The cofounder of the Seasteading Institute is Peter Thiel, who is also currently attempting to develop remote property in New Zealand with the hope of establishing a haven for a “cognitive elite” of “sovereign individuals” (clearly inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged). As [Douglas] Rushkoff points out, these entrepreneurs have always regarded the public and civic sectors as “antagonistic to their grand designs.” The creators of projects like ReGen and Seasteading have no interest in sustainable living or alleviating economic inequality. What they want is their own personal sandbox, unrestrained by governments, judicial oversight, or the collective will. These start-up societies reflect, if nothing else, a desire to create a new world from scratch and then choose who gets to be a part of it.
February 15th, 2024 at 9:13AM
Don’t these have a solid 100% failure rate?
February 15th, 2024 at 11:06AM
What does failure mean here? Failure to interest other investors/catastrophists?
February 15th, 2024 at 11:59AM
“a desire to create a new world from scratch and then choose who gets to be a part of it”
I don’t know, sounds like every existing polity. The US – a new world created from scratch with rules governing who gets to be a part of it. I like this seasteading, model cities, colonizing outer space stuff. Very American, to my mind. Think of our looong tradition of bizarro communes and alternative communities this country has been incubating from the outset – Brook Farm, Fruitlands, Oneida, Amana, New Harmony, basically the entire state of Utah… Those people were also wedded to “Mindsets,” not quite the same one as the Silicon Valley position, but perhaps equally misguided in different directions. The guy who founded Oneida preached that Jesus was an electrical charge that passed between people through bodily fluid, most notably semen.
Not that we should be publicly funding any of these harebrained ideas, but I don’t see why we should be prohibiting people from voluntarily joining in and trying out a new way to live until they realize it sucks and leave.
February 15th, 2024 at 12:41PM
Rita: Major LOL. And of course you’re right – let ’em do what they want to do. Only one proviso: Some of these people are so astoundingly rich that they could buy virtually the entire state of Maine, for instance, and I’m not sure we want that to happen.
February 15th, 2024 at 12:52PM
Well, a lot of these earlier communes needed big money to get going too. But I don’t think the state of Maine is for sale, so I’m not too worried.
There was a reasonable defense of one of the SV model-city projects in the NYT recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/opinion/flannery-associates-billlionaires-woodlands.html. I’m pretty sympathetic with this view – there is no obvious reason why we should only favor or allow governments to organize communities when sometimes enterprising individuals might have good or innovative ideas about how to make improvements. Maybe even billionaires might have something interesting to offer. It seems relatively low-risk – so long as buy-in is voluntarily, if they fail, people can just return to conventional communities. This Nation article is far too bleak.
February 15th, 2024 at 1:07PM
No, the state of Maine is not for sale, but enormous stretches of it are. Billionare John Malone owns so much of Maine (and other states) that he begins to look pretty kingly. Bill Gates and a bunch of Chinese investors are also buying up huge swathes of the USA. We have a lot of enormous pretty empty states (and getting emptier as we stop having enough babies to keep this vast national enterprise populated), so we can expect more, and more ambitious, John Malones.
https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children
February 15th, 2024 at 1:57PM
You can’t be a king if depopulation robs you of subjects!
February 15th, 2024 at 2:07PM
True. But you can be a legend in your own mind.
February 15th, 2024 at 3:22PM
Thiel, Bezos, Musk, et.al. are beyond nation states. Their grand programs can and will be implemented at least for a time. Governments are unable to stop ersatz billionaires, they have no chance against actual ones.
This topic came up in a group discussion I was in, in the early 2000s. One member was a messianic advocate. He had no real solution for the generational questions: Would the elite women attracted to this take time to have presumably elite children or would there need to be women who did that job while diluting the elite genes? Would the latter become part of this society/corporation – their service conferring citizenship and so on. We couldn’t bridge either the gemeinschaft (or gesellschaft) gap and it stopped there.
But that was some time ago. Perhaps the sponsors are working on “disrupting” the biological side of the equation through cloning, genetically enhanced surrogacy, or artificial wombs.