Slashdot Mirror
Building an Opt-In Society
An anonymous reader writes "In a talk at Y Combinator's startup school event, Stanford lecturer Balaji Srinivasan explained his vision for governing systems of the future. The idea is to find space to set up a new 'opt-in' society outside existing governments, and design it to take full advantage of technology to keep people in control of their own lives. That means embracing tech that subverts existing industries and rejecting regulation on new ways of doing things. '[N]ew industries are simultaneously disrupting existing ones while also exiting the system entirely, he says. With 3D printing, regulation is being turned into DRM. With quantified self, medicine is going mobile. With Bitcoin, capital control becomes packet filtering. All of these examples, Srinivasan says, are ways in which technology is allowing people to exit current systems like physical product production and distribution; personal health; and finance in favor of spaces of their own creation.' Srinivasan's ideas are a natural extension of a few proposals already in the works — Peter Thiel has been trying to build a small tech incubator city that floats in international waters, outside of government control. Elon Musk wants to have a Mars colony, and Larry Page has wished for a tech-centric Burning man that's free from government regulation. 'The best part is this,' Srinivasan said. 'The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there.'"
I guess America can have fun with it, though.
Somalia is having fun with it right now. I don't think this is what even the craziest teabaggers want.
Fortunately with Obamacare, America is realizing that there needs to be some kind of social security. In the long run, there's no way around it if you want to keep exploiting people and keep them relatively peaceful at the same time.
If the opt-in frontier societies of the American West are a precedent, there is no opt out. Once you're in the company town, you're there for your term of service.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Can you please cite instances of when northern European countries, in the recent decades which have seen welfare states, have kicked people out on the grounds of them following a different religion?
Finland chose not to join NATO during the Cold War and provide for its own defense, with the understanding that the West would not come to its defence in the event of invasion. It nonetheless managed to run a welfare state comparable to any of its Nordic neighbours.
'The best part is this,' Srinivasan said. 'The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there.'
But people who will be quite happy to exploit your deregulated society will be right there with you!
Complain all you want about 'big banks' unethical behavior (really, keep complaining, write to your local MP/senator/whathaveyou, make sure the issue doesn't get dropped) but government regulation of banking means that if you put your money in a bank, you can be sure (at least up to £85,000 per Bank in the UK) that you will always have access to that money. Without regulation, then you have situations like with Paypal where the holder of you money can just up and decide "Nope, you can't have it anymore. It's ours for at least the next 9 months. Oh, you want an explanation? Too bad!".
Or how about enforcing standards, like power supply? You want a situation where not only does every device have it's own plug, but your house may not even supply the same voltage or frequency as the neighbourhood a mile away? 'No government at all' works fantastically when all your actors are rational and honest. That is also true to Communism. Finding this mythical group of rational and honest actors (and keeping out even a single bad egg) is the hard part.
Which in a way is the point. These are generally people who feel they deserve more power then they have and it is the government's fault they are not doing better in life, thus if they break away THEY get to run things instead. There is a reason these types of projects tend to attract narcissistic people, it takes a certain amount of self centered confidence to believe that in such a shakeup they will come out on top rather then simply ending up worse then before since some new group of powerful people will simply have even more control over them.