Seasteading - Cities as Startups

Seasteading is concept that combines the dream of running your own country with the legal reality that you can only do that in international waters. The Seasteading Institute is an organization dedicated to facilitating the creation of these man-made islands/platforms/large ships, with the hope that these micronations will be the future of cities and governance.

Here’s the seasteaders’ philosophy:

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.

My interest in seasteading is twofold. First, it’s an interesting design challenge to create a city in the ocean, similar in scope to the challenge of designing for Antarctica. How do these places create power and food? What about water? What about loneliness? It’s a fascinating design problem.

My second interest is the same as the seasteaders — the nature of governance of cities. Seasteaders are basically advocating a return to city-states, where someone could move from one city (or seastead) to another and be in an entirely different country with different laws and customs. I’m a firm believer that the most important level of government is at the municipal level, so it would be fascinating to take all federal and state responsibilities and return them to a level closer to the individual. I’m not exactly optimistic that these seasteads will be built any time soon, but it’s definitely a cool thought experiment/design challenge.