Letting One Small Aquatic Festival Bloom

Back in 2001, I mused: “It seems really hard to start a new country full-time. Could we start one as a weekend festival?”, and thus was born the idea of Ephemerisle. A few weeks ago, we finally took the first steps by holding the very first Ephemerisle event. It was in sheltered waters, and did not have political autonomy, but it was an awesome start to a very different strategy to achieve political freedom than what has been tried – and failed – in the best. There’s enough interesting coverage online now to give you a round-up.

The Ephemerisle 2009 Coverage wiki has videos, pictures, and participant reports. (My favorite video is of the whole festival dancing to “I’m On A Boat”). Major media coverage so far includes Danny O’ Brien in the Irish Times, Declan McCullagh on his CBS News blog, and Brian Doherty in Reason Magazine. Brian’s piece: Building Ephemerisle – Can a party on a river lead to liberty on the sea? is the longest, and closes with a long quote from me about how Ephemerisle can pave the way to seasteading:

“As long as we position it from the beginning as a festival about trying to go to the ocean, we’ll build up a community who love working and playing on the water, and who are interested in it even if we know there will be brand new problems once we get to the ocean,” Patri says, linking the play of Ephemerisle, difficult as it was, with the work of permanent seasteads. “Even if we haven’t built knowledge, we will have built community. We’ll have a group of smart, creative people who have been there riding along with the vision and willing to step up when we need to make that next step, to think and test about how to move seasteading to the next stage.”

My favorite commentary on the political aspects of Ephemerisle came in the comment thread to Will Wilson’s post on Postmodern Conservative. Will wrote:

…the whole thing was at times creepily non-political. It seemed to me like the demographic was evenly split between those who were primarily there to build floating stuff and those who were primarily there to party. I’ll attribute this for now to the fact that it took us a while to climb Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Debating and discussing political philosophy is difficult when one doesn’t have shelter, and construction of the floating platforms took much longer than anticipated. The next few years will be crucial for the future of the project — if major engineering challenges get met but people still aren’t debating, I think that spells trouble for Ephemerisle (seasteading would still work, however, the two concepts are synergistic but separate).

And Glen Raphael responded (emphasis his):

I think you’ve just convinced me of the opposite. (and that I need to attend next year – I didn’t get there this time). The difficulty of surviving in this new frontier is a feature, not a bug. The New World and the Old West weren’t free or libertararian to the degree that they were because people debated political philosophy in their copious spare time and thereby reached the especially well-reasoned conclusion that they should spend minimal resources on government. No, they were free and libertarian because people were too busy working and surviving to put up with needless bureaucratic obstacles to getting stuff done. Politics in the old frontiers was an afterthought, something that got short shrift. The pioneers had to fight off predators, build shelter, clear fields, improve water supplies, plant and gather and prepare well enough to survive the next winter. Any time there was a need to solve a political problem, they’d apply the proven programming technique do the simplest thing that might possibly work so they could get back to the more important stuff. Serious politics is a luxury good. If a large fraction of ephermerisle participants were too busy being productive – learning, producing, solving problems – to waste much of their non-recreational time on politics, that seems like an excellent indication that they were on the right path.

Zing! I’m not sure how I feel about this idea – after all, my vision is to have a society with low regulation and luxury, that is productive but not a constant struggle for survival. But Glen beautifully captures the pioneer spirit and the reason why freedom tends to be found on the frontier.

Our challenge is to create a society that is, in a sense, an eternal frontier – that maintains this attitude even as it grows. My hope is that dynamic geography will do this, but for it to even have a chance, we need to find an incremental path to get to the seasteading world. Ephemerisle is one such path. I’m glad to have it in our portfolio of approaches, and as you can see from the coverage, this first year was an amazing, incredible experience.