Turn right along the American political spectrum and you find all kinds of curious species. First there are country club Republicans bemoaning the loss of their party to extremists. Then come Evangelical Christians, trying to reconcile themselves to voting for a Mormon. Further along, you find the Tea Party, crowing over their improbable rise and Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate.
Then somewhere out there past Ron Paul, the Texan libertarian, amongst the witchy thickets of Ayn Rand and techno-futurism, you will find Peter Thiel, billionaire technology investor, Christian, gay, and a man so committed to the idea of personal freedom that he is investing in ‘seasteads’, self-governing communities built on floating rigs out at sea, beyond the reach of any nation.
These seasteads are intended to be social and political laboratories, each one different, letting inhabitants hop from one to another in search of the perfect society. Choosing between Switzerland, non-dom life in London and the British Virgin Islands is not enough for Thiel. He craves a wider range of social options, free of ancient prejudices, legacies and lame-brained politicians. If it sounds a bit like Stromberg, the villain in The Spy Who Loved Me who was so disgusted with the world that he yearned to create an undersea civilisation, you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Thiel, 44, is the provost of a group of man-children who have come to prominence during the most recent Silicon Valley boom. Their most visible member is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Thiel, who had already made a fortune as a founder of PayPal, paid $500,000 for a 10 per cent stake in Facebook in its earliest days, and has since sold most of that for more than $1 billion.
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