I find the idea of Seasteading fascinating - it could certainly be a great thing for humanity if it accelerates the evolution of government systems and gets them to solve the Hotelling's law problem and the irrational voter problem . However, I have serious doubts that a seastead would be a good place to live in the long term. Assuming it gets off the ground, here is how I think the experiment would play out.
The first problem is that seastead "land" is extremely expensive - hundreds of dollars per square foot, on par with living space in a major US city but (initially) without the network effects that make US cities valuable places to live/work/do stuff. The "land" also has ongoing maintainance costs much greater than old-fashioned land - making sure it stays afloat, de-barnacling, ensuring a supply of fresh water and food, removing waste and so on.
This means that (at least initially) a seastead is going to be importing much more than it exports. In order to be practical, it's going to have to ramp up to being a net exporter as quickly as possible to pay back the initial costs, keep itself running and generate net wealth. But there are far fewer options for a seastead to make money than for a landstead. Farming is going to be particularly difficult as it requires a lot of space. So the seasteads will have to concentrate on producing wealth in ways that don't require a lot of space, and trade with land states for food.
The things which seasteads will be able to do cheaper than landsteads are things which are made more expensive by government interference, such as manufacturing (no government to impose a minimum wage or environmentally friendly disposal practices) software and other IP-intensive activities (no copyrights or patents to worry about) and scientific research (particularly biological - no ethics laws to get in the way). Drugs, prostitution and gambling will be common as sin taxes can be avoided. Seasteads which don't do these things just won't be able to compete with the land states, so by a simple survival-of-the-fittest process, this is what the successful seasteads will end up doing - a classic race to the bottom.
By design, it's supposed to be very easy to leave a seastead and join another if you disagree with how your current seastead is being run - you just pack up your house onto a ship and go to another seastead. But this very mobility will introduce its own set of problems. Crime, for example - if someone commits a serious crime aboard a seastead, there's little stopping them from leaving before the police start breathing down their necks. To avoid having a serious crime problem, the seasteads are going to have to sacrifice freedom for security in one of a number of ways:
- Make it more difficult to move (you'll need a check to make sure you aren't under suspicion of a crime before you'll be allowed to get on the boat).
- Have a justice system and uniform baseline of laws covering a large union of seasteads - allow free travel between these seasteads but you'll still be under the same criminal jurisdiction - similar to how US states operate. By agreeing to be a part of the union, your seastead gets some additional security but you have to play by the union's rules to keep your police protection.
Another problem is that it's going to be difficult to institute any form of social welfare - if you tax the rich to feed the poor, those who are getting a net tax will just leave for a seastead which doesn't do that. So there is likely to be a great poverty problem - a big divide between wealthy seastates and poor ones. The poor ones will just die out and their "land" will be taken over by other seasteads, accelerating the Darwinism to the delight of libertarians and the dismay of humanitarians.
If lots of people end up on seasteads, I forsee large environmental problems since it's going to be very difficult for seasteads to enact (let alone enforce) anti-pollution laws. Seasteads which take pains to avoid dumping their toxic waste in the ocean just won't be able to compete with those that don't.
There are certain economies of scale in many of the wealth-generating activities that seasteads will perform, so it seems likely that reasonably successful seasteads will merge into larger conglomerates the way corporations do in the western world (particularly in the US). These corporate sea-states will be the ones which are nicest to live on - since they are major producers of wealth they'll be able to afford the best living conditions and attract the brightest and hardest-working people. They won't be the most free seasteads though - only those who can (or have) contributed to the seastead's economy will be allowed to live there - customers, employees and their families, retired employees, employees of partner corporations and so on. As an employee, you'll have to play by the company rules and not engage in any activities which might be deleterious to the company's profit margin - don't expect to be able to take recreational drugs, for example - they might affect your job performance and add costs to the company healthcare plan.
Some seasteads might have constitutions which prevent this sort of thing. They might not be as big, as pleasant to live on or quite as good at making money, but their small size and consequent agility might allow them to survive and become viable in certain niche areas of the seasteading economy. They may have to make some compromises to stay viable, but as different seasteads will make different compromises, there will be plenty of choice.
The outcome of the seasteading experiment is really important because when humankind inevitably starts colonizing space, similar economic forces will be at work.