It sounds like the plot of a pre-Daniel Craig Bond film: an internet tycoon invests part of his vast fortune to fund a fiefdom afloat in international waters. He is joined by the libertarian grandson of one the world’s most famous economic thinkers and advertises for like-minded citizens “who are dissatisfied with our current civilisation” to join him aboard his brave new world.

However, this is not fiction. It is happening now and the group, called the Seasteading Institute, has just released the first detailed plans of what its utopian water world will look like. The first architectural stage is being financed by a $500,000 (£362,000) donation from Peter Thiel, billionaire co-founder of PayPal, the online payments system that was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. More funding will follow, and the group hopes to start building a small-scale version off the coast of San Francisco this year.

The computer renderings of this new ocean dwelling, called ClubStead, show a colossal structure similar to an oil rig that weighs 12,000 tons and is supported on four pillars each with a diameter of 30ft. On board will be room for about 270 people to live, including 70 staff, complete with shops, offices and transport. There will also be a hotel and spa facilities.

Although it looks like a fixed structure, the facility will be movable. It will have thrusters powered by four diesel engines capable of moving the whole structure at a top speed of two knots and providing utility power on the platform itself.

The brains behind the project is Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist. “If we can open up the ocean as a new frontier where different groups of people can go and set up their own countries and try different systems,” he says, “then the whole world can look at that, see what works and what doesn’t, and everyone can benefit. America was founded by pioneers who wanted to have a different society to reflect their political and religious values.”

The Seasteading Institute — the name derives from homestead — hopes eventually to create a new nation operating under its own laws with minimal government interference. However, first it needs to build the structure to house the community. So far it is still in the design phase and the plan is to build a series of seasteads, of gradually increasing size, as proof of the concept before the construction of the full-sized structure starts in earnest.

Friedman calculates that the extra construction cost of living on a platform in the ocean is about $200 per square foot compared with the average price of land in the US . “These costs are in line with property prices in Silicon Valley, Manhattan or London,” says Friedman. “It’s not accessible to a lot of people right now but it could be worse.” In the longer term, the institute hopes to see a flotilla of seasteads all established within 200 miles of a country that has legally agreed for them to be there and has yielded up quasi-sovereign status.

How do you build your own micro-nation? The initial premise is not simply to hoist a flag over the structure and demand recognition from the United Nations as a nascent nation. “In the short term, we’d like to qualify as ships,” says Friedman. “It’s only over a much longer period of time that we will be trying to get sovereignty of our own.”

Under international law, ships are technically under the jurisdiction of the country whose flag they fly until they are within 12 nautical miles of another nation state.

Some countries, notably Panama or Liberia, offer their flag to pretty much anyone who pays them a fee. These are known in shipping circles as flag-of-convenience states. Even though each seastead would in principle be under, for instance, the Liberian rule of law, it is hard to imagine the authorities in the impoverished west African country taking much interest in what happens aboard a vessel sitting pretty off the Pacific coast of America.

The idea of creating your own society at sea has been tried before. The best-known recent example is the Freedom Ship, described as the world’s first mobile floating city by Norman Nixon, the Floridian impresario behind the scheme who bills himself as a “registered professional engineer”.

In the late 1990s his company promised to build a 4,500ft vessel — about four times the length of the Queen Mary 2, the world’s longest passenger ship — consisting of hundreds of steel cells bolted together to form a sturdy base. The Freedom Ship would, it was claimed, house a “community continually moving around the world”.

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