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 he attempts to realize 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 face is a living human being with their own values and interests who is available for dialogue and persuasion—and on the other hand, that the state represented by that face only knows how to speak the language of structures and organizations, but never 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) followed by establishing a dialogue with representatives of states.
There is something to shit about here. The proposed method would be perfectly valid if we weren’t libertarians.
2. Mikhail Pozharsky
In my own work, I am gradually shifting from theory to practice, whereas Mikhail, conversely, being more of a practitioner in his youth, has now shifted into the realm of theory. His posts and videos usually represent a creative reflection on various smart books and articles. If we believe Pozharsky’s recent post, he intends to tell the emigrant community why emigration is pigsty behavior. I hope the presentation does not boil down to a retelling of his same-named and rather famous video. Especially since Mikhail himself later released a video of contrary content, about how migration is cool.
Pozharsky is often viewed in opposition to Svetov, and the festival organizers have followed this well-trodden path: Svetov’s report also concerned emigration and was formulated as “what Russian libertarians should do in emigration.” Mikhail Svetov’s answer boiled down to the idea that one must build a libertarian international. So, what will Mikhail Temnov tell us about this?
3. Sondre Bjellas
Sondre regularly shows up at our Bar, but my level of conversational English didn’t allow me to get to know him better. In principle, he was quite well introduced on the festival 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, where a couple of dozen activists live, plus an online community that the project supports and participates in. Similarly, blockchain technologies play a huge role in the development of Liberstadt, but while we use the third-party Stellar blockchain, Liberstadt has developed its own POS blockchain and toolkit for it, which is completely open-source, and they offer anyone interested to make forks to use the product for the needs of their own communities.
Sondre, as far as I can tell, is one of the developers of all this tooling. A quick look at his GitHub account showed that he also helped in the development of one of the Montelibero wallets for Stellar. Personally, I was more interested to see that he also works on Nostr developments, including having code for his own relay. We definitely need one like that 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 closely in Montenegro for a while and has a good idea of the local situation, he is still perceived by the die-hard Montelibero natives as a bit of an outsider.
On the other hand, to the extent that his report concerns the project’s blockchain internals, his status as a remote participant will not hinder him at all.
Ideally, of course, our developers should somehow ideologically cross-pollinate with those from Liberstadt. Perhaps some progress in this direction will even happen at the fest.
5. Bojo Popovic
Bozo is invited as a Montenegrin bitcoin enthusiast. Cryptocurrencies in Montenegro are in a gray zone: the Prime Minister promotes their widespread 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 out.
I hope the organizers briefly conveyed to Bozo that the audience will not consist entirely of random people, and that he will be required not to give an introductory lecture on Bitcoin, but rather some kind of inside information regarding the specific Montenegrin context.
Bozo’s Twitter consists exclusively of reposts; no other social media accounts 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 the Free State Project long ago and has managed not only to obtain US citizenship but even to be elected to the state congress.
In principle, from open sources, we have a fairly good idea of the main concept of the free state project, and also have a fleeting understanding of their successes: they elected so many Freestaters to representative bodies, abolished such and such regulations. What causes me the greatest bewilderment is 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 presidential candidate from the Libertarian Party), 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 the third post, I want to outline my expectations for the third day of the festival
