> 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.