Floating Cities: Future Or Fantasy?

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2017-09-26 15:07

“Deliberandum est diu, quod statuendum est semel — A final decision should be preceded by mature deliberation.”

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“Buy land — they’re not making any more!” so the old saying goes, but is it even true?

It seems more and more possible that with the concept of Seasteading that we should forget “buying” land and start “building” it.

In the form of floating Utopian islands, that is.

According to The Seasteading Institute, EST. 2008, they “empower people to build floating startup societies with innovative governance models.”

For many who are deeply intertwined in Libertarian and Cryptocurrency circles, this topic is old news, but for the world of new users to Steemit and hopefully BitShares, they may not have heard or seen of the possibilities that Floating Cities could provide.

But what exactly do Floating Cities bring, besides the possibility of being seasick?

Last year when I wrote Say Goodbye to Nation States, I gave my semi-amateur outtake on my observations of the changes in the world around us given the shifting political landscape.

I mentioned the possible shift from “Nation States” as overarching governing bodies to something more localized, perhaps even based on Online Communities or what I called “Virtual Regionalism”.

The problem of “Virtual Regionalism” is that we still have to actually live somewhere and that somewhere might not be the most conducive to our freedom.

So where do we go to get more freedoms?

These less free “Centralized” governments or “Nation States” came about “during a time of industrialisation, centralised ‘command and control’ bureaucracies and national loyalty.”

Now “modern technology tends in the opposite direction: it’s distributed, decentralised and uncontrollable.”

This is where we can remake the places we live into the places we need.

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Diving Deeper

Patri Friedman, American libertarian activist and founder of The Seasteading Institute, had this vision for our future:

“Patri is taking the Silicon Valley mindset and applying it to the nation-state. There are all these things you could now do that didn’t exist when our current system of government was invented, he told me. Constant online direct-democracy voting, building smart-cities, using crypto-currencies. And yet we still use a 19th-century model.”

With concerns of government crack downs on cryptocurrency, it might be a good time to start thinking which institute is the future and which is best left to the past.

The idea of at least testing new ways to live, govern, and grow goes beyond our current time period, but is essentially the entire story of human history.

Remember: “The Revolution Will Be Decentralized!”

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