How do you feel about feeding neural networks all the content from the internet, disregarding copyright and without anyone’s consent?

M1inki

It has long been no secret to my readers that the copyright law appears to me as an entity that is hopelessly obsolete and extremely expensive in terms of enforcement, and therefore will immediately wither away as soon as the state ceases to carry out this very enforcement. However, with the appearance of large language models, all grounds have emerged to believe that copyright will wither away even and significantly sooner than the state.

There are various arguments in defense of copyright. There is the utilitarian one: if everyone takes someone else’s content for free, the incentive to compose this content will vanish, and that is the end of progress. There is the objectivist one: a person has a right to the product of their mind, and damn it, because that’s what Ayn Rand said. There is the ethical one: labor must be paid for.

And then it turns out that to train another, more advanced version of a large language model, it needs to be fed the entire corpus of texts ever created by humanity, and it will devour them and ask for seconds. If this is not done, then a promising direction of information technology development will hit a dead end. Those training the model are not concerned with the artistic merits of the text. For them, whether it is the Bible or a Harry Potter fanfic—it is simply text possessing a key quality: written by a human. Knowledge of the Bible is more important for a language model, but only for the reason that, firstly, it is more voluminous, and secondly, references to it are far more frequent in other texts and in user queries.

And that’s it, we have immediately lost the utilitarian argument, because it is precisely for the sake of progress that texts need to be fed to the neural network. In exchange, we have acquired very wealthy lobbyists for the abolition of copyright, since companies developing large language models can quite well compete in terms of capital size with digital publishing houses. Moreover, even if for particularly widely circulated texts the rightsholders manage to defend the right not to acquaint LLMs with them, who wins from the fact that in response to “summarize such-and-such story by Stephen King” the chatbot will answer “I don’t know a single work by this author, let me instead summarize such-and-such story by David Friedman”? Surely it won’t be Stephen King’s publishers nor Stephen King himself who will benefit from such a thing.

How will content for training neural networks be obtained? Very simple. Content is usually already physically present on the web in free access; it just has a “pirated” label, and therefore law-abiding companies have to pretend it doesn’t exist. However, this is too flimsy a little fence, and it won’t stop those who consider themselves entitled to step over it. The only person a neural network won’t get is some Rodion Belkovich, because he in principle does not post his books on the web, even for money))) This is a huge loss for the future interlocutors of intellectual chatbots, but what can be done, humanity has lost many valuable texts throughout its history, shit happens.

Hack the Aggressor’s Brain, Not Humanity: Mistakes of Stephen King’s Dystopia

Stephen King’s “The End of All This” is a vivid dystopia that warns us about the classic trap of good intentions paving the road to, well, you know where. But let’s look deeper and soberly assess the main mistakes of the characters and how they could have been avoided.

The main character, Robert, discovered that the water in the town of La Plata possesses unique chemical properties that suppress aggression and the propensity for violence. Driven by a sincere and understandable dream to rid humanity of violence, he decides to disperse a similar substance across the entire world, using a volcanic eruption as a delivery mechanism. The experiment initially seems successful—the level of violence in the world drops to zero. However, a terrible side effect soon emerges: the substance causes an irreversible decline in intelligence, gradually turning people into helpless beings incapable of taking care of themselves or maintaining civilization.

As we can see, Robert messed up big time. Instead of reasonably and cautiously testing his idea, he simply sprayed a poorly studied drug on all of humanity at once, “flooding” the planet with unknown chemistry via a volcano. This is roughly like finding an old canister in the garage and pouring it straight into a new Mercedes without any checks. Naturally, the consequences were disastrous: aggression vanished, but brains melted right along with it.

Robert’s main mistake was not the desire to change “human nature,” but the absence of elementary caution and common sense. In a developed society, no one would apply radical methods without long-term research; moreover, “forced therapy” for all of humanity contradicts the very spirit of libertarianism. Coercion is only permissible toward those who have already violated the NAP by committing violence. It is with such people that cautious, gradual, and carefully controlled experiments should have begun.

How might this have looked in practice? Instead of turning the entire planet into guinea pigs, he could have started with small groups of particularly dangerous criminals. If society in some countries allows execution for heinous crimes, why not first try a much more humane and promising alternative—drugs to enhance violence inhibition? One could gradually observe the effects of the drug over years, record side effects, improve the formula, and only expand its application after full certainty. And even then, as a mandatory requirement without the right of choice, it should apply exclusively to those who have already initiated violence.

There is a whole set of tools for reducing catastrophic risks that our hero completely ignored. First and foremost is staging and gradualism—start small, observe, and correct. “Measure seven times, cut once,” not the other way around. Next is targeted application—limit use exclusively to aggressors rather than spraying “happiness” on everyone indiscriminately. This is simply more ethical and effective. Then comes independent oversight and transparency—scientists, ethicists, and supervisory boards acting as a system of checks and balances to eliminate the errors of a single genius (no matter how much he wanted everyone’s well-being). And finally, reversibility—the ability to roll back changes or minimize damage at the first signs of a problem. After all, transhumanism is not about playing Russian roulette with brains, but about controlling biology for the sake of expanding freedom.

Robert’s problem was not that he tried to hack human nature, but that he did it sloppily and hastily. When dealing with powerful tools like biohacking or biotech, responsibility and awareness of the consequences are vital. Here, the “do no harm” principle applies with an adjustment for progress: change whatever you like, but don’t break the whole planet in the process. The conclusion here is simple: hacking “human nature” is possible and even necessary, especially if it brings more freedom and less suffering, but it must be done intelligently so that instead of a brave new world, we don’t end up trapped by our own overconfidence.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

If buying is not owning, then copying is not stealing

When someone talks about piracy, images from pirate movies usually spring to mind—a wooden leg, a bottle of rum, and a parrot. But in the digital world, things are a bit different. There, a pirate isn’t some guy stealing “riches” from poor authors. It’s more like a guy or a girl who keeps the doors of a massive digital library open for everyone.

Imagine Nintendo. The legendary company has released over 1,500 games over the last 40 years. Many of them are now lying in dusty boxes in attics or have long since rotted in landfills because it’s not profitable for the corporation to maintain old content. But who saved these games for history? Exactly, those same “pirates.” In the digital age, they are a kind of volunteer guarding cultural heritage. Piracy today is a guarantee that we won’t lose priceless culture tomorrow.

But isn’t this theft? This is where it gets interesting. Theft is when you take something from someone, and that person no longer has it. By downloading a movie, a song, or a book, you aren’t taking it away from the author. The file remains exactly where it was, in its original form. No real loss—except, perhaps, the copyright holder’s illusions about their hypothetical income.

Fine, but shouldn’t authors be paid for their work? Of course they should. But for the first copy of the product that buyers voluntarily purchased, the money was indeed paid. Everything else is an artificial monopoly imposed by the state (i.e., a privilege from a stationary bandit, which is what patents were openly called in the past).

It’s also important to understand that the modern copyright system (let’s call it “copyrism” for convenience) doesn’t allow us to fully own even the things we’ve already paid for. You bought a game? Great, but it’s tied to a dozen DRM protections that vet you like a border guard at an airport. Bought a Netflix subscription? You aren’t the owner of the movies, just a temporary tenant. Subscription ends—goodbye, favorite series. Copyrism is a cult of control where the user is always under suspicion. We have become tenants rather than owners of our own culture. Admit it, that’s not very market-like at all.

Lost sales are a myth. Companies love to calculate virtual losses: claiming that since you downloaded 10,000 copies of our album, we lost 10,000 sales! No, folks, you lost at most the chance to sell it to a few dozen people. The other 9,950 would most likely never have bought your product if they couldn’t download it for free. And you know what’s funny? The most active pirates spend more on music and movies than the average consumer! Because piracy is more like a sampler than a robbery.

Piracy also helps in cases where the copyright holder doesn’t want to or cannot help. Remember how HBO ruthlessly deleted favorite series from its servers when closing HBO Max? They were saved specifically by pirates. When a book is banned by censorship, the only hope of reading it is again through pirate sites. They literally support the freedom of information.

Free does not equal immoral! Libertarian ethics are simple: violence is bad. And when you make a copy of a digital file, you aren’t taking anything from anyone. But government raids on servers, million-dollar fines for students, and criminal cases against “pirates”—that is real violence. If an author is talented, grateful listeners, readers, and viewers will support them voluntarily. This is fair and free, and most importantly—non-violent.

What can we do? Advocate for the abolition of copyrism. Don’t be afraid to say out loud: copying is cooperation and the dissemination of knowledge, not theft. We are not obliged to feel guilty for simply wanting to freely manage our files and the culture that has long since become part of a common heritage. And one last thing: keep your torrent client handy. Because while corporations are playing Monopoly, pirates are the only ones truly ensuring the preservation of culture!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Is anarcho-capitalism based not on libertarian principles possible?

The concept of ancap emerged within the framework of libertarian philosophy. However, besides libertarianism, there are other philosophies of freedom, such as objectivism or classical liberalism. It seems that any intellectual tradition aimed at achieving freedom has its own version close to ancap.

Question from Dmitry

I am currently translating an interesting article that traces the anarchist roots of ancap (funny, but many consider ancaps to be fake anarchists) from Proudhon, who, in fact, was the first to declare himself an anarchist. But there are still a few days until the work is finished, so for now, I’ll reflect on how fundamental it is for an anarcho-capitalist society to have specifically libertarian principles at its foundation—self-ownership and all that other NAP stuff.

Let’s replace self-ownership with “we are all instruments of the Lord” or “we are but a third theme in the music of Ainur.” This is simply a shift in the locus of control. Well, okay, now it’s external. Will this shift hinder the construction of ancap? Not particularly. The Lord, in His mercy, gave people commandments. The elves left humans their powerful epic, filled with moral messages. Take it, use it. In songs, you read about loyalty to oaths, or a commandment requires you not to bear false witness—one way or another, you learn the idea of a contract and the obligations under it, which means we have the basis for capitalism.

Can we do without the non-aggression principle? That no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity? No, someone does. Will this hinder the construction of ancap? Well, it depends on exactly who turned out to be the lucky exception to this principle. For example, if we declare that holy fools, small children, and women with PMS can initiate violence with impunity, this will not hinder us in building an anarcho-capitalist society. But if we declare that a certain special knightly order, sworn to maintain peace and tranquility in the Galaxy, possesses the right to initiate violence with impunity—it will be harder, although even then the situation is not hopeless, but we will be critically dependent on the procedures regulating entry into and expulsion from this order.

To what extent can ancap be built on the principles of classical liberalism? Gustave de Molinari described this very clearly. He didn’t know any of the clattering libertarian technical terms like NAP and self-ownership; he simply described how a competitive market for security services would yield better results than a monopolistic one.

What about objectivism? Egoism is a virtue. Reason is a virtue. Demanding that people sacrifice themselves for you is yuck. How is this not a basis for ancap? The principles sound as unfamiliar as appealing to the Silmarillion instead of the Bible as a source of morality, but essentially, by implementing the principles of objectivism, we get the same ancap, only with intellectual property. And yes, the state will not exist, regardless of what Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, because collecting taxes by force is to demand sacrifice from taxpayers, and forcing government officials to work for free is to demand sacrifice from them. But, of course, if voluntary self-governance coordinated by volunteers at their own expense or via donations is “the state,” then okay, let it be the state, but for us libertarians, this is simply ancap.

Privacy That Is Too Expensive: How the Good Intentions of Officials Are Destroying the Internet

Do you know the difference between good intentions and actual results? Naturally, it’s the number of ruined lives. When the EU and USA launched GDPR and CCPA to protect personal data, it all sounded beautiful: “We will protect your data from malicious corporations!” Russia, with its Federal Law No. 152, also jumped on board with the idea that they would protect citizens from digital bandits and Western agents. The concept looked decent, but what happened in the end?

Paradox one: your data is still floating around the web like a cat on the rooftops in spring. Leaks? Every year they break records! Just imagine: under GDPR in Europe, more than 160 thousand leaks occurred in the first year and a half. In Russia, the situation is practically farcical: the data of nearly all adult citizens has already been leaked online. What kind of protection are we talking about in this case?

Paradox two: the laws are supposedly against market giants, but they are the ones who came out on top. Google and Facebook’s share of the advertising market only grew after the introduction of GDPR. Why? They simply have enough money for an army of lawyers and technicians that others cannot afford. Moreover, compliance with GDPR or CCPA became a nightmare for small businesses and startups; many simply couldn’t handle it and shut down.

Paradox three: instead of growth in trust, we received only irritation from endless cookie banners and permission requests for every single breath. People don’t read—they just click “I Agree.” It’s like those bank terms and conditions that nobody reads, only to be surprised later: “How did I end up owing 5 thousand rubles a month for account maintenance?”

Another unpleasant point is data localization. In Russia, the law requires storing citizens’ data on local servers, allegedly to protect information from Western intelligence agencies. The result? Instead of Google or LinkedIn, Russians got local analogues with questionable security and low service quality. It’s like being forced to buy bread from only one store, with the justification that it’s “safer.” But when there is no choice, quality usually drops and prices rise.

There are also amusing examples: many American websites simply blocked access from the EU after GDPR, deciding that European users were “too expensive” to maintain. Imagine you want to visit your favorite resource, and it tells you: “Sorry, you are too expensive a customer, goodbye!” Absurd? Yes, but such is the new reality of data protection.

So what should we do? A libertarian approach, instead of suffocating state regulation, offers common sense and market mechanisms. First and foremost, these are voluntary standards instead of bureaucracy. Let businesses develop effective data protection rules themselves. And if consumers don’t like something—they will go to competitors who respect privacy. After all, if a company screws up, the market will punish it, customers will leave, and profits will fall. This works more effectively than any Roskomnadzor inspection or fines.

But what will help best is the use of technological solutions instead of paperwork. For example, end-to-end encryption, where access to your messages and files is available only to the sender and the recipient. Even if the data falls into the wrong hands, the hacker will simply see a meaningless set of characters. Another important approach is data minimization. Why collect every single piece of data if only the bare minimum is needed?! For most web services, a login and password are enough. The less data, the fewer risks. And also—decentralized storage. Instead of one large database that lures hackers, information can be distributed across many independent points, making the attackers’ lives many times harder. In short, technology allows for the protection of privacy far more effectively than government laws and endless inspections.

As we can see, a good intention does not equal a good law. Officials wanted the best, but they got what they usually get. Let’s trust people and business instead of bureaucrats and the instructions they impose!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Your opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict?

To be more specific, do you agree with the opinion that in modern history Israel defended itself against the aggression of its neighbors and was more of a victim than an aggressor (insofar as a state can be considered a victim at all)? What is the most optimal and politically feasible solution capable of stopping the conflict in the region, and what prevents its implementation?

Question from Zigoter

Having started writing a book on the libertarian theory of war, I realized with some bewilderment that, despite all my methodological individualism, I cannot construct correct descriptions without operating with fictitious entities such as collective subjects. These speculative subjects were named by me as spirits.

The Jewish people are very ancient and managed to survive over millennia because they possessed and diligently preserved a very strong spirit of the people’s divine election. Nothing could shake the Jews’ loyalty to their spirit, but the 19th century brought them a strong temptation: the spirits of nationalism were born—a phenomenon known as the Spring of Nations. From the connection between the spirit of divine election and the spirit of nationalism, the spirit of Zionism was born. Those possessed by this spirit made efforts to create a national Jewish state that could become a home for any representative of the divinely elected Jewish people.

In the early period of its existence, the State of Israel represented a very peculiar combination on the spiritual plane: the old Jewish spirit of divine election, the new Jewish spirit of Zionism, the new global spirit of socialism, the mature European spirit of individual freedom, and additionally, the spirit of a victim-people born during the Holocaust. These spirits supported each other in some ways, but in many ways they were at odds. The result was a dynamic, expansive state that not only habitually survived in a hostile environment, as the Jewish people had survived in a hostile environment for many centuries, but also actively expanded its borders, creating a zone of quite decent security within the assimilated space.

Currently in Israel, the spirit of the victim-people has completely exhausted its potential, and the positions of the spirit of socialism have weakened somewhat; otherwise, the picture remains the same. As long as Israel’s environment remains hostile, abandoning expansion is fraught with destruction for it: passive defense in conditions of technological progress does not allow for the effective containment of enemies.

And why, exactly, is Israel’s environment so hostile to it? Initially, Israel faced the spirits of nationalism, and these are quite weak in the Arab world. Therefore, it was sufficient for Israel to achieve a decisive military victory over one coalition of states or another for the situation to calm down noticeably. It was only the spirit of Islam, which gained significant strength at the end of the 20th century, that made the situation truly complex, because this spirit has strong grassroots support, which is precisely what makes it a real spirit and not a propaganda facade, like Orthodoxy in the RF.

Having finished with history, let us move to libertarian recipes. First of all, the rhetoric of “we are launching preemptive strikes because otherwise we will be destroyed” is already being received with difficulty by consumers of propaganda, even if it is true. On the other hand, it is precisely now that the rhetoric of “freedom is coming” is on the rise; it would be a sin not to take advantage of it. Externally, Israel needs to appeal not to the spirit of its divine election—it will only work on the Jewish diaspora, and even then poorly. Nor to the Holocaust, which as a news hook no longer sells (now October 7th must be used instead). And certainly not to socialism; it is sinful to be proud of one’s internal illnesses. However, the slogan “We are expanding the space of freedom” is not only dignified but also effective. “We are not destroying terrorist regimes in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran because they are against Israel, but because they are terrorist regimes. They are directed against all free people, whether inside the countries they control or outside. Islam is not a religion of slavery. It is quite compatible with the ideas of free trade. And those political regimes that are ready for trade rather than war, and in which their own citizens enjoy freedom, are welcomed by Israel.”

Of course, one should not confuse freedom with democracy; this mistake cost the USA dearly, there is no need to repeat it. What matters is not how a political leader took office, or if there even is one, but how free people are within that political regime, period. But, of course, such rhetoric imposes restrictions on Israel’s internal policy as well, which, however, is only for the better.

Trade unions can be cool – if they are voluntary

Trade unions are usually associated with dreary offices, imposed dues, and dubious characters who are more likely to walk the corridors of power than the shop floors and warehouses. But originally, the idea was completely different! Real trade unions are not a club for bureaucrats, but associations of free people who voluntarily protect one another. Without the state, without violence, without “you owe me, or we’ll get you fired.”

Think this is a utopia? Not at all! History knows many cases where voluntary unions, without any state privileges or coercion, achieved real success. Take, for example, the London Dock Strike of 1889. One hundred thousand people calmly and peacefully stopped working, demanding a pay raise. The authorities, of course, did not help: the workers simply marched through the city with rotten fish on sticks, vividly showing the bosses how they lived. And, unexpectedly, they achieved a pay raise. Without violence, without lobbying for laws, simply based on solidarity and a sense of justice.

Or consider the American grape pickers in the 1960s, led by the legendary Cesar Chavez. Instead of burning or smashing things, the guys simply organized a grape boycott across all of America. Imagine: millions of Americans stopped buying grapes in solidarity with the farmworkers! After a few years, the plantation owners simply could not take it and signed the first collective bargaining agreements in history with the workers. Again—without state aid and violence, through pure voluntary mutual aid.

And what about the Polish “Solidarity” in the 1980s? Workers independently dismantled the communist regime simply by uniting into a giant independent trade union. The state arrested them, banned them, crushed them with tanks, but they went ahead and won—peacefully, persistently, and voluntarily.

Why, then, do trade unions often look so dreary now? The answer is simple: the state loves to “help.” And when bureaucrats “help,” it usually gets worse for everyone except the bureaucrats themselves. The state monopoly on trade unions strips them of competition and motivation, mandatory dues create “reluctant passengers,” and privileges turn union leaders into ordinary officials, far removed from the workers. The stationary bandit provides privileges to certain unions, including mandatory dues from all employees, monopoly representation of all enterprise workers (even those who do not wish to join the union), and exemption from liability for damage caused during strikes. As a result, trade unions begin to look more like bureaucratic organs than independent associations of workers. Paradoxically, it is a fact: the more the state tries to “protect” workers, the fewer real opportunities workers have to protect themselves.

By the way, remember the recent history of Amazon in the USA. Ordinary warehouse workers, who had grown tired of working in harsh conditions, decided to create an independent union. The Amazon company—huge, influential, and most importantly, unwilling to allow a union organization—spent millions of dollars to prevent its creation. But the people simply organized themselves and won the vote. In this way, simple employees without resources or connections were able to prove that the power of voluntary solidarity works today as well.

The solution here is simple and libertarian: return voluntariness and freedom of competition to trade unions. If people do not like a union, they should be able to calmly leave or create another one. If a union protects its members poorly, people will simply leave and choose one that does it better.

History shows that it is precisely voluntary associations of workers, without state-imposed rules, privileges, and bureaucracy, that achieve the most impressive successes. Solidarity and mutual aid do not need a state “roof”—they are always born naturally where there is freedom. And voluntariness and freedom of association are not some kind of luxury, but the only real way to protect the rights of those who work!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

The meaning of life as the cherry on top of neural network glitches

In the comments of my previous post, I was asked to tell more about the speech given by the esteemed Atomic Cherry during a Sunday conversation with Kirill Grebnev at the Educational Resort.

Kirill brought up the question of the meaning of life. For me, the concept of meaning is by definition retrospective: the past is always what is given meaning, through reflection on what was planned, what was achieved, by what means, and, accordingly, whether there was meaning and what it was. Therefore, talking about meaning in the future can only be done hypothetically. For instance, practice shows that doing certain things is meaningful, therefore in the current situation it makes sense to apply a certain tactic. Whether there will actually be meaning in its application will be known in fact. The same applies to the meaning of life. Only the already lived segment of it is given meaning. Boring, instrumental, nothing to argue about.

As for Cherry, he didn’t interfere in the conversation for a long time; then, after a powerful puff of his pipe, he broke into a half-hour lecture, delivered at a very brisk pace so as not to be interrupted. I reproduce this to the extent that I managed to grasp.

Many animals are capable of advanced group interaction. Monkeys possess a highly developed intelligence that allows them to use tools, diversionary maneuvers, attack from ambushes, and enter into alliances. The genus Homo is capable of the same. However, all these wonders of social behavior hit the limit of Dunbar’s number. For larger collectives, the brain’s neural network resources are no longer sufficient, and emotional attachment weakens.

Cro-Magnon solved this problem through emotional attachment to fetishes and the construction of conceptual subjects, including collective ones (see my piece on spirits in the Libertarian Theory of War). Now, for him, “his own” are not only those with whom he has spent his whole life hanging out and hitting strangers over the head, but also anyone who is a descendant of the same totem animal, who believes in the same gods, and cracks an egg from the same end. It was precisely this ability to abstract attachments that allowed humans to assemble alliances of tribes, thanks to which they wiped out the Neanderthals completely. And after that came states, world religions, conspiracy theories, and other neural trash.

The thing is, a human cannot arbitrarily switch off this ability to abstract. He looks for patterns and finds them, always. Every neural network hallucinates. We see this most clearly in the example of large language models, but we ourselves are no better. Our consciousness, with all its searches for a higher meaning, is exactly those neural network hallucinations. If you want abstract thinking, accept the abstract glitches.

Abstract thinking has a practical value — it serves the biological need of humans to assert themselves by dominating large collectives. If we remove the ability to abstract, we simply return humans to the level of interaction of primitive tribes. And if we remove the drive to assert oneself over others, we get a pure hallucinating neural network, devoid of practical application, and therefore bogged down in fruitless spiritual quests.

Yes, the need to assert oneself over other people can be sublimated through creativity, asserting oneself over the forces of nature, and similar challenges. But without respect and recognition from other people, these activities lose their meaning for the human.

The City of Diaspar – how excessive control turns a utopia into stagnation

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The City and the Stars” (1956), the majestic city of Diaspar is described as the last bastion of humanity in the distant future. Its inhabitants live in luxury and safety, with practically eternal lives. But this stability comes at a high price. The city is completely closed off: no one leaves its walls, and nothing truly new ever happens. Diaspar is a “high-tech monument to stagnation,” where millions of years pass without change, and the spirit of adventure and discovery has been lost. It sounds like science fiction. But don’t you think our modern world is moving in the same direction? Let’s analyze how this manifests in different spheres of our society.

First, let’s consider the aspect of comfort and technology. In Diaspar, the needs of the residents (food, housing, entertainment) are fully met; access to high-tech entertainment and “virtual worlds” is practically unlimited; people live almost forever thanks to regeneration from “memory banks.” In the developed countries of the modern world, there is also a high level of domestic comfort—stable supplies of food, services, medical care, and housing conditions; the digital environment (social networks, virtual reality, computer games) can “lock” a person within their own informational “bubble” reality; scientists are working on life-extension technologies. Of course, one should strive for high technology and comfort, but it must not be forgotten that the absence of encounters with the challenges of the external environment prevents a person from developing resilience and flexibility.

It is important to pay attention to the fear of change and self-isolation. The residents of Diaspar are convinced that there is nothing beyond the city walls, and if there is, it must be hostile; exploration of the outside world has ceased; at the level of public consciousness, there is a taboo on the very act of leaving the city. In modern society, the fear of the “alien” is also quite common (due to immigration, cultural and political contradictions, terrorism, etc.); in some cases, states or communities erect “informational,” economic, and political barriers, striving to maintain internal stability; sometimes an excessive desire for a safe and “sterile” environment leads to a rejection of openness, flexibility, and dialogue. But when a society begins to perceive the entire external environment as a threat, it closes in on itself and loses the creative impulse for development.

Even more important is the factor of the loss of risk. In Diaspar, practically everything is under control: from the climate to human lives (immortality, regeneration); social and personal “risks” are minimized: any mistake can be “overwritten,” and any danger is excluded in advance. In modern society, more and more spheres are being automated; society increasingly seeks to insure itself against all risks—complex legal frameworks, security measures, censorship of potentially “traumatizing” topics—while the element of challenge and overcoming, which were once an integral part of growth and development, is lost. The common point is this: in striving for “zero risk,” one can miss the very essence of the human experience—the ability to go beyond the boundaries of the known.

The factor of the “bubble” of self-sufficiency and global challenges is also dangerous. Diaspar closed in on itself; people do not even imagine what resources or threats might exist beyond its limits. In the modern world, many people are not concerned with global problems (demographic collapse, environmental degradation) as long as everything is fine in their “local comfort zone.” Thus, by living in a “bubble” of stability, society becomes vulnerable to sudden crises because it stops observing reality in its fullness.

Personal freedom and responsibility are the best remedy for stagnation. If people are given more autonomy, many will act reasonably and creatively. Yes, freedom is a risk, a chaos of possibilities. But development and the energy of life go hand in hand with risk. Diaspar chose absolute security at the cost of stagnation. We, however, can choose freedom and forward movement. The world does not necessarily have to be either comfortable or alive—a balance is possible if we do not forget the value of freedom.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Anarchist Practice of Pedagogy

A link to a lecture on the anarchist theory of pedagogy appeared in the Ogurism channel, which I found very interesting. It tells the story of the teachings of a very wise Croat who served as a Catholic priest and, as befits a normal Catholic saint, regularly shamed the devil, played by various education officials.

Beyond the banal criticism of the dominant education system, which almost everyone has slammed for the insane ritualization of the process and the disregard for the opinions of those who should formally be the customers of education, our Catholic paid considerable attention to constructive solutions, and the lecturer recounted some of this construct, supplementing it with their own thoughts. In many ways, this construct echoes Friedman’s reasonings on how to prepare children (throw books at them and see which ones stick), although it devotes slightly more attention to the actual teaching technology.

Meanwhile, this weekend we took a private kindergarten, which I help out with small things from time to time, to an educational resort. The owner of the site specializes in inventing puzzles and, for fun, created an inspiring environment around himself. In addition to monetary donations, he took payment from me and my companions in the form of conversations about the meaning of life, libertarianism, Freud and Frankl, neural networks, and evolutionary biology; he was satisfied. The children, in the breaks between the pool and watching peacocks, steadily poked at the puzzles and various cool crafts piled everywhere, thus inevitably exercising their brains.

Let’s consider this somewhat disjointed story to be a toast, and drink to the hope that theory does not diverge from practice!