A group of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures are building startup societies that they believe will set them free.
This is a brief preview of an essay originally published by NOEMA, magazine of the Berggruen Institute. Image credit: TSI via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 1.0
In April 2018, the Thai navy towed a strange white box to shore. Octagonal in shape and around 20 feet across, it was made of fiberglass and sat atop a 65-foot-long steel pillar. It had been found floating about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Phuket. But this was no ordinary detritus of the sea. The Thai authorities feared it posed a threat to the country’s very sovereignty.
By the time Thai sailors climbed aboard the box, its previous inhabitants had fled. For about three months, the pod had periodically been inhabited by an eccentric bitcoin investor, an American software engineer named Chad Elwartowski, and his partner, Supranee “Nadia Summergirl” Thepdet.
Authorities accused the couple of “intent to cause injury to the nation,” a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death. Dodging the authorities, they fled before they could be taken into custody. The couple maintained that their home — which they called a “seastead” — had been outside Thailand’s territorial waters, but the government insisted it “reveals the intention of disobeying the laws of Thailand … and could lead to a creation of a new state within Thailand’s territorial waters.” Thai authorities worried that the pair in the box were part of a cult and that they intended to build a full-fledged floating community at sea...
The full essay is here.
