The Principality of SealandIn a recent blog post on BLDBLOG, Geoff Manaugh writes about a consultancy firm from Washington D.C., called Pegasus Global Holdings, who are looking to build a privately financed city of 20 square miles in the New Mexico desert so they can test out new technologies. The city will serve as a kind of laboratory for the testing of experimental smart grids, renewable energy integration, next-gen wireless, smart grid cyber security and terrorism vulnerability. If you’re thinking that it sounds like a pretty wild idea, you’d be right. Not only is it unsettling that a corporation can just manufacture an artificial city and use it as its own personal science experiment, it also sounds like the sort of place the zombie apocalypse might break out in. Years from now there will probably be a catastrophic nuclear meltdown and they’ll lock the place down. Plumes of thick black smoke will come billowing from dessicated buildings, and despite the inevitable media blackout, locals will report strange night creatures wandering the land, groaning and glassy-eyed, devouring stray cats…Anyway, it also made me think about another artificial environment that’s been in the news lately. Namely, the PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s megalomaniacal ambition to use some of his $1.5 billion fortune to build an artificial country off the coast of San Francisco—an island based on the designs of oil rigs. It’ll potentially be a Libertarian’s wet dream, allowing for lax gun laws, no welfare state, looser building codes and lots of other freedoms that those pesky governments won’t allow. He speaks about it in an article for the latest edition of Details magazine saying, “One of the things that’s endlessly dazzling and mesmerizing is this question about the future—what the world is going to be like in 20 years, and what can or should we do to make it better than the default track that it’s on.”So yeah, what can we do? Well, according to Thiel and Patri Friedman, ex-Google engineer and “the world’s most prominent micro-nation entrepreneur,” we might as well start building our own countries. That way you can do whatever the hell you’d like. You might think it’s laughable—nothing more than a rich man drunk on the objectivist ideals of Silicon Valley—but Thiel’s already pumped $1.25 million into the project and, according to the article, “architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together.”Artist illustration of what the structure may look like. Illustration: Valdemar Duran
These “start-up countries” will be built on international waters free from the laws and moral tyranny of the rest of the world, with the ultimate goal being to “open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government,” according to Friedman. Dangerous territory, for sure, but given the state of governments worldwide, possibly not the craziest idea we’ve ever heard of.But how would these microcountries function? Well, a potential idea is something they call Appletopia, where a company like Apple sets up a country in the same way it would a business, with property increasing along with the desirability of the country. If you don’t like the way it’s run, you leave, and go some place else, a place more suited to your ideals. Which brings up the problem of less integration, where we live surrounded by liked-minded people, with our capacity for toleration (outside of our micro-countries) decreasing as we find assurance in politically similar versions of ourselves.So could this be a viable way to live in the future? Where we literally and metaphorically band together to build floating micro-countries on the world’s oceans, making our own rules, like some bad Kevin Costner movie? Where science and designers would have no limitations, so we could start living the wildest ideas of science-fiction and speculative design? Where you could build an fortress to take over the world just like a Bond villain? It’s kind of terrifying and amazing all at once.Interview with Prince of SealandIt’s not the first time someone’s decided to set up a micro-country. In the North Sea, off the Suffolk coast of England lies the Principality of Sealand, founded in 1967 by Prince Roy and set on an island fortress created in World War II, which was later abandoned. It’s officially unrecognized as a country, but that hasn’t stopped it having it’s own currency—the Sealand Dollar—along with a national anthem, flag, passports and stamps, and in 2000 it became host to a data haven, although this ceased in 2008. It suffered a fire in 2006, which has unfortunately inhibited economic and social growth, but it’s still there, albeit with less ambitions than Thiel’s venture, and probably lacking his ample finances.
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