicated.
So this is going to be many PhD theses
worth of work over the years to figure out
how much freedom we can get and the best way to push things over time.
We have a series of papers that is going to start coming out in the next month or two,
outlining these legal challenges and starting to
draw the map of what the issues are and some of our attempted solutions.
We have also got one paper up online now about
specifically American jurisdiction over seasteads.
This is ongoing research.
Second area is engineering.
We think we'll start by adapting cruise ships, but they aren't right for the long term.
We need designs that are cheaper,
that are mass-produced; ships are more one-offs,
that are modular, so you can build one,
have a building, that expands to a village, that expands to a city...
Right now oil rigs, they don't attach them to each other.
They would bump into each other and they don't know how.
It's a somewhat hard problem that we're working on.
Our most detailed design we call ClubStead. It's a 200-guest hotel resort that was designed
for the waves off of Southern California. It got us some initial cost estimates.
We've had several papers on classification,
on some seamount locations,
and a general overview of engineering challenges.
The main things happening in this area are
a study that looks, this was just one design at one size,
now we're looking at three different designs:
a ship, a barge and a semi-submersible,
for 50, 500 and 5 000 people.
And looking at that cost matrix to get an idea.
And we're doing a location study. What would be the best places in the world for seasteads?
Could we put one between Helsinki and Tallinn, or
would the ice that happens every now and then be too much.
The third area is business. Very important.
If you can make money, then it can scale.
Much easier to get funding from people who are investing in a profit than from donors.
Especially as you get to big amounts of money.
The two main competitive advantages we see are the benefits of low regulation
and things that are based on the ocean, like aquaculture, wave energy, things like that.
Hong Kong and Singapore show us
that with great regulatory environment capital and entrepreneurs will come.
We don't need to cull all the capital to build a city,
we just need to build the framework and the system and then businesses will come.
We have something called the Magellan Network, which is a network of entrepreneurs,
like Henrik, who are working on seasteading-related projects.
We'll probably be doing a business summit in San Francisco later this year.
We also did a business plan contest called Sink or Swim.
Winners included aquaculture,
visa-free outsourcing off the coast, things like that.
In progress is a series of papers
for seastead entrepreneurs, talking about the main issues,
the top business ideas and things like that.
Our favorite business so far is medical tourism, where people go to other countries
for cheaper health care.
It's a 30-billion-dollar business a year worldwide, and it's really promising,
we could bring some of the cost savings people get by going to India and Thailand
to a cruise ship out of Florida that you get on, you go out 12 miles
and have a procedure.
It has to go to another country briefly, and then come back every 1-2 weeks.
I think it's got huge potential, medical business is very big,
very regulated and very expensive.
I'm really excited about this,
and I'll most likely be going to part-time
on the seasteading non-profit at some in order to work on this medical business.
The final challenge is building a community.
We don't need everyone to accept us, but we need some who are excited about living on seasteads.
This is a picture from our 2009 Ephemerisle event,
which was a sort of a Burning Man on the water that we did in a river in California
where we gathered with house boats and platforms and art that we'd built.
We had problems getting insurance, so we did it without insurance in 2009.
In 2010 it was going to be like $500 per person for insurance
so we had to cancel it,
and conveniently just a few minutes after we cancelled it,
some members of the community posted that they were going to have an event
in the same time and at the same place.
Run by them and not run by us.
We didn't get to bring some of the fancy equipment that we were meaning to bring
or build the large stuff because it didn't have our funding.
Still a hundred-some people gathered on houseboats and we're doing it this year
actually in just a few weeks.
Again, it's probably going to be a couple hundred people, twice the size before.
Part of movement-building is press coverage
We've gotten tons of press coverage, because seasteading is an awesome idea.
Reporters just come to us and say "please can we do a story?"
This actually is a little out of date. The biggest one lately was BBC Radio, One Planet.
That's the largest radio station in the world. Just did it a couple of weeks ago.
And again, they came to us.
Other things we do to build the movement...
We did a virtual town hall using video teleconferencing to let people ask us
questions from around the world.
We do that for paying members.
We did a general one a month or two ago
and we're going to have an engineering one in a week or two.
We're writing a seasteading book for a popular audience.
We got our book proposal almost done, we're going to be finishing up this week.
We're looking for entrepreneurs, like Henrik, future residents,
donors and people to go and spread the word about seasteading.
Here's the timeline. We started in 2008.
We've had a few years of research and we're at a really exciting point.
The movement is probably going to grow a lot this year.
Right now there's the Seasteading Institute.
We're also working on forming something called the Free Cities Institute.
which is to promote in general experiments with free cities including on land.
Like charter cities, things like that.
We're seeking foundation funding for that.
It looks like probably a couple of new for-profit companies will come out of
Seasteading Institute work later this year.
The medical tourism one I mentioned and probably another one.
It's exciting that we're making enough progress to start growing to multiple organizations
each advancing things in a different way.
The timeline we expect is, the first businesses
operating as early as next year,
will most likely be operating on smaller vessels.
Or maybe a small one-room underwater hotel.
In a few years to see larger businesses, a hunder plus people.
Still just a narrow business, where if you're there because you're a customer
or you're working for the business, people aren't just living there.
2017 is about six years. Having platforms that have multiple different businesses on them.
Maybe having people living there full time.
By 2020 having a village, thousands of people at that point.
Many businesses shifting towards more full-time residents as opposed to to transients.
Two decades, we think, to a floating city of
tens of thousands, maybe 100 000 people.
And after that...
world domination
After that, probably space,
universe domination
Some of the ways you can help.
I actually came to Finland because there's a disproportionate number of
paying Seastead members from Finland,
so we have memberships and donations and we then
send you various cool things and invite you to stuff like the virtual town halls.
We started a formal ambassadors program
where we're going to help train people to spread the word about Seasteading,
give them talk materials,
frequently asked questions and what we need.
Then they can go give talks and presentations and table at conferences and help bring people in.
You can also just act as an informal ambassador for seasteading.
Letting people know about it.
We need entrepreneurs to start these seasteading-related businesses.
As you could see in that timeline,
there's really this combination of a narrow business,
like an underwater hotel, medical tourism, deep-sea aquaculture,
and the more of those businesses there are,
the more entrepreneurs are starting those, who are excited about seasteading,
that's the demand for the big things that we're going to build.
Those are the people who bring jobs. We need entrepreneurs to start these narrow businesses now
so we can build the big platform, and bring them all together to lower their cost,
and build these big cities.
We're always in need of skilled volunteers: lawyers to do pro-bono legal research,
ocean engineers,
some programming stuff, PHP, Drupal, for our website.
Probably the most important is to keep in touch by signing up for our monthly newsletter.
Following us on Twitter or Facebook.
Seasteading is a decades-long vision that by its nature is hard.
It's ok, we're solving a very big problem, we can solve it on a very big scale,
it's ok if it takes a while.
It's something where if you're going to just burst with enthusiasm and say
"Wow, this sounds cool," you're going to forget it. More fun if you stay engaged,
read the progress and the updates every month or so.
Keep that vision alive.
That's our plan and if you're interested in this idea of reinventing government
check out our website seasteading.org and get connected to our movement.
I'll see you on the high seas or maybe in the Gulf of Finland. Thanks.