Contemplating the promised benefits of “seasteading” usually leaves me hung up on seemingly hard unsolved problems such as defense, but I have to admit the arguably outlandish idea offers more immediate practical potential for competitive governance and decentralization in support of individual sovereignty than colonizing much more hostile, distant, and hard- and expensive-to-reach worlds beyond Earth. This video makes an interesting pitch worth considering, that proposes development of seasteads as both a worthwhile end in itself and a potentially helpful equatorial stepping stone on our way to the heavens and colonizing [and perhaps eventually seasteading on] other worlds.
Seasteading does appear to offer a key advantage over territory-based governance: the potential for rapid reconfigurability. If you don’t like your land-based government, you can usually move elsewhere, but doing so is a high-inertia process that may involve selling your home, buying or renting another, possibly needing to apply to change citizenship, and moving your possessions a long distance. This inertia and the time and costs involved sets a high threshold for what people are willing to put up with, inhibiting salutary feedback loops and giving power to incrementalism. In theory at least, seasteaders can move and establish new voluntary associations at will and with much greater ease than people with land-based ties. There’s enough in that to make the idea worth giving further thought, and it will probably make a good topic to delve into in a future episode of The No Fear Pioneer. In seeking new frontiers to advance to, it certainly makes sense to consider as wide a variety of viable possibilities as we reasonably can.
With major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter showing an increasing enthusiasm for suppressing content and publishers they don’t like (whether by invisibly “shadow-banning” posts, silently culling follower lists, demanding post retractions, de-platforming users outright, or footnoting posts with disclaimers) we seem to be approaching the potential end of an era — or so many of us hope, at least. What the next era might look like, we’re still figuring out, but it sure feels like a good time for freedom of speech to be cherished and championed again.
Back in the day, we had the free frontier of the Internet and its very decentralized array of offerings — forums, websites, blogs, comment sections, and all that. We used tools like RSS/Atom feed aggregators to help wrangle it all into a firehose we could more comfortably drink from (the old-school version of “following” sites and authors). We still have those things, of course, but our focus has moved away from them and toward Big Social. Seduce by greater effectiveness at connecting with others and getting substantially more eyes on our posts, we went all in and moved from a largely decentralized world to one that entrusted our ability to publish to a small handful of companies. With their growth came power over our freedom of expression that we failed to be adequately concerned about, leading to where we find ourselves today — in many ways stifled, suppressed, and distrustful of “Big Social”, and wondering where to go next. It’s an important issue if you feel, as I do, that living under conditions where you aren’t free to speak your mind isn’t living.
In looking around for good alternatives, we find both centralized and decentralized alternatives to choose from, raising some interesting dilemmas. Sites such as Parler and Gab.com have promised to remain steadfast in support of free speech, and to the extent they can be trusted to do so may provide viable drop-in alternatives to Twitter. I’m reasonably optimistic about their commitment to freedom of expression, and have been trying both out (I’m @kulak on Parler, @kulak76 on Gab.com), but having seen the pitfalls of centralized social media, one can’t help but wonder whether sites such as these will eventually succumb to the same pressures to suppress and censor. (I hope not, and I give Parler and Gab much benefit of the doubt, but the concern is hard to escape.) Gab allows for setting up your own self-hosted alternatives to Gab.com, and in that sense doesn’t quite qualify as a “centralized” service, though in practice it will be interesting to see whether alternative Gab sites end up being widely used or even necessary. (If they prove largely unnecessary, that’s a good sign for Gab.com having kept its free-speech promise.)
We can also look to the publishing, reading, and communication tools that have served us in the past: self-hosted blogs like this one, and feed aggregator apps and sites (I used NetNewsWire for years and have been using Feedly lately). While ability to connect with large numbers of readers is likely to be no better than it was before (I’m very interested in ways we might be able to surpass those limits), hosting our own content at least gives us much greater control over our own publishing. If others really don’t like you, they can put pressure on your hosting provider, but if we get to the point where hosting providers are widely bullied into de-platforming customers the world will really be in trouble. As failsafe measures go, the ability to move your site to another host remains a pretty solid safeguard.
This isn’t necessarily an either-or proposition, of course. One can use social media sites together with self-publishing, leveraging posts on the former to help promote your work on the latter, for example. That’s been a key part of how I’ve used Twitter, Parler, and Gab, and I expect will continue to be. Publishing longer-form work here has intrinsic value to me because it’s helped me work through thoughts and develop ideas, so I’ll likely continue to do it regardless, but having my writing reach a more substantial number of people who find value in those ideas would certainly be an appreciated improvement.
Yet another set of alternatives exists in networking sites with focused purposes. BillWhittle.com is one example whose thriving I’ve been glad to be a part of. Ricochet is another that I’ve used in the past. These sites give users ways to publish to and communicate with one another, while firewalling member content to keep comment sections troll-free and enjoyable. They aren’t places to publish for broader public consumption, but they serve a related and very worthwhile purpose to those looking to publish and connect.
One thing I think we’d be wise to do, in weighing our options, is to refrain from underestimating the appeal of centralized social media sites. There are good reasons why the dynamics have worked out well for them, and our effectiveness at developing alternatives will rely on understanding, appreciating, and accounting for their attractiveness to large numbers of users. They include the value of familiarity and name recognition, the network effect, and the convenience of having a single (or a few) centralized service(s) for connecting with the people whose posts interest us. If we want to succeed in developing decentralized alternatives to Big Social, we’d be wise to find alternative ways to satisfy the same wants and needs. This is a subject that’s been very much on my mind, and I expect I’ll continue to think about it quite a bit. We have diverse options and numerous possibilities available to us (some perhaps as yet undreamt of), and it’s going to be an interesting challenge to figure out how to most effectively develop and make use of them.
Speaking of Bill, Steve, and Scott: While gathering links to their latest work, I ran across this Trifecta gem I’d completely missed last year, that resonates uncannily with a thought I’ve been mulling over quite a bit lately: Maybe cities are a mistake. So many of the problems and vulnerabilities we face seem to result from the helplessness and dependency that dense urban centers engender. Cities insulate us from the realities of what is and isn’t essential for our survival. Urban living saps us of our self-reliance, and deprives us of the continual, salutary testing and re-testing against nature that would otherwise drive us to cultivate essential skills and build resilience. It’s anonymizing, and leaves us dependent on corruptible and inevitably corrupt, wasteful, and unreliable centralized institutions, where we might otherwise develop mutual reliance on our neighbors in a more resilient, decentralized, voluntary web of trust for mutual benefit. City life makes it too easy for us to disconnect from reality, in ways that jeopardize our ability to deal with said reality when it rears its ugly head. We become, in a real sense, victims of our own success. Furthermore, dense urban centers make our thusly-concentrated populations easy targets for Jihadi lunatics who are just dying to prove the extent of their depravity on a massive scale.
I say all of this as someone who loves many of the products of city life — from technological marvels to universities, museums, and cuisine from all over the world — and has experienced life in many U.S. cities — from Los Angeles, where I grew up, to Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, and New York. It just seems that the negatives have come to outweigh the positives, and we may benefit from a change in direction. Dense urban centers of population may be largely an Industrial Age relic that we’d do well to re-assess look beyond. In a time when much of our activity now takes place in a knowledge and service economy, it may be entirely possible to de-centralize our populations without abandoning (and perhaps even better facilitating) the continued advancement of positive technological developments.
Having moved to an 1880s farmhouse in northern New Jersey two years ago, I feel like I have one foot already in a more rural world, and the sense of well-being I’ve gained has led me to wonder what else I’ve been missing. I haven’t worried much about imminent Apocalypse since growing up in the 1980s under fear of a Soviet ICBM attack. But the direction things seem to be going in is awakening dormant prepper/survivalist instincts in me. If the center will not hold, how will the remnant of what we are keep the flame of civilization lit until we can make a way to piece things together again? It’s been decades since this old place was worked as a farm (with the benefit of surrounding acreage that’s since been sliced up and sold to home builders). But I find myself thinking: even if the results don’t make much of a dent in our weekly dependence on grocery stores, learning some basic skill with growing a few small crops might be a good and useful thing. (Stay tuned; maybe I’ll have some Spring planting news soon.)
This is the kind of stuff that’s been on my mind as I contemplate the short-term mitigation of circumstances we need before we’ll be able to achieve a longer-term way out to the next place. Bill, Steve, and Scott bring some interesting perspectives to the table in this Trifecta — and the Green Acres theme is a nice touch. I remember watching the show at my aunt’s house growing up. Maybe that was a foreshadowing of my life to come?
Crabapples are all we’re growing right now, by the way. Feeding the deer, and leading my 3-year-old son to ask with concern whether they contain tiny crabs, seem to be about all they’re good for. But the trees do give us some very nice flowers:
The future we seek requires a philosophy of achievement, responsibility, and individuality, and a loose governing framework that stays off our backs and ceases to siphon precious resources:
What if the mega-rich just want rocket ships to escape the Earth they destroy?
Hey, geniuses:
When you insist on leaving no avenue of escape from Progressivism / “social democracy” on Earth, you guarantee that people will seek another way out.
Shouldn’t you rejoice to see those ruinous capitalists leave? At long last, you can have your Progressive paradise! Then we can see how the world ends up. Because apparently the Soviet and Chinese environmental records haven’t established a clear enough precedent.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
