Dreaming of Atlantis
A bonus post on (the idea of) floating cities
This is part 5 of 5 in Urban Proxima’s series on the theory and practice of building new cities.
Part 1: That time Google tried to build a neighborhood
Part 2: Outsourcing Sovereignty
Part 3: Urbanism-as-a-Service
Part 4: Urban Larping
Bonus Post: Dreaming of Atlantis
This one almost didn’t get published. As I was doing the research and outlining my thoughts for the series, I just couldn’t quite find the right place to fit in. But, after some cajoling from an editor, I decided to throw it on the end – consider this a digestif.
In part II of our series, we introduced the concept of competitive governance. Recapping things in brief, this is the idea that (a) governing institutions have a big impact on prosperity and (b) the best way to discover the best institutions is to create many independent jurisdictions, each with autonomy to try wildly different things.
And while we traced the history of competitive governance as starting with academic work on institutions before eventually winding its way to projects like the Próspera and the Honduran ZEDEs, there was another branch of competitive governance that developed in parallel to all that — Seasteading.
Seastading, as presented by the Seasteading Institute, ascribes to all the basic ideas of competitive governance. But when we get to the operationalization question, the answer becomes…found autonomous cities floating in international waters.
The big problem, however, with trying to create a new government from scratch in the middle of the ocean is much the same as the problem with doing anything in the middle of the ocean — the ocean doesn’t want you there.
It takes a lot of engineering to build and maintain human habitation on the water (just ask anyone with a boat quietly rotting away in a marina). Given the cost, you need a really good economic reason to bother. And while good institutions are good, they don’t directly put money in pockets or food on tables (though they can facilitate the things that do).
So, Seasteading has always been a bit of a solution looking for a problem. But there was one really good use case that involved circumventing (not breaking…maybe… probably) U.S. immigration law.
We’re on a boat
In 2012, the boys behind Project Blueseed wanted to repurpose a cruise ship as a live/work space for would-be startup founders who didn’t have citizenship or work authorization to do business in the U.S.
The idea was that the ship would stay 14 miles out in the ocean (and, therefore — in theory — outside the jurisdiction of the U.S.) and Blueseed residents could pop onto the mainland on tourist visas to recruit, network, fundraise, or go to burning man.
I remember watching the founders give a presentation in Berkeley and part of their pitch was that if your startup goes bust, you could still get hired by the founder in the next cabin over (labor market search costs be damned). And with monthly rent being quoted at $1,600 a month, what they were pitching was honestly quite competitive with San Francisco housing prices at the time.
For reasons about which I’m not completely clear, Blueseed never actually launched. Perhaps they just overestimated investor confidence or their ability to play I’m-not-touching-you with the U.S. immigration system, but whatever the facts were, Blueseed remains the most compelling business case for Seasteading I’ve heard to date.
While I (currently) think Seasteading isn’t practical given existing technology and known use cases, the anarcho-curious part of my soul does find something about the idea of setting up an autonomous, opt-in community beyond the reach of the nation state kinda rad.
So What?
While Seasteading is 100% about finding extra-territorial space to experiment with competitive governance, it has made me think about urbanism and architecture in ways I would have otherwise never considered.
The Dutch have experimented with house boats for years now (about a quarter of The Netherlands is below sea level) and I’ve even seen floating houses stateside in places like Seattle. So, as an infill strategy and climate change adaption approach, there are some interesting ideas there — many of which were first pointed out to me in the context of Seasteading.
So what’s the big takeaway? Honestly, there’s not much of one today. Mostly I just thought this all made for an interesting set of anecdotes that I chose not to shoehorn in elsewhere; mission accomplished if y’all were entertained.
Alright folks, that’s it for this series. Let me know how you like the deep dive across related posts and if you have any feedback for next time around. Next post we’ll take a very different look at self-driving cars; namely, all the weird stuff that happens when you put human beings in a metal box traveling at 40+ mph.
Hi Jeff, Co-founder of Blueseed here. Blueseed sunk when we couldn't raise the necessary funds. There were two reasons for this:
1. A single major investor changed his mind on this idea on the day we were supposed to close the round. We ended up closing the round anyway, but lost several other investors who became confused and hesitant after this turn of events. This made it harder to raise the big capital we needed in future rounds for obvious reasons.
2. Financing was *generally* tricky for a company like us at the time, since there was no established investor for what we were doing.
- The types of investors who financed tech companies or became LPs in VC funds found our primary revenue model appealing (we would take a small share of equity in all the startups that came through Blueseed) but these investors were (understandably) hesitant to invest in anything maritime related, since they had no experience in those waters. They worried that "ships are holes in the water you pour your money into".
- The types of investors who invested in maritime companies (cruise lines and the like) were totally happy to invest in us as a maritime play, but they didn't understand how our returns from equity based on the companies coming through Blueseed would ultimately succeed. They didn't understand the tech/VC investment model and were generally hesitant to play in that space.
Surprisingly though, USCIS, ICE, the Coast Guard, and local politicians (including members of Congress) were quite favorable to our plan at the time. We met with all of them and had preliminary plans on how to navigate the political waters. We also had more startups and tech companies interested in participating than we knew what to do with. (The one exception to this was an environmental group out there in the Monterey Bay, which seemed uninterested in our pro-startup and high skilled immigration arguments).
It was a great idea idea and perhaps someone, someday, will get another chance to pull it off in the future. Not having a true "Startup Visa" in this country is one of the dumbest policy stances this country has maintained for decades.
Granted, in the current political climate, I suspect the US Navy would be lobbing torpedos at Blueseed, regardless of how many unicorns would've been born had it been around this past decade.