If the world adopted anarchy, and small self-governing communities became the norm, what stops community A from attacking weaker/wealthier community B? What stops resource-rich places surrounded by arid land from overcrowding? What stops some charismatic person from leading a society into a more statist structure, thus allowing it to grow larger than it naturally would be? In other words, how is global peace to be kept and what stops tribalism from breaking out?

Let's take them one at a time, because each of these questions asks something distinct which is often lumped together due to the history of lumping them together.

First and foremost, “what stops community A from attacking weaker/wealthier community B” is going to differ from community to community. Deterrence would not disappear; cameras, sidearms and local security companies would deter the low-level violence and crime no different than police do now. But beyond that, agreement between community A and community B would likely be the most common reason; mutual voluntary agreements with all your neighbors would a must, regardless of the size of your property or collected properties. You don't go into your neighbor's garage and steal his tools just because he's better off than you, and those that do can be deterred.

It's also important to note that word of mouth is not something that would evaporate; if anything, your local “social currency” would be more important than ever, and taking to violent recourse against your neighbors could cost you materials and supplies that you need, because the person with whom you're doing business doesn't want to do business with you anymore.

It is to say, nothing as a form of greater authority would stop community A from attacking weaker/wealthier community B, but the costs of making that attack can quickly become far greater than the gains made by such an attack. Not to mention, you will then have four neighbors who know you are violent and unjust, and will hesitate less when it comes to defending themselves against you. But this isn't much different than what we have right now, even on the geopolitical scale.

Let's take resource-rich arable land, as per the first sub-question; do you live on a farm? How far do you live from arable land? For the majority of people it is greater than 100 miles. Most people do not live on arable and resource-rich land; as always with the Pareto principle, it is a small minority that holds and works the majority of these resources. But that wouldn't matter, because shipping and transport logistics solutions of all scales only becomes more important in a world oriented toward the community, the local, or the individual — everyone needs to both move product, and obtain supplies, as is their responsibility in the freedom of having none above you.

Most people will prefer to live close to other people; and in these areas it's extremely likely that you will see warlords arise from the massing of people seeking assistance. And if people in range of their collected territory aren't careful, they could be easy targets for those warlords. But, and this is a place where I haven't seen or read a lot of discussion so take this as purely hypothetical, the coalitions that form against would hold the guerilla and tactical advantage once they coalesced in response. And they would coalesce in response; not as a unified army but as homesteaders protecting themselves and their rights. As with any regime-change, including one that ends in no regime at all, there will be a spike in crime that will rapidly be addressed in wide and varied manners, bringing crime back down.

But there's a greater point that I see here; an absence where one might see requirement, given the history of the world and its endless territorial and ideological conflicts. That requirement isn't one with which I agree, however; with the correct incentives and disincentives distributed as responsibility across all people, those being security, economy, and community, you drive down the potential for conflict to the point where it is so small, or so costly, that when it does occur it is rare, and leaves all people wiser for how to ensure it does not happen to them, and thereby does not happen again.

There will absolutely be charismatic psychopaths; but there will also be, as they say, a gun behind every blade of grass in addition to a camera behind every awning and tree. They might be able to take ten, twenty houses; but like Go their actions only surround themselves further by their opponents' zones of control.

Anarchy does not change human behaviour; it acknowledges it directly, for its shortcomings and its strengths. War and warlords will not disappear; it's still up to everyone to maintain the society they so voluntarily invest themselves in.

Discuss...

In Kharkiv, the subway stations have been converted, in an ad-hoc manner, into shelters for civilians who want nothing more than to rest. Telecommunications attacks are coupled with the bombing and infantry attacks on the region, making getting information out of Kharkiv by the cellular networks nigh-impossible. If I were asked what I thought Putin was doing, I would say he's taking everything east of the Dnieper River, and he intends to do so by exhausting the Ukrainian forces on the Eastern and Northern fronts, while moving troops in from the Black Sea to slowly cut the nation in half. In my uneducated understanding, Russia does not need to worry too much about a land war, but historically has struggled to hold its own in Naval affairs. The geographic limitations of having no warm-water ports of which to speak constrains the places which ships can be built, and controlled safe waters are necessary for general-readiness training.

It is to say, if I were asked what I think Putin is doing, I would have far more to say than what I think those in charge in Ukraine are doing. The Ukrainian military, ragged though it may be, is standing their own where they are able, even capturing entire motorized and infantry divisions in some locations. Media is currently slanted; if it's in English it's far more likely to report the Ukranian wins, and if it's in Cyrillic it's hit or miss the information is even accurate for anyone. But we are barely one day into this conflict, and Russia has already redrawn the maps, and condemned people to hunger and fear in the underground.

One cannot un-cut a rope, however. Russia has moved offensively beyond discussed and controversially-recognized territories, and in response the West flinched.

It wouldn't start as an Anarchist Region, of course; each of the states would be best attempting to implement liberty and security on a smaller scale. And not all of the land would be immediately taken; large Air Force bases and other federal lands throughout these states would become contested for a time, but it won't be the State's Guards who retake those lands; it would be the ranchers and rednecks for whom the deserts, low tundra, forests, mountains and mine-lands are home, are hunting-ground and are known like the backs of their hands. If you take into account that, while most of these people aren't necessarily technically-inclined, they all know people who are and have strong relationships with them, the steep advantage of the encircled Federal militaries with air support will not be able to maintain logistics lines and would eventually be frog-marched into California or Colorado.

Speaking of those states, this civil war looks like it would divide the country into more than two pieces. The eastern seaboard would remain mostly in-tact, with the exception of Florida, Maine, and New Hampshire; the center of the country, covering most of Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma would devolve into a warlord state of its own ruled by cutting the nation in half and controlling all the highways and major trade rivers through the center of the country; Texas would invite New Mexico in as part of sovereign land, and would also begin trade negotiations with the Neutral Independent States. This trade would prove invaluable to the both of them, as Texas needs independent energy trade partners to maintain their perceived mass of barrels still beneath the ground; likewise, Nevada and Utah are mineral-rich but water-dependent, and the Colorado can only do so much for three states. With so many concerns on the field, the hardcore libertarians would start winning out with their ability to mobilize, develop, and strategize faster than government-run operations and government-funded corporations. Eventually, the states would be dissolved “to honour the rights of man and stand out of the way of the Regional Defense Board of the Mojave.”

This would be the first step toward a “government of anarchy” — a contradiction that is nonetheless seen in every organized anarchy; social, strategic, and logistical leaders collect to coordinate and act in the best interest of their own self-defense. Though powerful, these leaders would end up becoming talking-heads very quickly, as getting things done would have already been delegated to the acting leaders in the field, and the deals necessary to be made with Texas for energy, with Greater Cascadia for water, and with Mexico for the minerals they're unable to mine up themselves. But as with any government in revolution, the keys to power required to create that revolution are not the same keys to power required to secure that revolution — or in this case, secure the revolution from those that would seek to take it for their own devices. Accountability and relationship is where things begin to differ. Imagine if you will, just for a moment, walking up the long dirt driveway of a family that owns fourty acres, on which they grow an assortment of vegetables as well as some cows and chickens. They have three kids; the oldest is shooting at a target when you arrive. A dog runs up to you and barks, but never does any more than that, eventually returning to the owner when it calls. He's a grizzled individual as well; beard and shirt soaked in drying sweat. But you have absolutely no right to take anything from this man, as a representative of the so-called Regional Defense Council; you don't even know if he knows what that is. So you sit down and explain. It's in our best interests, as some of the most influential people in these areas, to pool our resources and our efforts toward formulating a defense, you tell them; with the Federal armies still applying pressure from California to hold Nellis and Las Vegas, we need to speak with every land-owner in the nearby area to know whether or not they're ready for Feds to try to march through their land.

The son stands up. “You're damn right we're ready,” he says, gun still slung over his shoulder as he stands in the doorway. His mother hushes him concernedly. “And what is it you want from us?” The father then asks. And you have to, knowing nothing else to be true, tell him with a straight face, “I can ask nothing of you. But if you'd like our help, or would like to work with us, I think we could come to agreement.”

And you won't always come to an agreement. That family may die defending their homestead; but they died free, and on their own terms. It hurts to think about, doesn't it? My stomach tightens, when I think about it, because some will make that choice. And moreso, I have to believe some will even survive, and hold them back from the land that is theirs, and their childrens'. If they need arms, and you provide them arms, you have to be prepared for them to use them against you, in the event they see you as no different from the Federal Army. Because, collectivized for the common defense, you are but a hair and a breath away from becoming what you seek to fight against. And this is where a Regional Defense Council of the Mojave gives way to the unorganized “silent majority” — those continuing to live their lives regardless of whatever war some government, or some company, says they're fighting. Life goes on, whether we can accept it in the circumstances we're provided or not; that life is precious, and should not be disturbed. And thanks to the age of the internet, a historical debate can take place between members of the Regional Defense Council and individuals from the region for whom this Defense Council purports to defend.

The Warlord of St Louis (he calls himself “The CEO”) is commonly brought up in these debates. “What will happen if a charismatic warlord of our own is able to sway the Defense Council to act in an offensive manner?” one of the homesteaders might ask. “Those gangs are still coming over the Colorado border; your checkpoints aren't able to handle everything.”

“Yeah, and you were never supposed to be a power in the first place! Aren't you supposed to be equal to us?” Noise picks up for a bit, and then settles back down. Another homesteader comes forward. “Look, I appreciate what you say you're doing for us, but I live just south of Yellowstone; I have more to worry about from wolves that have moved into the properties around me than anything in this war. I live here because I wanted freedom for myself and my family; I didn't want a king or president or council or anything ruling over me. So I have to ask; when is the end-date for this defense project you're pursuing?”

The silence is deafening for a moment. It's only when an arms manufacturer shifts in his chair that the silence is broken. “We don't know.”

“Then are we to assume this war could go on forever?”

More silence.

“Not even a war is worth sacrificing my rights. My unalienable rights. If you need to deal with the people on the Colorado border, you deal with the people on the Colorado border. If they want to ask my help, they can ask my help. But no one holds power over me and my family.”

The cities would have a spike in crime before seeing it plummet rapidly; just the thought of conflict makes open-carry more common, and those weapons on display leave everyone that much more polite after the first few robberies that end, not in a robbery, but a kneecapped man fleeing with nothing, and his face being shared around to surrounding businesses. Life, in its own little way, would just go on, with only the sources of materials and goods being different. Avocados would be easier to obtain than lemons, but Florida would never stop selling her oranges to anyone willing to buy them. Las Vegas would continue to be Las Vegas, with the added benefit of fewer regulating bodies; this, of course, would also welcome back the mob into the equation. This wouldn't be like the Five Families in New York, however; with legitimate and legal gambling able now to compete with professional gambling establishments on an unregulated playing field, one good numbers game could be enough to cut deeply into the casino's primary income. This, coupled with their history of becoming more and more family-friendly, inclines me to think they would double down on the live entertainment industry to great success.

But just the presence of an organized group within a major city will create some amount of feedback at the edges of where their supposed control ends, and the liberty truly begins again; there is a vigilance that people will need to take to see where their supplies are coming from, and whether or not this poses them long-term risk. It may just be better business to buy your own trucks, or make a deal with truckers that own their own vehicle, than to rely upon the Teamsters like you may have before. But with vigilance as an individual and within the community with which you interact, you can prevent liberty from being eroded by having the conversations with the supposed mobs, or if that doesn't work, ensuring the competition for them you deal to support is one of many competitions they will have to face.

After all, no family or corporation holds extreme power for long. If they stay too anchored in their traditions, they may not be flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions. If they are high-risk and high-reward actors, a long-term stable strategy for competition can ensure you may not be on top, but will not fall out before whoever is on top begins to wane from their risk-taking.

Eventually the Debates with the Regional Defense Council would break down, and amid the gridlock a corporation would be formed — the only suiting solution for a businessman who genuinely believes in what he is doing, even if everyone else doubts him. In the articles of incorporation, he declares the rights of man, not dissimilar to the Bill of Rights, and concludes in the introduction of the Articles, that this corporation exists to hold share in the defense of the Mojave. The company's stated goal is to ensure that everyone in the Region has access to sufficient land and air defense systems, arms, and training. They're an arms dealer, to be sure; but their client is never another State; it is only the individuals that fill such a beautiful place.

Of course, this also is looked upon with suspicion, even months and years after the formation of the company. Rightfully so; that suspicion keeps them in check, and their incentive structures are built around not war, but peace. They will never make the kinds of money an international arms company could make, but that's not the point of the company, and each generation of Board Members and Presidents have to be reminded of that. The world isn't perfect; but neither is the world in which we live right now. No, it is just another adaptation in the eternal search for truer liberty — a liberty that does not lie to me with false senses of security, but rather allows me to choose how to pursue that security for myself.

If you cannot imagine a leader who is not a ruler, then your experiences in life must be very narrow; leaders reveal themselves every day by doing what seems mundane but makes all the difference for their community. If your neighbor begins sweeping the sidewalk in front of their house, after seeing you out there every week doing the same, that makes you a leader, but you have exercised no rule over your neighbor; to the contrary, you showed how much you love your home and neighborhood that your neighbor couldn't help but make the same decision. When a community leader opens a boxing club, and gets in the ring with every one of his pupils, taking care to mind his strength output and take the full strength of their blows, he is leading without ruling. Those kids can give up at any time; the exercise requirements alone to keep up in boxing are very strenuous; but many of them will stick around and the relationship narrows from teacher and pupil to teacher, pupil, members of a community together.

Leaders fulfill needs; they humble themselves to the needs of others in front of them. Archons, on the other hand, I shouldn't even have to describe; if they can officially disagree that a peaceful protest is a peaceful protest, and rob and trample their own citizens without so much as a word from other nations against, then they are leading nothing. I'd argue they're following — either following their fears or following the rulers that are leaders above them.

So would leaders exist amongst anarchy? Of course! People would still respect the leading cardiologists and neurologists for their insight into their fields; people would still organize to fix what they saw as needing fixed and distribute amongst their skills and experience to accomplish the task necessary; new ideas will come to be and come in conflict with other ideas, each best espoused by only a handful of elocutionists and writers. The only difference between anarchy and the world we have now is the absence of violent and incarceratory coersion as an accepted means of leadership.

There's also a detail to this that many people like to overlook when talking about liberty; there are people who just want to follow. Ill-equipped to cover all their own needs, structured environments give them exactly what they need. Some will outgrow that need, others will come upon experiences in life which force them to adapt, but others still will find themselves in need of support and protection through their entire life. And they might be your sister, or your grandmother; they might be your father or your best friend since you were a child. It brings me disgust to see people conflate leadership with rulership. A ruler, he wields power. But a leader humbly respects the power placed in his hands and acts with honour. Certainly, a ruler is able to do the same, but would you say that he acted as a good leader in his term if he did not act with honour? Why, then, would you hold anyone else to different terms, when in such a world both of you have a sidearm on your hip anyway?

Even then, there's also a matter of scope. Let's take, for a moment, something people would think impossible: a President of the Anarchist American Region. This individual is elected as the Commander in Chief, in this mental exercise, by an electoral college vote composed of contractural representatives sent to fulfill one purpose — electing the president. In this world only ever so slightly different from ours, you have no obligation to vote for the president, but you would likewise have no vestment as a stakeholder when the Commander in Chief of the Defense Army and Defense Navy make purchasing or business decisions. Likewise, they would have no right to operate on your land or in your airspace without invitation. If you do not benefit from a service you would not pay for it, and your social network and “governance” would be limited to the limitations that exist on those within the community with which you interact and operate. And the cherry on the cake; there's an implicit understanding, being one of the families in these Anarchist Regions, that keeping a gun behind every blade of grass is not only what keeps everyone else away; it keeps our own sanctioned weapons of war turned outward and on a defensive stance.

Now, I'm not advocating for anarchy of this variety; I merely lay it out there as an example of what one person's understanding of anarchy, completely without violent coersion, could look like. More often than not, though, the scope of anarchy rarely if ever needs to exceed the bounds of a single property. Another interesting example of anarchy to look at is the matter of how English privateering ships were run and operated in the Golden Age of Piracy; while people might think of the captain as a dictator, he's only permitted to lead by an agreement of a large majority of the crew, and the crew likewise is contracted with very specific earnings, expectations, and limitations. Even the looting was remarkably fair; with the quartermaster (the logistical leader of a pirate ship) keeping close count of everything, you are sure to get your single portion of the earnings. Crews also had a very easy time of addressing a captain who was a bad leader: mutiny and heaving the asshole overboard. No one benefits from a bad leader, from someone who rules with cruelty and callousness. It's a shame the kinds of people so many are calling “leaders” these days can't be given the same treatment.

At the end of the day, anarchy is not a synonym for chaos or somehow misnamed; being such a young and underdeveloped philosophy, it is rather poorly discussed. And that's probably par for the course, since most anarchists just want to be left alone and likewise avoid bothering others. Anarchy is a lot of things to a lot of people. But the one thing it is not, is “debunked” because of midwitted contrarian semantic arguments. It is the absence of violent and incarceratory coersion, and little more. Everything else is just... part of being human.

Discuss...

Another matter I have given far less respect than it deserves is urbit. I spend as much time there as I do on the fediverse, but I've done comparatively little exploration in it. My planet, ~linnum-fidrut, has slowly become a place in which I write in streams of consciousness as well as keep up with some of my nerdiest friends; of all the bleeding-edge decentralized social media I try to consume, it is the one that seems to have the most fire behind it. Not to sell the fediverse short; it has its own little innovation boom just starting to happen and I suspect it will catch up soon.

But there's a magic to urbit. A magic I have yet to completely put into words; but the magic begins somewhere around the fact that it is a single function, which operates on a very specific list-based data model, to provide the basis for everything from a command line, to a web interface, to a cryptographic wallet, and so much more. They've also pivoted since the days of Curtis Yarvin toward a more positive developer experience; airlock, for example, exposes APIs accessible from any language to interact with the system as it exists, and with rather patternistic hoon, you're able to extend those APIs to do anything it is you'd want the Nock Machine to do.

There's also a culture worth mentioning; from the idea that perfect Martian code can exist, to the developments of that metaphor to bring the perfection of Martian code back to Earth (and in the other direction, bringing more of Earth's content to Mars), the community has given themselves a fascinating perspective into the problem of decentralized, interoperating computers and the decreasing likeliness of them in the face of megalithic software companies. Reading Urbit blogs is like little else on the internet, leaving even the most practiced hackers humbled before the mystery of Hoonic sigils and syntactically-significant horizontal whitespace. And, like a tourist to Mars, you can't help but be fascinated at how everything has been done, and done so minimally at that.

Everything in your machine has a source that can be read, and once you're keen enough to read it you'll find that so much is being accomplished in very little code. It's truly a fascinating world, and one I need to delve deeper into, to truly understand. For now, though, I find myself caught up in the serenity of the new, the foreign, and I want that serenity and youthfulness of perspective to guide me exactly where I can make what's best for me, and the schizoposters with whom my planet connects.

Discuss...

Discuss...

I hope this finds you well. It's hard to ignore the chaos in the world, but that's partly why writing seemed like such a good idea; it can serve as a distraction, a means to spend the time that isn't work, maintenance, or rest. And in writing, topics that are otherwise harder to discuss in short-form, such as agalmics or personal intelligence systems, can be given the time and attention they deserve. Thankfully, they can be federated as well.

This won't be a long missive, as diving into the topics too early, without giving them the space of their own missives and articles supporting them, would just be silly. No, for now, I will just set up for myself a style of sorts; minimalist, with a hint of memetics to convey the right feeling. Or at least, I hope that's how it comes across.

Oh, and me? I'm sevvie Rose, or at least that's how I've come to be known. You can find me on the fediverse. I hope we can form an appropriate relationship, and benefit each other's individuality and localities.

love, sevvie.