Water World

I haven't looked at Wonkette for a million years. What's over there? Maybe something truly bizarre:

(E)ccentric Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel will do everybody one better and use a little of that billionaire barbecue tinder pile to the tune of $1.25 million to fund an adorable lunatic venture proposing to build an island nation of Paultards “oil-rig style” somewhere off the coast of San Francisco/ wherever. “Will there be Internet forums?” Oh, uh, probably! The organization behind this blockbuster premise is called the Seasteading Institute, a group that devotes itself to arguing on its Wiki about what kind of man-made island would be most likely to live up to Ayn Rand’s paradisiac vision of total lawlessness while trying to avoid tsunami death. No one claimed libertarian utopia was easy!

Is Wonkette exaggerating? This reminds me when I was planning new and exciting cities in my early adolescence! That was fun then; it could be fun now. Let's look deeper:

It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They'd be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that'll take some lawyers and time.

"The ultimate goal," Friedman says, "is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government." This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

It's a vivid, wild-eyed dream—think Burning Man as reimagined by Ayn Rand's John Galt and steered out to sea by Captain Nemo—but Friedman and Thiel, aware of the long and tragicomic history of failed libertarian utopias, believe that entrepreneurial zeal sets this scheme apart. One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, "starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate," Friedman says. When I ask if this wouldn't amount to a shareholder dictatorship, he doesn't flinch. "The way most dictatorships work now, they're enforced on people who aren't allowed to leave." Appletopia, or any seasteading colony, would entail a more benevolent variety of dictatorship, similar to your cell-phone contract: You don't like it, you leave.

R-I-G-H-T!

Well, if the imaginary cities of my adolescence didn't work out so well, neither will this, but it will be interesting to watch!