Part three of our multi-part series (see here and here) comes from The Seasteading Institute. The San Francisco-based, Peter Thiel co-founded organization is doing exciting work in developing alternative, watery ways of living on earth. Seasteading has become an increasingly popular topic of intellectual discussion in recent years, and for those of you keeping up with HBO’s Silicon Valley, it has acquired a particular cultural je ne sais quoi.
In their words…
Seasteading is such a wide and deep subject it’s very difficult to sum up for people. The creation of this video is a lesson in how many complex technologies can be summed up by focusing on shared goals.
Seasteaders gathered from all over the world at our Seasteading Conference in San Francisco in 2012. Even though I was a committed seasteader, I was astounded by the number of ideas from different industries for how to create floating civilizations on the seas. Nathan Green, who was charged with creating a video to capture the essence of seasteading, couldn’t see how he was going to make a video capturing two days of presentations on technical aspects of ocean law, ocean farming, maritime engineering, algal fuel, “bluegreen technologies,” and environmental cleanup. Then I gave a speech summing up what everybody was doing, and, Nathan said, “The video should be based on that speech.”
Then a truly collaborative process began among everybody at the Institute, as we worked to feature a dozen key speakers and their goals in less than three minutes. Working together, we created something that was more concise and elegant than 25 presentations by 25 experts. We managed to sum up an effort we thought was impossible to [to do].
