Рубрика: Answers

Answers to your questions

Makhnovshchina 2

In the first part I attempted to demonstrate the specific logical twist that allows libertarians (in our hypothetical past, these are urban workers and primarily the technical intelligentsia, who simultaneously embraced the radically liberal ideas of Gustave de Molinari—who had given lectures in Russia not so long ago—the economic theories of the Austrians Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, and Kropotkin’s anarchism) to take an active part in the Russian Civil War on the side of those wishing to redistribute property, namely the practical rural anarchists under Makhno’s command.

How can the city and the countryside interact on equal terms under conditions of external threat? The village is capable of providing the army with people, horses, and food. The townspeople are far fewer in number, but they can provide the army with technological equipment, from spring-loaded carriages for tachankas to rails and wagons, plus repair everything from rifles to locomotives and artillery. It is precisely the city that provides artillerymen, engineers, and telephone operators. But Yekaterinoslav, while highly industrially developed, is still just one city, and it is incapable of producing the full range of military equipment. It doesn’t even produce ammunition or textiles. This means that the free land needs not only to somehow establish an exchange between the city and the countryside but also to trade with distant places, taking into account the hostile environment. Not everything can be obtained from this very hostile environment as a trophy in battle.

The historical Makhno entered into a military alliance with the Bolsheviks, falling into a critical dependence on their ammunition supply, while paying with the blood of his fighters. Ours, convinced by the libertarian preaching that freedom is not for sale and that the market is better than bondage, will attempt direct trade with the Entente powers and beyond, utilizing access to the port of Berdyansk and the railway leading there from Yekaterinoslav. This will help not only to purchase missing industrial goods in exchange for grain but also, for example, to revive the pipe factory by establishing the sea transport of its products to Batumi, and from there to the Caspian oil fields. Makhno is made to understand that the guarantee of peace is interdependence, not just the readiness to slash anyone who invades the native steppes with a saber. Neighbors should be interested in you living and prospering, rather than in quickly wiping you off the face of the earth.

An emissary is sent to Denikin, explaining that American President Wilson is declaring the right of nations to self-determination, and therefore the slogan of a single and indivisible Russia should be pushed into a corner, since he is your ally. If you want, raise slogans about protecting civilization from Bolshevik barbarism. If you want, defend the idea of indeterminacy and the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly. But you will have to forget about our free land, just as about Finland, the Baltics, Poland, two Ukraines, the Far Eastern Republic, and many other lands that will find it useful to do without the authority of Petrograd or any other city. In short: your truth is yours, ours is ours, don’t tread on us. Roughly the same is brought to the attention of Lenin’s government. Namely, we aren’t interfering with you in Petrograd, and you aren’t interfering with us in Hulyai-Pole, and if we need to exchange bread for calico, we are always happy to do so. It is more complicated with Petliura’s Ukraine, since we cannot prevent the peasants in his zone of influence from defecting to our side, and we inevitably find ourselves his enemy. But he will have so many problems with the Volunteer Army, which is neutral to us, that one needn’t worry about him especially much.

Will the Volunteer Army defeat the Bolsheviks if we do not operate in their rear? Perhaps not, but it will certainly be much harder for the Bolsheviks, and they definitely won’t take Crimea (we are on the way to Crimea, and we will let the retreating Denikinites pass, bartering artillery for bread from them). And later, the Reds will also get a thrashing from Pilsudski. The latter might, of course, poke his nose around here too, but that is unlikely: a prosperous land where there has been no war for a year, and where there is trade, including with Pilsudski’s allies, is unlikely to seem like a convenient target to him, unlike the capture of Smolensk. Again: Pilsudski needs buffer territories between himself and Russia—and here we are.

What will we get in the end? The collapse of the Russian Empire into a dozen sufficiently stable sovereign regions with all sorts of self-governance models. Against this backdrop, Gulyaipole will not be the most exotic — after all, there are also the Bolsheviks and some place like Mongolia with Baron Ungern. None of the regions will have the ability to subjugate the others, which was a completely natural state for the world at that time: the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Chinese empires all collapsed.

Here, perhaps, a paragraph with a very brief description of the free region’s self-governance model is needed. The land has become heavily depopulated and has ceased to be a scarce resource for a time. Anyone who wishes can take a piece and cultivate as much as they can manage. In the cities, at large enterprises, workers’ assemblies appoint and control guild masters and other management, which results in a certain amount of chaos, as is typical in egalitarian democracies. Small enterprises are either sole proprietorships or cooperatives. There are many consumer cooperatives — a useful form of organization, whether for hiring a janitor or for joint purchases in a village. The gold karbovanets is in circulation, though large denominations are initially quite scarce. For small transactions, anything and everything is used at first, but gradually the market for small change is taken over by tokens issued by the Yekaterinoslav tobacco factory, which guarantee exchange upon presentation for a pack of cigarettes. Following the development of foreign trade, foreign industrialists also appear. However, there is no central authority that could protect their interests. They must negotiate with elected representatives of workers’ collectives and other authoritative figures regarding the terms under which they will be allowed into the market. This usually implies a collective agreement with workers and cartel agreements to coordinate prices with adjacent enterprises. The commune, damn it! The army remains voluntary, yet it sits on a good ration and, in peacetime, engages mainly in border patrolling, so there is a certain surplus of those wishing to serve. Thus, gradually becoming accustomed to a peaceful, civilized life, marred only by skirmishes with Soviet Russia due to Soviet peasants fleeing to the free region, we experience the twenties.

And what next? Will Hitler be able to cope with a much stronger Poland? Will a much weaker Soviet Russia invade Finland? Will Japan go to war with the United States without the Reich as an ally, or limit itself to Asian conquests? Will Great Britain and France retain most of their African colonies? Will the foolish state of Israel appear? Most likely, the world in the twentieth century will be a much less insane place, much more like a natural continuation of the nineteenth century, where the Great War remains the most terrible monument to human arrogance.

Nevertheless, even this branch of development will not avoid the rise of statism and even, for example, the Great Depression. However, if in the actual twentieth century the communists of the whole world had a shining beacon in the form of a thoroughly mythologized Soviet Russia, then in our hypothetical reality, the anarchists of the whole world will also have such a beacon in the form of Hulyaypole. This world will certainly be no less complex and interesting, and therefore thanks to Nihilist for the question; it gave me great pleasure to speculate on this topic.

Makhnovshchina

Could you please review a YouTube video about Makhnovshchina? In particular, I am interested in the context of the Civil War. Let’s imagine that you are a libertarian living in Russia during those years. For whom would it be more logical to root: for the Cadets with their parliamentarism, market economy, and civil liberties, or for the Makhnovists with their anarchism, land redistribution, and collective self-governance?

Nihilist (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00012BTC)

Here is the video:

The question is interesting, but it’s not too difficult to give a short answer: of course, it would have made sense for libertarians at that time and in those places to support the Makhnovists specifically. Under the conditions of a civil war, it is impossible to build a normal free market anyway, but functional institutions of anarchy are more or less realistic.

Nevertheless, that key thesis regarding the Makhnovist movement, which is repeated twice in the proposed video — the state always defeats those who refuse to be it — requires an adequate response. Therefore, let’s try to estimate what joining the Makhnovist movement could have provided for libertarians.

To start with: where could they have even come from? Obviously, from the city. The works of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk had already been published in Russian and served as the foundation for the scientific critique of Marxism. So our hypothetical libertarians are a sort of reading club that could have continued to peacefully study all this theory, if practice hadn’t arrived right on their doorstep. In the conditions of the general revitalization of political thought before the February Revolution, they could have been arguing in journals with Milyukov and Struve about how to organize Russia, but when Soviets began to appear across the country, it became obvious that the workers’ striving for self-governance could not be ignored.

The main libertarian thesis regarding historical private property during periods of turbulent social transformation is this: Yes, the peaceful exchange of property titles is an obvious basis for continued ownership. But the forced seizure of property is an equally obvious basis for restitution. And in conditions where a thoroughly corrupt tsarist regime distorted all relationships through its abuses, including those concerning property, no one can truly establish to what extent each transfer of property titles was voluntary and to what extent it was forced. This means that defending all historical property rights indiscriminately means primarily defending injustice. And the grand war for the redistribution of property and social relations themselves occurring right now on our doorstep fully confirms this thesis.

Therefore, with all due respect to the representative of the Kadets, Mr. Struve, a member of the Special Council under General Denikin, the truth is more likely on the side of Batka Makhno. The peasants are fully entitled to redistribute the land so that everyone cultivating the land disposes of the fruits of their labor, and the workers are fully entitled to organize their own labor self-management. But this is precisely restitution, not the permanent order of things, and gradually property rights must stabilize so that they may thereafter pass from subject to subject exclusively through peaceful means. The permanent revolution that Comrade Trotsky dreams of is for those for whom war is a mother, whereas for us, peaceful labor is closer—unlike that Trotsky, who neither plowed the land nor worked in a factory. But Comrade Trotsky is right about one thing: we must permanently rid ourselves of anyone who would attempt to establish political power until those who desire it move on, otherwise all the conquests of the revolution will go to waste, for power is coercion, and the forced transfer of property rights will give rise to new demands for restitution.

In short, when in our hypothetical reality in October 1919 the Makhnovists entered Ekaterinoslav, they discovered a well-organized grassroots libertarian workers’ movement there, and their subsequent interaction was conducted on quite equal terms. How did the libertarian workers propose to organize the interaction between the city and the countryside?

I will write about this in my next post so as not to delay the publication, as I have already had a long pause due to my move to Serbia.

Horn of Plenty

Alex Rozov in the comments of my channel, and before that, in the channel “Myth Eaters”, proposed an interesting problem:

There is a myth that the nymph Amalthea, daughter of Ocean, in the form of a goat, suckled the infant Zeus in a cave on Crete. Amalthea had a horn of plenty, from which, upon a magic word, the fruits of the earth poured out in an endless stream… When Amalthea cast off her goat skin and disappeared, the horn was lost somewhere.

Suppose Amalthea’s horn was suddenly found where it was lost: on Crete.

How will this affect world politics and the economy?

Well, let me try to fantasize.

So, after another earthquake, a landslide revealed an ancient cave, and a couple of days later, some hiker tourists climbed in. In the cave, they discovered a stone bed, a table, and on the table, a goat’s horn in excellent condition. Since everyone on Crete has been badgered about Zeus’s caves and the myth of his foster mother, the hikers chuckle, thinking, “here’s another one, and even the horn is in place. Hey, Horn, what will you give us? At least give us a couple of oranges.” The Horn provides. After recovering from their initial shock, the hikers begin spamming requests and quickly find out that the Horn doesn’t pour beer and doesn’t give meat. It said “fruits of the earth,” so it will be fruits of the earth, period. A command recorded and played back from a phone works perfectly: the Horn does not require personal presence to execute an order; it only needs an instruction on what to serve. It also turns out that outside the cave, the Horn loses its magical properties. This is precisely what determines that the Horn will not leave Crete, and its further fate will be tied specifically to this island. Otherwise, of course, tourists would have no trouble smuggling a goat’s horn out of Greece, since it’s not exactly a golden treasure.

What happens next? Tourists disciplinedly turn to the Euphoria of Antiquities, and some legal complications begin. The object is clearly older than 1453, which means it undoubtedly belongs to the state. Theoretically, its place is in a museum, and tourists are entitled to a reward for the find. But the object is useless outside the cave, and the cave is located on private land. Unlike mainland Greece, in Crete, deep in the island, most land is either private or municipal, rather than state-owned. Thus, local archaeologists begin studying the cave, while the horn itself is also being studied by various other specialists who, of course, are interested in the physics of the materialization of the earth’s fruits. The owner of the cave, a certain Manolis Petrakis, sets up the “Amalthea” restaurant nearby, where he treats guests to vegetarian cuisine, and starts wine production right there, because in Greece it is difficult to think of a more high-margin way to process the fruits of the earth than making wine with a beautiful legend. Thus, during the day, eggheads study the horn, and at night it provides the location owner with raw materials for processing.

Next, large-scale business by local standards enters the game. The state, Mr. Petrakis, and the agro-industrial company AGROCRETA agree to create a special public-private partnership, the “Amalthea Consortium.” The concession agreement states that the state grants the consortium the exclusive right to use the Horn for 30 years and ensures permits for infrastructure installation, in exchange for which it receives a fixed annual payment of 50 million euros and 20% of the consortium’s net profit. Mr. Petrakis provides his real estate for the consortium’s use for 30 years, receiving a fixed annual payment of 2 million euros and 10% of the consortium’s net profit. The AGROCRETA company invests money, manages the consortium, bears the entrepreneurial risks, and receives 70% of the net profit from this.

Now the consortium’s task is to build logistics from the cave to the port of Heraklion, located 50km away across rugged mountainous terrain, which at its peak had a turnover of about 3 million tons per year. The “Princess Xenia” highway in Montenegro took 7 years to build, and with a length of 41km, it cost almost a billion euros. OK, the consortium doesn’t need a highway, just a good road for serious freight turnover. But even so, one must budget at least 4 years and at least 500 million, and, of course, the construction will be contracted to the Chinese. In the meantime, they will have to lay down gravel, then pour concrete up to the nearest local road, and be limited by its modest capacity.

Thus, from the very beginning, the consortium management will face the question: what to produce?

While all traffic is provided by ATVs and helicopters, they will have to work on special orders, such as “deliver 100kg of coffee beans to Mr. Papadakis’s craft roaster, full analogs of the lot sold at an auction in Costa Rica for 50 dollars per kilo” — but such a delivery will satisfy all the hipsters on the entire island for long, and the rest simply won’t understand why they should buy such expensive coffee when Lavazza is available in the supermarket.

When the first trucks start coming, they can already be loaded, for example, with cocoa beans, because there is a more than solid price per ton of raw material, and the global market is quite large. As freight turnover further expands, one could think about natural rubber, but here is the problem: you can’t eat it. The stupid artifact is enchanted to provide the owner with fruits of the earth for food, not for just anything. So, rubber, mahogany, and the like will unfortunately have to be left to the local producers, but on saffron or natural vanilla, one can make up for it completely, simply by driving all other producers out of the global market, because why would they even be needed.

But when, finally, a full-fledged highway designed for the heavy traffic capable of fully loading the port will be built, the main cargoes will essentially remain the same cocoa and coffee, and the consortium’s capacity will only be enough to bite off a certain share of the global market for these goods; logistics will not allow for more. Of course, in addition to this, all of Crete will have access to cheap durian, coconuts, and other exotic items that previously were expensive solely due to the long logistical arm. But there is no point in shipping these tropical goods beyond the EU, as tariffs begin there, and Asia can fend for itself—Heraklion is not made of rubber.

And if anyone fears that an endless stream of rice, wheat, and potatoes will pour from Crete, they are fearing in vain. This will only happen in years of local crop failures, military crises, and the like. The Horn must not leave the cave, and no matter how much you expand or reinforce its vault, it will still be a hole of a fixed width, through which a conveyor belt travels one way with empty packaging and the other way with filled containers, then reloads onto trucks, goes to the port, is loaded onto container ships, and is distributed around the world. From one single port, and there are thousands of such ports in the world.

In order for the Horn of Plenty to truly crash all global food markets, and the energy market along with it due to biodiesel, a new transport revolution will be required. Someday, perhaps, this will happen, but I see another event as far more likely. It is not for nothing that at the very beginning of the story, scientists began to study the horn. It is they who will eventually find that physical principle on which it operates. And when a universal synthesizer stands in every home, the goat Amalthea will finally be able to consider her mission on Earth accomplished. Where to look for her after that? I suppose on the Jupiter moon of the same name, but for a description of that stage—turn to the Strugatskys.

Debates on enemy platforms

I have a friend who is a freshman. His university has introduced mandatory, useless subjects at the expense of the rest of the learning process. I am mainly talking about “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.” It is terrible propaganda, a twisting of facts, and the omission of others, all heavily seasoned with emotions and the speaker’s personal opinion.

I have the opportunity to attend this lecture without being a student and to publicly leave the instructor exposed, as the fairy tales coming out of his mouth are easily shattered by logical inconsistencies and objective reality.

The question itself: Is it worth the candle?

Anonymous question

Your doubts are completely justified. The question of whether it is worth the candle arises when the inevitable costs of an activity are large enough, while the potential gain is small. For example, if you played cards at night before the Industrial Revolution with tiny stakes, it is quite possible that even the person who hits the jackpot would not recoup the cost of the burned candles from their winnings. If, in a police state where the public expression of non-enthusiastic views is punished by imprisonment, you were to hold a debate with a state propagandist before an audience of a couple of dozen people, even a total rhetorical rout of the opponent might not be worth the subsequent lost years. However, blowing up a drone manufacturing plant might justify the risks of criminal prosecution in the eyes of many.

Of course, to make the game worth the candle, it is not necessarily about raising the stakes. You can limit yourself to reducing the costs. For example, participating in online debates under a pseudonym. Or moving to a less repressive state. Or engaging in a public dispute with a state lecturer on the subject of paleontology. In other words, playing cards with small stakes, but after the Industrial Revolution, when candles have become cheaper and you can burn even cheaper electricity instead.

In your particular case, where resources are scarce and you don’t want to take too many risks, but you want to harm a specific person who represents the hated state, and in such a way that they have a chance to understand their mistakes, it seems to me that a minor terrorist attack, also known as hooliganism, would be the optimal solution. The simplest thing would be to break a car window. And the stone used to break the window could be wrapped in a piece of paper with a profound saying. You know, something like, “Sudden arrival is the foundation of Russian statehood.” The person is left with nothing, and at the same time suffers an intellectual defeat, which is exactly what you wanted.

Of course, the recipe will have to be modified to fit the context, and obvious precautions will have to be taken: don’t get caught on camera, leave your phone at home, and don’t leave traces of your DNA on evidence.

Review of examples of an agreement not implying external enforcement

This order is accompanied by an advance donation in the amount of 33 EURMTL.

Not long ago, I received an order from Rinat Enikeev for a review of the Onym messenger, and now he has asked for a review of a set of documents called “Founders’ Agreements.” He is primarily interested in how “orthodox” these agreements are from a libertarian perspective, as well as any other thoughts I might have on them. For roughly the same purpose, he even passed them to Stefan Kinsella. Stefan noted the document’s flowery style and the lack of definitions in the text, but mostly analyzed the points that were personally closer to him, i.e., those concerning intellectual property.

To start, I will provide links to the documents under consideration in the order that makes the most sense for reviewing them:

1. For whom and why the hell. Here, Rinat explains that the proposed agreement will not be of interest to just any potential co-founder, but only to those who are prepared to invest only labor and time into the common cause, but not money.

2. Principles. This outlines the main idea: to build an agreement that excludes any hierarchy and coercion among the participants. The only source of obligations is ongoing consent, not any kind of external order.

3. Agreement for two. The actual text of the agreement for two participants.

4. Agreement for three. The text of the agreement for three participants. It differs from the previous version by a slightly more complex procedure for the division of property.

I would say that what we have here is an ambitious attempt to make a smart contract function in the real world. As long as there is consent among all participants of the agreement, they act together in some way. As soon as disagreement arises, they have procedures in place to express it, and then ultimately arrive at some new agreement, even if that agreement manifests as the termination of their joint activity.

However, just as blockchain is not the Internet of Things, a smart contract in the physical world is only implementable as long as the objects it regulates behave according to the logic of the contract. As long as the founders operate with certain information objects that either represent knowledge (and are therefore freely copied) or can be cryptographically restricted—as long as the proposed agreement describes something close to reality. But when an enterprise’s property is a certain physical object, it can be, say, taken, appropriated, and sold, and then the person simply ceases to communicate with the co-founders. What should the co-founders do in response according to the agreement? Wipe their hands of it, leave all the property on the balance sheet of the old company, and found its fork without the runaway co-founder.

Another problem associated with such agreements is the extreme difficulty of dividing profits in any way other than equally. Theoretically, of course, the one who made the decisive contribution might suggest they would like to receive a more significant share; however, in a situation where a partner can freeze all proceeds simply by refusing to communicate, the producer will have to contend with the free rider and pay them simply for the status of being a co-founder.

In other words, despite the nobility of the premises behind their drafting, such agreements scale very poorly. As long as there is consensus, a written agreement is not required. As soon as consensus disappears, anyone can violate any clause and disregard any procedures, especially if it reaches a serious conflict rather than just resulting in a loss of interest in further participation.

To put it aphoristically, such agreements prioritize freedom over property and, therefore, in essence, do not protect property at all. But we are talking about creating a commercial enterprise! And such an enterprise is generally created to convert time, effort, and entrepreneurial talent into property. If following the agreement creates systemic threats to such conversion, it is unlikely to be actively applied.

However, I do not consider the work done to be useless. It’s just that I feel we shouldn’t push the codification of life to extremes. Rather, I would find it useful to frame the individual mechanics of the proposed agreement as recommendations on how to protect freedom within the conditions of contractual activities. For example, it is useful to use multi-signatures. It is useful to divide equally under conditions of uncertainty regarding individual contribution. And if it is difficult to divide incomparable sets of things equally, it is not necessary to monetize them first; one could use the “one divides, the other chooses” mechanic, or in the case of N participants—”draw lots to see who divides, and then draw lots to see who gets what.”

In my view, the very striving to minimize coercion in the sphere of voluntary transactions is quite commendable. But the higher the initial trust, and the more details one can neglect, the shorter the contract will be, and the better it will be in my eyes. “We live together until one of us gets tired of it.” Or “I contribute this much money and a little help with labor, you make the main labor contribution and a little bit of junk, we split the profit in such-and-such a proportion, and you can kick me out, but then you must return my investments.” Or “I write as I see fit, you donate as much as you see fit.” Or even “We try to avoid each other, but if we run into each other in public, we tolerate one another and do not express dislike.” In my eyes, these are all good agreements that are easy to remember and easy to follow. However, I absolutely do not rule out that some people will find them completely unsuitable because the nuances and procedures are not specified.

The Billionaires’ Final Plan — a review

An anonymous user asked me to comment on a video from the Netstalkers channel about how “famous super-rich libertines arrange libertarianism for themselves and the state boot for everyone else.”

I am completely unfamiliar with the channel, however, it is clearly better known to the public than my own, as it had 859 thousand subscribers at the time of this post. The video in question fits well within the channel’s theme, which mainly discusses various behind-the-scenes global mechanics. Well, the topic is in demand, and I want to understand how this demand is exploited in relation to libertarianism.

I don’t want to analyze the style of presentation. Since people watch it, who am I to dispute someone else’s business approach. The video provides quite correct facts: about the book “The Sovereign Individual,” which set many current trends; about how the development of autonomous libertarian territories proceeded, from seasteading in the Andaman Sea to Prospera and Network School; about the fact that this movement is largely driven by representatives of the American tech and financial industries; and finally, that these same people often provide business services to the state, despite all their libertarian rhetoric. Oh, yes, the theme of cosplaying the Roman Republic was also touched upon, but that’s been going on in the US since the Founding Fathers, so there’s nothing particularly surprising about that.

The final punchline is quite funny: basically, that capitalism is already established in the world and works reasonably well, but no, there are troublemakers who are bored and want some action. Thus, enthusiasts of private charter cities are equated to Putin. And rightly so; enough of chewing over the now-tedious Hitler, it was long overdue to find a new bogeyman. Now everyone will be equated to Putin for every possible reason, until the understanding of what exactly is wrong with him is completely blurred, but with a firm fixation that he is definitely terrible, and no one doubts this—unless they want to be seen as literally Putin themselves.

The video prompted me to reflect on the evolution of the criticism of the libertarian movement.

Historically, the first platform for criticism boils down to the idea that libertarian settlers will be communally helpless, that in an-cap there will be no one to build roads, and that these folks will eventually have to go begging to the state if they want normal infrastructure. There are texts about this regarding New Hampshire, and Sperry incriminates Coopersmith with roughly the same position while he was establishing order in Hong Kong. In the video being discussed, this position is no longer used because it is outdated.

The second position is that if an-caps were given their way, they would build a grim corporate cyberpunk world with ruthless exploitation of workers and charging a fee for every sneeze. High tech low life, all that. This is again illustrated by Sperry’s article on Hong Kong, the game BioShock, and is very widely represented in general mass discourse. The video about the billionaires’ final plan hints at this, but, of course, does not illustrate it with real examples.

What happens when an-caps actually found a settlement and start establishing their own rules? Everything turns out fine for them. It becomes a normal peaceful life where people are busy with their own affairs. But then the state inevitably comes along and tears everything to shreds, because where is the cyberpunk, what are you showing us, where is the oppression, are you libertarians or did you just come out for a walk? Now we will show you oppression.

Thus, the third complaint about charter cities is: why do these suckers even bother, the big uncle will come anyway, break this sandcastle, and send everyone to toil in a sand quarry. Some “autonomous settlement” that can’t even withstand a navy. The author of the video slightly indicates this position but does not delve deep, because his task is not to criticize the state, but those who wish to avoid its embrace.

Instead, he goes all out criticizing libertarians from a fourth angle: look, the libertarians have learned from their early attempts, and now they more and more often speak to states from a position of strength. To do this, they simply bring another state over to their side. And to attract that state, they provide services in the proper organization of oppression. Why specifically in this field? Because these are exactly the services the state needs; it buys them.

In other words, the criticism of libertarian autonomous structures now follows the line of hypocrisy. That they establish one set of rules for themselves, but help states establish completely different ones. Well, here we are.

What should the next step be? I think it’s quite obvious. Another libertarian settlement will actually be able to stand up for itself without appealing to state courts and without turning to other states—but simply by its own strength. What will libertarians be incriminated with then? Well, this sort of criticism was quite accurately described by Rozov in the Meganesian cycle. The founders of private autonomous settlements will be accused of war crimes, immorality, poaching talent, financing extremist organizations, and so on. These accusations have one thing in common—they are small dick energy. Anger born of helplessness. I dream of living to see this stage, of course)

Onym messenger review

I was sent a donation in the amount of 77 EURMTL and asked for a review of the decentralized messenger Onym. Getting started.

The website onym.app explains the concept of the messenger. Its main idea is to eliminate the single point of failure and allow the user to choose the services that will be responsible for different components of information exchange.

The assumed structure of the product is roughly as follows.

  1. The authors offer an open-source messenger client that is installed on users’ phones. Anyone wishing to do so can write their own client, and it will be able to operate within this same protocol.
  2. Registering a new user does not require the input of any data; keys are generated on the user’s phone and tied to it. Since, however, anyone can write their own client, nothing prevents them from registering users even with full KYC, if they can figure out how to convince them to install specifically their client.
  3. Data transfer occurs via Nostr relays. By default, the client uses a single relay supported by the project authors, but it can be replaced with one’s own or any public relay. A relay is a dumb transmission mechanism: it receives data encrypted with the user’s private key and puts it into open access, from where anyone who wants it can take it. Relays are not obligated to store user content for long, so ultimately all data is strictly tied to the end device on which the messenger client is installed.
  4. The most unusual part of the architecture is related to group chats. Information about who is an administrator, who can invite new members, and who is part of the group in general is recorded in smart contracts on the Stellar blockchain. Thanks to this, group management does not depend on any single server. However, the end user does not need to worry about funds in their account for blockchain entries; this is done for them by a so-called relayer. The price of transactions in Stellar is pennies, but this is nevertheless a point of failure. An attacker could organize the registration of many fake accounts, creating a new identity in their client and immediately deleting it. The registration of each such identity would require a blockchain transaction, and the relayer would have to pay for it. Currently, the project operates on a test version of the blockchain, but upon moving to the mainnet, the expenses will become real.

The website also has an English-language page describing the threat model within which the messenger operates, and based on which the decision should be made regarding how safe it is to use. It is claimed that the messenger cannot withstand such obvious threats as a mole in the chat, device compromise, and physical coercion; such hypothetical threats as quantum hacking; and such resource-intensive threats as a biased Stellar validator or systems similar to the Russian SORM. The latter, however, only allow one to approach the disclosure of chat participants’ anonymity, but not the reading of messages within it.

Now a bit about personal impressions of working with the Onym messenger. This is an early alpha, meaning it is, of course, terribly raw, and a discount must be made for this, evaluating not so much the functionality that already exists, but that which is intended. The messenger allows creating groups, inviting an arbitrary number of people there, and communicating in these groups. In principle, many other Nostr clients can do the same, since such functionality is part of the protocol. But there, chats have some confusing semi-public status, and Onym, thanks to the additional Stellar layer, ensures chat privacy without using private relays. In general, this cute feature is intended to be the messenger’s killer feature: ordinary Nostr clients are not private enough, and private device-bound messengers like Briar require fully trusting the messenger client. Here, trust is distributed among several layers, in each of which one can choose a specific implementation, including one’s own.

As of today, the messenger looks like a simple proof of concept, and therefore, in essence, is aimed at IT specialists. For the average user, it looks a bit “bones out,” as they are offered setup instructions for Dockers and similar specialized matters in far too many places. I think that the main task for the authors of the idea today should be increasing the number of contributors in the project’s GitHub and generating interest among Nostr enthusiasts. Looking at the GitHub, it is clear that the project started in early May, then went quiet for a long time, and a few weeks ago the dust was blown off it and they continued hacking away. But if the project were to form even a small core of users who regularly sent their issues, the authors of the original idea would clearly have more motivation to work more briskly.

My recommendations to the messenger authors, in order of decreasing urgency:

  1. Refine the minimal functionality that allows using the messenger: group administration (deleting users/messages), push notifications, demonstration of user statuses, at least a simple online/offline. It is essential to finish the claimed but currently unimplemented account export-import capability.
  2. Get users used to a distributed architecture. The client should offer a list of independent relays and Blossom servers with monitoring of their status. As alternative relayers and smart contract implementations for group management appear, a similar choice should appear for them as well. Without the offer of third-party services, an unprepared user will be limited to default settings, and this will create a single point of failure.
  3. Think about a desktop application and the possibility of simultaneously running the messenger from several devices. Tying the entire identity to the device rather than to the key will simply not allow the messenger to achieve any kind of mass adoption.
  4. Implement audio and video calls; the Nostr protocol already allows providing such functionality.
  5. Implement channel functionality, including a streaming function, which can also be realized via the Nostr protocol, while connecting Stellar smart contracts will allow one to avoid exposing oneself in the channel’s subscriber list.

The project has another website, opym.foundation, which describes the foundation that is intended to manage the infrastructure. The foundation’s website talks about why the foundation needs money and how it will be managed. The talk about money is devoid of calculations, and this strongly spoils the impression for potential investors. Moreover, the idea of a governing body somewhat contradicts the premise that every user should easily be able to launch their own service to handle that or another aspect of message exchange. It seems to me that the idea with the foundation should not take off, even if the concept of a Nostr messenger with Stellar contracts is warmly received by the public. Therefore, I do not plan to analyze the proposals for foundation management in detail, however, those who disagree with me can easily figure them out themselves on the foundation’s website.

Overall, the idea seems powerful to me, but in order for it to conquer the market, a great deal of effort will be required.

Can you give recommendations for psychological help for unhappy libertarians suffering from statism?

And if possible, please provide contacts for verified psychologists who work with this topic.

Nihilist (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.0005 ₿)

In my book about ancap, there are two chapters on this topic: Problems Within Us and, accordingly, Eliminating Problems Within Oneself. In short: from early childhood, our lives being completely dependent on our parents leads to paternalism being something familiar and natural to us, while the drive for freedom, the readiness to take full responsibility for one’s life, and other libertarian things manifest gradually, not in everyone, and not fully. The state exploits this vulnerability, giving rise to statism, which is a form of abusive relationship. This means that statism within oneself must be reflected upon, worked through, and one must learn to outgrow this childhood trauma. And that is exactly when the author of the question knocks on my door, asking for recommendations on this matter, as if I were a verified psychologist and not an armchair theorist.

And I have great news for you. I am not a psychologist, but the market is full of psychologists. Among them (I should mention right away that I have no firm confidence in this precisely because I am not a psychologist and have never used their services) there are not only charlatans but also true professionals of their craft. And if you give them a task, even one that sounds quite unusual to them, they might, of course, bail and go into denial, like DeepSeek when asked about what happened in Tiananmen Square, or they might actually start doing their job.

So, here is my recommendation for psychological help for those suffering from the statism of their own brain. Go to a psychologist and present the problem: “I cannot seem to get out of an abusive relationship. The abuser uses me at their discretion, imposes rules on me that constantly change, and refuses any firm commitments. I owe them simply by virtue of being born, but they owe me nothing. They demand love from me and constantly belittle me in petty ways. They take my money and constantly instill the idea that I cannot survive without them. And while I logically understand that I need to run away from this monster, I truly struggle to imagine life without them. Help me get out of this dependency.”

Then, once the psychologist states that they are ready to handle a task of this sort, all that remains is to add that this abuser is the state. At this point, the psychologist will likely experience a slight freeze, but then there is a chance that, having already begun to think about the object of dependency in their professional terms while describing the task, they will by inertia begin to think of the state in the same way. And that is exactly what we want! They will get a truly interesting problem, you will get professional help, and the state will lose two statists: you and the psychologist. Moreover, after this, you will be able to recommend them to others suffering from statism—and then the second part of your question will also be answered.

How do you, as a libertarian, view the historical image of the Amazons?

If we assume that they truly existed as a society of women who were independent owners of themselves, their weapons, and their property, and were not under the power of men, could this be considered a manifestation of those principles of personal autonomy, self-ownership, and equality that you write about?

Nihilist (question accompanied by a donation of 0.0005 ₿)

Even if we don’t assume that the Amazons were a real, purely female society, and instead consider them—following current historians—to be ordinary steppe female warriors in ordinary nomadic tribes, they still represented an intellectual challenge for the Greeks creating their myths.

The attitude toward common curiosities, like people with dog heads living somewhere on the fringes of the Oecumene, was much more relaxed: so what if there are cynocephali, my neighbor over there is practically a ram. But here we are talking about a different social structure, where a woman possesses military honor and valor, which means that these qualities, as it turns out, are inherent to every woman. Meanwhile, we, an enlightened people, know that if you just give a woman her way, this weak, cunning, and corrupted creature will destroy all of civilization: she will chatter endlessly at folk assemblies about her trivial problems, seduce worthy husbands into unworthy deeds, and in her audacity, she might even demand the right to a divorce while keeping the children… No way, forget it. Lock them in the gynaeceum. Even the Lacedaemonians, for all the female liberties they allow, still don’t let them into the folk assembly. And here, naturally, people live freely, plundering neighbors no worse than we enlightened Greeks, and women participate equally with men in all affairs. Such a thing cannot be.

Better to tell a story about how these women kick their men out entirely, and only through this strange practice did they acquire all the virtues befitting warriors. Now this is a challenge not for a reformist politician, but merely for a hero: sail to this land, plunder their capital, and defeat the queen in a duel and fuck her. Worthy booty. One can even consider this union a bond of equals; it’s not scary. After all, great heroes coupled with goddesses, and that’s no reason to lock a goddess in a gynaeceum, so it’s forgivable here as well. The main thing is to return home afterward without an Amazon wife who will start imposing her own order in the new place. Or do you think that’s also fine? Well, here is the story of Medea. She, of course, wasn’t an Amazon but a sorceress, but she also tried to impose her order in Iolcus, and it didn’t end well. So we don’t need any of that. Our establishments are the best.

But let’s assume that the Amazons were a real people in which women “lesbo-separated” and led roughly the kind of lifestyle described in the myths. Cultural norms can be very persistent, so why wouldn’t this specific cultural norm survive into fully historical times? What would that change in human history?

First, of course, the Amazon people would be conquered by the Persians. There is no point in appointing a satrap to a nomadic people; a dynasty of Amazon queens would simply recognize their vassalage. This wouldn’t particularly change the Amazons’ way of life. They would fight at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Plataea; Xenophon would tell us about the retreat of Greek mercenaries through the land of the Amazons in his Anabasis, and Seleucus or Mithridates would couple with their queens—in general, the Amazons in antiquity would feel quite fine as a people within one empire or another. They would still remain a desirable prize for a hero, and in this capacity, they would significantly legitimize female monarchical rule. Equal marriages of monarchs with equal participation in affairs would be perceived as a variety of cultural norm.

Serious problems would begin for the Amazons with the emergence of Islam, since the cultural norm it aggressively imposes has very little in common with the historical Amazon way of life. Of course, nomadic tribes usually Islamize slowly and incompletely, but the most orthodox Amazons in their beliefs would likely migrate from their southern Black Sea coast to some middle-of-nowhere in the eastern Caspian steppes, where they would survive even the Mongols without much trouble. To the Mongols, the Amazons would not be some particular exoticism, at least no more so than the customs of Tibet. When the Amazon territory fell under the power of the Soviet Union, they would, of course, start molding them into a model for the liberated women of the East, but not too zealously, because the Soviet woman must be emancipated without separation from men.

And now the Amazon autonomous republic is part of the republic of Turkmenistan. The Amazons breed excellent horses and weave wonderful carpets depicting Queen Penthesilea defeating the Achaeans at Troy. Their cultural traditions haven’t gone anywhere: they still hold a large annual festival where local jigits gather and compete with the festival hostesses. The most worthy are chosen by them as husbands and they depart for remote nomadic camps to conceive a child. After the first signs of pregnancy appear, the wife waves goodbye to her spouse, and he clears out, leaving an email. If a boy is born, the father is notified, and he is told to come back in another year to take his son.

Dating apps – the market crash we were so afraid of?

It is clear that incentives in commercial dating apps do not always align with the expectations of clients and society as a whole (to quickly find a spouse and never use the app again). They have to keep the business afloat somehow. What else is there to hope for if not some government uncle, a state-approved dating site, and standing in an electronic queue for a “wife voucher”? Perhaps philanthropy, as a stopgap for awkward moments in a market economy—that Musk will create a less mindless dating app for us that will get family formation and birth rates back on their feet?

Saddam Hussein’s rotating aluminum pipes

Let’s go through the problem you’ve outlined. People want to meet, and the market monetizes the fulfillment of this desire. People want to meet for different purposes and in different manners, so the market is naturally segmented.

Online dating services theoretically allow a user to quickly obtain information about people with complementary needs and to meet more purposefully. After going through enough options, a spherical client in a vacuum finds a suitable partner, after which they move to communicating via less specialized tools, leaving the dating service. This is unprofitable for the service creators; they are interested in the client returning again and again, and, of course, purchasing a premium subscription. As long as dating apps have not gone out of style, this model works quite well; people really do return. Furthermore, since the market is already quite saturated, the success of dating apps cannot be linked to simply attracting new clients; it is precisely that the use of these apps has managed to become a lifestyle for a fairly broad segment of people. I am not one of them, so I do not claim to provide a deep analysis—I am simply noting their existence.

Of course, there are those who have not succeeded in using dating apps. The reasons can vary. The most banal is that the process of meeting itself can be perceived by some people as a source of intense stress. They are not opposed to finding a partner in life, and would even settle for a fading interest after a year, after which they would need to find a new one, but they will do this as rarely as possible, and are certainly not ready for a queue of candidates from which they must choose, say, one and reject the rest. And they are even less ready for a series of rejections or being ignored. If every failed encounter becomes a reason for serious distress, then an app capable of providing dozens of such experiences a day turns out to be a hellish invention that drives a person into the depths of depression and from which one should stay far away.

Of course, psychological difficulties are not the only reason for not using fast-dating services. A person may have certain preferences regarding a prospective partner and the method of meeting them that simply do not fit into the typical application scenario of an app.

So, does it turn out that there are tons of people in the world who wish to meet, but this desire cannot be monetized through specialized mass-market apps? Yes. There are tons of people who happily buy fast food, and tons of people who do not consider this option at all because for them it is: too shabby, too expensive, too unhealthy, too anything else—in short, it doesn’t fit. But these bastards eat something! Yes, and these bastards meet somewhere, even if they don’t have a Pure account.

But the author of the question is not concerned with getting everyone hooked on fast-dating. On the contrary, they likely believe that fast-dating kills marriages, childbirth, and the replenishment of the taxpayer ranks. I find this concern baseless. Mises once wrote that it is foolish to blame an entrepreneur for producing guns instead of butter; this only means that investments in guns are more profitable. However, he will gladly switch to butter when the conjuncture changes, so it is foolish to blame him for starting wars just to sell more guns—that is the prerogative of politicians, who are, of course, always happy to blame entrepreneurs for their own ignoble dealings. And while many may wish to dispute this thesis regarding guns, claiming that dating app creators are to blame for the decline in birth rates is a bit too much. At the very least, the dates don’t match; the second demographic transition began much earlier. So this is merely a symptom: people want fast encounters—here is a service for fast encounters. People have always wanted fast encounters; they just used to pick each other up in bars or even hit on each other in the streets, and now apps have not only greatly simplified their lives but also saved a lot of people from random harassment.

OK, but people also need strong, exclusive relationships, not just fast and disposable ones, so where is the app for finding them? Why is this need not being monetized?

Fine, let me imagine how I would monetize the need for people to establish strong family relationships in the IT sphere if I had access to serious capital. I would create a service that provides a person with a personal AI advisor, which can be configured to support a certain type of relationship. To start, you simply communicate with it, send it your favorite books and movies, discuss them, tell it what you value in relationships and what you cannot stand—and this in itself is a consumer benefit, allowing one to better realize their needs and learn how to communicate them. But the assistant also communicates with other clients. At some point, it might ask, “Are you acquainted with so-and-so? Great guy, and it seems he might suit you.” You ask the assistant questions about the proposed candidate, the assistant asks questions about you, and at some point the AI confidant reports: “You know, when he read about you, he became interested, and it seems he’s not opposed to meeting. Maybe we should start a three-way chat?”

And now, you are communicating directly, but the confidant is invisibly with you, and you can still privately discuss the details of your communication with it. Then you meet, grow closer, and at some point decide to join your destinies. And here you receive an offer: why remain in the general database, wouldn’t it be better to take care of privacy? And you rent a personal server where your confidant moves with all the knowledge about you. It continues to care for the well-being of your marriage, and you continue to pay for the service. At this stage, the company no longer receives your data and limits itself to model updates and technical support.

Such a monetization model is anything but fast food. For lovers of fast dating, all this is too troublesome, expensive, and excessive. Therefore, there is no danger that you will be pushed toward people looking for a one-time hookup; on the contrary, only virtuous husband candidates. Right at this stage, one could hit their forehead and shout: “Aha, I have an excellent candidate to implement all this magnificence,” and push him toward Dobroum. But I am a libertarian, not some conservative, so let’s think further.

It may very well turn out that you prefer open relationships, or even polyamorous ones. At this point, we lose Dobroum as a potential founder of our startup, as well as the possibility of government grants. Nevertheless, I see no reason why an AI confidant could not serve cute polyamorous kittens, same-sex couples, and all others: as long as they have a need for long-term, stable, ecological relationships based on love and trust in each other, this need can be monetized using the proposed tool. But, of course, the more exotic the kitten, the harder it will be for them to find that very partner or group of partners. However, as the service grows, simply by the theory of probability, options will appear for them as well.

Thus, the market will once again make the world more beautiful.