I’ve been advised that I haven’t talked about Montelibero at all lately. That’s not entirely true; it’s just that I usually write about specific problems, whereas there truly hasn’t been a general overview of the state of affairs in the project for a very long time. I’m correcting that now.
Overview
For a long time, the project’s calling card was MTL-City. This is also what undermined it. One day, a local journalist appeared who, based on separate and loosely connected facts, concluded that Montelibero was a Putin project created for another attempt at a coup in Montenegro, similar to the one that took place in 2016. As a result, the state, having received such a public denunciation, became interested specifically in the activities of DOO Montelibero, the legal entity through which the land in City was purchased. A criminal case regarding illegal construction was opened, and as a result, the construction of all permanent structures was frozen pending the investigation. Well, now only modular houses are being assembled there, which, being temporary structures, require no installation permits. However, the unfinished construction doesn’t look very pretty, not to mention the money buried in vain.
Nevertheless, people live in City, public breakfasts are held on Fridays—for those wishing to meet the project participants—plus there are occasional creative evenings and other cultural events. However, to people who have just arrived in Montenegro and want to “settle in this commune of yours,” I advise against jumping on this idea without thorough prior acquaintance. In City, the ratio of costs to comfort is not very optimal, and there is practically no choice of housing. This situation will improve as new modular houses for rent are put into operation—but not very quickly.
The main Montelibero community, as before, resides in the city of Bar, spreading fairly evenly across the city, some in rented housing and some in purchased. They have the opportunity to gather at the First Montelibero Club (it was evicted from its premises in the spring, but recently opened in a new location), at Quiet Backwater (it was evicted from its premises in the summer, but reopened in a new location almost immediately), as well as in several non-Montelibero Russian bars, where the crossing of Monteliberians with the rest of the Russian diaspora occurs most naturally. In Budva, the Montelibero movement has practically gone quiet; in other cities, it never started.
Tokenomics is used by the local Montelibero community no longer with the enthusiasm of neophytes, but simply as a clear and long-familiar tool. EURMTL and EUROMUT are used for cashless payments. USDM mainly serves as an auxiliary token for currency exchanges (I, for example, withdraw dollars from a crypto exchange into USDM, and then exchange them for “mulki”). Some businesses fix debt obligations in their own tokens. The Blockchain Social Network still hasn’t acquired a convenient viewer and editor, so it remains deeply marginal. The Stellar wallets being developed by community members, Montelibero Wallet and especially Sunce, are gradually becoming more convenient. The MTL Fund has sharply reduced its public activity and is now effectively interesting only to its shareholders, and even then, not to all of them. The Montelibero Association has de facto become the mouthpiece for the project as a whole, so let’s discuss it in a bit more detail.
Of course, the fears of paranoiacs that the Association was created only to leak lists of members of an organized criminal community to “comrade major” have about as much relation to reality as that Montenegrin journalist’s ideas that Montelibero was dreamed up by Putin to destroy Montenegrin democracy. Everything is much more boring. The project activists simply rearranged the furniture in the room. I hope they’ve become more comfortable. The Association implies liquid democracy, a secretariat, and a small budget for its routine expenses. This internal kitchen has little effect on the lives of others (which is good), but draws some resources away (which is bad).
Fortunately, the Association activists also handle periodic contacts with the outside world, which is potentially the most useful part for fitting Montelibero into the global libertarian movement. Alas, I rarely have the strength to keep track of this. For instance, in recent months, there have been public calls and private negotiations with representatives of the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem (they have their own rich developments in DAO), with the MetaState project (creating a system of non-governmental electronic passports), with a project to lobby for a simplified visa and entrepreneurship regime for relocants to Albania, with volunteer fire organizations in Montenegro, the Free Private Cities fund, and certainly with others—it’s impossible to mention everyone.
The Association also includes corporate participants, among whom are the aforementioned MTL Fund and the First Club. Besides them, Green Zyland is more or less noticeable, a producer of modular houses for rent (they had a business back in the RF, and now they are expanding into three more countries). In November, they plan to hold a festival in Georgia; a few people from the Montenegrin Monteliberians will go, but I cannot afford it financially. Another active participant is the MTL Alert group. They are preparing for a zombie apocalypse; it’s a cool hobby, but for some reason, I find it hard to take seriously.
The Association is divided into factions, but only the panarchist faction is more or less publicly active. Two of its members, Stas and Ved, both run very sensible thematic channels.
The previously announced redirection of Montelibero’s efforts toward Argentina has not yet led to the formation of a Russian-speaking libertarian community there that is in contact with the rest of the project. The only news from those parts is that a delegate from Montelibero spoke at some Argentine libertarian conference and delivered a letter to Milei. What was in that letter and what effect it had, history remains silent about.
Conclusions and forecasts
At the start, Montelibero participants acted monstrously irrationally and made a ton of mistakes. How could this have been avoided? For example, by delaying the start of construction and other loud activity to instead more thoroughly scout the situation, and only then decide what to do and how. Was it realistic to act according to a more rational scenario? No. Montelibero is a movement, not an organization. It was precisely the drive of the pioneers and their enthusiastic mistake-making that attracted many new participants to the project. Without all this, a fairly strong libertarian community in Montenegro might simply not have formed, just as it didn’t form in Serbia, Georgia, Thailand, or even Argentina. So once again I state: centralized planning sucks, the market decides.
Nevertheless, many initiatives within Montelibero have successfully fizzled out, and many previously active project participants have, at best, tempered or completely lost interest in it, and at worst, moved into open opposition, considering the project to be meaningless “info-gypsyism.”
The economic part of the project must be mentioned separately. Here, the miscalculation proved fatal. It’s one thing when nine out of ten startups fail and one takes off. This happens thanks to fierce competition that selects the truly best. It’s a completely different matter when nine out of ten startups fail, and the tenth balances on the brink of breaking even. This happens thanks to a disgusting investment climate, under which one simply should not invest serious market capital here, just as one should not invest it in some Donbas. Even if something does take off, it will be not thanks to high utility for clients, but thanks to connections with the authorities, for example. And for libertarians, making money this way is usually considered “beneath them.”
Therefore, the following forecast can be made about Montelibero now. This project will not make Europe, or even just Montenegro, free. But it allowed those who believed in it to create a free society around themselves, and also became a platform for testing interesting ideas and technologies suitable for application in other places.
