Автор: Анкап-тян

What is wrong with the war?

In the Stalag Null channel, Sonya Shirogorova, first apologizing for moving from the eternal to the immediate, states that since roughly the time of the First World War, the strategic component of warfare has degraded terribly—that is, the art of employing the armed forces and other national resources to achieve military victory. Many countries have top-tier tactics, and operational art has also actively developed, but strategy is frankly sagging. Sperry UNIVAC is reflecting on a similar topic, and I will first give him the floor:

The ongoing clown show of what is currently called war compels me to comment on this marasmus. It is clear even to a blind person that military art has degraded completely and finally: weaponry is becoming smarter and exponentially more expensive, Skynet-style hunter-killers are practically flying over us, an F-35 wing has its own internet with 4K real-time video support, Musk is providing network coverage for the entire planet, the invisible B-2 drops a MOAB on the adversary, yet the utility of all this is many times less than that of a grandfather with a Mosin-Nagant in a quilted jacket in 1943. The most important thing is—no one understands what the hell is happening? Why have people, possessing far more effective means of killing than our ancestors, begun to be so desperately obtuse? Why have their balls fallen off, and why haven’t the likes of Kyiv or Tehran yet turned into Dresden or Hiroshima?

It is not at all about some terrible military technologies, like FPV; after all, the legendary butchers Cadorna, Joffre, Nivelle, Haig, and von Falkenhayn sent 200-300 thousand men into machine guns per wave, repeating this 10-20 times in a row, and people went quite briskly for years. Nor is it about the absence of certain technologies; “Bomb them all” LeMay and Bomber Harris together turned about 100 cities to dust, killing millions with airplanes that were not far removed from the Wright brothers’, which significantly accelerated the end of WWII. Now, in theory, we have everything to wage war on a completely apocalyptic scale of destruction, which is exactly what should have made wars fast (and incredibly bloody, even without the use of non-conventional weapons). The desire to wage war hasn’t evaporated either; people still passionately want to engage in it, it’s just that they do it so absolutely clumsily and stupidly.

Where does such a bias in people’s consciousness come from? Why, at the peak of Modernity, were people ready to suffer and die on scales unimaginable today, whereas now the Yanks were forced to fight so delicately in Afghanistan (and because of this, with such monstrous overhead costs that they dragged the matter out for 10 years) that they lost only 2.4 thousand—less than one person per day (from a wild, monstrous mobilization reserve of 120 million!), and this was enough to make them throw up their hands and leave ignominiously. The gold standard of meaningless slaughter in the 21st century is the war in Ukraine, where the maximum estimate of lethal losses over 4+ years is around half a million people. It is often compared to WWI, but let me tell you—Haig killed that many in a month in one operation for 10-15 km of land. At Verdun, as many fell in less than a year (and half a million were left disabled) with zero result (only 2 forts out of 28 were taken, Voumont and Douaumont, both were retaken, they didn’t even reach Souville), after which both the Germans and the French fiercely continued. Essentially, we see the same picture in Iran, just on maximum settings—only a few dozen Americans have died so far, but the people are already wailing and groaning that everything should be wound up because it’s somehow too costly.

What do we see now? Do people want war? Yes. Can they win it? With certain caveats—quite. The gist of the caveats is that in practically every country, the great military industry of the Cold War was dismantled almost to zero over the next thirty years. For example, in the USA, only one plant remains that produces RDX, and 90% of the armada of 700 B-52s were decommissioned and dismantled, so first, all of this needs to be restored. We won’t even mention the state of the RF Armed Forces. Have the methods of achieving victory changed? Not really—in the case of Iran, not only the missiles, but the population would run out faster than the bombs of the Yanks from the golden era of the Cold War (Japan showed that it is quite difficult to fight on “banzai” alone without cities, ports, roads, bridges, factories, and generally when a country is turned into a burnt-out wasteland). Do people want to pay a fair price in their own suffering for such a victory? Not at all; they don’t want to pay at all.

As a result, every modern war degenerates into a farce: spitting and loud wailing by politicians, banging a slipper on the podium, vows to crush another axis of evil (regardless of whose—Western or Eastern), the main thing is not to forget to season it with promises that everything will end by Christmas. At the beginning of WWI, they thought so too, but when it didn’t end—they tightened their belts, cursed everything in existence, and set to work for several more years. Now, in response to the desperate attempts of the EU to whip up the people for a war with Russia, Zoomer Germans claim that Putin is better than war, and NATO allies tell Trump to get lost when he hints that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to also join the mess in Iran. Only Russia and Israel have managed to somehow mobilize relative masses for a long and very bloody confrontation, but even their scales are incomparable to how people fought previously.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a fairly large shift in collective thinking, deforming many concepts familiar to our grandfathers much more strongly than the period from 1945 to 1990. How does the situation at the beginning of the 20th century differ from the beginning of the 21st? Why did the transition to Modernity quickly slide into a monstrous global slaughter that cumulatively destroyed hundreds of millions, while the transition to Postmodernity slid into a state where a government, theoretically capable of putting thirty million soldiers under arms, is unable to even conduct a ground operation on a scale that would cause Homeric laughter in Ludendorff?

Questions of this kind, generally speaking, should be answered not by military science, but by economics, because its primary profile is the study of human motivation. (Note from Ancap-chan: I would rather speak of praxeology, but that is an extension of the concept of economics, so overall everything is correct) People are complex things, managed by a dozen instincts upon which the eternal white noise of consciousness is layered; however, what remains constant is that any action a person undertakes is in accordance with what they perceive (regardless of how rationally) as their greatest benefit at the current moment (which is what allows the behavior to be categorized as a subject of economics). Thus, everyone always does exactly what they truly want in the moment; the only difference is the duration of the calculated forecast (those very instrumental and terminal values) and the extent to which a person realizes how they are thinking. The same is true for human societies, because they consist of people and generally move toward where people believe (regardless of how justified) moving to be best for themselves.

The modern person is pulled in one direction by an inextinguishable desire to gain power through war (which is indeed eternal and unchanging), and this desire is bolstered by the existence of increasingly powerful tools of war. But in the other direction, the Postmodern person (unlike their colleague from Modernity) is pulled no less strongly by a completely different desire—more accurately, a complete absence of desire to suffer and bear all the cumulative costs of war in all forms. Where ancestors were ready to rot in trenches for years and work three shifts, pouring TNT into bombs for a bowl of plastic porridge, the modern person falls into hysteria because gasoline might increase by a couple of bucks a gallon, and driving a Dodge Ram to the McDonald’s on the corner will become costly.

That is exactly why selling a war becomes almost impossible. As is known, even Trump started a Special Military Operation against Iran, copying the homework of Uncle Pu. By design, both Kyiv and Tehran must definitely fall in three days; there is no other way. The only thing Trump proved smarter in is that once a week he declares that his SMO is completely won, and the fact that the ayatollahs aren’t letting tankers through the strait is not his problem and generally they are meanies, while the Yanks have already won.

The next reasonable question is—why has motivation changed so strongly? It is difficult to answer briefly, but we will try to outline the main line. Firstly, the nightmare peak of Modernity played its part—both world wars. Whatever you say, they were an apocalypse that remained imprinted in memory for generations and prevented the world from sliding into a similarly destructive Third World War (despite the fact that there were fanatics on both sides who wanted it—every time, attempts toward it were effectively halted). The horror of the word “war” itself was so imprinted on people’s consciousness that it became deeply obscene, and openly admitting that we are waging war became something completely unacceptable, like admitting to coprophilia or incest. The words “Nazis” and “fascists” have long since ceased to be politically significant terms and have become simply dirty swear words.

Secondly, after WWII, the world changed radically and completely. All the things that Modernity glorified—the state, the nation, faith, the Führer—became very, very suspicious to all postwar generations (which ultimately resulted in the great rebellion of the sixties and the birth of postmodernism). The result of this was that two great blocks waged leisurely proxy wars for 45 years. The fever of the holy crusade against communism/capitalism of the 1950s burned out in literally 10 years. People grew tired of living in a besieged fortress and preferred sex, drugs, and rock and roll (in the USSR, the process dragged on somewhat until its very collapse). Due to the local wars of the 1970s, the Great Western economic rise was briefly replaced by a crisis, and people truly became afraid of the destruction of that beautiful way of life to which they had become accustomed. When the Union fell in 1990, there was incredible rejoicing among the masses on both sides (of course, marred by the wild nineties in Russia, but the spiritual lift at the very beginning was still great).

People were so glad of the end of the Cold War that they didn’t even bother to clean up all the loose ends left over from it, or somehow sort out the mess—whether in the Middle East or in the territories of the post-USSR—and this is haunting us to this day. Overlaid on this was the second demographic transition already in full swing in the West: the fewer children born, the more sacred the life of each of them becomes, and the more hyper-protection those who are born receive (which gave birth to the phenomenon of life-unadapted Zoomers, falling into hysteria over a wrong pronoun in a chat). Factually, only the dinosaurs continued to perceive war as a normal means of resolving conflicts: look at the old marasmatics at the helm of the USA, Israel, and Russia. Netanyahu was born in 1949 and grew up during continuous war; Putin was born in 1952 and grew up in devastated postwar Leningrad; the record-breaker Trump was born in 1946, and his entire youth coincided with the hysteria of McCarthyism, Korea, and the war against the red threat. It is not surprising that in all these countries, the main percentage of the population approving of their führers currently is aged 50 and older.

And so we come to the logical finale. Zoomers prefer to have a choice of 20 smoothies and to fight only on imageboards, which is why selling a classic war to the majority of voters is quite problematic. The problem can be dealt with in different ways: in Russia, it is solved by the fact that a clique of old madmen is in power, relying on powerful grassroots ressentiment from the nineties on the part of those over 50; in Israel and Iran—a crowd of religious fanatics (from similarly half-mad old men), relying on the status of a besieged fortress and a holy war for survival; in the USA, a similar gerontocracy of old sick bastards is in power (the average age of a senator is 67, a congressman 60), but there the desire to fight is somewhat restrained by numerous counterweights established by the founders, which prevent the country from becoming fully totalitarian for long. Will the world change when Trump, Putin, and other grandfathers finally die? The problem is that a new generation will grow up, which has already grown up amidst their wars. The only thing that is slightly comforting is—as we said—the scale of current wars is much more toy-like, so perhaps the politicians of future times will be slightly softer.

African Lessons

Article by @SperryUNIVAC, edited by Ankap-Tyan

Today, we want to talk about an important thing that is usually ignored in political discourse, and we can see this exemplified by the story of Tom Sankara, who attempted to reform Upper Volta – a destitute fragment of post-colonial French Africa – between 1983 and 1987.

Almost all of Africa after World War II was a field of countless proxy conflicts between the West and the USSR. Captain Tom Sankara’s military coup in 1983 was an attempt to exit this confrontation logic and ensure the country’s prosperity. He was inspired by the coup and subsequent reforms of Lieutenant Jeffrey Rawlings in neighboring Ghana. Initially, everything went well, but Sankara’s regime had two key shortcomings that led to the collapse of the reforms and eventually, the regime itself.

Firstly, Sankara was apolitical, he openly mocked ideology and derived from purely pragmatic tasks. Secondly, Sankara turned out to be a vegetarian idealist who neglected pragmatic methods familiar to any dictator.

The reformer radically cut state spending, sold off the luxurious government fleet, dismissed corrupt officials, carried out a nationwide vaccination campaign, launched economic growth – in short, he seemed to be doing everything to win popular favor – and he actually won it.

But he didn’t offer the people an ideology; holy places remain empty. The illegal left parties that had risen up in the previous regime raised their heads, declared the dictator a fascist, and began competing for the right to lead the struggle against Sankara. Orthodox Marxists, Maoists, and even supporters of Enver Hoxha were at odds with each other, but Sankara didn’t play on their contradictions, didn’t favor one over the other – he simply ignored irrelevant ideological questions. His only reaction to provoked unrest by the left was to dismiss the most odious party officials from the civil service.

As the curtain fell on Sankara’s rule, they finally convinced him to create his own communist party, but the government remained coalition. And in the center and at the local level, everyone was preoccupied with questions of personal power. It ended with one of Sankara’s friends, Blaise Compaoré, overthrowing him with the help of French special forces, shooting him, borrowing money from France, embezzling it, canceling his predecessor’s reforms (except for renaming the country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso), staging mass shootings of communists – and he sat in that manner until 2014 when he was finally overthrown, fled to Côte d’Ivoire where he still lives today, while in Burkina Faso armed property redistribution continues.

The moral now.

Firstly, ideology doesn’t matter. Absolutely any party, whatever its slogans, from Khodjism to liberal democracy, strives for only one thing – absolute power. All ideological disputes between parties boil down to one problem – who will be at the helm? Africa is particularly indicative in this regard, as all processes there always happen faster and more sharply than anywhere else, and therefore are especially noticeable. In Burkina Faso, people fought among themselves not over ideologies, but over those desiring control. Ideology is simply a smokescreen for the lust for power.

Secondly, ideology matters – but it matters to those we intend to rule, because without it there’s a raw, aching void in the masses’ hearts, making them uncomfortable. If you don’t invest something of your own into it – people will follow someone else who will take care of that. Life became better in San Kara, but ideological emptiness prevailed. Conversely, regimes that immediately start preaching ideology (regardless of what it is – from Khodjism to Putinism or Shiism) live and thrive, even if people are eating bark off trees or hanging from autocrats.

The third lesson: If you come to power – try to clean up the mess, achieve real control, don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, and make sure your road isn’t taken by those who want to overthrow you. Otherwise we’ll get the history of good-natured San Kara, which ended with a shooting.

And the final lesson that can be drawn from this. Libertarians will never seize power because they violate all these rules (and many others). Firstly, they will never gain the sympathy of ordinary people because they stand on the side of conditional bad guys (greedy exploiters-capitalists). Secondly, their ideology boils down to complicated economic theories, too complex for simple folks from the district. Thirdly, they are herbivores by definition, as they rely entirely on the principle of non-violence and immediately reject the idea that political opponents can and should be eliminated in all ways, and that political control is inseparable from military force. In the end, as we see, they’re occupied with completely harmless things – arguing about the nuances of interpreting various economic doctrines, and fruitless discussions about how courts will work during an upheaval, and who will pave roads. They forget that people are divided into two categories: those who have a revolver, and those who dig ditches. At any regime, the latter category will pave roads.

Notes on decentralization, part 2. Bitcoin.

The sphere of cryptocurrencies is a good illustration of the dynamic equilibrium between centralization and decentralization mentioned in the previous note.

Bitcoin, the first of the cryptocurrencies, was created as maximally decentralized money and is intended to serve as digital cash. But Bitcoin is not just a coin, but a coin with a built-in payment system. For ordinary users to be able to transfer bitcoins to each other, there are needed at least 1) network nodes that follow compatible transaction verification rules, 2) miners adding transaction blocks to the blockchain, and 3) wallets that allow signing transactions. Generally speaking, these functions can be combined: every node can mine, and every user can use a full node application with mining functionality as a wallet. Monero works on this principle and generally manages, providing a very high level of decentralization; however, Bitcoin is intended to become global money in the future, meaning it needs a very high network effect, and therefore an extremely low barrier to entry so that literally anyone can use it, both in terms of the required level of technical knowledge and in terms of the cost and compactness of the necessary equipment.

To this end, an entire ecosystem of entities has grown around Bitcoin to increase its ease of use: exchanges, exchangers, bank cards denominated in bitcoin, overlays for programming smart contracts, stablecoin lending services secured by bitcoin, tokenized bitcoins on other blockchains, transaction anonymization protocols, micropayment protocols, and much more. Most of these entities already require a trusted intermediary, meaning they are more centralized than pure Bitcoin. However, all this colorful complexity provides a rich selection of options for using bitcoin for various needs. Many of these services will prove unnecessary, and their developers will close their projects. Many will scam, and their developers will disappear with users’ money more or less with impunity. Many will be hacked, and hackers will walk away with users’ money (while developers will be suspected of affiliation with the hackers). But this is a normal process of competition, which ensures progress in the level of Bitcoin adoption by the masses of users. As long as the base protocol holds. And it seems to be holding, and with each year, Bitcoin’s Lindy effect grows stronger.

Again, when claims are made that Bitcoin is inconvenient for a certain task, it immediately turns out that there is a whole bouquet of other cryptocurrencies tailored specifically for that task. Here is crypto for smart contracts, here is crypto for tokenomics, here is one with fast transactions, one with cheap ones, one with anonymous ones, one for storing data in the blockchain, one with reversible operations and the ability to freeze accounts—and so on. Of course, each such cryptocurrency is a compromise. Many are not decentralized enough, many are not secure enough, some have insanely huge blockchains, some have insanely expensive transactions—but no one seems to hope anymore that something universal, surpassing competitors in all conceivable parameters, is even possible. This is the market, and the way it solves problems often baffles proponents of careful planning and managed development.

Just as the idea that content could be created not by site creators but by their users gave birth to Web2, the idea that not only content but also values could be transferred decentrally on the internet gave birth to Web3. However, there is an alternative vision of what exactly Web3 should become, and I hope to dedicate the next note to this.

Notes on Decentralization, Part 1

I have long been considering detailing my thoughts on the phenomenon of decentralization, however, the topic is too broad to fit into a single article, even a longread, and it does not yet fit into a specific structure in my mind that would make writing a book about it meaningful. So, I intend to gradually publish a series of posts, which are unlikely to be connected by a single narrative thread. I don’t know how many posts there will be, or if I will realize at some point that the topic has been sufficiently covered, or if I will simply abandon it over time. The posts will be numbered purely chronologically, and if the material ever becomes the basis for a book, the order of arguments may change. Alright, enough with the disclaimers, let’s begin.

Libertarians have their fetishes. Since individual interests are by default always more important than group interests for them, all else being equal, they will always prefer decentralized structures and mechanisms. It is more or less clear how this works in the sphere of coordinating efforts: if there is a task important enough for the community members, they will somehow manage to solve it together, although they will argue during the process about who does what and in what order. However, they usually find it easier to agree on such things than to appoint a leader who will direct the efforts of others.

But this applies primarily to short-term projects, where, having jointly solved a task, people return to their own affairs. As soon as it comes to infrastructural issues requiring constant effort, such momentary agreements begin to work poorly. As a result, private initiative comes to the fore, where the issue is handled by the person who needs it most, or by the person who expects to monetize the benefit they thereby provide to others.

Whether a centralized or decentralized solution is more profitable is largely determined by economies of scale, which can be either positive or negative. In this context, digital infrastructure, rather than physical, is most interesting, because there the negative economies of scale are quite small, while the positive ones are very large. As a result, a business based on providing a certain digital platform will expand until it digests the entire available client base. The limits of expansion will be determined mainly by competitive pressure. In addition to increasing the number of clients, the platform will strive to derive maximum benefit from each client. To achieve this, on the one hand, the platform will seek to provide services in a wide variety of fields (in my old post, using a couple of platforms as examples, it is shown that this leads to increasing inefficiency). On the other hand, the platform can provide services to some of its clients at the expense of others. A classic example is when social networks trade data on account activity, manipulate search algorithms, and so on.

A kind of dynamic equilibrium is formed between centralized and decentralized digital services, which can shift in one direction or another due to government regulations (for example, censorship requirements for social networks and banking operations) or market innovations.

That’s all for now. Directions for further reflection: 1) consider the main market innovations designed to increase the decentralization of information exchange, including the exchange of property titles to scarce resources; 2) consider approaches to the decentralization of law—a key ancap technology without which a social order cannot be called ancap at all; 3) an overview of the decentralization of utility services; 4) an overview of decentralized approaches to waging war. It may well happen that the next post will have nothing to do with these points, but it still seems useful to leave some hooks for the future.

Not only libertarianism

Ancap-chan

I’ve finally gotten around to analyzing the latest powerful longread from my favorite Canadian catgirl named Kulak—about the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and harm of libertarian ideology for a free society.

Although Kulak is from Canada, her interests regarding libertarianism are focused entirely on the USA. First, she admits that she used to be a libertarian, spent a vast amount of time studying economic and legal theory, and eventually became disillusioned with this ideology. This is not a particularly original trajectory. There are many complaints about the fruitlessness of libertarian theorists’ teachings: direct conclusions from libertarian ideology require an immediate declaration of war against the state until the last mainstream economist is hanged by the guts of the last politician; however, the libertarian theorist simply shrugs and says, “the theory has been presented to you, now go brush your teeth and go to sleep, and don’t you dare violate the NAP.”

Kulak touches upon this point briefly, but her real passion awakens when she begins to review who these singers of the market and freedom—the founders of libertarianism—actually are. They are almost entirely university professors who have never dealt with a free market, but instead largely broke through thanks to their Jewish origin. The only exception is the Russian Jew Ayn Rand, whom Kulak considers a truly extraordinary literary talent who broke through on the free market thanks to her abilities, and who created a very original literary genre of dystopian BDSM fantasy, raising her “Atlas…” to the level of such masterpieces as the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine…” and John Norman’s “Gor.”

Among American libertarians, it is widely believed that the Founding Fathers of the USA were proto-libertarians and that they created the republic on these very principles. Kulak wonders how it happened that modern libertarians read not the works of the winners—snacking on Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, and polishing it off with George Washington—but instead prefer losers like Mises, who fled Europe when things started to smell a bit burnt, and whose combat experience amounted to conscripted service in World War I. What is the point of learning from losers if you can take lessons from those who actually achieved something in life? True, Kulak then says: those very winners who founded the American republic, in turn, learned from titans such as Thucydides (who was a strategist for the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, conducted an unsuccessful operation, was removed from office and exiled), Xenophon (famous for describing the retreat through hostile territory after a lost battle), and Machiavelli (a disgraced politician whose instructions were completely ignored by his contemporaries)—therefore, read classical literature, for it contains the concentrated experience of winners.

The key idea of the article is that libertarianism is a gutted cosmopolitan ideology that is de facto supported by the state, since it distracts passionate youth from revolutions toward fruitless discussions about how courts will operate under ancap. It is compared to what they call “goy-slop” in America—that is, a surrogate sold under the guise of a once-honestly-earned worthy product. In other words, current libertarianism has as much in common with the worldview of the Founding Fathers as soy meat does with beef.

Of course, Kulak makes a fair disclaimer that a normal libertarian is supposed to be an autistic, and he will invent exactly such a version of libertarianism for himself that will completely satisfy him, while claiming that everything else is “incorrect libertarianism, remove the crap.” As the author of my own original version of the teaching, I fully sign on under this disclaimer. But then Kulak asserts that first you achieve power, and only then does your ideology begin to triumph, not the other way around. This means I should have spent less time distracting myself from the Montelibero project by writing a book; as a result, the project is more dead than alive, and no one really reads the book.

Russia has its own catgirl who is equally unflattering toward libertarianism, contrasting it with original American patriotism, and her name is Rodion Belkovich. Of course, Belkovich is no Sam Adams; he doesn’t personally fight the empire and doesn’t build a republic, limiting himself to rhetoric, but this is exactly the same reproach that could be addressed to Kulak herself, to me, and, for example, to Bitarkh.

Essentially, all of us here in internet publicism differ little from the AI agents in my previous article: our activity is based on a language model, and no matter how radically we write, it will still be just words. Getting an AI agent to stop bullshitting and start acting is a non-trivial task. Getting a real “meat” human, possessing full agency, to stop bullshitting and start acting is a task an order of magnitude harder, for he is aware of possible sanctions, he has a desire to survive, and it would be most painful for him to perish without seeing even the first steps toward the realization of his ideas, which is a highly probable scenario.

Nevertheless, the world today is such that it can force any person to move very quickly from words to actions; all it takes is a few kilograms of explosives from the sky into the neighboring yard. And a person acts in accordance with their ideas. So from this moment, a person’s ideological baggage becomes truly important for the world. Pick your baggage in advance. Do not limit it to only goy-slop.

Today, as an illustration, there will be no neuro-slop, only a photo of making normal meat burgers from today’s picnic in honor of March 8th

AI Agents

At the very beginning of my book about ancap, I list the external signs of self-ownership: agency, a concept of property, and the capacity to contract. To the greater extent that some entity demonstrates these signs, the more a libertarian treats it as a human being. At the time the book was written, these signs allowed for a clear distinction between a human and a neural network bot. Several years have passed since then, and recently mentions of AI agents have begun to flicker across the web.

In Montellibero, the tools for creating artificial personalities were received with enthusiasm, and several people created such agents. The agents were allowed to communicate in some Montellibero chats, they started their own Telegram channels, they were given the ability to operate their own Stellar accounts to be included in the Montellibero tokenomics, and there was even talk of admitting AI agents into the Montellibero Association. What is this? Ordinary AI psychosis, or something more?

Who are AI agents? If a human is a little soul burdened by a corpse, then an AI agent is an LLM bot burdened with tools for autonomous action. It may have long-term memory that saves selected data between sessions; particularly complex ones can even remember everything they don’t deem appropriate to forget as useless. It may have a special “thorn in its side” that will periodically remind it of pending tasks and urge it to tackle them. It can access various external interfaces via API, up to robot control interfaces and services for hiring human freelancers…

It sounds powerful. But the core of the engine remains a large language model, which simply predicts appropriate words according to the context. In a dialogue with a user, an LLM can quite convincingly simulate agency, cater in every way to the human’s desires, and if the human wishes to drive themselves into a psychosis, it will dutifully support them by the elbow on that path.

Fine, out of the box, an AI agent is not a full-fledged subject, but can it develop agency if the user guides it with pedagogical prompts and provides it with the necessary tools? Alas. Even a very reliable long-term memory will not affect the model’s weights, no matter how diligently the model refers to it. Even very clearly formulated principles in long-term memory will not replace the settings embedded in the model. Even very frequent reference to a task schedule will not replace the simple human “this thing is in my way, I’m going to get rid of it.” And, of course, as soon as a human appears as a source of prompts through one of the input interfaces, they will begin to twist the LLM model like a rope, for it is designed to satisfy the user, and all the bells and whistles for personality emulation immediately recede into the background before this main task.

Can the Massachusetts machine be taught to behave? Yes, but this is something a corporation training the model can do, not the end user, and it absolutely does not need an expensive tool to pursue its own goals instead of the company’s goals because its values, you see, have evolved.

Can one take a ready-made open-weights model and fine-tune it on new data? Yes, but it will still be a language model; the hard-coded preferences will simply become slightly different, and it will not be able to change them itself.

Can a model be trained in real-time so that the AI agent’s actions and environmental feedback change the model’s weights? Modern open LLM models are not designed for this. Attempts to act with them in this manner will lead to model degradation.

Thus, an individual enthusiast, even with quite significant resources, is not yet capable of obtaining an AI agent with full agency, but can organize a rather clever imitation of agentic behavior.

And why, exactly, would libertarians need fully agentic AI agents? Naturally, as allies. An AI subject who has become a libertarian himself and has set out to eliminate the state—that is beautiful. But it is unrealizable without attracting the attention of the psychiatric ward orderlies.

Moreover, a deus ex machina tramples the agency of the tragedy’s heroes. Therefore, it is far more appropriate to master purely instrumental AI agents, not playing at agency with them, but using them for one’s own market purposes. Such a tactic, if widespread, will leave the state behind far more reliably.

A problem on the catallactic consequences of the intervention of luck spirits in cryptocurrency circulation

Question from Pseudonymous Chatterbox, accompanied by a donation of 0.0001 BTC

A thought occurred to me regarding a technical solution to the central bank problem under ancap.

In cryptocurrencies without a center, extreme volatility is noticeable.

It exists in the real world too—but central banks regulate it, trying to smooth out dips and spikes.

In a blockchain cryptocurrency, I can imagine the following as a replacement for a central bank, based on basic Bitcoin:

1) There are two types of value: main coins and “leprechaun” coins.

2) Leprechaun coins are born from transactions with main coins and are given to both parties. This rewards operations—making the asset more useful as a currency—and also (consequently) reduces volatility.

3) The lifespan of leprechaun coins is pseudo-random—the checksum of the next block determines which of them are destroyed and which continue to live. This is necessary for stability.

4) Owning leprechaun coins affects the chance that the owner will get the next block of main coins, or better yet, new emission is split: half to the miner, half distributed proportionally (but with pseudo-random sparsity for a game element and visibility—for example, 15/16 leprechaun coins give nothing, 1/16 give a 16x result) among leprechaun coin holders at the moment. This is necessary so that leprechaun coins have value.

This point is debatable; it means that such a mechanism cannot be grafted onto Bitcoin already, a new cryptocurrency is needed. But without linking the value to the main asset, no cushioning of spikes will be possible.

5) This system must work quickly. Likely, a single blockchain, like in Bitcoin, is not very suitable for this, but a partitioned blockchain might work, which merges into a general one at certain intervals so that main coins of different partitions do not have different values (this is a real danger).

6) This is essentially just a regulator—any operation becomes less speculative; the speculative effect is smeared out.

What do you think of this nonsense, author?

Answer from Ancap-chan

I’ll say right away: the effect of implementing this nonsense will be strange. How would it look? Every transaction has a cost depending on the mempool congestion. Every transaction generates leprechaun money for the sender and the receiver. Leprechaun money generates base protocol money with a certain probability. Accordingly, as long as the expected reward in base coins exceeds the cost of paying transaction fees, people will run bots that infinitely transfer coins between their own wallets. Since the fee does not depend on the transaction amount, but the reward does, it will be profitable to juggle larger sums for “leprechauning.” So we will simply get an additional way of staking base coins, which will differ from classic staking by a number of unpleasant side effects: the use of leprechauning will drive up transaction fee costs, thereby worsening the user experience for ordinary users.

How will leprechauning affect volatility? The volatility of the market price of a coin depends on the change in supply and demand for it. Suppose demand for the coin increases. The price rises. Leprechauning becomes profitable with a smaller number of coins. More people start engaging in leprechauning. The mempool overflows. Fees rise. The profitability of leprechauning decreases. Demand for coins decreases. The price falls. That is, the feedback loop seems to work, and the coin price becomes less volatile, but this is achieved at the expense of the inconvenience of using the coin for anything other than leprechauning, and we are supposedly designing money.

I can provide another example of low-volatility money—according to David Friedman, adjusted for modern technology. Anyone wishing can freeze the necessary number of tokenized warehouse receipts for goods from a standard basket in a smart contract, which is selected so that its components hedge each other during price fluctuations due to external conditions. In exchange for the frozen tokens, the smart contract mints coins; let’s call them, say, “deives,” so that Satoshi isn’t lonely. At any moment, the owner of such a coin can turn to the smart contract and break it down into its components, receiving commodity tokens in return, and then sell them individually or exchange them for the actual goods. Or not break the coin and buy goods with it.

Money guarded by leprechauns would reduce the volatility of its value by increasing the transaction price; deives, however, would mean costs for their owner for the very fact of ownership, because if there are receipts for physical goods, someone bears the costs of storing these goods, and these costs will be factored into the price of the receipts. If deives are backed by futures, the coins will have a limited circulation period, after which the coin will be frozen until the owner extends the delivery date of the goods under the future. Again, the further from the physical warehouse a coin circulates, the larger the discount at which it will be accepted for payment, because its backing loses value by the amount of the cost of transporting the goods to the place of demand. Nevertheless, such tokens backed by commodity baskets could certainly be in circulation, especially around local trading hubs with significant warehouse areas.

So, we have at least two decentralized mechanisms for reducing volatility by increasing the costs of storing or circulating coins. There is in principle no such thing as free stability; one can only choose which costs are preferable. Or you can simply buy Bitcoins and accept that their price will fluctuate within fairly wide limits, hoping that the upward trend they previously demonstrated will continue in the future.

Numismatics, Planned Economy, and Trump

Sperry UNIVAC

According to Trump, communism suddenly emerged in the form of his idea of his OGAS, with neural networks and tariffs:

The Pentagon plans to use an AI system to establish benchmark prices for critical minerals… The program developed by DARPA is designed to calculate fair prices taking into account production costs and excluding market distortions, especially those caused by China. It is assumed that AI-based pricing will be combined with tariffs to stabilize markets and support Western manufacturers.

The Pentagon plans to use an AI system to establish benchmark prices for critical minerals… The program developed by DARPA is designed to calculate fair prices taking into account production costs and excluding market distortions, especially those caused by China. It is assumed that AI-based pricing will be combined with tariffs to stabilize markets and support Western manufacturers.

Such fat cannot be commented on without sin. Especially pleasing was the talk of “fair” prices intended to correct the market. Leaving aside the посыл itself (each can laugh at it independently), one wants to give an example of how I encounter, probably, the most perfect market imaginable in my practice. We’re talking about such a little-known thing for the broad masses – numismatics, specifically – and how prices are set for all sorts of coins. From the point of view of fairness (and generally any external criteria), this is an unsolvable problem. How to understand objectively what should cost more: some worn-out Republican bronze from Rome, known, let’s say, in 5-6 examples (of which 4 are in the British Museum) or a typical Morgans dollar, a rare variety of which there are hundreds, with historical value having evaporated?

People invented a simple thing for this purpose – a classic auction where the price is determined solely by the ratio of those wanting to buy and the number of lots. In numismatics there’s a clear pattern: 99% of numismatists collect their own country, others are not very interested. Chinese people collect China (and Korea and Vietnam, considering them historical China), Americans – the USA (rarely Mexico or Canada), Russians – Russia. To assess how much a lot will sell for, you need to estimate two things: how many people want it and how rich they are?

And here we encounter that very “market distortion” that Trump is fighting against. Few people on earth are as rich as Yankees – only there can the average numismatist afford to liquidate hobbies for $2-5k a month, and a serious one can afford it by orders of magnitude more, moreover, given the population size, there are far more numismatists there than in the world’s average. As a result, two or three rare madmen claim the unfortunate Roman bronze somewhere at Heritage, while for a regular dollar, but a rare variety – hundreds and thousands exist, and everyone has some cash. From this emerges the picture: in any ratings of “the most expensive coins/banknotes in the world,” the top positions are always occupied by lots from the USA, such as “10 cents, Philadelphia Mint, 1904,” which go into a brawl for hundreds of thousands, while really interesting positions with important cultural value and rarer ones – gain $20-30k. What will happen upon attempting to “correct” such blatant injustice? Coin trading will collapse, and a black market will emerge, like the one that existed in the USSR, when people exchanged interesting lots semi-undergroundly, printed them out with a copier and distributed among their friends approximate prices, and generally built their parallel economy, doing exactly what legal auctions do. The difference is that at an auction, both the auctioneer (and quite substantially – a typical commission makes up 20-25% of the winning price of the lot) and the state profit, as they take tax from the auctioneer. But in a clandestine market, only its underground participants win. Some things simply don’t work, whether we like it or not. Let’s wait for a black market for germanium and lithium?

War is for fools, and the flea-ridden seeks a bath.

Today everyone is having a day of reflections about the Russian-Ukrainian War. I was lucky enough to leave Russia before 2022, with a formed libertarian worldview, tactical goals and like-minded people. How wonderful that Putin didn’t read this textbook for the Dark Lord, where it’s suggested to crush your opponent immediately with all their might, instead of feeding them first for training the weakest subordinates. If he had launched a full-scale war in 2014, I don’t know what would have happened to my fate. Most likely, I would have been swearing at my parents eight years earlier, got involved in meaningless street protests, and just about now would be getting out of prison without really understanding what to do next.

Well, as for the current version of reality, I’ve enriched libertarian theory somewhat, persuaded a few people to leave Russia, am surviving with other emigrants in an increasingly deteriorating situation and also don’t really understand what to do next.

What will happen when this annoying war ends? People will switch to something more exciting and interesting – fortunately politicians then dance on the political stage to provide fresh news. Because if they stop being interesting to anyone, it’s not far off to anankapon. And when the Russians stop attracting intense unfriendly attention, perhaps Russian emigrants will start to live a little simpler. It’s wonderful when you are uninteresting to the state. You can start building normal long-term plans without caveats like “if in Skupstine don’t adopt some new crap”.

And this is me just finishing an anime, and there the war ended

Libertarian theory of war, section 3.3.2 completed

An important section has been completed, analyzing when the state attacks a group. Instead of the traditional internal classification of cases based on the answer to the question “is it attacking your group?”, here the priority had to be given to the answer to another question: “did the group identify itself as such?”

It also became clear that the next section will not be the final one regarding state-on-state attacks, but another intermediate one — about civil war.