Here are some practical elements that mean that seasteading is not going to work the way it's current proponents want it to. 1. Seasteads will require enormous

Here are some practical elements that mean that seasteading is not going to work the way it's current proponents want it to. 1. Seasteads will require enormous amounts of hard, barely rewarding work to be even marginally functional at first. 2. Much of that work will be farming, and much of the rest will be weather-related; preparing the vessel to deal with storms and dealing with the damage wrought by weather. 3. Speaking of weather, the volume and intensity of open ocean storms has been increasing for the past three decades and will continue doing so for the forseeable future. 4. Ocean aquaculture can be quite a difficult proposition, particularly if you're in an area that lacks an existing nutrient cycle. 5. Political autonomy doesn't work the way people think it does. Sure you can give yourself some breathing room, maybe a new set of building codes; some structures that will let you run business a bit more freely; and those tend to be beneficial. But what about human rights? What if a group wants to experiment with allowing human slavery? Or post natal birth-control where only worthy warriors are allowed to become people? You can generate a whole menagerie of horror stories, but for the most part the upshot is "Autonomy within limits." And then you have to have an open debate about what the limits are. Or not, maybe the seasteasds will be a giant set of floating Dubai's without Islamic temperance to limit the abuses. Either way seasteads are likely to be fragile enough in the first few years that cohesive social structures will be a requirement for survival. Which argues against the Spencerian libertarianism that seems to be the default position of many interested in the topic. I rather suspect that successful seasteads will have social structures that look more like Kibbutzim than libertarian autonomies.