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: <math>seastead=seabase+$\epsilon$</math>