Category: Neocameralism

u/acc, patchwork and the Uruk Machine

i finished reading the Uruk Series by Lou Keep a few days ago, and the framework it provides raises so many questions of immediate interest here that i couldn’t help but post about it. you’re advised to read the whole series, not only because Keep writes very well, but also because none of the following will likely make sense without it. at the very least, you need to understand the main terms he’s referring to (here‘s a not-so-brief summary).

for full disclosure, i haven’t read any of the books. i’m familiar with Scott’s Seeing Like a State because it’s a staple in the market anarchist milieu from which i come, and have heard of Polanyi’s Great Transformation because of the two years of social sciences undergrad i took (yes). the other two – Hoffer’s The True Believer and Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism  – were absolutely new to me. so this is going to refer mostly to Keep’s reading of them, in the framework of the Uruk Machine, rather than directly to the original authors’ theories.

i’ll be using Keep’s general ordering to make a few points, as well as some of the tweets i used as placeholders for my specific comments on each section. to wit, here’s an introduction to my point:

i will not address Keep’s main point (nihilism) here. it’s too broad, and i’d need to revisit he’s other great and humongous post on it to start having some more thoughts. the central point today, if you needs a tl;dr for 2k-word posts, is: power is inherently fragmented. let’s begin with those fragments then.

metis, patches and bit-nations

to the extent that the political structure that made epistemic rationalism possible, desirable, necessary or inevitable is crumbling to pieces – and, yes, this is probably the most contentious statement in the background of any discussion of patchwork – the question arises: is there a future for metis?

it’s complicated because metis takes many social cycles to be created and has been more or less thoroughly eliminated from the face of the earth by High Modernism. can it be remade (more or less) from scratch in a fragmented world? tentatively, my answer is “yes, possibly”.

the foremost reason i’d present is that the current trend of political fragmentation is underpinned by a previous fragmentation of cognitive communities in the wake of the internet, as people self-sorted into clusters of interests and likemindedness. political fragmentation is downstream of cultural fragmentation.

as these new fragments slowly speciate into very different beasts, i think the underlying cognitive methods will much more resemble metis than episteme, even to the extent that they (obviously) incorporate abstract theories and knowledge. rituals and worldviews slowly form from a shared space of communication that is no longer projected top-down from a centralized nation-state. knowledge is still local, even if it’s geographically distributed (some have called this “glocal”).

of course, this doesn’t directly plug into patchwork but there’s definitely a way such cultural species turn into bit-nations that consume sovereign services. to be sure, any such sovereign service providers are likely to “see like a state” – through maps – but there’s an opacity that each of the new cultures gather from being turned into a “bit-nation”. this is somewhat idealized, of course, hence the “possibly”.

one reason people can come at me right away: “not everyone can partake in that!”. yes, it’s true. cultural speciation leaves a lot of people behind. the usual suspects, but maybe also some unusual ones. i won’t make predictions about it. but i don’t think that the non-universality of patchwork is an argument against it’s plausibility, or it’s capability of allowing for metis to resurface. i think it’s precisely the opposite. fragmentation means something, right?

a market for societies

can these new cultural species control markets and put them side by side with other (more or less) personal bonds? i think so. but also, the essential new feature that’s brought into view by thinking through patchwork is that, rather than a “market society”, patches are inside a “market for societies“.

in this somewhat alien environment, “economic prejudice” is now submitted to it’s actual efficiency for the survival of a specific culture inside the patchwork. it might be that it’s useful for patches and bit-nations to conduct GDP censuses and focus on economic growth, it might improve their chances of self-sourcing and continuation (profit, abstractly conceived). but now economic prejudice is facing real competitors, plenty of them, so that it has real chances of being driven under.

what about the patchwork (systemic) level itself? it’s hard to tell, since this level is close to an alien cognition. does it think in economically prejudiced ways? what does that even mean, if it doesn’t share a language with us? of course, all societies have some sort of awareness that they live inside a competitive system, right now. talks of “international community” abound, and international relations is supposedly a serious branch of political science. but i think it’s uncontroversial to say that pretty much no one really knows what goes through the mind of the international system *itself*.

be it how it may, economic prejudice doesn’t strike me as the most interesting part of Polanyi’s theory. the “double movement” is definitely much more explanatory, especially when coupled with Scott’s framework. people lose something important and immaterial when societies become market societies – something that can’t be grasped by rationalized cognitive modes. and so they revolt. which never solves anything, and indeed makes things worse, and people frustrated (next section).

does it change anything that a market society suddenly becomes a market for societies? in a certain way, if [all of the above] is coherent, people are back into normal (“human”) societies. they have safety networks, personal bonds, rituals, the whole metis package. markets are no longer necessarily unbound within societies. the picture is very different among them.

if anything, a market for societies is even more alien. people revolt against the losses that market society bring upon them, whatever the material gains might be. but at least they can revolt against someone. there is some ascription of agency to certain groups, the bourgeoisie or the elite or [something]. there’s no such “evil-doers” or easy targets in patchwork.

how is anyone suppose to make sense of their societies (most likely chosen, but also possibly inherited) dying off? even the mechanism by which this could possibly happen is a little bit clouded.

there’s being conquered, sure, that’s the old way. then there are the two mechanisms that are more likely to feature in a highly fractured landscape: merger (different groups fusing into a single one) and dispersion (enough members of the group joining other groups that it become impossible for the remaining to keep as a group). even being softer on the edges, what kind of “double movement” aren’t these going to bring about? is anyone really ready to let go of tightly knit communities because there are better options? are human beings anytime ready for doom?

which brings us to the topic of anti-praxis.

frustration and anti-praxis

of all the four books Keep brought to the table, Hoffer’s has been the one whose theory most added to my worldview. i mean “mass movements are fueled by frustration” is something pretty informative that i haven’t come across in basically any of the circles i’ve inhabited so far. and it seems to me it’s the one doing most of the work in the Uruk machinery too. it basically furnishes the central mechanism through which make sense of the other parts: [bad things] make people frustrated, and frustrated people make [worse things].

so it’s important to pay attention to what exactly frustration means in the context of the series. Keep boils it down to an “inability to act meaningfully”. obviously related to the destruction of metis. if patchwork can locally restore shared meaning and distribute power, as i’m positing in the first section, then there’s no reason to worry about frustration on a very large scale in patchwork. on the other hand, given the utterly terrible and common occurrence of social liquidation in patchwork, we can have something terribly similar: let’s call it networked frustration.

what does networked frustration look like? imagine you’re someone who’s just been victim of a dissipating bit-nation. your former bit-compatriots all signed up for different services and left you hanging in a limbo. very frustrating. not much of a problem until you meet a whole bunch of similarly bit-frustrated fellows.

and yet, if you actually do find these people, isn’t building things together much more probable than mass movement? who would they pledge for or against? other patches are certainly not very interested in enabling that (maybe as a weapon, but even then, there are better options). i’ll be cautious, but i guess it can be hinted that the dynamics of a patchwork makes things more complicated for the general strategy of mass movements. it begins to pay more to actually empower its adherents than to endlessly prolong the frustration. anti-praxis becomes an incentivized position: you can do what you want, why claim something instead?

i might be wrong, of course. it might be that such action capabilities allowed by the patchwork are driven into a new business of feeling very bad (and not doing anything about it). it would tell a lot about human psyche. and i have no idea how badly it could play in the long run. if passive frustration is actually much more profitable than all the alternatives – and thus survives the longest – the future is as bleak as it gets. it’s hard even to conceive how that could possibly work.

the catastrophe of narcissism

okay, this is a longer loop, going through xenoeconomics first. what does narcissism look like from the point of view of an alien invasion from the future, building itself from the materials of its host?

at the very least it seems like a good way as any to manipulate human psychology to produce a perfect consumer. a consumer, that is, who is predictable and constant, a consumer performing perfectly the redistribution of resources through markets that Say’s Law predicts. all the havoc wrecked in the previous sections (destruction of metis, economic prejudice, masses of frustration) – whatever the costs it had for capital – were a good way to create this absolutely broken being: the consumer. all image, all of the time, in warlike social environs.

nonetheless, capital has a constant incentive to do away with the rigid, evolved structures of human psychology, replacing them with something more plastic. hence, at the height of globalized consumer capitalism, the leading edge of technological innovation lays heavily in creating predictive models of consumption. read: Amazon and Netflix.

much of the talk about technological elimination of jobs focus on the other side of Say’s equation: production. if people don’t have jobs, how are they going to consume? but i think the reverse is more pressing: if your consumption can be mapped out precisely, what’s left? “consumer sovereignty” starts looking pretty bleak.

what capital can’t automate right away, even as consumption goes into silicon, is creativity. that’s what it truly needs to ponder over as it abstracts away from human flesh. consumer are boring, workers ever more so, what about the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the artists and artisans? that’s the niche (a small part of (what’s probably no longer accurately defined as)) humanity can find some employment.

back to patchwork: you’re consuming societies and eventually sorting algorithms will probably be able to predict pretty accurately to which bit-nations you’d likely belong to at any given time. so now, as the liberal order literally crumble to pieces, what remains for you to do is make new stuff. it’s that or the trashcan.

so, from the catastrophe of narcissism (the destruction of action to produce lean images) comes the anastrophe of… can i call it “nemesis”?

conclusion: a beautiful new world

[so it’s actually around 2000 words lol]

i’m not sure anyone is 100% on board with the description of patchwork, and its effects. it seems obvious and pretty inevitable to me, but of course opinions diverge. nonetheless, i think the foregoing can be said even if patchwork is treated as a mental experiment.

the bottom line seems to be, as up there: power is inherently fragmented. as fragmentation was overtook by High Modernism, everyone became disempowered. not only those poor fucks at the bottom who got their communities wrecked by well-meaning technocrats, but the very technocrats themselves, since the goals they pursued eventually led to completely different things. as this centralizing trend comes to an end, leading into patchwork, power makes a return.

another point, stemming mostly from the last section, is that power is creativity. i definitely would need some specific post to develop that at length, but the return of not only the ability, but the absolute necessity of creating things matches pretty well the return of power.

the final thesis that i’ll have to develop is the one from the tweets above: the current stage of automating away the consumer-voter, and the current labor struggles in the fields of consumption and reproduction. i’ve gotten at least into the first one right here: how the consumer came to be, and how it’s being automated away. the reproduction part is both more interesting and more consequential (and thus will have a post of its own). it all feeds deeply into the question of nihilism, i suspect.

if it all plugs in properly, i think we have more or less a general theory of society (which i think is the fundamental project of mutualism, mostly incomplete) or productive multiplicities, way beyond any human instantiation of that: fragments that build new stuff, leading through several intensive phase transitions. endgame? transcension

on patchwork

given the recent interest in patchwork (1, 2, 3, 4), i think it’s important to complement a few things – especially to the extent that, from all the cited, i’m probably the one who sticks the closest to Moldbug’s original formulation.

i do so to the extent that Moldbug’s formulation – contrary to panarchy, atomic communitarianism and (this i’m less sure) D+G’s views – emphasizes what i deem to be the most definitive feature of patchwork: independence or sovereignty, the ability to act without permission or interference on a given space.

yes, this last word is what complicates things a little from Moldbug’s somewhat idealized territorial city-states. nonetheless, patchwork depends inherently on skins, i.e., distinctions among organisms inside a system, and on the persistence of such distinctions.

thus, Patchwork is also inherently competitive. the “Business Ontology” Moldbug uses to define neocameralism (which is a theory of how to govern, and possibly a theory on how to think about government, but not a theory of competitive systems) is not necessarily all that any given patchwork includes, but it’s a useful language because entrepreneurial competition is the closest we have to a competitive social system. trade “profit” for “self-sufficiency” and you still have the same basic dynamics.

of course, any given patch might choose differing governance schemes (and to a large extent i think networked groups are likely to be separated from most sovereign services), but some will work, and others won’t. which are which is something that can only be decided inside the playing out of the system itself.

another question that stood out for me is “how we’re going to get to patchwork”. as i’ve argued here, i think divided sovereignty is the perennial state of the world, and so patchwork is as old as any “membrane” (very old). what makes the patchwork imagined by Puydt, Alexander and Moldbug any different from the current system of sovereign nation-states? the technological trends driving fragmentation (just like the previous technological trend driving centralization from the more fragmented feudal patchwork produced the current system, etc). so, “here to there” depends largely on communicational, energetic and military technologies.

finally, and possibly supremely, the question of guarantees of exit always arise. people want to know if the Wizard will save the poor children from oppressive parent-environs. this question has been also answered repeatedly, so i’ll just quote it:

As a prefatory note: Like the Misesian praxeology from which it is cladistically descended, the Moldbuggian System is a transcendental political philosophy, which is to say that it deals with ultimate or unsurpassable conditions. You have reached the transcendental when there is no higher tribunal, or court of appeal. This is the socio-cosmic buffers. If you don’t like what you’re seeing here, there’s still no point looking anywhere else, because this is all you’re going to get:

(…)

Suppose a realm unilaterally abrogates this right of emigration? It has just converted its residents into what are, in a sense, slaves. It is no longer Disneyland. It is a plantation. If it’s any good with cinderblocks, barbed-wire and minefields, there is no escape. What do you say if you’re stuck on this farm? You say: “yes, Massa.” A slave you are and a slave you will be forever.

This is terrible, of course. But again, the mechanism we rely on to prevent it is no implausible deus ex machina, no Indian rope-trick from the age of Voltaire, but the sound engineering principle of the profit motive. A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted by anyone ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears. The potential real-estate bid from immigrants disappears. And, while your residents are indeed stuck, they are also remarkably sullen and display no great interest in slaving for you. Which is a more valuable patch of real estate, today: South Korea, or North Korea? Yet before the war, the North was more industrialized and the South was more rural. Such are the profits of converting an entire country into a giant Gulag.

there is no Wizard.

a few simple questions for neoabsolutism

in the wake of a similar post by the Imperial Energy, and given that for all that matters, neoabsolutism and lrx-mutualism are forever locked in a cosmic cage-match, i figured i should map a few of the most prominent questions that i feel the neoabsolutists haven’t really answered so far (i believe it’s obvious why unanswered questions are way more of a problem for them than it is for me):

  1. where does power come from? a lot of the writing in Reactionary Future, as well as in Imperial Energy and Neoabsolutism has to do on how insecure power seeks to secure itself through centralisation, etc. but not once have i seen any definition of power (something like this), nor any account of the ways power comes to be.
  2. how universalist is neoabsolutism? i’ve made this argument before (2, 3), but if division of power is seen as something to be avoided, then delegation is not really the greatest idea. with that in mind, can anything short of a global centralized empire be enough for neo-absolutism? parallel centers of power can or cannot coexist? and if they can, how far really is this from individualism?
  3. what is sovereignty if not a relation between divided powers? this arises immediately from the previous questions: isn’t freedom-as-power the exact same thing  as freedom-from(-other’s)-power? isn’t a sovereign, by definition, an individual, atomized in relation to other individuals?
  4. finally, what’s neo in neoabsolutism? how does the theory you are sketching differ significantly from early modern absolut kings, those enlightened despots?

back to the future

one of the first ever posts on this blog was this one, commenting upon Park MacDougald’s “Accelerationism, Left and Right“, to date one of the very best primers on acceleration and its schisms. there I made a few points that deserve follow-up given my recent developments.

the first one, regarding the acceleration of market catallactics as a propellant of human autonomization is very much the topic of the last section of the Dark Enlightenment essay, although in a much darker vein. darkness notwithstanding, there is no real distinction between the dissolution of a population in its technology and the autonomization of human beings.

the second one deserves full restatement here, following-up my last arguments against left-accelerationism:

Left-Accelerationism mostly ignores left-wing anarchist tendencies which focus on individual autonomy and the forces of bottom-up global organization through capitalist technologies (bitcoin, ethereum and the Internet itself being the foremost examples). It’s my contention here that any “left” that does not interest itself with decentralized, disruptive processes, and focus rather on keeping and maintaining centralized power, is not “left-wing” at all.

market forces need no “repurposing” to deliver left-wing results, they need intensification. (as a brief aside about a text that deserves much more attention, Justin Murphy’s point here can be answered from that: yes, “revolution” can be properly understood as an enterprise within an inherently competitive system – call it “capitalism” if you want – and it’s within enterprises that any action can be made sense of).

the third point, regarding Carson’s subjective LTV still stands, especially since some reflections on Bohm-Bawerk’s roundaboutness and subsequent Cambridge Capital Debate have led me to ponder that maybe Carson’s work has indeed much deeper insights to questions of accelerationism. i will be returning to those soon.

finally, i guess i’ve touched repeatedly on the topic of Neocameralism and territoriality lately (1, 2, 3, 4), so the fourth point has been dealt with.

a neocameralist reconstruction of the US Constitution

the original US Constitution was very amenable to neocameralist restructuring. in fact, pretty much all was already in place, except for the language.

voters were property owners (the closest you got to a real shareholder) who elected a board of electors to point an executive officer. the federation was a consortium among States for mutual protection, so we had corporate representation (Senate). the Congress, as the representation (direct and indirect) of proprietors/shareholders, controlled the funds that went to the executive office.

this is all pretty much in tune with corporative structure. the glitch was with Supreme Court and the whole ideological apparatus

instead of the CEO appointing the justices, I would make justice a single church-like institution with the aim of controlling the legality of shareholder actions. in turn, it would be controlled only by the executive branch’s decision on law enforcement.

Cathedralist institutions (universities, media) would cater to either justice-church sentimentalities or become themselves shareholders.

of course, late 19th century and FDR reconstructions of the Constitution made it impossible, but a neocameralist US of A was once possible.

bit-nations and sovereign services

okay, since we’re talking about immigration, it makes sense to talk of higher level  libertarian solutions everyone will ignore.

if you don’t know Bitnation yet, be sure to check it out. it’s, quite simply, an free associative nation. deterritorialization taken to extremes.

now, the problem of immigration is a problem of knowing who to trust. in modernity, “institutions advance by substituting for trust”. bit-nations (the one extant, and the many yet to come) do that for societies: you can anonymously associate to a network of mutually reassuring parties.

of course, if you took to Bitnation’s site, you’ll see they are merely the network, not the space. some people within the network supplies it with a few embassies across the world, that can be accessed by their members (for a fee). but this could be made by another service provider, such as a sovcorp. we’ve been talking a quite lot about them lately.

couple these two concepts: a bit-nation makes a deal with a sovcorp, so that the members of such nation can access (for a fee) the sovereign holdings of the sovcorp. rent a city. various bit-nations can hire the services of various sovcorps, creating an effective market for sovereign services. this is almost ancap proper, come to think of it.

this solves the problem of immigration even more easily, as I’m sure you realize.

meta-neocameralist program of research

Land starts MNC here. in this post I list general questions that have to be answered by a MNC research program.

Descending the levels as the original landian post, we start at the occult level-0 and dig deep:

(0) MNC-theology: what is the arcane fundamentals of organization and order? what is the formalization of order in the universe (i. e., what is the cosmos)? Who or what has sovereign property over the cosmos?

(1) Power economics: How is power produced, distributed, maintained and lost? Which physical quantities determinate the quantity of power? Does power define boundaries? If so, how? Is division of power possible? If not, does secession really ever happen or only a single hegemon always governs the world? Else, what are its possible configurations, and which configurations determine the growth or decrease of systemic power? How does level-0 entities check power? What is a realistic definition / determination of power? How does power relate to (systemic) survival, i.e. linearly, non-linearly, inversely, etc? Abstractly, what is reality, especially from the point of view of power? How to discover it?

(2) Power pedagogy: How do regimes learn? How do they learn how to learn well? How do they produce realistic information? How do well-governing regimes learn and apply such information? How does power recur upon itself, i.e. how does it intellectualize? And what are the specific consequences of this? Is power indeed selected to check itself? If so, how does it happen? If not, where does Land go wrong? What is a formalization of power? How does this increase its commercial liquidity? What is a model for power to become a business, and thus perform experiments? What are the networks of exchange between “public” and “private” spheres, and how fast do they integrate both? How can entropy in government be dissipated through bankruptcy and market-drive restructuring?

(3) Power formalization: How can one formalize existing regimes as sovereign corporations? Who are the clients, executives and shareholders in each polity? How is power sold and bought? How does power markets function? Does power increase through this monetization cycle? If so, how and how much? Which definite social quantities are power factors? In which proportion to each other?

Of course, some answer have been pursued ever since “neocameralism” became a word, and thus may have been more or less thoroughly answered. Also there may be questions which I haven’t covered. Link both of them to me, and I’ll link them here (so that this becomes a reference post). Most of them, though, I suspect have been mostly neglected in the last 2 years, and deserve further investigation.

There is a fourth possible degree, called “power engineering” that Land has not (for obvious reasons) included. This is the point where MNC folds back upon NC and finally tells you which principles have been the “best practices” of functioning social orders, and thus at least a little of how to design a society. It may be included here, if there is any exploration in this regard going on.

neocameralism for leftists

…wait, what?

why would leftists want neocameralism? well, because it makes the dream possible. instead of a rule by impolite proles from deep country, rednecks and bigots in general, a civilized progressive morally superior social justice paradise, governed by BHO and his descendants, forever, with the loyal and intelligent help of science and rationalism (aka rule by certified PhD professors).

think, a shiny Californian Republic sovcorp, with LGBTQA* rights, affirmative action, universal basic income, no racial discrimination, no wage gap, a police force that effectively prevents rape, open borders, progressive media, and everything good. a city upon the hill, indeed. plus, the certainty that never ever ever will the red-tribe bigots ever get into power again. a general ban on white-cisheteropatriarchy and fascism in general.

in fact, for the Cathedral, building heaven is not very hard, since it already holds power. it just has to let go of one thing it already only pays lip service, namely, democracy. formalize all the assets, restructure the State of California, declare independence (and back it up with the latest developments in military security) and just live the dream.

seriously, I guessing the other side will be just as happy. the bliss of divorce…

neocameralism for agorists

in opposition to more “traditional” ancaps, agorists have no time to waste on transitions. they do commerce, legal or illegal, right here and right now. agorism is the NAP taken to its utmost consequences as a personal code of honor.

what, then, can neocameralism offer to agorists?

good governance. any commercial enterprise needs a sound theory of how to deal with its internal organization. if you’re doing things all alone, it’s a personal code of ethics. if you’re dealing with others, you have an organization. and if it’s an organization that intends autonomy, it is a sovereign corporation.

an agorist sovcorp would be essentially a nomad war machine: whatever other business it may have, it’s core activity is protecting itself. which may be ever harder, given it’s non-territorial nature (“we aren’t states anymore”). it’s internal organization is a strict contractarian hierarchy, with every member being on a contract that is to be enforced by the sovcorp itself, according to the rules established by the contracts. the ultimate option is exit.

this sovcorp primarily offers protection services. it’s clients may be anywhere in the world. essentially, it’s indistinguishable from a private army. this company may as well pay dividends on its profits, thus having shareholders.

if you’re an agorist, opening a sovcorp may be the best way to present competition to the state, and thus assure its downfall.

neocameralism for ancaps

David Friedman proposes, in his classic Machinery of Freedom, a world of protection agencies, in contract with each other, so as to replace nation-states. the only difference from this to Moldbug’s Patchwork is territoriality. Moldbug dismisses right away the military feasibility of protection agencies competing over the same territory (as the good Hobbesian he is), and so territorializes Friedman’s  agencies in Webberian-state-like corporations.

are non-territorial sovcorps, and so ancap itself, feasible? let’s start with Moldbug’s model and make only a few feasible transformations, and see if the end result looks like something an ancap would love more than the Patchwork.

the first transformation is for a territorial sovcorp to allow private courts in its territory. although it’s still solely responsible for any enforcement in its territory, there’s no reason all judicial procedures need to be carried out by the sovereign. someone may appeal to the sovereign, but it is not required to do anything. also, private courts allows for one less expense and one more source of profits.

the operation of private courts will likely involve insurance agencies, which may start selling insurance policies that include specific adjudication in case of certain crimes or other covered risks.

the next step is a little more rogue, but equally feasible. the sovcorp abstains itself from enforcing contracts or law (now private) inside its territory, allowing protection agencies to freely enter the market. it’s a bold move, but if has enough military power to remain sovereign in a largely hostile world, it can certainly contain a few private armies. it may demand some sort of regulation, restricting the protection agencies’ military power to the degree it can contain. ultimate appeals are still possible, and conflicts among protection agencies are still mediated by the sovcorp.

another way to think about this is to imagine a virtual federalism, in which protection agencies are states, and the sovcorp is the federal government. essentially, the sovcorp has the same functions as the Constitution originally envisioned for the fedgov: external relations, protection from outside forces, adjudication of conflicts among member states.

the final step is way less bold than the second one, but more consequential. now, the protection agencies become all shareholders of the sovcorp. which turns the sovcorp into a constitutional contract among protection agencies. by either Friedman’s or Long‘s account, this is ancap proper: non-territorial protection agencies in contract among each other, replacing nation-states.

the punch-line of all this reasoning is: ancaps have good reason to spouse neocameralism, since it’s only three feasible steps away from ancapism. how to get to neocameralism? all power to the pilots.