> “Do I want to create the first venture-backed city-state? Hell yeah”

Ahem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_Indies

And we all know how well that turned out for the locals.

I like this game. Let's continue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

Nope, there's absolutely nothing that could go wrong here.

Here's one in the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Company

The 90% death rate in the first two years is really impressive.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824178

It's their plain for the whole planet, basically.

In fact it's what the whole idea of "smashing the state" has been about all along.

You would need a private military for that.

You’re in luck! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Also, this story is wild: https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/erik-prince-trump-uae-pr...

We’ve seen a bit of this domestically too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Well, I am glad I work in medical devices. Vouchers for stents or pacemakers probably won’t be very attractive.

Scrip is certainly not limited to the products a company produces. In the states it was lumber and mining companies but the stores offered whatever people needed.

This is kind of the worst part- that they lack the historical literacy to recognize that they wouldn't even be the first. And they'll just dive headlong into it.

And in a similar vein John Company taking over India

Why the fear of opt-in competition? Nobody is forcing anyone to move to these places. What they are is an opportunity to try out new governance modes. They might work or they might not. I find the hostility towards people trying new things to be strange and misplaced.

> Why the fear of opt-in competition? Nobody is forcing anyone to move to these places. What they are is an opportunity to try out new governance modes.

It's a governance mode that was heavily used throughout the European colonial period and it resulted in the rape and theft of the local populations and underclasses of all the nations involved. When you put things in the proper historical context, the hostility is rather well-reasoned.

Since you're talking about proper historical context, it should be mentioned that none of the "nations" you speak of of were nation states in the modern sense. Many of the local populations were experiencing theft from their local warlords or kings or emperors before the Europeans came. Human history is full of people abusing power, it certainly wasn't first introduced by the Europeans, and it isn't unique to colonial style oppression.

Weren't there always native populations involved in these cases? That isn't the case with seasteading. For now you have to assent to the idea and immigrate.

Local populations AND the underclass. It's not like the entire population of the United Kingdom benefited from the largess of the Empire — the benefits accrued to the wealthy and the Monarchy.

What happens when you move there and some local strongman with the most weapons decides he needs slaves? Government exists because the majority of people got tired of being hassled by warlords, and they got banded together to create and enforce laws they could all abide by or one warlord was able to create a stable coalition for a time by taking responsibility for the justice of the land.

Why would anyone in their right mind, other than a warlord-wannabe billionaire, assent to this idea?

> Why would anyone in their right mind, other than a warlord-wannabe billionaire, assent to this idea?

Maybe they won't. You are, in a certain sense, assenting to it right now. Websites have exactly this governance model. Hacker News is run by a king. We all choose to spend time here anyway, because he does a good job responding to our needs.

A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there, but you choose which restaurants you patronize. There is no, in principle, reason that the same cannot be applied to where you choose to live.

The primary difference is the transaction costs of relocation and the cost of mistakes. It's easy to go to a different restaurant if you don't like the menu. It's less easy to move. But some people are willing to make that tradeoff for more efficient governance.

>We all choose to spend time here anyway, because he does a good job responding to our needs.

>A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there.

The problem isn't that someone else might choose something for you. That's not what anyone is worried about here. An incredibly silly comparison.

The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.

> The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end.

This is the environment, as it exists, for hundreds of millions around the world right now. So even if your critiques are true, we're no worse for trying.

Surely investing in and supporting putting even more people in such a position, rather than helping those already in it, is obviously worse?

> The problem isn't that someone else might choose something for you. That's not what anyone is worried about here. An incredibly silly comparison.

> The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.

Explain to me what you think the difference between "undemocratic" and "people choosing things for you" is.

I promise I will do that for you if you tell me you are having trouble differentiating between an organization physically capturing you and locking you in a box, versus an organization deciding which brand of mayonnaise they will bring to your table.

Which organization is physically capturing you and locking you in a box, here?

The unaccountable billionaire rulers of the oceanic fief who went to incredible expense for the sole purpose of escaping democratic accountability.

Ok. So don't move there.

Holy Christ.

Do you understand that if these types of fiefdoms are built, they will be able to attract people with misleading claims or by dangling short-term economic relief in front of desperate people who they can then ruthlessly victimize?

Maybe you do, and you just think "ah fuck em"

Which is in character for the types of people who want to start a fiefdom in the ocean.

I'm gonna have to recommend you pick up BioShock, for real. It's on sale for 5 dollars.

You're making a bunch of very weird assumptions about what's going to happen. All of which apply to the formation of literally any new country. You're not making any specific arguments about these structures and why they would lead to this. Your argument is a blanket argument against all forms of experimentation in this regard.

Some people like to try new things, and they're ok taking risks to do so. They should be allowed to do that. If you want to make a rule that says "such and such amount of disclosure is required for people moving there", i'd be fine supporting something like that. But just saying "well theoretically it could be exploited in this way" is not a very strong argument against trying it.

It seems to me that the primary difference is your ability to reverse course once you have relocated if you aren't the guy at the absolute top. Rather, it's not the switching cost going in, so much as the switching cost going out - it's the same problem you'd face joining Scientology.

The original question I responded to is "why the fear of opt-in competition to the current model of governance?"

The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.

> It seems to me that the primary difference is your ability to reverse course once you have relocated if you aren't the guy at the absolute top. Rather, it's not the switching cost going in, so much as the switching cost going out - it's the same problem you'd face joining Scientology.

Yes, indeed. That is the essential question for Patchwork-based ideologies. However, that is something they actively try to think about

> The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.

Ok, but how exactly does an experiment lead to that? If that is the outcome that it generates, and people do not prefer that outcome, then they simply will not move there. So, if you are correct in your diagnosis, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The only thing you do have to worry about is discovering that your preconceptions were not accurate.

Look into the slave labor situation in the Middle East for an example of how people are lured into a voluntary working situation that quickly becomes slavery. Desperate people make poor choices mostly because of information asymmetry.

In addition, the eventual children of the people who moved there won't have made this choice, and the example of history says they won't easily be able to leave.

> For now you have to assent to the idea and immigrate.

Unless you're a victim of human trafficking. Or, for example, read up on how scientologists use their cruise ship [1].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/world/scientology-cruise-ship...

So...your concern is that seasteading will promote human trafficking?

I'm saying it's a risk, and directly responding to the notion that "for now" emigration is at-will.

Human trafficking is a risk in any scenario, though. It's unclear why that's a salient issue here.

It's salient because seasteads are relatively lawless and, like Alcatraz or a cruise ship, difficult to flee without assistance.

I'm glad you brought up cruise ships because, as you say, they are difficult to flee, and they have indeed been embroiled in human trafficking. Few people think that this means that cruise ships are inherently a bad idea; it just means that they should be done well. Why do you think seasteading can't be done well?

The same could be said of any governance model, including democracy, tyranny, monarchy etc.

Perhaps the problem is humans, not a particular system of government.

ReallY?

Can you list a few historical cities founded under a similar model that had the awful results you claim?

yea damned humans will rape the mermaids

One would assume that on a site like Hacker News, there would be more imagination and enthusiasm for innovation.

Perhaps it's mostly selection bias on articles like this one that brings out the comments we see around us?

Over the last two decades, HN (and hacker culture in general) has shifted from a creator-oriented, anti-authoritarian (both left and right) culture to one supporting the establishment. I suppose that was inevitable - someone has to build the tools of surveillance capitalism at Google and Facebook.

Would you describe YCombinator as part of 'the establishment'?

In my recollection, HN has always been pro-YC and pro-venture-capital-in-general, for obvious reasons :)

Eh, I wasn't really referring to venture capital in particular, more the general philosophy. For example, here is an essay on the word "hacker":

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

This sort of attitude is definitely not the one held by most coders at BigStartupCo today.

Personally I would say HN never had the anti-authoritarian/punk/anarchist ethos of 1990s cypherpunks, rather than having had it once and lost it.

HN culture has always seen multinational companies like Amazon as something to aspire to become, billionaire investors as heroic risk-taker allies, and lauded small companies that get brought out and shut down for achieving an exit.

There's nothing wrong with that, HN's culture is still perfectly valid. But HN hasn't lost an anti-authority ethos, it never had one, from the moment the URL ended with ycombinator.com

HN still has a general pro-civil liberties, anti-surveillance tech vibe. Snowden was praised here, Palantir denounced. In this past year this stance has led to a rise of anti-China posts. But I'd also characterize HN as getting increasingly more skeptical of libertarian/classical liberal/neoliberal economics as well, and so would have a dim view of utopian seasteading libertarians.

This, so much.

It's because those who are invested in seasteading tend to have libertarian, if not outright objectivist or anarchy-capitalist ideals, and thus their commitment to free enterprise at the expense of other values are seen as suspect, or at least are accused of behaving as such.

How are neocolonial company towns based on British common law a new form of governance?

I'd love to actively prevent people from moving to these places because it'll continue offshoring domestic wealth into tax havens.

Honestly, this is the huge problem of our time - globalization has happened and the concepts of tax laws and taxation of value production haven't properly adapted. The US should be taxing all the value legitimately made in the US - if a designer in the US makes something that is then mass produced in China the value taxes currently only comprehend the physical good value, not the intellectual value of the good - for things like fashionable clothing nearly all of the value is created domestically and the actual material value is inconsequential.

Over time the ability to dodge taxes in this manner has placed unfair downward pressure on countries to lower taxes in an effort to attract the revenue that can be freely moved around and hence we've got spiraling wealth inequality due to insufficient taxation.

People opting out of taxation while reaping the benefit of educated populations (or their personal education) along with security and the laundry list of the benefits of society is simply ethically unacceptable.

There is no shortage of tax havens. Anyone who wants one will just move to the Bahamas. They already do, as you point out. Charter cities are thus totally orthogonal to this (despite the article's misleading implications).

The point is to improve life for the 99% of the world who can't just move to a tax haven, by building prosperous cities they can move to. This is not just a theory - China lifted 500,000,000 out of poverty using Special Economic Zones to transform their economy over decades. Many countries aspire to the same advance in prosperity for their people.

As much as I like embracing the statement "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" I think we really need to solve tax havens before we can make more places that can serve as them.

The simple solution to me is that a country offers good value for the taxes people pay to it.

Then people and their taxable assets will gladly stay.

The problem is once you have the kind of money where tax havens become a priority, you no longer need anything the government might be able to provide. And then the game just becomes collecting as much money as you can and preventing that money from flowing through the economy by shuttling it out of the country.

The “good value” should hopefully be a well functioning nation full of healthy and happy people. Unfortunately that’s not the goal of most people with that kind of money.

This - although easier said than done in a liberal democracy.

Solve them internally in your own country instead of the near-impossible task of trying to bend the whole world to accommodate your interests.

Actually, I emigrated - I now live in a country with more rigid tax laws and left the US behind. This is somewhat of a salve, but we live in a post-globalization world, cleaning up your backyard doesn't mean anything if your neighbor's sewage is leaking under the fence.

Huge tax loopholes being accepted by central world players like the US puts pressure on smaller countries to accept them as well.

> "nearly all of the value is created domestically and the actual material value is inconsequential."

Only because the laborers are being horrendously underpaid, no? If globalization had really fully happened you wouldn't be able to pay people in china slave labor wages to make your clothes for you.

In the US that labor is so extremely unvalued that it's almost always automated - other countries have such intensely undervalued labour that it can actually compete with automation.

And yea, I think we do have some twisted and perverse version of globalization - rather than bringing the world up we seem to be perpetually exploiting the third world... eventually that might piss of the third world enough that they do something about that but it hasn't happened yet.

This isn't true. As time goes on, places that were non-developed become more developed. China's already started to outsource its production because people there expect higher wages than they did 10 years ago.

It's a gradient from country to country. Overall, for individuals in absolute terms, things are getting better- although for certain subpopulations in relative terms (e.g. blue collar americans) they've gotten worse.

This is happening one country at a time. It happened to South Korea and a lesser extent Japan. It’s happening in India and China.

We still have centuries of third world countries to exploit until they are fully developed.

They're scared it might succeed.

Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff.

Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get hit by an asteroid.

I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously transgressive. If you make new things, something bad might happen! And existing companies might lose customers! There will be change! Chaos! Mayhem!

Or - crazy idea here - perhaps we could have the courage to not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation?

Or, if that's the only metric you have, at least pick the right game - SimCity!

The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years

That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.

Exactly. A large chunk of the population was forced to American against their will, and a large chunk of the people who chose to go to America only survived because of the labor of the people who were forced to be there. Claiming success on the back of slave labor isn’t something that’s super popular these days.

> That's a bit of an overstatement.

After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so.

> I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best.

Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.

The bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves.

That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.

We can do both.

Colonising other planets is a lousy idea; at the very best you could at massive expense colonise Mars, but it would be (a) almost certainly worse than Earth and (b) only s doubling of our resources.

Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was.

Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.

That exact argument could be made against disaster recovery data centers. Why bother building a new data center and buying two servers when you could just have one and save tons of money?

There's no place in the solar system that's remotely as habitable as Earth, even if the latter suffers a massive disaster.

Space exploration is more like Amazon spending $100B to build a hut with 10 Arduinos on the summit of Mt. Everest.

The argument isn't that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's expensive, it's that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's Pareto inferior to making orbital habitats.

> Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff.

I mean... yeah? There was famine and then genocide, then slavery?

>>is bleak, bleak stuff

Is the movement so narcissistic that the very existence of the people already living there is not even noticed? Is this hypothetical country a place where you ruthlessly steal from the original people to make a state where private property is the only right? Because "bleak" is the exact word that describes the lives of the millions of people who don't even show up on libertarian radar.

And "hypothetical"is the right word because there were taxes and regulation form America's earliest beginnings. And, fortunately, it protected more rights than just property. Indeed, the founding fathers intentionally _removed_ the word "property" from the original phrase "life liberty and the pursuit of property"

If there are any analogies to North America, it would either be the Puritans who had shockingly strict ideological requirements on their members or plantation owners who lived by laws completely different than their slaves. Because we know these libertarian colonists are not going to be building their own log cabins or personally work "their" land. Startups are those bootstrapped farms and self built log cabins. Likewise space exploration. But colonialism, when it isn't simply theft, is rent seeking and always at best zero-sum-gain.

>not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation

"Bioshock" is apparently a necessary comparison because its plot is clearly more accurately known North American history evidently.

Well let’s not forget “moving to the new world” also meant they process subjectifying the people whose land it was, in order to take it.

I don't see humanity doing anything but descending into self-destruction. I'm sure tax-haven offshore city states will prove once again that humans, taken as a whole, are craven ruthless creatures. It's the reason we are the dominate species on this planet.

Or maybe we are the dominant species because we cooperate so well. :)

Startups aren't remotely transgressive. They're heavily promoted, financed and supported by virtually every state government and have been for decades (centuries if you count the startups behind colonial enterprises).

Settling the solarsystem would be neat. It won't do anything to fix climate changes or overpopulation. It's not even possible in principle, let alone practice to remove significant quantities of people from the gravity well.

Creating lawless zones for the specific purpose of fiefdom isn't new, entrepreneurial or even particularly imaginative. Unless you count the villains of Connery era James Bond as novel entrepreneurs.

Just where do you think these marvelously useful, livable but mysteriously uninhabited "vacant tracts of land in developing countries" will come from.

Charter cities are, like startups, heavily supported by the partner nation. The models are Dubai & Shenzhen. Instead of being completely funded and operated by the state, the new generation of cities will be public-private partnerships between developers and nations.

A small, incremental degree of privatization. I have no idea where you get "lawless" or "fiefdom". These zones are requested, authorized, regulated, and monitored by a nation. Do you think the 3,000 SEZs in the world are lawless fiefdoms?

This is strangely hyperbolic language for what's basically a new kind of free trade zone. Would make a good movie plot, though, you've got a grand imagination!

> This is bleak, bleak stuff.

There have been a number of low tax, rule of law city states like Hong Kong and Singapore that did rather well and provided a refuge for many Chinese when China was going a bit nuts under Mao and the like. It's not all bleak.

I don't know if Singapore counts - it's a fascist dictatorship.

Didn't seem very fascist when I was there. The Economist Intelligence Unit has it as a 'flawed democracy', the same category as the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index)

The Democracy Index rankings are non-transparent measures by a less than objective organization that places significant weight on a country's openness to multinational corporations.

Singapore specifically is an example people use to illustrate the inherent flaws of the Democracy Index rating system. This is a country with low press freedom, one ruling party that sues the opposition into bankruptcy for "defamation" to prevent any loss of power, and oh, they execute people for carrying drugs.

The extent to which their political and economic system is influenced by fascism may be up for debate, but given that they've not conducted any genocide or imperialism, the charge doesn't hold the gravity that you intend.

Let me just remind everybody that Bioshock is a computer game, its plot is fiction, and it constitutes no evidence whatsoever tht a real-life scenario that start the same way would end the same way.

Sure, it is obvious when spelt out, but it is less obvious when it is a game of implications.

Agreed. It’s become a bit ridiculous when “but the game/movie/Netflix series showed that it can’t work” becomes an argument that is taken seriously.

Plenty of people defer to social parables like Atlas Shrugged or Animal Farm.

Isn't this how most other civilizations lived in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as small city states, until the recent entry (in the west) of eastern style nation states?

> won't get hit by some speedboat pirates and decide OK, we're gonna arm up

No. What will happen is that the authorities will arrest the pirates, or whoever.

All of this is being done within the bounds of the law. So I am not sure why people are bringing up ridiculous hypotheticals.

Special economic zones are not a new thing. And they have worked out fine in many places.

What’s bleak about consensual human experiments? The volunteers who sign up are doing a great service for all mankind. There is so much to learn.

OK now Sea Citizen, you haven't been hitting your production targets... This is the third month you've failed to qualify for the monthly "bonus" scrip. After rent and commissary, I'm afraid that puts you in the red. And I don't have to tell you what that means.

There aren't any open positions higher up, and you aren't exactly a top performer. The only way I see you digging out of this is signing up for the Human Initiative Project. A couple injections a week, plus your regular salary, and you'll have more than enough scrip.

Don't believe the rumors, you'll be just fine.

One of the stated goals of the project is to create employment in undeveloped regions. The plight of the unemployed in the 3rd world has never been cake and candy. Unemployed people struggle even in developed countries.

Another interesting contrast to your hypothetical is that in the US people are free to volunteer for paid clinical trials. Yet somehow you imagine the proposed alternative to be entirely malicious...

https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/recruit/volunteers.html

Leaving aside the issues with exploitation inherent in using power imbalance to experiment on the poor the OP is talking about a situation where you are “voluntold” and have not volunteered.

As opposed to the power differential between a federally funded, government operated research facility and poor US citizens? Would be nice if the OP could cite where residents of the special economic zone will be coerced.

Pretty sure the whole point of all of this is that it is voluntary.

People are free to leave, if they don't like living in the special economic zone.

Unless they're paid in scrip, which you know they would be

Special economic zones exist in all parts of the world.

And people are able to freely leave them, lol.

Special economic zones like the UAE?

There are all sorts of special economic zones which are not some made up fantasy land that you read in a book.

This one would be literally run by the UK. I don't think the modern day UK is going to be holding people against their will, in their country. People are able to freely leave the UK, whenever they want.

You can’t have anything really consensual if there is a big power differential and the party with more power is willing to use it and allowed to do so. We have seen multiple times in history that this leads to slavery, servitude or other forms of exploitation.

I’ll start with this one...

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2917810/elephant-man-drug-test...

I find it interesting that a site who's stated mission is "promotion of intellectual curiosity", consistently lacks curiosity about ideas which question the primacy of the state.

In this case, because 'video games'. Perhaps if readers had more curiosity they might be interested to investigate the topic of voluntarism, free-association and economic theory. This is not to say that there is no room to disagree with the aforementioned ideas.

However, I feel disappointed that the most prominent comment here forgoes literacy and logic in lieu of hyperbole while citing the plot of a video game.

Intellectual curiosity indeed.