Автор: Анкап-тян

MTL fest 2023, impressions

Yesterday I had the chance to attend MTL-fest. The festival was held in MTL-City literally on a construction site, and the preparation for it was completely decentralized, based on the principle of “whoever wants it most, takes a piece of the work and does it.” So, naturally, there were some glitches, but as a result of this approach, the festival certainly gained its own eclectic charm.

I ran into Svetov in person; we chatted, although I didn’t manage to hand him the book yet, as everyone was too busy. Usanov, however, did not go empty-handed. We are still thinking about recording a separate video with him. Unfortunately, my level of spoken English didn’t allow me to give enough attention to the English-speaking speakers.

Surprisingly, I managed not to fuck up my own presentation; thanks to Dan Lesnov for forcing me to do two preliminary dry runs. To be honest, speaking immediately after Svetov is a questionable pleasure, because about twenty people immediately swarm him and start throwing questions; he continues to speak, moves further away, and the audience suddenly shrinks.

If you look at which parts of the festival were more crowded and which were less, it’s clear that libertarians have well-honed the skill of organizing conferences and all sorts of small-scale trade: people mostly hung out in the lecture hall, at the food court, and at the fair. However, as it turned out, this theme blends poorly with a music festival. Firstly, the loud music interfered with the lecture hall, and secondly, almost no one came specifically for the DJ program; everyone preferred either to listen to the speakers or to sit further away and chat—to dance in front of the stage, apparently, requires a completely different audience.

As expected, there was a severe lack of shade: a whole day outdoors is not for Montenegro. There was a moment when I felt a heatstroke coming on, so I had to lay out the foam mat I brought with me and lie in the shade for a while. Also, at the food court, there was a certain bias toward alcoholic beverages: beer, cider, and various strong liqueurs were offered, while coffee and mors were only available at one spot, which had the longest queue. The mineral water I brought with me saved the day.

However, all these small rough edges do not negate the main point: the festival went very energetically, about 270 people attended, and the lineup of speakers for a first time was beyond expectations—and at several venues, the fest was described as annual and far from the first. In other words, there was no feeling of a modest debut in the air; the fest was immediately perceived as part of an unshakable tradition, which is cool!

Various pictures and short videos from the fest can be seen in a separate channel. I hope that text reports will also start appearing there soon.

Network State, Chapter 2.3: Political Power and Technological Truth

I am posting the translation of another chapter of The Network State. In it, Balaji Srinivasan argues that if you look at history from the top down, it is a narrative dictated by power, allowing the establishment to maintain its power—but if you look from the bottom up, it is simply a dispassionate recording of facts from the past. And while there seems to be a temptation to focus entirely on the bottom-up approach, on the purely technological aspects of history—no, that is a path to political defeat. Anyone wishing to have an acceptable world around them must push their own historical narrative, and they cannot manage without a top-down approach.

Work on the translation, as you can see, has slowed down a bit. I hope this is temporary; once the festival is over, I will continue more briskly. By the way, a tiny print run of my own book on ancap will be sold on paper at the festival, which we decided to print as a trial.

Alternatives to the right to carry a pistol

I’ve noticed that almost all answers to the question “how will it work?” boil down to “gun law.” If anything goes wrong—shoot, and figure it out later. If you break the law (which doesn’t exist, meaning you just seem like a bad person to someone)—you’ll be killed. Don’t want to pay a court judgment—shoot your way out, but the plaintiff can hire a private special forces squad against you. And so on. The principle of proportionality of punishment is somewhere far off, but the right to shoot is right here. Everything indirectly leads back to the idea that “whoever has the gun is right.” Wouldn’t it be better to organize a social order where such situations are prevented in advance and long before they happen?

Muscovite (not Chinese)

To start, I’ll note that the status quo is exactly as described in the question: the principle of proportionality of punishment is somewhere far off, while the right to shoot is right here. Therefore, whoever is armed can easily dictate their will to those who are unarmed. Anyone could be armed—a bandit, for instance, or a cop. If he uses a weapon with particular cynicism, there’s a chance he’ll be reprimanded, fired, or given a suspended sentence after the fact; even if it’s a real sentence, it is, one way or another, a delayed punishment that in no way prevents either the already occurred outrage involving the use of weapons or new similar actions.

Ancap differs from the status quo in that everyone has the right to own a weapon, everyone can use it, and whoever wants to dictate their will to a randomly chosen victim by threatening them with a weapon risks encountering armed resistance not only from the victim but from anyone else. Can it be said that under ancap, whoever has the gun is right? Well, then we would have to admit that everyone who bothered to bring a gun is right. Even so, this seems more attractive to me than a situation where “the one who decided to use armed violence is right, and the others are unarmed, disenfranchised cattle.” But anyway, enough about ancap, the question is about a hypothetical society without “gun law.”

The first idea is the most obvious. No guns—no gun law. Alas, if you deprive society of guns, you simply get brass-knuckle law, knife law, or even just fist law. Not to mention the possibility of plowing into a crowd with a truck.

The second idea is the creation of a smart environment in which any violence is suppressed by technological means so quickly that you can barely manage to exercise your “gun law.” Among sci-fi writers, I read a description of such a society by Lem, but I didn’t like it: it exaggerates too much; instead of serious forecasts, it becomes a kind of parody that discredits the idea. I can only note that this path implies enormous trust in technological solutions. If we don’t leave them to state monopolies and allow private entities to independently design solutions in this vein, we could very well end up with numerous commercial zones where a high level of security is ensured purely through technological means.

The third idea is being actively pushed by Bitarch. He proceeds from the premise that there is nothing terrible about self-defense, but the inclination toward aggressive violence is something that can be worked on. To take away a person’s desire to attack is far more humane than killing. What can be said here? For me, the moral status of a “vaccination against violence” is roughly the same as the moral status of any other vaccine. If you can ensure mass testing and vaccination through non-violent means—well done. If you can’t—prepare for acts of mass disobedience, lawsuits, and an extremely poor reputation for your proposed solution.

So, in short, those are the options for replacing a “gun law” society that came to mind. Do you have any others? Describe them in the comments.

You stand there and wonder: am I right enough, or should I tuck a couple more guns under my crinoline?

Network State, Chapter 2.2. Microhistory and macrohistory.

I continue to grind away at the translation of Balaji Srinivasan’s book (soon I’ll even memorize that surname) The Network State.

In the new chapter, Microhistory and Macrohistory, the author moves along a narrow and dangerous path along the border of the heresy of scientism, which, as is known, is based on the approval of applying natural science methods to social sciences. So far, it seems the line hasn’t been crossed, but I am viewing all of this with great suspicion and hope to notice any methodological incorrectness in time.

For the first time during a book translation, the layout is taking up almost more of my time than the translation itself—all these endless external and internal links and such. I find it hard to imagine how this will look on paper, although it seems a print version is also planned for publication.

Ancap-paternalism

Something peculiar happened in Montelibero recently. Someone appeared who wanted to enter our tokenomics with a large sum. Most likely, he read the instructions and began to follow them. He obtained dollar stablecoins from some external exchange and went to exchange them for our euro ones. Meanwhile, the order book usually looks something like this:

What do we see here? There is a certain number of tokens trading in both directions with a more or less reasonable spread, and then orders begin at completely absurd prices; for example, 5 EURMTL are offered for sale at a price of 1000 USDC each. For such an order to be triggered, someone would first have to buy more than four thousand EURMTL at a price of around 1.12, and under normal conditions, this of course never happens. But when someone, without looking and with a broad gesture, throws, for example, 40,000 USDC into the market, they will buy up all the cheap euros, and with the remaining amount, they will stock up on overpriced ones. That is exactly what happened.

According to libertarian principles, this deal, like any other voluntary transaction, is completely legitimate. A person has every right to sell a glass of water for a diamond in the heart of a desert or a kilogram of flour for an antique icon in besieged Leningrad. Likewise in our case—there were no more favorable offers on the market, and the buyer agreed to what was available.

What is the difference between our case and the aforementioned cases of buying under conditions of extreme scarcity? In our case, there was no real scarcity in the market. It would have been enough to buy as many tokens as were listed for sale at an acceptable price, then wait a bit and make sure that other traders arrived and placed new orders at prices not much worse. One could also have written in the chat: “I want to buy euros for forty kilobucks, but there aren’t that many on the exchange, who is ready to sell more?” Finally, one could have contacted the MTL fund directly, saying, “Guys, you’re emitting a stablecoin here, how about you issue more coins against my dollars.”

But to do this, one must understand the specifics of the acquired asset and the specifics of the trading tools. And this leads us to a discussion of paternalism under ancap.

What is paternalism? It is a demand for a social arrangement that reduces the cost of a mistake. Is there such a demand under ancap? Of course, yes. Even looking only at tokenomics, it exists, firstly, from the side of beginners who do not yet fully understand the principles of how it works and therefore risk losing a lot through carelessness. Secondly, there is a demand from the developers of tokenomics tools: if a tool is dangerous to use, people will use alternative solutions. Thirdly, there is a demand from community activists: it is important to them that people come and stay, rather than fleeing in horror after hitting such pitfalls.

How was the case described above handled?

Firstly, additional checks were added to the MTL-Wallet. If a user wants to exchange a large amount at market price, the bot compares the effective exchange rate for the proposed amount and for an amount a hundred times smaller. If they differ by more than 10%, the bot issues a warning.

Secondly, the trader who made a fortune on their order was found and persuaded to return the earnings (I am not aware of the details; perhaps they kept some for themselves, but the victim, nevertheless, remained completely delighted). This was the hardest part, as the ancap community has no tools for forced coercion to return funds, nor should it have any.

Thirdly, the fund plans to place protective orders for all main trading pairs so that it would be extremely difficult for a careless buyer to break through them.

What conclusions can I draw from what happened?

Firstly, paternalism is natural, and there is no need to fight it.

Secondly, under ancap, paternalism is limited by libertarian principles, namely self-ownership and the non-aggression principle.

Thirdly, even with such limitations, fully functioning paternalistic tools can be created in society.

So here is another argument for your collection of debates with statists, proving that ancap is not cannibalism, and that private paternalism is more effective than state paternalism.

Network State. Part 2, History as a Trajectory. 2.1. Prologue.

I am continuing the translation of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State. In the comments for the translation of the first part, the idea was mentioned to translate the fifth part next, which concerns the actual construction of the network state. It is tempting, but no: every sufficiently original work tends to introduce its own conceptual apparatus (this is also very evident in my book about ancap), and reading out of order proves to be more difficult without it.

Therefore, here is the beginning of the second part of the book, where the author presents his thoughts on the fact that history is an applied discipline, that there is no predestination in history, and that true communities should be created specifically on the basis of properly processed history. In the prologue, a brief outline of the entire second part is provided.

I still hope to occasionally mix the translation of the book with my own original posts, otherwise you will get completely bored and scatter. But the translations will be released quite frequently.

I am starting to translate a new book

A year ago, the channel Russian Crypto Frontier began publishing a translation of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State. The enthusiasm lasted only for the first chapter, and even a piece of that translation is already unavailable. So, I am picking up the process, as I have done previously with the translation of Friedman’s Mechanics of Freedom and his Legal Systems Differing Significantly from Ours.

I will not host the original text here because the author promises to keep it on his own website dedicated to this book and provide updates as needed; therefore, I will limit myself to hosting the translation.

In brief, the book is a comprehensive guide to building one very specific type of extraterritorial contractual jurisdiction: a self-governing archipelago of territories located around the world, possessing diplomatic recognition from traditional territorial states—at least from some of such states.

The first chapter is essentially an extended introduction, which is entirely sufficient to understand whether one should continue reading.

Since the translation has a sponsor, I expect to be able to produce the text quite quickly. Unfortunately, my other ongoing translations do not have such sponsors, and the process is moving extremely slowly. I continue to hope that the situation can still improve somehow.

How will prostitution work under ancap?

Digit

I thought it would be interesting to discuss this issue specifically after a couple of posts about a hypothetical cellular stimulator that allows one to gain serious short-term advantages at the cost of premature wear and tear on the body. Professional prostitution in a free market is exactly the same trade-off. Intensive exploitation of one’s body while it is young and beautiful, and after that, it is a personal matter how to dispose of the fruits of this exploitation: one can squander it, invest it successfully, or invest it unsuccessfully.

The fewer the barriers to entry into the market, the higher the competition, the lower the prices, and the lower the chances of exchanging youth and beauty for a sufficiently serious income that such an exchange would make sense at all. Therefore, of course, prostitution as a mass profession under ancap is unlikely. It is far more likely that it will be used as a side job while searching for more suitable permanent employment, including during the period of study. Roughly for the same reasons people go work as couriers, taxi drivers, or waiters.

Naturally, as is the case now, various activists will speak in defense of these low-paid unskilled service workers, with varying degrees of clumsiness. But, since under ancap they will not have options like “achieving a ban on the activities of aggregator platforms” or “achieving the criminalization of the purchase of services,” this activism will be reduced either to demands for the reduction of platform commissions or to campaigns such as “I always pay service workers good tips, do as I do.”

As is well known, the activity of taxi aggregators currently faces active opposition from professional licensed taxi drivers. Under ancap, this activity is not licensed, and professional licensed taxi drivers simply disappear, so competition for freelance taxi drivers using various aggregators is provided only by those who prefer to be behind the wheel themselves, including those who give friends rides for free. The same applies to prostitution—permanent marriage unions and ordinary friendly flings will not go anywhere; both have their costs, but direct payment is usually not discussed here. However, somewhere at the junction between full-fledged prostitution and completely free sex, work for donations may well be located: a person may be shy about stating a fixed price but clearly makes it known that they would be glad for a voluntary reward.

This is exactly how I create my texts. They will appear for free because I enjoy the creative process, but I will give preference to a question with a donation, even if it is not as interesting as a free one—because I need money, and because the fact of payment creates a moral obligation. Moreover, this provides a simple ranking of those for whom my answer is more important and those for whom it is less so. Roughly the same mechanism will operate within ancap and with donations for sex: if one party basically enjoys the process but does not want to make a hobby a profession, and the other represents an undefined circle of people, then instead of a long and careful search for an exclusive partner, such a donation scheme is quite likely.

As a reminder, it is better to ask questions here, and the ways to donate are listed here.

How much did they donate? Right, the get-together with girlfriends is canceled, I’m scheduling a meeting.

Discussing the magic stimulant

So, readers have discussed across several platforms the fantastic assumption laid out in the previous post, its consequences, and their own personal lines of behavior.

Here are the main ideas.

  1. Humanity already consists of both fanatical overachievers and those living “half-heartedly.” If the contrast becomes slightly stronger—well, that’s great. Overachievers will achieve even greater success, burning with their ideas, while others will enjoy the results in a comfortable mode for themselves (as a separate opinion, some believe that those dabbling in the stimulant will be spatially separated from those who don’t, or conversely, communities of advocates for naturalness will appear).
  2. The first thing people under the stimulant will do is develop a second version of the stimulant, devoid of the side effects of the first version, and then we’ll all live well.

Many also noted that the value of a conditional Harvard lies not in knowledge, but in networking; this is a long-term task, and the stimulant does not solve it. Nor does it solve many other tasks, such as finding a long-term marriage partner, raising children, selecting new varieties of baobab, and so on.

It’s funny how the question of a life-accelerating stimulant echoes another question I answered not so long ago—about the consequences of the appearance of immortality technology for the chosen few. Let me introduce additional constraints here as well. Let the production of the stimulant be a cheap and easily replicable technology that is practically impossible to ban. Also, let this technology provide no shortcuts allowing it to be tweaked in a relatively short time to remove the key unpleasant side effect. Otherwise, it’s not interesting.

How could this stimulant appear? Most likely—during developments in the field of traumatology or something of that sort. They struggled for a long time with animals, could not overcome the effect of premature aging, and finally released it for use in first-aid kits as a last resort, initially for the military. If you don’t use it—you die in half an hour; if you do—you live some number of years less. Then, a recovering person, out of boredom, picks up a higher mathematics textbook, or, say, a manual on repairing HIMARS in field conditions—and discovers with surprise that the material is absorbed perfectly. That’s it, the genie is out of the bottle.

It is also quite obvious that cancer patients of any age will use the stimulant. Additionally, it is a more than justified remedy for Alzheimer’s. In short, there will be a significant number of people for whom the use of the stimulant will provide a double plus—both the extension (or serious alleviation) of life and the enhancement of abilities. Instead of living for twenty years as a demented person, a paralytic, or undergoing surgery every six months, a person would quite easily prefer ten years of more comfortable aging coupled with a flowering of cognitive functions.

It is more than likely that the stimulant will be used in poor, large families. Why send a daughter into prostitution or a son to a hazardous production site if there is a way to lift the whole family out of poverty with far lower costs, even regarding the reduction of expected life expectancy. In other words, the stimulant will accelerate social elevators. For those who have acceptable starting conditions, there are fewer incentives to use the drug. Thus, the stimulant will contribute to increasing equality, which leftists love to prattle on about.

As for a truly mass transition to the stimulant—this seems unlikely to me. After all—so we know that methamphetamine is actively used in North Korea to increase labor productivity—and so what? Perhaps students before exams sometimes follow this example, but it is not the case that consumers of this stimulant are directly displacing those who shun it from the labor market. Again, modern left-wing governments are far more concerned with unemployment than with labor productivity. If some maniacs are ready to replace entire creative teams—then for those who have dropped out of the competitive race, even more bullshit jobs will simply be invented.

And under ancap? I see no serious difference; this technology is not key to the formation of society. Except that bullshit jobs under ancap would be substantially fewer, which means those not using the stimulant would have a less stable income, but would be able to enjoy lower prices. However, those using the stimulant wouldn’t become models of stability either, since the stimulant is more about extreme effort than about a constant increase in efficiency. So, the niche for the workhorses will remain wide enough for a long time.

What do you mean “I don’t want the stimulant”? The clock is ticking!

Birthday – not only once a year

I was sent a text describing a fantastic hypothesis and a question about what should be changed in human relationships so that the consequences wouldn’t frighten us too much. So…

Imagine that a certain cellular stimulator had been developed and became available, which, by accelerating biological processes in your body, could cure you of a disease or injury very quickly—literally in an hour—allow you to prepare for entrance exams to a prestigious university in a week, or perform huge volumes of work in the shortest possible time. The price for this is an accelerated “wearing out” of the body, visually and physiologically indistinguishable from natural aging over a longer period of time under natural conditions and, let’s say, without any other side effects. Would you use such a technology?

At first, you’re unlikely to like the idea, but afterwards, you might wonder if it’s worth sacrificing a piece of your life just once and literally celebrate several birthdays in one year for the sake of some significant achievement—for example, getting into Harvard, which should ensure you a good profession, a brilliant career, and high income for the rest of your slightly diminished life. But you’re unlikely to be the only “smart one,” and you’ll soon realize that with such a means existing, many people might start using it in the pursuit of efficiency and quick gains—first in one particular situation, and then again and again. This means that remaining competitive in studies or work without resorting to this means will simply become impossible. And employers, of course, all other things being equal, will prefer to deal with people who never catch a cold, don’t get tired, and can perform a month’s worth of work in a week. And you suddenly find yourself in the position of a professional athlete who understands that it’s impossible to win without doping, but doping will most likely lead him to the grave or make him disabled about five years sooner.

How would you solve this problem? A blunt government ban on the drug won’t help. Government agents themselves would be happy to use its effect, primarily for military purposes if talking about others, and to increase efficiency in political struggles if talking about themselves. How, in your opinion, should human relationships be influenced so that situations do not arise where some people absolutely do not care about others and are only glad if they completely exhaust their life resource for their own benefit?

In the next post, I will share my reflections on the proposed situation, but for now, I would like to read your ideas in the comments.