To avoid bothering readers with news about every single sneeze, I present a large chunk of the translation of The Network State all at once.
Chapter 4.4. The Foreseeable Future: here the author simply had some fun with a couple of interesting technical predictions. They have a rather indirect relationship to the theme of the book.
Chapter 4.5. American Anarchy, Chinese Control, and International Centrism. A monstrously large text where the author mostly, of course, writes about the USA, analyzing step by step exactly how the degree of confrontation between supporters of the establishment and supporters of decentralization will increase in the States, and reports that this, generally speaking, is not funny or romantic at all (to be honest, while reading, it seemed to me that the author created a straw man out of Bitcoin maximalists, and they by no means propagate societies of total distrust, but who knows what kind of freaks actually hang out in these Americas of theirs). The alternative in the form of the Chinese recipe for a digital gulag obviously does not entice him either. As usual, he hopes that foreign countries will help him, and primarily bets on Israel and India. However, in his view, this is merely a base for building many startup communities, some of which will grow to the high status of network states.
Chapter 4.7. Toward a Recentralized Center. And here Balaji Srinivasan only has to emphasize once more that institutions are not scary, centralization is normal, you just shouldn’t obsess over the fact that the old things don’t work, and it would be more correct to actually launch a market process for building new institutions.
I will try not to take too long with the translation of the final, fifth part of the book, which presumably contains the recipes for what the author proposes to do.
There is an extremely interesting study from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, regarding the use of oxytocin for police and military purposes. Oxytocin is a hormone that enhances trust and predisposes one to the building of trusting relationships, which is proposed to be used to forcibly reduce people’s reluctance to interact with security agents. It also considers various methods of oxytocin delivery, the most effective of which is inhalation—releasing oxytocin via a humidifier, an aerosol sprayer, or another device—since upon inhalation, it enters the brain almost instantaneously and begins to take effect.
Some of the proposed application scenarios are quite harmless and could be useful. These include stimulating trust in a child who is a victim or witness to a crime, in a person expressing suicidal intentions, in hostage situations to conduct successful negotiations, in criminals for their rehabilitation, or in terrorists so that they quickly trust an undercover newcomer.
But extremely bleak scenarios are also proposed, which could allow stationary bandits (states) to consolidate power, even up to the construction of a totalitarian dictatorship, without facing resistance. The first scenario is the control of protests by stimulating the trust of protesters in the police and security forces. The second scenario is the fight against uprisings, including through the mass spraying of oxytocin, in order to gain the trust of the population and predispose them to give up individuals disliked by the authorities.
It should be noted that this study was published back in 2007, and it is marked as “unclassified” and “approved for public release.” What the American military might have come up with since then, which remains classified and not in the public domain, we can only guess. Especially considering that they had ideas in the past such as “gay bombs,” which, when dropped on enemy troops, were intended to make soldiers combat-ineffective by inducing strong arousal.
One thing is clear: we can safely assume that stationary bandits want to manipulate our feelings and behavior by resorting to biological methods of influence. And perhaps, someday, they may even acquire means capable of brainwashing people and making them absolutely submissive.
One effective solution to such a threat can be proposed: to act preemptively, also by resorting to biological means that can be produced easily and cheaply. We are talking about means to enhance the function of the violence inhibition mechanism, the lack of which leads to psychopathic predispositions and the ability to commit intentional and planned acts of violence. The desire to have violent power over people is also a sign of psychopathic traits, and strengthening the violence inhibitor should predispose a person to abandon it. It should also make the security agents of stationary bandits unable to effectively commit acts of violence.
But what about delivering such means to their patients? It should be noted that security agents do not exist in isolation from society. They live among us, walk the same streets; they will not be able to chase dissenters in gas masks, especially if someone throws paint at them—after all, they are recruited directly from society. They are no more protected from biological influence from ordinary people than ordinary people are from such influence from them. They will be especially vulnerable if means for the permanent enhancement of the violence inhibitor, such as gene therapy drugs, become available and cheap. The question is only who will seize the initiative in biological methods of influence, and whether people will manage to overcome such a pathology as violence inhibitor dysfunction and eradicate it from society before the appearance of effective brainwashing tools.
The channel is still on vacation, but the largest investor of Montelibero stopped by for a visit, and I had an evening to chat with him, so it felt strange not to publish my reflections on this.
My previous overview of Montelibero concerned tokenomics. Now I want to examine such a mysterious entity as the Montelibero Association. I first mentioned it in the sixteenth (and apparently final) news issue — since then, I no longer write about Montelibero as a whole, only about specific aspects.
The reason for the Association’s appearance was that the Montelibero community had accumulated problems:
Goal setting. The stated goal of the Montelibero project was initially libertarian transformations in Montenegro. However, those coming to the country are somehow more concerned with issues of their legalization in this state, earning a living, increasing the quality of that very life by developing internal culture within the community, and so on. Ancaps do not want to build an ancap for others; they are perfectly satisfied building an ancap for themselves, plus some minimal costs to keep the state from getting in the way.
Lack of activists to create public goods. Who will build the roads is not a particularly acute problem, because it is easy to outline the circle of main future beneficiaries of road construction. But who (or rather, for what incentives) will write the wallet code for our tokenomics, who will organize a large annual festival and many smaller intermediate activities, who will pay for hosting, who will handle the filling and promotion of information resources — and so on? Administering the collection of small targeted contributions for any such trifle would be too expensive; it is more profitable to aggregate administrative expenses somehow.
Insufficient clarity of collective decision-making mechanisms. For example, who and how will decide whom to send to deliver a report at a conference if the conference organizers contact one of the Montelibero participants and invite some representative of Montelibero?
One could simply dismiss such problems, claiming that the “market” is meant to solve them. But the “market” is precisely a generalized name for the entire sum of voluntary private initiatives. And so, one such initiative sounded roughly like this:
Since a loose community without fixed membership responds poorly to such challenges, let’s create an organization with fixed membership from its participants, gather activists into it, implement liquid democracy there, and within the framework of the association, they can engage in creating various cool infrastructural things for the entire community, as well as make collective decisions that can then be communicated to the whole community.
Half of last summer, the Association was at the stage of preliminary discussion. It was officially created at the festival. Now it has slightly over a hundred people in its membership. I will try to briefly list its main achievements:
Creation of a mechanism for identity verification of its participants and a standardized blockchain record of this fact
Creation of a court, which has already managed to consider several cases
Creation of a competition commission to select the organizing committee for the Montelibero festival in 2024
Creation of internal factions united by a common direction of interests (creates associations with secular Civil Society)
Even at the stage of preliminary discussion, the Association faced serious difficulties, and some of them became even more apparent after its activities began.
Firstly, the very idea of officially joining something, obeying the decisions of a collegiate body, and so on, proved alien to many ancaps. A working group around a specific project — as many as you like! Membership in a club — by all means! But the Association, by design, looked like something too similar to a political party, and therefore was rejected regardless of the arguments in its support.
Secondly, the Association has internally contradictory goals. On one hand, to engage in constructive activity, it needs a high concentration of activists. On the other hand, to communicate legitimate decisions to the entire large community, it must be as numerous as possible. On a third hand, principled opponents of the association perceive any attempts by the Association to communicate its decisions externally as encroachments on their freedom and try to delegitimize them in every way.
Liquid democracy deserves a separate mention. The Association’s council, to simplify the model slightly, consists of twenty of its participants with the highest number of votes delegated to them by other members of the Association. This creates an incentive for those wishing to enter the Council to campaign for their own sympathizers to join the Association, preferably passive ones, so that all their activity in the organization boils down to joining, verification, and delegating their vote.
As a result, a contradictory situation has emerged.
On one hand, the Association carries out some useful activity. For example, the court it created resolved several conflicts that were previously in limbo. However, in one of these conflicts, the defendant (a member of the Association) did not recognize the jurisdiction of the court over them, thus questioning the claim that the Association is a contractual jurisdiction. A potentially even more useful project is the development of a standard for the blockchainization of relationships. Finally, it is the Association that plans to carry the festival on its shoulders.
On the other hand, all this looks like an attempt to create a monopoly out of nowhere, combining completely diverse activities under a single brand, even to the detriment of efficiency. For instance, the development of the blockchainization standard and its accompanying toolkit requires a compact working group, not a bureaucratic structure. To create a tradition of resolving conflicts in court, examples of successful conflict resolution are needed, not attempts at forced court appearances under threat of loss of Association membership. Cumbersome democratic coordination procedures repel enthusiasts rather than attract them. Attempts to inflate the prestige of membership through economic incentives for Association members and restrictions for non-members lead rather to the opposite effect: any anti-statist knows that if someone tries to impose a certain free service on you, threatening sanctions for not using it, you should run as far away from such gifts as possible.
Now my conclusions.
The creation of the Association was a response by a small active part of the community to quite real challenges facing the community.
This solution is unsuccessful by design and is quite naturally rejected by part of the community.
Attempts to infiltrate the Association from the outside for the purpose of correcting its design flaws are harmful: it is a sin to try to replace the market with politics.
Attempts to destroy the Association for the purpose of returning to the past are counterproductive, since even if the price seems acceptable, as a result, the community will still have to solve the same problems that the Association tried to solve.
The only strategy that seems reasonable to me: ignore its very existence as some unified entity, without rejecting the people who are part of it in any way. Membership in the Association is neither good nor bad; it has no more meaning than an earring in the ear.
As for the little problems, they will have to be solved by our own efforts; no kind uncle will come and help, and no evil uncle will come and hinder. He doesn’t exist, this collective uncle.
There is a view that the only essential condition for achieving freedom of activity, agreement, and association is the creation of significant costs for criminals. Allegedly, it is sufficient that any harm inevitably requires compensation, and that everyone owns weapons, which would make attacks unprofitable (do not think that we are against gun ownership – it is useful for evolutionary selection, but right now we are talking about something else). In such a case, even if everyone were a psychopath, significant violence would not arise in practice. Moreover, some might say that aggressiveness is even necessary for a free person, for example, to easily kill for any encroachments upon oneself and to carry out violent revenge (on the principle of “an eye for an eye”). But we can easily dispute this position and prove why freedom is possible only in a society of peaceful people.
First, it would be foolish to believe that people always act rationally and accurately assess benefits and risks. Even in societies where fingers and hands were cut off for theft, thieves did not disappear completely. This is even more true for psychopathic individuals. As research shows, they concentrate too heavily on their goals, missing important details. For example, in a task where they had to navigate a maze by manipulating levers and avoiding those that delivered painful electric shocks, they handled the first condition well, but were worse than ordinary people at the second. In gambling, they were poor at learning long-term strategies; it was important for them to quickly hit a huge win, even at the risk of putting themselves in the negative. Likewise, psychopathic pilots in World War II would easily chase an enemy, forgetting to monitor fuel, the position of other aircraft, and other factors critical for victory.
Understanding this, would anyone still think that psychopathic individuals can be reasoned with or intimidated enough to ensure they definitely do not commit violence, do not organize criminal gangs, or even avoid trying to forcibly subjugate everyone and create their own power in a society where none exists? Let us not forget that current states arose precisely through the violent subjugation of people. And striving for the position of a “stationary” bandit, “nomadic” bandits ignored the risk of death at the hands of defenders and their competitors.
Second, there are many ways to cause harm to people without direct violence. Various kinds of manipulations, including gossip, blackmail, threats, pitting people against each other, provoking a hostile reaction (to make you look unstable to others), wearing someone down, psychological and economic violence, etc., which are often used by psychopaths in the pursuit of their own benefit. It will be impossible to write deterrent factors and punishments for all such scenarios. This means that the more psychopathic individuals there are around, the more such manipulations will be applied to you personally, and instead of productive activity, you will spend all your time defending yourself from attempts to walk all over you. Also, psychopathic individuals are prone to sabotaging collective work for personal gain.
Now imagine the opposite situation – psychopathic individuals are absent or negligibly few. In such a society, freedom of relationships would occur instantly and without additional requirements. At the same time, in a society of psychopaths, one could likely expect something similar to what is currently happening in Haiti or the scenario of the movie “New World,” where rapists sent to live on an island organized a mass slaughter, and at some point, a small portion of them even forcibly subjugated all the others and monopolized the possession of resources. And if you would not want to participate daily in a war of all against all in a “free” society, you should first think about eradicating such a pathology as the dysfunction of the violence inhibition mechanism, which makes some people psychopathically predisposed and capable of easily causing harm to other people.
It is a commonly held opinion that psychopathic individuals experience little empathy or do not manifest it at all. This, of course, makes them cold-blooded and callous, capable even of easily committing murder if there is a reason for it and no significant risks. But besides this, their lack of empathy has long cast doubt on the possibility of providing easy and effective therapy for their condition.
However, a study of psychopathic criminals found that they can experience empathy. Moreover, during the experiment, they exhibited the same level of activation of mirror neurons—which are responsible for the ability to learn through imitation of other people and are believed to be involved in the manifestation of empathy—as healthy individuals.
However, psychopaths have one very important difference. While empathy manifests spontaneously in normal people, regardless of whether the person wishes to experience it, psychopaths can intentionally control this process. Their normal state is switched-off empathy; they manifest it only when they want to. And within the experiment, normal activation of mirror neurons in psychopaths was observed only when the researchers explicitly asked them to show empathy.
The results of this study align with what psychopaths often claim about themselves, for example, on question-and-answer websites like Quora. If you search there for questions asked to psychopaths about whether they are capable of experiencing empathy, you will see many positive answers, but with the note that they can literally turn empathy on and off whenever they want, as if they have a switch for it. However, there are also psychopaths who claim a complete inability to feel empathy. But, given the data already known to us, it can be suggested that they simply do not know how to turn it on within themselves.
Researchers do not yet know how to turn the empathy that psychopaths can manifest intentionally into the spontaneously manifested empathy characteristic of most people. However, the fact that psychopaths can show empathy, at least under certain conditions, gives therapists something to work with.
It is also worth hypothesizing that empathy can be made spontaneous quite easily by using certain agents that activate specific serotonin receptors and favorably influence the function of the serotonin system as a whole. Pharmacological activation of serotonin 1A and 1B receptors in animal experiments often leads to them ceasing aggressive attacks on their peers, or even becoming more predisposed to help them—for example, by sharing food, even if it brings the subject no personal benefit. This effect is linked to the activation of a violence inhibition mechanism, which in humans plays an important role in the development of empathy.
The results of this study provide an answer to another important question. Someone might easily find and point to individuals who, in their ordinary social life, are normal family men, good friends and colleagues, law-abiding citizens—that is, full members of society—despite the fact that under certain conditions, for example, while serving in law enforcement or as a soldier on the battlefield, they easily committed violence and even murder without feeling the slightest repulsion. As is known from a number of studies, including military ones, the ability to easily commit violence and murder in such conditions would still be a manifestation of an individual’s high psychopathy. But there is no contradiction here. For perhaps such cases are precisely explainable by the fact that psychopathic individuals can be empathic when they intentionally want to be, for example, wishing to have a full social life. However, it should not be forgotten that such individuals can decide not to experience empathy at any moment, and this carries certain threats to society.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, and at the same time, happy end of Maslenitsa; and to those who love filming queues in fast-forward mode—happy opportunity to indulge in your favorite pastime. So many holidays in one day—isn’t that great, isn’t that panarchy!
As for me, another chapter of The Network State has been quietly translated. Balaji Srinivasan continues to discuss the trends of the near future, and if in the previous chapter he discussed socio-political trends, now he touches upon the techno-economic consequences of the digitalization and internetization of everything.
For instance, he notes that the sharp lowering of the publishing threshold increases variance: alongside traditional, polished, and weighted but uninteresting positions, a multitude of the most unusual chthonic entities crawl into the light. And besides the shaking of discourse via social networks, there is also the shaking of financial stability through countless cryptocurrencies.
Another interesting aspect discussed by the author is that the total digitalization of everything leads to digital entities becoming primary, while physical ones, in essence, materialize on demand if there is a need.
He also briefly touches upon the mystery of why we do not observe as frantic a leap in productivity in the physical world as we do in the digital world. Then, providing a whole brood of hypotheses, he suggests choosing between them independently.
In short, the chapter is quite saturated with ideas and generalizations, so I don’t see much point in summarizing it; it’s easier to just read it.
While the channel is on vacation, I’m not bothering with original materials, but so you don’t get bored, I’ll be posting some external content from time to time.
Soz recorded and posted a very high-quality video on MTL-TV, where he explains why the use of multi-signature wallets is extremely useful for literally everyone who holds large sums in cryptocurrencies, and how easily and conveniently this is organized in the Stellar blockchain in general and in the Montelibero tokenomics in particular. I highly recommend it, and I also want to use the suggested recipes once I have a bit more free time.
And don’t forget about the Ankaposhnaya segment on the same channel; they’ve already reached the part explaining the market and seem to have no intention of stopping.
From the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism, we know that a healthy individual, when observing the suffering (distress signals) of another person, begins to experience a feeling of aversion and becomes predisposed to ceasing aggressive actions toward them. This effect is psychological; the neural pathways responsible for it are activated as a result of observing suffering as a social signal. At least, this is what we used to believe. However, some new discoveries indicate that the impact of certain distress signals on the violence inhibitor—specifically, crying—may be chemical in nature.
Several years ago, a study on rats revealed that rubbing female tears onto the face and other body parts of males, who played the role of “intruders” in the experiments, reduced the aggressiveness of the “residents”—the males whose cages they entered. Given that all necessary conditions of the resident-intruder paradigm are met, an aggressive attack by the resident on the intruder is expected. However, it was found that if the intruder smells of female tears, no aggression is shown toward them. At the same time, male tears do not possess this effect.
Recently, a similar result was reproduced in humans. To measure the aggressiveness of men, a money game was used involving provocations and the possibility to “get revenge” for them, without receiving any personal benefit from the revenge. Players were told they were playing against another person, although they were actually playing against a computer. Before the game, men were given 1 ml samples to smell 13 times at intervals of 35 seconds. The first three times it was a saline solution; the remaining ten were also saline solution for the control group and female tears for the experimental group.
As a result, aggressive gaming behavior (the desire to avenge provocations) in men who smelled female tears was 43.7% lower than in the control group. Additionally, MRI scans revealed that their prefrontal cortex and the anterior part of the insular cortex in the brain were not as strongly activated as a result of provocations during the game.
Of course, as psychologists note, certain questions may arise in real-life situations—for example, why tears, despite the remarkable results of the experiments, do not always play a significant role in stopping domestic violence. There is a suggestion that tears may not be significant in relationships between adults, and that the evolutionary role of their anti-aggressive effect is to protect children, who are unable to state that aggression must stop but will cry a lot if it occurs. Experiments with children’s tears are still planned. Research is also planned to find the specific component of tears that causes the anti-aggressive effect. This could help in the creation and production of a highly effective, humane means of self-defense that causes no harm to the attacker.
Another translation order has come in, and it’s also quite urgent. This means I may need to take a break from running the channel.
Therefore, for now, I can recommend listening to the podcasts on our Montelibero channel MTL-TV, especially, of course, the new “Ankaposhnaya” section; it’s not so much about Montelibero as it is about various libertarian theories—after all, that’s why you gathered here to read, isn’t it?
Montelibero is a decentralized community, which is why the channel has no single host; it is managed by whoever needs it most at the moment. First it was Soz, then Birkin, now it’s Ivan from the Ogurism channel, and later perhaps someone else will take over.
Also, to keep from getting too bored, you can boost the channel for now. Previously, this would only have given me the ability to post stories, but I find it barbaric to work on content that is destined to disappear quickly—such is my vain nature. But now, a well-boosted channel can also be styled more exquisitely, and it’s better to have that option than not to have it.
A substantial piece of text is ready for a book on the theory of war, covering various aspects of war preparation. It took a very long time to write; it is evident that excerpts from different periods differ in style, but I do not want to delay publication; I will still have time to proofread it.
Let us consider this as a substitute for the routine post on the anniversary of the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian troops, and after all, I promised to speed up after Navalny’s death. So, I am speeding up.
