Autonomous City States on the Ocean

According to the Seasteading Institute, their mission is to further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems. Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside the territory claimed by the government of any standing nation.

The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 by activist, software engineer and political economic theorist Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and technology entrepreneur, investor and Philanthropist Peter Thiel.

The Seasteading Institute, seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from a libertarian framework free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

"There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009. "That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late."

The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.

Here is a video of Friedman talking about the concepts for Charter Cities and the Seasteading Institutet from TEDx in Hong Kong in December.

Friedman's assertion that the Constitution of the United States is obsolete is incorrect, nevertheless the idea of Charter Cities, floating or otherwise is interesting.

The Seasteading Institute