Building a commune in the middle of the ocean?Why not. Patri Friedman joins YourJustice as an advisor
Fairer world needs passionate people to sit around the bonfire and think about global justice. We are incredibly pleased to report that Patri Friedman, an American thinker and entrepreneur, has joined the team as an advisor. “Excited to be involved with this fascinating meta-network state project. I love their ambitious vision to create governance systems that can be forked and customized like a code base. When it’s easy to instantiate new jurisdictions, competition increases & citizens benefit”, Patri wrote on Twitter. Friedman is a well-known theorist of political economy, founder of The Seasteading Institute and Pronomos Capital, which aims to build the cities of tomorrow. This article explores his biography and major projects. And they are really cool.
Born into a family of economists
Patry grew up in a family of economists. For such people, it is usually said: “The child’s fate is sealed”. His grandfather Milton Friedman received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The award was given for “achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy”. Milton was an advocate of the free market and the main proponent of the monetarist school of economics.
Together with his wife Rose, also an economist, he wrote the book Free to Choose, that later inspired Estonia’s young prime minister and reformer, Mart Laar.
Patri’s father David Friedman graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics, though became famous by writing the book, The Machinery of Freedom. In it he advocates an anarcho-capitalist society, where all goods and services, including the law itself, can be produced by the free market.
So you understand that Patri had little chance of going the other way.
However, times have changed.
Political autonomy in the ocean? Why not!
Friedman Junior chose tech. He graduated from Stanford University with a master’s degree in computer science and received an MBA from New York Institute of Technology — Ellis College. Worked as a software engineer at Google. Was pretty good at poker. Started Ephemerisle, the largest self-organizing festival on water. In the end of the day decided to dedicate his life to changing the future
In 2008, Patri founded The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit organization, based in California. Financial support was provided by technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel.
Seasteading means building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy.
How do autonomous communities resonate with YourJustice mission?
— Today, there is no open space for experimenting with new societies. That’s why we work to enable seasteading communities — floating cities — which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for how to live together.
The Seasteading Institute builds a community of entrepreneurs, aquapreneurs and visionaries, also conducts research.
Active projects inspired by Institute include Atlas Island, Freedom Haven, and Arktide. Ocean Builders in Panama work on version 2 of their single-family, affordable seastead, called the SeaPod. They are hosting an Incubator for entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts, electronics hackers, marine biologists, and other people that are passionate about developing new products and services that a city on the ocean would need.
Quote from Patri’s article:
– We argue that those advocating the reform of current political systems in order to promote jurisdictional competition are in a catch-22: jurisdictional competition has the potential to improve policy, but reforms to increase competition must be enacted by currently uncompetitive governments. If such governments could be relied upon to enact such reforms, they would likely not be necessary. Since existing governments are resistant to change, we argue that the only way to overcome the deep problem of reform is by focusing on the bare-metal layer of society — the technological environment in which governments are embedded. Developing the technology to create settlements in international waters, which we refer to as seasteading, changes the technological environment rather than attempting to push against the incentives of existing political systems. As such, it sidesteps the problem of reform and is more likely than more conventional approaches to significantly alter the policy equilibrium.
Here’s what Peter Thiel wrote about the project:
– We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.
Cities of the future
Another Patri’s “project of life” was also backed by Peter. It’s about Pronomos Capital founded in 2019. The purpose of this venture capital firm is to bankroll the construction of experimental cities. Founder of AngelList Naval Ravikant and former CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Balaji S. Srinivasan are advising the project. Dream team!
– When institutions are outmoded, corrupted, or failing, the result is untold human suffering, the authors of the project сlaim. “Workers are trapped in low wage jobs and dangerous working environments, children don’t get educated, adults can’t get quality healthcare, and people can’t start businesses to support their families. Yet, upgrading national institutions is notoriously difficult, and consensus on country-level changes should be slow and deliberate”.
The solution is to upgrade institutions and to build the cities of the future.
Inspiring facts:
- The city of the future is designed as a product to attract and uplift its citizens.
- Charter cities are a new tool for governments to serve their citizens by better attracting investment, creating jobs, providing security and promoting equality. They do this by making regulation more flexible and allowing officials to more easily enact reforms.
- Decades of research on economic development has shown that the primary determinant of prosperity is the quality of a country’s laws and the integrity of its courts, administrators, and other legal institutions”.
- These cities may be one of the most effective ways to alleviate poverty.
- Charter cities can serve multiple purposes to solve the global refugee crisis.
- Communities will be regulated by their partner countries, follow all international treaties and standards, and “plug in” to the international legal system through the sovereignty of existing states.
Pronomos Capital’s stand on laws and justice:
Since law is a form of code — written by humans, run by lawyers and judges — we view legal institutions as society’s operating system. We want to see the lobbyist-written legal systems of today evolve towards collections of modular legal codes found to create prosperity and promote justice. We see a future where writing a legal system from scratch will be considered as absurd as rolling your own crypto. Instead, governments, citizens, and businesses will assemble combinations of proven legal codes like they choose apps or software libraries today.
“People can attempt to live their ideals without having to impose them on others”
Patri is also on the board of the Startup Societies Foundation, ran the angel fund Zarco Investment Group.
Patri on politics and society:
- Before I was introduced to the field of law and economics, I assumed that the main problem in achieving a good society was coming up with shared morals and values. Then you just write them down as laws, and you are done. It turns out that even if we agree on a definition of rights, there is no straightforward way to derive laws and enforcement mechanisms. Implementation is not a trivial detail, it’s the hard part!
- Because we have no a priori knowledge of the best form of government, the search for good societies requires experimentation as well as theory — trying many new institutions to see how they work in practice. This requires institutions to be embedded within a system which allows for their easy creation, testing, and comparison. A governing industry with a lower barrier to entry and easier switching of providers would allow for this constant small-scale experimentation.
People can attempt to live their ideals without having to impose them on others. Not only does it embrace multiple variants of libertarianism, but other goals and methods for creating a good society.
- …Most importantly, it increases jurisdictional competition. It will not just create one new country, but rather an entire ecosystem of countries competing and innovating to attract citizens. Like any market, the process of trial and error will generate solutions we can’t even imagine — but that we know will be better for customers.
Patri about YJ and idea of Web3 Reputation layer:
— Step one is the reputation for crypto addresses. This leads naturally to putting laws & justice on the blockchain because you can now enforce arbitrated decisions by impacting the reputation of the participants (when you can’t do it on-chain, like a smart contract with bonded assets).
In the long-term, they aim to create a full-stack system for creating jurisdictions, each with its own customized laws, that can apply in both the world of bits and the world of atoms.
We believe, YourJustice is aligned with and could complement Seasteading and Pronomos initiatives on their path to liberalising jurisdictions and humanising cities and states.
About YourJustice.
YourJustice is a blockchain platform where anyone can create a virtual jurisdiction based on values and enforced by code. Currently building a Web3 Reputation layer.
Willing to contribute as ambassador or YJ fellow?
