As we can see, most projects aimed “bluntly” at creating new nations at sea have failed. Sealand achieved relative success, but most likely because it was created for specific purposes—pirate radio broadcasting, and later, extraterritorial server placement.
By the way, failures stop no one. Water settlement projects are multiplying. Some of them—such as FreedomShip or the “City of 120 Acres,” which attracted Bill Gates’s attention—are under development. However, it seems to me that the future belongs to a somewhat different strategy for developing “the last unclaimed land” for the benefit of freedom.
This strategy can be illustrated with two examples. The first is the pirate radio of the 1960s.
In the 1960s, most radio stations in Europe were state-owned. They broadcast state news and transmitted state music. Their editorial policies reflected officials’ understanding of what people needed. The BBC, for instance, believed that four hours of “popular music” per day was sufficient.
The baby boomers, who by this time had fully reached adulthood, thought otherwise. They wanted hours and hours of rock and roll. This small gap between demand and official assessment gave rise to an entire economic phenomenon—offshore radio broadcasting from ships.
The pioneer was “Radio Veronica,” which broadcast from a ship anchored in neutral waters off the coast of the Netherlands. British and Scandinavian entrepreneurs quickly picked up the practice and developed it further. Soon the coastal waters of these countries filled with “radio ships.”
It was in relation to this audience that the word “pirates” was first used in the sense it carries today. The pirates’ activities acquired enormous scope and became a threat to show business.
Enormous profits encouraged pirates to practice piracy in the literal sense of the word. For instance, they stole the pre-release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” from Paul McCartney’s home. The album was broadcast on pirate “Radio London” two weeks before its official release. Pirate broadcasting became a serious factor in business and culture. The Who’s album “Sellout,” for example, is recorded as if being broadcast on “Radio London,” complete with jingles and advertisements.
States tried to jam pirate stations, but public protests put an end to this practice. In 1965, Belgium, France, Greece, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Britain concluded an agreement prohibiting broadcasting from “floating and flying objects,” as well as supplying these “objects” from their territories. It didn’t help. Pirates procured supplies in countries that had not signed the agreement—for example, on the Isle of Man, a “semi-British” territory.
Offshore piracy ceased only in the mid-1970s. The final blow came when Britain prohibited businesses operating on its territory from advertising with pirate stations. But only the opening of private FM stations on land truly ended this story.