Chasing Utopia, Startup Style
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.
Shortly before the box was towed to shore, Elwartowski posted a message on Facebook, which is no longer available but was widely quoted in media at the time: “I was free for a moment. Probably the freest person in the world. It was glorious.” For Elwartowski, life on the seastead was supposed to be like inhabiting the utopia of Galt’s Gulch in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
