(Details) [Peter] Thiel spends a lot of time thinking about frontiers. “Way more than is healthy,” he admits. Not just financial frontiers, though that’s his day job: He cofounded PayPal, the online money-transfer service, and, most famously, was the angel investor whose half-million-dollar loan catapulted Facebook out of Harvard’s dormitories and into the lives of its 750 million users. Yet his frontier obsession extends much further than spreadsheets, further than even technology. Political frontiers, social frontiers, scientific frontiers: All these and more crowd Thiel’s head as he navigates the shoreline.

“We’re at this pretty important point in society,” [Thiel] says during a brisk walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge, “where we can either find a way to rediscover a frontier, or we’re going to be forced to change in a way that’s really tough.”

It sounds like Mr. Theil has conceived the premise of Part IV of Juggernaut on his own. From the chapter, ‘Transcending the System’:

Almost from the moment the frontier closed, one could see this countervailing force throughout culture and especially in America, where it was most evident in the romanticism of the Wild West. First seen in the paintings of Frederic Remington, then in the dominant Western film genre and even in classical music with the work of Aaron Copland, America’s undying devotion to the idea of the West showed how powerful the longing for freedom has been and still is in the country’s spirit. And it was not limited to the romance of artists. The introduction of the automobile and the subsequent flight to the suburbs seen from the 1940s to the ’70s had as its central premise the same notion of fleeing the restraints of the city, being independent, and cultivating a family apart from the masses.

One of Thiel’s possible solutions? Floating cities as envisioned by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton). The plan is summarized in the article:

(Details) It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that’ll take some lawyers and time.

“The ultimate goal,” Friedman says, “is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government.” This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

The skeptic has his choice of criticisms. This visionary cannot find fault in the audacious effort, but would at least question the attempt on one front: the capacity for self-sufficiency. If these islands are dependent on the U.S. for everything from building materials to food, then it is not clear how they will constitute a true frontier. They will be satellites of the existing countries and thus subject to their politico-economic dictates.

Notwithstanding this substantive concern, the project deserves the attention it is getting, and should be a central component in an ever-growing push for a new frontier.