David Friedman’s laurels wouldn’t leave me alone, and I wanted to add a bit of pathos to the book. So, spending an evening, I finally provided the book with an epigraph. Now an audiobook can be recorded, if there are any volunteers.
People strive to live in peace with themselves. People strive to live in peace with others. What then punishes us with war? The spirits of war — what lurks behind them?
To build cunning, secret plans, To amass strength, to stock up on weapons, To practice the art of deception… Is this necessary? Who needs this?
Is the master an offspring of hell? Have you not grown accustomed to slavery over the years? To rise and strike? Or perhaps, there is no need? Do it. Thus demand the Spirits of freedom.
I don’t quite understand publishing books on paper, unless they are books for small children that can be physically chewed on or, at a slightly older age, creatively doodled in. Even if a person leads a sedentary life in their own home, storing paper books at home is a luxury, as it requires acquiring such a strange vintage interior item as a bookshelf (if there are few books in the house, a small shelf in the toilet would be more suitable). And if a person rents housing, is forced to move from time to time, and doesn’t even know in which country they will be in six months, then for them the expression “paper book” is definitely something for the rich. Therefore, paper books migrate to public spaces, and they can more often be seen in some time-cafes next to board games. The few paper books that for some reason ended up with me in recent years quickly migrated to one of these spaces, and now in the apartments I rent there lies a single comic in Serbian about Corto Maltese, which wandered in from a comics festival.
Nevertheless, paper books, this deeply niche product, are still not only being bought but even produced in new editions. For example, my acquaintances were engaged in this back in Russia, founding the “Svoboda” publishing house, then continued in Montenegro, and now in Germany. However, they are still oriented towards the Russian market and are sold mainly on Ozon. I doubt that my own books will be published in this way because they are extremely small in volume, which means that the share of postage costs in the expenses of obtaining the finished product will be disproportionately high. However, if I happen to write another work, then three books under one cover would already have a chance.
On the other hand, “Svoboda” published my translation of Friedman’s “Mechanics of Freedom,” and there are even a couple of dozen reviews on the Ozon website. You can perfectly well read the translation absolutely free in electronic form, but if you enjoy owning a hefty souvenir brick, then you are welcome. As I understand it, the links I will provide here contain a mention that they were received specifically from me. I think this is for analytics, so that the publishers understand how effective advertising in this way is. I have no idea myself; we’ll see.
What’s there on libertarianism, besides Friedman?
2. Alya Zanoza. A Guide to Rational Egoism. Well, I’ve started with my trump card, of course. You are probably familiar with Alya from her YouTube channel, which will likely be soon renamed to “Serbian Political Stove.” The text of the book is not in the public domain, so buying a two-hundred-page brick is not only a souvenir but also an extremely perverse way to get acquainted with the content of Alya’s creativity. If the author throws the text my way, maybe I’ll even post a review.
3. Linda and Morris Tannehill. The Market for Liberty. This is another exclusive, previously unpublished in Russian. Friedman and the Tannehills almost certainly actively cross-pollinated each other’s ideas (judging by the nearly identical publication years and references in Friedman, since I am not directly familiar with the Tannehills’ work). For instance, the famous idea of private security agencies, which are intended to replace the most toxic function of the state, was launched to the masses in the 20th century specifically by the Tannehills.
4. Hans-Hermann Hoppe. The Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. This is no longer an exclusive of “Svoboda” publishing, but a reprint of an edition by the Novosibirsk Hyde Park Library. Judging by the annotations, the most valuable part of the book is not the discussions on socialism and capitalism at all, but Hoppe’s argumentative ethics, upon which he presumably builds all further constructions.
5. Ayn Rand. Capitalism: An Apologia. This is a noticeably less popular author, judging by the number of reviews on Ozon. This is a collection of various articles in which Ayn Rand applies the tools of her developed objectivism to discuss different political concepts. Maybe in my old age I’ll also put together a collection of appendices to different aspects of reality for my own theories…
6. David Bergland. Libertarianism in One Lesson. Somehow it happened that I knew about this book with the basics of libertarianism, but didn’t get around to reading it in my time, immediately rushing to gnaw through Rothbard. As a result, I have no idea how good this direct competitor to my Ancap is for carriers of Russian culture. If anyone has compared them, please share your opinion.
Perhaps in the foreseeable future I will make more detailed reviews of these books, as well as new releases from the publisher, should any appear.
I still have some grievances regarding the cover: Rothbard’s portrait resemblance to his spirit in the image leaves much to be desired, and the neural network stubbornly insisted on depicting me in exactly that image, despite the reference I provided. Nevertheless, I generally like the result, so I’ll leave it as is. But if anyone decides to try and improve it, I’m all for it; post your versions in the comments.
I also believe that finishing the book is a good occasion to remind readers of the link for donations to the author: https://ancapchan.info/donate/
So, the book on libertarian theory of war has finally touched upon war itself just before the finale. A couple of paradoxical conclusions and several banal ones have been made, and recommendations have been formulated on what libertarians should do in all this mess—in short, I am rather satisfied with the new section.
Now all that’s left is to smoothly summarize the entire text, and then the book can be assembled into a single epub, illustrated, and presented to the general public in some way.
And just as the finish line is very close, one misplaced question has started to irritate me. Actually, I love juicy and atmospheric details in books. But I made both of mine—on ancap and on the theory of war—as dry and concise as possible. Compressing ideas into a minimal volume was sometimes damn difficult, and now I wonder: was it even necessary to bother with that? Perhaps it would have made sense to generously pour out a stream of consciousness, adding various historical anecdotes and lyrical digressions? Maybe that would have been swallowed much more easily?
From April 11 to 13, I was with a group of Montelibero residents at the eleventh birthday of Liberland. The party took place near Apatin, the closest Serbian Danube town to Liberland. There, Liberland had purchased land and built a tourist complex The ARC — a very cozy eco-village.
guest houses
canoes
summer cafe
sauna
various livestock grazing on the opposite shore of the pond
demanding carrots
remnants of a water spillway from another pond; Liberland bought the land there too, but hasn’t landscaped it yet
the main building, where all the action was
a huge fireplace — the centerpiece of the whole house
the first floor, with a dining room, bar, and stage
first floor
second floor — conference hall
By the way, the Liberland website has a list of Diaspora villages, where, in addition to Liberland itself and Arc Village, Montelibero is featured, along with some community in Mexico unknown to me, and several settlements from a single developer, ECI Development. It seems to me that colleagues from Green Zyland should connect with Liberland so that their Georgian and Antiguan Green Zyland settlements eventually appear on their map as well.
On the first day, there was an excessively dense speaking program; by the end, my head was swollen from English, and instead of normal networking, I shied away from all English speakers just to get a little break from them, but we had some good chats with all the Russians present. There was no single theme for the presentations; it seems President Edlička simply gathered everyone he could reach, and if someone had something to say, he pulled them onto the stage. So it turned out quite eclectic, and there were relatively few talks about Liberland itself, except for an overview report on what successes it has achieved over 11 years.
On the second day, they organized a trip along the Danube to show us Liberland itself.
a small Liberland houseboat
a larger rented one
and a motorboat, which was towed behind the houseboat and served as a gangway as needed
they invited a colorful singer named Branimir, who looks like Milei
Edlička shows where an attack on Liberland was being prepared
On the left is Gornja Siga island, on the right is Donja Siga; both form the territory of Liberland
A settler named Martin has lived on Liberland territory for several weeks now and is preparing to open a summer cafe there. He was cheered on from the boat.
signed the Liberland flag
signed the sand of a Serbian island
As the excursion approached the shores of Liberland, a Croatian police boat was spotted both above and below it, and a patrol car accompanied us along the Croatian shore. Croatia jealously guards the inviolability of foreign land. The plot of the conflict is described on the wiki, so I won’t retell it. Nevertheless, a settler named Martin waved to us from the shore of the smaller of the two islands that make up Liberland. It was mentioned that he intends to build a beach cafe there, although I don’t rule out that this was said as a joke.
What can be said about Liberland in general? The project is firmly on its feet 11 years after its founding. Despite the fact that quarterly congress elections regularly take place in this pseudo-state, the executive power does not plan to be re-elected until the official establishment of the state, which fully aligns with what Balaji Srinivasan writes in his “The Network State” — namely, that without a single founder figure, nothing will work; only under the leadership of a benevolent dictator are liberty-loving voluntarists capable of moving anywhere. The project is not struggling; it lives and celebrates without excessive luxury, but quite lavishly, and its establishment consists of fairly wealthy entrepreneurs.
A business approach is also evident in the treatment of participants. Tickets for events are paid, including simply purchasing the opportunity to watch a broadcast. Electronic residency is paid. Citizenship costs a quite significant $10k, which is, of course, cheaper than from the “big brothers,” but then again, the power of a Liberland passport is currently near zero. In short, it is a very interesting venture project that can exist in a state of limbo for quite a long time, but as soon as it receives actual diplomatic recognition, the project’s shares will skyrocket, since there is certainly no overabundance of libertarian jurisdictions with open entry in the world right now.
Since I plan to relocate to Serbia within the year, I will inevitably continue to interact with Liberland. We’ll see what the prospects are for attaching one business or another to it.
I continue to perceive Liberland without excessive seriousness, yet with respect.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
