Source item

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Last century had the centralizing technology of mass media and mass production. But this century is driven by the decentralizing technology of the smartphone and the Internet. So, while last century saw a centralized left and centralized right shooting it out for Europe, this century may witness an anarcho-communist left and anarcho-nationalist right battling it out in America. (And indeed, we already see this on the Internet every day, with pockets manifesting in the real world.) So: while I agree that the mood is anti-state, that in itself is no panacea. Rather than left and right tyranny, we could see left and right anarchy. That is *the* question. Short answer The Internet is not a place, but there will be Internet places. We can print out the internet, using million-person online social networks to crowdfund offline territory, building first voluntary startup societies and eventually network states. Long answer China is a place, so it’s obvious. But it’s closed to everyone but the Han Chinese. The Internet is the only thing with economic scale comparable to China, and it’s open to everyone everywhere. If China is Apple, vertically integrated and closed, the Internet is Android, messier and more open. But the Internet isn’t a place, right? True, but Christianity is not a place. Yet there are Christian places: churches, cathedrals, entire countries with the cross on the flag. The “software” of Christianity was able to convert enough people to materialize upon the “hardware” of the land. Ok, so generalize that. The Internet is not a place, but there are already many Internet places: startup offices, datacenters, tech conferences, entire countries with Bitcoin as the national currency. The software of the Internet could convert enough people to materialize upon the hardware of the land. Extending the analogy, just as there are many Christian denominations, there are many Internet social subnetworks. Whatever subcommunity you belong to can organize and print itself out in the physical world. And where would that be specifically? Like Bitcoin, everywhere and nowhere. The key insight is the idea of the fractal frontier. List all the special economic zones, ghost cities, tech parks, deindustrialized towns, and abandoned villages around the world. There’s a lot of surprisingly developed empty space out there, thanks in part to the global fertility crash. And thanks to robotics, solar, and modulars, we may be able to develop yet more completely empty space. Anyway, that’s the idea. We can reopen the frontier through the Internet. In the same way we have hundreds of tech companies and cryptocurrencies distributed globally, we can use the Internet to found new startup societies and network states. Yes, it’ll take a while to get the new startup societies to million person scale, but it won’t take forever. And everyone doesn’t need to move there to change legacy societies for the better. After all, only 4% of the world moved to the US, and that changed the world. Basically, all the billion person digital networks were only founded in the last 25 years or so. We can scale quickly once the formula works. And it will likely work all over the world, because the Internet does.