User:DanB/BaseStead Strategy

I have been thinking about Seasteading strategies. A strategy is a plan of action that will achieve a goal. The Seasteading community has a well defined goal: construct autonomous floating societies. This is an enormously ambitious goal. It involves at least the following steps:

• Design and construction of large scale floating structures.
• Development of a legal framework guiding the relationship of Seasteaders with one another, and with the outside world.
• Convincing large numbers of people to uproot their lives, careers, and families and risk everything to move to a far off place with a bunch of strangers, some of whom have expressed a (shall we say) certain moral laxness.
• Development of an economic structure that allows the Seasteaders to support themselves.

Currently the main focus of TSI appears to be publicity/marketing/outreach and design. The underlying strategic assumption seems to be: if we design a good enough Seastead, and if we tell enough people about it, the rest of the above process will happen naturally. Significant expenditures of effort and time have gone into thinking up and testing new designs.

In the startup analogy, Seasteaders are currently like a bunch of hackers pounding out code, without bothering to write a business plan or figure out a way to make money. In order to succeed, we need a strategic plan. It is important to realize that the mere act of writing such a plan can be very useful, serving the following purposes:

• It makes assumptions and risk factors explicit.
• It ensures that everyone on the team has an idea of what needs to be done and what direction the organization is moving in.
• It allows the leaders of the organization to convince outside parties, such as funding agencies, of the basic viability of the proposal.

In my view, the current "build it and they will come" strategy is naive. My purpose here is to propose a new type of strategy. These are incremental, parallel strategies. The basic idea is to work on all 4 of the bullet points listed above simultaneously.

The plan involves the use of a "seabase". This is basically living place which is much more reliable than a seastead prototype would be. The seabase can be one of the following:

1. Used cargo or cruise ship.
2. Uninhabited desert island (e.g. Clipperton Island)
3. Seaside plot of land in a tax haven country (e.g. Cayman Islands or Anguilla).
4. Seaside plot of land in an established country (e.g. USA)

The various advantages and disadvantages of the different choice of seabase are discussed below. The important property of a seabase is that it is highly reliable. The problems of living on a seabase are well-understood and -solved. If a group of people decided they wanted to form a community on a seabase, there are no technological problems stopping them.

The seabase strategy can be summed up as follows: seastead=seabase+X. X represents the work and money expended on designing and constructing the floating platform. At the beginning of the process, X is small. In this regime, the seastead is basically just the seabase. This is not great, but is also not so bad (compare the formula seastead=X). As time goes on X becomes large, and eventually we no longer rely on the seabase at all.

The seabase strategy is as follows. First, organize a small core group of adventurous souls, perhaps 10-100 in number. This group moves to the seabase and simply lives there. At the beginning, they don't worry much about spar designs or the merits of ferrocement at all. They just try to solve the basic problems of living: how to make money, how to resolve disputes, and how to live comfortably in a strange environment.

Once these problems are approximately solved, they start to do two things. First, they begin to design and build seastead structures. Second, they try to recruit other people into the community (it may be that finding people is easy, but effectively integrating them into the community is hard). As more and more people arrive, the seabase economy starts to grow, and the seastead construction process starts to accelerate. As the seasteading structures become more reliable, more people spend time there as opposed to the seabase. But note that the seabase and seastead form an integrated community: moving from the seabase to the seastead does not require a major life upheaval. Critically, note that the risk from technical seastead design problems are mitigated: if prototype A sinks, the people just swim back to the seabase and try again later.

Risk

In contrast, there is significant upheaval and risk involved in the initial move the the seabase.

I submit that the seabase strategy allows us to attack the 4 development obs parallel