Chasing Utopia, Startup Style

Fernando Kaskais

June 1

Carolina Moscoso for Noema Magazine

A group of Silicon Valley's most powerful figures are building startup societies that they believe will set them free.

BY LILY LYNCH - Lily Lynch is a foreign affairs writer and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Balkanist Magazine.

In April 2018, the Thai navy towed a strange white box to shore. Octagonal in shape and around 20 feet across, it was made of fiberglass and sat atop a 65-foot-long steel pillar. It had been found floating about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Phuket. But this was no ordinary detritus of the sea. The Thai authorities feared it posed a threat to the country's very sovereignty.

By the time Thai sailors climbed aboard the box, its previous inhabitants had fled. For about three months, the pod had periodically been inhabited by an eccentric bitcoin investor, an American software engineer named Chad Elwartowski, and his partner, Supranee "Nadia Summergirl" Thepdet.

Authorities accused the couple of "intent to cause injury to the nation," a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death. Dodging the authorities, they were charged in absentia. The couple maintained that their home — which they called a "seastead" — had been outside Thailand's territorial waters, but the government insisted it "reveals the intention of disobeying the laws of Thailand … and could lead to a creation of a new state within Thailand's territorial waters." Thai authorities worried that the pair in the box were part of a cult and that they intended to build a full-fledged floating community at sea.

Shortly before the box was towed to shore, Elwartowski posted a message on Facebook, which is no longer available but was widely quoted in media at the time: "I was free for a moment. Probably the freest person in the world. It was glorious." For Elwartowski, life on the seastead was supposed to be like inhabiting the utopia of Galt's Gulch in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged."

"Seasteading" is a utopian, libertarian-inflected vision of creating floating communities at sea beyond the tentacles of the state. The movement's most prominent organization is the Seasteading Institute, which aims to "reimagin[e] civilization with floating communities" and was founded by none other than economist and free market evangelist Milton Friedman's grandson, Patri Friedman.

The younger Friedman, a former coder at Google, received his seed funding from Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and the spy tech firm Palantir, to start the institute. As Thiel pronounced at the time: "The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level."

Silicon Valley tech barons have set their sights on new frontiers for human life. In addition to Thiel's dream of floating communities at sea, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos talk about colonizing space. Balaji Srinivasan and Marc Andreessen call for the territorialization of online communities into so-called network states or "start-up societies."

All these aspirations are rooted in a desire to withdraw from existing polities and to escape their high taxes, regulations and the disorder of liberal democracy. It's a yearning for new forms of self-governance and citizenship. In other words, they are political exit projects. And while the network states illuminate some real problems — the failure of nation-states to respond adequately to 21st-century crises, disintegrating social cohesion, the epidemic of loneliness — they also create new ones.

In 2009, economist Paul Romer proposed a similar concept: the charter city. Modeled on Hong Kong, he believed it would be an engine of wealth and innovation. In a 2009 TED talk, he suggested that China's rise could be attributed to the creation of "special economic zones" like Shenzhen, where the government of Deng Xiaoping introduced special tax benefits for foreign investors in the 1980s.

Romer believed that new Shenzhens and Hong Kongs were waiting in the wings; they were a model that could be replicated almost anywhere, creating pockets of prosperity through low taxes and cheap labor, particularly in the Global South. Romer insisted this was not a new form of colonialism. "The thing that was bad about colonialism … is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. This model is all about choices," he explained in his TED talk. "And, choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension."

Not all were convinced. Writing in The Baffler in 2012, author Belén Fernández quipped: "It's … safe to assume that, were the Chinese to build a charter city in half of Paul Romer's house and give him the option of living in the other half of it, he might well be hailing this incursion as something other than an 'antidote to coercion and condescension.'"

"'I was free for a moment. Probably the freest person in the world. It was glorious.'"

— Chad Elwartowski

That same year, Thiel voiced his belief that exiting the tyranny of centralized government could be facilitated by a proliferation of new countries around the world. "If we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries," he explained. As Quinn Slobodian wrote in "Crack-Up Capitalism," Thiel imagined this would discourage states from raising taxes for fear of losing resident capital to competing states.

There were other supposed benefits. "The specter of the zone and the attendant threat of capital flight serve to blackmail out of existence the remains of the social state in Western Europe and North America," Slobodian wrote...

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