Morons on the High Seas: Ex-Googler Plans Cities on Oceans

One of the greatest things about the high-tech revolution is how its unleashed the inner bonehead in people.

Today’s case in point: Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute. The ex-Googler wants to build cities on the high seas to escape the pernicious influence of government. It’s a Libertarian experiment.

“We don’t have a frontier anymore. The reason our political system doesn’t innovate anymore is that there’s no place to try out new things. We want to provide that place,” he told News.com.

Brave talk like this is always great, particularly when it comes from a guy whose whole career is bound up in a technological achievement (the Internet) funded by an ossified political system he’s carping about. Granted, we don’t have much of a frontier anymore. We paved it over and gave the early inhabitants smallpox a long time ago. But is that so bad? We live in an area where we have to understand the limits of resource exploitation. We could continue to do that in Brazil, but it would be frowned on and cause ecological damage.

An experiment like this could work, but only if you limited citizenship to the audience of “This American Life” or the members of They Might Be Giants. The first criminals with guns that pop up and the term Libertarian Utopia takes on a different hue.

And ecologically, would it be a disaster? It depends.

“Some rogue seasteads are, sadly, likely to pollute. But most of the technologies seasteaders use will be much less polluting than what is used on land. Also, resources will be more expensive, which means seasteaders will use less of them, so the net result may well be a reduction in footprint. And it’s not like seasteads are completely unaccountable—we see pollution as one of the areas most likely to provoke interference from traditional nations,” the statement said.

There’s the upside: The organization is at least giving us an invitation to invade.