I've had feelings along a similar line. Not due to Bitcoin or Wikileaks, but Anonymous.
"encroaching on the sort of grand scale project space that first gave governments their legitimacy."
Technology is not just a tool. It is also a resource. Governments are used to controlling resources. However, when the populace can create unregulated resources, there is untaxable wealth exchanging hands...
I need to digest this a bit more.
"Wikileaks has made a forward assault on the governments of the world, and as of yet seems immune to their prosecutions" paranoia and violence cling to this sentence, government must be assaulted. I'd like to see his gun collection and food stock room....sorry just couldn't resist engaging in some polemics of my own. He likes Romers "Charter City" concept, because people "buy in" to it. My impression of the charter city system is that they create city states controlled by the owners of capital. These cities are tightly controlled non-democratic institution that are driven by the pursuit of profits. The will excel in this endeavor because they will have strict control of wages and behavior. Get drunk one night and yell at the neighbors and you will be ostracized. Get sick and cant do your job for some months, ostracized. Advocate for better working conditions, say you want regular bathroom breaks and the company wants you to shit out another widget instead ostracized. They will potentially attract many workers if wages are marginally higher and crime is marginally lower than then the in the third world cites they are recruiting workers from. The idea that government is bad and whatever opinion "I" hold is good seems pretty pervasive now a days. Living in a society means that you will be part of somethings you approve of and you will also be involved in things you disapprove of. Them's the breaks. Kenneth can rub the lucky stone in his pocket all day wishing for his Libertarian or anarcho-syndicalist society, but I'll do what ever I can to see it not come true. I don't believe in letting children grow up uneducated or letting old folks starve, I like that government helps the losers in our society, I don't believe in creating uneducated criminal classes or letting grand-folks starve. I realize that to get these societal benefits I'll have to pay taxes and that these taxes will go to other things that I wouldn't choose to buy into, if I had a choice. Children learn that they won't get their own way all the time at a very young age, seems like a large proportion of our society has forgotten that lesson.
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. I actually had an email exchange with Kenneth, and he didn't seem anti-social in the least. I don't know if he likes Rand or not. >>"Wikileaks has made a forward assault on the governments of the world, and as of yet seems immune to their prosecutions" paranoia and violence cling to this sentence, government must be assaulted. I didn't read it that way. I think that he is saying that technology is building people-power. In the decade of the Patriot Act, I don't think it's paranoid to say that the government needs to be challenged on the information front. But I do have some canned goods in my basement. :) I need to read up on Charter Cities. From your description, they sound like company towns. That didn't work well. I'm not much for Libertarianism. Not because I don't think that it doesn't make theoretical sense, I do. But, I don't like it because it is too fragile. Any social-economic policy that doesn’t work unless practiced in a near-pure form is a non-starter with me. Or a system that assumes the masses will become better at something than they currently are. People will game any system, and people will seek to destroy any system. A system based on profit-motive is very easy to game. I think that’s why some libertarian-leaning folk have a disdain for the masses. They are an obvious stumbling block, as they don’t act libertarian very well on their own. As a result, it’s easy to characterize the masses as lazy, unproductive, and unrealized. All that aside, I think Kenneth is getting at something just a bit different. I think that he is talking about a fundamental shift in the playing field, wherein some libertarian ideals are less fragile. Good or bad, I think I agree with him, -as to that’s where I think we are headed. >The idea that government is bad and whatever opinion "I" hold is good seems pretty pervasive now a days. I think this is more or less true. However, I think ‘isms’ are getting tired too. Better data analysis is allowing us to see what works and what doesn’t far better than we could just 20 years ago. Some governments will become data-driven, and they may rule the next century. Those that chase philosophies based on a non-technological history will stumble. Yet, I think the real danger for the have-nots is not so much what type of government they have, but whether or not they will have one that has any power. There is a class of global elite growing that doesn’t have strong national bonds. I see the first non-geographic nation forming in the next couple of decades.
He sets the stage supporting anti-fascist Spanish freedom fighters. Who can't sympathies with these freedom fighters? It's pretty innocuous, who can object to fighting fascism, but it's the governmental form he is exposing, standing up against the fascist tyranny, deposing democracy. Pretty classic opening to an essay, sets the tone, has a bit of a slow burn, catches your attention, pushing your attention forward in an effort to rationalize the opening metaphor. Hey maybe he got lucky. I know most writing teachers would appreciate his opening. "The ship is still made, of course, and it crosses the world conquering savages for loot. But in the end, the organizer is a king, and we all swear the pledge of allegiance. The original reason for building the ship? Shit, no one remembers." metaphor for the state, it's not so subtle. Government is bad, it doesn't serve it's people, we don't need it, all it does is turn into a theft machine. Picking around through the piece you pick up the buy into the government you want idea, lets explore that because it's one of his moral, practical conclusions. Giving people the option to choose to buy into the government style services they want and not for ones they don't. This would be the end of civil society. As the prideful owners of capital, swollen with the knowledge that they are the ones who create value and get things done, pull funding for the social institutions that primarily give benefit to the working class or those groups not fortunate enough to be part of the working class, these institutions would crumble. As they became less and less effective the average Joe would say "why should I give to the schools? They are so terrible my money couldn't possibly make a difference." As general welfare rapidly declined, leaving poverty and crime in it's wake, we would all clutch on to the little bit of money we did have, hoping only to preserve our own threatened welfare. People would be so busy trying to feed their own grandparents, those elders without sons and daughters would starve, there would be no more social security to keep the most vulnerable from starving. Society as we know it would be gone, it would take a decade to make the U.S. look like the third world. You may think this is extreme, but hoovervilles came right after the relatively prosperous 20's. Maybe the author isn't intelligent enough to understand his the consequences of his policy prescription or maybe he is just a starry eyed idealist, in which case I apologize for my anti-social snipe. If his libertarian values have led him to the conclusion that all taxation is theft and people should only have to pay for the things they specifically think should be provided for than he is antisocial and undemocratic. This is the moral philosophy of the child, of the unregulated anti-social owner of capital and the populist power grabbing politician. And yes all these ideas are being explored via a discussion of the consequences of emerging technology, but it doesn't change the subtext of the piece. I'm sure that this guy writes a nice email and probably is a swell guy to have a beer with, but I think his political/economic views are dumb or dangerous. In this form of government would make us all serf's to the owners of capital, business as the state, whoa isn't that what charter cites are? Not like my ideas are normal, I still think that the cost benefit dictator is the best form of government, this is certainly undemocratic, but I believe would benefit society immensely.
I do feel that libertarianism is a serious philosophy, but a terrible social-economic policy. So, I actually agree with most of your points. I see the accumulation of capital and of merit as two very different things. That said, I think technology might make some libertarian principles useful in action when applied to a subset of problems. But capital-based classes of wealth are enough. A civil society is the opposite of one with capital-based classes of power.
The historian Barbara Tuchman had a rule, which I think might have been paraphrased by Alfred A. Knopf... but it is: Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. The paraphrased version is: The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold (or any figure the reader would care to supply). At any rate, my generalized reading of it is: Crazy times don't seem so crazy to the people in them. I think we are in those kind of times. Technology is revealing possibilities faster than our social structures can adapt. I think these will be recorded as very extraordinary times.