Seasteading book series
Posted by Vlad_ben_Avorham 2 years, 6 months ago to Books
In a plausible near future, the titans of the newest tech revolution, fed up with restrictive regulation protecting existing monopolies, decide to build their own floating island.
Experience a tour of the first island city state through the eyes of Elaine Winters, a typical left leaning tech blogger, invited out for an interview with the island's creators. See her culture shock, as she gets a real taste of freedom and a lesson in what can be accomplished when you don't have to ask permission first.
Torn from the headlines technology, is featured on MU as mature and operational. Sometimes, still expensive, at others, it has been brought down by economies of scale. This is a fun easy read, designed to be enjoyable rather than deeply philosophic, while still conveying a basic understanding of the principles of free enterprise and market forces to a young woman who's "education" has been severely lacking in such basic information.
MU is a right leaning libertarian political philosophy, book two, Atlantis is about a more left leaning yet still libertarian political philosophy which runs that Island. The third book wrapped up the series, essentially tying up the basic story arch, while still leaving you plenty of room to imagine what the world could do next. After all, the best part of Tomorrowverse, is thinking about how you would better it.
Experience a tour of the first island city state through the eyes of Elaine Winters, a typical left leaning tech blogger, invited out for an interview with the island's creators. See her culture shock, as she gets a real taste of freedom and a lesson in what can be accomplished when you don't have to ask permission first.
Torn from the headlines technology, is featured on MU as mature and operational. Sometimes, still expensive, at others, it has been brought down by economies of scale. This is a fun easy read, designed to be enjoyable rather than deeply philosophic, while still conveying a basic understanding of the principles of free enterprise and market forces to a young woman who's "education" has been severely lacking in such basic information.
MU is a right leaning libertarian political philosophy, book two, Atlantis is about a more left leaning yet still libertarian political philosophy which runs that Island. The third book wrapped up the series, essentially tying up the basic story arch, while still leaving you plenty of room to imagine what the world could do next. After all, the best part of Tomorrowverse, is thinking about how you would better it.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021...
Never deliver a vessle, with the owner aboard, who is not a competent Captain.
A level of independence could certainly be achieved, probably better than living on the land, but they would still be tied to some resupply from the land. I don't think they could achieve full self containment, or even containment, plus what could be harvested from the sea. Which I would see as the ultimate goal.
Perhaps as an intermediate step though, it would be a good move in the right direction.
It depends on what self-containment means. Trade and collaboration are where wealth come from. So avoiding trade and interaction is a recipe for poverty, even if you imagine a micronation located in an ideal place with abundant natural resources.
That being said, isolation wasn't the ideal, but rather a survivable baseline. We'll trade with you for mutual benefit, but we won't depend upon you for survival. That would be how I would define "fully self-contained" in this context.
The same holds true for the advanced ag techniques. Both for plant and animal, and to be honest things that are hybridized.
I think the role you presume trade would necessitate, these advanced production methods would allow singular facilities to accomplish the same goal, provided the raw materials.
So yes trade is still preferable, and yes easier because it is mostly information and raw feed stocks, but quality life is possible without it, should hostility be the preference of the outside. That is a must for any seastead to survive. If it is dependent on the outside for survival, it is a colony of the land and nothing more.
The idea is that each of the islands once built functions as an independent city state. So any form of governance you can dream up, you could try. If you fail, you only doom one island. So long as people can still vote with their feet in a worst-case scenario, no harm no foul.
Needless to say, that alone is one of the points that makes him unpopular with the existing governments on the land. After all, they don't like it when you give their serfs another choice.
Actually, you should never be sure.
Laws and rules that differ from state to state are bothersome but uniformity is worse, it assume things and opinions never change or vary by location or circumstances.
Note- the current climate change conference COP25 gabfest wants a uniform minimum tax rate everywhere.
In the book I think it was owned by someone using knowledge gained from a time machine for nefarious purposes-- nothing to do with reality.
A communist society wouldn't be evil if residents could vote with their feet, as you say, but generally communist societies shoot people trying to flee to freedom ("desert their comrades in battle"), so such a civilization probably would turn evil.
I suspect we're hundreds of years away from people moving out in to the rest of the solar system and trying different things. Maybe we have to wait that long. There's a thousand years of Middle Ages (dark ages) between the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. Maybe we're in a Roman Empire period, and in a thousand years people on Mars or in stations constructed from asteroids will experiment with the ideas of the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Repubilic, and the US experiment. In this scenario, some place in space goes form being a backwater to a beacon of liberty and technology, who visit DC and NYC along with London, Rome, Greece, and Syracuse, Sicily, places that are nice places but no longer centers of trade.
I don't count on this, though, become I'm not sure living off Earth will ever be practical. Living under the sea would be easier. There may really be not "planet B".
It isn't so much that we can't do these things, but rather that the focus wasn't put in that direction because it doesn't serve the purposes of those who currently make the decisions. Depending on who comes out on top of the centralization/decentralization fight that is currently brewing, that may change. We will then either expand and take risks and grow again, a new age of exploration and colonization, or we will implode and retreat into neo feudalism, at which point, it will be Orwell's boot on the human face until the machines eventually replace us. Which they will, because only greater and greater reliance on the machines will allow the level of police state required. That will eventually get away from the control of TPTB, and you can take your pick of Terminator/Matrix what have you, as your favorite replacement scenario.
Being a religious man myself, I think it will be the second. At which point our Creator will have to step in to salvage his creation. That is just my view though, and I allow for the fact that we could learn from our mistakes and keep this wonderful playground we've been given ticking for quite some time.
Sadly I don't see a strong fight for decentralization. My hope is that we're seeing balancing trends from the world getting small vs increased respect for individual liberty.
Expanding into space could come from some sudden reason to need access to space, like a manufacturing process that requires zero-G or finding some resource in space, and some technology that decreases the cost of getting to space.
How do you keep the enforcers from pushing the serfs back to their tax plantations? No one has a good answer for it. Even in the novels, I cheat and resort to a new, purely sci-fii technology. The only time I use one that isn't pulled from a current headline in the whole book.
So yes it has it's issues. Doesn't make it less of an entertaining story. After all even rand had to come up with magic holographic mirrors to keep government thugs from invading Galt's Gulch.