The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer best known for being Milton Friedman’s grandson. Although both men are outspoken libertarians, the nonprofit institute insists that it isn’t politically motivated. It claims to want more space for political experimentation—and the beauty of aquatic governance experiments is that they’re free to fail on their own merits. “If we can solve the engineering challenges of Seasteading, two-thirds of the Earth’s surface becomes open for these political start-ups,” explains Friedman, a self-styled cult leader who’s known to the community as just Patri. The Seasteaders have chosen as their motto “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom’—an apparent spin on “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” a Maoist policy which encouraged dissidents to speak out and then used their views as a pretext to jail them.
The mantra was repeated many times during the Seasteading Institute’s third annual conference, which took place one week before Ephemerisle in the basement of the San Francisco Grand Meridien Hotel. The Institute hasn’t been officially affiliated with Ephemerisle since 2009, but a number of attendees, many of them Seasteading Institute staffers, had plans to go to the festival and encouraged me to come party with them. A few older donors to the Seasteading cause planned to make appearances at Ephemerisle, expecting to look out of place in the festival’s trippy, offbeat surroundings. There was a rumor that Peter Thiel would go, too, but no one could confirm it.The crowd at the conference was disproportionately white, male (I counted maybe ten women in the room) and wealthy (tickets started at $715), and the vast majority of attendees needed no prompting to profess their tax-hating libertarian views just minutes into a conversation. The junket also brought together a number of academics, who, I later learned, had been courted by the Seasteading Institute because their expertise—legal, environmental, or technical—happened to contribute to the greater Seasteading project. The experts had no plans to visit Ephemerisle; in fact, the movement’s radical, libertine side seemed to elude them completely.
Like Ephemerisle, the tenor of the conference was scrappy, defiant, and idealistic. The event was staffed by a group of a dozen Seasteading Institute “ambassadors,” who proselytize for the cause all over the world, and talks ranged from the highly speculative—“Seasteading for Medical Tourism,” “The Economic Viability of Large Floating Structures”—to the practical: “Seastead Security,” for instance, outlined how water cannons and noise machines can protect the cities from pirates and government agents. A panel of legal experts offered a dense explanation of the legal aspects of Seasteading, which is theoretically possible since no one nation has jurisdiction over the high seas. Still, as one lawyer on the panel pointed out, there’s no way of knowing how existing countries will react to this assault on their dignity. The Seasteaders I spoke to were undeterred by the possibility of a seastead shutting down at the hands of a belligerent country or the international community. One Institute “ambassador” who spoke of Patri Friedman in hushed, reverent tones, told me she was confident that the movement was on the right side of history, and that they would be vindicated in the end.
A Costa Rican professor of agricultural engineering named Ricardo Radulovich gave one of the session’s most impassioned talks, about how terrestrial crops like tomatoes could thrive at sea and how algae could provide a sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuels. I met Radulovich, a dapper, ponytailed man in his fifties, over breakfast on the first day of the conference. After telling me about his passion for seaweed, Radulovich pulled a small vial of dried algae from his pocket and opened it on the table. Between bites of his Continental breakfast, he assured me that the powder, which smelled like fish food, would someday “feed the world.” He described his involvement in Seasteading as a conversion: “I couldn’t care less about land anymore. I was able to transcend land. It is too limited for the solutions we need.”
by Atossa Abrahamian, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Ephemerisle, 2009. Photo by Liz Henry via flickr.
