First, I want to inform you that the epub of the Network State has been re-uploaded — there was a dynamic gif that e-readers didn’t recognize, so it had to be replaced with a static png.
Leaving my job finally happened, and now I want to devote more time to my channel. However, it turned out that in its current form, it burdens me more than anything, which is why posts appear rarely and without much enthusiasm. Therefore, the main thing I want to achieve now is to start enjoying it again. In this regard, I plan to run it differently. Instead of rare articles that barely fit into the format of a standard Telegram post, there will be frequent notes, usually without images — just certain thoughts that I want to share with readers. In the coming days, I will try to return to daily posts, just to establish the habit, and we’ll see where it goes from there.
I don’t intend to descend entirely into a blog format; I have Instagram for that. It is also possible that not every post will now be duplicated across all social networks, we’ll see.
Let me know in the comments which topics of notes would be most interesting to you.
This summer, I finished translating Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State. Not everyone finds it convenient to read from a browser screen, and the automatically generated PDF suffered from some layout issues and occasional missing chunks of text. So, slowly and for fun after work, I laid out a version in EPUB format for e-readers (while also proofreading several more bugs in the translation). Given how many links are scattered throughout the text, the task turned out to be quite meditative and kept me busy for several months. And you’ve just had a few months to save up enough money to donate to me.
Also, I am finally leaving my full-time job, which has taken a considerable amount of my time and energy over the last three years. So, in a couple of weeks, I will have far more opportunities to maintain the channel. I think some reformatting awaits it.
I wasn’t able to watch the Starship flight live, as I was on a business trip involving socializing and alcohol tastings. However, at the very first opportunity, I inquired about how things went and was overjoyed by the success.
In this regard, I want to reflect on a trend that has become particularly pronounced lately and is becoming a complete commonplace: in almost any state, an entrepreneur can face numerous problems related to their political stance, and the more of an innovator that entrepreneur is, the more likely it is that their political position will run counter to the mainstream — it is difficult to imagine a completely systemic innovator. Jack Ma in China, Pavel Durov in France, and Elon Musk in the USA are not even close to an exhaustive list, but merely a cross-section showing that this trend is quite global, and these entrepreneurs, for the most part, have nowhere to run.
A quite obvious question arises. Within libertarian circles, the idea of a Libertarian International wanders—an awareness of common interests among holders of libertarian values and the joint defense of these very interests, despite the individualistic nature of the libertarian ideology itself. One wonders: among entrepreneurs, who encounter systemic state opposition to the values that fuel their businesses, is there no demand for an Entrepreneurial International? What could the joint defense of common interests by entrepreneurs consist of, and are they capable of realizing them, despite the individualistic nature of any entrepreneurial activity, and especially innovative activity?
In a speculative free-market society, a person is wealthier and more respected the more benefit they bring to others. In a real society, where politics is mixed with the free market, such a person receives, in addition to wealth and respect, envy, which quickly turns into hatred—and a very active kind of hatred at that.
Of course, the most obvious move for entrepreneurs is to relocate their business to the freest possible jurisdiction. That is, to seek shelter under a politician who shares their values—someone like a hypothetical Milei. However, how many political systems can boast long-term continuity of political course? The alternation of power is a well-known democratic fetish. Therefore, an entrepreneur cannot trust a politician who lures them into their jurisdiction with promises of economic freedom. They know that in a few years, the politician will exit the stage, a leftist will crawl into their place, and will begin to demolish everything built by their predecessor. And relocating a business is a loss of time and money.
In response to all this, a libertarian will dig through a manual and provide a quite decent, well-theorized recipe: extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions. But that is also a business. And this service can only develop if there is stable, solvent demand. That is, conditional Durovs and Musks must at least signal their readiness to enter into a contract with someone who can and will agree to provide protection for their businesses from the appetites of territorial states and their greedy, envious voters. And then, perhaps, a couple of outlaws will be found who will dare to launch this honorable, yet extremely dangerous and responsible business.
Of course, variations are possible. For example, such a forceful entrepreneur might first launch their own service and only then offer their services to those in need. Or entrepreneurs might organize extraterritorial protection on their own.
For now, however, there is a feeling that entrepreneurs continue to rely on traditional political protection, funding one politician or another despite the obvious unreliability of this method. I don’t have a recipe for how to change their mindset. I am simply admiring the filigree landing of the fifth Starship booster on the launch pad and continue to marvel at how much harder social innovation is to implement than engineering…
From October 4 to 6, MTL-Fest will take place in Bar, Montenegro, and its surroundings. Libertarians from various corners of the world are expected, including representatives of related libertarian projects. However, the description of a given libertarian community is usually made with rather broad strokes. Something like “Monteliberro is a movement to build a free society in Europe, starting with Montenegro”. It’s not even a lie, but there are no guarantees that the picture in the reader’s head after such a description will be even remotely similar to what exists in reality.
On October 5, many interesting talks about different approaches to building libertarian communities are expected. On October 6—many no less interesting talks about the tools we use. But this is all a bird’s-eye view; it will allow you to grasp trends, but it won’t let you fully feel who the people gathered in this very Monteliberro are and how they live. And that is exactly where one should start.
Therefore, on October 4, the first day of the festival, we invite everyone interested to Tikhiy Omut(this is a small agorist club of Monteliberro). There, you will be met by real people who will tell you a little about themselves: how they joined the movement, what they found on the ground, how they settled in, what they do, and how they interact with the community. Talks about structures and institutions will await you in the following days, but for a start—the purely human dimension.
There will be no presentations or other attributes of public lectures. We will sit around the table in an informal setting, enjoy some refreshments, and gradually move from storytelling to discussion, and perhaps we will even arrive at some interesting ideas.
We are gathering at 19:00, and we will head out whenever we decide to. For those who find it difficult to return home at night, we will offer an apartment in the center of Bar to stay overnight.
On October 6, the final day of the festival will take place at MTL-City, and most of the performances on this day will involve exchanging practical experience, though that is just my own arbitrary generalization.
1. Ivan Gavrilov
Ivan runs the Telegram channel Ogurism, positions himself as a professional amateur, and, I suspect, his talk will be an apology for the Non-Aligned Movement (in Yugoslavia, or where?). The informal center of this movement has turned out to be Tikhiy Omut—an unmarked club that shares a roof with a private kindergarten and brings together those who feel constrained by the organizational activities accompanying the Monteliberio project.
2. Valery Utroshin
Valery runs Mabiz, a division of the Monteliberio investment fund designed to help develop the businesses of project participants. In my view, this business accelerator performs its task at a mediocre level, but perhaps Valery will present data that will make me revise this assessment upward.
3. Igor Tolstov
Igor is our Sondre. Most of Monteliberio’s tokenomics are his developments. I would like to hear not only an introductory talk about tokenomics, but also what new features he plans to implement in his software in the foreseeable future.
4. Soz Nov
Primarily known as the founder of Montelibero Space—a club that has hosted many participants and guests of the Montelibero project—Soz, having been forced to move to Bulgaria, has shifted his focus to developing blockchain tooling, and has achieved some success in that capacity as well. I think twenty minutes of speaking time will barely be enough for him to give an introductory talk on what a Blockchain Social Network is, but perhaps there might even be time to answer the short question, “where is the decent frontend?”
5. Ilya Kopychina
At the start, MTL-City was being developed as “God wills,” which is completely natural for an ancap. Now, thanks to Ilya, it is being developed in the same manner, but with preliminary renders that provide some idea of what the developers intend to depict. He also has a peculiar writing style with many Capital Letters, so for me, attending his report on MTL-City will primarily serve the purpose of determining the balance between pathos and self-irony.
6. Vladimir Baidálov
He is set to talk about the M-City internet radio project. I have a very simple relationship with classic radio: it is not present in my life at all. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed listening to something like Morning Mail, so who knows, the project might turn out to be quite interesting.
7. Dmitry Epikhin
He is a key developer for MTL-City and a defendant in several lawsuits related to conflicts between him and his employees. He will talk about his experience with business tokenization and answer questions about where the water in the tap comes from.
8. Vladislav Ketov
The most experienced of the Montelibero cyclists, he has ridden his bicycle around the world. He might even be able to explain why my front sprocket is squeaking, but I won’t embarrass myself by pestering him with such amateurish questions. He plans to hold his own personal art exhibition at the festival. Let’s set our artist on him, and let them see whose exhibition is longer.
That is all I have for now regarding the announcements for MTL-Fest 2024.
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
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
In just a couple of weeks, MTL-fest 2024 will begin. The first MTL-fest took place last year, and it seems it will continue annually. There are quite clear expectations from the festival:
crowded hustle and bustle
interesting stories
exchange of practical experience
networking
Regarding the crowded hustle and bustle, there were about 250 people in 2023, and it’s unlikely there will be fewer this time. Moreover, the festival is now becoming a three-day event.
As for interesting stories: there were five speakers last year, and six are expected this year. The headliner then was Svetov; this year it’s Pozharsky. From related projects, there was Edlicka from Liberland last year, and this year there will be Biellas from Liberstad and Polozov from FSP. From the Montenegrins, there was a lawyer; now a bitcoiner is expected. Among the theorists, there was Usanov; there will be Shustov. From MonteLibero, Stas Karkavin is expected, and he looks somewhat more organic in public speaking than I do.
There was no separate block for the exchange of practical experience last year; instead, a musical block was planned, which didn’t take off at all. But now, the entire third day of the festival will be dedicated to practice.
In terms of networking, I want to understand the main thing: what benefit, specifically, can diverse libertarian projects scattered across the globe bring to each other? To pinpoint this benefit and learn how to extract it.
For those who have already planned a trip to Montenegro for MTL-fest—I can only be happy for you. For those who can suddenly drop everything and come—suddenly drop everything and come. Those who want to but cannot will have to make do with broadcasts and recordings of speeches, reports and interviews, stories from those who return from the fest, and the application of the experience they bring back from the festival. That is quite a lot.
On October 4, the first day of the festival, the official program will consist of a screening at MonteLibero Space of a documentary film about the defeat of the Hong Kong independence movement. Parallel to this, it is planned to gather at Tikhiy Omut and informally chat about the fate of libertarian emigration in general and MonteLibero in particular.
In the next post, I will briefly talk about what I expect from the speakers’ presentations on Saturday, October 5, the main day of the festival.
On August 31, I released an interview with representatives of the MEREXP company, in which I tried to figure out how to make money trading cryptocurrencies using metrics based not only on mathematical wizardry, but also on economic theory. Even after the interview, I was left with a feeling of some misunderstanding as to how theory translates into practice, so we decided to continue studying the proposed product.
To start, I registered on the website merexp.com. Here, I must say, the process seemed quite insecure to me: the password was simply sent by email, and afterwards, I couldn’t find any way to change it in the personal account. However, as long as the service only provides paid subscriptions to certain indicators rather than taking money under management, it’s not that critical.
In the future, the company representatives promise a large set of analytical tools, but so far only Swallow is on sale. This is an AI that swallows news related to Bitcoin (and separately to other crypto) and spits out an assessment: how many positive and how many negative mentions accumulated during the day. Then the information is displayed as a simple needle indicator, which shows what the news background is right now, in the moment.
For those who want to understand the dynamics of the news background, graphs are provided, which look roughly like this:
A monthly subscription for access to the indicator is 17 dollars. They provided it to me for free for the first month so that I could play around with it and write this review. For those who register via my referral link https://merexp.com/?ref=ankap_tyan, the subscription price will be 12 dollars per month (this is for monthly payments; there is an additional bulk discount for quarterly or annual payments). Payment is made through a third-party service, cryptocloud.plus, in USDT or USDC, depending on your choice.
A natural question arises: how meaningful is it to buy access to a single indicator. Even the service authors are sure that it’s not very meaningful, which is why weekly reviews are included as a bonus, in which analysis is performed using an additional set of metrics (they are not ready to sell these metrics yet).
So, I have the ability for instant monitoring of the news background and detailed reviews, which, however, are released only once a week. I set a task for myself: to find out if this is enough to feel confident while trading. From the sale of DOGS tokens received in an airdrop, I had 0.00123149 BTC (about 65 dollars) lying in my exchange account; these were used for trial trading using the proposed analytical toolkit, as these were definitely funds I wouldn’t mind losing.
On September 4, MEREXP released another review: “Bitcoin: A Time of Uncertainty and Hidden Opportunities.” The content of the review boiled down to the following theses: seller pressure is growing in the market, while buyer activity remains stably low. The news background is consistently positive, so any drawdowns that occur are shallow, and after some time the exchange rate returns to its level. But as soon as the news background becomes negative, that’s it, expect a crash. Thus, an ideal situation was created for testing the news indicator specifically, since the price was supposed to depend primarily on it.
At that time, on September 4, I opened a position—a long with 5x leverage—at a price of 58071, using a quarter of my deposit. The rate almost immediately began to crawl down. Daily monitoring of the news background showed that it remained positive, sometimes shifting toward the yellow zone. Taking what was written in the review on faith, I interpreted this as a signal that “the drawdown is temporary, I can average down, we will go up soon”. And I averaged down. This is roughly what my trading looks like on a chart with daily candles:
The position was closed on September 10 with a slight profit. On September 11, it was opened again at a lower rate and closed finally on September 13 at a price of 58454, as I had to start drafting this report. Taking into account all the averaging, leverage, and trading commissions, the net profit was 0.00009351 BTC (about 5 dollars), which in relative terms means 7.6% over 9 days. Considering that I deliberately chose an unfavorable moment to enter, I consider the experiment successful. Of course, if I had honestly bought the indicator via my own referral link for 12 dollars, the purchase would not have paid off in such a short time. However, if a real deposit of at least a thousand had been involved instead of a toy deposit, the indicator would have paid for itself handsomely, with enough left over for some wine.
It is clear that a single success does not guarantee further profits. However, you know, sitting in a serious drawdown is quite an ordeal for the nerves, when you have to guess: is the rate ready to collapse, and I must urgently close at a loss to avoid liquidation—or is it ready to bounce back, and I should buy more at the bottom. The news background indicator is exactly what answers this question. Without access to it, I would not risk trading with leverage, and you can’t make a serious profit with spot trading.
One last piece of advice for the MEREXP company. Try to set up a test deposit as well and illustrate your weekly reviews by demonstrating how you trade in light of your own analytics. Then, firstly, potential buyers of Swallow or other future indicators will gradually develop a clearer idea of how to use such tools. And secondly, by the time you resolve the legal issues and are ready to accept money for trust management, you will have a proven success story. You don’t need to show trading in real-time so that people don’t copy trades for free, but reporting on a weekly basis looks like a quite viable marketing move.
Montelibero activist Stas Karkavin gave an interview to Plot publication, where he answered a series of questions about the community, which, in turn, prompted some reflections on my part.
When I first came across bits of information about the activities of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, I was initially surprised by the looseness of the community: they seem to have a large festival, PorcFest, and some influence on local politics, manifested in the election of project participants to local representative bodies—but there is no clarity. It is unclear how many people participate in the project, who its public faces are, where to read a coherent chronicle of its implementation, and how to acquire a franchise.
But when we started creating Montelibero, it quickly became clear that these characteristics are not so much a bug, nor a feature, but rather boundary conditions. The harder one tries to force the project into the framework of a single organization, or even just to count everyone, the more strongly its participants will resist. Simply because they are volunteers, and therefore owe nothing to anyone.
A bit later, after reading James Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed,” it became clear to me that this tactic of evading being recorded, counted, assigned to a supervisor, and provided with supervisory instructions has been inherent in humanity since the Neolithic Revolution and is an invariant human response to the potential possibility of power being applied to them.
For this reason, unlike Stas, I do not believe in the Montelibero Association—a normal libertarian would not voluntarily sign up for any jurisdiction, regardless of how “contractual” it calls itself—especially if this contract cannot be terminated at the first whim. A libertarian does not need power over other people, even in the form of participation in power over a public resource. He needs it so that power cannot be arbitrarily applied to him.
At the same time, a libertarian is perfectly capable of voluntarily associating with people on specific issues that interest them. For example, on the website of the aforementioned FSP, one can see a calendar with a schedule of various events organized by a wide range of organizations, businesses, and initiative groups. It looks quite spontaneous and decentralized (if we don’t count the fact that all this information is presented on a single website, which is, of course, a potential point of failure). Similarly, over time, I expect a similar calendar on the Montelibero website, so that anyone interested can quickly check: if I’m traveling from Budva to Bar tomorrow, is there anything interesting happening there—at the First Club, Tikhiy Omut, Tortuga bar, or a couple of other less-exposed locations.
At MTL-Fest, which will take place this year from October 4 to 6, Stas will speak on behalf of Montelibero. This does not mean that he is the head of Montelibero, that he knows everything, or that he is authorized by everyone. No, it simply means he is from Montelibero, he is a good storyteller, and he has agreed to speak. Similarly, there will be presentations by Sondre Bjellos from Liberstad and Yuri Polozov from the Free State Project—and both are speaking on behalf of their projects, but they will only be able to tell a small part of what is happening there, and some people from the respective projects may likely find these accounts inaccurate. No big deal: if they seem inaccurate, there will be something to discuss.
In the coming days, I intend to briefly talk about all six speakers at MTL-Fest: who the presenters are to me, and what I expect from their presentations.
