Back when I was a naïve young blogger getting ready to take up seasteading (living aboard a sailboat and sailing about, that is), I wrote a manifesto. I did it mostly to inspire myself. I called it, rather pompously “The New Age of Sail.” Here is what the newfangled silicon dummy says about it:

“The New Age of Sail is a 2006 online manifesto by Russian-American engineer and writer Dmitry Orlov. It predicts that a collapse of global industrial civilization and peak oil will force a return to wind-powered maritime transport and decentralized, low-energy coastal living.”

As predictions go, this one was definitely a dud. Peak oil came and went and global industrial civilization did not collapse. Instead, it disintegrated into several clusters; some, such as China, Russia and a few others, are doing better than ever; others, such as Germany, Italy and the UK, are doing worse and worse. Wind-powered transport is nowhere to be seen but bunker fuel-powered shipping is doing strangely now that any flipflop-and-turban-wearing miscreant can sink a ship pretty much at will provided someone provides him with precise targeting information (while a balalaika softly plays Tetris music in the background) and other miscreants under various EU flags can declare any vessel they don’t like to be part of a “Russian shadow fleet” (a term that lacks a valid legal definition), piratically abscond with it and sell the booty I mean cargo. I’ll have more to say on the subject of this global maritime fiasco later.

So much for my predictive abilities, but looking back 20 years the seasteading lifestyle I embarked upon back then doesn’t seem to have been so naïve. It helped me solve a basic problem of living in the US, which is that in the US real estate, whether mortgaged or rented, is a racket and an extortion scheme. The scheme is designed to work in tandem with a corporate job and a car (also leased or financed) for commuting between the housing and the job. Knock out any one of these elements and you are suddenly homeless and destitute. But what if you want to knock out all three — as I did? I didn’t like corporate work any more once my long-term gig as an Internet Systems Architect ended (that was actually quite a bit of fun!) and I never liked driving to work. And I wanted to reinvent myself as a writer/blogger — which I did, successfully.

So, real estate is a racket. Boating, on the other hand, is not ensnared in this racket because it is generally considered to be a form of recreation, not housing — this in spite of the large numbers of middle-aged divorsé alcoholics found living aboard semi-derilict boats at run-down marinas or at anchor in muddy estuaries and backwaters. (Not my case; I took to seasteading with a wife and, eventually, a son, and actually went to sea, repeatedly cruising the East Coast from Maine to Florida.)

Boats are also a racket, but different from the real estate racket because recreation is generally paid for from disposable income and as such is not amenable to the same forms of extortion as housing. That said, new boats are outrageously priced consumer items designed for ostentation, conspicuous consumption and sport. Used boats are still designed for these same purposes but no longer serve them, no longer being the fastest or the most fashionable. Used boats also quickly become maintenance nightmares, being designed, as just about everything else, with planned obsolescence in mind.

So, housing is a racket and boats are a loophole but also a racket. But there is a loophole inside that loophole: home-built boats. These can be built without planned obsolescence in mind and instead be made endlessly maintainable using basic carpentry, metalworking and fiberglass skills. I was lucky to find one of these, built by a maniac who got his hands on a huge pile of marine plywood (at an estate sale, he said) and used it all up to make a virtually indestructible sailing tub. It was a bit sloppy but it held up amazingly well in spite of the endless abuse to which two amateur sailors subjected it, be it by running aground or by broadsiding navigation buoys.

At the time, recreational boating in the US was rather sloppily regulated. Give a boat inspector some money and he will issue a Hull Identification Number and an Inspection Certificate to go with it. Take that certificate plus some money to the Coast Guard and it will issue a Certificate of Documentation (COD), form CG-1270, giving you the right to fly the US flag in international waters. As long as the boat moves about, it remains tax-free. And so, off you go… seasteading!

Of course, this loophole-within-a-loophole is not for everyone. You have to have a sizable nest egg to get started and the readiness and the ability to live frugally. (Most people who have a large income have large spending habits to go with it.) You have to have no debt. (Debt invariably shackles you to a job.) You have to be mentally and physically healthy, very fit and quite handy. (There are no psychiatrists/doctors, personal trainers or marine technicians to summon when you are 100 nautical miles offshore and something on board fails.) You have to be immune to seasickness because you can’t skipper a boat when you are suffering from dry heaves and are delirious from dehydration because you can’t hold down any liquids. And you have to have the presence of mind to not freak out when you are well out of the sight of land and the weather kicks up.

The people who fit this description comprise such a tiny minority that writing a manifesto for their sake was a waste of time. Young people either have no money or are pampered rich little idiots; old people may have money but are rarely healthy or fit. In fact, there is exactly one category of people who are able to embrace seasteading: sailors. But why would sailors listen to a novice like me? Well, a few did, but strictly for entertainment, which is what this post is — so far.

Moreover, I eventually found an even better loophole: leave the US and move back to Russia. Here, housing is not a racket, with 85–88% of Russians owning their primary residences free and clear, with an overall home ownership rate of 92.6%. In addition, around half of Russians own a rural or seaside summer home, giving Russia the highest rate of second home ownership in the world. Meanwhile, only 39.4% of Americans own their home free and clear, and over half of these are retirees. Their children, when they inherit these properties, often lose them to yet another racket called Medical Estate Recovery Program.

I could make use of this mega-loophole with ease because I happen to be Russian and so is my entire family. Russia is my natural element in ways that the US could never become no matter how long I stayed there. Of course, this loophole is not for everyone either. To start with, knowing Russian well is a must and Russian is not particularly easy to learn. (I might write something about that at some point.)

This concludes the entertainment portion of this blog post. And now, the serious portion.

Globalism (a word whose time came and went) relied largely on maritime commerce. In particular, it allowed economic specialization among various countries scattered around the globe because the cost of moving commodities and manufactured products by sea could be neglected. This is no longer the case. The world is swiftly forming several parallel maritime shipping systems which are functioning, or dysfunctioning, under a variety of incompatible regulatory regimes and levels of legal protection varying from unreliable to nonexistent. Iran can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off a good third of global shipping and the US, which some people still insist is a superpower, can’t even bring an aircraft carrier within strike range of it without fear of being sunk by a hypersonic missile or two. Some nice Yemenis can shut down the Bab el Mandeb, cutting off the Suez canal from Asia and East Africa. Meanwhile, Russia, with its own merchant fleet, marine insurance system and outstanding military potential, is in a privileged position: it has all the necessary resources for efficient shipping in this new reality. But, as always, there is a fly in this ointment, and that fly is the European Union.

As part of its 21st packet of anti-Russian sanctions, the European Union not only approved the seizure of oil tankers associated with Russia, but also created a market for trading the oil so stolen. The newly printed regulations allow EU countries to confiscate the oil from Russian tankers they seize and to put it up for sale. Mind you, this directly contradicts the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the entire system of international maritime regulations, but, as I mentioned, globalism is dead and with it any international legal frameworks that once made it possible.

This 21st-century piracy may be justly rewarded with a forceful response. From the point of view of strategic planning, Moscow, for now, prefers to view such piratical actions as an element of an ongoing hybrid war which the EU is losing and which therefore does not warrant a transition to full-fledged combat operations at sea. So far, Russia has preferred to respond in an unassailably legal manner by creating long-term vulnerabilities for its European enemies as they slide down the slippery slope toward deindustrialization, impoverishment and dissolution.

The other day, Putin spoke of the need to act “carefully but decisively” in responding to attempts to seize Russian tankers. What stands behind these words is not difficult to guess. First, facing a possible forceful response from an armed escort group will force EU pirates to play round after round of Russian roulette: if they were lucky, they would get the oil; if not, they would end up treading water with fish nibbling at their toes. Second, Russia will form an independent international legal framework, in cooperation with friendly nations, for prosecuting such acts of piracy. The pirates, on a holiday trip to some tropical destination, may never make it past passport control on arrival there and end up in pretrial detention instead.

Russia’s immediate response was to abandon the previous practice of flying flags of convenience in favor of the Russian state flag while simultaneously deploying armed security groups on ships and organizing naval escorts for sailing through key straits. At the same time, a presidential decree simplified the process of by which foreign-owned ships can be added to the Russian registry. It is expected that at least 1,000 additional ships will choose to fly the Russian flag.

This is not so much a show of force as a rational step aimed at increasing the cost of any attempt at piracy. Any boarding attempt now carries the risk of a direct counterattack with regular Russian naval forces. After all, now this is not some hallucinated “shadow” fleet, but the Russian Navy. Paradoxically, by sanctioning piracy, the European Union is effectively stimulating further fragmentation of the shipping market, as vessel owners will be forced to avoid routes passing through EU military control zones. Even more paradoxically, this will lead to increased demand for reflagging vessels under the Russian flag, as these vessels will be granted protected status.

Although Russia will not resort to symmetrical measures — piracy against European-flagged shipping — it is quite likely to make use of forced boarding provisions within the framework of the right to self-defense. This strategy preserves asymmetry, creating a zone of uncertainty for European shipowners without escalating to a full-scale armed conflict. Doing so would be pointless, given that Europe has effectively disarmed itself by giving most of its weapons to the Ukrainians, for the Russians to destroy, but still dangerous. The effectiveness of this approach is confirmed by the experience of Iran, which has managed to radically alter shipping conditions in its area of ​​control without engaging in direct conflict while still managing to ship oil to China.

There is little doubt that Russia will benefit politically from the European Union’s piratical new policies. The confiscations will help Russia to consolidate its position within BRICS in negotiating reforms of international maritime law, which are already being supported by China and India. Both of them are interested in protecting their merchant fleets from piratical actions by the West. The need to avoid sailing through pirate-infested waters close to EU coastlines will make Russia’s Northern Passage even more attractive, making good use of Russia’s atomic icebreaker fleet. Given European enmity toward Russia, along with the fact that previous European prosperity was made possible by pipeline-based access to Russian oil and gas, a further weakening of the European Union will automatically mean a further strengthening of Russia’s position vis-à-vis Europe. The populace of the EU would do well to get rid of their national leaders who imagine that acts of piracy against Russia won’t end in tears.