Purron
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2007
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- 5,596
Interesting concept - creating new floating countries.
Here's the official Seasteading website.PayPal-founder Peter Thiel was so inspired by Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand's novel about free-market capitalism - that he's trying to make its title a reality.
The Silicon Valley billionaire has funnelled $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, an organization that aspires to launch a floating colony into international waters, freeing them and like-minded thinkers to live by Libertarian ideals.
Mr Thiel recently told Details magazine that: 'The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn't do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?'
The floating sovereign nations that Thiel imagines would be built on oil-rig-like platforms anchored in areas free of regulation, laws, and moral conventions.
The Seasteading Institute says it will 'give people the freedom to choose the government they want instead of being stuck with the government they get.'
The venture capitalist who famously helped Facebook expand beyond the Harvard campus, Mr Thiel called seasteading an 'open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government.'
After making his first investment in the project in 2008, Mr Thiel said: 'Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public sector models around the world.
At The Seasteading Institute, we believe that experiments are the source of all progress: to find something better, you have to try something new.
But right now, there is no open space for experimenting with new societies. That's why we work to enable seasteading communities -- floating cities -- which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government. The most successful can then inspire change in governments around the world.
We're opening this new frontier because humanity needs better ways to live together to unlock our full potential.
Some interesting people are involved in this.
Peter Thiel is the Managing Partner of the Founders Fund, an American Investment firm. Previously, Mr. Thiel was the Chairman and CEO of PayPal, an Internet company he co-founded in 1998 that eBay acquired in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Patri Friedman received a BS in math from Harvey Mudd College, an MS in computer science from Stanford University, and an MBA from Cardean University. While in school he experimented with technology startups, ran a small consulting business, and co-founded two intentional communities. In 2004 he joined Google to work as a software engineer. In 2008 he left Google and founded The Seasteading Institute with seed funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Patri is on the board of Humanity+ and co-created Breakthrough Philanthropy. He is also a prolific writer on political theory and philosophy. Patri comes from a line of great revolutionary thinkers, his grandfather Milton Friedman was the 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, and his father David Friedman is a well-known political theorist and festival founder.