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.