In 1968, the inventor and environmentalist R. Buckminster Fuller wrote an essay in Playboy envisioning the city of the future. The new metropolis would consist of a giant tetrahedron—a pyramid made of equilateral triangles—a shape that Fuller, the popularizer of the geodesic dome, admired for its stability and symmetry. Each edge of the pyramid would be two miles long; each face would accommodate dozens of detachable housing units, with sky-facing windows and terraces. Inside the pyramid, in the vast space formed by its base, a public garden would be illuminated by shafts of sunlight from openings on the pyramid’s sides. A funicular would deliver residents up and down the giant structure. And the whole thing would float on the open ocean.



“The depth of its foundation would go below the turbulent level of the seas,” wrote Fuller, “so that it would be, in effect, a floating triangular atoll.” Commissioned to design a pyramidal city to float in Tokyo Bay, Fuller envisioned spacious and sunlit living quarters, but also radical efficiency: The floating structure would be powered by nuclear reactors, whose excess heat would desalinate seawater for use by its inhabitants. The project offered freedom from life on dry land, the chance to build an ideal society out of nowhere. Technology, Fuller believed, was the only path toward a better life: “If humanity succeeds,” he wrote, “its success will have been initiated by inventions and not by the debilitating, often lethal biases of politics.”

SEASTEADING by Joe Quirk With Patri Friedman Free Press, 384pp., $27.00

The project wasn’t to be: When Fuller’s financial backer died in 1969, the plans were dropped. Yet they weren’t entirely lost. Today a new set of futurists is envisioning the next iteration of the floating city. They call their movement “seasteading”—and, as Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman outline in their new book of the same name, Fuller’s heirs believe their ocean utopias will allow humanity to “feed the hungry, enrich the poor, cure the sick, restore the environment, power civilization sustainably, and live in peace.” These lofty goals will be made possible, they reason, by the particular characteristics of the ocean itself—sunny, windy, huge, empty, full of waves and algae and temperature gradients and fish—and the technologies that will spin those assets into city-state gold.

The seasteading movement has already garnered considerable backing for its unlikely-sounding vision. When Friedman launched the Seasteading Institute in 2008, the organization received early funding from libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. Not all seasteads are marvels of design, like Fuller’s plans for Tokyo Bay; they can be anything from a modified cruise ship to an abandoned oil rig. The first floating city, in fact, may soon become a reality: In January, the Seasteading Institute signed an agreement with French Polynesia to begin work on a floating island project that will ultimately have its own “special governing framework” and “innovative special economic zone.”

Independence—political and financial—is a central goal of seasteading. The movement doesn’t just strive to utilize the empty expanse of the ocean for human habitat—it seeks to create a space for new kinds of societies to spring up. And while the promise of technology is at the heart of their vision of a better life, seasteaders also argue that government would work better on the high seas—that the ocean, like all frontiers, would foster a new and unexpected form of politics.