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If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems."

"Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world," Thiel said in a statement.

It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn't playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls "seasteads" -- homesteads on the high seas.

Within the pantheon of would-be utopian communities, there's a particularly rich history of people trying to live outside the nation-state paradigm out in the ocean. The most ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at nothing less than the colonization of the universe. There was also Las Vegas millionaire Michael Oliver's attempt to create a new island country, the Republic of Minerva, by dredging the shallow waters near Tonga. And the Freedom Ship was to be a mile-long portable country costing about $10 billion to construct.

None of these projects has succeeded, a fact that The Seasteading Institute's founders, Google's Patri Friedman and the semi-retired Wayne Gramlich, are keenly aware of throughout the 300-page book they've written about seasteading.

Instead of starting with a grand scheme worthy of a James Bond villain, the Institute is bringing an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-states.

"There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," said Joe Lonsdale, the institute's chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform."

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"There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing,

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Originally posted by Bravus:
Meh, Stephenson's 'lash a whole lot of shit together' model in Snow Crash and Mieville's in 'The Scar' seem more plausible.

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Originally posted by Splitcoil:
The only thing protecting your sovereignty on the high seas, really, is the society of states neglecting to think about you or have any interest in you.

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Originally posted by The Psychophant:
I wonder if it would be possible to buy the USS Iowa or the USS Wisconsin before they become a museum...

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Article 92. Status of ships

1. Ships shall sail under the flag of one State only and, save in exceptional cases expressly provided for in international treaties or in this Convention, shall be subject to its exclusive jurisdiction on the high seas. A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.

2. A ship which sails under the flags of two or more States, using them according to convenience, may not claim any of the nationalities in question with respect to any other State, and may be assimilated to a ship without nationality.

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Article 110. Right of visit (emphasis mine)

1. Except where acts of interference derive from powers conferred by treaty, a warship which encounters on the high seas a foreign ship, other than a ship entitled to complete immunity in accordance with articles 95 and 96, is not justified in boarding it unless there is reasonable ground for suspecting that:
(a) the ship is engaged in piracy;
(b) the ship is engaged in the slave trade;
(c) the ship is engaged in unauthorized broadcasting and the flag State of the warship has jurisdiction under article 109;
(d ) the ship is without nationality; or
(e) though flying a foreign flag or refusing to show its flag, the ship is, in reality, of the same nationality as the warship.

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Article 109. Unauthorized broadcasting from the high seas

1. All States shall co-operate in the suppression of unauthorized broadcasting from the high seas.
…
3. Any person engaged in unauthorized broadcasting may be prosecuted before the court of:

(a) the flag State of the ship;
(b) the State of registry of the installation;
(c) the State of which the person is a national;
(d ) any State where the transmissions can be received; or
(e) any State where authorized radio communication is suffering interference.

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WASHINGTON -- A windswept gun tower anchored six miles off the stormy coast of England is about to become the first Internet data haven.

A group of American cypherpunks has transformed the rusting fortress, erected by the British military during World War II to shoot down Nazi aircraft, into a satellite-linked virtual home for anyone looking for a secure place to store sensitive or controversial data.

The founders of HavenCo, which will announce operations on Monday, believe the concept will appeal to individuals and businesses looking for a "safe haven" from governments around that world that are becoming more and more interested in Internet regulation and taxation.

It's for "companies that want to have email servers in a location in which they can consider their email private and not open to scrutiny by anyone capable of filing a lawsuit," says Sean Hastings, the 32-year-old chief executive of HavenCo.

Hastings says that because a 1968 British court decision effectively recognized the basketball court-sized island as a sovereign nation called Sealand, HavenCo can provide more privacy and legal protections then anyone else on the planet.

To create HavenCo -- which will offer Linux servers for $1,500 a month -- the founders signed an agreement with Roy Bates, the quirky "crown prince" of Sealand who landed on the abandoned platform in 1966 and claimed it as an independent nation with its own currency, stamps, and flag.