Silk Road forums
Discussion => Philosophy, Economics and Justice => Topic started by: Visionary on May 09, 2013, 09:21 pm
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Like the well-reasoned arguments for anarcho-capitalism, counterarguments should be extensive. Considerations from economics, history, behavioral science, etc. should be abundant. Unfortunately, I ain't got time for that.
Arnold Kling, libertarian and once celebrated blogger for EconLog, has recently reviewed The Rule of the Clan (http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/Klingclan.html). He quotes the book, "the belief that individual freedom exists only when the state is frail misunderstands the source of liberty. The state can be more or less effective in the pursuit of its goals—it can be stupid or smart—and it can be used for illiberal, totalitarian ends. But ultimately a healthy state dedicated to the public interest makes individual freedom possible." That is, a strong centralized state fosters liberal values (i.e., individual freedom), whereas more decentralized communities rely upon "Status" rather than "Contract," with order based upon revenge, violence, etc. rather than lawfulness. This is of course contingent: a centralized state can become despotic, but that is not demonstrably inevitable. Ultimately, although a centralized state is not sufficient for a liberal culture, it seems necessary.
Larry Arnhart, a conservative scholar who has incorporated Darwinism into his political philosophy, recently wrote (http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.de/2013/05/liberalism-anarchism-and-darwinism.html): "A Darwinian view of the evolutionary history of society and government would support the classical liberal endorsement of limited government, while casting doubt on the liberal anarchist vision of abolishing government. Although the evolutionary history of stateless societies shows that social order does not require a Weberian state, social order does require government, even if this governmental rule is informal, episodic, and dispersed." Canvassing Austrian economists, he adds, "the social orders arising as the unintended outcome of the self-seeking actions of individuals can lead to beneficial institutions, even though they are not the products of any intelligent design." Nonetheless, he finds that "Menger insisted that intentional design could and should be exercised to some degree in adjusting unintended orders to changing circumstances. For example, while he argued that legislators and judges should recognize the 'unintended wisdom' often inherent in customary legal traditions, he also recognized that customary law often needed to be corrected by statutory stipulation to make the law more suitable for the common welfare." In other words, societies can be largely self-regulating, but not wholly so. Statutes, for instance, truly can supplement common-law rules (generating greater economic efficiency and human well-being).
Matt Zwolinski, a libertarian philosopher that blogs for BHL, recently questioned (http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1676&Itemid=366#response4): "The argument that market anarchism will not produce excessive violence, like the argument that automobile markets will not produce exploding cars, depends on an assumption that consumers and producers will generally act rationally. When it comes to automobiles, that assumption is probably close enough to correct to generate the right outcome, most of the time. But is there something special about violence?" He argued that violence qua violence is special. He elaborates: "Did the Hutus who hacked their Tutsi neighbors to death with machetes really consider those violent acts a cost? A burden to be borne, grudgingly, for the sake of some offsetting hedonic benefit? On the contrary, it seems much more plausible to say that, for them, the violence was a constitutive part of the hedonic benefit -- not an obstacle standing between them and their goal but part of the goal itself. And I suspect that the same is true of much of the violence involved in primitive tribal conflict, the Christian Crusades, and contemporary street-level gang violence. It is no doubt true that some of this violence served an instrumental purpose. But there’s nothing incoherent about violence being both instrumentally and intrinsically gratifying, and I suspect that this is the best way of understanding the motivation of at least many of the perpetrators of these types of violence." Zwonlinski then considers the exceptions to rational choice theory: "Is the husband who gets drunk and beats up his wife for the third time this year rationally weighing the costs and benefits of his behavior? Is the meth-head who – while in handcuffs – tries to pick a fight with his arresting officer? These examples are cheeky, I admit. But the lesson is real. We know from our study of the brain that aggressive impulses are correlated with a very different and much more primitive region than that responsible for rational calculation. So when we see on Cops that people often make strikingly irrational decisions about violence, or for that matter when we see on Teen Mom that people often make strikingly irrational decisions about sex, we should not be surprised." Finally, he raises Adam Lanza as proof that "the negative effects of decisions about the use of violence are largely externalized and can be devastating," rather than internalized (which is needed for the self-correcting wonders of markets).
Ultimately, Zwolinski leans upon the scholarship of Steven Pinker who has authored the much-praised The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, stating: "It is natural for the state-produced horrors of the 20th century to dominate our thinking about such matters. But we should resist the temptation of historical myopia. Stephen Pinker has argued persuasively that even taking the hemoclysms of the first half of the 20th century into account, the world today is a much safer, much more peaceful place than it has ever been before. And a substantial portion of the credit for that fact, on his analysis, goes to the development of the modern state. In absolute terms, to be sure, more people die violent deaths in state-based societies than in stateless ones. But that’s largely because there are more people around to be killed today than there were in our anarchistic past. In relative terms, one’s chances of dying a violent death in a state-based society are significantly lower than in a stateless one – somewhere between 6-25 percent as low, to be precise. Anarchist societies may not have had nuclear bombs or concentration camps, but the constant raids, skirmishes, and low-level conflicts took a heavy cumulative toll."
Overall, if one emphasizes empirical evidence, anarcho-capitalism seems to be simplistic; markets are efficient and produce widespread gains without deliberate design, but they cannot be the sole organizational model for all human activity. It would be like turning all of your internal organs into the one you like most like--perhaps a bit neater on paper, but fatal nevertheless.
I certainly chamption counter-economic activities that help uproot undesirable legislation (i.e., drug prohibition), but full-blown anarcho-capitalism seems impossible economically (e.g., Austrians can't wish away public goods or externalities), historically (e.g., state-based societies are less violent than stateless ones), and behaviorally (e.g., rational choice theory is not always valid, especially in regards to violent behavior). To be a libertarian, one first needs a state.
Bottom line: Hobbes beats Rothbard.
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I remember reading Zwolinski's piece, and I remember that I wasn't all that impressed. And it was a case against the "non-aggression principle (NAP)", not anarcho-capitalism. Personally, I prefer Bernard Gert's "Common Morality". Common Morality is Objective morality with a slight subjectivist spin.
George Smith takes apart Zwolinsky pretty well here (in 4 parts):
part 1
http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/defending-non-aggression-principle-reply-matt-zwolinski-part-1
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You should look into pinenarchy. I've heard lots of arguments against anarcho this or that, but never pinenarchy.
I agree incidentally, that a strong central, small but powerful state is necessary for markets to begin. The data supports that idea. However I am also convinced that the world will be stranger. The most extreme anarcho-capitalists with new ideas are the Cypherpunks, and frankly I've yet to hear any rebuttal of it.
It is interesting that you bring arguments against anarcho-capitalism on SR, since after all although SR is very heavily inspired by anarcho-capitalism, it is really more properly described as anarcho-cypher-capitalism. It is not a construct that could possibly exist in the physical world or as plaintext in the virtual one. The shorthand for anarcho-cypher-capitalism is cryptoanarchy.
None of the philosophers have thought of this, it would have been too much of a leap, and that I find very interesting indeed. This is a genuine New Thing. See, despite appearances, cryptoanarchy isn't a highly specific concept, it just sounds like one. It is really a very general concept.
Despite the fact Julian Assange even wrote a entire book about the Cypherpunks, almost nobody in the media or government grasps the long term ramifications of such developments. The Silk Road, Bitcoin, the darknets and cryptocurrencies are just the start of a long term secular change in society. Fortunately nobody believes this, even when they hear it, it is the platypus flavoring, otherwise they'd probably put a stop to it by any means possible.
Here is a thread where we discussed anarchy and cryptoanarchy earlier. See if you can come up with arguments against cryptoanarchy, that'll be something that hasn't been done before.
http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=139891.0
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I remember reading Zwolinski's piece, and I remember that I wasn't all that impressed. And it was a case against the "non-aggression principle (NAP)", not anarcho-capitalism.
I was quite surprised that you have assumed Zwolinski's entire oeuvre can be reduced to just one article criticizing the non-aggresion principle. He has written much before that, and he has written much since that. In other words, you're wrong: this is not the same article you had once read.
The non-aggression principle, moreover, was long-ago defrocked by David Friedman and can't hold muster against the entire law-and-economics movement. I am not arguing that here, though.
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It is interesting that you bring arguments against anarcho-capitalism on SR, since after all although SR is very heavily inspired by anarcho-capitalism, it is really more properly described as anarcho-cypher-capitalism. It is not a construct that could possibly exist in the physical world or as plaintext in the virtual one. The shorthand for anarcho-cypher-capitalism is cryptoanarchy.
None of the philosophers have thought of this, it would have been too much of a leap, and that I find very interesting indeed. This is a genuine New Thing. See, despite appearances, cryptoanarchy isn't a highly specific concept, it just sounds like one. It is really a very general concept.
Actually, if crypto-anarchism could be more generalized among commercial transactions, I would be more optimistic. As it stands, many here are still risking their freedom by using DEA-vulnerable postal carriers. Give me a crypto-anarchized teleporter for merchandise, and you'll have me convinced.
As it stands, what has been established is a cypherpunk marketplace that evades, but does not entirely avoid, the State. And it is limited: did big business flock to Bitcoin once the Senate passed a bill for Internet-sales taxation? Do anonymized Internet connections impact the issue of same-sex marriage at all? Has government begun withering away, yet?
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But ultimately a healthy state dedicated to the public interest makes individual freedom possible." That is, a strong centralized state fosters liberal values (i.e., individual freedom), whereas more decentralized communities rely upon "Status" rather than "Contract," with order based upon revenge, violence, etc. rather than lawfulness.
This statement is pretty well supported by the fact that cartels and mafias so thoroughly dominate the only truly free market in the world, the black market, and they rule by violence.
It is interesting that in all of human history, no society seems to have existed, in fact no group of people with more than say 10 members, has existed that didn't include some kind of hierarchy or social order. It seems to arise spontaneously, even in ad hoc groups. Someone is bound to take the lead.
We are social species because many individuals working together can accomplish more than everyone working alone, or against each other. It allows us to build cities and send people into space. But in order to accomplish those goals, we must coordinate the actions of many individuals, so someone has to make executive decisions. Even if people disagree with some decisions, you have to make everyone do the same thing in order to get anything done at all. So ad hoc groups of students assigned to a project get a spontaneous leader, organizations have presidents, corporations have chief executives, towns have mayors, and nations have prime ministers.
That's just how you get shit done.
Even SR has an executive and this forum has mods. Imagine this community without leaders. It would suck.
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the case against "anarcho"-capitalism (it isn't actual anarchism) is that it would result in the greatest tyranny the world has ever seen...
it would simply replace the tyranny of the State with the greater tyranny of unrestricted private power.
It would, in fact, merely PRIVATISE the state -- not abolish it. There would be private armies, private police forces, etc.
In fact, capitalism and the state imply each other. Capitalism only exists because of state protection of private property. Abolish the state, and you abolish capitalism.
"Anarcho"-capitalism is a contradiction in terms.
Real anarchism is the enemy of both the State and capitalism.
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That makes sense.
Property is the most widespread form of state force in the world.
For some people it's a sacred cow. State force is bad, but the enforcement of property rights is an exception, and one of the few "legitimate" uses of state force. Well, first you have to demonstrate that property rights are legitimate. To me, they exist not because they are inherent in nature, but because people agree to pretend property exists. In other words, it's a social contract. :)
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But ultimately a healthy state dedicated to the public interest makes individual freedom possible." That is, a strong centralized state fosters liberal values (i.e., individual freedom), whereas more decentralized communities rely upon "Status" rather than "Contract," with order based upon revenge, violence, etc. rather than lawfulness.
This statement is pretty well supported by the fact that cartels and mafias so thoroughly dominate the only truly free market in the world, the black market, and they rule by violence.
It is interesting that in all of human history, no society seems to have existed, in fact no group of people with more than say 10 members, has existed that didn't include some kind of hierarchy or social order. It seems to arise spontaneously, even in ad hoc groups. Someone is bound to take the lead.
We are social species because many individuals working together can accomplish more than everyone working alone, or against each other. It allows us to build cities and send people into space. But in order to accomplish those goals, we must coordinate the actions of many individuals, so someone has to make executive decisions. Even if people disagree with some decisions, you have to make everyone do the same thing in order to get anything done at all. So ad hoc groups of students assigned to a project get a spontaneous leader, organizations have presidents, corporations have chief executives, towns have mayors, and nations have prime ministers.
That's just how you get shit done.
Even SR has an executive and this forum has mods. Imagine this community without leaders. It would suck.
I think any community would be better without leaders. It just requires the right technology to support it. SR would suck without leaders because it was designed to have a leader.
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But ultimately a healthy state dedicated to the public interest makes individual freedom possible." That is, a strong centralized state fosters liberal values (i.e., individual freedom), whereas more decentralized communities rely upon "Status" rather than "Contract," with order based upon revenge, violence, etc. rather than lawfulness.
This statement is pretty well supported by the fact that cartels and mafias so thoroughly dominate the only truly free market in the world, the black market, and they rule by violence.
It is interesting that in all of human history, no society seems to have existed, in fact no group of people with more than say 10 members, has existed that didn't include some kind of hierarchy or social order. It seems to arise spontaneously, even in ad hoc groups. Someone is bound to take the lead.
We are social species because many individuals working together can accomplish more than everyone working alone, or against each other. It allows us to build cities and send people into space. But in order to accomplish those goals, we must coordinate the actions of many individuals, so someone has to make executive decisions. Even if people disagree with some decisions, you have to make everyone do the same thing in order to get anything done at all. So ad hoc groups of students assigned to a project get a spontaneous leader, organizations have presidents, corporations have chief executives, towns have mayors, and nations have prime ministers.
That's just how you get shit done.
Even SR has an executive and this forum has mods. Imagine this community without leaders. It would suck.
I think any community would be better without leaders. It just requires the right technology to support it. SR would suck without leaders because it was designed to have a leader.
Techmology will save us. lol
No, technology is what is tyrannising humanity. Technology is power, power leads to domination and hierarchy. Technology is also a power that is autonomous with no human centre of authority. As long as the technological system infiltrates itself in aspect of human life, anarchism will be impossible.
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I think any community would be better without leaders. It just requires the right technology to support it. SR would suck without leaders because it was designed to have a leader.
Techmology will save us. lol
No, technology is what is tyrannising humanity. Technology is power, power leads to domination and hierarchy. Technology is also a power that is autonomous with no human centre of authority. As long as the technological system infiltrates itself in aspect of human life, anarchism will be impossible.
Am I the only person that thinks anarchism means not-state, the absence of a state?
There's an infinite number of models possible, just as there being many many forms of state based governance, from despotism to democracy to republicanism to communism.
Y'all can add on extra features for your favorite form of anarchism, but don't expect the next anarchist to agree.
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Am I the only person that thinks anarchism means not-state, the absence of a state?
There's an infinite number of models possible, just as there being many many forms of state based governance, from despotism to democracy to republicanism to communism.
Y'all can add on extra features for your favorite form of anarchism, but don't expect the next anarchist to agree.
But what is the point of anarchism? What do you hope to achieve?
Because if it's the whole thing about state violence, I agree with the poster above, state violence merely gets replaced by private violence, private police, private armies. What you really get is a de facto plutocracy, which is much worse that the various forms of western democracy, despite their many dysfunctions.
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markets are efficient and produce widespread gains without deliberate design, but they cannot be the sole organizational model for all human activity.
Exactly! This is the fairly inoffensive argument I have been trying to make on these forums for months.
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Am I the only person that thinks anarchism means not-state, the absence of a state?
There's an infinite number of models possible, just as there being many many forms of state based governance, from despotism to democracy to republicanism to communism.
Y'all can add on extra features for your favorite form of anarchism, but don't expect the next anarchist to agree.
But what is the point of anarchism? What do you hope to achieve?
Because if it's the whole thing about state violence, I agree with the poster above, state violence merely gets replaced by private violence, private police, private armies. What you really get is a de facto plutocracy, which is much worse that the various forms of western democracy, despite their many dysfunctions.
I have what may sound like contradictory ideas about all this, but bear with me, it makes sense in the end I promise.
For pine, anarchy is not a political concept in of itself. It is a "mode", so I am calling it now. Sometimes we use words so often and for a variety of meanings that they become laden with historical or social baggage that we don't mean to put upon them. So let's think about anarchy-as-mode.
A mode is something that affects the entire human race, so you should imagine the earth from space as if you were an alien analyzing our collective behavior patterns as some sort of cosmic anthropologist. To us scurrying about like so many ants this is invisible or irrelevant, it is only from a great distance above our heads that you can see discernible patterns emerging. These may not be literally visible patterns (although they could be too), but instead they are alternations in the flow of information throughout human society.
We need to think of these things in the same way as a geologist thinks about "deep time", of unknown trillions of particles being laid down over immense periods of time to form layers of the earth, if people are those particles then modes are an impersonal concept not congruent with everyday experience of society. So I don't hope to achieve anything with anarchy in particular, since the idea is meaningless. Even whole nations are merely actors, being are unable to influence at this level of organization, let alone poor old pine. I think of "statism" and "anarchism" as being analogous to hierarchical vs networked "modes" in human civilization. They are like huge cycles in human society which take place over very very long periods of time. e.g. The rise of a Roman Empire is the ascendancy of hierarchical modes, the Middle Ages is the reverse. This is not to imply one is superior to the other, it cannot be simplified like that.
You might say that it took less energy at one point in history to form the Roman Empire, and then it took more energy so that the Roman Empire disintegrated and the Middle Ages became a more energy efficient equilibrium, even if it was at a lower level. At the level of individuals this is a non-deterministic process, but at the mode level all this is quite deterministic and predictable (but it is extraordinarily hard to make money knowing this kind of information, it simply takes too long!). Put simply, if you didn't do something to encourage mode X when it was prevalent, and you fought against it with all your power and resources, it wouldn't matter very much because the mode can produce endless counterparts to do you battle. Types of people are produced, literally like products, by modes. Socialists call this concept "commodification of human relations", but they are only half right, it's a much more general principal than just Capitalism. This is because a mode is mostly about economics at the deepest levels, and we know that as physics is the substrate of chemistry, so too economics is the substrate of society and politics.
It should be noted that I completely disagree with the concept of anarchy as being "without leaders" or without "hierarchy" or structure. It is the difference between one dominant hierarchy (like state communism) and many many networked forms of it (like a market with its corporations). I consider an absence of leadership to be completely non-describable and fundamentally unnatural. Any power vacuum is a very dangerous thing in all places and times, which is why people intuitively rebel at the idea of anarchy (or too strict hierarchies, like a caste system, because the system doesn't produce enough entropy to be healthy).
I think that Statists and Anarchists are sometimes guilty of anthropomorphizing reality and Pine is probably not an exception to this. That is to say they are putting a human characteristics on something that isn't really human at all. Calling some paradigm good or evil is an example of this. People who talk about "the State" or "Anarchy" are always Systems people, they specialize in thinking about systems all the time, that would be you and I and lots of others on this forum. If you suggested this was a genetic predisposition, I would say you might be onto something. It is not a good thing to be a Statist in an Anarchist world mode and visa versa, since your ideas shall go unused.
Pine believes we are entering a transition period between the two modes, from hierarchy to network. From here on out since the development of the Internet, anarchist ideas about the world shall much more rapidly develop in complexity and power, most explicitly the Common Economic Protocols but in other ways too. State and anarchists shall battle it out on a bunch of levels, but fundamentally we shall win because economics shall favor us on this round. In fact this has been the case for several centuries now, this back and forth is not a recent phenomena, it's like a cosine wave or see-saw. Originally we had Kings and Queens (H). Then it spreads out a bit and we had the Feudal system (N), then we had the beginning of Leviathan (H), the nation state came into existence. Small but exceptionally powerful. In turn the market (N) hugely prospered for two centuries or so while the nation state remained tiny at relative size. Then suddenly in the 20st century the Leviathan (H) ballooned to be enormous extremely quickly (due to democracy, debt and war), larger than any centralized system in history in both absolute and relative terms as a percentage of the economy. The logical consequence that happens next is collapse followed by market based state function replacement (N). This could seem to happen suddenly, but take many decades to play itself out fully. Then after that aggregation will probably take place at a higher level we haven't conceived of yet, and the cycles starts over again. But let's not get ahead of ourselves!
If you look at most advances in technology of recent years, I think it is reasonable to suggest it supports the Network, not the Hierarchy. This is not necessarily pure technological determinism, I just think society is ready in this century for the change. There are more NGO type organizations at this time in history than any other, and the power of non-state actors continues unabated as all think-tanks recognize while the obstacle course for States becomes ever more treacherous. The State shall be hollowed out and eaten alive. Whether I "like" this (I suppose I do, it's like making money by playing Jenga) is irrelevant, it shall happen. We are generally biased as a species to think of the future in a dystopian way, and indeed I think that there will definitely be civil strife and war concerning this transition, but ultimately the networked form shall result in a more advanced world. So simultaneously the future is bright and there will be horrible (Net)wars.
I think our ancestors will say that the world wars of the previous century were indicators of a transition from hierarchy to network (monarchy to republican democracy), and that the events of the 21st century were part of that ongoing transition. It seems to me like every network or hierarchy ultimately puts down the seeds for its future demise and a return back to the other mode. It is like the heart beat of human civilization, it is what makes our species the most successful I think, that we have optimized this process by virtue of being able to communicate directly.
Cryptoanarchy *is* a political concept, or at least the end result is intended to be such. It is really an anthropomorphism. We are putting a shape on the system, giving it a political information theory, a narrative. This is because we (genetics!) wish to take advantage of the transition to the network mode and get rid of our opposition, who are the current leaders of the hierarchical mode. Basically we want power and money and this is how we're going to get it, by riding the wave of state dysfunction and rise of the Network. Perhaps Pine has altruistic plans (building platypus sanctuaries for my dear little friends) but collectively we don't.
I think all that needs to be done, is for a great clash to begin with any two great State powers. Once accomplished, they shall beat each other senseless, adhering to old memes about state power and nationalism. Every up-surge in nationalism and protectionism is to be privately welcomed by us, because it means the beginning of the end. Deep inside, the woodworm of network participants is eating away at the concept of State, often literally selling out their own due to crude self interest. The privatization of the army, even the NSA, it's all the beginning of the end. The populations of those states engaged in war shall decide nationalism isn't worth the trouble after their countries are turned into burnt out shells of their former selves. Populations are much more hyper-sensitive to war than they used to be, a Muslim fellow on another thread said as much and he's right. Look at how dizzy civilian America becomes at the cost of arming and carrying out pitiful struggles in half baked countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Is this the greatest superpower on earth? I think no power on earth has been so conflicted about its role on the world stage as America. It cannot decide whether its a imperial world power or a freedom loving liberal democracy. What is happening is that the logic of nation state war is becoming increasingly expensive and the logic of Netwar is becoming increasingly cheap.
I salute ex-Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper. A man with real brains and courage. He knows that the national security apparatus with its demented self contained narrative is fast becoming the biggest threat that could ever exist to its host the State. He is no Cypherpunk, but he understands the Netwar.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/020906-iraq1.htm
The Pine Program for Government:
In fact I think if you're a real patriot, the most noble thing you could be doing for your country is to dismantle large parts of the State deliberately and replace them many more loosely networked (mostly non-coercive) organizations instead of hierarchical ones. "To get yours in first" as it were. That would slow down the fall of the empire sufficiently to maintain some degree of control. These new NGO-style orgs would be to a greater or lesser degree self sustaining without direct assistance from the politburo i.e. tax farming or fund raising. The problem is that this "NGOing" process shall derive the State of much 'direct power' of which they are used to handling, the benefits aren't that obvious to a mandarin because it's mostly about indirect forms of power. And conservatives shall attack you for frivolity since they believe that America can be saved with sufficient budget cuts, despite all evidence to the contrary in that we don't have that power of self control in a democracy. For example it is highly interesting to Pine that Prediction Markets aren't employed by the State anymore. This is an extremely interesting development for me, here they are clearly throwing away tools that work because of the Principal Agent problem. The problem is that those people in the State who recognize all this, such as Lt Gen Paul Van Riper, really don't have a narrative on which to hang their concepts of the future, you cannot get a fish to pretend its a frog, whereas the Cypherpunks have a great coherent narrative suitable for a networked society, that is our great strength as a future political mass movement. Violent action is not likely to be our strong suit so we should avoid it at all possible costs, because in the future winning the media war will be more important than winning the actual war.
So, in summation: Is this the right thing to do? I wouldn't know, I don't think the question matters very much. I'm just along for the ride. It'll happen anyway, so I'm just paddling out to the deeper water on my torified surfboard with the rest of you to catch the next wave.
tdlr1; The state will trend to a straitlaced technocratic authoritarianism though narrow self interest by principal agents, which shall backfire in the media war. Trust in the state is at all time lows and is getting worse. Meanwhile the Common Economic Protocols shall act like Wolf Packs on the fleshy thighs of the State, resulting in the people blaming the State for everything at the same time as they BitTorrent, BitMessage and Bitcoin their way to the central authority's oblivion.
tldr2: Mwahahahahahahaha! :D
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Thanks for the thorough reply, pine. :) It's a lot to digest, but I'll hit on a few points...
It should be noted that I completely disagree with the concept of anarchy as being "without leaders" or without "hierarchy" or structure. It is the difference between one dominant hierarchy (like state communism) and many many networked forms of it (like a market with its corporations). I consider an absence of leadership to be completely non-describable and fundamentally unnatural. Any power vacuum is a very dangerous thing in all places and times, which is why people intuitively rebel at the idea of anarchy (or too strict hierarchies, like a caste system, because the system doesn't produce enough entropy to be healthy).
Anarchy as I understand it is a lack of official political authority, but it isn't necessarily leaderless, so I agree about the transition from state to corporations, which would be inevitable with anarcho-capitalism. Of course, corporations and governments already collude for their mutual benefit, and against the public interest, which is why I say, under any scheme that removes the government but preserves private heirarchies: say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.
IMO, the greatest source of suffering in the world isn't government, but power differentials that allow some people to abuse others. There's really no way to solve that problem. If you enforce egalitarianism, then the enforcer becomes the boss with power. At best, we have invented mechanisms to mitigate abuse: in a democracy, you vote out bad leaders, and in the market, you vote with your wallet. Both mechanisms are imperfect, of course, but this is the best we've come up with in thousands of years of experimenting with how to run societies.
If you look at most advances in technology of recent years, I think it is reasonable to suggest it supports the Network, not the Hierarchy.
It seems to me that technology is neutral. It can be used just as easily for good or evil. Technology supports the Network, if I understand your term correctly, through things like anonymity networks and cryptography, which give people freedom from hierarchy, but it also gives state agents better tools to spy on their citizens.
It's bad enough that people are volunteering to carry a snitch around in their pocket, since most phones comes with GPS devices that report your exact location to some corporation that won't think twice about handing that info over to government agents, but even if you elect not to use that technology, they want to put cameras around the cities and record license plates as cars drive by.
2 steps forward, 2 steps back.
We are generally biased as a species to think of the future in a dystopian way, and indeed I think that there will definitely be civil strife and war concerning this transition, but ultimately the networked form shall result in a more advanced world. So simultaneously the future is bright and there will be horrible (Net)wars.
Technology increasingly gives people the power to destroy each other. 2000 years ago, all you had was a sword, and 500 years ago, all you had was a musket. Now you can fly a plane into a building and take out 3000 people at a time. Someone just wrote the blueprints for a pistol, which a 3D printer can mass produce. What happens when those printers can produce more powerful weapons?
What happens when someone can write malware that takes out the energy grid or water system across a geographical area that contains tens of millions of people?
If we get to a world where every human has the power to eliminate the entire species, our only defense will be the self-preservation principle of mutually assured destruction. But that requires rational actors, and if there's one crazy person in the world...
That's a scary thought, and I don't know how we could solve that problem, except through massive regulation of the technology. It's the reason why we don't let any nutball own a tank or missile launcher today.
It is like the heart beat of human civilization, it is what makes our species the most successful I think, that we have optimized this process by virtue of being able to communicate directly.
Yep, our greatest asset is the ability to store and transfer information, so each person doesn't have to rediscover the most basic facts about our world. We can stand on the shoulders of giants instead.
I think all that needs to be done, is for a great clash to begin with any two great State powers. Once accomplished, they shall beat each other senseless, adhering to old memes about state power and nationalism.
And they will beat rest of us senseless too.
There's good news, though. Did you know that statistically, your chances of dying in armed conflict today are 90% lower than they were a century ago? And now we have nuclear weapons and ICBMs, while back then they had cannons and rifles. The world has gotten a lot less violent, and that's a great thing. Our only chance to survive as a species is to continue that trend.
The interesting question is why have we gotten less violent. It isn't just mutually assured destruction. I think it's because global trade makes us dependent on each other, and forces us to work together rather than against each, but also, global communication makes us sympathetic to each other. When you can see people in Haiti suffering after an earthquake, because the live video is fed into a box in your living room, that makes them more than just nameless, faceless "others". They are people like you and me, deserving of moral consideration. Global communication is killing the tribalism of the past (which manifested variously as nationalism, religious and ethnic pride, etc).
Most importantly, global communication is expanding our moral circle. The only way we're going to survive as a species is to progress past our ape phase.
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i agree with astor and joywind on this one.
it seems to me that Pine wants to cast off absolute government, but just replace it with the more effective totalitarianism of the technological system. Any consist freedom-loving anarchist, i think, must be equally opposed to (a) the state, (b) capitalist exploition (which is only possible through the state), and (c) the technological system (which has absorbed the state, and gives power to the state). the State is actually a highly advanced form of technology -- consisting of specialised and replaceable human parts. like the previous totalitarian systems, the technological system is motivated by insane drives based on the will to power -- particularly, the desire to build instruments of mass destruction, and to extend the system itself at any cost. these drives cannot be divorced from the system as such.
I disagree with this:
It seems to me that technology is neutral. It can be used just as easily for good or evil.
technology is assuredly not neutral or passive; it is man who is neutral and passive within the technological system. read the excellent work of the anarchist philosophy jacques ellul for information on this. the System requires the integration of each element as its object. man is an object within the system. he is acted upon by the system. nothing is autonomous but the system itself. even the managerial elites and scientific priesthood are components of the technological system, not its masters. all technological factors are absorbed into the technological system.
pine claims this is all inevitable, so we shouldn't oppose the totatalitarian technological system, but welcome it. but if the technological system is inevitable, then the self-destruction of the technological system is equally inevitable. and even pine's rather vision of the future were inevitable -- it is better to be on the right side of history than on the side that wins. the right side often loses in history. it is better to be against the system, even if it will inevitably defeat humanity.
Technology supports the Network, if I understand your term correctly, through things like anonymity networks and cryptography, which give people freedom from hierarchy, but it also gives state agents better tools to spy on their citizens.
the multiplication of devices registering and transmitting information will destroy human freedom. it is the registration and transmission of information through these devices that is solidifying the various technologies into an all-encompassing System. it is this system, this technological environment into which we are all born, which is the enemy of human sovereignty. it is also the enemy of all life on earth.
Pine is very mistaken if he wants to abolish traditionary power while keeping the totalitarian technological system in tact.
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a government violates the non-aggression principle though - even if it was more efficient (it isn't) to have a state, it is immoral.
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I suppose there are two things that are required for a free world. One of those things is anarcho-capitalism, however this by itself is not sufficient. That is to say that anarcho-capitalism is required for total freedom but does not ensure it. In order to obtain total freedom, we additionally require that militant libertarianism dominates the world. Anarcho-capitalism is an economic system, and it is the only economic system that is compatible with freedom. However, it is possible to have a world full of slaves even if anarcho-capitalism is the only economic system utilized. Private police forces could enforce laws that say black people are slaves, for example. Clearly this world would not be free, however it would still be anarcho-capitalistic.
First I will explain why anarcho-capitalism is the only economic system that is possibly compatible with freedom. In an anarcho-capitalist economic system, there is no taxation. Taxation is inherently theft. It is the violent redistribution of wealth, most commonly managed by a centralized government force. Under non anarcho-capitalist economic systems, people put forth effort to obtain wealth only to have large percentages of the wealth taken from them at gun point. Of course, the armed thugs who steal the money from the wealth producers use the stolen money to fund themselves. Thus they are very parasitic. In order to maintain the power to be parasitic, they also distribute the stolen wealth to some of the common people, in order to gain the support of enough people that they can continue being parasites. In the current economic systems utilized by the governments of most of the world, people are not given a choice in regards to many of the services they obtain. People are currently forced to fund organizations that they are against (ie: the DEA), they are also largely forced to fund select service providers (ie: police, fire, roads, schools, FDA, etc), in some cases they are allowed to use alternative providers but they still must fund the state selected providers, in other cases they are only allowed to use the providers selected by the state. This is state control of the market, it reduces peoples ability to spend their funds on the things they desire, it reduces the amount of capital that people have available for themselves, it forces people to fund things they are against and it is based entirely on violence, collectivism and slavery. This sort of market is against the better interests of all the people, especially the most productive people in society. This sort of system is also ripe for corruption; the politicians can get funding for programs such as the war on drugs because everybody is forced to fund these programs even if they are against them, the politicians always give contracts to their friends and financial supporters, indeed entire industries rise up that serve the political elite. Wars are fought and millions of people are murdered simply so friends of politicians can get money in military contracts, we ourselves are enslaved so the prison industrial complex can continue profiting off of our slavery, etc. In addition to this, we are given sub adequate services, we are forced to pay for things such as roads and schools and yet the quality of the provided services is much below the cost we are forced to pay for them. The lack of competition also stifles innovation, etc. The list of reasons why the current economic system is horrible and totally counter to freedom goes on and on, but at a fundamental level it is counter to freedom because it is built on the backs of financial slaves and because it restricts our choices and forces us to fund our oppressors.
Now of course simply having a totally free economy is not going to guarantee that we have freedom. A free economy could lead to private parties paying for slave traders to enslave us, paying for armies of robbers to steal from us, etc. Even though a totally free economy is required for total freedom, it is not in itself sufficient. This is why we must also have militant libertarianism, of course voluntarily funded. We need police forces that enforce libertarian laws. That means if somebody hires a private police force to arrest drug dealers and steal their drugs and money, the libertarian police force will treat them as robbers and kidnappers. Only when the militant libertarian forces are capable of overcoming all adversaries, can we hope for actual freedom.
So no, anarcho-capitalism by itself is not sufficient for freedom, however it is indeed required for it. However, only when militant libertarianism dominates the world, protecting the anarcho-capitalist economic system as well as our human rights, can we hope to obtain freedom.
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The thing is that even in an Anarcho-Capitalist economy, things that greatly resemble states will exist. You guys are absolutely correct in saying that there will be private police forces, private armies, etc. Some of these armies and police forces might even enslave people, just like the current governments do! This will effectively make them governments though. This is why we also need powerful militant libertarian forces. The libertarians will also have police forces and militaries, but rather than being funded via taxation they will be funded by voluntary donations and such. Then we will have a market for libertarian police agencies and military forces, and it will very much resemble a state. The only real difference is that we will not be forced to fund any of these agencies, and that we will be able to select between many different agencies in order to make sure we are receiving the best value for our money. This will also cause the agencies to be innovative as they compete with each other. Additionally, it will lower our costs as the agencies will compete with each other financially as well.
Of course there will still be networks of criminals trying to steal from us and enslave us. And they can be viewed as states. We simply need to make sure that we are protected from them, and hopefully over time we can eradicate them like the cancers they are. The end goal is to have minimized governments so much that they are small networks forced to hide from the powerful libertarian forces. Essentially we will trade roles with the government; we will live openly and freely and they will hide in the darkness plotting how they will rob us and kidnap us. The difference is nobody will be forced to fund our protectors, but they will do so voluntarily as they desire to remain protected from the government actors.
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And as far as the claim that SR would suck without leaders goes, let's look at things from two perspectives. From a microscopic perspective SR has a set of leaders, from a macroscopic perspective the online drug scene consists of dozens of independent forums and sites that have sets of independent leaders. Nobody is forced to use SR, rather they use it because they find that it is in their best interests to do so. SR does not really have leaders, rather it has operators who provide a service. From a macroscopic perspective the online drug scene takes on a hydra formation. Different service providers compete in a free market, nobody holds a gun to a persons head and tells them they must use SR. Additionally, the hydra model is not the most efficient model there is. Ideally the online drug scene would consist of what is called an all channel network. In an all channel network, all of the nodes are able to communicate with all of the other nodes. Additionally, none of the nodes are more important than any of the other nodes. It is entirely possible for the online drug scene to take on an all channel structure, however the technologies that we are currently using go against this organizational model. Tor hidden services inherently require a centralized server, the centralized server is always going to be managed by a single person or a select group of people. The site running on the server is always going to be under the control of a single person or a select group of people. Freenet is much more suited to a leaderless organization. On Freenet it would be possible for us to have a forum that is entirely decentralized, spread throughout the entire Freenet network. No node would be more valuable than other nodes, and no single group of people would provide a service that is used by the larger community. This would achieve a leaderless all channel network whilst still allowing us to carry on with a forum similar to the one we have here. Reviews could still be left on vendors, vendors could still advertise their services, Bitcoin could still be used for transactions, etc. Of course this would require a significant reworking of the currently utilized system, and some custom software would also need to be made that utilized Freenet for its underlying transport protocol. There would still need to be providers of escrow services, but they could operate as independent service providers and compete for the market.
So it is entirely possible to have something very similar to a leaderless SR. It is just that the technology we are currently utilizing essentially requires a hierarchical organizational structure.