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I recall the pseudonymous anarchist Rayo mocking the idea of floating cities is his pamplet “Vonu.” (Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he was in favor of it, and I mocked the idea as I read it. It’s been a while.)
The idea back then (1960’s ... when he wrote it, not when I read it) was that families would sail in yacht flotillas, farming the sea (actual farming! with crops growing from dirt on deck!), trading for necessities (vitamin C, manufactured goods, etc.) in port, and generally enjoying the benefits of free, non-coercive association. If anyone didn’t like the mayor of the flotilla, then they could sail away and form a new flotilla.
If course, if it were that simple, if you could grow enough crops on deck and catch enough fish to eat, with enough left over to trade for other goods in port, I think we humans would have developed these floating cities centuries ago. I mean, we’ve been farming for what, 10,000 years? And probably fishing for longer. And there’s been no shortage of despotic, oppressive, and violently coercive regimes from which to flee.
Hell, just ask the fishermen of New England or the watermen of Maryland how well they’re doing these days - what with the fishing stocks depleted due to over-fishing, which is turn was due the fact that you have to catch and sell a lot of fish just to stay afloat - literally and figuratively.
But, as China Mieville points out, the visions are utopian (true, sometimes they’re bland, banal utopias), and as is often the case with libertarian utopians, reality and practicality have little-to-no space in their proprosals.
As for the Freedom Ship: Why is it that people who defend the free market to the last breath have the weakest grasp of basic economics? Supply and demand, people! Supply and demand! On a floating city, physical space is gong to have the highest demand because there’s a definite physical limit to its supply. Think of the real estate prices! And where the hell are you gonna go when you’re priced out of the market? Overboard? Or will they be kind enough to drop you off at the nearest port ... for a fee, of course.
Posted by djmagaro on Sep 28, 2007 at 11:16 AM
I looked through the freedom ship site. It seems like a pretty obvious scam site to me. I am amazed they’ve been there as long as the dates indicate. You should probably visit their addresses to see what is there, if anything.
Still, it would seem fitting to con the rich with a utopian vision of Richistan on the high seas. Were it ever realized (but not by these con artists) it would surely turn into a dystopian world. Maybe they can hire Dennis Hopper as the captain (reprising his role in “Waterworld”).
Posted by kcdancer on Oct 1, 2007 at 7:59 AM
What I find disheartening is not the concept of this Utopian or Segretopian projects, but that when cast off their marketing sheen, there’s still a number of people who would support them, namely here the people of Trujillo. Why it is so? Because a closer look would reveal that they would accept a simultaneous appropiation of land and being the subject of a pyramid (pun) scam while aspiring for a better life beside the crazy rich.
Yes, probably no freedom ship will sail off Trujillo, but surely walled communities and their ill cascading effects (broken society, increased costs and appropiation of the public space) will take root there as they have been doing elsewhere in Latin America. And that’s a fairly utopian enough for the investors.
I’m a bit sad to see so much material apparently drawn from the book I wrote (Seasteading: A Practical Guide To Homesteading The High Seas [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/index.html ]), and not see it even mentioned. At least, the set of projects listed in the article reads like a walk through the Review section of my book [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/review.html ], which seems unlikely to happen by chance. So it seems like my book was used heavily as a source. I’m not familiar with the standards for non-academic writing, but in the world I come from, it’s considered dishonest not to state your sources.
As to the content of the article: yes, the history of floating utopias has, to date, consisted of scammers and dreamers. That’s why people like me, with a more serious interest in the subject, write web pages about how the Freedom Ship is bullshit (http://patrifriedman.com/projects/independence/freedomship.html), and spend lots of words in our books describing how wackos like New Utopia are…well…wackos. Floating cities are an idea that appeals to dreamers (which again is why it’s a bummer that Mievelle left my contributions out, since the whole point of my book was to take a more realistic approach.)
But just because the idea appeals to dreamers doesn’t mean it’s absurd, and that it can’t be approached realistically. For an SF author, I must say that Mieville has a rather sad lack of vision. He almost seems to delight in this piece at sneering at and belittling people for dreaming about better worlds. Without such dreams, we would have less crackpots for sure, but also less visionaries. Maybe seasteading is a hopeless dream, but I think there is at least a small chance that it can revolutionize the world by transforming government into a dynamic, competitive industry, which will benefit everyone, not just libertarians. Here’s my article arguing why: http://patrifriedman.com/projects/socs/commented/drawer/dynamic_geography.html
The bottom line to me is that it feels like the piece, while prettily written, is in essence a hatchet job by someone who demonizes libertarians. And demonization is antithetical to understanding. Yeah, it makes for nicely flowing vituperative prose, but not a very accurate picture of libertarianism’s flaws, let alone a balanced viewpoint. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms to be made about libertarianism and seasteading. I’ve made lots myself, and heard plenty more from smart people who knew enough about the subject to argue about the actual movements, rather than the caricatures which Mieville paints here.
Anyway, if any readers are interested in seeing what the more realistic side of the movement actually believes/expects/claims, instead of just this caricature, please check out my book at seastead.org. The most recent draft is all available online.
Posted by patrissimo on Oct 1, 2007 at 11:24 PM
You seem to have two points:
1) Libertarianism sucks. Or at least anti-tax libertarianism sucks.
2) Seasteading doesn’t/won’t work.
On the first point, I disagree, but there’s not much to talk about. I’ll only say that while you might not like the libertarianism you criticize in this article, in the polycentric world we would like to move closer to, libertarians would be free to live under libertarian laws (so much the worse for us, right?) and socialists would be free to live under socialist laws (so much the better for you, right?).
On the second point, I assume that since you have a PhD, you are at least somewhat interested in truth, rather than merely pushing your ideology. As such, I think you should have linked to, or at least referenced, Patri Friedman’s book. The readers of your article know your views. Let them at least, if they wish, read the other side. Maybe seasteading won’t work; let your readers see the other side of the argument.
Posted by Jonathan Wilde on Oct 2, 2007 at 10:24 AM
As one of the editors who adapted this piece, the lack of references to Patri Friedman’s book was my fault, not China’s. In the essay that appears in the collection Evil Paradises, China includes a footnote that cites (and lauds) Mr. Friedman’s book. Since magazines like In These Times never use footnotes, I overlooked that citation, but that, obviously, was a mistake. I certainly should have incorporated it into the text, and I apologize to Mr. Friedman for not doing so.
Posted by Brian Cook on Oct 3, 2007 at 10:17 AM
China is wrong to state that libertarians are averse to recognizing pirates. Peter Leeson, an anarcho-capitalist professor, has done a great deal of research on functional pirate “anarchy” (Hakim Bey referred to them as Temporary Autonomous Zones) which has been written about in publications like the New Yorker. See here:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/07/peter-leeson-in.html
Posted by TGGP on Oct 6, 2007 at 1:41 PM
A good blog response is here: http://positiveliberty.com/2007/10/captains-and-the-kings-a-reply-to-mieville-on-libertarian-escapism.html#more-2764
Posted by TGGP on Oct 11, 2007 at 12:26 AM
just what exactly is the freedom ship supposed to be freeing anyone from? stuff still costs money… you still pay income tax.. sure they say they won’t charge taxes, but that will be quickly offset by the higher cost of goods onboard… i think a better term than freedom ship would be rich-folk-sick-of-flying-to-a-different-country-each-week ship
Posted by norrab on Oct 30, 2007 at 8:44 AM
My guess is that it would free one from supporting the Iraq war and the war on drugs, as well as any bridges to nowhere. If you look at the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom, taxes form only part of it, things like regulation and corruption make up the rest. I don’t think the ship is ever going to leave port, but in the hypothetical of it doing so one might assume it wouldn’t attempt to meddle in the lives of its customers. Peter Leeson has a paper critiquing such “vertically-integrated proprietary communities” from an anarcho-capitalist perspective saying that if they have such power over their citizens they will be prone to abuse it. http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/04/new_paper_on_an.html
Posted by TGGP on Oct 30, 2007 at 9:00 AM
Mieville incorrectly brands the Freedom Ship a libertarian phenomenon by conflating the Freedom Ship’s advertising talking points with the tenets of libertarianism. No libertarian would give up privacy and personal mobility to join a floating coop with questionable legal status and an authoritarian social structure. In his argument against libertarianism Mieville has replaced the straw man with the straw boat.
There is a nonzero percentage of corruption and error-making in every human organization. At its core, libertarian thinking in the United States recognizes that concentration of power at the federal level empowers and projects that percentage of damaging corruption exponentially. In free societies, the power of corruption must be limited, not concentrated. Since corruption/error is the constant, power itself must be limited and carefully distributed to reduce risk. The nation model of states with a limited federal government preserves power at local levels where true accountability is possible, and this limits the risk effectively.
Per his Wiki entry, Mr. Mieville associates himself with a socialist platform. Socialism takes the optimistic view of concentrated state power: that representatives honor the will of the populace; that elections are a self-healing process to remove corruption; that taxes will maintain public infrastructure and not be wasted or funnelled into private hands. Sometimes it can. But what does human history say about how long benevolent concentrated state power remains benevolent?
When concentrated state power becomes corrupt and self-serving, the general population is shut out of the process of making laws and bears their imposition as subjects. The real progressive thinking in the US today acknowledges that the federal government has exceeded the limits on power that the founders created for the purpose of controlling risk. This view is most often associated with libertarians because they have consistently stood for restoring strict limits to federal power. Right now one presidential candidate advocates restoring limits to federal power and he ran once as a libertarian: Ron Paul.
Posted by tree.path on Nov 14, 2007 at 8:21 AM
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Reader Comments
I recall the pseudonymous anarchist Rayo mocking the idea of floating cities is his pamplet “Vonu.” (Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he was in favor of it, and I mocked the idea as I read it. It’s been a while.)
The idea back then (1960’s ... when he wrote it, not when I read it) was that families would sail in yacht flotillas, farming the sea (actual farming! with crops growing from dirt on deck!), trading for necessities (vitamin C, manufactured goods, etc.) in port, and generally enjoying the benefits of free, non-coercive association. If anyone didn’t like the mayor of the flotilla, then they could sail away and form a new flotilla.
If course, if it were that simple, if you could grow enough crops on deck and catch enough fish to eat, with enough left over to trade for other goods in port, I think we humans would have developed these floating cities centuries ago. I mean, we’ve been farming for what, 10,000 years? And probably fishing for longer. And there’s been no shortage of despotic, oppressive, and violently coercive regimes from which to flee.
Hell, just ask the fishermen of New England or the watermen of Maryland how well they’re doing these days - what with the fishing stocks depleted due to over-fishing, which is turn was due the fact that you have to catch and sell a lot of fish just to stay afloat - literally and figuratively.
But, as China Mieville points out, the visions are utopian (true, sometimes they’re bland, banal utopias), and as is often the case with libertarian utopians, reality and practicality have little-to-no space in their proprosals.
As for the Freedom Ship: Why is it that people who defend the free market to the last breath have the weakest grasp of basic economics? Supply and demand, people! Supply and demand! On a floating city, physical space is gong to have the highest demand because there’s a definite physical limit to its supply. Think of the real estate prices! And where the hell are you gonna go when you’re priced out of the market? Overboard? Or will they be kind enough to drop you off at the nearest port ... for a fee, of course.
I looked through the freedom ship site. It seems like a pretty obvious scam site to me. I am amazed they’ve been there as long as the dates indicate. You should probably visit their addresses to see what is there, if anything.
Still, it would seem fitting to con the rich with a utopian vision of Richistan on the high seas. Were it ever realized (but not by these con artists) it would surely turn into a dystopian world. Maybe they can hire Dennis Hopper as the captain (reprising his role in “Waterworld”).
What I find disheartening is not the concept of this Utopian or Segretopian projects, but that when cast off their marketing sheen, there’s still a number of people who would support them, namely here the people of Trujillo. Why it is so? Because a closer look would reveal that they would accept a simultaneous appropiation of land and being the subject of a pyramid (pun) scam while aspiring for a better life beside the crazy rich.
Yes, probably no freedom ship will sail off Trujillo, but surely walled communities and their ill cascading effects (broken society, increased costs and appropiation of the public space) will take root there as they have been doing elsewhere in Latin America. And that’s a fairly utopian enough for the investors.
I’m a bit sad to see so much material apparently drawn from the book I wrote (Seasteading: A Practical Guide To Homesteading The High Seas [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/index.html ]), and not see it even mentioned. At least, the set of projects listed in the article reads like a walk through the Review section of my book [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/review.html ], which seems unlikely to happen by chance. So it seems like my book was used heavily as a source. I’m not familiar with the standards for non-academic writing, but in the world I come from, it’s considered dishonest not to state your sources.
As to the content of the article: yes, the history of floating utopias has, to date, consisted of scammers and dreamers. That’s why people like me, with a more serious interest in the subject, write web pages about how the Freedom Ship is bullshit (http://patrifriedman.com/projects/independence/freedomship.html), and spend lots of words in our books describing how wackos like New Utopia are…well…wackos. Floating cities are an idea that appeals to dreamers (which again is why it’s a bummer that Mievelle left my contributions out, since the whole point of my book was to take a more realistic approach.)
But just because the idea appeals to dreamers doesn’t mean it’s absurd, and that it can’t be approached realistically. For an SF author, I must say that Mieville has a rather sad lack of vision. He almost seems to delight in this piece at sneering at and belittling people for dreaming about better worlds. Without such dreams, we would have less crackpots for sure, but also less visionaries. Maybe seasteading is a hopeless dream, but I think there is at least a small chance that it can revolutionize the world by transforming government into a dynamic, competitive industry, which will benefit everyone, not just libertarians. Here’s my article arguing why: http://patrifriedman.com/projects/socs/commented/drawer/dynamic_geography.html
The bottom line to me is that it feels like the piece, while prettily written, is in essence a hatchet job by someone who demonizes libertarians. And demonization is antithetical to understanding. Yeah, it makes for nicely flowing vituperative prose, but not a very accurate picture of libertarianism’s flaws, let alone a balanced viewpoint. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms to be made about libertarianism and seasteading. I’ve made lots myself, and heard plenty more from smart people who knew enough about the subject to argue about the actual movements, rather than the caricatures which Mieville paints here.
Anyway, if any readers are interested in seeing what the more realistic side of the movement actually believes/expects/claims, instead of just this caricature, please check out my book at seastead.org. The most recent draft is all available online.
You seem to have two points:
1) Libertarianism sucks. Or at least anti-tax libertarianism sucks.
2) Seasteading doesn’t/won’t work.
On the first point, I disagree, but there’s not much to talk about. I’ll only say that while you might not like the libertarianism you criticize in this article, in the polycentric world we would like to move closer to, libertarians would be free to live under libertarian laws (so much the worse for us, right?) and socialists would be free to live under socialist laws (so much the better for you, right?).
On the second point, I assume that since you have a PhD, you are at least somewhat interested in truth, rather than merely pushing your ideology. As such, I think you should have linked to, or at least referenced, Patri Friedman’s book. The readers of your article know your views. Let them at least, if they wish, read the other side. Maybe seasteading won’t work; let your readers see the other side of the argument.
As one of the editors who adapted this piece, the lack of references to Patri Friedman’s book was my fault, not China’s. In the essay that appears in the collection Evil Paradises, China includes a footnote that cites (and lauds) Mr. Friedman’s book. Since magazines like In These Times never use footnotes, I overlooked that citation, but that, obviously, was a mistake. I certainly should have incorporated it into the text, and I apologize to Mr. Friedman for not doing so.
China is wrong to state that libertarians are averse to recognizing pirates. Peter Leeson, an anarcho-capitalist professor, has done a great deal of research on functional pirate “anarchy” (Hakim Bey referred to them as Temporary Autonomous Zones) which has been written about in publications like the New Yorker. See here:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/07/peter-leeson-in.html
A good blog response is here: http://positiveliberty.com/2007/10/captains-and-the-kings-a-reply-to-mieville-on-libertarian-escapism.html#more-2764
just what exactly is the freedom ship supposed to be freeing anyone from? stuff still costs money… you still pay income tax.. sure they say they won’t charge taxes, but that will be quickly offset by the higher cost of goods onboard… i think a better term than freedom ship would be rich-folk-sick-of-flying-to-a-different-country-each-week ship
My guess is that it would free one from supporting the Iraq war and the war on drugs, as well as any bridges to nowhere. If you look at the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom, taxes form only part of it, things like regulation and corruption make up the rest. I don’t think the ship is ever going to leave port, but in the hypothetical of it doing so one might assume it wouldn’t attempt to meddle in the lives of its customers. Peter Leeson has a paper critiquing such “vertically-integrated proprietary communities” from an anarcho-capitalist perspective saying that if they have such power over their citizens they will be prone to abuse it. http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/04/new_paper_on_an.html
Mieville incorrectly brands the Freedom Ship a libertarian phenomenon by conflating the Freedom Ship’s advertising talking points with the tenets of libertarianism. No libertarian would give up privacy and personal mobility to join a floating coop with questionable legal status and an authoritarian social structure. In his argument against libertarianism Mieville has replaced the straw man with the straw boat.
There is a nonzero percentage of corruption and error-making in every human organization. At its core, libertarian thinking in the United States recognizes that concentration of power at the federal level empowers and projects that percentage of damaging corruption exponentially. In free societies, the power of corruption must be limited, not concentrated. Since corruption/error is the constant, power itself must be limited and carefully distributed to reduce risk. The nation model of states with a limited federal government preserves power at local levels where true accountability is possible, and this limits the risk effectively.
Per his Wiki entry, Mr. Mieville associates himself with a socialist platform. Socialism takes the optimistic view of concentrated state power: that representatives honor the will of the populace; that elections are a self-healing process to remove corruption; that taxes will maintain public infrastructure and not be wasted or funnelled into private hands. Sometimes it can. But what does human history say about how long benevolent concentrated state power remains benevolent?
When concentrated state power becomes corrupt and self-serving, the general population is shut out of the process of making laws and bears their imposition as subjects. The real progressive thinking in the US today acknowledges that the federal government has exceeded the limits on power that the founders created for the purpose of controlling risk. This view is most often associated with libertarians because they have consistently stood for restoring strict limits to federal power. Right now one presidential candidate advocates restoring limits to federal power and he ran once as a libertarian: Ron Paul.
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