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.'"

Comments

Power abhors a vacuum.

[devman]

Power abhors a vacuum. There will always be a government analog (even if it just your local warlord) wherever you go as long as there are other people. This is also the reason why weakening governments simply allows corporate power grabs, I'm sure there are some who'd love to return to the days of the East India Trading Company private armies and all.

no thanks

[Trepidity]

As a resident of a prosperous northern-European country with working infrastructure, a working healthcare system, relatively low poverty and homelessness levels, and generally a decent civil society that we all pay our share towards, I'll take the universal welfare state over some kind of ridiculous experiment in anarcho-capitalism. That's about as likely to work as any other anarchist experiment has worked. I guess America can have fun with it, though.

Re:no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

In all likelihood, your "northern-European country" has low indigenous birthrates, which means you have more grandparents than grandchildren and you're importing labor to help pay those taxes that prop up your welfare state. In about 2-3 generations, your welfare state will be gone, and so will your entire culture. Probably replaced by something that doesn't hold the same values as you do today.

If you're looking for an investment, start a women's clothing store that carries burqas.

Re:no thanks

[Kjella]

You're generally shielded from the burden of unskilled migration by your geographical location, shielded from invasion by your southern and eastern neighbors who recently joined NATO, you are far out enough in the periphery of world affairs to not attract the ire of regional powers, but near enough that everyone wants to woo you to their side. You have few people, yet have a claim to large swathes of ocean energy and mineral resources. While you have some exposure to the world and to racial diversity, you still remain one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions in the West, sparing you much of the social strife that other countries experience. Plus, most people have forgotten your country's contributions to murder, slavery, rape, and pillage, or they'd rather focus on someone else's. Pretty comfortable place to be. Though, not quite a place from which to judge.

Quite a lot of fair points there, though I'd disagree on the last one. While the people who lived through WWII is quickly dwindling, we're very aware of our not-so-distant history when most of northern Europe was in flames and we considered ourselves all but ethnically homogeneous with über- and untermenschen. An awfully lot has happened since then though and we've probably done more to mend our wounds in the last 70 years than many other conflicts that have gone on for centuries. But I think I speak for most of Europe when I say we don't want to become a United States of Europe, the English want to be English, the French French, the Germans German and so on. We've found a peaceful way to coexist with "the other side" ceasing to exist and if it sounds a bit like we're saying "we did it, you can do it too" then that's probably true.

what about a week later?

[raymorris]

He wants to build a society with built-in mechanisms that subvert existing businesses and institutions, while promoting new ones. Okay, that's fine on day one.

A week later, the "new" institutions are "existing", so those mechanisms subvert them. His plan then, is quite literally to build a society that subverts itself -where anything built is destroyed.

Old joke: who cleans the shitters in Galt's Gulch?

[Anonymous Coward]

To dust off an old joke: who cleans the shitters in Galt's Gulch? Who "opts-in" to be a janitor?

Remember, the toolbags who are coming up with this are the same ones who think BART employees get paid "too much", so don't count on financial incentives to make somebody sign up.

Somalia, Somaliland, Statelessness, and Vampires

[SteveFoerster]

Somalia doesn't have statelessness, it has an overlapping collection of theocracies and despotisms. The main exception is Somaliland in the north, where there's been a functional breakaway republic for years and there's a noteworthy level of prosperity. Somaliland has been completely unable to secure any kind of foreign recognition, largely because if it gets it, it ruins the claim that the vampires at the IMF have to shakedown the Somali people to repay the loans made to the Barre regime. The upside of this lack of recognition, however, is that the Somaliland government hasn't been able to get foreign aid, which, as it turns out, suppresses development rather than fostering it. But condemning foreign aid to governments of low income countries is about the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from the twenty-first century Somali experience, it doesn't speak to the efficacy of statelessness at all (either way).