The Official Ephemerisle Blog

(Patri’s thoughts, still somewhat unpolished, still mulling this over / researching next steps, but wanted to get something out to be part of the discussion.)

Relentless in the face of obstacles such as TSI’s inability to insure Ephemerisle at a reasonable price, the seasteading community came together last weekend for a fabulous floating festival that many have been calling “UnEphemerisle” (like an unconference). The event drew 116 people on 9 houseboats, one platform (part of Apocaisle’s foundation), and San Francisco artist Chicken’s John’s artstead. Saturday’s activities included wakeboarding, tubing, water zorbing, and a series of talks at Memocracy.

Here are some thoughts comparing UnEphemerisle 2010 and Ephemerisle 2009, and about how the crowdsourcing affected the event:

• EI09 had slightly more attendees (despite EI09’s $50 tickets vs. UE10 being free), and many of those signed up for EI10 canceled and didn’t come to UE10. Canceling definitely hurt attendance (we’re guessing by 50%). That said, plenty of people still came!
• As a community-building event where people interested in seasteading gather for fun, connection, and inspiration, the event worked great. Post-event, there was a resounding amount of positive feedback on the event mailing list, and a group formed to work on a marina hackerspace.
• The event was a bit cramped with only houseboats and no large open platforms, although the houseboat roofs helped a lot as open space.
• Anchoring away from shore, while somewhat scary as the flotilla moved with the tides, was successful, although somewhat marginal – the group couldn’t do it Thu night, had to try again Fri morning, and 2 of the main lines got twisted and the large houseboats were unable to retrieve them after several hours of effort on Sun, and had to cut the lines. I don’t think anyone has any idea how solid or risky the anchoring setup was, and what the chances were that we could have woken in the middle of the night to the flotilla being swept against the rocks. It was again clear that this is a difficult challenge, one with scaling issues, and a key piece of group infrastructure.
• There was much less art, likely due to the cancellation of art grants and weaker integration of Chicken & his team (who arrived on the Relentless at midnight on Saturday after an epic voyage). EI09 had a wide range of art, while UE10 had Matt Bell’s giant koosh, a half-day of the half-finished art boat, and not much else. For example, documentarian Jason Sussberg said that he found UE10 far less visually appealing than EI09.
• Despite there being no official medical services, Patri reports that he was quite happy with the care he received for his dislocated shoulder.
• There were no interactions with authorities that would have required permits, relationships, etc. (although there were last year, and the lack this year might have been due to the prep work TSI did pre-cancellation).
• Almost everyone slept on rented houseboats, the only exceptions being a piece of Apocaisle (built last year w/ a TSI grant), the Relentless (partly funded this year by a TSI grant before the event was canceled). So there was no progress in structure/platform innovation (regression, if anything), and on the last day a couple sailboats. On the one hand we can look at this as settling on a standard structure, one which effectively provides space and infrastructure at a reasonable price. On the other hand, houseboats are not ocean-worthy, so while convenient they are a dead-end as far as getting to international waters.

Now that we have these two events as examples, we can evaluate these different approaches in the context of TSI’s goals for ephemerisles (floating festivals) and how they contribute to our mission of building startup countries on the ocean. TSI has two goals for Ephemerisle:

1. To be an embryonic seasteading city which incrementally grows towards true seasteading (full-time autonomous ocean life).
2. To bring together our community to bond, learn, play, and deepen their commitment to our shared mission, which we think is most powerfully and elegantly accomplished in the setting of a shared journey from a few boats on a river towards a temporary city in international waters (1).

We’ll start with (2) – Community. UE10 mostly accomplished this at far less cost than a TSI-organized, safe, insured event would have. While it was smaller, and seemed to appeal less to the high resource individuals we’d like to engage (for example, 4/5 TSI’s board planned to attend EI10, and only 1/5 came to UE10), it had much of the value at little to no cost to TSI. Which is great!

The picture is rather bleaker for (1), however, as there was basically zero incremental progress. The anchoring was a little better, but the difference was mainly the group’s willingness to trust a potentially unreliable anchoring system (which Chicken had available but was not willing to depend on at EI09), as opposed to any improved technology or knowledge. And anchoring houseboats in the Delta is standard enough that Paradise Point rents out houseboats with anchors that they train non-boaters to use in a few minutes, so it doesn’t represent a big achievement. The experienced mariners we have talked to have uniformly said that a raft-up in international waters is a very difficult and currently unsolved challenge, and we saw zero community push this year towards engineering better solutions to make incremental progress to meet this challenge. There was also no progress in location, wave size, # of attendees, structure type or variety, or variety of legal/cultural environments (ie multiple competing platforms).

Even more disappointing from my & TSI’s perspective, is that some people seem to be taking these two points and drawing a line – expecting next year to be another raft-up of houseboats on the Delta. Which sounds like a great weekend to me – but not an Ephemerisle. I’m very worried that without funding, research, and direction from TSI, the community would happily gather in the Delta each year for a fun raft-up party with little relation to seasteading, rather than my original vision of building towards the seasteading world.

So here are my thoughts for what’s best for Ephemerisle 2011 and beyond. It’s clear that an UnEphemerisle style event can achieve a significant amount of value at a small fraction of the cost – only a few, well-defined areas are lacking. However, those areas are crucially important to the long-term strategic implications. So it seems likely that the event’s value would be significantly increased by an organization such as TSI providing more of what I think of as “Seasteading-ness”: central anchor points, a large marine barge, funding for art / engineering work / sociopolitical experiments, research to allow future ocean events, and in general consciously pushing the event towards it’s long-term goal. But it also seems likely that TSI can focus only on this limited set of things. Perhaps TSI could participate in or supplement a community-organized UnEphemerisle, rather than trying to organize the event ourselves. This could be far cheaper as our liability and thus our insurance could be much less, if we are only contributing some grants or research.

Many open questions remain, such as the feasibility (cost/complexity/rental vessel availability) of moving to the Bay in 2011, insurance costs and requirements for various forms of TSI participation, when to hold the event, and how best to realize the seasteading vision within the Ephemerisle context. We’ll be investigating these over the coming months and pondering how best to combine the lower cost participatory model we saw this year with the safe, strategic, beautiful step towards seasteading that we have been envisioning.

As I said at the beginning, these thoughts are far from full-formed, just wanted to get them out for feedback and discussion.  Welcome your input!