“Big ideas start as weird ideas,” Patri Friedman, an ex-Googler and the grandson of the late economist Milton Friedman, recently told Details. And Friedman’s idea is weirder than most. The libertarian blogger is tired of the restrictions he feels are imposed on him by American society. The solution? Floating chains of micro-countries, each little colonies in the vast Petri dish of the sea, and each an experiment in a new form of government. The idea, which Friedman terms “seasteading,” caught the eye of PayPal founder Peter Thiel (who recently made headlines for paying kids to drop out of school), who sunk $1.25 million into the idea. Thiel’s picked a few winners before—he was one of the earliest investors of Facebook.
Well worth checking out are these conceptual designs of the floating micro-countries of the future, winners in a Seasteading Institute competition from a while back. (Inhabitat has them queued up in a slideshow, here.) The technologies for building such communities already exist—the Seasteading Institute thinks the first such communities will be retrofitted oil rigs or ships. But an FAQ on the institute’s site shows that the institute is concerned with technological advances in order to bring the cost of such communities down. (The FAQ on the site is worth reading, if only for smirk value. It contains entries like “What about pirates?” and “Why not just buy a boat?”)
The first seasteads would not be self-sustaining, and would need to rely on trade. It should be emphasized that seasteads are by no means being touted as eco-friendly—they’re expected to run on diesel. Libertarians and the green movement, which calls for heavy regulation of carbon emissions, rarely see eye-to-eye.
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