Seasteading

Building permanent autonomous communities on the open ocean as a path to greenfield governance — one branch of the broader City Building thesis (charter cities, seasteads, network-state “exits”) of founding new polities from scratch rather than reforming legacy ones. In the wiki, seasteading enters through the City Building page as part of the intellectual lineage that runs from Paul Romer’s charter-cities idea through Patri Friedman and the seasteading movement to Balaji Srinivasan-style network-state exit.

It is a formative influence in the Bluebook Cities origin story recounted there: Dryden Brown had “followed Paul Romer, Patri Friedman, and the seasteading movement since high school” and was “obsessed with building a new city.” Friedman himself later appears as an investor in the founders’ seed round to develop charter-city legislation in Ghana — so on this page seasteading reads less as a literal ocean-platform project than as the ideological on-ramp to frontier city-building.

Context: Seasteading was popularized by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman), who co-founded The Seasteading Institute in 2008 with early backing from Peter Thiel. The aim is to create floating ocean settlements outside existing national jurisdictions so that new systems of governance can be tried experimentally — “exit” rather than “voice.”

Where this appears

• City Building — seasteading as one branch of the new-cities/frontier-governance thesis and a lifelong influence on Bluebook Cities founder Dryden Brown; Patri Friedman later backs his charter-city effort