( *_* )

( *_* ) <[ Anyone wanna go in on one of these with me? ]

What is “Seasteading”?

Seasteading is creating permanent dwellings on the ocean - homesteading the high seas. A seastead, like in the picture to the right, is a structure meant for permanent occupation on the ocean.

Why would you want to do that?

Because the world needs a new frontier, a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to test out their ideas. By opening the ocean as a new frontier, we hope to revolutionize the quality of government and social systems worldwide by enabling experimentation, innovation, and competition.

Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social systems on a small scale; countries are so enormous that it is hard for an individual to make much difference. Seasteaders believe that government shouldn’t be like the cellphone or operating system industries, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, they envision something more like Web 2.0, where many small governments serve many niche markets, a dynamic system where small groups experiment, and everyone copies what works, discards what doesn’t, and remixes the remainder to try again.

Think about all the major political divides - freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, etc. - that are decided through rhetoric and the votes of a few representatives who decide for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once. Imagine if small groups had the capability to instead test their own ideas on a small scale and see what happens. People could create societies with different priorities, and we’d be able to quickly see how well those ideas work in practice. Some ideas will work well, some will work terribly and some will be a matter of preference; but above all we are dedicated to the believe that whatever our ideas, we want to stop arguing about them, stop proselytizing them and start living them.