Seasteading Institute, San Francisco, California
A group of 21st-century utopians of the libertarian persuasion wants to permanently escape the heavy hand of government (that is, taxes) through "seasteading." The idea: floating communities, whether cruise ships or artificial islands, that lie in international waters, outside the purview of any particular country's laws. The concept's biggest backer, the Seasteading Institute, was co-founded in 2008 by software engineer Patri Friedman -- the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning free market economist Milton -- and billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has contributed more than $1 million to the project. The idea of finding freedom at sea isn't new: In 1964, Ernest Hemingway's younger brother, Leicester, launched the island nation of "New Atlantis" on an 8-by-30-foot bamboo raft off the coast of Jamaica. (It lasted a few years, until a storm destroyed it.) More successful has been the Principality of Sealand, an abandoned World War II-era sea fort seven miles off the coast of southeastern England, declared a sovereign nation (complete with coins and passports) in 1967 by Roy Bates, a British Army major turned disk jockey.
Seasteading Institute
SUBJECTS:
