The other day, someone shoved a book at me, saying, “Oh, you’re pregnant, here, read something interesting.” More accurately, they shoved a link to a LiveJournal where I am banned, and when I protested, they handed me an epub file. I poked around distrustfully, assuming it would be something about pregnancy or parenting, and, strictly speaking, it was indeed about that, but not at all in the way I expected.
I’ll say it straight away: the book is written in an obnoxious style. In places, it is pure, unedited neuro-slop, which was physically difficult for me to wade through. But I had to, because the novelty of the approach used in the book to represent the human phenomenon proved to be very significant to me personally. So, fine—if a person is a biologist, you shouldn’t expect them to also be a genius of elegant prose.
To put it very briefly, it tells the following story. A human is an unfinished project, and that is its main feature. A human’s primary skill, deeply embedded in its nature, is delegation. It delegated part of its digestive functions to fire, and by doing so, got rid of a complex digestive system, with the saved energy going toward brain development. The large brain created difficulties with childbirth, so humans began to be born premature, and their brain, as well as the rest of the body, began to be completed in the external environment—and over a staggeringly long period, which means that upbringing was delegated to society. Not just the content, but the neural structure of the brain itself is shaped by social experience. The brain’s key functions became social: understanding the intentions of others and modeling them within one’s own brain. Bipedalism freed the hands for the use of tools, which in turn freed the mouth for facial expressions and speech. Speech allowed meanings to be preserved in symbols. Writing moved the collective intelligence beyond synchronous contact. Information processing is being delegated to computers and AI. This is supposed to free the brain for something new. For now, we can only guess what that might be. We are an unfinished project.
And this is all, of course, very interesting, but as they say, one man’s meat is another man’s poison—or rather, libertarians will always talk about libertarianism. A human has delegated so much, and on so many levels, that it is literally impossible to view them in isolation from either the external environment they created or from society. And this blurs the main frameworks that guide libertarian discourse. If a human is a product not so much of genes as of their habitat, and primarily of society, then the concept of self-ownership begins to look somewhat contrived. The axiom of action that lies at the heart of praxeology begins to look somewhat contrived. “A human acts by choosing means to achieve ends”—but why on earth? Action has a cause; no one has canceled the principle of causality. But the idea of a “goal,” taking into account all this countless delegation, already seems quite blurred. A human is excellent at reflection, and they can easily invent a goal for their past actions post-factum, and once invented, become completely convinced of it.
On the other hand, in light of all these concepts, the idea I proposed in “The Libertarian Theory of War” regarding spirits as speculative collective subjects takes on new colors. It turns out they aren’t so speculative after all. In many ways, they are no more speculative than a human being. For instance, there is the author of a book. This is a speculative subject that I model in my own brain based on the text of the book. And if the book is co-authored, the author in my brain still remains a single speculative subject, while their collectivity remains entirely off-stage. The same applies to characters, who might embody many prototypes. These are collective subjects. But in the exact same way, any human is also a collective subject that I construct in my brain in the same manner, endowing them with, among other things, the traits of many of their prototypes, which, in my opinion, they inherited certain features from. Putin is literally Hitler, yeah.
I am leaving my reasoning unfinished. I think there is no need to explain why.
A recent post by Bitarch on trust networks reminded me of my decentralization cycle, and that it would be a good idea to supplement it with a new note.
People inevitably interact with one another and would like to derive maximum benefit from this with minimum costs. Of course, in a praxeological sense—meaning it doesn’t necessarily have to be about monetary profit or loss, but rather about satisfaction or, conversely, dissatisfaction. In repeated interactions, one can attempt to predict the counterpart’s actions and, based on this, decide in advance how to act. And if the counterpart knows that the interaction will continue to repeat, this knowledge will also influence their actions. Constantly interacting counterparts can agree on cooperation, distance themselves if they find each other unpleasant, send signals suggesting the boundaries of what is acceptable, and so on. Each person inevitably builds up a certain reputation in the eyes of the other.
Additionally, in human communities, the transmission of information about one person’s reputation to another person is of great importance. The other is not obliged to take this information on faith and may, on the contrary, believe that they are being misinformed for some reason. And even if the information received turns out to be completely reliable, they may still believe that someone is trying to gain their trust only to deceive them later. There can be as many layers of reflection as one likes; that is why we grew such a complex brain—to gossip with pleasure.
To gossip and especially to collect gossip about people outside their constant circle of communication, people devise various systems for recording and representing reputation. What should such a system be like from the perspective of someone studying another’s reputation? They would want to be able to receive information about a person’s behavior in the area of interest, and for that information to be easily accessible, difficult to forge, and difficult to hide. And if it is not a matter of studying one specific individual, but of searching for a suitable option, then there should be many options—ideally all possible ones—with convenient data filtering tools.
And what should the system be like from the perspective of the person whose behavioral data is being studied? Naturally, they would prefer that only the information they want to keep public is made public, while information that doesn’t need to be known by everyone could ideally be formatted as reliable proofs and presented only to those who need it. It would also be useful to have the ability to provide ill-wishers with convincing fake information about oneself.
From this set of contradictory requests, it is clear that an ideal reputation system that satisfies everyone is impossible. Again, we have so far neglected the costs of collecting, storing, and presenting reputational information, but those costs also exist.
Thus, it is quite easy to imagine the economically justified construction of a reputation system in some specific narrow field, but it is difficult to understand who would be interested, and why, in maintaining comprehensive open dossiers on every action of every person. Even government agencies prefer to collect voluminous dossiers only for official access, and their employees are certainly not interested in ending up in them themselves, perfectly understanding that the wider the circle of those who have voluminous information about them, the more vectors there are for sudden attacks.
Who, besides the consumers of reputation information, is interested in this information appearing in the corresponding systems? Of course, those who believe that their reputation in this system will present them in the light they wish to be presented. Those aspiring to the title of faithful spouses are unlikely to want to see themselves in an open registry of top lovers, although in another context, a high rating in that capacity would flatter them. A talented craftsman will have nothing against appearing in a rating of masters in the relevant field, while a less talented one would prefer to appear simply on a bulletin board, without a built-in reputation system, or at least have the ability to boost their rating a bit.
What general conclusion can I draw from all these considerations regarding the processes of centralization and decentralization in reputation systems? In a free market, it seems more likely to me that there will be many local reputation systems, rather than comprehensive, monstrous social rating systems. Even if some open system stores data on a large number of people, this will be fairly narrow information. Services for aggregating comprehensive open information on a specific person of interest are also quite monetizable; however, the objects of such research are unlikely to be interested in having information about them from diverse sources be easily aggregated. Nevertheless, working with big data today is a relatively inexpensive pastime, so few will be able to seriously confuse researchers of someone else’s digital footprint.
But these numerous local reputation systems will, I believe, be mostly centralized. As for systems of distributed storage of reputational information in electronic form, they are unlikely to gain serious popularity, remaining a niche solution for small communities. There are no serious prerequisites for scaling here.
A week ago, I mentioned three events where the state took repressive actions and people responded to them in various ways. All three storylines have since had developments.
The second fork of the Libertarian Party of Russia has also been recognized as a foreign agent organization
Now no one feels slighted that the state notices his party while ignoring the rivals’ party; both got a taste of the medicine. In response, both parties announced a total freeze of their activities. This is more than logical, because writing “bullshit” in every headline is quite humiliating, and there is no point in enduring this humiliation, as a foreign agent organization is prohibited from engaging in educational activities and participating in politics—which is exactly what both LPRs have done throughout their history.
A side plot has also seen some development. Montelibero reminded us of the support program for repatriates to Montenegro, and the Montenegrin state, in turn, reminded us that it is actively striving for the EU, harmonizing its visa policy with the European Union, and therefore introducing a visa regime with the RF starting in November. Finita, a popular relocation destination is closing. What is the point of getting a Montenegrin visa if the requirements will be Schengen-like; wouldn’t it be better to just get a Schengen visa and at least have the opportunity to choose one of 27 countries for residence.
The popular Ukrainian Minister of Defense was not reinstated, but instead, the commander-in-chief was replaced by a more popular one
This is, of course, the strangest development of the plot, because it moves in complete contradiction to the official rhetoric. The President of Ukraine claimed that he had no complaints against the former Minister of Defense, but simply a conflict between him and the commander-in-chief. And so, the commander-in-chief was removed; it would seem the problem was solved. But no, in fact, the firing of the Minister of Defense was the goal of all the reshuffles. The retired minister is asserting his rights, the street continues to protest, and the democratic process—being by definition a euphemism for civil war—is working at full blast in exactly this, its primary capacity; if it worked like this for everyone, there would be significantly fewer complaints about democracy.
Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State has signed a partnership agreement with Kazakhstan, and he’s getting the hell out of Malaysia
Thus, the founder of the Network State not only carried out his threat to move capital out of a toxic jurisdiction but was also welcomed with open arms in another jurisdiction, and this is exactly what the concept of the network state was devised for: the possibility of obtaining diplomatic recognition from traditional territorial states.
The subject of the Network State’s conflict with Malaysia, if Twitter comments are to be believed, is quite ridiculous in itself. The Malaysian police literally stormed their campus not just for no reason, but were looking for Jews under the floor, which makes the plot completely Tarantino-esque.
General conclusions and forecasts
Traditional territorial states care less and less about their own systemic well-being and more and more about serving the momentary whims of top officials or long-neglected bureaucratic processes whose meaning has long been lost. The sanctity of state decisions has been lost almost everywhere; now legitimacy is being actively spent. When legitimacy drops sufficiently, the sabotage of state decisions will become a widespread and quite ordinary phenomenon. It seems, however, that the collapse of state management systems will remain fairly peaceful: where the state is aggressive, individuals and organizations avoid violent conflict with it, but the conflict still undermines the state’s strength.
I thought it would be interesting to compare the reactions of various targets of state attacks to the fact of the attack, especially since there have been several multi-level examples recently.
The Libertarian Party of Russia has been recognized as a foreign agent organization
Reaction:
LPR members are wondering which of the two LPRs specifically.
The LPR(s) posted an official statement: “we are patriots and condemn this decision.”
Those not in the LPR congratulate both LPRs on the state recognizing their existence.
Montelibero reminds about the assistance program for moving to Montenegro.
A popular Ukrainian defense minister has been dismissed
Reaction:
The dismissed official posted a report on the work done and held a press conference.
Like-minded people of the dismissed official in the troops publish public statements in his support.
Foreign officials express bewilderment.
The general public: protests in support of the dismissed official.
Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State was subjected to swatting
Reaction:
The founder politely asks on Twitter whether Malaysia would like capital flight from this toxic jurisdiction to more welcoming ones for such startups, such as Kazakhstan.
The founder’s like-minded associates specify exactly how much has been invested and how much will be withdrawn if Malaysian officials do not swear that it was a stupid mistake and that they will not dare do such a thing again.
Commonalities in all three reactions
No one expresses any doubt that the state is committing overt aggression against the interests of its citizens.
The targets of the attack officially express loyalty to the state, although they condemn its decision.
The targets of the attack try to convince the state to revoke its decision amicably.
The uniqueness of the reaction in one of the cases
Only the founder of the Network State communicates with the territorial state as an equal.
Conclusion
The state is effective in violence. The targets of state attacks prefer not to give it a forceful response in order not to provoke escalation. Nevertheless, they lean towards an asymmetric response. In the case of the LPR and the Network State, this is emigration, meaning the deprivation of the state of economic resources. In the case of the dismissed minister, it is the delegitimization of the decision through public pressure. I have arranged the cases in increasing order of the probability that the toxic decision will be overturned. In the case of the LPR, the probability is vanishingly small. With Fedorov, I think the probability is about thirty percent. With Balaji, about seventy percent. I will follow the last two cases.
Very few manuals have been written on the transition from a society with a state to a free anarcho-capitalist society. The best of what has been created, in my opinion, is Konkin’s New Libertarian Manifesto. There is also a clear lack of fictional works on this subject, at least those demonstrating all stages of the transition rather than just one striking moment.
However, there is the somewhat separate Meganesia cycle by Alex Rozov, in the initial part of which the transition to a stateless society is covered in quite some detail, although, of course, from slightly different ideological positions. I would like to talk about the first work of the cycle, “Maui and Pele Holding the World“, which describes the events of the so-called Aluminum Revolution.
Part 1. Playing as Rebels on the Initial Difficulty Level
Briefly, the plot of the book.
Christian sectarians from Guyana board Muslim sectarians from Yemen in the waters of the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean and seize five tons of gold from them. The gold was intended to be spent on weapons for the Christian sect, but the US intelligence services acted faster and exterminated the sect; only the commandos with the gold remained. They decide to continue the sect’s cause right on the spot and get acquainted with the local authorities. These turn out to be:
cocaine smugglers from Mexico and Haiti;
producers of unlicensed electronics and mechanics from New Zealand, and joined by a clever and beautiful woman from a family of American Baptist missionaries, who is friends with North Korean Komsomol members;
a bored Australian philosopher on a yacht and his son, who develops military strategy games;
steampunks led by a certain Czech;
descendants of German colonists from the Solomon Islands;
a squadron of mercenary pilots from South Africa;
and a very few actual Polynesian natives.
Next, all this crew notes that they were pushed out of the civilized world into this armpit, but now the civilized world is encroaching here too. They must fight it before it “civilizes” this armpit in its own way, because there is nowhere left to run. They instantly bring in several thousand Indians from Guyana and Blacks from Haiti, release from captivity and immediately recruit several thousand North Korean Komsomol members, start a war, and easily win it in a landslide, destroying along the way:
a US carrier strike group, plus about a marine battalion, plus two stealth bombers;
a combined international military flotilla along with half of Singapore;
a British PMC;
a brigade of the French Foreign Legion;
more than ten thousand armed Indonesian migrant workers;
several tens of thousands of peaceful civilians, predominantly ethnic Europeans and Indians, plus a few Arabs;
a liner with several hundred billionaires on board;
a plane with a prince from the UAE.
The total losses of the rebels were not named, but in the bloodiest of operations, the capture of New Caledonia from France, they amounted to 78 people. I think I would hardly be mistaken if I said that in total the People’s Fleet of Meganesia lost a couple of hundred killed and as many seriously wounded. Oh, yes, the whole war is run by that same developer of computer strategies without a single armed minion, whom all the local authorities unanimously put forward as the leader and subordinated their sizeable military contingents to him.
Then they conclude peace with the USA, as favorable for the States as Trump’s peace was with Iran.
And somewhere in the middle of the text, they realize that they have already executed a lot of people according to some Charter, however, they forgot to actually draft the Charter itself. They had to gather in an assembly where the Australian philosopher presented a draft, and right then the local authorities almost shot each other. But everything, of course, worked out, and thereafter they executed people according to the Charter in full compliance with procedure.
A logical question arises: if defeating the state by military means is so simple, what prevented this from being done earlier? Of course, I will not give the most obvious answer that this is all the author’s empty fantasies and that it is simply impossible to defeat the state in a war. Let us agree that the key factor was the pushing of all anti-state elements into a single point, which resulted in this kind of synergy.
It is clear that there are still a mass of complaints regarding the internal logic of this military strategy, and here the most obvious explanation is as follows: this game was played on the minimum difficulty level. The opponents are stupid, unorganized, and neglect reconnaissance and planning. The allies have infinite resources and work perfectly as a team.
Why was this done? Obviously, to awaken maximum interest in all potential participants of the movement. A venture investor needs attractive brochures, and a detailed description of all possible risks will only deter him. Moreover, states indeed demonstrate such stunning inefficiency at times that the chances of success for a hypothetical Aluminum Revolution truly exist.
Part 2. Ancaps Join the Game
Now let’s imagine that at the start of the game there was another faction on the field — a libertarian one. Let’s say it went like this.
According to Rozov’s original plot, after robbing the golden galleon, the sectarians retreat to lick their wounds on Suvorov Atoll, where a secret transit point of the Cocaine Trail is located. Now let’s step back a quarter of a century…
In 2011, Russian political technologist Anton Bakov announced the establishment of the Russian Empire on Suvorov Atoll — the heir to the RI destroyed during the 1917 coup. In current reality, Bakov’s project withered away after a few years, never leaving the bounds of internet discussions. The course of events was similar in Rozov’s book. However, in the plot we are constructing, Bakov turned out to be more successful (since we are playing on a low difficulty level). He managed to agree with the government of the Cook Islands to create a memorial complex on Suvorov Atoll in honor of the discovery of the atoll by Lazarev’s Russian expedition. By 2014, a memorial, a Russian cultural center, and an Orthodox church were opened on the atoll. Then the “Crimea-grab” happened, and at the insistent request of the USA, Russia’s funding of the project was wound down. The Chekists and intelligence officers from the cultural center returned home; the priest remained, as well as some settlers.
There were two factions in Bakov’s project: conservatives and libertarians. The conservatives wanted to cosplay the Russian Empire; the libertarians wanted to build a free society. After the winding down of state funding, the etatists left, while the libertarians felt it was not the right time to return to a country suffering from imperial hysteria. On the contrary, they invited a number of like-minded people from all over the world. Let us remember that Vit Edliczka announced the creation of Liberland only in 2015; the Free State Project announced reaching the threshold of 20,000 signatures only in 2016, after which relocation to the Free State officially started; the first land for the future Prospera was bought in 2017; the Montellibero project started as late as 2021. Thus, in our 2014, the Pacific libertarian project had a head start, thanks to which the most passionate people ended up specifically on Suvorov Atoll, rather than in the Granite State or on an island in the middle of the Danube or the Caribbean Sea, not to mention a piece of land in Montenegro.
Main factions among the first Suvorovians:
Russians from Bakov’s project. Their move was partially sponsored by murky Bakov capitals for the sake of crowd-filling, and thereafter they were left to their own devices. Mostly IT specialists; their share among Russian libertarians has always been disproportionately high.
Americans who never made it to New Hampshire. The relatively wealthiest, and thus having the ability to relocate in comfort. They brought a developed individual gun culture and the cult of Bitcoin.
Australian and New Zealander libertarians — these simply lived nearby and therefore easily fit into the ideologically close movement. Predominantly yachtsmen.
By the start of the book’s action, the libertarian colony on Suvorov Atoll has already existed for a quarter of a century, and a second generation of colonists has grown up. The size of the colony directly on the atoll is a maximum of a few hundred people, because the atoll itself is quite small. However, participants of the project live across all the Cook Islands.
How did technology develop in the world of the Meganesia cycle? The neural network revolution didn’t happen, nor did Starlink. Instead, biotechnology turned out to be more developed than in our world. Therefore, organic microchips exist — weaker than advanced silicon ones, but more accessible for decentralized production. There are also transgenic crops of all kinds and colors. Why did it turn out this way? The answer is obvious: because with the start of the Ukrainian war, the PRC took the opportunity to seize Taiwan by force, and the global semiconductor industry went down the drain. Thus, global scientific thought surged in another direction.
Satellite communication is weak, and our ancaps need reliable broadband internet, as they have IT specialists here, moreover soaked in Bitcoin, plus yachtsmen. Therefore, they willingly get involved in a messy project with a network of relay airships over the entire Pacific Ocean. Rozov does not describe what the network nodes looked like, but it is known that communication did not collapse despite the USA destroying the factory producing the corresponding equipment. This means the airship is extremely autonomous and does not require regular repair and maintenance. I think, given the abundance of biotechnology, this airship is something like a Westerveld jellyfish, only better. A colony of microorganisms feeds on alcohol, decomposing it into carbon and hydrogen. From the carbon, it grows the graphene walls of the aerostat. It fills the aerostat with hydrogen. The decomposition reaction is exothermic; the heat generated is enough to power the electric motor and transmitter. When the alcohol runs out, the jellyfish gradually loses hydrogen through the walls, descends to the ocean, and begins to eat phytoplankton, processing it into alcohol. At this time, if desired, the jellyfish can be caught and the server equipment can be maintained. Jellyfish are territorial animals. They exchange signals with each other and try to position themselves in space so as not to approach at an uncomfortable distance, but also not to drift far enough to lose the signal. The jellyfish relays the signals it receives. I don’t know if the jellyfish can reproduce. Most likely, for this, it still requires an incubator where it assembles around a server with pre-installed software, and then begins to live its jellyfish life, carrying the server on its back.
Forgive this long technical digression; sci-fi writers always sin with this, it’s the law of the genre.
In short, by the start of the book’s action, we have a fairly large agorist community engaged in IT, logistics, and decentralized finance. The community has hit the limits of development since it has no opportunity for expansion where state regulations are strong. From time to time, groups branch off and settle on various islands, but maintain contact with the community, primarily thanks to the Bitcoin standard and tokenomics à la Montellibero. However, this is quite slow expansion. The libertarians have nothing to fight over with the cocaine dons, but they do have some economic contacts. The dons get communication and help with traffic. The libertarians occasionally order enforcement services from the dons.
And then, like Robert in Ruanapur, socialist sectarians from LiRe fall upon their heads, with five tons of gold and plans to start a war.
In the following text, I assume that everyone has already seen the movie and formed their own opinion, and if not, it doesn’t matter much whether you watch it before or after reading this text.
Reviews often call the film a piece of propaganda, a pamphlet, or a political manifesto. That is not the case. What we have here is an instructional film. It does not criticize the current state of affairs. It provides instructions on how to act and what is needed for that. Here are the narratives that need to be transmitted: if you are a vigilante; if you saw a news story about a vigilante; if you are a TV presenter talking about a vigilante; if you are a witness being questioned by the police about a vigilante. No wide field of opinions is given — only clear, correct answers; the viewer must not be confused, they need clear instructions. The key message is: look, I’m showing you how it’s done. Later, you will do it yourself. This is the only take that is repeated several times in the film, including right at the curtain call.
A successful vigilante needs: to have combat skills, a stable source of income, the ability to articulate their position, neatness and attention to detail, to demonstrate professional integrity, and not to leave the regime with hostages in the form of family members, sticking to superficial connections; always offer simple executors on the opponent’s side to retreat, and shoot only in case of refusal. Outsiders need: to express a clear public demand, saying, “it’s cool that there are such people, we need them very much in such-and-such a country.” Journalists need: to hammer the public and the establishment with the question, “should our system protect victims of violence or criminals? And if it handles criminals poorly, then why hinder those who handle them better? Or are you in favor of more crime?” Witnesses need: while demonstrating a willingness to cooperate, to sabotage police actions to capture the vigilante.
A separate important feedback mechanism is shown, which is necessary for the vigilante to remain within the framework of the public demand, without replacing it with personal notions of morality. The main character always asks the victim if they are satisfied with the procedures of restoring justice already carried out. And only when the victim states that they are not satisfied do they give the vigilante sanction to act. However, a vigilante can, of course, search for injustice directly perceived through the senses in order to correct it immediately. To do this, he simply needs not to move around the city in a Batmobile, but to occasionally use public transport, walk, drop by bars, and so on. In short, not to be detached from life.
With that, I will end the general conclusions and move on to various sweet details.
The film takes place in a kind of averaged Europe, but from the visuals, it is obvious that it is Croatia. It is clear why. First, Croatia is almost devoid of the shortcomings that the main character fights against: it is an almost mono-ethnic and quite racist society, without a painful law-abidance drilled into its citizens. In short, Uwe Boll is using the sacred right of a Soviet citizen to shout on Red Square that Reagan is an idiot. Second, the target audience of the film is not Americans at all, and for them, all European countries look more or less the same. Third, those who are slightly familiar with regional specifics can get an extra laugh out of this.
For example, it is precisely in light of Croatian specifics that the episode in the brothel acquires additional meaning. The girl is unaware of why mold is appearing on the walls, which means that this is her first winter on the Adriatic. Obviously, in her native Ukraine, this problem does not exist. And for us, this is a clear signal: the author shows that not all migrants are equally harmful; there are useful, hardworking ones, ready to perceive local cultural values, and they need the local specifics to be explained delicately and to be paid honestly for honest work.
There are probably other cool moments, but I will leave you to discover them on your own. The main thing I wanted to say was said at the very beginning. Before you is an instruction. Take note and apply it creatively.
In the comments of Bitarch and Voluntarist’s post, a discussion flared up regarding contracts and their binding nature. Opinions ranged from the view that a contract is sacred to the view that a contract itself is not worth the paper it is written on, and that only the good will of the contracting parties matters. All this was accompanied by questions about how an ancap society is even supposed to be built if contracts are not observed there. I will try to outline my approach to the problem.
Ancap is a free market plus the decentralization of law. That is, on one hand, it presupposes developed exchange relations—gifting and coercion are not completely excluded, but they certainly do not dominate. On the other hand, there is no top-down guarantee that the exchange will prove to be fair. Especially in situations of deferred exchange, when one party to the deal provides real value right now, while the other promises some presumed value later.
Within the framework of this text, I will understand a contract as the accompaniment of an exchange transaction by certain non-obvious conditions. These are precisely what must be fixed in explicit form, because otherwise, it will inevitably turn out that the parties understood each other differently. There is no particular sense in composing a detailed text describing a transaction for buying vegetables at a market. Often, people don’t even ask for the price: a person simply scoops up the goods, shows them to the seller, the seller names some amount within reasonable limits, the person pays and leaves; everything works on defaults—so much so that one can even not know the language and simply show numbers on a calculator.
It is a different matter if it is assumed that the transaction should take place only if both parties agree to some deferred interaction. For example, there is an employment contract. One party promises productive labor, the other promises payment for that labor. But beyond this, a desire arises to ensure that the parties agree on which party provides the space, tools, and materials; what labor is considered productive and, accordingly, subject to payment, and what labor, conversely, is sabotage and subject to a fine; to what extent the employee is responsible for damage to the employer, and to what extent the employer for damage to the employee, and so on. Fixing this agreement in an explicit form allows, firstly, the parties themselves not to forget after some time what agreement was reached, and secondly, to appeal to this agreement in the event that any of the parties decides to involve third parties to secure their interests.
I need a diligent worker to build a palace…
There is an obvious problem here. Long-term relationships are inevitably accompanied by changes, sometimes quite radical. These changes may be impossible to predict in advance, or their possibility may have seemed too irrelevant at the start to be described. You hire a worker—and after some time you find that they are now a business partner or even a spouse. Or, conversely, that they are a competitor who secured the start of their own business using your client base. Or less radically: you hire a person for cleaning, and it turns out they also cook well. Or they clean the premises so thoroughly that they simultaneously “clean up” some valuables stored therein.
But employment is only half the battle. After all, if the relationship has changed significantly but both parties are interested in continuing it, the new relationship can be formalized through changes in the contract. And if one of the parties is interested in breaking off the relationship, they can simply leave the job or, accordingly, show the worker the door. In this case, the parties may have unresolved claims, but if the breakup is not delayed, the volume of claims will be small, and it will then be easier to write them off than to insist on a final settlement.
It is worse if we are talking about investments. There, a unilateral breach of relationship is precisely what the investor wants to avoid from the very beginning, whereas the recipient of investments is initially interested in exactly this scenario: just give me your money and leave forever. In order for investments to exist as a noticeable phenomenon despite such a powerful asymmetry in incentives, a systemic factor of coercion of the investment recipients is needed, so that they strive to fulfill the original agreements rather than presenting the investor with a fait accompli: the money is spent, there is no return, maybe something will be returned someday, inshallah. At the same time, when this factor works too harshly, the entrepreneur bears additional risks: the success of a business is never guaranteed, even if the entrepreneur did everything in accordance with the original business plan for which the investments were obtained. He may indeed find himself in a situation where the investments are spent, success is not achieved, there is nothing to return, and then the notorious coercion factor begins its violent actions to collect the debt. The cheaper coercion is for the investor, the more readily he will invest in dubious projects, and the harsher the conditions under which he provides investments will be.
The investment climate is precisely formed by the perception of such subtleties: how likely is the sudden intervention of third parties and natural forces into the bilateral relations fixed by the contract; how conscientious are entrepreneurs in following agreed-upon plans, or are they more inclined to collect money for one thing and spend it on another; but also conversely, how likely is it that the goal of providing investments is not the creation and development of a business, but the enslavement of the entrepreneur and turning him into a serf.
In other words, both extremes harm the economic prosperity of society. The conditionally left extreme is bad, where it is impossible to motivate a worker, and any somewhat complex project is simply not implemented because everyone has scattered to their own affairs and steals every single nail from work. And if you are foolish enough to lend money, you had better say goodbye to your money immediately; it will be spent on all sorts of good things, but by the very design of society, you are entitled to no benefit from this. But the conditionally right extreme is also bad, where a worker has a choice between several types of indentured contracts and starving to death, and if someone wishes to work for themselves using borrowed funds, the payment schedule will put them in conditions as difficult as those of a hired worker, only with the hourly prospect of falling into debt slavery. If someone starts a business using their own honestly saved funds, the person who has the resources to coerce their workers and debtors into order feels an irresistible temptation to use those resources to put spokes in the wheels of an independent competitor, even if this would be considered an unlawful act.
Ifrits or djinn? Marx or Pinochet?
Applying this to the topic of contracts, it means that, on one hand, contracts, being evidence of the existence of complex and structured declarations of the parties, are absolutely necessary in a society with a developed market and, generally speaking, should be respected. But, on the other hand, the desire to observe any contract to the last letter at any cost, as well as the desire to describe all conceivable conditions of interaction between the parties in contracts with incomprehensible precision, is counterproductive and leads to the loss of that very respect for contracts, since they begin to be perceived more as a tool of violence by the party who drafted the contract over the party who was given a ready-made text to sign.
The most important thing in contractual relations is the presumption of good faith of the participants. Both the parties to the contract and public opinion must be confident that a contract is, firstly, a privilege of equals (a document describing unequal relations is called a “statute”), secondly, stems from the parties’ desire for their own benefit, and thirdly, a good contract is beneficial to both parties. It is this presumption of good faith that makes one party seriously and benevolently consider the other party’s statement that the previous terms of the contract are no longer beneficial to them and therefore it is desirable to revise them, or if this is impossible, to carefully terminate the contract.
But good faith is not inherent in everyone and not under all conditions. In order for the presumption of good faith to justify itself, rather than prompting one to enter into contracts with fraudsters over and over again, one must understand that powerful incentives work toward this very good faith. It remains to understand what these incentives could be in a world with a developed market and an absence of centralized coercion.
Historically, such incentives were provided almost exclusively by the counterparty’s membership in a particular community that bore a share of responsibility for its member and was therefore forced to independently ensure their good faith in relations with the outside world. If merchants from a certain polis cheated while trading, subsequent merchants from that polis might be robbed or denied entry to the harbor. And if merchants from a certain polis were robbed without reason, a punitive expedition might sail in their stead. Or no one might sail at all, because your polis had acquired a bad reputation among traders. If you hire a stonemason from the guild of free masons, he will work so as not to bring shame upon his corporation. If Swiss mercenaries flee the battlefield, who will be interested in hiring Swiss mercenaries?
However, relying only on such insurance groups also entails costs. At some point, for example, it may turn out that you have the right to hire only a union member, otherwise both you and your worker are guaranteed problems. And now membership in a professional community becomes not a sign of quality, but simply an imposed inevitability. Tying a person to a corporation deprives the market of flexibility, forces the loss of profitable opportunities, slows down progress and, ultimately, harms general prosperity, not to mention that it provokes conflicts out of nowhere—that is, when outsiders poke into things that are seemingly not their business, claiming that they have an interest in this matter.
But if a person does not belong to a group that bears responsibility for them, how can their good faith be guaranteed through purely market incentives? In many cases, insurance can help. A third party is brought into the transaction, who receives an insurance premium and in exchange undertakes to guarantee compensation for damages from unforeseen circumstances that arose despite the good faith execution of contractual obligations by the parties. This party is interested in paying nothing for the insurance event and will therefore try to prove the bad faith of one party or another. This means that the parties become interested in drafting the contract and conducting business as transparently as possible so as not to be left holding the bag when it comes to the prospect of insurance payments.
Will such a scheme help us? Alas, only partially. It does not protect against conscious fraud if the profit from it exceeds the amount of the insurance premium. The fraudster has left with the money, and the insurance company shrugs and says that there is clear bad faith of the counterparty, which they did not insure against and do not intend to insure, because today you pay for the loss from a fraudster’s actions, and tomorrow half of all deals will become fraudulent.
To provide guarantees in trade and employment, escrow account mechanisms and various collateral schemes help quite well. In the case of escrow, the participants of the deal lose the ability to receive payment until they prove the fact of execution of contractual obligations to a third party. In the case of collateral, the loss of one participant of the deal from the actions of another is compensated by the value of the collateral. But this does not help protect the investor at all, because in investments for creating a business from scratch, it is specifically the investor who puts in the money, and the entrepreneur only gives a promise to direct this money toward creating a business that should bring profit.
Is this vulnerability so critical? One must look at the context. The market develops a habit of typical actions because they save transaction costs. In a developed market, competition leads to a decrease in insurance commissions, so insuring risks becomes not particularly expensive, and this is done almost everywhere. The world of typical market interactions turns into a cozy park with paved paths, detailed infographics, and fences in all dangerous places. Sweet, cozy, beautiful, and zero drive. In other words, the profitability of business decreases. A good haul can only be made by opening a new market. And only here do we enter the space of unprotected investments.
Venture investing, based on a bare business idea, is a conscious risk for the chance of a big win. Yes, this sphere will attract strange people: project-pushers, “info-gypsies,” simple fraudsters. But from the investors’ side, those who are ready to deal with such a crowd will enter this sphere—those who can sift through insane projects to find those whose insanity looks noble, reinforce inventor-maniacs with clever managers and technical specialists—in short, the market will reward those who set sail not in a washbasin, but at least in a caravel. And then legends will be composed about them, and someone will also earn money on the reproduction of these legends.
In my previous post on this topic, I told you how I set up my own personal Nostr relay. I used strfry, which is quite popular for large relays because it is stable and performant. However, I also wanted ease of configuration so that I wouldn’t have to work magic with console commands every time. An attempt to attach a web control panel on top of the existing relay was unsuccessful. The Khatru relay suggested by Grok turned out to be a project abandoned in early 2026. But its developer is @fiatjaf, the author of Nostr itself, and he doesn’t just abandon projects. So I started looking into what he is developing as a replacement and came across Pyramid. This is a specialized relay for community management; meaning, while it can handle basic relay functions, it also helps manage various private and club-like features.
After some tinkering, I uninstalled strfry and installed pyramid. Voila — I have an engine for developing an online community, and half a day later, the first invited client of the new relay appears. We discuss the process on Nostr in the comments of my previous post, and I tag the software creator. Fiatjaf likes this comment and then comes to me on Telegram, congratulates me on installing Pyramid, and starts asking for feedback on both the relay and Nostr in general. We already had a chat history from the time when he created a popular custodial Lightning wallet in the form of a Telegram bot, and I actively promoted it (that project was wound down, and Nostr emerged to replace it).
Anyway, I gave all the feedback I was capable of, given my limited experience and competence:
I asked for a more convenient format for adding a new user to the relay: the user clicks to leave a request, I click to approve or deny the request — basically, the familiar Telegram method. I received a promise that this would be done soon.
I asked for a monitoring service for relay availability from different corners of the network, suggesting an implementation option that doesn’t require renting servers all over the world. Fiatjaf said the option was doubtful, but he would try to attach one third-party service instead.
I asked for a service for local key generation so that new users could be sure that the Nostr client would not have access to their private key. He replied that he had already built a whole set of such utilities — both for offline key generation and for offline event signing, so security advocates can sleep soundly.
That’s where my imagination ran out for now, but I certainly assume that readers have or will soon have their own brilliant ideas.
Anyway, for anyone interested in testing a specialized relay for community management, welcome. Leave requests in the comments, and I will send the invitation link via DM — for now, this is the not-so-convenient connection mechanism in place.
https://relay.ancapchan.info — my relay, where you can observe the community participant tree growing and publications appearing from them
I hope you won’t need a special guide on how to set up a Nostr account. Since it is a very decentralized ecosystem, there are already tons of ways to enter it, as well as ways to use it. But anyway, let me recommend that you start exploring via the Nostria client. I also know the developer there, Sondre Bjellos, a participant in the Liberstad and Montelibero projects; he lives three kilometers away from me (when he doesn’t head back to his native Norway, of course) and is very actively developing his client.
Yesterday, I felt a sudden urge to have my own personal relay for Nostr. My system administration skills are practically zero; even the ancapchan.info site was once built and configured for me without my involvement. But since then, LLMs have appeared, and it would have been a sin not to use them. So, I dug into Grok, and after a few hours of tinkering, the relay relay.ancapchan.info was up and running. This fully revealed the peculiarities of the protocol’s decentralization. For instance, broadcasting a test message only through my single relay turned out to be convenient via the Snort client, syncing relays is convenient via Amethyst on Android, and Nostria knows how to broadcast an arbitrary event as raw JSON, and so on.
The purpose of a personal relay is to store a full archive of my publications, private messages, and everything else, as well as the content of those I follow. This is a good step toward local autonomy, although still far from the ideal I described in the third “Notes on Decentralization”. I still have to figure out backups and content management, and then, perhaps, it will come to providing this relay for use by the local community. And if it proves to be in demand by the community, then it will be, again, a step toward centralization: someone bothers with their own server, and someone uses shared ones—why not.
At this rate, I’ll even properly connect a wallet to Nostr (currently it only works conveniently for receiving), set up a Lightning node, or even start “vibecoding” something…
Readers are also pleasing me with their examples of using neural networks. For instance, one of them opened a resource where they post AI-narrated books for free, including those on libertarianism/Austrian Economics. Of course, a certain amount of cringe remains in AI narration, but it is so much cheaper that it’s a sin not to use it. For those who find it easier to listen than to read, welcome: website, Telegram bot. By the way, the AI narrations of my two books are already there (I’ve already added direct download links to my book pages: Ancap, War).
The Internet began when people started publishing data in electronic form: that is, not just storing it for themselves, but providing access to it via remote connection. To ensure this, a minimum set of components is required: 1) a data storage device; 2) a communication channel to which the storage device is connected; 3) a protocol for providing remote access to this data. There can be many different types of devices, channels, and protocols, as long as they can somehow interface with each other. This looks quite promising in terms of ensuring decentralized data exchange, doesn’t it? Of course. But there is also a vast open field here for deepening centralization.
It is cheaper to produce identical devices. Identical communication channels are cheaper to maintain. The use of a single protocol is an invaluable asset. But the main thing is the functional separation that occurs between different system components when, for example, it turns out that storing data is cheaper on a large stationary server with a thick, uninterrupted communication channel, while accessing it is more convenient from inexpensive personal clients. And just like that, a platform economy begins, in which those who need to store and consume data become completely dependent on the rules established by the storage and publishing platform.
Naturally, throughout history, this state of affairs has greatly irritated both data producers and consumers, who would prefer to retain control. However, the question is how to have this control without spending too much money, ensuring everything works fast and doesn’t require mega-skills from every user. The struggle for the user, accompanied by the involvement of the state as a conflict regulator and the state’s own initiatives to ensure the interests of politicians, is all well-documented and generally well-known. The struggle for digital autonomy is also well-documented and quite known. One could provide an overview of the dynamic equilibrium between centralization and decentralization processes at the time of writing this text, but I want to approach this from a different angle. Specifically: how do I personally see the ideal functioning of the Internet given the current level of technology?
Current snapshot of the technological level
Data storage. Without investing in specialized devices, the average user easily secures volumes on the order of hundreds of gigabytes on a phone and several terabytes on bulkier personal devices.
Communication channels. A more or less settled user can relatively easily afford a 24/7 unlimited channel with speeds ranging from units to tens of megabytes per second. An actively traveling user, without additional investment, may occasionally be offline, have traffic limits, and a more modest channel width.
Clouds. For a price comparable to the cost of personal internet access, a user can rent cloud capacity for data storage and processing that slightly exceeds the power of their personal devices.
Money. Thanks to cryptocurrencies, a user can technically pay for any services over the network directly to their providers in arbitrarily small fractions with an arbitrarily high frequency.
Now I will daydream
I produce only a few gigabytes of data per month, mostly crappy photos. With crappy videos, let’s say it would be tens of gigabytes (the highest subjective value for me, of course, is text, which is a mere few hundred kilobytes, and with all the chatter in chats, let’s say a few megabytes). I want to have unconditional access to all this content from any of my devices, as well as the ability to share access to individual pieces of content with both a limited and an unlimited circle of people. To achieve this, I need my texts to be fully synchronized between several of my personal devices and cloud storage, while photos and videos gradually settle into cheaper and higher-capacity storage, unobtrusively leaving, say, the phone—but with the ability to easily return any archived data back to local access.
Beyond this, I consume other people’s content. Here we are talking about hundreds of gigabytes per month. I need the ability to selectively save any data into personal storage. Ideally, while preserving metadata about where and when this content was obtained by me. It would also be good to substitute locally saved content when surfing the same network resource again to avoid re-downloading—and if the content on the network has updated, to have the ability to replace my version with a fresh one or save an archived version.
I also value a convenient way to donate directly for someone else’s content and receive donations for my own. For this, I need the ability to attach payment detail metadata to an arbitrary object.
So, effectively, I need an operating system for working online that would link locally stored materials with the network addresses where they should be available, provide flexible data synchronization between storage systems, allow for configuring access rights, contain tools for viewing and editing data, as well as a toolkit for managing money. Naturally, all of this must be sufficiently protected from unauthorized access.
It turns out that in order to provide me with the most decentralized workflow on the web, a quite comprehensive centralized solution is required. It could, of course, consist of modules from different providers, but these modules need to work together seamlessly, so centralization practically invites itself here.
And what do we have today?
There are separate services for organizing local data storage and for organizing cloud storage. There are services for synchronizing local folders with cloud ones. There are tools for various network activities: publishing photos, videos, texts, tracks, exchanging messages, money, plans, task lists, and a ton of other types of data. There is the ability to rent servers and host websites on them. There is the ability to rent a domain name. In short, there is a huge, flourishing variety of tools for working on the web, the development of which is quite decentralized. And none of this gives me the possibility of full control over my data.
