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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.
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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.

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.

