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Hahaha. I remember the 90s and how the Libertarian-inflected idea of building floating island(s) - seasteading - was all the rage with that bunch. Even as someone in the Libertarian mindset (as I was at the time), it seemed a bit out there, even for those with more money than sense.
I know the idea predated the 90s, but for some reason, it seemed to take on a different...tone...than some of the 60s utopian/futurist visions. It seemed a bit dark even back in the 90s and that was back when the (commercial) Internet still felt it had a lot of hope and promise beyond just "make shit-tons of money for the already wealthy".
Coverage of "The Principality of Sealand" and the popularity of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon probably contributed to the enthusiasm, as well as to the creation of Bitcoin.
Ryan’s intro is a great sales pitch but the real story is in the tapes left by maintenance guys complaining about leaky plumbing and shit that never gets fixed just to save a penny.
Best part is some of them are still trying, Adam Something did a couple videos on it and frankly speaking shit hit the fan rather quick in several cases. Inclusing at least one instance where the Thai government boarded and seized one of the prototype badly build floating houses. I refuse to call it a house boat because it being a boat would imply respectable engineering quality.
They have moved on to Network Cities. They are working to make a city state somewhere near Singapore right now. It's called Network School, for tech optimists and digital nomads.
I remember back then coming across a proposed "constitution" someone had posted on the Internet for one of these sea-steaded micronations. It was presented as a contract rather than a constitution, every citizen was supposed to literally sign on to it (or be treated as a non-citizen). It was zany. Hundreds of pages, with all sorts of minutiae. The main bit I remember was the rather large section that was the equivalent of the American second amendment, it had detailed rules about what kinds of landmines one was allowed to put on one's property.
A constitutional right to place landmines, on a seastead micronation that would no doubt have rather constrained living space.
I'm generally in favour of personal liberties and all that, I can see how libertarianism can appeal as something that seems like a reasonable idea. But it's so easy for it to just go careening wildly off the edge of reasonableness into territory like this.
Ha! That rings a bell. Somewhere back in the mists of time, I wonder if I ran across the same thing. Or I seem to remember something about a contract, and I thought there was also a component of buying into it with large amounts of money to help fund it. Sort of like a proto-GoFundMe project.
They should just live on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Behold the Network State!
Those 4 particles per cubic meter are gonna have to do some heavy lifting
I hope not
It's interesting to see where it's gone. There are enough techbro billionaires and multi-millionaires now that if it were feasible at scale in the long run, someone would have pulled it off.
Yeah, I remember a lot of vague circle-jerk kind of conversations about it on USENET, and that was before a lot of billions were made by the likes of Thiel...I mean, besides the engineering aspect, I don't know what would be in it for the typical human being who is not a decamillionaire+ to join up and be part of some weird cult/Ayn Randian human experiment? Just to be "free" of current nation-states and join a new one?
On a related note, I started reading The Sovereign Individual since it apparently inspires so much of these fucking whack-a-doodles with wayyyyy too much money than is good for the world, and .... wow. I recommend everyone check it out since it's quite the ride at least so far.
No wonder these dipsticks like the ideas in there, since it is hitting every note that someone with way too much money and notions of grandiosity would just looooove. I'm not sure how well this stuff dovetails with the likes of what Curtis Yarvin is spewing, but I think it doesn't come in direct conflict with his "ideas", LOL.
In a word - these people are fucking nuts. I'd love to see some way to wrest a lot of money, and therefore, power away from them, since they hold way too much sway over the rest of us.