Outer Edges (Session 6)

Hello everyone, welcome to the sixth session of Nick Land's Outer Edges 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics Seminar. Nick, I'm going to pass on the camera and the microphone to you to start the class. Okay, cool. Welcome everybody, great to see you all here. I hope people have a sense of the reading this week I've got it on my list of sort of all neatly organised week by week which I'm hoping other people have I think it's probably in a certain sense

generic so if people think that they're missing out on arcane references then of course just give me a prod and I'll point to the specific things. But this week is dedicated to sort of nuts and bolts seasteading material basically, and by nuts and bolts as I think we've said before there's a technical and a more socio-political side to that and they're connected by complicated non-linear tangles of various kinds which maybe we can talk about a little bit.

They're only sort of analytically separable for the sake of convenience but I don't think they're really distinct and those connections is part of what I hope we're going to be able to talk about. I'm not going to push too far into it right now. I've got a bunch of what I think are nice quotes in this, but I think I might feed some of them in during the discussion rather than try to just slam people with a whole wave of stuff at the moment. So I was just going to say a preliminary, a few remarks about some context, because when you're looking at these texts, and one that's actually one step in, and I say I will therefore link it, is a particularly good example of

of the kind of nuts and bolts side and it's useful to us I think particularly because it's very this is linked to in the Doherty piece it's very crunchy I mean he's actually talking about trying to bring down the cost of a kind of a seastead village to a hundred thousand dollars and I think some of his plans for that he later thinks are a little bit unrealistic they involve like used soda bottles and various other kind of found object type solutions

but I think the point that makes it really worth immediately introducing is that he provides and in fact lays claim to the term seasteading which has now been sort of converged on by the whole of this community and I will just quote his remarks here I think they're very useful so he starts off saying that there are there are capital intensive solutions to this problem that would involve major corporations having to take a serious, dedicated interest in that. But he's more interested in catalyzing the whole process through something that he overtly

compares to the opening of the American frontier. So that's why I think this is a nice connective article. And to quote him, as opposed to these very capital intensive papers, he says, quote, This paper proposes a different strategy to achieve the colonization of the ocean surface. By way of analogy, the Western territories of the United States were not colonized by a few well-financed colonization efforts, but instead the West was colonized by tens of thousands of more individualized efforts. One of the primary ingredients was the Conestoga wagon technology. The Conestoga wagon was affordable by individuals and allowed them to successfully take their

possessions to their eventual destination. In the discussion below I intend to outline some technology that is within the financial means of individuals and would allow individuals to colonize the ocean surface rather than large colonization corporations. I call this technology a Seastead for C Homestead. So the very word Seastead is deliberately designed, we can see, to insert in particular Patrick Friedman's socio-political project into a particular tradition rooted in the opening of the American frontier. And so I don't think it's any stretch to think that our starting problem discussed

a bit last week about the closing of the frontier and how that resonates with the kind of things we're talking about here is directly related to our concerns. Sorry, did I actually send that one? So you can see from what he's… what… sorry, one second here, let me just get this guy's name… Oh, I forget it. OK, so I'm going to take five minutes anymore on this to contextualize it a little bit.

So how do these particular nuts and bolts questions tie in with more abstract issues of political economy and political philosophy? And I think a good starting point for this is to start right at the other end, because you can see that he is aiming for this attempt to catalyze this highly fragmented, uncoordinated,

decentralized, he uses it as an individualistic set of dynamics which he thinks are in some ways blocked by this. And I think this sense of blockage is huge and is part of what this notion of closing of the frontier is all about. And I think that a sort of interesting counterpoint to go right to the other extreme of this is a little quote that's been a very successful meme, it totally drives me mad, but everyone will recognize it, from Frederick Jameson, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I'm sure everyone has heard that said a million times. Now the main reason I find that utterly maddening is because it sounds as if no one has ever

watched an episode of Star Trek. The basic form of the scientific imagination, as has been constituted since the mid-20th century in the United States has been almost explicitly communistic and post-capitalist in orientation. But I think we can be a bit more specific about that, and I've already stuck on the sidebar 2 Wikipedia links to these forms of United Nations collectivization of the virtual frontier, virtual meaning it's not being tapped at this point. So both, you know, I think we need to refer both to the law of the sea, which is treating

the sea as something that's under sort of united nation purview for the good of humanity, and the outer space treaty, which we'll get to more next week, or the issues around it next week, which explicitly describes all off-planet resources as the common heritage of mankind. So I don't think it's any exaggeration. I think at the very least we're talking about a strong implicit defence of the commons in both these cases. And I think in a slightly more, but only slightly more extravagant or hyperbolic way we're

talking about a preemptive communization of the frontier and that these trends that we've been talking about in this course are moving into a horizon that has already been subject to this top-down, collectivist, universalist, managerial framework that is in place and controlling the legal context in which these kind of events are taking place. So counter to this, I think it's worth noting another little fact that comes up in the Doherty

piece in particular where again, quote, in April 2008, Friedman's vision received a tangible and encouraging business reward, a half million dollar stake from Peter Thiel, libertarian co-founder of PayPal. So Peter Thiel put half a million dollars, it's not a vast amount of sum but it's certainly not peanuts, into Seasteading after the pointed head who already received that label. Now I don't think that we've got a Dr. No available but the closest thing we've got is Peter Thiel. And I think it's worth extrapolating a little bit

and fictionalising or sort of abstracting from his position. I'm not wanting to pin what I'm going to say now on Peter Thiel, what he's trying to do. I think that's an interesting discussion itself. I'm interested in what Peter Thiel is suggesting or what can be suggested from Peter Thiel's decisions terms as a political economic intervention. If we were to assume a highly strategic intervention that would lead from a certain perspective to this kind of investment of fairly serious money in seesteating what's going on there.

And I think the thing that is really important to say that could be missed if we immediately head straight into the nuts and bolts issue which we're going to get onto is that the fundamental driver from that perspective, that as I say I could use the word hyperstational perspective is exit options. That's to say, by making seasteading more plausible and these other types of outer edges, these reopenings of the frontier more plausible to whatever extent that is possible, the effect

is to increase the exit pressure on the existing political infrastructure of the world. It doesn't require that someone personally is of such a bent that they are going to be a pioneer heading out into these extremely difficult early pioneering exercises to see them as having a political economic value. To see them as having a political economic value one would have to see that to some extent they reopen the dynamics, the social dynamics that were lost by the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century.

That's to say they give people choices to exempt themselves from existing regimes at a certain level of pressure. And in that way they are systematically connected to another set of concerns that I hope we we can touch on this week as well, which are to do with the forces of social repulsion that are required to drive some of these things. Like the decision to go out onto a sea stair is an economic trade-off, if you look at the

details of the incentive structures. And the factors involved in that, on the one hand, there's the pull factors, and on the pull factors are all of the actual difficulties of building a seastead. That's to say the pull factors are weak if seasteading is expensive, dangerous, socially isolating, economically difficult in terms of actually making a living on a seastead. Here are some of the pieces I've got at other factors, even low internet connectivity being one of them, the law of the sea puts limits on the kind of economic activities people can do.

These are actually all on the side of the pull factors, that they reduce the pull factor, they make sea stets unattractive and therefore they lower the incentive to engage in that kind of pioneering activity. There are also push factors, and the push factors is how much repulsion is actually coming from the existing social arrangements that people are leaving behind. And we could probably draw up a considerable list of that. They intersect very strongly with certain kinds of survivalist cultural themes and prophecies to do with increasing government tyranny, social collapse, ecological collapse, the

Guardian article that's actually the most recent of the ones that I gave and I'll link it again, connects the whole stuff up with climate catastrophe and says that if cities are going to be drowning due to global warming then that's going to be a push factor into some of this seasteading type activity. So to just return to Dr. No, to return to Peter Thiel, the motivation in that case is to try to lower the threshold, to try to actually ramp up the pull factor of seasteading so

so that its capability of competing with existing government arrangements in the epoch of the closed frontier are elevated. It's to therefore backtrack on the political economic consequences of a closed frontier. And I think people are very clear and basically realistic in linking this to Peter Thiel's libertarian politics. Like, if you are in the basic libertarian framework where you're looking for all exit and no voice, and therefore you're looking for exit... I don't want

to use the word exit options twice, but I think I have to. If you're wanting to accentuate exit pressure on political institutions, then the way to do that is to actually offer people increasingly attractive exit options. So that solving these social and technical problems to do with incentives and also the difficulties of just actually producing, creating survivable units are all part of making this option available and therefore reducing the bargaining position of the sedentary state organisation. Okay, I said five minutes, so I'm sure I've spent that time, and maybe just see what people

want to come in with at this stage. If anything. If everyone's feeling quiet, I might just read out what I thought was a really good quote from this Guardian piece, where Jessa Gamble, I'm afraid I don't know what the gender of that name is, if it matters, said, Until the late 1980s, nestled behind the Yan Ma Tai Great Water in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay, you could find tens of thousands of boat dwellers who formed a bustling floating district.

The residents were members of the Tangka community and their ancestors were fishermen who retreated from warfare on land to live permanently in their vessels. Until the mid-twentieth century, these traditional outcasts were forbidden even to step ashore. The Typhoon Shelter was famous for its restaurant's cuisine, including underbridge spicy crab, and it was a nightlife hub, alive with mahjong gamers and hired singers. Shops on sandpan float boats catered to the floating district's needs. It may seem like science fiction, but as rising sea levels threaten low-lying nations around the world, neighbourhoods like this may become more common. Whereas some coastal cities will double down on sea defences, others are beginning to explore a solution that welcomes approaching tides. What if our cities themselves were to take to the sea?

And I think that this quote is interesting both because it obviously ties it into this larger framework of climate apocalypticism which therefore takes on a very different set of political economic resonances to the ones I think we're generally used to, but But also for this little quote where it says that these fishermen retreated from warfare on land to live permanently in their vessels, and therefore emphasizing this push factor. So there is, I think if you're going to be really cynical about it, which I'm hoping Dr. No would always be, there is at the very least deep relaxation about catastrophic

catastrophic socio-political trends that actually becomes a positive inducer to a lot of these potentialities. Okay. Good morning. I had a thought. I think there might be a lot of rich language, and I think it's really interesting how seasteading affords a greater congruence between the form of life of the micro-nation or microstate and the form of government.

And so with land-bound countries, the government gets projected over regions of land. But with sea-setting, it seems like it would tend towards much more self-contained microstates that have a greater congruence with the physical form. Yes, I think that's right. I'd only say about this that I think even though that side has to be the most important, or maybe I could be pushed into retreating on that. At least I'm open to the strong possibility it's the most important side of this. The other side of it, and look, the starting point for me on this thing is there is no way I'm pretty confident

Peter Thiel is not about to set off to see and live on a seastead. I mean he is not a seastead pioneer, I'm willing to bet on that. So why would he care about this phenomenon? And the reason he would care about it is that the externality of seasteading, that people are slightly reserved about emphasising, perhaps because it does sound aggressive and because it would actually tend to accentuate resistance from existing political structures to these kind of innovations. But the big externality of it is that it puts pressure on land-based regimes because of

the fact that their populations now have this increasing possibility of escape. So even for the, go back to the sort of frontier time in America, like what was really going on there? Why did it shape America? It's not just because a whole bunch of people actually got in a caravan and headed west. It's that for everyone, even if they remained in the East Coast, there was a very distinct geographical exit option available where they could very affordably buy themselves a wagon and under certain circumstances,

if they considered that things had deteriorated or become oppressive to an unacceptable degree, they could head west. This is something, it's a virtual potential that completely saturates the whole social space. It's not something that's just restricted to those zones that actually are frontier zones, it's the way that the frontier washes back on the sedentary part of the political system and loosens its social attachments and in particular it loosens dependencies, it loosens structures of social dependency and that is what, I do not think

it as an exaggeration, say that is what gives America its peculiar historical character. It's the fact that there's no way they could have had a czarist government, you know, with those set of assumptions about the intensity of dependency between subjects and the state, of the fact that people had this escape route available to them. And we've seen that actually when you dial up social oppression to a certain level it becomes extremely sensitive to exit options, as we were saying last week, to the extent

that people don't even question the absolute coincidence of the fact that the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of all of these forms of restraint on the most crude physical form of exit absolutely coincided with the collapse of those regimes. The two were so closely connected that people don't even really make a distinction between them. But if you do take a step back and say it's actually interesting that a state could be utterly dependent upon him on the immobilization of his population. And I think this sort of stuff is going on in Teal. I think he's giving half a million bucks to Seasteading is a way of virtually reducing

levels of social dependency. Yeah. I mean, I think this thing Jake's saying is true, and I don't know how serious that is. I tend to be a bit blasé or complacent about it, because I'm sure that internet disconnection is becoming more and more impossible to do to people.

Surely you can get a good satellite-based net connection now from anywhere, can't you? Yeah, the infrastructure isn't there at present, but Google is doing stuff with high-altitude and suborbital, like cheap weather balloon like routing and I mean I know that Dish Network, the satellite company or television here in the United States is looking at the same kind of thing doing like global coverage satellite internet that would be affordable. So I mean it seems like a pretty parochial problem. Yeah, of all the problems being faced it doesn't seem to get high up the list to me. So I'm

agreeing with you on that, I mean it surely is a technical fix level problem of a fairly straightforward kind. Also, it seems to me that one of the obvious niches that would be available to something like this from an economic perspective is the sort of offshore data storage hosting outside of national government and legal purview. You know, the idea of Radio Luxembourg and that sort of thing, you know, these sort of off-the-coast radio broadcasters. Yeah.

Or even like, you know, The Matrix, hacking into The Matrix from your Nebuchadnezzar, which is sort of outside the network but hacks in and has its own sort of unofficial extra legal role. That would surely be an obvious way for these things to sort of sustain themselves economically and to keep providers off. And so the connectivity point would be quite central, it would be one of the highest priorities. You've got to have a really fantastic connection. I totally agree with two thirds of that, but I think one third of it then enters into a really complicated thing, because two thirds is one yes, it seems to me for sure the internet

is going to be the basic provider of sustenance, economic sustenance under these circumstances. That's my massive prior on this. Secondly, I agree on the economics of it. The problem is the politics of it, in the sense that if we're going to be concrete about the actual tangle of technical and political issues that are acting as the obstacles to getting this started, one of them is obviously the fact that there is an initial situation of completely asymmetric power between sedentary governments and whatever agents are involved in this project and I think it's the Doherty piece makes this explicit point that therefore

there's very strong incentives to try to be sneaky initially and to minimize those types of activities that look like direct challenges to state authority, you know, things that would be coded straight forwardly as criminal activities if they were done in a terrestrial state are, for the very reason that they are super attractive economically, are probably extremely problematic on the political level of this thing, because they incite strong counteraction

don't they, by existing governments at a point where the whole thing is so embryonic and weak that it would probably be easy to squash if it was annoying enough. Yeah, you don't want to be deliberately provocative. I mean, because you've got the existing, what they call the dark web tour and that sort of stuff. Yeah, if you were to set up an offshore data host and to promote that it's obviously the, because we're outside, we're not party to all these international treaties, it's the, you know, we're going to become the, I'd best as well go there, the child pornography hub of the world or whatever. You're just inviting military invasion, aren't you?

Because, you know, everyone is outraged. Sorry if that was distasteful. No, no, I think that's exactly right, yeah. But I was thinking more about Wikileaks, because I think they moved, didn't they, to somewhere like Iceland, and I think they've been investigating offshore solutions for their... Isn't Wikileaks in Russia? I mean, you know, it's a very interesting question, and I think it is crucial to the stuff we're talking about, because I think that WikiLeaks is now basically behind the Russian nuclear deterrent capability. I'm not sure it would be able to survive without 10,000 Russian ICBMs between it and the people whose eyes it's sticking its fingers in.

So, I mean, it's very, I think it's very, what makes this interesting is it's such a difficult question, because of course the only reason people want to do this stuff is to make problems for the sedentary state. But on the other hand, if that is full-grounded as the motivation, then you're heading into a whole world of hurt from the moment you cross the line, because you're basically, if not exactly an act of war, it's something that from the state's point of view is not massively dissimilar to that. That is the whole point of the whole thing though, isn't it?

Ultimately the goal is that we are going to do stuff, the whole point is we're going of is the purpose is to facilitate things that are impossible whether politically or legally or whatever in current states. As a strategy, yeah absolutely, you should probably, certainly at first, until you actually are self-reliant I suppose or can defend yourself or you know it's geopolitics isn't it? then I suppose you should advertise yourself as being voluntarily compliant and whiter than white and that sort of thing. I mean I think there is a huge kind of propaganda issue exactly about how you present it in

the most cuddly possible fashion. And I think that Patrick Friedman, I'm not saying, I think he's a cuddly kind of guy, so I'm not saying that he's doing this cynically, but were you being cynical about it, I think the result would be very similar in the sense that the way he defines the goals in terms of the benefits of experimental government and trying out new governmental forms and everyone will benefit from this learning process and you know it's actually quite brilliant in terms of its kind of minimization of the antagonistic element in its self-promotion.

And I do think it's probably very sensible that if there's a mainstream, it sounds ridiculous to say a mainstream seasteading sort of trend, but I think if there is one it would probably have to learn those sort of lessons and present itself in a way that doesn't look as if it's actually of course piracy, you know, from the word go. Yeah. I mean, as I said, there is that contradiction though, because if you're not going to do only think that you can't do now, what's the point almost?

Yeah, I think there's that. The dynamics. Yeah, I think that's true, and also equally antagonistic really is this whole thing about just lowering the negotiation position of the sedentary stay, so that you just rot it and honeycomb it by the fact that you just stuff it so full of these plausible exit options that it has to, you know, it loses its capacity to strike the kind of deals with its own populace that it would like to be able to do. And from its point of view, I imagine that's more annoying than child pornography, you

I mean it's a direct assault on its bargaining position, its power isn't it? Did you see, we probably have but I don't think we've actually seen it specifically before, and I'm going to keep on doing this, but mention unqualified reservations. Before he was kicked off the two more recent conferences, Strangeloop and Lambda, he was banned from

the Seasteading Conference after he, it was the whole thing with Chroma and Paul Romer. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, he wrote about it. Yeah, so he was rude about Paul Romer and was disinvited. But I'll post a link in the sidebar. At the end of it, after he was disinvited by Patrick, he posted his unedited view on Seastepping. Right, yes, yes.

Part of his critique was that because Patry was going about it in this cuddly way, as he said, essentially you're, and he discusses it in terms of the ring from the Lord of the Rings, that basically if you, there's a quote here, The problem is that the people you recruit in this manner will be people who read the New York Times. Thus a substantial percentage of the people on your ship will be people who believe in the New York Times. Are you starting to see how this might be an issue?

So I suppose that, you know, there is a danger, isn't there, if it becomes too mainstream. that you're going to fall within the same supranational structures? I mean, obviously, the alternative, there's the cuddly strategy, and hard strategies are ones that are intrinsically self-protective, aren't they? I mean, the example like this is obviously Bitcoin, is basically a hard strategy. people are trying to make it cuddly in lots of cases, but it's intrinsically hard, because it's just saying you cannot take this down

without actually uprooting the internet and ripping apart. So it is intrinsically secure, and the sort of equivalent on the CSTED thing would be to have an effective deterrent. So we're then back into the deterrent discussion, where you could say, you know, if you screw with us, we will actually fight back in a way that you will find extremely unpleasant. So that's the alternative side of this. But, yeah, just one thing about Moldbuck on this. I think it's important to mention that he does have a characteristic

that is very like Karl Marx, in the sense that the people that he just goes absolutely gonzo against tend to be people saying something that's very close to his own ideas. You know what I mean? Like his whole thing about Roma, his whole thing about Patrick Friedman, to me I just see this saying, you know, the fact that Marx just goes off the rails at say because he doesn't want people to actually, he wants them to stop looking at Say. He wants at least his people to just stop reading Say and stop thinking about it because he doesn't like that. And you can go through Marx and find the people where he just goes into irrational abuse

and they are always extremely interesting people saying something important. And I think it's the same, I'm not saying that Mobbuck, I mean, he went really over the top on the Roma thing. And with Robin Hanson as another example, you know, his whole Futurarchy thing. I mean, they're all ideas that would be seductive and interesting to exactly the sort of people who are taking his own thinking seriously. And I think he tends to try and just block them out in this rhetorical death wave, which I don't really think should work. I mean, I think people should push back against that.

Nick? Yes? Can you hear me? I can. I guess I've got a question about the, I guess the legal fictions that start to, like, define where the frontier, if we can call it frontier for seasteading, kind of commences. Because if we have to take a line that's, is it 12 miles out from... Right, that's the new one, I guess.

And then there's a 200-mile economic belt as well, which I think is the one that's the real killer. Yeah, so there's no... I mean, just the kind of... The idea that the frontier has a kind of backwardsman. Right. It's like that kind of front line has to immediately start with all the full conditions of seasteading. It can't kind of occupy like a marginal space at the shoreline. Yes. where the kind of technical conditions of seasteading might otherwise more kind of naturally commence.

You might sort of gradually start to occupy, you know, say a kind of flooded archipelago that forms in Kent or something. Yeah, totally. This is totally crucial and I think it needs to be said in terms of this that the ad hoc sort of cuddly hard sort of division maps this very strongly and the stuff that's actually being done is being done close to short. And that it's obviously a coherent package, and that means that it has to be done, actually I'd like to quote him, but I get it a little bit by memory, that I think it's Doherty,

sorry I've just been immersed in this and I'm getting them all scrambled up with each other. One of the articles I put up for this week says that precisely because of what you're talking about here and the fact that that means that the imperative of not antagonising the state is particularly strong because the places they're suggesting for these things is like Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, I mean San Francisco Bay is the absolutely hilarious one obviously for so many reasons, it's like of course it would be San Francisco Bay, I

mean sociologically and all of this kind of thing, it's a nice sheltered thing, it's obviously completely under the jurisdictional control of the United States and it's like you but it can tap into your Silicon Valley population and they can all you can sort of uber them across have a quick latte and then ferry them over to spend a bit of time on the seastead I mean it totally works on that sort of level but it does mean that exactly like you say you just cannot have the antagonistic approach for this and I think this is why You know, I would agree with probably people in a very hostile position who would want

to say that what's being done here is basically kind of insidious. I hope it's insidious, because if it's not insidious it loses what little interest it has. insidious thing is that you use these very moderate sort of experimental models in order to try to jack up the technology that will then become available for more extreme projects. And I think the analogy with the space thing that we'll be talking about next week is really strong. Look at the position that Elon Musk is in, you know, where it's kind of private space

activity but it has to be done in such close connection with the existing government space infrastructure that, you know, it's like servicing the International Space Station, all of this collaborative work with NASA that it's all rhetorically very noncombative and the argument is just to do that these social national projects are being outsourced to the private sector which is a completely different type of rhetoric to the one that would be that we're going to reopen the frontier, we're wanting to escape these kind of national constraints, you know, getting off planet is a way to get away from all this stuff.

And in both cases, the reason that you have this very inoffensive initial catalytic mode is that you want to get the technological infrastructure up to some sort of functional point in a non-antagonistic context to allow it later to be made available for other stuff. I think what you're saying is totally crucial. You cannot start with totally autonomous space activity in deep space. It's just, you know, there's no bridge between where we are now and what that would take.

And you can't start with anarchist collectives deep in the Pacific. It's just like there's no technological bridge that will get you from one to the other. So if you're building a path, that path at least this self-consolidating mainstream tendency is wanting to say, because the whole discussion is sensitive, but it's wanting to say if you want this technology you have to take these baby steps and those baby steps have to not have a hint of a kind of a narco-revolutionary rhetoric about them. This seems like a good place for the climate change and inland city extension

angles on this to come in, in terms of government collaboration, sanitizing this, and also rapidly ramifying the technology. Because I would argue that it's actually much more difficult to do something like floating the Ninth Ward or extending Manhattan or whatever. Maybe there's a couple projects off the Gulf Coast, or calls for them at least. One off of Alabama and then one, this one that I linked over there, looking for proposals to float New Orleans's 9th Ward. That would be a big technological achievement to be able to do anything like that, and it looks great from a public relations kind of perspective. Yes, I agree. I think that's right. That's excellent. And I mean, I don't want to be unfair on The Guardian.

There are, you know, it carries some good articles, but it's not a publication one would normally associate with sort of right-wing anarchism. And so for them to have this quite affectionate article about seasteading is quite interesting to me. And I think that the reason it's there is exactly what you're saying. I think that this whole climate change context that it's been put in allows for some really strange alliances to be put together, where you can say we're providing urban survival services to states being traumatized by climate change.

That doesn't sound Peter T.-lish in the slightest actually. Not at all, resettle refugees, the trash conversion thing, that garbage patch the size of whatever it is, Texas or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. That will eventually play its role for sure, I think, that entity. Yeah. So, sorry, what's Derek's just put a link there? Oops. It's a link to an old Archigram project, which envisages using, I think, space colonization

technologies within a sea colony. It's from the 1960s. Right. Yes. But one of the consequences of the modular approach that's being taken to thinking of the kind of technical constraints of like building a Seastead module takes everything into those old mega structural projects. It's all about kind of building these sorts of networks of I guess very kind of teleological

linear modernist structures that start to become the form that the cease and take. If there is this kind of intent to hide or masquerade this projected, free, more liberated space that the seastead has as its goal, then I guess that goal is as teleologically motivated

and linear and structural as it kind of sounds. How does one get beyond that kind of line? create a frontier, but the frontier is this, is this metabolist rather than catabolic kind of structure. Well, I don't know, I don't know, it's interesting. I mean the example that, you know, which, this is beyond the edge of my historical grasp or whatever, so I'm just trusting him on this. this Knessdoga wagon technology. I mean it's quite an interesting example in this, isn't it?

It too is a kind of modular unit, I'm assuming. You know, it's open to being sort of standardized, mass produced, and a certain kind of techno-economic infrastructure is put together that just knocks these things out and you get the sort of normal benefits of industrialization such that they become reliable, there are interchangeable parts that are available for them, they're affordable to people. And yet, the effect that's being sort of suggested of that is that they become quite radically liberating in the sense that they just provide this extreme alternative social option to

people you know that anyone who can afford one of these wagons it's not like you have to be in some super privileged economic strata to be able to do that you know you suddenly your continued residency within the existing political space is structured by this virtual alternative, you know, and you could always pull up stakes and leave because of this technological possibility. Now obviously we don't have a kind of staggered wagon of seasteading, is there? And so I think this is a very systematic attempt to replicate that historical process, and

And then the question is, well, what is a realistic historical pathway that would get you to having these kind of stable wagons, these new ones that would just open up a new frontier? And obviously from the point of view of the economy, the existing economy, it's an attractive new industry. If it was big enough to sort of boot itself up and there's people building these things and maybe international competition to do it better and the technological tweaking gets faster and faster, all of this stuff that I'm constantly repeating about Elon Musk's forcing functions, that it's happening enough to get some momentum behind it. So I'm not sure whether I'm exactly quite, I hope I've not peeled away from your point

on this, but it's just like when you say a teleology, it's got a kind of, the teleology is kind of an emergent effect, it seems to me, of this kind of thing. And it's being anticipated as an emergent effect, so it's quite an interesting circuit. I think Amy's been frantically posting material from Constance near Babylon, which is the other kind of more, I guess, kind of cybernetically oriented version of these kinds of structures, the kind of consequences of taking this sort of modular connectivity.

Here, let me look at that. Maybe Amy should talk about it. That would be good. I actually don't know a heap about it, apart from a few little things. But as far as I know, the cities that he conceived were moveable, and the idea was that they would constantly migrate by using this principle of modularity that Friedman talks about. People could reposition their modules, they could turn them into different, or kind of realign their functionality. It was kind of like just this conceptualisation of Asidia's play. But the idea that it would slowly migrate across a terrestrial space

was very interesting because people would obviously reattach and detach nodes. But, I mean, you're the architect, Derek, so maybe you know more about this. If you wanted to jump in, that would actually be really cool for me to hear what you had to say about it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure what more to add in a way. It is precisely as you know, there were, you know, between the 50s and the 70s, there were a number of these kind of structures, the ideas of play and cybernetics kind of filtering through visionary architecture. you know

the New Babylon comes out of the kind of situationist and Archigram kind of I guess closer to sort of pop science fiction not really built examples of of anything but the ideas I think are something that could really see some great connectivity with the seasteading concepts and the larger or broader concept of dynamic geography. I do see a kind of great affinity overlap. But I specifically mentioned the Metabolists,

which was a kind of Japanese movement around the same kind of era as Archigram were operating, so later in the kind of 1960s. And I think the seasteading, or the idea of dynamism within seasteading, needs a kind of post-metabolic kind of approach, which was the kind of point I was trying to get to. Is there a kind of catabolic architectural manifesto in the making? But I'm the wrong person really to do that. Well, that's already really helpful.

Sorry, I hadn't realized how concrete your metabolism was. I mean, sorry, my ignorance here is... Yeah, sorry. ...deeating me about this. So I can see immediately it's somehow connected then with this. Yeah, I'm worried about sort of losing myself in a bunch of Wikipedia articles. Sure, I mean, I can post some links to the classroom later. I mean, I think move on to something else. Yes, I think even just that name is really good. Yeah. I don't know, it's interesting, this metabolism-catabolism thing.

So, yes, I was seeing it as much more abstract than this. I mean, I wonder how it does. Do you know why they called themselves metabolists? Oh, God, I can't remember. I'm sorry. I mean, it is, you know, in a sort of scientific framework, it's beyond a kind of metaphoric kind of use of the metabolic. Right. Yes. I think that the criticism, sorry, I will stop, but the criticism is that you end up

with this kind of hierarchical tree-like structures, which was the risk that Amy's moved us into the kind of new Babylon forms, which obviate that risk kind of totally. But the criticism of the Metabolist movement was this kind of hierarchical, modernist, linear sense of time and growth, which is entirely kind of hierarchical. It's hierarchical, I mean concretely it's hierarchical because the modular standardization

presupposes some kind of social structure capable of that kind of activity, or I'm not sure I'm exactly getting what the meat of this critique is in this case. Yes, structurally. Yes, structurally. But as a consequence, socially as well. Derek, was there an aspect with the metabolic architecture where the technology just wasn't there in a way? Like the technology wasn't able to catch up with the vision in the mid 20th century,

but you can sort of imagine we have a different technological generation now. You know, like you can combine something like this with 3D architecture and with the ability to model curved spaces and sort of achieve them. Like it seems like there's a lot, you know, the enabling technology might have changed. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it's a... I don't want to get everything sidetracked in this. No, no, it's really good. Don't be all in here. There were... I'm trying to remember. Kenzo Tang, I think, is one of the Metabolist architects.

did build actual buildings, but there was also this kind of more visionary line which, as is the case with this, even the kind of visionary structures that you see in some of the seasteading material, has that at the outer edges of constructability. Right. So I think it's Adam that asked me that question. Yes. The technologies have of course radically changed since then. The ideas though I think are very, very similar.

very similar well I mean there's obviously a bifurcation point that gets blurred when we're talking about the sort of the selling of seasteading within a threatening or oppressive socio-political environment so that tends to obscure some of the boundaries here but there's a it seems to me there's a big fundamental bifurcation about the point that within the dominant architectural traditions that

some kind of coherent centralized social approval is accepted as a kind of an element within the architectural project. So obviously the architecture has an interesting complex relation to politicisation, but the normal way it evolves is to say that we've got this architectural vision and we need to, we're being pushed into politicisation by the need to provide the socio-political context or framework in which that vision can be realised. certain sort of rigidities or conservative structures or whatever in the existing socio-political

apparatus is acting as an obstacle that's preventing the realisation of this kind of more or less utopian architectural policy. It seems to me that the C-setting thing, it's written off the possibility of achieving an integrated political resolution such that this vision will become realizable. It's rather the vision is actually intrinsically disintegrative and sort of oriented to escape and in a way that can't be completely…

Is it me or you guys are also experiencing Nick? Yeah, everything just dropped out. Oh, yeah? Where are we now? No. We're all here, and you hear you had a little glitch. OK, OK, yeah, that's probably true. You might want to repeat the last two sentences. Well, I'm just interested in this thing about whether, to what extent the comparisons that Derek is making between the kind of architectural dimension of seasteading and these other architectural traditions is subject to this very basic bifurcation in the sense that the kind of solution, the socio-political solution that one is led to by a certain kind of, I

think, recurrent tendency to utopianism in architecture seems to me very different to line, the seasteading line, which the whole point is you're trying to use these capabilities in order to provide exit options, and an exit option is not an attempt to, I mean it's you know, very very crudely I would say it's back to the voice exit distinction again, the architectural utopianism tends to be carried further and further into political voice, to say we want to do this stuff just as architects, but we can't because we have these social

obstacles and so we're forced to politicize ourselves in order to collectively transform an environment such that it becomes conducive to these types of developments. So I don't know, maybe I'm over emphasizing that distinction. There's something in the... I mean, there's something in the... It's somewhere in the distinction between like the... It's like the movement to some other set of conditions like an island versus the construction

of a relatively ideal set of conditions. Seasteading inevitably is establishing for itself. It's almost as though it's not the... I think this comparison between the smooth space and dynamic geography is somehow generating set of conditions which are really, have within them the potential to be articulated in an

entirely striated form. So I think that's the risk that I'm highlighting in that kind metabolic, catabolic architectural. I mean, the catabolic architectural space doesn't... Oh, sorry, Derek, I'm losing you just at the minute. You're losing me, okay. Yeah, no, you're back again now. Sorry, my connection. It looks like it should be good now. Sorry, just last sentence. Your last sentence. I think I need to spend a bit of time just thinking through what might be the implications of a catabolic... architecture rather than a metabolic architecture. I can see the kind of legal fictions being generative of or kind of imposing this kind

of scheme onto a form of architecture that isn't the one that would facilitate the kind of dynamism, the political dynamism that is intended. So I'll have to withdraw I think just to… Yeah, no, it's good. I think that I've certainly got a lot of new reading to do from this thing. And it's absolutely fascinating that this metabolic language is there so firmly installed. And I apologize to everyone for being so unaware of it.

But, yeah. I mean, I'm assuming it's relatively unproblematic, terminologically, to say that this model of of the WAC is intrinsically catabolic in the sense that it's basic, the capability that it opens up is to allow for forms of disintegration to take place that couldn't occur without And that's the form of modularity that within the seasteading discourse seems to be basic

to them. I think, you know, why do they think modularity is good? I mean, they think modularity is good because obviously you can have dynamic geography. Now is dynamic geography inherently anti-metabolic? I don't know. I don't know, I mean, I'd have to look and see what this whole situationist's take on that would be. It seems to me weird if they're saying that, is it not? It seems a much more anarchistic end point than I would have thought the situationist would be happy with embracing. I wonder about how much or to what extent this modularity needs some kind of like universal

interface platform to build itself on. So when Friedman talks about it, this idea that you can disconnect from any particular cluster, reconnect with your neighbors or your new friends or whatever, it needs a kind of architectural material interface so you can hook your stead up to another group easily and you don't end up with some kind of messy configuration like the raft in Snow Crash. So to what extent, and maybe like Derek I'm kind of asking for you to jump in again too, to what extent do we need a sort of universal operating system, architectural operating system to ensure that this modularity is fluid enough for it to be active?

And does that actually matter? Can we kind of override that just by the kind of desire to create these new spaces? Maybe another way to phrase that is to what extent does this idea of decentralization require some kind of universal platform? Yes. I mean it's a crucial discussion. This whole thing about standards is obviously totally crucial. The internet is a massively, truly massive event in the course of disintegration but But it requires common standards in order to do that.

And so, yeah, your hooks and plugs and all of that stuff that would allow your modules to be attached and detached from each other. I think, sorry, one of the... The idea of homesteading, this was language that was used by the VR pioneers as well, wasn't it, about cyberspace and homesteading the net. Right. People like, I can't remember their names, like Howard Reingold and those sorts of early early 90s VR homesteaders

but they I think it's the same set of conditions with the frontier where we're essentially in a deregulated space where with seasteading kind of homesteading the sea everyone from the beginning is seems to be acutely aware, acutely conscious, and rightly because someone's going to nuke them or something if they're not cognizant of the maritime law.

So the legislative conditions are totally different to the frontier condition. shaped by legal fictions rather than by mythological fictions of other frontiers. So I think there's a question about what sort of basic conceptual images we have for this. that I'll just put out there, I mean, people might think this is totally wrong,

is if you take the closure of the frontier as an epoch, as a thing we're talking about, and it has some kind of center of gravity at the point of sort of maximum elimination of exit options, And it has an open, ragged historical edge in the past where the frontier was radically open and you could sort of migrate beyond government control into this, what is a zone of massive, as you say, sort of resilient sort of libertarian mythology and the notion of the homestead.

It's no coincidence, even the very notion of property has been put together historically in relation to this notion of homestead. You look at the whole sort of Lockean, Rothbardian attempt to sort of get to the atomic structure of property and it's totally tied up with this primitive homesteading relationship where you own what you can actually put together under those sort of circumstances and everything else as a kind of parasitic secondary derivative structure. But then sort of going forwards you're coming out of that gully of state maximalism, Leviathan

maximalism, and obviously the early stages of that slope are, as you say, deeply shaped and configured by the fact that you are just exiting this pessim or minimal frontier condition where it's been completely suppressed. But as you go up the slope and off-planet activity is becoming realistic and deep sea de-steading activity is becoming realistic, then you are moving truly into a kind of smooth space.

So maybe this condition you're talking about is just to do with the fact that you're in this particular basin of deep state of traction that you're crawling out of or you're looking retrospectively about how you fell into it. I just wonder whether it's also to do with the... Occupying the sea bed gives you somewhere to hide. In deep space you can land on an asteroid and you can be hidden again, but on the surface

of the sea, you're on this kind of measured surface. I don't know what the... If you look at science fiction literature, for example, you see mysterious islands and you see submersible machines, you know, kind of Nemo's under the sea or hidden on a mysterious island isn't he? So the surface is a much more kind of observed and therefore problematic space. Right. Exposed. Exposed, yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they actually used it in the article, but just the titular language of the Reason article describing it as the long tail of nations in a statistical sense, where you have this sort of large peak of the original frontier stage that dominates a large amount of land and then it's a point where diminishing returns, where it maximizes that territory and then you see this long tail of expansion as driven by, I mean, the long tail in CISIX is just that he's increasing outliers, which you could view in a jurisdictional, theological sense, and his exposure to contingency, which is a sort of like smooth space where you're

exposed to different kinds of environments and different pressures, you know, on how they have to be modulated. I'm not sure what you can take away from that. It's good, I agree, it's really interesting. Yeah, anything that's got outliers in it has to be good, for sure. Yeah, and even maybe that does allow for a certain amount of rhetorical smoothing. it tends to sort of suppress the kind of antagonistic, dialectical kind of character of it, of saying look it's not that we're trying to cause trouble, it's just we're the long tail, you know, this is just the problematic, miscellaneous, atypical fringe of what is of course your

normal system and no one is challenging your claim to normality. So that should be soothing perhaps. Yeah, for sure, and it's pretty easy to deploy the arguments for that to rest on, just like there's, I mean I would think a fairly limited proportion of the population that's ever going to be able to live on the sea, you know for technological and financial and all kinds of reasons, and it's never going to be like a military challenge to anything going on on land, like maybe you know in terms of the exit pressure thing like some sort

of marginal political one, but you could definitely cast the narrative that way pretty easily. Yes, I would think so. But I would definitely rest on that last statement, because, I mean, it is a kind of intrinsic military challenge to have anything outside of your orbit of control, isn't it? I mean, and earlier in the thread, people were saying, hey, you know, what would be a great economic opportunity for seasteads? totally unregulated AI research. I mean, for sure there are people who wouldn't see that as a military challenge, but I think they're not necessarily the deepest speculative analysts on the...

What book is that where that's like, I think you've mentioned reading it before, that's like a major... It's River of Gods is the one where like the whole data haven concept is basically like an AI experimentation project or concept, because it's locked down everywhere else. Right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I mean, I've seen a lot of political arguments, and I think they're interesting because they're not easily ideologically typed, but they're a sort of integrationist, sort of authoritarian argument saying in the age of accelerating X-risk it simply cannot

be allowed that you have this runaway autonomy to engage in activities that have these kind of collective existential implications for the human race. I mean it's a good, you know, I tend to see it as basically a kind of ultimately a communist argument but I mean I've seen sort of wacky right wing versions of it as well, depending on your definition of right wing. And you know, that's bound to grow for sure. I mean, just in the sense that so much of the notion of what is the kind of collective

global political administrative infrastructure is attending to these kind of issues isn't it? Nuclear proliferation, biological research, various kinds of new biotechnical options, obviously the whole AI issue, I mean that can only be something that escalates it seems to me and as it does escalate it's one critical context for this question about how tolerable are these kind of plans for autonomous political experiments. Right, and it's definitely interesting, I mean I was like yesterday or something, I saw

someone on Twitter making an argument that I thought was really sort of, oppression isn't quite the word, but like ahead of its time, which is like well you can have your Christian nation or you can have your democratic socialist order, but you're all going to deal with the problem of somebody resurrecting smallpox in their garage. And that's your fundamental constraints. Yeah, I think that's totally right. And obviously on the flip side, as we've seen, it's into the contemporary theory of deterrence. I mean, from the normal side, the side of the existing X-Risk suppression discourses,

these are just things that some maniac might do unless stopped. But obviously on the other side, they become these critical game theoretical resources. If you're going to say, like Derek saying, you're out and totally exposed in a situation where there's, you know, you could be destroyed at any moment by a hostile state, then the only thing that you have got if you don't have a political deal with them is a deterrence capability. I mean, all of this ex-risk stuff is just deterrence capability under a different coding format. Yes, maybe your move is to covertly start developing AI as a way of developing military

force that can't be seen as pre-empting the military capabilities of states. Yeah, there is obviously a convergence of this. You look at something like Stuxnet or you look at these kind of advanced cyber war capabilities And, you know, they are continuous with the AI X-Risk problem, aren't they? I mean, there's no... They're obviously not at this stage the same thing, but there's a clear continuum. And you can see how, like, with all... With every use of military AI, its use in cyber war has its intrinsic vector

towards the fact that you want to, you're driven to pack more and more intelligence into these devices because they're coming up against more and more sophisticated resistance and you've got more and more sophisticated military functions that you want them to carry out and so it's already the case that there is a real common matrix to these two things You know, the AI systems as we already have them as weapon systems, so to just move them up the track to massive deterrence weapon systems is just something that's following

a kind of extremely powerful trend. I don't honestly see how that's even stoppable. I mean, the state. It's so much more elegant and obvious than the original SkyNet proposal, like to have a self-regulating, self-adapting cyber defense proposal, because basically you're constructing a system that is engaging in homeostasis at an effectively cognitive level, yeah, for sure. And especially with these smart grid proposals, where you're intrinsically infrastructure warfare is something that you're defending against, you know, in constructing them in the first place and you're building in intelligent self-regulatory functions, I mean then you're

extending it into, I mean specifically urban world but like the physical and energetic world and so forth. Yeah, actually that Skynet point is totally brilliant I think, I mean you know, yeah, it's totally fascinating that it's like Skynet is conceived within the context of nuclear deterrent, the whole thing is that it has no sense of its intrinsic character as an AI being a weapon system, it's rather that in a context of nuclear rivalry there is this kind of emergence of a sort of artificial intelligence managerial structure, but the

The line is crossed at the point where the AI is itself seen as the payload. Forget the nukes, the AI is the weapon. And it's not that AI being a weapon has to be an accident, I mean that's just cute to think that. We can see back to Stuxnet again, it's not an accident that Stuxnet broke things, it it was built to break things, and it was completely rational within that competitive structure that it was built to break things. Right, absolutely. Yeah, and the whole Skynet narrative and in general the crossover from Skynet to Cybernet

or whatever is this sort of weird reflection of the move from a logic of deterrence to a logic of preemption that, you know, I'm assuming talks about and on to power and that we've hit multiple times in different ways. Because you have this logic of mutually assured destruction and deterrence builds up to this point where you need instantaneous reactions and you need absolute managerial control. And it produces of itself this cross into the logic of preemption where you try to pull the plug and kill it and then it just nukes everyone. And then in this cyber case, it has to preemptively build up the ability to control its own borders and resistance to memetic warfare and so forth in order to be ready for the next wave of cyber attack. Yeah, this conversation I'm sure is absolutely loved by the cuddly C-step types.

Exactly. Within six steps we're from a cuddly C-step in San Francisco to a global AI apocalypse. Can we talk about accidents for a second? Yeah, sure. So there's something that I was noticing in the last two paragraphs of the Doherty piece. Oh yeah? I didn't find it. Okay, so there's like two kind of philosophical maxims compressed in those last two paragraphs. The first one is empiricism.

So to quote Doherty, Friedman tells me, So let's do it. Let's live it. It could be a disaster. People might die. But living it makes it so much more powerful than talking about it. End quote. Doherty, through burning man, he adds, he's, quote, seen the power of experience to shape people's perception about what's possible. Yeah. And then just after that, the next one, the next maxim that's expressed is this idea of the ruin of epistemology. So what would the experience of living on a seastead be like? Social structures will arise, sorry, what social structures will arise in a liberated ocean Friedman recognizes that it's neither possible nor necessary for him to know.

In his words, it's, quote, an enormous relief to realize that we can just throw off our hands and safely leave some of the questions philosophers have been discussing for millennia unresolved. So I was wondering if we could talk about this as a model for a sort of empirical pursuit in full acknowledgement of non-epistemological traction on the result. Well, I mean, the difficulty of that is only adding something to what's… I mean, I totally agree with the kind of… with emphasizing that, and I think that this is… I feel I've had so many of these arguments before, I mean, just to get totally personal about it, you know, I think my endless argument with Pete Wolfendale on this topic is exactly

in this zone, this and that. I mean, it's about the question of whether... And it's also, Amy, your question you're raising about the standards. The standards thing also docks onto it very nicely, doesn't it? So it's about... The whole thing can be formulated in terms of radical empiricism. I think 100% that is right. And I don't know, it has some weird features. It has some weird features now. Because obviously the weird feature it has that's kind of enraging in certain contexts

and all of this kind of stuff is the fact that it isn't an argument. Or it's a simulated argument. This is the thing that has Pete sort of jumping on the table and stuff. to say, you're making an argument, but obviously it's like, and Patrick Friedman would have the same effect on people, you know, that it seems like this is a debate, but actually the whole point of what is being said from his side is that that debate is completely beside the point, and the whole point of what he's trying to do is to sideline the debate and marginalize the debate in terms of these actual pursuit of experimental options.

And the more that what's happening in that experimental process is interesting, the more comical and irrelevant this kind of preliminary and inevitably kind of aprioristic debate structure becomes relative to those processes. So I don't know, I don't think I've got anything to add to that, other than just to say I totally agree about the massive significance of that. I mean, its corollary in this debate is the pre-emptive communism that you talked about before, the kind of declaration of the commons of space, and whether or not that ultimately has traction on the processes that Friedman is describing is, I think, the question.

of this whole thing. Yes, I think that that's to pan out to the largest degree, I think you know, you can then bring it in and tighten the focus, but for sure the horizon is pre-colonised, it's been pre-formalised or pre-settled, all of this language is wrong because it's all empirical language by this structure of implied universality. I think it's crucial this terminology of the common heritage of mankind.

Because it sounds so completely innocent, and I'm not saying that someone wouldn't want to defend that. For sure lots of people want to defend it. But what they're defending and defending that is something incredibly substantive. They're not simply just defending some kind of default, some harmless default, which obviously in some ways, you know, I don't want to get too lost in this, but what was going through the heads of American negotiators when they signed off on that? It's just unimaginable. It's just to say they might as well have gone in there with their kind of hammer and sickle t-shirts on and all just agreed, you know, look we're all communists here, of course

we've got no problem signing away all possible frontiers to the authority of the human collective. It's absolutely staggering. Yeah, I think James is right. I'm trying to avoid continuous mold bug references, but I have to say that one makes a lot of sense to me. Yes, absolutely. Antarctica too, for sure. Anything that could be a frontier. I mean, it's just absolutely incredible, really. Because the only things that are exempted from that, I mean I'm sort of going full circle

to why I started this at the start, but I think it is fascinating this, I think it is fascinating this thing about, you know, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism, when everything that was actually in the zone of imagination, that was actually this virtual frontier, was thoroughly communist. I mean it's almost to me 180 degrees raw that everything we could imagine is communist, the only things that are, is the stuff that was sort of already structured in such a way

that it was not open to being signed off to the imagination. So America somehow avoided becoming the common heritage of mankind only because of the fact that that thing already had actualised itself to some extent. But, you know, like you're saying, space, the ocean, Antarctica, anything that is potentially an open frontier has been kind of legally put under the purview of virtual communism. And that is the horizon for sure, yeah. The only other paradigm is the sort of mega corporations around the world which sort of

crops up in anime and things, doesn't it? Which is sort of... That's not capitalist, really. It's very corporatist, because you've got these corporations are now more powerful than nation states. I think Ghost in the Shell was based on that sort of world, I think. Megatokya. But I'd love to see a sort of... They may exist, I don't know, but a sort of... it doesn't have to be cyberpunk, but a good sci-fi that is based on a sort of libertarian sci-fi, that has a different imagining of a future that isn't communist without actually explicitly setting it out, just assuming that that's a sort of state of the nature of the future.

Right. But this I-Batsu model, you know, for sure it's big, this notion that the giant corporations will control everything. But where were they? when the United Nations was being given all of this authority. I mean, the Zybatsis did not get them written into any of this structure of international law relative to these new frontiers quite explicitly. Obviously, their position, at least at the point that all of that legislation, in international legislation was drafted was completely pitifully weak.

I don't know whether through their own lack of ambition or because everyone just thought this stuff was science fiction. I mean, it makes it actually illegal to do asteroid mining. You know, it's actually against international law to do private asteroid mining in the current setup. I mean, how did that get, how did that get? Is it because the firms that would be lobbying, you know, in that area don't exist yet? Because if you look at, it's not as if these sort of international organisations aren't vulnerable to, and we're going way off topic, but aren't vulnerable to lobbying.

I mean, if you look at, there's all the furore around the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the T-tip and that basically these things have been written by corporations and puts them on an equal footing and they can sue governments and all this stuff and you know I don't know what the merits of those things really are, those arguments. But because it's so sort of, it's, we're talking about real sort of futures you know, industries that don't exist, no, no, no, only not exist. Yeah. But it's all a bit irrelevant, isn't it? You know, it's a bit like they could try and have an international treaty on, you know, time travel.

But when it comes to it and actually the technology's developed, I mean, the situation would have so overtaken the stupid little agreement that they've come up with. Like if there is this space exploration does produce exponential wealth, this agreement isn't going to hold water really, is it, for the next 5,000 years? No, it's hard to imagine that. And it's also a product of a sort of 20th century regime. And I would, you know, would you wager that it will last longer than, long enough to still

be around when we have, when this technology eventually comes to fruition? Well it's about 50 years old now, isn't it? I think the Space Treaty actually was first in 1967 and then the laws of the sea were put together in the early 70s and revamped in the 90s. But I mean the ironic effect of this stuff is it means that anyone who does want to engage in these frontier activities for the most, let's just say the most mercenary reasons, it doesn't require any ideological fervour, just someone wants to make a lot of money kind of tearing minerals out of asteroids, they automatically sort of predefined as engaged

in some kind of piratical activity, like it's an engine of radicalization in that respect. The United Nations is their enemy by definition because of this structure of legislation. So unless there's some way of dismantling this whole legislative framework, it just means that the United Nations is kind of being determined as the opponent of all frontier activity, all private frontier activity. It's true, but when they had those, it was a few years ago, the Somalian piracy activity and whoever it was, the Horn of Africa or whoever it was, they had enough trouble stopping

that. Yes, yes, yes. On planet Earth with all of the world's militaries fully on board with this is a bad thing that must be stopped. But the crucial point there James is that that is piracy. So those guys have got, I mean okay they've only got AK-47s or all of that kind of thing, but they've running the Jolly Roger or whatever their version of that is and openly defying the, you know, a million, quote marks, international community. Whereas the big companies that are going to be engaged in the capital intense side of this thing, Astrid Money, do not want to be running up the Jolly Roger right now, do they?

I mean Elon Musk is going out of his way to not run up the Jolly Roger. None of these people do. saying Patrick Friedman doesn't want to run up with Charlie Roger, and he's an anarchist, or I don't think he described himself as that anymore. So you know what I'm saying, it's like it forces you into a kind of posture of defiance, however reluctant you might be to adopt that posture. But it might also, do you not think, overestimate the clout of the UN, especially if America were on board with it and you could get the American government on the side of this being done.

I just think that they would happily stick two fingers up to the United Nations on the issue and say well, what are you going to do about it? You mean private businesses would? Yeah, you know, private businesses can lobby, they can lobby the American government. I think that would probably be enough in practice. I mean the interesting thing though is that it suppresses this sort of small entrepreneurial effect, which is very frontier-like. So it's very hard to get these little developments and be covered.

So it's another push away from a frontier space because it increases that cost. Okay, maybe a big zaibatsu or whatever decides to lobby because they see it in their interest, It actually is quite different from this sort of dynamic geography process, I guess. Yes, I think that's a good point. There's obviously a kind of preset like left libertarian critique of the whole thing that going down that road and say all of this structure is designed for the most apple polishing level

of big capital to have a regulatory framework which has high barriers to entry, is impossible to navigate unless you have good political connections. And these companies will be up there saying, you know, we're doing all our activity in the name of the common heritage of humanity or some such, you know, slight updated version of making the world a better place type Silicon Valley rhetoric. So I can totally see that being a reading of it. But it's so constrictive at the moment. It is extraordinary. I mean the Antarctic for instance is closed, doesn't it?

You basically have to have a government mandate as a scientist or whatever to do anything there at all. I think we've got a whole sidebar totally obsessed with time travel legislation. United Nations time travel legislation. Yeah, sorry, I've been pulling stuff into slightly digressive zones as much as anyone

Yeah. I should have included the Antarctic Treaty on this. It's funny that very easily Antarctica could be a further, just time-wise, a further frontier

than space. I mean, just depending, it looks like melting is happening faster, at least like relative to ice volume in the Arctic than it is in the Antarctic and then you add sort of just like the sheer distance of environmental difficulty and we may have like a reasonable foothold in orbit before anybody is clustering around the Antarctic shoreline. Yeah, it's massively ironic in the sense that obviously even compared to seasteading the technological challenges are tiny, you know, like it's obviously an inhospitable environment in certain respects, but I mean, you know, you can breathe, I mean that's a kind of, that's a big one.

So, and I think we've already had in some other part of this whole thing, whole prospect of putting server farms and all of this stuff that requires cooling, data storage cooling. I mean, the Soviets already, not Soviets, the Russians already put a whole bunch of this stuff up in the north, don't they? So yeah, so I agree with you, it's like it would be utterly ironic that this, what technologically would be the, like, you know, falling over log is potentially going to be the last one

to pull. Yeah, it seems so about. It's history protecting us from what's lurking and the parts that don't show up. Right, sure, yeah, I don't know what's there. Yeah. So let me see whether there's any major str… I mean, obviously, like, it's unrealistic to think we're going to start going into the nuts and bolts level of the sea setting thing about whether, no, there's no way you could

build this thing for $100,000. I did connect the Gammish paper, didn't I? I mean, it is quite extraordinary. I'll see if I can find this key thing. But the whole heart of his article is about this plastic, using plastic beverage bottles

as a kind of, what he calls, what's he called it, some sort of the C-cell concept. So I think that you get these structures by using some photovoltaic process to kind of harden up the skin of coke bottles and all of that stuff and that's your fundamental technological procedure. Yeah, here we go.

He says, I figure that an initial one acre seastead, which is pretty big, isn't it, could be built by a relatively small dedicated team of volunteers for between $10,000 and $100,000. Now this is an old piece but it's not that old. So I mean it's absolutely crazy. saying that people might only need to put an investment of 500 bucks to get themselves

a chunk of a one-acre sea-sail estate. Yes, no, that's true, what Amy's saying. I mean, okay, just a glorified trauma of suicide. Yes, I saw that quote. But still worth a try. Oh yeah, did you see Joshua's thing?

So someone has got a one-acre floating home island. I think someone has to say one more highly provocative thing just to push us to the finishing line. I know lots of people that are like, Amy must be like four in the morning or something so hideous to even mention. I'm not sure if I can achieve highly provocative, especially even the distance we've already covered, but the metabolic architecture discussion earlier, which I had to dig into more myself,

It reminded me of this idea that I would sort of expect the nature of the design of the modules, whatever your modules are, to have this interconnected property, and that's sort of politics being expressed in technology. but i would also expect arm this limit to style expressed in that modularity uh... which is isn't committed to this idea of relatively small independent communities arm you kind of have you know

you kind of the more awkward to do to put together more than my carol hundred or a couple hundred of these things. And you see those sort of reinforcing mechanisms, for instance, in stateless sort of communities in Southeast Asia and whatnot. So I would expect it to scale, to allow modules to break off but also to allow them to come together but only to a certain limit, basically. Yeah. You mean that there would actually be some explicit protocol to resist agglomeration

beyond a certain scale? Beyond a certain point. It would support, I don't know, somehow intuitive to me, that like, yeah, you could agglomerate into villages and even small towns or something, but baked into the protocol, I guess it's sort of reminiscent of these sort of blockchain takeover type problems, right, where you need certain proportions of minors to vote. I think that's one parallel and you can also see this sort of stuff in social structures

where when a leader gets a certain amount of power they basically chop him down in various ways, nice or not so nice. So yeah, I guess because there's such a technological substrate to this, I would expect that sort of thing. And you get it in a very basic geometric form with something like a wagon train, right, or these sort of wagons that you can circle. Like there's only so many you can pull together into this circular structure. I mean this one actually, this time of docking and integration, disintegration, I mean the tessellation problem there seems severe to me. Like assuming it's not just a linear structure,

how do you not just lock in the internal module so that they just can't get out? I mean, that would be, in terms of what you're saying, almost a sort of self-organizing element of that. Like, if it grows beyond a certain scale, the amount of social disruption that would be involved in taking an internal unit and dismantling your platform in such a way that it can actually be extracted would be huge. Well, that's true. It's like, okay, that's it. We're out of here. these ten houses which are in the middle of the suburb of this floating island, you know,

you then have to convince everyone in the park to get out or I guess. Yeah, I mean it's like the problem. Yeah, for sure. It's just a design problem though isn't it? A what problem? I can imagine a scenario where you've got these units and you have collections of them but pathways in between them. Right. Yeah, I think it's doable so that one can unlock and sort of scoot away down the canal and there are sort of bridges and whatever. I think that's doable.

I mean it would be interesting to see how like the Feasteading Institute if they took an interest in trying to develop these standard, an open standard and encouraging private firms to develop for it and also we talked about I think how there might be uses for similar things that they could sort of sell their technology to these climate change sensitive parts of the world where Bangladesh or wherever so that they can be houses, cheap houses that are floating on the water. Sorry, go on, Darren. Sorry, I was just, I mean, it might be controversial or not, but isn't the open standard for seasteading

a yacht, a kind of luxury private boat. You don't need the connectivity. I think that's the design problem. The design problem is this kind of spurious need for physical connectivity. We don't need airlocks. So this kind of deep space model of the space station seems to me to have been transplanted at the level of the surface of the sea. Yeah. But you don't need the connectivity. You've got no kind of... You can get in a smaller boat or you can get in a small plane or something and fly to your neighbour or move your boat across the free surface.

So it would just be a flotilla, actually. Your... I guess... It would never be a flotilla. would never be integrated. That seems to me to be the most open Seastead community that just, you know, you swim to your neighbor or something. You don't... Towing your cargo to trade or something. You don't... Why go to the... Why start, in a sense, with the megastructure? I think that's... So I might have completely misread this sort of modularity and the kind of insistence on a standard that allows for this connectivity to build communities in this way,

but why, if it's about exit, why build in that as a sort of structural coupling necessity? My, I could answer that speculatively. If you want to make them cheap and you want to make it so that ordinary people maybe could buy one, there are lots of things that I think a yacht, like a mega yacht would have to have that would just be too expensive for everyone to have individually. But you could have like a lightweight unit that when it plugs into this sort of network of others and maybe there's a bigger more capable central ship that forms the foundation

of it. An ocean liner. You dock in, you get high speed internet, you get electricity that you don't have to generate yourself, you get all these sorts of benefits and also communication stuff if if you're building sort of like a town, that are cheaper to do if you've got 100 clients being served from one server rather than, sure, Roman Abramovich could have all of that on his yacht, but his yacht cost 200 million pounds and took five years to build. That sort of, you know, it's... But if they could do like a standard model, you know, client ship that you could get people competing to produce cheaply and if it's, you know,

it becomes useful to these devastated communities with, you know, climate catastrophe and wherever and there's a humanitarian effort to fund it and the Seasteading Institute is involved in providing relief to these people that is funded by governments and by, you know, charities and what not, it could be an interesting path for development of the technology. Yeah. No, that's… Just speculative. No, but your conversation with Derek is great actually, because it covers this fantastic spectrum. Because yeah, on one side, like if you… it's this thing about… there's a whole bunch of extremely divergent, or not divergent, convergent, but distinct narratives that can

be, that this stuff can come from, that's the point. Like Derek is saying, why are we talking about it like this, why aren't we just talking about it as a particular type of kind of social transformation of having a boat, you know, So it's just like the basic, what it's all about is having a boat and then doing that with some kind of possible collective, coordinated process super added to it. And then on the other side, as you're saying James, it's like you could come with the fact that you've got some devastated, undeveloped country, dire poverty and people living in

in a flooded environment that requires some extremely cheap mass solution, you know? That context. And those are totally, in a sense, they're coming from such different places, aren't they, as kind of narrative constructions, and yet obviously they converge on a certain abstract seasetting conception, like from the opposite sides of the world. Yeah, it also was, yeah, I agree with that, and I also appreciate that not sort of reinventing the wheel needlessly, you know, if there's a solution that could incorporate the thousands,

hundreds of thousands of vessels that already exist, that would be good. But I was thinking in terms of that sort of thing though, and providing for those sorts of scenarios as an alternative to this idea that was discussed before where we've got this sort of fifth column, we have to pretend to be cuddly, but really one day we're planning to turn around and go, ha ha, you didn't realise, but we were all secretly hyper-libertarian baddies. Whereas if you're just sort of selling a technology to people and there's no... The Seasteading Institute has its goals

that everyone knows about. But I don't think it's regarded particularly in a sinister way now. Well, these people might be willing to buy from it, buy boats from it. And it could be a way of growing it and getting to a situation where you've got your wagon and if the political situation is ripe for it you could be there to take advantage of the opportunity. Yeah. If you see what I mean? No, I do. I sort of wonder about this question about how sinister is the reputation of this I think I probably tend to read weird things.

So my sense of it is that it's pretty sinister. I mean, I've definitely seen... When people are not simply... The normal response, you know, and you see it on the IET website whenever they talk about this and various places, is a certain kind of extremely saw-toothed mockery. You know, like it's basically, oh, this is ridiculous, but you can tell that there's a kind of real venomous hostility underpinning that, that I think is sort of saying, if it wasn't ridiculous, then it would be something appalling.

But I'm agreeing with you that if it was all repackaged as being a kind of humanitarian solution to climate change devastated third world countries, then it would be harder to do that to. And I mean in a way it would be like, in terms of the technology they think they need, that's a perfect narrative context for it, isn't it? I mean to say we want massive amounts of extremely cheap, robust, offshore habitation modules.

Recyclable too. But yeah, the boat thing is interesting. And part of the reason the boat thing is interesting is because of getting back to this thing we were talking about last week a bit and this one about this Hong Kong boat community did actually exist. This tanker thing. I mean, I saw it, there's a lot actually, maybe it's not just one thing, but it is a whole urban structure consisting completely of these little junks, you know, and they

are kind of modularised, not super expensive I would have thought, I'm pretty sure not, But obviously I guess they have very low capability for surviving oceanic conditions. And I don't know how far out you could travel, but you certainly couldn't stay. The first time you got hit by a bad storm in one of these things, you would be done. Whereas some of the plan… When you actually have to produce a plan for one of these things that could survive an ocean storm, it looks like something out of science fiction.

I mean, you're really talking about some serious piece of architecture. And it's not even these little, I mean, it's nowhere near these little rafts. Like there's a good picture of one in that, yes, the Ars Technica piece, which Jake was talking about earlier. Here, it's on page three or whatever. And I mean it's like a… it's not quite a mega structure, but it's definitely closer to that than a wooden junk.

But I guess you see that's… Derek's question could be taken… one direction can be taken in is like, is the whole idea of a fixed, okay, Derek was concentrating more on the notion of an integrated structure, but is the whole notion of a fixed structure, even a temporary fixed structure also a mistake? I mean, isn't it, it's just as it's kind of physically a flotilla, why wouldn't it socially be a coalition, you know, like something that just is like, it's a coordinated relation.

Really early in the course we were talking about this Hachimbe temporary autonomous zone model, you know, like it just lacks, it simply absolves itself of all connection with the kind of state model of time, you know, that you have a perjurant institution, that its kind of ideal type is that it's kind of eternal even, you know, unboundedly durable. And why not simply eliminate that entirely in the same way that Hacken Bay does and just saying you just have arrangements, you just have social arrangements, systems of coordination

between these outer fragments and maybe it's just the whole notion of seeing it as a kind of a compact community of a traditional type is just misleading. I think it comes back to the economics of it. It depends how they make the money, right? So if you assume that, like, it's not you go and make your money elsewhere and then just for convenience or, you know, out of personal conviction or whatever you decide it has to go off, you want to be outside holidays, you want to be on the ocean. Yeah. We've got that today, right?

Right. can be a sea gypsy or whatever and sail around. But if you assume a number of these plans do that you have to be growing food or sort of like, then if you're growing food then you need a platform to grow food on. And current boat designs aren't really great at that. And then maybe you're making money in another way and buying food because it's horrendously inefficient to grow food in that way apart from catching some fish.

And then how are you making your money? It sort of comes back to that. So if you're making your money from something where you need to dock, well, you need a docking technology in a community that can be that sort of proximate neighborhood. If you're making your money through ambiguously legal AI research or whatever, then maybe you can do that by all hanging out in the same sort of area and emailing each other and just dropping over there for a couple of face to face meetings, and maybe you don't so much need that physical platform

of the town square or whatever, or the rice farm. Well, yes. It's partly like how much physical coordination is required, isn't it? Like if the internet, if we're assuming the internet, there's two different models, like among all the different models one way of dividing them up is on this thing about, like we were talking earlier, good or bad internet connection. But one of them is a kind of almost sea hippie version where, you know, providing your own

food is really important, having a good internet connection is something that you aren't relying upon, you know. And so it's like a, it has a certain kind of primitive autonomy like that, like it can actually feed itself whatever its integration, economic integration into complicated information tech kind of stratum of the economy is really weak. And the other side where you've got a kind of white hot internet connection seems to me to lead to a lot of your economic coordination happening in cyberspace. Like why, what are you doing that requires you to actually physically dock into a larger

unit? It's clearly it's not any kind of software development, even malevolent AI software development. It's something industrial. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be a welder and have to swim. No. But now your life as a welder, yeah, there's a size of kind of CSED social unit that could have specialized welders I guess and specialized everything, isn't it?

What if we kind of combined some of these different things we're talking about? So suppose you modularized the different social functions that would be necessary for seed-studying to work. For example, I just posted a link to a farm bot that automatically grows food. So what if you had a food platform that you just worked on making that economically profitable and then you had a self-owned AI controlled food platform which would then sell food to anyone who came by? Yeah. Like a division of labor between different ocean based. Yeah and then you can modularize the design and start to work on each part until you have all the necessary parts turning to small profit so that they can be built.

Yes. Yeah, I guess the different kind of models that we're talking about, the different ways that seasteading technologies might manifest are not mutually exclusive. So the Archigram image that I shared earlier with the kind of mega structure also had boats free moving on the surface. And I think it also has kind of submersibles.

So submersibles would need docking. I mean, if they're kind of data mining straight from deeply submerged kind of internet cabling on the ocean floor or something, then you need those technologies. So I think there's perhaps within the sort of specifications that are being designed by the Seasteading Institute, they're perhaps missing the full range, the kind of ecosystem of technical solutions that might come together, kind of assemble to make this work.

And then you've got something that can operate at a number of scales and you can get your kind of backwardsman, sea gypsy I think Adam mentioned, or someone mentioned. Right, yeah, yeah. exist so they can kind of immediately start to kind of trade. I don't know. I mean, it would be extremely weird to me if it didn't sort of fall out into power laws like these things always do. You know, like once it becomes... You know, that's what happened on the frontier, isn't it? Like, it's not like there's some homogenous level of social organization accepting myth as soon as the process gets rolling.

You've got things happening at a variety of different scales. And that's the way I would expect everything would fall out, you know, unless subject to some extremely confining protocol about it. But in terms of the point, in terms of this point about the CSETI Institute not envisaging these things, I think this is partly back to Amy's point about this extreme, it's an attempt to be an extreme empiricism, isn't it? So it's like it's almost that if it sounds as if they're envisaging what these things

should be like, they've got it wrong. Their actual intellectual evolution is towards dismantling a definite, concrete image and to kind of catalyze the process more and more in the direction of a radical experiment, know, where it doesn't, the less it has in terms of like anticipated outcome, the more it's actually closing in on its kind of abstract conception. And I mean, I don't know whether, I would be just kind of completely beyond my zone

here, but I mean, I'm assuming the tendency in architecture is not that. And the sort of architectural tendency is in a way to have a strong attachment to the notion of the vision. And so the deliberate dismantling of vision, of course it conforms to a certain type of urbanism, but do you think it conforms to a certain type of architectural thinking? I think it's probably closer to a kind of urban rather than architectural thinking.

Yeah, like Jane Jacobs or someone would be a relevant reference there, wouldn't it? I mean this has been the trend in software for the last 10 years or so, right? And if you go further back, this whole sort of startup concept, right, that you find a sort of useful space and you try things out in this process of experimentation. has been explicitly sort of advanced as an approach, you build a minimum viable product,

you test it in the market, you get the feedback as soon as possible and you iterate on that. Right. It's coming out of exactly that culture. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. So how are people feeling? Oh yeah. We just entered the same time. I was going to say that the class is perfectly on time. If you want to end here. Well, I mean, if people have more to say, but I get a feeling we've hit entropy to a certain point

on this. So I'm happy to pull the plug. I don't know whether that's OK with everybody. Yeah. Somebody just left. I don't know who it was, but I think it was somebody just left. Yeah. OK, Mo. I think we should say goodbye at this point, is that cool with everyone? I'm good. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, thanks. So, anything that anybody has to say about outer space goes next week. I just wanted to say a couple of words, is that I'm researching this for the exhibition

that I mentioned last week, but I did not speak a word, so I was basically just listening and taking notes. But I'm totally interested in continuing the conversation about CSTED on the classroom, especially with the sidebar, all the notes and links put here, because this is going to be my resources. So yeah, so I just wanted to put this little footnote at the very end. So please engage with me on the classroom platform, and hopefully we got somewhere with this. Yes, great. OK, thank you. OK, thanks, everybody. How good do we? I'm going to post the comments and go. Bye bye.