On October 5, the second day of MTL-fest, six speakers will perform.
1. Alexey Shustov
Alexey has some experience in political and political technology activities and attempts to implement his libertarian values specifically through this framework. He is the author of the book “After the State,” in which he rediscovered the concept of panarchy, which was unknown to the Russian-speaking community at the time. A heavily revised second edition of the book—”After the State 2.030″—was recently released. Alexey asserts that, on one hand, any bureaucratic snout is a perfectly living person with their own values and interests who is available for dialogue and persuasion—and on the other hand, that the state represented by that snout only knows how to speak the language of structures and organizations, but never that of individuals or amorphous communities. Therefore, he insists on the necessity of creating such structures (among Russian-speaking panarchists, the term “extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions” is commonly used) with a subsequent establishment of dialogue with state representatives.
There is plenty here to argue about. The proposed method would be perfectly valid if we weren’t libertarians.
2. Mikhail Pozharsky
In my work, I am gradually shifting from theory to practice, while Mikhail, on the contrary, being more of a practitioner in his youth, has now shifted into the realm of theory. His posts and videos are usually a creative reflection on various smart books and articles. If one believes Pozharsky’s recent post, he intends to tell the emigrant community why emigration is piggishness. I hope the speech does not amount to a retelling of his fairly well-known video of the same name. Especially since Mikhail himself later released a video of the opposite content, about how migration is cool.
Pozharsky is often viewed in opposition to Svetov, and the festival organizers went exactly down this well-trodden path: Svetov’s report also concerned emigration and was formulated as “what should Russian libertarians do in emigration.” Mikhail Svetov’s answer boiled down to the fact that one needs to build a libertarian international. So, what will Mikhail Temnov tell us about this?
3. Sondre Bjellas
Sondre regularly appears at our Bar, but my level of conversational English did not allow me to get to know him better. In principle, he was quite well introduced on the festival’s channel.
He represents Liberstadt, a project that is closest in spirit to our Montelibero. Liberstadt is slightly older and has achieved results quite comparable to ours: it is a small settlement that serves as the project’s flagship, home to a couple of dozen activists, plus an online community that the project supports and participates in. Similarly, blockchain technologies play an enormous role in the development of Liberstadt, but while we use the third-party Stellar blockchain, Liberstadt has developed its own POS blockchain and a toolkit for it, which is completely open-source, and they encourage anyone interested to make forks to use the product for the needs of their own communities.
Sondre, as far as I can tell, is actually one of the developers of all this tooling. A quick glance at his GitHub account showed that he also helped in the development of one of the Montelibero wallets for Stellar. I was, however, more interested to see that he is also involved in Nostr development, including having code for his own relay. We definitely need one of those for Montelibero!
4. Stanislav Karkavin
Stas will be representing Montelibero itself at the festival. Like Sondre, he is an IT professional, a good speaker, very active in the project, and has only one flaw: he lives in Serbia. Therefore, although he has lived quite closely in Montenegro and has a good idea of the situation on the ground, he is still perceived by the very hardened Montelibero natives as a bit of an outsider.
On the other hand, to the extent that his report will concern the blockchain internals of the project, his status as a remote participant will not hinder him in any way.
Ideally, of course, our developers should somehow cross-pollinate ideologically with those from Libertad. Perhaps the festival will even see some progress in this direction.
5. Bojo Popovic
Bojo is invited as a Montenegrin bitcoin enthusiast. Cryptocurrencies in Montenegro are in a gray zone: the Prime Minister promotes their wide adoption, but at the same time is obliged to declare an aspiration toward the European Union, and in the EU, they mostly try to keep cryptocurrencies in and not let them out.
I hope that the organizers briefly conveyed to Bojo that the audience will not consist entirely of random people, and that instead of an introductory lecture on Bitcoin, he will be expected to provide certain insights regarding the specific Montenegrin context.
Bojo’s Twitter consists exclusively of reposts; no other social media could be found. So I have to state that I don’t even have a rough idea of the agenda he broadcasts. Judging by the reposts, the values seem similar, which is something.
6. Yuri Polozov
Yuri is a veteran of the Libertarian Party of Russia, who joined Free State Project a long time ago and has managed not only to obtain US citizenship, but even to be elected to a state congress.
In principle, from open sources, we have a fairly good idea of the main concept of the Free State Project, and we also have a passing understanding of their successes: they elected so-and-so freestaters to representative bodies, abolished such-and-such regulations. My greatest bewilderment stems from the fact that in a country of three hundred million with a powerful tradition of social mobility and deeply rooted libertarianism (millions of people vote for a libertarian party presidential candidate), only six thousand participants have joined the Free State Project in twenty years. What is wrong with FSP? This is the question I want to ask Yuri.
In my third post, I want to outline my expectations for the third day of the festival
