Book review: Liberty Awash, by J.W. Bruns
New author J.W. Bruns defies the predictive track in this one because the author does not present seasteading like a fan pushing their convictions of a soft focus, rose-tinted ideal. In this novel, we get the social problems, engineering concerns and philosophical dog-fights by hard-liners that are irretrievably bundled into the subject, almost before we realise the simple joys of breaking free from state control.
In this book, we soon learn to accept the imperfections of mankind, how ‘getting along’ smooths us through, but there are also revelations around the natural consequences of human motivations when people are not policed. This helps the reader to decide if they would really want to be a member of a fully self-organising community like this. That’s helpful insight, in case you haven’t already guessed the red flags. Say someone feels like assaulting you, then the community agrees they would be wrong to be aggressive but there’s no proper disincentive to prevent that happening or to respond with justice. The acid test would be how the community responds to its first murder, asking who has the authority to do anything about it? Is there even banishment? If so, where is it written and by what right was it agreed? No, I think it would be a lot easier to borrow an existing book of legal statutes from a legacy country, just as you have borrowed their language and dictionary. You can always delete the laws, codes and regulations you don’t need. A seastead should, I think, be an opt-in community with some terms that have to be agreed first to gain entry.
On land, what is a city or a country anyway but several million of the same species herding together and supressing their natural instincts? What happens when you turn that suppression off? It could be like the fences going down in Jurassic Park.
“Anarchism is all very well, but my question is: who will be responsible for the drains?” (inimitably, Joyce Grenfell).
We are shown the different angles from which people can be drawn to seasteading. There are the dropout stoners, the students of economic forces, religious preachers, imposters, non-conformers (gender and orientation), a lottery winner, paranoid gun-nuts, fugitives, essential providers/profiteers and an inquisitive pod of dolphins. This is sounding more and more like Casablanca, but without Rick.
In this world, all is revealed through the interactions of a diminutive American analyst, a kind of sterile human abacus who has no choice but to shrug off the flaws and derision of people who put her down for her visible Asian descent. So much for everyone beginning afresh and equal, as discrimination persists in what could otherwise become paradise. To her credit, she keeps helping them whether they deserve her services or not. I suppose this is because she has been presented with a challenge (quantifying, creating management information) and can’t help but be fixated on that, inching into a substantial puzzle. This disempowered character can’t control anything at all on Liberstead but can at least identify where it’s going wrong. To me, that sounds familiar.
My impression of this book is that it pays back your patience more than ordinary entertainment might have. Some readers will be put off by the characters’ slang in the first few pages, but that’s needed to differentiate characters — and they sure are different, so don’t worry about that. You could say it’s a story about a caravan of damaged souls, until about the last hundred pages, then the philosophical meat is laid out and the reader can really start thinking for themselves. Hopefully your brain will be lit up in a flurry of pros and cons but then, because the audience of a fiction tale insists on a conformist ending, the whole thing has to be wrapped up in a sort of cathartic testing event which may or may not give us hope of finding a way. I wasn’t sure whether this author would let the cast sink or swim, to be honest. J.W. Bruns observes his creation but doesn’t completely buy into their views or feel the need to make them heroes. There’s some gentle chuckling here.
Natural selection ‘chooses’ a new path with genetic mutations which fail or become dominant, whereas the evolution and direction of human governance is about thoughts and decision points, so happens faster. The advantage of seasteading is that if you can liberate people to play out all possible decisions instead of just one. If you ‘blow the dandelion’ or float many different experimental visions of society out there like lanterns, some of them are always going to survive, despite the many which fail, which is better than entrusting everyone’s lives to one basket (a country, a union of conquered states). All options are still open on the high seas*, so there’s no problem going your own way and then linking up again when a crisis is over. If you drown, it is the result of your own personal decision, so it teaches us all to be better decision-makers.
*A seastead in coastal waters, say 12 miles, is considered to be part of the nation state, so may as well be on land unless there is some agreed exemption with that state (read Joe Quirk’s book). A seastead positioned between 12 miles and 200 miles is still under the land nation state’s sphere of influence, so isn’t truly free from their external control. A seastead position more than 200 miles from land is genuinely free from any state regulation and can set its own rules (a ship must obey the international conventions of the high seas and display a national registration flag, but a seastead is not a ship). The risk of catastrophe increases the farther the seastead is away from land, from storms, piracy, lack of provisions and being worryingly distant from external emergency services. The closer in and the smaller the risk, the more the reason to do seasteading shrinks. The best chances for seasteading to be embedded properly appear to be either (i) a state being submerged by rising sea-level inviting seasteaders and transitioning to a floating country or, sadly, (ii) a natural or anthropogenic disaster forcing a population onto floating habitation because the land is gone. Will Bangladesh or the South Seas islands become fixed-location seastead nations? The UN are not required to recognise countries which already exist.
The domino of consequence for the American diaspora in seasteading is when people who hold such a high opinion of a constitution wish to live in a society rejecting any constituted order, so that doesn’t quite gel. Anarchy is a gaping risk, so if a seastead were to be populated by people from my country, they would form a voting democracy because that’s what they already know and are comfortable with. The author raises the objection that this allows the majority to tyrannise the minority, which initially sounds valid but the minority over-ruling the majority is infinitely worse, a dictatorship where the majority have no legal or democratic means of stopping the entitled few. There will always be abuses of power in any system, but is the answer to make sure that no one (individually or collectively) has any power over others? This ends any hope of the structure or coordination which education, health and civil peace rely on. Is freedom only possible if you cancel society? Is society only possible if you intrude on freedom?
Okay, so why not change the configuration of a society to best adapt to external forces? The objection to this will come from the seasteaders themselves. Think about this one. The author poses the question that if the medicines of the past are not fit for purpose now, if horses are not optimal for transport after the invention of better vehicles, why do we not do something about government designed in the 18th and 19th centuries not being fit for purpose now? Well, although seasteading on the high seas (that area beyond national regulation) gives the opportunity to try something new, the problem is that most people who wish to become seasteaders are implacable libertarians. At the orthodox extreme, this means they will not accept any form of government, top-down control or even tolerate voting. All these things are ‘aggression’, arguing that a person’s body and what they have made by their own effort is theirs, so shouldn’t be claimed or taxed (Locke, apparently, but I haven’t read him yet).
How can you introduce essential organisation but still be acceptable to orthodox libertarianism? Is it better to not allow libertarians to join your breakaway society unless they compromise (small governance) but that defeats the point in several respects, over-ruling private free will, you naughty dictator you. If group decisions are impossible, libertarian seasteading is herding cats, but ones uncaring of whether they stay together, stuck on a moving ocean. Why join equal minded folk if you don’t accept being joined? Joining implies at least some degree of submission so you aren’t anti-social.
A character in the story tells us that philosophical libertarianism has never been fully tried, although it influenced the US Constitution (saying there weren’t even taxes for over 130 years). Then, cleverly, the author introduces the thought that Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) have successfully provided an organisation without an organisation or hierarchy, not even voting, which has still achieved its purpose. An interesting angle, that. A free society based on the principles of AA? I can imagine they wouldn’t run out of clients.
People run away from no end of different things, often shackles blindly accepted by their peer group because life has always been that way, constrained. Human governance is supposed to be a tolerable mid-point between two unsafe extremes: The total freedom of tiny government, where you can do anything you want without any consequence (heaven for robbers and rapists), versus large, byzantine government with total control of everything you want to do or think and the ability to intervene and hurt you if you don’t comply with what suits them (heaven for strutting totalitarian bastards). The irony is that modern ‘liberals’ have morphed into those dictating totalitarians (you always become the thing you hate), so liberal and libertarian are political opposites. If people are drawn to seasteading to escape overly oppressive top-down control, that’s excellent. If they have been drawn to seasteading because they want to carry out evil intent in a place where law enforcement does not exist, then the new society becomes a hell, populated with demons, and then you’ll see good people move out. This is an argument to have some governance, to help vulnerable people to live in relative safety, but not to allow that historic mission-creep where more and more of your life is regulated, then the leaders borrow in your name to spend it on their own lifestyle.
I like the sense of society having been broken by a shock event and then having to think again. It’s a bit like the Covid event switching so many of us to home working. A new way to configure society is perhaps only ever going to happen if something worth trying arises from a catastrophic crash, as that’s the only way to break the bonds of vested interests (property, wage-slavery, big business, banks, politicians, conformists). Leaving land dumps so much of this luggage of resistance.
Although the residents in this story have done away with currency, they rely on someone’s wealth solving their external problems. Although some goods are exchanged free, the new society portrayed here is not based on abandoning property law and sharing. The story and characters are US-influenced and we see the haves and have nots, including the perception of ‘illegals’ who did not get there by investing in property.
Seasteading has many problems to solve before people take to the oceans en masse. There’s 1. Acceptance of legitimate autonomy by land-based nations, 2. engineering design safety, 3. the food and energy deficit, 4. the provision of the twin safety nets of health and welfare; and 5. that an unstructured new society selects in favour of young men who want to make their mark plus anti-social people (addicts, criminals) who like the idea they cannot be stopped by any rules.
Without regulation, a fully libertarian seasteading society would be too dangerous for women, children and frail people to ever want to settle in. Just imagine the bad press influencing the undecided after every incident. My conclusion after reading this not unrealistic fantasy is that libertarian seasteading would inevitably become a boys’ club, unless some regulation reassures us there would be more of a balanced and safe community to move into. Seasteading can be done, a little differently, but the compromise is that committed libertarian frontiersmen won’t get it all their own way.
I’d like to say thanks to this author for introducing the topic of seasteading to a mainstream audience and fuelling a necessary debate on future societies.
