Somewhere, Beyond the Sea
by Jennifer Altavilla

Herman Melville, in his classic novel Moby Dick, says all men are "at some time or other crazy to go to sea." A farmer in South Dakota who has never seen the waves crashing upon the sand; a fisherman in Japan who lives in a house on the edge of the beach; or Moby-Dick’s Ishmael, a boy born in the shadow of the Manhattan dock, are all intrinsically wired to gravitate towards the ocean.

Patri Friedman has taken Melville's theory to heart. Friedman, a former Google software engineer, is the executive director of the Seasteading Institute, a non-profit organization whose mission statement promises the establishment of "permanent, autonomous ocean communities:" homesteads in the open ocean.

The Seasteading Institute has hired oilrig designer Marine Innovation and Technology to create a sturdy and well-equipped structure that can be a permanent oceanic home. The $50 million platform will contain everything from a desalinization system for fresh water, stabilizing water tanks for stormy seas, and helipads for easy access to and from land. It even has four diesel engines that can move the platform to more pleasant waters if need be (or if the inhabitants just want a change of scenery.)

The architects of Marine Innovation and Technology say that such a structure may be floating somewhere beyond the Golden Gate Bridge three years from now. According to the history books, however, the future of the Seasteading Institute creation is bleak. Operation Atlantic, launched in 1971 by Werner Stiefel, a wealthy dermatology product salesman, a mammoth boat made of cement was destroyed in a storm while "docked" between Cuba and Honduras. The Republic of Minerva, millionaire Michael Oliver's sand and coral reef creation in the South Pacific, dissolved shortly after inhabitants of the nearby island Tonga invaded it in 1972. Only the oldest of the oceanic utopias - Sealand, a seventy-year-old gun platform floating in the North Sea - still exists.

But Friedman maintains that Seasteading Institute has the potential to succeed. For one thing, the floating platform off of San Francisco Bay would be more than a glorified cruise ship, Friedman says. Although it will contain “comfortable, spacious… [and] environmentally friendly dwellings (according to the Seasteading Institute official website),” it will not cater to tourists, but to serious seafarers who want to build their homes and businesses, and even raise their families, far from land’s maddening crowd.

More than providing a greener; cheaper; and more spacious place to live, oceanic utopias would “enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems,” says the mission statement of the Seasteading Institute. “Instead of deciding [political issues] through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, imagine if we could try them each on a small scale and see what happens,” the official website says.

But the chances that such small scale political experimentation would actually work are miniscule. Unless a like-minded community decided to populate the oceanic utopia, and refused to allow people of other political bents from entering, there would still be political strife. In fact, fewer people might even augment political discord since more people could voice their opinions. With literally nowhere for dissenters to go, violence could easily erupt. It’s like cabin fever: the longer you are cooped up with the same people, the more sensitive and frayed your nerves become and the quicker you are to anger.

And so far, their have been no answers as to how would citizenship and law enforcement would work on these floating utopias. Residents would probably still be citizens of the countries in which they were born, but what about babies born onboard? Would they become the citizens of their parents’ nation, or the country nearest to the platform? Would criminals be tried in the country off which the platform was docked, or would they have to return to their home country for trial? What kind of law enforcement officers would live onboard and which countries would they be from? Would those officers control only those residents from their respective countries, or would the same laws apply to all residents?

Oceanic utopias could face other problems. According to the United Nations’ Law of the Sea, a nation controls the area up to 200 miles from its shore. Perhaps some nations would not want the hulking Seasteading Institute platform cruising off of their shores. The areas where the platforms could travel might be circumscribed and difficult to navigate. What would happen if an oceanic utopia happened to sail in forbidden waters?

Unless vital questions such as these are answered, oceanic utopias have little chance of staying afloat. Sorry to sink your ship, Mr. Friedman, but the Seasteading Institute will never face anything except stormy weather.