Sea Legs

Recently, I came across this article on CNET. I highly recommend perussing it yourself, but in sum it's about a bunch of silicon hippies who want to build floating cities on the high seas, tucked away from repressive governments in international waters. Seasteading, they call it. Never mind all the technological reasons this seems implausible (or the fact the group's executive director is a ringer for Seth Green) - the article intruiged me for a variety of reasons.

First of all, it reminded me of The Many-Headed Hydra, a history of the revolutionary and politically dissembodied sailors of the Atlantic (the authors aruge - convincingly - of their role in the American Revolution, among other events). Escaping social and political dogma on at sea is nothing new - but it does seem to have disappeared since the industrial revolution.* I'd wager that has to do with expanding industry weaving itself more firmly into the transport trades, both culturaly and economically, leaving far less room for autonomy. So, maybe nowadays life at sea would need to be totally autonomous from life on land in order to afford more freedoms...

Of course, another question is why folk (american folk, specifically) suddenly start feeling all repressed and looking to the sea again...The bush administration's fascit policy leanings aside, I don't think any of us can really argue we're more politically repressed than we were 10, 20, or 50 years ago. But then, what is really intruiging is that the folks plotting this escape from government oppression are silicon hippies. The prime proponents are technology savants pulling down more 0's than 1's in places like Palo Alto...Places that are financially restrictive for those of us who aren't Googlionare's, but are otherwise pretty liberal. What gives? Political escapism is supposed to be for the little guy, the proles, or at least for the middle class who bear the weight of keeping all the oppressive machinery running....

One thing's for sure - I'll never be able to afford a house on a floating platform. Which is just as well, because there's not much use in being all free and stuff, if I'm just hanging my sea-sick head over the toliet all the time.


*Somalia of course seems a recent exception...but then there isn't even a landlocked government to escape, so that's probably a different phenomenon.