Personal Deterrence Doctrine

Bitarch’s Column

I will start by noting that this is a thought experiment and a test of a philosophical concept, not a discussion of technological implementation.

The essence of the idea is very simple. There is a potential aggressor in the form of a group of people (a criminal organization). You probably already guess who is being referred to. Although besides a Westphalian state, this could also be an aggressive ECU or a territorial community. A lone individual possessing a technology, which we will conventionally call MinMAD, opposes the criminal organization.

This technology ensures mutual assured destruction (MAD) of only two individuals—if the victim of aggression dies, one person from the criminal organization dies immediately (for example, a random government official, regardless of their relationship to the specific case). The victim of aggression may use conventional weapons to oppose the criminal organization (for example, firing a machine gun at a police squad sent to detain them) and remain alive as long as the aggressor does not destroy them. But if a cruise missile is then launched at their house and they perish, a random member of the criminal organization will die instantly. They can also activate MinMAD independently, for example, if they are taken prisoner. In that case, both they and one random member of the criminal organization will die immediately.

From the conditions of the problem, it is clear that both the criminal organization and the victim are not anonymous. Suppose that in a certain territory, at least 10-20% of the residents have MinMAD. Question: is it possible to maintain institutionalized coercion (the state) in this territory?

My assumption is an absolute “no”: no one will want to participate in the criminal organization (the state), knowing that there is a very high probability they could die. Accordingly, the necessary deterrent effect is achieved, forcing government officials to abandon coercion and seek other ways of making a living that are not based on robbery (which is what “taxes” actually are).

Ancap-chan’s Comment

Bitarch and I disagreed on the prospects of such a doctrine, and now we are submitting the discussion for your judgment.

I believe that we already live in a society where this experiment was conducted and led to results that differ significantly from those intended. In the past, the state was relatively compact, and those who opposed it were executed. This led to the emergence of tactics of individual terror by the resistance, which strongly demotivated government employees from performing their duties. But since then, the state has adapted to this threat, and, firstly, it has exponentially expanded the number of government employees, budget workers, and other beneficiaries of the existing system, and secondly, it has stopped killing its opponents, preferring more “vegetarian” methods, such as short prison sentences and fines. Thus, on the one hand, the resistor is demotivated from self-sacrifice, since they only face temporary inconvenience—and on the other hand, the risk of death for government employees has become significantly lower, since there are now millions of them.

So—no. A modern deterrence doctrine should imply the elimination of specifically the person who gives the order to initiate violence, and the higher their position in the state hierarchy, the better. Also, a modern deterrence doctrine should, whenever possible, remove the person practicing it from the line of fire, rather than relying on proud self-sacrifice. A “minimal” deterrence doctrine is like a vaccination against a disease for the state, rather than the disease itself.

P.S. By the way, since the deterrence doctrine is so prominent in Bitarch’s work, he created a separate VKontakte public page, where he puts all materials on this topic to make access to them more convenient.

And again about the monopoly

This question was inspired by an article on Habr and the subsequent comments. The gist is: there is Yandex — they have a search engine. In the search engine, they promote their other products, thereby limiting competition. How correct is this? In the article and comments themselves, there are quite a few arguments IN FAVOR of antitrust legislation. What do you think?

анонимный вопрос

In connection with this question, I would like to recommend Vyacheslav Kostrov’s lecture “Platform Economy and the Hayekian Market Process,” delivered by him at the “Capitalism and Freedom” conference in 2019.

The lecture is very rambling and contains no conclusions, but it places the question you are asking into a broader frame — it considers not a specific case of using a dominant market position, but the principles of the functioning of the platform economy as such.

Let’s consider a platform such as a search engine. By design, it is a service that searches the web for mentions of information that interests the user, based on certain input data provided by the user. After attracting a sufficiently large number of users with the convenience of the service and the quality of the search, the owner of the search engine may raise the question of monetizing the platform.

The most direct way to monetize a service in its original form is through customer donations. This method is implemented by Wikipedia, and it allows it to focus its efforts on the completeness of content and the neatness of its presentation, that is, on improving exactly those consumer qualities of the supplied product for which the user came to the platform. Of course, Wikipedia is not a search engine in the pure sense, but theoretically, nothing prevents the use of the same model for classic search engines. My channel practices this method of monetization.

A search engine could also sell analytics on user search queries to interested clients. This is also a fairly “herbivorous” way to make money and, as in the case of Wiki, is unlikely to bring in mega-bucks. My channel also practices this method of monetization in a sense — these are answers to questions with attached donations and commissioned articles.

Next come the methods of earning money whose application degrades the product itself.

First, there is advertising. In addition to providing the user with what they are searching for, the search engine slips into the results something that the advertiser would like them to be introduced to. Thus, for the user, the product becomes worse due to the lower relevance of the results, but the platform owner gets a profit. I no longer practice this method, and if a request to sell advertising on the channel appears, I try to switch the requester to one of the monetization methods mentioned above.

And finally, the owners of the search engine may start earning not only from others’ advertising, but also lure the user to their own subsidiary services that have no direct relation to the search engine. This is exactly what we see in the article under discussion. As a result of such a policy, search results become even less relevant for the user, and they start looking toward DuckDuckGo, but before the user has completely fled the search engine, the subsidiary platforms, thanks to the inertia of human thinking, will manage to build their own customer base. I do not practice this either, but I can well imagine a blogger periodically advertising some own business on their channel.

As a result of the development of such a mega-platform, after some time it turns out that some businesses under the general brand are more profitable, others less, and some are completely loss-making. However, making decisions about optimizing the asset structure is quite difficult because they influence each other. The platform flounders, making increasingly less balanced decisions, until it finally goes belly up. Just relatively recently, one such behemoth of the platform economy went bankrupt — Cook’s outfit, which existed for over a century and a half. It was the first to implement the package principle for organizing tourist trips, thanks to which it quickly became a global hegemon in the tourism industry, and it ultimately burned out on exactly that: too many of its assets, instead of reacting to market stimuli, were engaged in serving other subsidiary companies of the holding. Its own airlines, its own hotels, its own tour operators — it would seem, here is a monopoly, just collect the rent — but no, it failed to keep up with progress and lost to a conditional Booking.com, a next-generation platform business.

Exactly the same fate will befall Yandex, without any antitrust authorities.

Contract Enforcement

Bitarch’s Column

The question of permissible methods of contract enforcement was touched upon during Mikhail Svetov’s lecture in Novosibirsk. Svetov once again unequivocally expressed his position—physical violence (coercion) must not be used. The maximum that can be done against a violator is ostracism.

Unfortunately, not everyone accepts this moral position, so I will try to explain it, relying on utilitarianism and game theory. The example described below is an original illustration for the summary of the RAND Corporation study On the Doctrine of Deterrence, chapter “Local Balance of Power: An Important, but Not Always Decisive Factor.”

“Suppose I entered into a contract with you and decided to break it on my own. You dug in your heels and began to threaten me with ‘special forces’ who would forcibly seize my property. Assume you can send ten fighters, but I can guaranteedly destroy one of them. I make it clear that I am prepared to go to the end. For the fighters to agree to such a risk, you would have to offer each of them $10M. Suppose the contract amount is $100K, and I possess assets that can be liquidated for only $1000. You evaluate the ratio of benefits to costs—and tell me something like: ‘Get out, I don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore; people are right, it’s better not to touch shit!’. After that, we part ways, and you no longer enter into any deals with me. Under certain circumstances, you can retaliate by placing information about my behavior in the public domain, thereby prompting other people to join the ostracism.”

As seen from the example above, contract enforcement through physical coercion becomes impossible in a society where there is at least some balance of violence potential (different from the conditional ‘zero’ for citizens and ‘infinity’ for the state, as is usually the case in etatist societies).

In his book “For a New Liberty,” Murray Rothbard provides historical examples confirming the described theory and shows his affinity for it.

“The fact is that in the Middle Ages and up until 1920, merchants relied exclusively on the power of ostracism and boycotts by other local merchants. In other words, if someone refused to obey the decision of an arbitrator or ignored his decision, other merchants brought this fact to everyone’s attention and everyone refused to deal with the rebel, which quickly brought them to their knees. Woolridge provides a characteristic example of this:
‘Merchant courts were effective because merchants agreed that their decisions would be enforced. One who refused to obey was not sent to prison, but he did not remain a merchant for long after that. The influence of his colleagues and partners proved more effective than physical coercion. Take John of Homing, who made his living in the wholesale fish trade. John sold a batch of herring, all of which was supposed to be the same as in the three barrels presented to the buyer, but it soon turned out that it was actually rotten, and even mixed with sprat. He had to quickly reimburse the buyer in full under threat of ostracism from other merchants.’
Over time, ostracism became an even more effective means, since a situation arose where one who had once disobeyed an arbitrator’s decision could no longer expect any other intermediary to deal with them. Industrialist Owen D. Young, head of General Electric, concluded that moral censorship carried out by other businessmen operates far more effectively than the official judicial system. Modern technologies, computers, and credit ratings make the threat of nationwide ostracism more effective than ever before in the past.”

Why, when discussing representative democracy, do we always have upvote in mind? Today, when everyone is lying to everyone and everyone is buying everyone, downvote is significantly more productive.

анонимный вопрос

What is the downvote mainly used for in politics today? These are dislikes under harmful bills, petitions to repeal harmful laws, rallies demanding the government’s resignation, actions like egging, and so on. In other words, it is a standard tool of direct, rather than representative, democracy.

Let’s try to imagine what the consequences of implementing the downvote for representative democracy would look like.

An elective body, a dozen candidates are running, all of them appear on the ballot; the voter comes to the polling station and gives dislikes to everyone they definitely do not wish to see in the specified position. The candidate with the minimum number of dislikes wins.

What are the downsides of such a system?

The chance of victory sharply increases for a “slippery Joe” who hasn’t managed to offend anyone because nobody really knows who he is. Politicians will compete for the image of the most featureless nobody.
A nobody might turn out to be lacking agency and simply hand over the levers of real control to their puppet master. We get the same result, just from a different angle, and with an even greater dilution of responsibility for political decisions.

What are the pluses?

The concept of a spoiled ballot disappears. An empty ballot means all candidates are liked. A scribbled-out one means none are liked.
No candidate with even a moderately high anti-rating will pass; that is, unpopular measures in a previous position effectively kill a public political career, even if there is a significant support group.
Voter turnout increases sharply: for the pleasure of giving a public politician a dislike, even the paralyzed will drag themselves to the polling station.
The fear of drastic measures will ensure that the state becomes far more inactive, and that is exactly what we libertarians want.

So, I approve of the proposed system for improving representative democracy. It’s just a pity that neither you nor I will live to see this wonderful time…

Is it permissible for a libertarian party to become a vozhdist party with a strong vertical?

Judging by the charter that Svetov wants to adopt at the congress, that is exactly the case.

Anonymous question. A donation in the amount of 0.00099851btc

was attached to the question.

This question turned out to be today’s record holder among questions with an attached donation in terms of the time I needed to answer: usually, if an answer is paid for, I answer on the same day. The fact is that I have no relation to the Libertarian Party of Russia, so I had to scour both of your charters — the one currently in effect, and the one Mikhail Svetov expects to adopt at the LPR congress, which will take place on November 2 in Moscow (I was sent links to the cloud, but for safekeeping, I preferred to move the documents to my own site). The reading was not easy, so I apologize in advance to those who may find the answer a bit boring; it is a very specific question.

So, if we rely on the letter of the charters, then both now and in the wonderful Svetovian LPR of the future, you have a typical oligarchic party where all real power is held by committees that control the mechanisms of their own reelection. The changes proposed to be made are, in essence, cosmetic:

regional branches are prohibited from engaging in entrepreneurial activity (very strange for a party that, in theory, should treat entrepreneurship as a fetish).
on the other hand, regional branches are allowed their own symbols, albeit in agreement with the federal committee (I didn’t even know that previously your charter had only one symbol for the entire party; this norm was violated left and right).
the general meeting of a regional branch loses the right to expel members from the party (all power to the committees!).
the general meeting of a regional branch loses the right to consider an appeal against expulsion from the party by the branch’s steering committee (the power of the committees is indisputable!) .
the moratorium on the return of previously expelled members to the party is increased from three to five years (this reminds me of the constant extension of Disney’s copyrights for Mickey Mouse — it feels as if someone was expelled from the LPR whom they really don’t want back, and now they are extending the term during which this cannot be done).
previously, the federal committee was dissolved if more than a third of its members left; in the new edition, it is more than half (if the dominant faction has an absolute majority, the opposition is in principle unable to block the committee’s work).
a limit is introduced on the maximum size of the committees (increasing the administrative weight of each committee member)
the federal committee will be able to suspend the powers of individual members and dismiss the party chairman (expansion of the dominant faction’s power).
appealing to the ethics committee becomes paid. If you win the case, the deposit is returned. If you lose, the money goes into the party coffers. No sanctions are provided for those who made an unlawful decision upon which an appeal was won (very convenient, for example, to kick out the entire opposition from the party before the congress, and by the time the ethics committee reinstates everyone, the train has left, all decisions at the congress have already been made, profit).

I probably didn’t notice all the changes, but I hardly missed anything fundamental. Another feature of Svetov’s charter is that it contains two charters: the first part works until the party is registered, and the second part replaces the first in the event of official state registration of the party.

The volume of the documents is quite large. The current charter has 44 pages; the one proposed by Mikhail Svetov has 78 pages. Usually, when people draft such detailed agreements for joint activity, it speaks of an immense lack of trust they have for each other and a certain external force to which one can always appeal if something goes wrong in the joint activity. A charter is important specifically for an external judge who knows nothing about what is happening in the organization and for whom the map equals the territory. Organizations that are created naturally for the maximum efficiency of joint activity, and which do not intend to rely on someone’s external legitimacy, do not typically describe internal norms in such tomes.

A natural organization is characterized by first relying exclusively on informal agreements, then introducing some written norms as it grows, and then consolidating them into charters. An unnatural one, complying with the Russian law on political parties, is forced to take a template charter and demonstrate to the state that it lives by it. In fact, however, it will still operate within the framework of certain informal agreements.

And now I will allow myself to deviate from the charters and quote a fragment of a lecture by Mikhail Svetov, given by him on October 16, 2019, in Novosibirsk:

The Libertarian Party of Russia today is the only organization that seriously says that the regions need to be given broad powers, transferred in such a way that it would be impossible for Moscow to take them away again.
Mikhail Svetov

Mikhail has been talking for several months, and especially often in the last month as part of his unprecedented tour across the country, about how the regions should impose a new federal treaty on Moscow. So impose it!

A regional branch of the party brings together local politicians who interact directly with local politicians representing other political forces. It is with them that they form coalitions and alliances, agree on the distribution of candidates by district and the order of speeches at rallies, or arrange to borrow equipment or use an office. Moscow in all this real regional political activity is a disorganizing factor that can only contribute to the disruption of agreements carefully built on the ground, but is almost never able to help. This is especially relevant for parties without centralized funding from above. If the main source of the party’s money is membership fees from ordinary members, then how shell-shocked by the vertical of power must one be to pay any attention at all to the whims of the Moscow leadership! He who doesn’t buy the girl dinner doesn’t get to dance with her.

The Libertarian Party of the Russian Federation does not need a charter. It needs a federal treaty. I will allow myself to quote again a fragment from the same lecture:

What is the libertarians’ criticism of democracy? That democracy adopts equal inconvenient laws for everyone. There is no such law that is equally suitable for Muscovites, Novosibirsk residents, and residents of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Mikhail Svetov

Well, if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Thank Mikhail for the useful lecture and do as he suggests. If you can manage to impose a new federal treaty on Moscow within the party, it will be the first step toward imposing it on Moscow within the state. If you can manage to limit such a mild and intelligent leader as Mikhail Svetov, it will be the first step toward limiting such a brutal and unpleasant type as Vladimir Putin.

Autoimmune Damage to the State, or How the Power of the State Itself Can Be Used for Its Destruction

Bitarch’s Column

In medicine, there is a class of diseases known as autoimmune. These include muscle weakness (myasthenia gravis), type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and others. The essence of these diseases is that antibodies (killer cells) begin to recognize the host’s tissues (human, animal) as harmful and attack them. Most often, this happens after infection by a specific virus that, in terms of recognition by the host’s immunity, resembles healthy tissues (to put it simply). The antibodies simply fail to see the difference between whom to attack—the virus or healthy tissues—and kill everyone.

Autoimmune damage can be observed in any complex system, not just biological ones. For example, many users of computer antivirus software are familiar with the problem of the deletion of normal files that the antivirus mistook for malicious. Those who use browser extensions for ad blocking (AdBlock) know well that they often disrupt the normal operation of a website. This happens precisely because the blocker takes normal website code for an advertisement—and removes it.

The state also represents a complex system and can easily be subjected to an autoimmune attack. An interesting situation arises here—the more security forces and various services a state has, the more effective the autoimmune strike will be. This strategy bypasses the well-known assertion that “the state is stronger, it can easily crush you, therefore a forceful struggle is useless,” since for the forceful struggle against the state, it uses the state’s own force.

How can an autoimmune strike against the state be implemented? There are many ways; the main thing is to understand the general meaning. Here are some examples:

1) Realistic silicone masks of the faces of officials, security personnel, and other enemies of freedom (hereinafter – etatists). In them, we do whatever it takes to set up the etatists to be targeted by other security forces.

2) Imitation of the fingerprints of well-known etatists. Throw a bottle through an FSB window, and they “bottle” whoever we want.

3) Planting Trojan horses on the computers of etatists to proxy traffic. From there, one could, for example, engage in carding, stealing money from state banks and other organizations linked to bandits, and spending it on the promotion of libertarianism. They will “come” specifically for the etatists (or they won’t come, deciding that these etatists have the right to steal money from the state—the main thing here is that another Magnitsky or even Navalny does not suffer from this—note by Ancap-chan).

4) Ordering drugs from the darknet to the addresses of etatists and reporting it to the proper authorities.

5) Not hesitating to send anonymous tips for any reason against etatists: smoking in a prohibited place, parking under a sign, cruel treatment of their own children, walking a dog without a muzzle, meetings with girls under 16, non-compliance with fire safety/labor protection/health and safety regulations/taxes/illegal immigrants, and other violations at enterprises owned by etatists.

6) Registering a SIM card in the name of an etatist and committing several victimless “crimes” using a smartphone that has never been used before.

Ancap-chan’s Comment

The tactic considered above is another tool from the agorist toolbox against the state, alongside the uber-retribution that you perceived so ambiguously, for agorism is not reduced to counter-economics alone. Counter-economics is its most important part, as those claiming a life without a state must be able to demonstrate that they can provide themselves with all the most important benefits of civilization without the state. However, the state must not only be undermined but also tamed, otherwise the home-tormentor will not perish.

*Hello, government, we have illegal migrants on our roof!*

In your review of Svetlov’s lecture, you sharply condemned the phrase “a child becomes a subject of law when they conclude a non-aggression pact,” calling it monstrous. Can you expand on this thought?

In my view, any person is a subject of law by virtue of their belonging to the human race. At the same time, any person can be an object of law by virtue of the fact that other people, in the course of legal interaction with one another, act upon this person as an object. For example, my father may gift me an apartment or, conversely, bequeath some of his property to third parties, thereby disavowing my right to inherit this property, which I have by default. This is a unilateral action affecting my rights; that is, here I am an object of law.

If a person is incapacitated or for some other reason is unable to carry out subject-based legal activity, other persons may act on their behalf and in their interests. And although their direct expression of will is absent here, from the perspective of the persons with whom transactions are carried out on their behalf, they are already a full subject of law. For instance, a transaction carried out by proxy remains a transaction with the person who issued the proxy, not with the person to whom it was issued. But they remain a subject of law and can at any moment delegate the right to perform transactions in their name to someone else—or begin to perform them independently. To do this, they do not need to sign any non-aggression pacts—neither literally nor figuratively. They simply, so to speak, consume the right that they already have and have had all along.

Refusing a subject the exercise of their rights is a usurpation of law. A child has the right to leave home at any moment and live independently, and if they own a share in that house, to demand the division of property. This will likely be an imprudent decision on their part, and if this imprudence is obvious to everyone around, they will try to convince the child that it would be better to change their mind. Or simply not help them (but not hinder them) in the legal formalization of the actions to divide the property. But justifying the usurpation of someone else’s right by the fact that some non-aggression pact has not been signed is a kind of mental gymnastics that is beyond me.

Uber-retribution and uber-justice

It seems that no other post of mine has sparked as much discussion as the description of the uber-retribution concept. Perhaps it is worth breaking down the main arguments of the opponents.

Scientific novelty

It was rightly pointed out to me that similar functionality has already been implemented in Hydra and other similar darknet marketplaces, so I find it necessary to emphasize the differences from existing services, since they proved to be insufficiently articulated in the original post.

Ads placed on the service must be open. Why?
1.1. While classic hitman exchanges aim not to scare off the target, here the target’s knowledge of the pending retribution is part of the retribution.
1.2. The more widely a specific injustice becomes known, the greater the likelihood that third parties will add their own money to the prize pool (both those affected by similar actions of the target of retribution, and simply those who are not indifferent).
1.3. The target of retribution is given a chance to settle things amicably.
The already mentioned possibility of crowdfunding the prize pool (although a similar mechanism is used by prediction markets, where a large number of people can place a bet on a death).
Third parties can apply their own expertise to the provided proofs—both proofs of injustice and proofs of the completed retribution.

And beyond this, such an aggregator of retribution requests must possess far more powerful usability than just a message board; otherwise, it will fail to gain sufficient popularity, without which there will be no network effect, and without a network effect, most requests in the service will remain a voice crying in the wilderness.

Ethics

It was pointed out that this tool could easily be used to carry out attacks on the innocent: all sorts of freaks, gays, drug addicts, lovers of voluntary sex with minors, and so on.

To this, I can say that in a society where such attacks find mass demand, people do not need a special application; they will happily stone an undesirable person anyway, or demand that their relatives commit an honor killing. In our case, the possibility of public retribution is organized against those who would be difficult to deal with without hiding: primarily, people like the hypothetical Petrunko.

At the same time, one must realize that the executor of the retribution risks getting hit back from the target, from state representatives, or even from random passers-by—if they act carelessly and get caught. At the moment the retribution is carried out, they look like the criminal to all witnesses. But, by the way, such an executor could perfectly well be a state representative, for whom it would be easier to evade responsibility.

Retribution is not justice

Retribution, normally, is only part of the justice process, while the proposed mechanism somehow ignores the judicial process: the sentence is passed by the initiator of the request themselves.

It seems to me that designing a universal instrument of justice, where investigation, trial, and punishment are all provided within a single service, is excessively cumbersome. I also want to point out to the public that there are currently no major problems with investigating injustice: this is handled by projects like Scanner and Russian Elephant, FBK, Bellingcat, and a huge number of other independent agencies. Problems arise at the stage of issuing and implementing sentences, because this area, unlike investigation, is monopolized by the state.

So I focused on expanding exactly this bottleneck. Let diligent journalists provide the facts and the evidence base—and through Wanted, a third party, having no direct connection to the hypothetical FBK, organizes the retribution. Meanwhile, by the way, several competing requests can be created for the same case. For example, one person might order a splash of green ink in the eye of the aforementioned Petrunko, while another orders acid. Which contract will more people support? Which contract will be executed? The market will decide that. Let’s trust the market.

*Or perhaps no one will order this patriot-statist at all: what a brave young fellow he is*

Uber-retribution

In the video about anarcho-capitalism, I fantasized about the possibility of Uber-police providing security on the streets.

Of course, right now such a service has little prospect of being implemented because the state jealously guards its monopoly on police functions. Nothing would stop police provocateurs from DDoS-ing the service with false calls, or even using paramilitaries to deal with well-meaning people rushing to help upon a call—whether driven by the heart or by profit. And the service itself would unlikely be able to gain a sufficient number of users while remaining illegal.

However, certain anarcho-capitalist services for the private production of security can be organized today within the framework of purely agorist practices. And first and foremost, I am talking about Uber-retribution.

Imagine a mobile application with the following functionality.

A user launches the app and anonymously uploads information about a certain injustice, accompanying it with a proper evidentiary base: photos, videos, links to independent testimonies, and so on. Then they specify exactly what punishment they consider acceptable for the perpetrator, as well as the amount they are willing to offer to whoever undertakes to ensure this punishment.

Another user has the opportunity to see in this application what injustices fill the world and, if they wish, add their own funds to those already promised for particular cases.

A third user has the opportunity, after choosing a case to their liking, to carry out the requested retribution—and provide proof. Then anyone wishing to do so can independently verify whether the retribution actually took place and leave their opinion on it. Those who reserved their money for the administration of justice can either perform the verification themselves, trust the opinion of third-party experts, or grant the right to manage the prize fund to someone else, for example, the author of the original description of the injustice—though not necessarily to them, and more on that below.

As everyone who placed their money in the prize fund becomes convinced that the retribution has indeed occurred, they release their funds, and their bitcoins go into the wallet of the person who identified themselves as the one who carried out said retribution. One could get fancy here with smart contracts and multi-signatures, use the principle of how OpenBazaar works, or a banal centralized escrow mechanism, although the latter is undesirable as it would mean the prize money is stored in the service’s wallets, which is potentially unsafe. I am not competent enough in crypto-technologies to unequivocally point to the best desired implementation of this specific mechanism.

And as additional functionality, the application could include the possibility of private messaging between service users, a rating system for those who administer retribution, a system of various medals and other pats on the back for those who help co-finance the restoration of justice, search by map, by categories of villainy, and so on.

As is easy to see, the service is quite universal and, with proper quality of execution, allows everyone to remain anonymous except for the object of retribution and the victim (who, however, can claim they had nothing to do with it and ordered no retribution, which may well be true). Also, the object of retribution, upon finding an announcement calling for all sorts of punishments upon their head, can anonymously contact the claimant and try to reach a friendly agreement. Although one cannot rule out attempts to reach an agreement through threats or to eliminate the claimant altogether—and for this very reason, it would be useful to be able to delegate the right to authorize payment to a third-party auditor via the app; then additional violence against the victim would in no way protect the aggressor, as the victim would no longer have the right to stop the launched mechanism of retribution.

Finally, nothing prevents any law enforcement officer, upon discovering information about a certain crime, from treating it as a criminal report—and making some extra money on the side. This would be quite in the spirit of the agorist doctrine of corrupting government servants so they get used to working for people rather than official superiors.

At the same time, it will be extremely problematic by law to hold anyone in the chain of application users accountable, provided, of course, they are not caught red-handed.

Of course, such an application would unlikely be placed in official stores, so one would have to limit it to the circle of Android users and suggest downloading the APK from the project’s website—but this is a trivial inconvenience. Again, all functionality can be perfectly provided via a website to avoid being tied to a phone altogether.

All that’s left is to come up with a name. Without straining my imagination too much, I would call it something simple and clear to all consumers of Hollywood products, meaning all inhabitants of the globe: Wanted.

Besides a service that allows organizing decentralized retribution, it would also be useful to have functionality for collecting evidence: a way to start recording video to the cloud with literally one button, and preferably to stream it, and to do all this in the background with the screen off. Of course, it is important to record the filming time and geolocation, and to have the ability to send a distress signal via SMS to a group of contacts. Various decoys would be useful, allowing the simulation of deleting information from the phone, fake passwords, secret disk space, and so on. Similar applications exist, and nothing prevents them from being posted in the store—but I haven’t heard of all such functionality being gathered into one convenient product yet. I would name such an application vividly: They’re beating our people!

If you have heard of anyone developing something similar, please let me know. If there are ideas for implementation—we can discuss them.

Mikhail Svetov, lecture in Novosibirsk

On October 16, a lecture by Mikhail Svetov took place in Novosibirsk, for which I recently asked you to chip in money. A huge thank you to everyone who responded to the call!

The organizers of the lecture were unable to spend this money for its intended purpose because absolutely all the venues they tried to negotiate with backed out. As I understand it, it was theoretically possible to mislead the venue owners and not inform them that Svetov would be speaking—then we would have enjoyed power outages, a police visit in the middle of the lecture, some kind of fire alarm—or simply the doors being closed half an hour before the start. Instead, all the details were told to everyone immediately, and the venues honestly refused to cooperate. Whether it made sense to act in exactly this way, I will leave to the organizers’ conscience.

One way or another, the lecture eventually had to be held at the headquarters of Sergey Boyko. About one hundred and fifty people crowded into an office of about a hundred square meters (there were over eight hundred registrations on Timepad), it was very stuffy, one person fainted, I was close to it as well, and there was no sound amplification—in general, the impression was not very good.

Brief financial report:
A total of 42,570 rubles were collected.
15,560 went toward stage rental, printing, transportation costs, and partial compensation for the ticket cost to the federal tour organizers.
The remaining money will be returned to the general sponsor or will be used by them for other projects.

On the other hand, Libertarian band released a surprisingly decent recording of the lecture—for once, Svetov’s performance can be watched without straining; even the questions from the audience are clearly audible. So, I have now re-watched the performance in a more human setting, and at least I can comment on its content.

Briefly, Svetov’s message is as follows: uniform legislation for all regions is completely unsuitable for Russia; such a large and diverse country can only be a federation. But it is pointless to wait for federalization to be handed down from Moscow: however it is granted, it will be taken back later if desired; we went through this under Yeltsin. The demand for federalization must come from below; ideally, Moscow should simply be presented with a fait accompli: that we have these rules, this economic policy, and now let’s agree whether we pay you any taxes at all, or simply tell you to get lost. If you want taxes—give us representation and guarantees of autonomy, something like that. Of course, this is all my interpretation; Svetov expressed himself carefully so as not to trigger a criminal article.

I assume it is precisely because any specificity leads to a criminal charge that Svetov offers no plan of action for federalization. On the question of methods, he is extremely laconic: do something, anything.

I was pleased that, standing in front of a banner about contractual jurisdictions, Svetov mentioned those very contractual jurisdictions several times in a complimentary key, which is a further development of the idea of federalism. I also cannot fail to note Svetov’s thesis on how nuclear weapons specifically gave humanity the possibility of the practical implementation of libertarian ideas, since it makes the concept of the Westphalian state meaningless—this is either a direct borrowing from our article on the deterrence doctrine with Bitarkh, or an independent invention. Similarly, the thesis about the church as an example of a contractual jurisdiction is either taken directly from Laxi Catala or also invented independently. Thus, one can state the gradual formation of a quite specific Russian school of libertarianism, which is not reduced to the dogmatic reproduction of the rhetoric of the founding fathers of the teaching.

My main grievances with the considerations presented by Svetov concern the expression “non-aggression pact,” and especially the monstrous phrase “a child becomes a subject of law when they conclude a non-aggression pact.” Such rhetoric is well-suited as material for stupid memes, as well as for forming a sect around oneself, but certainly not for conscious acceptance by a wide circle of people.

At the end of the lecture, Svetov gave a short interview to Ekaterina Khudoleva (Just in case—that’s not me! Yes, also from Kuzbass, yes, also a journalist, yes, roughly the same age, but not me). In the interview, I was pleased by the answer about Nozick, where Svetov’s grievances with Nozick’s analytical philosophy were laid out quite clearly. I hope that in the book Svetov is writing, according to his words, he will expand on them in more detail.