A Quote by Joe Quirk

Seasteads are man-made islands that float permanently on the ocean with any measure of a political autonomy. They would essentially be startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted.

Joe Quirk

Quote Topics

Any Autonomy Community Could Essentially Float Form Islands Kind Made Man Man-Made Measure Ocean People Permanently Political Societies Startup Wanted Whatever Would

Quote Author

Joe Quirk
American - Author

Nearly half the earth's surface is unclaimed by any country, so seasteads would be startup countries on the blue frontier. Patri Friedman is a Google engineer and theorist of political economy who realized that if society floated, it would completely change the nature of governance itself. If seasteads are modular and can be moved about, allowing people to choose new societies, we'd create a market of governance providers, competing to attract residents.

Joe Quirk

Seasteads are a technology for anybody to form an alternative community based on their unique values - for communities to organize themselves however they want. Seasteads are their chance to demonstrate their vision can work. All that matters is that people can create, join, and leave seasteads voluntarily. As long as people can choose among seasteads, the best ways of living together will prosper, and the ones that people don't like will fail.

Joe Quirk

For a long time, I've ranted against naming your startup community 'Silicon Whatever.' Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.

Brad Feld

People can leave seasteads, or people can choose them, and people can create new seasteads if they want. This fluidity will engage an evolutionary market process that'll allow a diversity of societies to emerge that will in principle be superior, simply because people chose them. Governments on land don't allow this fluid dynamic of choice.

Joe Quirk

I wanted to show that women could run, but I also wanted to kind of inspire the idea that ordinary people can run. I was like, boy, I feel so good when I run, if everybody could feel like this, this sense of joy and physical well-being and strength and autonomy you have when you run, how much better the world would be, you know?

Bobbi Gibb

Oil platforms are a technology for floating permanently on the high seas, and cruise ships are a technology for self-governance on the high seas, and if you combine these two technologies, imagine cruise ships that never dock but float permanently. Imagine if they were 10 times as big. Imagine if they were modular and could move about and you could choose the neighbours you wanted to live with.

Joe Quirk

Almost all of the Marshall Islands' 72,000 residents live within seven feet of sea level. If the climate continues to change at its current pace, ocean acidification could destroy its resources and rising oceans could flood large parts of the islands.

Brian Deese

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.

Chad Harbach

My own father had always said the measure of a man wasn't how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up. I made a pledge to myself that I would get up and emerge from this debacle better for having gone through it. I would live up to the expectation I had for myself. I would be the kind of man I wanted to be.

Joe Biden

I wanted to be the kind of woman who would attract a certain kind of man that I could respect. That was my thinking. It had to do with the kind of couple I would be a part of.

Lisa Kudrow

My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in, we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it.

Maggie Stiefvater

Go to the east shore of any of the Hawaiian Islands, and that's a pretty big lesson on how much plastic is ending up in the ocean. Basically, the Hawaiian Islands act as a filter out in the middle of the Pacific.

Jack Johnson

That's the marvellous thing about seasteads; if a government fails, there's nothing much the people who live there can do about it. But if seasteads fail, they simply disassemble and go away.

Joe Quirk

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

George Bernard Shaw

I wanted to participate in the political responsibilities of an American citizen. I wanted to vote. I wanted to be a full member of the American community. I made America my home country. It's my identity in many ways.