Seasteading
Based on Wikipedia: Seasteading
In 2019, a couple anchored a small floating home in the Andaman Sea, about twelve nautical miles off the coast of Thailand. They called it a seastead—an experimental dwelling designed to exist outside the jurisdiction of any nation. Within two months, the Thai Navy had dispatched a vessel to investigate. Authorities declared the structure a threat to national sovereignty, a crime potentially punishable by death. The couple fled to international waters on a sailboat, then eventually to Panama.
This wasn't a military installation or a smuggling operation. It was a modest octagonal structure, barely large enough for two people, bobbing in tropical waters. Yet it represented something that governments find deeply unsettling: the idea that people might simply opt out of the entire concept of nations.
The Dream of Floating Away
Seasteading is the notion that permanent communities could exist on the ocean, outside the territorial waters of any country. The word itself blends "sea" with "homesteading," evoking the American frontier tradition of claiming unclaimed land. Except there's no land involved—just water, waves, and the engineering challenge of keeping humans alive in one of the most hostile environments on Earth.
The appeal is obvious. International waters begin just twelve nautical miles from most coastlines. Beyond that boundary, in theory, no single government holds authority. You could build your own community, make your own rules, live by your own principles. No income tax. No zoning laws. No drug prohibitions. No immigration restrictions. Just the open sea and whoever else wants to join you.
Critics see something rather different: a fantasy of the wealthy designed to escape democratic accountability, dodge taxes, and create libertarian enclaves where money talks louder than votes. When tech billionaire Peter Thiel provided seed funding for the Seasteading Institute in 2008, the suspicions only intensified.
Both perspectives contain truth. And neither captures the full strangeness of what happens when people actually try to make seasteading work.
Living on Water Is Nothing New
Humans have been living on water for thousands of years. The Bajau people of Southeast Asia, sometimes called "sea nomads," have traditionally spent their entire lives on boats, rarely setting foot on land. The Uru people of Peru construct floating islands from totora reeds on Lake Titicaca, building and rebuilding their homes as the organic material slowly decomposes beneath them. In Aberdeen Harbor in Hong Kong, the Tanka people lived for generations on sampans, an entire floating community with its own schools and markets.
These aren't seasteads in the modern sense. They exist within national boundaries and under national laws. But they demonstrate something important: the technical problems of living on water have been solved many times, in many ways, across human history.
The famous city of Venice began as a refuge. When Germanic tribes invaded the Italian peninsula in the fifth and sixth centuries, people fled to the marshy lagoons of the Adriatic, building homes on wooden stilts driven into the mud. Over centuries, those desperate refugee settlements became one of history's most remarkable maritime powers—the Republic of Venice, which lasted over a thousand years and at its height controlled trade routes across the Mediterranean.
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan offers another model. Founded on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325, the city expanded through the construction of chinampas—artificial islands built by layering aquatic vegetation, mud, and soil in the shallow lake bed. By the time Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1519, Tenochtitlan had a population of perhaps 200,000, larger than most European cities of that era. Mexico City now sits where the lake used to be, but you can still visit the floating gardens of Xochimilco in the city's south, a remnant of that Aztec engineering.
The Modern Seastead Movement
The contemporary idea of seasteading as a political project rather than mere survival dates to the 1960s, though it remained a fringe interest for decades. Things accelerated in 1998 when a programmer named Wayne Gramlich wrote an essay called "Seasteading—Homesteading on the High Seas," which attracted the attention of Patri Friedman.
Friedman is the grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas shaped conservative economic policy for a generation. The younger Friedman had inherited his grandfather's libertarian sympathies but grown frustrated with traditional political activism. Elections were slow. Lobbying was inefficient. Constitutional amendments took decades. What if you could simply start fresh somewhere else?
Gramlich and Friedman collaborated on a book, posted online in 2001, that explored the practical challenges of ocean living: waste disposal, food production, legal status, protection from waves and weather. This work eventually led to the founding of the Seasteading Institute in 2008, with Thiel's money and Friedman's vision.
The institute's approach evolved over the years. The original dream was fully autonomous platforms in international waters, beyond any nation's reach. But that turned out to be fantastically difficult. International waters are international precisely because they're far from shore—far from supplies, far from emergency services, far from the economic networks that make modern life possible. Building a structure capable of surviving the open ocean's storms is enormously expensive. And no existing government had ever agreed to recognize such a structure as a sovereign nation.
So the Seasteading Institute pivoted to a more pragmatic strategy: find a friendly nation willing to grant special legal status to floating communities within its territorial waters. Not full independence, but significant autonomy—a "special economic zone" on the ocean.
The French Polynesia Experiment
In January 2017, the Seasteading Institute announced what seemed like a breakthrough. The government of French Polynesia, an overseas territory of France in the South Pacific, had signed a memorandum of understanding to explore creating a "seazone" in its protected lagoons. Floating platforms would be built. Special regulations would apply. It would be a proof of concept, demonstrating that ocean living could work.
French Polynesia made sense as a partner. Its economy depends heavily on tourism and has struggled since the end of French nuclear testing in 1996 once provided employment for thousands of locals. The government was open to innovative economic development. And the territory's lagoons offered calm, sheltered waters perfect for prototype platforms—none of the violent storms that make the open ocean so dangerous.
But politics intervened. The memorandum was signed under one administration. A presidential election brought new leadership. The new government had different priorities, different relationships, different suspicions about American tech entrepreneurs seeking to build autonomous zones in French territory. In March 2018, French Polynesia permanently severed ties with the seasteading project.
This pattern would repeat. Grand announcements followed by quiet failures. The gap between the dream and the reality proved stubbornly difficult to close.
Other Attempts, Other Failures
Blueseed was one of the more creative seastead concepts. The idea was to anchor a ship in international waters just off Silicon Valley, outside United States territorial jurisdiction but close enough for easy commuting by ferry. Foreign entrepreneurs who couldn't get American work visas could live and work on the ship while still attending meetings and raising money from Silicon Valley investors. It would be a floating startup incubator, a workaround for immigration law.
The founders, Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija, had both worked at the Seasteading Institute. They raised some initial funding and generated significant media attention. Tech publications ran enthusiastic profiles. Here was a practical application of seastead principles that might actually work!
It didn't. By 2014 the project was "on hold." Investors had lost interest. Meanwhile, Congress was debating a Startup Visa Bill that might make the whole concept obsolete. Why live on a boat if you could just get a visa? Blueseed quietly died.
A more ambitious project emerged in 2020 when a company called Ocean Builders Central purchased the Pacific Dawn, a 1,500-passenger cruise ship, and renamed it the MS Satoshi (after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin). The plan was to convert the ship into a floating residential community anchored in the Gulf of Panama. Cabins would be sold as condominiums. Residents could live outside traditional jurisdictions while still enjoying the amenities of a modern cruise ship: restaurants, pools, entertainment venues, medical facilities.
The ship never opened for residents. Ocean Builders couldn't obtain insurance for the proposed operation—a reminder that even outside national waters, you still need to engage with global financial systems that have their own rules and risk assessments. The MS Satoshi was resold in 2021 for conventional cruise operations.
The Micronation Precedents
Seasteading has a longer history of inspiring attempts to create new nations, though most have ended in farce, failure, or forcible shutdown.
The Republic of Rose Island was perhaps the most audacious. In 1968, an Italian engineer named Giorgio Rosa built a 400-square-meter platform on stilts in the Adriatic Sea, about eleven kilometers off the coast of Rimini. He declared it an independent nation, with its own flag, stamps, and even an official language (Esperanto, the constructed international language). Rosa wasn't a tax evader or a libertarian ideologue—he seemed genuinely interested in the artistic and philosophical project of creating a new country.
The Italian government was not amused. They viewed Rose Island as a scheme to build a casino or nightclub outside Italian law. Within months, Italian naval vessels arrived. Authorities forcibly evacuated the platform and then demolished it with explosives. The Republic of Rose Island had lasted less than a year.
Sealand has proved more durable. During World War II, the British military built several sea forts in the North Sea, concrete and steel platforms designed to defend against German naval attacks. After the war, most were demolished, but one—Roughs Tower, about seven miles off the coast of Suffolk—remained standing. In 1967, a former British Army major named Paddy Roy Bates occupied the abandoned structure and declared it the Principality of Sealand.
Sealand has survived for over fifty years now, passing through family dramas, attempted coups, and legal disputes. No nation officially recognizes it as sovereign. But no nation has forcibly shut it down either. It exists in a gray zone—technically just an abandoned military installation, practically a strange little quasi-state that issues its own passports (which no country accepts) and noble titles (which you can buy online).
Pirate radio stations offer another precedent. In the 1960s, entrepreneurs anchored ships just outside British territorial waters and broadcast pop music to listeners on shore, circumventing the British Broadcasting Corporation's monopoly. Radio Caroline, the most famous, operated for years from a ship anchored in international waters. The British government eventually changed its laws to shut down the pirates, extending jurisdiction to cover broadcasting to British territory regardless of where the transmitter was located.
This last example illustrates a fundamental problem with seasteading: even if you can escape physical jurisdiction, you can't escape economic jurisdiction. A radio station needs advertisers. A business needs customers. A community needs supplies. As long as you need to interact with the world's existing nations, those nations have leverage over you.
The Engineering Challenge
Set aside the legal and political obstacles. Could you actually build a functioning community on the ocean?
The technical challenges are substantial but not insurmountable. Cruise ships already demonstrate that thousands of people can live on the water for extended periods. Offshore oil platforms operate in some of the most extreme ocean conditions on Earth, supporting hundreds of workers for months at a time. Floating docks and breakwaters made from reinforced concrete have proven durable across decades of use.
Most seastead designs fall into a few categories. The simplest approach is to retrofit existing ships—buy an old cruise liner, anchor it somewhere, and convert the cabins into permanent residences. This leverages proven technology but comes with problems: ships are designed for travel, not permanent residence. Their systems assume regular port visits for resupply and maintenance. Their layouts prioritize passenger flow, not community living.
More ambitious designs envision purpose-built platforms. Some proposals use spar buoys, the same technology employed in deepwater oil drilling. The platform rests on floating dumbbells that extend far below the surface, reducing the influence of waves and providing remarkable stability even in rough seas. The living areas sit high above the water, connected to the submerged structures by elevator shafts.
Modular designs offer another approach. Instead of one large structure, build many smaller ones that can be connected and rearranged. Reinforced concrete is the material of choice—it's durable, relatively inexpensive, and already used extensively in marine construction. If one module fails or a community wants to expand, individual pieces can be added or removed without affecting the whole.
The most speculative designs imagine underwater structures, inverted skyscrapers descending into the deep. These "oceanscrapers" would be protected from surface storms and could potentially tap into ocean thermal energy conversion—using the temperature difference between warm surface water and cold deep water to generate electricity. But the engineering challenges multiply at depth. Pressure increases. Light disappears. Emergency evacuation becomes vastly more complicated.
Why Governments Care
You might wonder why any government would bother opposing a few dozen people living on a platform in the middle of nowhere. The Thai Navy's response to that tiny seastead seems absurdly disproportionate. Death penalty threats? For a floating octagon?
But governments have reasons to worry. Sovereignty isn't just about territory—it's about control. A successful seastead would demonstrate that you can simply opt out of the social contract, taking your wealth and your talents with you. If rich people can escape to floating tax havens, who pays for roads and schools and hospitals? If pharmaceutical companies can operate from offshore platforms, who enforces drug safety regulations? If anyone who dislikes a law can simply float away, what happens to democracy itself?
The fear isn't one seastead. It's the precedent. Allow one, and you might get hundreds. Then thousands. A migration of capital and expertise away from nations that impose obligations toward artificial islands that impose none. The existing international order—with its treaties, its tax regimes, its regulatory frameworks—depends on the assumption that people fundamentally belong to countries. Seasteading challenges that assumption at its root.
There's also a colonial dimension that critics have highlighted. Most seastead proposals target tropical or developing regions: French Polynesia, Thailand, Panama, Honduras. Wealthy Westerners arrive with grand plans, promise economic development, extract favorable legal arrangements, and then... what? History offers many examples of similar arrangements ending badly for local populations.
The United Nations has shown interest in floating structures, but for very different reasons. A 2019 presentation by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme explored floating cities as a response to rising sea levels—not libertarian havens but climate adaptation infrastructure, helping coastal communities survive as oceans rise. These proposals envision structures in sheltered waters, working with existing governments, addressing collective problems rather than escaping collective obligations.
The Legal Gray Zone
International waters aren't as lawless as seastead enthusiasts sometimes suggest. The high seas are governed by multiple overlapping legal frameworks: admiralty law, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, various international treaties covering everything from pollution to piracy.
Any vessel in international waters must fly a flag—be registered with some nation and subject to that nation's maritime law. A ship flying the Liberian flag (one of many "flags of convenience" offered by countries with minimal regulation) is still subject to Liberian law, such as it is. You can't simply declare yourself flagless and free.
Creating a new sovereign nation requires more than just building a platform. It requires recognition by other nations. The traditional criteria, established by the 1933 Montevideo Convention, include a permanent population, defined territory, functioning government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. No seastead has come close to meeting these requirements. No nation has ever recognized a man-made structure on the high seas as a sovereign state.
Even if recognition were somehow achieved, practical problems remain. International shipping lanes crisscross the oceans. Fishing rights are contested. Environmental regulations apply in many areas. The high seas may be outside national territory, but they're not outside international law.
In Fiction and Fantasy
If seasteads have mostly failed in reality, they've thrived in imagination. The concept appears throughout science fiction, often as a setting for exploring ideas about freedom, isolation, and social organization.
Jules Verne wrote about an artificial island as early as 1895, in his novel "Propeller Island." A community of wealthy Americans creates a mobile island that travels the Pacific, complete with parks, mansions, and all the amenities of a luxury resort. The story explores what happens when a community is unmoored from geography—and from the social constraints that geography implies.
The 2003 novel "The Scar" by China Miéville features Armada, a floating city assembled from thousands of captured ships lashed together over centuries. It's a pirate haven, ruled by quarreling factions, perpetually sailing in search of a legendary sea creature that might grant its leaders unimaginable power. The city is brutal, fascinating, and terrifying—a vision of what statelessness might actually look like.
The video game "BioShock" takes place in Rapture, an underwater city built by an industrialist who wanted to escape what he saw as the parasitism of government and religion. Players explore Rapture's ruins after its libertarian experiment has catastrophically failed, finding audio diaries that chronicle the community's descent into violence and madness. It's not subtle political commentary, but it captures a real anxiety about what happens when people try to build utopia from scratch.
The television series "Waterworld" imagined a future where melted ice caps have flooded the entire planet, forcing humanity to live on floating settlements constructed from salvaged debris. Here seasteading isn't a choice but a necessity, and the results are grim: scarcity, violence, endless searching for the legendary "Dryland."
These fictional treatments share a common theme. Building a community on the ocean is technically possible. Building a good community on the ocean—one that doesn't collapse into tyranny, chaos, or simple misery—is much harder. The ocean is unforgiving. Resources are scarce. The normal social institutions that hold societies together don't exist. What prevents the strong from simply taking from the weak?
The Dream Persists
Despite the failures, seasteading continues to attract interest and investment. A Japanese consortium called N-Ark has proposed a floating "healthcare city" for 10,000 people, with hopes of beginning construction by 2030. Ocean Builders, the company behind the ill-fated Thailand seastead and the MS Satoshi project, continues developing floating home concepts. Architects around the world produce beautiful renderings of aquatic utopias.
Some of this is genuine utopianism—the belief that starting fresh, on new territory, might allow humanity to build better societies than the ones we've inherited. There's a long tradition of this thinking, from the pilgrims who sailed to Plymouth Rock to the kibbutzim of early Israel to the commune experiments of the 1960s. Sometimes starting over really does produce innovation. More often, it produces the same old problems in new locations.
Some of it is escapism—the fantasy of leaving behind complicated modern life for something simpler and more autonomous. This fantasy sells books and generates clicks, even when the reality falls far short.
And some of it, critics argue, is simply regulatory arbitrage disguised as philosophy. If you can't change the tax code, float around it. If you can't repeal drug laws, anchor outside their reach. The rhetoric of freedom obscures a straightforward desire to avoid rules that wealthy people find inconvenient.
Perhaps all three motivations coexist in most seasteading projects. Humans are complicated. Our reasons for wanting to escape are rarely pure.
What seems clear is that the full dream—autonomous communities on the high seas, recognized as sovereign nations, genuinely independent of existing governments—remains as distant as ever. The ocean is hard. Governments are vigilant. International law is complex. And building a functioning society turns out to require more than just finding unclaimed territory.
But the appeal endures. As long as people chafe under rules they didn't choose, as long as the ocean beckons with its apparent emptiness, as long as anyone believes that somewhere out there exists a place where you could truly start over—the dream of seasteading will survive. Whether any seastead itself can survive is a different question entirely.