Why Not Build Your Own Island Country?

Lately the American Tea Partiers and other US conservatives have been trying some libertarian ideas on for size; ideas like putting a stop to state pensions and chilling out with that whole 'regulating the banks' snoozefest. But there’s one notion that remains too fringe for them: seasteading. Libertarians fucking love seasteading. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it basically involves you and your buddies getting together and building an artificial island in international waters and then telling everyone it’s a real country. In theory, it sounds like a lot of fun, but no one’s ever done it successfully, because in real life, the new, tiny, fake countries get invaded by older, larger, real countries that have armies.

Bitches lost their minds for The Republic of Rose Island Not that that's stopped people trying. In 1967, an engineer named Giorgio Rosa built a 400-sq. metre, Esperanto-speaking island resort called the Republic of Rose Island off the Italian coast, only to have it blown up by government warships a few months later. The year after that, Paddy Roy Bates, an English pirate radio broadcaster, declared that the decrepit WWII-era sea fort he occupied was its own country called Sealand. Over the years Sealand issued currency and passports, fought off an “invasion” by some Dutch men and later briefly became the headquarters of a failed data-storage company. (Its status today is unclear, but it still sells titles of nobility online.) The funniest seasteading story is probably that of the Republic of Minerva, which was the brainchild of libertarian real-estate mogul Mike Oliver. Mike built an island on some reefs in the southwest Pacific and notified nearby nations there was a new kid on the block. Everyone ignored him except for tiny Tonga, who invaded his republic with a single boat in the shortest, most pathetic “war” on record.

Sealand pictured during one of the many times it's been on fire More recently, in the early 90s, an entrepreneur named Eric Klien established the Atlantis Project, a foundation that wanted to build a "capitalist paradise"/ "haven for free thought" called Oceania in the Caribbean. Eventually the project fizzled out due to a lack of funds, the idea not making it further than this sort-of-manifesto and the proto-Sim City images you can see on this page. Klien remains captivated by big ideas, though, and he currently runs the Lifeboat Foundation, which is devoted to making sure humans don’t kill themselves off any time soon. We called him up to see just how crazy he is. VICE: How did the Atlantis Project get started?
Eric Klien: I had a Libertarian candidate running for the state senate in Nevada and there was a lot of election fraud in that election that affected not only our candidate, but a bunch of the Republican candidates as well. That annoyed me so much I decided, well, if there’s going to be election fraud against me, I may as well start my own country. Why do you think libertarians in particular are attracted to the idea of building artificial islands? Why aren’t communists trying it out, too?
Because communists have had no problem getting their own country. And in the past they’ve had really big countries like China. The closest thing to a libertarian country is the United States. As technology advances, sooner or later somebody will pull it off. Why did the Atlantis Project end up not succeeding?
The main answer is there wasn’t sufficient interest. This was before the web and it was very expensive to interact with people. You used phones and newspaper ads… It’s now much less expensive with the internet. I don’t feel that there’s any more support for these ideas, but it’s a lot easier to interact with diverse people throughout the world.

So do you think someone else like the Seasteading Institute will succeed in actually building islands?
They have a lot more of a chance because they’re backed by a billionaire, but today, if I was still really into that, I could have a functioning group that would last a long time, because the internet has dramatically lowered cost. For example, the Lifeboat Foundation's board of directors is spread out throughout the planet, but we've had live meetings free through Skype. Try that 20 years ago. There’s a difference between having an organisation devoted to building artificial islands and actually getting together and building them, though. Do you think anyone’s going to step up and construct a country anytime soon?
The Seasteading Institute could at least do something small somewhere. You could at least put a boat somewhere and call it a country. You could do that tomorrow. The problem would be how to make that sustainable.
If I was going to try to make it sustainable, one way would be to make the boat into a hospital-type ship where you offer people the latest medical technologies, because in the US, the FDA takes years and years to approve stuff. That’s actually why I bought the domain lifeboat.com, because I was thinking I might do that one day.

How would you go about feeding your new countrymen?
You could fish, and beyond that you could import a lot of stuff. Unless your island is of a reasonable size. Richard Branson, for example, owns an island that’s big enough to grow food on. Right, that’s a good point – you don’t even need to build an artificial island if you're rich enough to just buy a natural one.
Well, if you buy an island and turn it into a country and it becomes successful, other countries will invade you at some point. It’s a pretty serious problem, for sure. That’s how the world works. Richard Branson is allowed to own an island because he’s not trying to have his own country. What you’d need is a high-tech military. Israel isn’t a very large country but they’ve got a high-tech military that has shown itself capable of fighting off all of their neighbours at once. What do you think about the idea of starting a country by having individual families or small groups of people start seasteads, and then having them clump together over time?
It’s difficult, because people don’t work well together. Especially libertarians don’t work well together.
Yes, I’m well aware of that. But the whole point is you have to start somewhere. If your organisation is well-structured and inclusive, it could work. The smaller your group is, the easier it is to evaporate. You somehow have to have an organisation that’s cohesive enough that it will expand very rapidly to like, 100 families, so it won’t evaporate on you.