With uncertainty in the environment around us, many people are trying to establish an escape plan. One escape we are seeing as a pattern is the outpost/bunker genre we seeing trending in video games, subculture, and even having a music genre.

However, there is another angle – the ability to setup an operational center away from the city or a tech center. A space for micro-entrepreneurs assisted by artificial intelligence and remote talent to create solutions or provide specialized services.

In this article we want to discuss these outposts and how to start planning for one. I see the modern outpost model of both an escape/opportunity space.  It is a space that is more realistic than a downtown office space to run micro-entrepreneurial business models and may be a better choice.

Outpost Background

Before we get started, there is an genre called outpost ambiance themed around outpost designs, a darker offshoot of study hop. So the above is an example of such a video.

An outpost is a real estate space where you setup for your business to conduct operations. The type of operations is key. Let’s discuss some entities that setup outposts.

Government.  The government is the biggest outpost creator in the world. They setup secret outposts to run surveillance, torture programs, intelligence gathering, special military operations.

Kooks. These are people are considered conspiracy theorists that ran into the mountain cabins. But the kooks are usually the “wise ones” considered SME in their area of practice.

Cartels. Dealer spots, trap houses, stash house, grow farms, brothels, weapon cache, are all outposts and setups by the cartel to manage their operations and grip on a region and area.

Lone Wolves. These types are considered survivalists who have a background in military or law enforcement and mainly about man vs wild quest in solitude. They build their home, hunt their food and companioned with a hunter-grade dog. In urban areas, this would be someone like John Wick.

Cults. These are the religious and racist nutjobs who setup compounds in remote areas and slowly and quietly take over rural towns with their nutjob followers and members.

In this article, we are looking at the new paradigm of an ex-corpo running a cyberpunk agency in a remote outpost. Be mindful this is not new – Silicon Valley has plenty of these kinds of characters who have nice remote forest homes outside the Valley in the mountains I had to drive up mountain roads to visit and discuss high-tech and Undernet stuff back in the 1990s.  

Modern Outpost Model

We do not recommend some kook building their own cabin or these goofy YouTube videos of someone building their own bunker – they building that only for the clicks and views. What we recommend is operating in plain sight – get a mountain cabin.

The problem with that is the demand and cost of a mountain cabin even in rural areas in the Appalachians are expensive and up in the $300k to $400k range. The next section is going to discuss global options for cheaper but there are advantages that are baked in the high price for an American option.

Even at $350k for a nice mountain cabin, you have access to water and sewer, gun ownership, right to privacy, right to enterprise, and able to purchase the proper remote data center setup to run your operation.

Don’t balk at the price. Go and check your 401K, you got the money so stop tripping – lol, don’t tell us you waiting to be old and pooping in an adult diaper before you figured out you should have hustled that 401K money when you was in your 40s and 50s.

You do not have time to build a cabin and play survivalist; your job is to hook up the operational equipment to run your outpost and setup the global escape hustle in silence.

Global Outpost Locations

For global options, I don’t want to name places because to be honest, the geopolitical situation in the world is fluid. The best option in my opinion is pursue a digital nomad visa and have a build camp/break camp outpost center to setup and tear down. Move from Greece to Italy, then to Spain and Portugal, then Costa Rica and Mexico then to Bali and Thailand.

Here is what I would consider for an outpost.

Cheap Electricity. Kigali, Rwanda for example have cheap hydroelectric and one of the cheapest power in the world and attract crypto entrepreneurs as a result. Also Rwanda has the same landscape and weather as Colombia that is mild year round without all the hyper-violence and crime.

Cheap Real Estate. Kigali, Rwanda for example have nice large homes for under $200,000USD and land plots for $5,000USD to build on. It is also important to have access to water and sewer on your property because not all toilet and sewer are equal. People be wanting to get an abandoned home in Japan to find out the bathroom is an molded squat toilet with a bucket going into a septic tank nor used in 50 years and smells like it too.  

Keep to Yourself. Places like South Korea and Japan are awesome to move in silence and keep to yourself and focus on your hustle. There are other places where people be watching you and remembering you and be talking to others on you and plotting on you like in Latin America. Your outpost is going to be running high tech equipment and you don’t want locals thinking you ops or an agent peeping through your window pretending to cut the neighbor grass.

Close Access to Amenities. You will need to buy equipment, wires, food, office equipment and want to have the ability to order and pick up these things. You do not want people delivering food to your place because they get nosey and start asking questions about what you doing. It’s better to casually go out and eat and enjoy a nice safe park or beach area.

Overall, the best global setup is stay in a spot in Asia region where you can keep to yourself and portray yourself as a retiree or a student. But you should always have the capacity to to break camp when you need to up and leave and move to another outpost setup.

Outpost Operation Models

I want you to think of the situation that would lead you to creating an outpost for yourself in the first place. Widespread corporate layoffs and you been invited to a video call with your boss and an HR representative. You have years of experience and know how to do it better but your manager did not give you the chance or opportunity to make a difference.

You see everybody around you not willing to improve, doing drugs, have awful uneducated beliefs on how society should work and have no values. You want to get away from them and you want to start a business limited only by your imagination and you have the money to start your own enterprise and don’t trust too many people that will work as hard as you.

The only thing you can trust is the machine and you can train the machine to improve over time. That is who you are to understand what kind of business model to create in your outpost.

Fractional Executive. This is where you can serve as a CIO or CFO of more than one startup company where you manage their books on your server system and lead in giving direction and advice on growth and development. You also make decisions, own shares and stake, and cash out when they go IPO. Companies of the future do not need full-time executives just looking for a parachute clause.

Remote Services.  This is where you can perform tasks such as data cleanup on their servers, compliance checking with your data algorithms, perform language translation with your machine learning, upload and download satellite data from IoT sensors, manage corporate meetings and licensing and more. You charge corpos by the hour like a lawyer and your AI machines are your assistant performing complex tasks you train them on.

AI Training. You can train nice little model agents to serve as chatbots, GenAI virtual models, or decision makers and sell them back to the company that asked you to create them. You create agents that can call a person and handle offering comp tickets to a comedy club where they have to buy minimum of two drinks. You can also create virtual presenters who can sell cars next to an auto display and answer questions and run no-impact credit checks via SMS.

Media Development. This is where you can do things such as pre-processing and post-production media work for bloggers and influencers from a remote location. Manage the time release, editing of content, your AI can even formulate stories and distribute similar to Reuters/Associated Press to smaller content distribution. You can also run a record label with K-pop artists from Texas with global distribution to music streamers worldwide and fan management. You can also run fantasy sport leagues for sport bars and distribute crypto buy/sell prices to crypto cafes and bars as well.  

Notice the similar theme – you create a data processing environment with AI agents who can do the work for you and you just oversee the quality and finalize the product/service. This is the future of micro-entrepreneurs who will be the future growth of the modern economy.

Future of Outposts in a New Century Paradigm

To understand the opportunities is to understand the future of micro-entrepreneurs in the digital age. As you see massive layoffs, it is going to be a new crop of talent that will not work for corporations as a salaried employee and will venture into specialized data services.

That means the office and work will change in the post-pandemic remote work landscape we are currently in. It was actually normal for small businesses to purchase a church or store zoned for commercial to refurbish into an office space. Today, we are looking at small micro-entrepreneurs creating outposts designed around them to do business and have a work/life balance.

You sitting there in your 40s and 50s holding on your 401k until you in your 70s wondering if that was a fart or you just crapped in your adult diaper again is something you want to rethink in this era. We are in a paradigm shift and your new retirement plan is creating perpetual informational value with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence and providing data services.

To get started, build an outpost in your apartment or home right now. A home office is not just a desk you slap a laptop on – that’s for the coffee shop. You need the data center components:

Micro Desktops. Use this as your compute area of a data center. These are the Lenovo or Dell or HP mini-desktops that have a little antenna on the back of them. You can find them under $200 and configure them to be compute servers to run open source software such as automation, data queries and computation.

Networking Hub.  Use this as the network area of a data center. This is mostly an ethernet hub with high-speed cables to have all of the desktops communicate with each other at high speed. This does not have to be connected to the Internet and used for internal computation. Also firewall and security is done at this level.

Storage Servers.  These are the RAID drive you can by from SanDisk or Western Digital to store your data. This is where you backup data, store logs, and store shared files such as media and configuration settings for each box.

Monitors. I use a combination of horizontal ultra-wide monitors as I do not perform well with stacked servers having to lift my head up.

Then you setup with a nice view to look out and give yourself space to walk and relax and an analog space to draw on a white board or sit down and write on a tablet or notebook. You can start your outpost setup in your home, take notes and then write it down as your plan b for your second hustle to get going.

Be mindful that once you setup the infrastructure, you can build and pivot to anything you need to so learn how to build and break camp and be able to pack and ship to anywhere in the world if you realize that option has to be exercised.