Hacker Sailing with Mitch Altman – A New Kind of Hacker Adventure in Snowdonia (opens in new tab)

That's exactly what the astral pirates are - a growing worldwide movement of people who don't want the next decades of our lives to be defined like the last one was: 1.5 hours of mayhem, bouncing and jostling through tubes full of people full of worry wrapped in expensive headphones only to be deposited into well decorated offices in London to try to solve difficult problems. I failed at that - the really difficult problems can't be solved in that way.

Sure, a corporation might be able to launch a cloud product, the engineers might be able to scale out and secure the cloud offering. And more abstractions will be layered upon the human experience and more "wealth" will be created. But then we have to spend 1.5 hours desperately trying to rush back to a small slice of ?life? and then spend an exhausted hour trying to code some freedom into the FOSS. But this is not how free software or free culture or free society will come to be.

Locking on in front of oil company headquarters and doing mass sit-downs at major London landmarks are great but Astral Ship is one of the very concepts which can create viable and sustainable alternatives.

There's a huge emphasis on linux, local services (filesharing, fedwiki etc). The concept of a pirate ship borrows from federation, decentralize, etc. But it gives a centre - a ship. There will be many ships helping each other out. If you're not able to make the voyage watch this space anyways: an astral ship in nature on the edge of London has been designed and planned for some time as well.

It's gonna be very interesting to see what comes out of it. Some great people making the journey. There may be a great advantage to have a crew that stays in a hackerspace and focusses for an extended period