As incongruous as it may sound, a trip to Nevada’s bone-dry Black Rock desert is what got Patri Friedman thinking about a political utopia in the middle of the ocean. Back in 2000 Friedman had just returned from Burning Man, the weeklong festival of radical free expression, where tech geeks build elaborate installations and free spirits dance naked in the sun. Friedman, then a 20-something dot-com entrepreneur, was still buzzing from the sight of thousands of people casting off the shackles of societal convention on the desolate terrain outside Reno, and started wondering if there might be a way to unleash stifled political activity in the same way. His first idea was a modest offshore floating festival to explore the options, and from that seed a grander vision grew.
Today Friedman is a leading proponent of the seasteading movement, an effort to create permanent floating communities in international waters that would allow “the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas of government,” he says. Think of these as the political equivalent of business start-ups: self-created micronations where anyone could be president of his own domain, setting up his own political and economic rules. All it would take would be an ocean platform or large vessel, some capital investment, a vision, and a good dose of chutzpah. And settlers, of course. The laws of supply and demand would determine which of these micronations would attract settlers and survive. “If you join a city and you don’t like the way it’s going, you can float away and join a different city,” says Michael Keenan, former president of the Seasteading Institute.
“It’s not about one person’s vision of utopia, because most people’s visions won’t work in practice,” Friedman explains. “The concept is to open a new frontier so that a bunch of people can go out and try a bunch of ideas.”
