![]() The cruise ship industry in particular is bound by intricate rules. The high seas, while appearing borderless and free, are, in fact, some of the most tightly regulated places on Earth. But converting a cruise ship into a new society proved more challenging than envisaged. The Satoshi also offered a chance to marry two movements, of crypto-devotees and seasteaders, united by their desire for freedom – from convention, regulation, tax. No longer was seasteading a futuristic ideal it was, said Romundt, “an actual ship”. Their vision was utopian, if your idea of utopia is a floating crypto-community in the Caribbean Sea. They hoped it would become home to people just like them: digital nomads, startup founders and early bitcoin adopters. In homage to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of bitcoin’s mysterious inventor (or inventors), they renamed the ship the MS Satoshi. Grant Romundt, Rüdiger Koch and Chad Elwartowski planned to sail the ship to Panama, where they were based, and park it permanently off the coastline as the centrepiece of a new society trading only in cryptocurrencies. ![]() Then, in October 2020, it seemed his dream might finally come true, when three seasteading enthusiasts bought a 245-metre-long cruise ship called the Pacific Dawn. “Seavilization,” to use his phrase, remained a fantasy. In the decade following Friedman’s talk, a variety of attempts to realise his seasteading vision were all thwarted. (Quirk now runs the Seasteading Institute Friedman remains chair of the board.) “Democracy,” the two men wrote, “would be upgraded to a system whereby the smallest minorities, including the individual, could vote with their houses.” In 2017, Friedman and the “seavangelist” Joe Quirk wrote a book, Seasteading, in which they described how a seasteading community could constantly rearrange itself according to the choices of those who owned the individual floating units. The beauty of seasteading was that it offered its inhabitants total freedom and choice. “Let’s think of government as an industry, where countries are firms and citizens are customers!” he declared. Why, he asked, in one of the most advanced countries in the world, were they still using systems of government from 1787? (“If you drove a car from 1787, it would be a horse,” he pointed out.) Government, he believed, needed an upgrade, like a software update for a phone. In a four-minute vision-dump, Friedman explained his rationale. He wanted, quite simply, to start a new city in the middle of the ocean.įriedman called it seasteading: “Homesteading the high seas,” a phrase borrowed from Wayne Gramlich, a software engineer with whom he’d founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008, helped by a $500,000 donation from Thiel. He wanted to transform how and where we live, to abandon life on land and all our decrepit assumptions about the nature of society. From behind a large lectern, Friedman – grandson of Milton Friedman, one of the most influential free-market economists of the last century – laid out his plan. ![]() The event was hosted by the Thiel Foundation, established four years earlier by the arch-libertarian PayPal founder Peter Thiel to “defend and promote freedom in all its dimensions”. O n the evening of 7 December 2010, in a hushed San Francisco auditorium, former Google engineer Patri Friedman sketched out the future of humanity.
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