Islands in the Net, a perennially popular notion

(((I'm glad to see a mere half-million splashed down on this sci-fi boondoggle; why, that would hardly pay the fuel bill for a privately-financed geek space-launch effort.)))

(((I might go hang out on one of these seasick libertarian arcologies if they can promise me it won't get hammered by &%$#%^ four-inch chunks of hail. I see they've got onboard windmills this season; the zillionaire's latest add-on...)))

Link: Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies .

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"If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

"With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems." (((I wanna see the one that's based on some good old fashioned Jules Verne steampunk Captain Nemo smash-the-state violent anarchism.)))

"Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world," Thiel said in a statement.
It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn't playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls "seasteads" – homesteads on the high seas.

"Within the pantheon of would-be utopian communities, there's a particularly rich history of people trying to live outside the nation-state paradigm out in the ocean. The most ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at nothing less than the colonization of the universe. There was also Las Vegas millionaire Michael Oliver's attempt to create a new island country, the Republic of Minerva, by dredging the shallow waters near Tonga. And the Freedom Ship was to be a mile-long portable country costing about $10 billion to construct...."

(((I can forgive these damp geeks anything for this awesome Silicon Valley reframing of the Westphalian doctrine:)))

"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," he said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."