Tiberius Seasteads

Opportunities and Challenges for Small New Societies
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-7281-3826-2
Verlag: vdf Hochschulverlag AG
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 246 Seiten

Seasteads - artificial settlements on the open sea - represent a near-future chance for multiple societal restarts. Where nation states suffer from ineffectiveness and inefficiency, both politically and economically, and cannot be changed due to path-dependency and rigidity, the open sea is a clean slate. Here, we can test new ways of doing things differently. This book discusses the opportunities and challenges of seasteads. Its focus is on socio-philosophical, political, economic, and legal aspects of founding new small societies of pro-active and productive individuals and groups. An explorative exercise, this book presents paradigmatic ideas and suggestions for partial aspects of seasteads.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tiberius, Victor

Leseproben

The Politics of Seasteading

Abstract

The political implications, possibilities, and restrictions of seasteading are analyzed. Particular attention is given to the question of new political structures, collective decision-making, and democracy. Four major objectives of seasteading, that are related but have different implications, are discussed. A realistic analysis leads to a skeptical but sympathetic assessment of seasteading.

1 Introduction

Seasteads are efforts to homestead on the sea, to create new settlements away from the naturally available land. The motives may be varied, and so are the political implications.

The original meaning of politics is the art of creating and maintaining a “polis” – that is a good and functioning society. However, the current meaning of politics is somewhat at odds with this definition. Today, we consider politics the domain of collective decision-making. Most political thought starts from collective decision-making as a premise and leaves little room for alternative views. The idea of seasteading, however, is born out of an anti-collectivist tradition which doubts the need for politics in the modern sense. Thus, a political analysis of seasteading, to be meaningful, has to be based on the broader understanding of politics, which is at the same time truer to the European tradition of politics as a science or art.

We have to analyze the character and dynamics of such settlements to understand their political implications. Four motives for settling on seasteads can be distinguished: First, a demand for community. Second, a demand for sovereignty. Third, a demand for security. Fourth, a demand for real estate.

2 Community versus society

The longing for community is not only an essential human trait but also the main reason for political conflicts, efforts, and decision-making. As Hayek (1982) observed, modern society does not satisfy the atavistic tendency of human beings to seek adherence to a tribe. Building on this insight, Jouvenel (1997) contrasted the two ideas of Babylon and Icaria which have haunted mankind throughout its history.

Babylon is the archetype of an anonymous, large-scale commercial society. In this kind of society, people of different backgrounds and values cooperate according to formal rules. Hayek (1982) offered a useful definition: It is a social arrangement in which people are not united according to their ends, but occasionally align according to their chosen means. This kind of arrangement does not necessitate collective decision-making, only a basis of law in the general sense of a set of rules, institutions, or mechanisms to settle disputes over means. Whether those rules are chosen by collective decision-making, imposed by law-givers, discovered by judges, or are merely the result of a market provision of mediation is less important than the content of those rules: their compatibility with conflict-free exchange between people who do not necessarily share goals or values.

The quintessential societal basis of such arrangements is the market: a physical, digital or symbolic meeting place where people can freely exchange means without fear of extortion, plunder, or violence once they reveal their market offers (their disposable assets). Successful marketplaces tend to grow and attract larger numbers of market participants, market makers, and market service providers. Thus markets themselves form the core of settlements, which tend to increase in density and reach urban levels if allowed to grow.

But are markets political projects? Do they call for politics? In the narrow, modern sense of politics, markets are even the antithesis to politics. Austrian economist Böhm-Bawerk (1968) contrasted political power and economic law as two different ways to view the world. Oppenheimer (1914) proposed a similar distinction between economic and political means. Building on these distinctions, one can define the market as the field of human action in which only offers are made that can be refused, whereas “politics” in the narrow, modern sense usually refers to one-sided “offers” that cannot be refused (Taghizadegan and Otto, 2015). As propositions which are enforced without consent are categorically different from offers, the question of legitimacy arises.

Currently, after older efforts to legitimize coercion have lost their appeal, the last remaining ground for legitimacy seems to be the argument for community: “Democratic” decision-making over rules and sanctions is generally viewed as a legitimate basis for enforcement without individual consent. Building on fictitious social contract theories, a kind of “community consent” is invoked. Drawing on Rousseau and Hegel, this modern theology of the state appeals to the intuitive longing for community without offering true community, which has to be based on homogeneity and charity.

This fake “community as legitimacy” increases both the conflict potential and the longing for unfulfilled “true community”. The resulting dissatisfaction is one of the motives that nourish interest in “political alternatives” like seasteading. Modern democratic societies have seemed like a peaceful “end of history” after the Second World War. However, the explosion of “politics”, the ongoing replacement of private decisions by political decisions, is putting more and more pressure on the legitimacy of the political apparatus. Overreaching collectivization of decisions translates societal heterogeneity into threats. While trust in the political systems is decreasing, subsidized mass immigration increases heterogeneity even more. The growing conflict potential is a powder keg in most Western societies. At the same time, the longing for more homogeneous communities increases, because the sense of belonging and community that has been abused by growing statism becomes increasingly lacking.

This situation creates a difficult political dilemma for seasteads. People are drawn to the idea of seasteading as their former political arrangements are increasingly perceived as dysfunctional. Many yearn for “intentional communities”, where homogeneity of ideology and interest increases feelings of legitimacy and belonging.

However, intentional communities are in stark contrast to market societies. Almost no intentional community survives for long, because the needed homogeneity is too much for modern man (Holloway, 1951). Only deeply religious communities seem to be able to survive for long. In a community, as opposed to a society (after the famous differentiation between Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft from Tönnies (2001)), conflicts can be avoided and settled without coercion because people behave literally like brothers. Modern ideologies, however, do not afford such high levels of trust. Permanent conflict is the rule for two reasons: Firstly, ideologies are mental concepts with set conclusions, not open endeavors to understand reality. Thus, diverging subjective experiences and sensibilities with time necessarily erode the ideological homogeneity, because the ideology is interpreted in terms of the perceived reality and context. Secondly, ideological homogeneity means unearned trust, which increases incentives for free-riding on this trust. Ideologically homogeneous groups are invitations for scammers. Thus most intentional communities that select for ideological homogeneity split sooner or later due to disagreement or fraud.

Anti-collectivist or pro-market ideologies do not differ at all in this regard. Any “libertarian” seastead that is conceived as an intentional community of like-minded „libertarians“ thus has very little likelihood of surviving. Usually, such efforts already falter at the early conceptual stage. Afterward, the inward turning due to the geographical separation from alternative settlements by the ocean would greatly increase the conflict potential. Being locked into a settlement based on ideological community can soon turn into hell.

If, in contrast, a seastead was understood not as a “libertarian” Icaria, but as a Babylonian marketplace, it would be politically more feasible, but would exhibit different problems. Babylonian settlements are ideologically much less appealing. Only Icaria is synonymous for Utopia, and utopian thinking is politically much superior in the sense that it draws out energies, creates unity, increases tolerance for risk and frustration and appeals to masses. For all his warning of human hubris and totalitarian Utopias, Hayek (1967) realized this political superiority of utopian thought when he urged even libertarians to make use of its power.

Market societies like dense urban settlements or bustling ports appeal to some people, but usually only to a minority: most live there as a means to other, usually financial ends, only few seek these kinds of settlements as ends in themselves. Such settlements cannot be created artificially and at will. They can be designed and created, but only at real or potential intersections of the streams of goods and services. Those intersections, however, are very valuable and attractive and elicit fierce political competition over control. Any kind of politics that ignores the difficulties of establishing and keeping the control over settlements, or at least, in the case of an anarchic settlement, keeping out adversary control, would seem naïve – in the sense of Weber (1988), who warned about politics that does not account for violence. Of course, accounting for violence in no way means endorsing violence.

Whereas communities can be managed by collective decision-making, market societies cannot. The complexity of a market society by far exceeds the dilettantism of collective...