Joe Quirk

Joe Quirk is President of The Seasteading Institute and co-founder of Blue Frontiers. He is also a science writer, novelist and memoir ghostwriter, with national bestsellers in each category, and co-author with Patri Friedman of Seasteading. He is leading a team of lawyers, engineers, business leaders, artists and investors to establish the first floating community, promising residents unprecedented political autonomy.

Seasteading, the book he wrote with Patri Friedman, makes the case for floating settlements as a way of testing new forms of government without displacing anybody, and it did more than anything else to carry the idea to a general audience.

Blue Frontiers was the attempt to build one. In 2017 the Seasteading Institute signed an agreement with the government of French Polynesia to develop a legal framework for a floating island in its waters, with construction planned within a few years. Local opposition and a change in the political weather ended it, and the agreement lapsed in 2018.

He calls himself the movement’s seavangelist and has kept the institute running through the years since, on the argument that the ocean is the one frontier where a new jurisdiction can be added without taking anything away from anyone. He is a Free Cities Ambassador in Panama City.