Freeport-type cities in the 1600s Carribean were parasitical on surrounding societies by enabling and profiting from piracy.
What are the citizens of your modern distributed platform society going to live off?
If I were to guess at how seasteaders would make money? Bringing things to you that you'd normally have to travel for (or are illegal) and pay a lot of money - medical and cosmetic tourism, gambling, that sort of thing.
Hook up a subsea cable and plenty could make a living just fine. Starlink itself might just be enough.
The only actual bandwidth needs I ever have is for conference calls, my actual "work" can survive off dialup speeds for the occasional SO search.
Other than that setting up a port for sailors would probably bring in some retail cash, marinas around the world often cost a pretty penny to moor in.
The last one is a plot point in a Ghost in the Shell episode, if I remember correctly.
What's actually on that list though? That you can't find somewhere with actual land that's will allow it so you don't have to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up where you could also put this lab.
If its that consistently regulated, there's likely to be sufficient will to come up with an excuse to take action against a vulnerable violator. And a nation of boats doesn’t need to be invaded, they just need powerful nations to impose sanctions (including second-order ones on trade partners) on them.
E.g. Guantanamo for research. Or Project Paperclip.
The criticism that smaller states will just get invaded makes no geopolitical sense. If that were the case, the entire world would be divided into 3 countries.
If the larger states wants to benefit from research without legalizing it...they’ll just do it covertly, without legalizing it. The reason to not want to legalize it is to prevent other people from exploiting it, which is definitely going to extend to anti-authoritsrian seasteaders and their other potential customers.
And if they did want to tolerate an external third-party for deniable benefit doing something the major state felt the need to keep illegal...well, historically (even when the minor partner has the resources of a traditional nation-state) that’s often a transitory relationship that ends poorly for the minor party. Ask Manuel Noriega—or Saddam Hussein—about it sometime.
> Guantanamo for research. Or Project Paperclip.
Yeah, Guatanamo-for-Anything and Operation Paperclip are the kinds of things states (even if they involve things the state wants to pretend to prohibit) really want to keep tight, direct control over.
Right now, states use each other to circumvent domestic laws. It really doesn’t seem far fetched that a larger state would allow a smaller one to exist if it were geopolitically/economically/etc. in its (the larger state) interest. If anything, it’s more likely, because they can be more easily controlled.
“Sure, we won’t invade your scientific seasteading research nation, as long as you share the results with us. “