Help Us Name the Seasteading Book (and win $100, a signed copy, and an acknowledgement!)

Following the lead of Bryan Caplan’s crowdsourced book title, we’d like to get ideas for the title of the Seasteading book. We’re reasonably settled on “Seasteading” as the main title, but we need a subtitle which is exciting gets our central message across. We can’t guarantee we’ll use the title in the final product, but if we use your title for our book proposal, which we’ll be using to land a great agent and publisher, we’ll give you $100, credit in the acknowledgments, and a signed copy of the book when it comes out.

First, a little about the book: It’s a work of popular social science which takes ideas from economics and political science and presents them to an intelligent general audience. Our central contention is that progress is driven by parallel experimentation, and this is as true for government as it is for science, technology, and biology.

Rules are a type of technology – social technology – which allows us to cooperate more effectively. We currently see very little innovation in politics due to a lack of experimentation, and the best to fix this is by developing the technology to settle the ocean. This will reinvigorate the declining technology of governance and make the world a much, much better place. We describe the challenges involved, our strategy, and provide a possible timeline.

The key themes of the book we’d like to get across in the subtitle are:

     1. Floating city states!
     2. Experimentation!
     3. Progress!

It’s always fun to come up with witty titles, but that’s not really what we’re looking for. We want someone picking up the book in their local Borders to be able to see what the book is about without deciphering any cryptic metaphors or references. Advice from the publishing industry generally recommends going for a subtitle which clearly communicates the promise of the book: what it’ll tell the reader and what they’ll get out of it. (Read these: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3)

Here are a few ideas we’ve been tossing around:

  • Seasteading: The Coming Wave of Startup Societies
  • Seasteading: Building the countries of tomorrow on the open ocean
  • Seasteading: How startup societies on the ocean can bring progress to politics
  • Seasteading: How floating city states will bring the entrepreneurial spirit to government
  • Seasteading: How floating city states can unleash the power of ideas and bring progress to politics
  • Seasteading: Why startup societies on the open ocean will create progress toward a more peaceful and prosperous world

Add and vote on suggestions here.

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6 thoughts on “Help Us Name the Seasteading Book (and win $100, a signed copy, and an acknowledgement!)”

  1. Great idea to crowdsource some ideas!

    I guess I’m not sure if the book is supposed to convince the uninitiated or if it’s more to present the info in a nice orderly form.

    People who already agree with the message might be more attracted to words like “Founding” or “Entrepreneur” whereas the unconvinced may be more affected by words like “progress” and “politics”. I also think the scale matters to these two classes as well, with the former group being just fine with the idea of founding a new “nation” and the latter group more comfortable with new “cities”.

    I’ll add my ideas as soon as YayBoo confirms my account!

  2.  The book is meant to attract and convince the uninitiated. The theme will be that political institutions evolve through decentralized trial and error, so we’re making the argument that it’s like a market, but beginning by arguing that markets are like ecosystems. 

  3. My idea is quite similar to berend’s, though arrrived at independently:

    Seasteading: Pioneering Communities on a New Frontier

    Has a bit of science fiction appeal like space travel: go somewhere new, and do something new.  Sort of a Robert Heinlein vibe if you will.  “Pioneering” is ambiguous since it can be a verb or adjective.  I tend to use gerunds as verbs, but read it however you like.

    Space was the new frontier of the 1950s and 1960s.  Start with oceans.

  4. In the interest of maximizing my chances by making a lot of suggestions:

    1. Seasteading: Islands of Invention in an Ocean of Inertia

    2. Seasteading: Making Waves in the Business of Governing

    3. Seasteading: The Coming Tide of Competitive Governance

    4. Seasteading: The Ebb and Flow of Government and the State

    5. Seasteading: Dynamic Communities with Dynamic Geography

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