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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.'"
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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Once you can print 3D metal cheap, that changes a lot of things.
Plastic, less so.
..don't panic
So let's say there are N choices you can "opt-in" for. Does this mean there will be 2^N societies to choose from?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
If the opt-in frontier societies of the American West are a precedent, there is no opt out. Once you're in the company town, you're there for your term of service.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think that when those "existing governments" want to collect taxes on your opt-in society, you'll find out just how easy it is to be "outside existing governments".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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.
'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.
Not seeing any concrete plans here. Some of the ideas are silly, such as Blueseed, the scheme to have a ship just outside of US waters full of programmers. That's just a tax shelter. Of course, they want the U.S. Coast Guard to help them if they get in trouble, as their prospectus says. And they want a large ferry dock and a freighter doc in San Mateo County's Pillar Point small-boat harbor. And they want ICE to make that small-boat harbor a US entry point, so people don't have to go up to San Francisco on a boat to visit the US. They also wanted to set up a microwave link at the USAF radar station at Pillar Point. But they don't want to pay for any of this.
Then there was CITE, a small city to be built in New Mexico. No people - it was supposed to be just for testing "new technologies". The company behind it turns out to be basically one guy without much money and a lot of clip art. Got a lot of press, and even some political support, then the vaporware project went away. The business model made no sense.
Further back, there was the high-tech Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which Walt Disney was going to build. Disney World has EPCOT today, but it's a theme park; nobody lives there. Disney did eventually build Celebration, FL, which is a retro-looking subdivision.
Some very top-down countries have done things like this: Tsukuba Science City, Guangzhou Science City, King Khalid Military City, and Brasilia. Those are all Government projects. The US private sector has a long history of "company towns", most of it not too good.
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).
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
The one non-shitty part of Somalia has an (unrecognized thus far) state. Of it's 3 politil parties, 2 are left of center and I have no idea how the third leans.
The rest may be better off stateless than what they had before, but that's hardly the same thing. I would be better off having my leg sawed off than having my leg sawed off and being branded with a hot poker, but I would be better off still if neither was happening.
I mean, just look at cigarettes. The instant someone figured out that second hand smoke was causing cancer, the free market pulled them *right* off the shelves...