Oblomovka

2008-09-16»

(Here’s another column from the archives of my Linux User and Developer columns, written in 2003/2004. This one eerily predicts next month’s Seasteading Conference.)

When you’re signing the fifteenth online petition about software patents this month, or clicking on a Slashdot poll about whether the RIAA is right to shoot BitTorrent developers before they’re born, do you ever throw up your hands at the world of politics, and wonder: “Gosh, wouldn’t it be easier if me and a bunch of mates ran off and set up a utopian independent sovereign state?

Congratulations! You’re not the only one (which is good, because if you’re starting your own country, you really need someone else to be deputy King).

Starting a new country is a popular response by geeks to any problem that might involve other people, especially people in uniforms knocking at their door at 3AM, or those who don’t seem to reply to email and ask them to “phone” “them” in the “morning”.

Most independent free states form by either moving to somewhere that is friendly to their aims, or constructing some sort of floating island or platform in international waters and living there.

An example of the former is the Free State Project, where a bunch of American libertarians plan to move to New Hampshire, there to influence local politics with their independent-minded theories.

I originally thought of a similar plan for free software advocates. But then I realised that if we moved to New Hampshire too, we’ll all end up voting down each others’ “Initiative To Start Charging For Inhaled Oxygen” and “This House Believes In a 200% Supertax on Lusers Who Use Microsoft Messenger”, and so forth, and no-one would get anywhere. Except to New Hampshire, which is cold this time of year, and really not as nice as they make out on The West Wing.

An example of the build-your-own-island plan is Marshall T. Savage’s “Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps”, which I read a when a young man. Mr Savage’s step one is easy: forming a new independent state by creating a floating platform made of accreted seacrete from which to launch spaceships powered by lasers. Steps two to eight I recall being not much harder.

But what if our plans are humbler? What if we intend to create a new micro-state, not to colonise the universe, but to pursue our open source coding, unmolested by politicians who would have us kowtow to their delusional belief that bits need owners, or require us to shower more often than Nature’s God requires?

And what if eight steps smacks to us of typical managerial over-planning?

I’ve been slowly filling out my own blueprint for the formation of the new country of Linuxania. So far I’ve done the flag, and set up a website, mailing list and a wiki. By my estimates, that’s already around 70% of the way to being recognised by the United Nations.

I’m now working on some of the nitty-gritty, niggling little details of my five step plan. And here’s where I’m hoping to get some help from the Linux User and Developer community – accompanied, I hope, with billions of euros of speculative capital investment.

Constructive criticism only, please!

First, we must play to our strengths. Very few open source developers and users have succesfully started a country. But many of us have organised or attended conferences in hotels.

As any independent witness will attest, a hotel with any kind of volunteer-driven software project conference in it is very similiar to a country occupied by an enemy army composed entirely of bearded men in braces.

So my first step is to stage a traditional conference with no posted end date. Attendees will simply remain at the hotel for as long as it takes to the existing owners to give up and leave.

In the early days, we’ll survive primarily on the contents of the mini-bars and those tapas they sell at the bar. Soon, we’ll learn to cultivate our own miniature liqueurs and hydroponically-grown salted peanut crops.

My second step revolves instead around taking our sovereign hotel and somehow getting it into the middle of the sea.

My first idea was to just cut it out of the ground and flush it down a giant toilet, like how the fishes escape in “Finding Nemo”. Poo-pooers with some experience of constructing things bigger than a desktop PC inform me this may be impracticable, despite the fantastic proof-of-concept drawing on my web site.

So my new plan is to use our newfound hotelling skills to plan and build a new floating convention hotel in the middle of the sea. Money to finance this will come from risk-taking entrepreneurs in the bigger-than-a-desktop-PC construction industry, paypal donations to our sourceforge project site, and extorting money from the New Hampshire libertarians by threatening to turn up there instead and vote down their “Create an Internal Free Market For Snow” proposals.

Once we’ve built one conference hotel, we can easily build another, which is step three. Money for this will come from other micro-state planners holding their conventions in the first hotel (and not taking us over, because that would be rude).

Step four comes naturally: a flotilla of hotels, filled with open source geeks, enjoying the camaraderie and productivity that a continuous conference will bring. The hotels will be connected by the Starbucks and car rental places that naturally spring up around hotels. Each hotel will be named after a popular open source project; whenever anyone needs to fork, they just need to build a new hotel, and move.

What do you think? If you’d like to join me in Linuxania, simple register for our first (and last) conference, to be held sometime this year. The venue will be announced nearer the date. I’m thinking somewhere by the sea.

6 Comments »

Went to the inaugural social meet-up for those who interested in Seasteading. Now, this is the kind of utopian, enthusiastic, optimistic, small-chance-of-not-being-doomed, high-chance-of-being-fun libertarianism I can get behind!

Well, perhaps more a brand of meta-libertarianism: Patri’s underlying theory is that the reason why governments aren’t terribly efficient is because the market for governments isn’t very competitive: there are terrible barriers of entry to becoming a government, and your customers don’t have much room to shop around. The solution? Dynamic geography — in which one builds states composed of units that can wander off when the state they’re in (or rather, tethered to) becomes less than ideal. Homestead the seas with mobile, inhabited, relatively self-sufficient platforms, able to join together, outside of current jurisdictions, and you can create competitive governance experiments with free movement between them. Allegedly.

I’ve actually been tracking seasteading for some time — long enough, I notice, to have written a fond parody of it back in 2003, herewith enclosed below.

Sitting in and arguing the finer points of it with a crowd of fellow bipolar skeptic-enthusiasts was fun: like a Marvel no-prize, you really only scored points if you could come up with an objection and a potential solution at the same time. My parochial objections were about bandwidth — Ryan from Sealand, who’s back from wiring Iraq, ran through the possibilities of getting Kb/s out into the deep sea, and we ended up talking about the positive benefits of being a radio-frequncy test-lab relatively free from ITU and FCC regulations. Your latency to the bigger Internet might suck short-term, but the intranet would be fantastic. Oh, and the perennial social problems of creating an environment whose selling point is a freedom from current jurisdictions, but which runs into attracting only people who are primarily interested in escaping current jurisdictions because they’re doing things that no current jurisdiction (or sane person) would like: what I’d describe as the Freenet problem.

At the risk of being the person who postscripts their letters “I am not a mental or anything”, the Seasteading group aren’t your straightforwardly crazy idealists. They’re far more practical, and rather better funded (they got half a million of funding from Peter Thiel to play with this idea, and are already dancing with nautical engineers to run up a model of their idea in the waters near to SF).

It’s really easy to see the first-order problems with seasteading, but I don’t think those are the ones that will sink them, because they have mostly good responses to those. It is however a lot harder to envisage the problems that are one or two steps after that. Crazy ideas don’t fail to work because they cannot be implemented: it’s that they can’t be implemented and stabilised to work for fifty years or more. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, and it doesn’t mean you can’t be skeptical, hopeful, and willing to help out simultaneously.

The first Seasteading Conference is next month in Burlingame; it has all the hallmarks of being one of those fascinating meld of pies-in-the-sky projections and gritty earth engineering arguments that spells everything I like the most about California conferences. Come along!

Comments Off on seasteading