The Seasteading Institute September 2010 Newsletter

Table of Contents

• In the World

  • FDA Halts Stem Cell Research - Trouble For America, But A Good Case For Seasteading

• What’s New at The Seasteading Institute

  • TSI Welcomes Its New Director of Engineering, George Petrie

• Sponsor Profile: Kresten Buch, Sink or Swim Sponsor

• Call to Action

I've been working for over a year on a new version of the Seasteading book, incorporating all we've learned since starting TSI. Book progress has been very slow given my many duties at TSI, like raising the funds to keep the organization alive. However it has become increasingly clear from discussions how vital and urgent it is to have a detailed, up-to-date motivation and strategy compiled into one polished piece. We may do a good job of communicating our core vision - startup countries in international waters - but the full detail behind that vision basically lives in just one place right now - my head. This results in frequent misinterpretations of our strategy and me answering the same questions again and again, which is not effective.

On the floating-festival mailing-list - now turned mostly to a marine hackerspace / bay area seasteading community list - Matt Bell asks some basic questions. Really, all these questions should be answered in a book, or a "How To Seastead" guide, but our versions of those are about 8 years old and badly in need of update.

The Seasteading Institute is still seeking an Oceanography Researcher who can identify specific regions best suited for the progression of seasteading. Here's our Executive Director with some thoughts on how we could scale down the project to make recruiting easier while still getting useful information:

TSI is pleased to welcome its new Director of Engineering, George Petrie. George's ongoing presence will enable TSI to increase its engineering output, making this partnership a critical milestone toward realizing the seasteading vision.

Jody Shapiro's new documentary "How To Start Your Own Country" features Patri Friedman in a centerpiece interview. Set to premiere September 11 at the Toronto Film Festival, it focuses on micro-nations, principalities, and freedom movements across the world and uses comedy to raise serious questions about what it means to be a country, a topic that will only become more relevant as the seasteading movements gains momentum.

Short video with clips from a talk Patri gave at UCSD for YAL and some thoughts from host Simeon Morris on student reactions and the idea of seasteading:

The Seasteading Institute August 2010 Newsletter

Table of Contents
 

• In the World

  • Immigration - A Case for Experimentation

• TSI News

Several TSI members plan to attend the Singularity Summit this year in 2010.  If you answer yes to any of the following questions, maybe you'll be interested in meeting up with us there! 

Would love help coming up with media contacts for the upcoming seasteading book - people who could review it & get the word out especially. Ideally we can find a wide variety of people in a variety of forums, each of whom has written something that indicates they are philosophically aligned with seasteading. Would be awesome if those of y'all who read a lot of blogs/press or network a lot with media types would bookmark this page and make use of it over the coming months :). This is an experiment in crowdsourcing more of our research - we'll see how it goes!