
How to create a startup country - olalonde
http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-create-a-startup-country
======
SudarshanP
The seasteading institute hopes for an exploration of possibilities. Not
implementing one particular agenda. And exploring the solution space could
lead to unforeseen rewards.

For eg. the open source movement hacked the legal system to come up with an
awesome solution. It was different from capitalism, which assumes that
innovation happens only if people see financial reward. In a communist system,
you are "expected" to innovate by an order from the top. But these systems
never thought that people could do stuff like writing things like Operating
systems, Compilers, browsers, databases... medicine... electronics,
architecture, movies, novels and even ads "just for the sake of doing it."

Our current systems are tied to labor as a critical cog for the economics to
work out. In the future automation will significantly reduce the need for
labor in manufacturing and services. This will be a disruptive change. Right
now the labor that gets outsourced to cheaper countries will finally be
outsourced to machines. A lot of services like mechanical turk will even take
up skilled jobs like even that of doctors.

Right now though machines do most of our manufacturing, we have invented
absurdly complex services to keep 6 billion people busy. But at some point we
can stop and ask... is this the best way to let 6 billion people have what
they want/need.

Right now we technically have driverless cars. It is not inconceivable we will
automate most of humanity's grunt work. The rest is FUN to do "just for the
sake of it". So it will be a time to ask whether capitalism+voter elected
oligarchy is the best way to live in such a world.

Watching this video from the venusproject was a real eyeopener:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3932487043163636261#>

<http://www.thevenusproject.com/>

Another interesting take on the effect of automation on the way we live is
this short story at <http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

Carl Marx codified communism, The French revolution gave us the modern
democratic framework, Stallman and others gave us the skeleton for open
source. It just shows radical changes are possible. Maybe we will invent
something totally different from what we currently have. Maybe not. But why
ridicule a guy like Thiel who wants to sail west to reach the east. Maybe he
will end up doing something very different from what he set out to do.

~~~
stcredzero
_A lot of services like mechanical turk will even take up skilled jobs like
even that of doctors._

There are already organizations which try to increase the efficiency of
doctors by maximizing the time they see patients and increasing their
throughput. My experience is that many manage to increase profits while
depersonalizing care.

~~~
olalonde
I guess that's meant to be a criticism of capitalism. Note however that health
care is a highly regulated market which is much more likely to be accountable
for the behavior you noticed.

------
iwwr
Homesteading is the default means of expansion into a previously uninhabited
territory. The question is if that would be allowed to happen on the high seas
before space.

This woman, Kristina Gjerde, was giving a talk at TED about the UN landgrab
(called "making law on the sea").

[http://www.ted.com/talks/kristina_gjerde_making_law_on_the_h...](http://www.ted.com/talks/kristina_gjerde_making_law_on_the_high_seas.html)

It's fascinating to watch this sort of mind at work; the consternation that
political authority does not extend everywhere yet, and how to work to
accomplish it.

If humanity is to become more civilized, there has to be a space for
alternative political systems to develop.

------
kloncks
I don't understand why we can't apply what he seems to suggest (treating
governments and politics in a smart efficient manner) without navigating the
high seas and creating new land.

That's just giving up on all the land we already have. That, for a starter,
seems pretty defeating.

edit: We keep on forgetting that our government (the US) was created on
purpose to be very slow but ultimately fair. That's the inefficiency, yet it's
still a great place for startups. That, coupled with our 300m citizens, makes
something like this harder to do in a country like this. That's why we haven't
been too successful in creating startup _communities_ outside of 2 or 3 places
in the entire United States.

Yet, this can work in a lot of places. Or, rather, we can try to start
applying it in a lot of places. Smaller places that have seen similar
successes. I'm thinking Dubai, Israel, etc.

~~~
olalonde
I think you missed the point of the article. The ultimate goal is not to
create startup communities but to create governments that are ran as startups.

~~~
arethuza
Most startups fail - when a company fails people pick themselves up and go and
do other things, generally a bit wiser for the experience.

History suggests that when countries fail, or at least when the machinery of
civil society fails, things can get _very_ unpleasant.

~~~
stcredzero
I suspect that this may be merely a problem of granularity. Countries have
been located on a permanent continuum, not on many discrete little movable
platforms. If a seasteading nation failed, the pieces would just get sold off
and towed away to simplest that is civilized.

~~~
gbhn
Just like Yugoslavia? It isn't that simple. Guns come out when sovereignty
gets threatened in this way, especially if things have deteriorated to the
point that lots of people want to leave.

~~~
stcredzero
Yes, but before, you couldn't tow your land away. Borders don't work quite the
same way. Sure, you can bring out the AK-47s, but then you're going to get in
the Zodiac with your cronies and motor over to...a reinforced concrete
platform 60' above the water...and those guys have AK's too and you have to
climb a ladder up to the platform? I don't think it's quite the same deal.

------
Kilimanjaro
Corruption is the disease of all societies. It will be present in seasteading
societies too.

Fight and cure corruption here on terra firma first. That's the real utopia
and exactly there is where money should be spent.

~~~
patrickaljord
To get rid of corruption you'd need to get rid of humans first.

------
tedesign
This idea is based on the false assumption that there are no pre-existing laws
for seas. There is a UN treaty and there are maritime laws and unwritten
seamen laws. And the latest date way back in history. Pretending that seas are
virgin territories as regards laws is a misconception.

~~~
danenania
I don't think the idea is based on that assumption. It's okay if there are
international maritime laws, as long as they don't prohibit this sort of
activity (I have no idea whether they do or don't).

These sorts of laws could even conceivably offer some protection to such a
venture.

~~~
billswift
The most fundamental law, and one that effectively negates all floating "new
country" ventures, is that any vessel that is not "flagged" by a real country
is classified as a pirate vessel and _will be_ taken over by any country, on
the high seas most likely by the US Coast Guard which is the most widespread
and aggressive enforcement presence on the high seas.

If your vessel is flagged, then this isn't a problem, but you must abide by
the laws of the flagging nation. And, in international water, you are still
vulnerable to random searches by the Coast Guard if for any reason they get
their back up.

~~~
stcredzero
I just see another business opportunity for small nations who want the money
from granting flags but have no agenda otherwise.

------
piramida
The problem here is that as soon as you build a platform in the sea and
declare yourself independent from any country, you have to be able to protect
it, too. Because nothing would stop someone from taking over your highly
intelligent platform with a help of a banal machine gun.

The world outside of developed countries is still a very unhappy place to
live. Many micronation island projects failed badly in a few years being taken
over by pirates.

~~~
danenania
I think defending against pirates would be economically feasible through
private security. The more serious problem would be defending against
aggressive states.

Real political progress would entail policies like legalized drugs, freedom of
information and ideas, physical currency, etc. that would likely raise the ire
of powerful states.

Like the article says, these kinds of political experiments have the potential
to act as competition toward established nations. Sadly, I think that nations
would realize this and attempt to preempt the challenge through force if they
could, this being their main advantage.

------
afshin
_The best discoveries of these startups, like in any industry, will be copied
by the market leaders — the countries of today._

That seems to be patently false. If better ways of governance really were
infectious, governments would be roughly converging in their policies. At the
very least, for example, similar governments (let's say western democracies)
might all have universal healthcare.

~~~
il
With the exception of the US, don't they?

~~~
afshin
Yes, they do. But that's quite an exception.

------
stcredzero
Awhile back, there was an article here about minimum-communication distance
nodes located between major trading centers. If there'd is a company that
specializes in trading on the New York and London exchanges, then the minimum
lightspeed lag for both exchanges is somewhere in the Atlantic. I can envision
financial seasteads arising from server farms and their infrastructure.

~~~
rwhitman
Its called Iceland

~~~
stcredzero
If you had floating platforms, you could do better on one end.

------
jdp23
"Every year, our phones get smarter, our cars safer, and our medical
treatments more advanced. We all benefit from startups and established
companies competing through constant innovation. So why is it that in one of
the most advanced countries in the world, we’re still using the legal
technology … of 1787?"

Oh that pesky constitution, getting in the way of startups ...

~~~
iwwr
The modern world is using largely the legal technology that came out of the
French Revolution, a combination of: nationalism, democracy (on the surface)
and oligarchy (below the surface).

Regarding the American Revolution, it is interesting to note that tax rates
immediately after were higher than during British rule. Even George Washington
part-took in the centralization of the American state afterwards:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion> . ( _The Whiskey Rebellion
demonstrated that the new national government had the willingness and ability
to suppress violent resistance to its laws._ )

Of course, the idea of a centralized state (with imperial ambitions if it has
enough power) is thousands of years old.

------
rwhitman
I read an article a while back about an academic paper in which a new system
of experimental government could be formed by a sort of international charter
company on property leased from existing nations.

Instead of building ridiculously complicated, expensive structures in the
middle of the ocean, to experiment with a new government it would be
substantially easier to carve out a small chunk of territory in a place where
land is cheap.

I think seasteading has its merits in terms of vacation resorts and perhaps
fisheries or mining, but beyond that who wants to live out in the middle of
the friggin ocean, especially if its going to cost as much as it would to live
in a condo in san francisco?

------
guelo
This idea is just stupid, not even considering the ridiculous technical
challenges. There are about 200 countries in the world, so there are many
experiments going on, and many of the experiments are very successful, from
the socialist northern European states to more conservative ones like
Singapore. Even the USA with it's many flaws is one of humanity's greatest
achievements in terms of producing wealth and welfare for its citizens. Rich
people like Thiel can pretty much choose whichever of these countries they
want to live in but that is not good enough for him, he has this weird
obsession with creating a Libertarian utopia out at sea.

~~~
kkowalczyk
The only argument you give for why this is such a stupid idea is that
everything is just fine with existing countries/governments.

I beg to disagree.

Just in recent days we read on HN about cops assaulting 15 year old and
throwing in jail 17 year old who filmed that on tape. We've been assaulted
with Assange/WikiLeaks stories, where government officials are calling for
assassinations, scramble to find existing/create new laws to prevent their
dirty laundry being known to public. US is waging two unjust, unprovoked wars,
started under made up pretenses (and that only few years after Vietnam
disaster). Health care costs are spiraling out of control in US, while at the
same time the quality of service is bad. Broadband in US is worse than in
South Korea. Law making process is out of control, with mega-bills stuffed
with unrelated rules bought by lobbying. War on drugs, terrorizing war on
terror, prisons population out of control (compared to other countries). I
could go on (and no, other countries are no better in that regard).

What I like about that talk is that it talks about governments serving the
people. On paper that's what it is but in practice the government is the
master and it behaves like one. The government has all the power and the way
it feels is that it is on a relentless drive to get even more power and it's a
rare act of short lived triumph where some of its power is stripped away and
sanity restored. The examples of power grab abound (expanding search and
seizure at borders and in the airports, trying to silence whistle-blowers by
e.g. bullying private sector, criminalizing behavior like recording police at
work (so that they can abuse their power more freely), unconditionally
accepting content industry propaganda about terrible losses from piracy and
enacting censorship legislations that try to go around due process).

So no, things are far from being good and I for one would welcome a government
that tries to serve its people in reality, not just on paper.

~~~
BerislavLopac
And this is precisely the reason why this is utopia.

You see, power and money are related to each other pretty much like matter and
energy: they are two forms of the same thing, interchangeable from one into
the other, and behaving in mostly the same ways.

As long as there is some power to accumulate you will find some people who are
better ad doing it than the others, and you're getting a power imbalance which
is easily abused. So there is no guarantee that any nicely engineered utopia
won't become warped after a while -- if anything, human history pretty much
guarantees that it will.

Human society can't be engineered, it's a living mechanism, and in the past
millennia we've been through pretty much all we could (although that heavily
depends on technological advances, such as communications and the like). So
far, we can safely say that there are two extreme forms of society when it
comes to laws: a totalitarian state, where a small group of people keep the
rest in control, and a total anarchy, where there are no set laws and rules.
At each point in time, any society is at some point between those two
extremes, and the larger the society it's more probable that different rules
apply to various subdivisions within it.

So no, it is not possible to set up an ideal society (of any form, libertarian
or socialist or whatever) and keep it such for a long time -- unless perhaps
for very small, heavily regulated and closed groups, isolated from the rest of
society which tolerates them (as is often the case with religious cults and
small but wealthy totalitarian countries).

~~~
danenania
"Human society can't be engineered, it's a living mechanism"

These aren't exclusive. Certainly there are limits, but human society is
engineered every day on many scales and the effects are all around you. Just
look at the the differences in culture between a new tech startup and IBM.
Aren't these human societies? For a larger scale, compare North Korea and
Iceland.

"...in the past millennia we've been through pretty much all we could"

No, we've been through all that we've been through. Before democracy, there
was no such thing and your reasoning would have deemed it impossible to live
under any system but autocratic despotism. Even though we have a long way to
go, humanity has created political innovation for its entire existence, and
the rate of this innovation has continually accelerated. Why would this
change?

I believe it comes down to culture. If the members of a society are instilled
strongly enough with the right values, it isn't necessary for a central body
to enforce these values. It would actually be counterproductive. For
companies, these values relate to ingenuity, productivity, cooperation,
ethics. For countries, the same apply, but replacing a central legal authority
also requires strong judicial values. These already exist to an extent. Try
punching an old lady on a crowded city street and see what happens to you--it
won't matter whether there are police around.

Compassion and charity are also necessary. Luckily, in spite of the bad news
we see constantly, these values are also quite pervasive in the world.
Pervasive enough? I'm not sure. But I certainly wouldn't rule out the
possibility that humanity could make great strides in improving its political
systems, and perhaps reach a point that would look utopian to our present day,
even if it takes a hell of a long time to get there.

~~~
BerislavLopac
I meant that we've been through most varieties we could considering the
environment so far. Of course new forms of societies will appear as the
environments (technological, sociological, environmental, biological etc)
change.

My whole point was that it's impossible to create a "frozen", immutable form
of society. There is no ideal form, it's always a compromise of some sort, and
it always changes.

~~~
danenania
Fair enough.

------
nihilocrat
_Let’s think of government as an industry, where countries are firms and
citizens are customers._

People should be thinking of governments/countries/cultures this way anyhow.
Vote with your feet.

------
gfodor
If your startup fails, some investors lose money and you have to go get a job.

If your country fails, people will probably suffer and/or die.

Am I missing something?

~~~
DaniFong
If your startup succeeds people will suffer and die. That's life. Your spirit
of adventure should be kindled by a consideration of the baseline risks of
life.

~~~
gfodor
Uh, the risks are certainly a lot higher with starting a country than starting
a startup. The two are barely even comparable in terms of real risk.

------
angdis
Probably much better to offer "Ayn Rand" cruise-ship packages. For
libertarians, it would be a "nice place to visit" but NOBODY would ever want
to live there.

------
nivertech
Building next Singapore on high seas?

