Ryan Grim on Warpcast

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🙂 All right. Let’s go a few rounds. Our mutual friend @mazmhussain can adjudicate. (1) First: startup societies are based on 100% consent. No one is there who hasn’t chosen to be there. No one is in a hierarchy if they haven’t opted into that hierarchy. Signing the social contract to join a community is much like signing a contract to join a company: you view the docs, make an informed decision, and opt out if it doesn’t work. That right to exit is the fundamental right. (2) Second: not all existing laws are good laws, like the PATRIOT Act. Sunsetting *some* laws doesn’t mean you don’t believe in laws in the abstract. (3) Third: you likely have views on what your ideal community would be. Maybe it’s a vegan village. Maybe it’s modern Amish, where tech is paused at the level of flip phones and people enjoy each other’s company. If you ever decided to build such a peaceful, opt-in community, then we would support you. And that’s what startup societies are about.

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You’re probably already deeply familiar with the sordid history of utopian communities in the 19th and 20th century but for those aren’t, basically all of them collapsed or worse. That doesn’t mean nobody should be able to try again it doesn’t bode well. And of course, there’s no such thing as fully cleaving yourself off from society. What you allow to happen there will require external resources and will influence the rest of the world. And usually there will also be people already there. I’ve interviewed several residents of the Honduran island prospera has tried to take over and they never opted in and are appalled by it. I didn’t directly address some of your other points but will try again later.

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A few points. (1) The history of startup societies is actually one of great success. William Penn’s Pennsylvania worked. The Massachusetts Bay colony worked. Oneida worked. The United States of America, for all its flaws, worked for 250 years. Really, virtually every major city and country in the Americas was essentially founded from scratch in the last few hundred years. (2) Moreover, these new startup societies were responsible for many of the democratic innovations we take for granted. Concepts like representative democracy, written constitutions, and universal suffrage were pioneered, popularized, or reinvented in the New World. These social innovations then filtered back to Europe. (3) Yes, no doubt many societies did fail, like Roanoke, and many of the new political ideas failed, like Prohibition, but in general without trying (and sometimes failing) there is no progress whatsoever — whether social or technological. [continued]

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(4) With respect to trying again: we've established that startup societies have worked astonishingly well. But even if they *hadn't* yet worked, it's worth trying again every few years with new ideas — so long as it's an opt-in experiment. For example: for all of history, humans couldn't fly. And then, after the Wright Brothers, we could. It was worth trying again. (5) With respect to cleaving yourself off from society, it's all on a continuum. But I think there is a pretty big difference between (a) anyone "dictating" anything to you vs (b) people going off and building a society on their own. No one is your CEO/president unless you sign a literal social contract making them your CEO/president. (6) Regarding the Honduras situation, as I think you may know, the previous government passed a ZEDE law [see below]. So Prospera didn’t “try to take it over”. The Latin American founder legally invested millions in a largely uninhabited area near Crawfish Rock, Roatan. That's what development looks like.

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On point 5, on the legal creations of these ZEDEs, take a look at the actual process of creating them: it involved a coup, the destruction of the Supreme Court, and then to defend them an effort to override a subsequent election. All of that was done in alliance with a president now convicted of drug trafficking. That can’t be an example of success.

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Let me start with two analogies and then go into the substance. (1) First: as the left puts it, Donald Trump is a convicted felon who attempted a coup. Does that mean every real estate deal signed during his first term is invalid? (2) Second: as the right puts it, Joe Biden is a senile warmonger who misused his autopen. Does that mean every pardon and visa issued during his term is invalid? Point: you can actually understand the dysfunction of Latin America through the increasingly dysfunctional North America. Yet every business has to play the game on the field, even as crazy instability rocks the center of government. (3) Next, on Honduras specifically: the new left-wing government that oppposes ZEDE is also reportedly connected to criminals. To wit: "the Castro-Zelaya family appears embedded in some of the same criminal networks as its predecessor" Point: the anti-ZEDE government is not good. Agree? https://www.csis.org/analysis/bad-worse-xiomara-castro-administration-begins-weaponize-honduran-state

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The key difference here is that the ZEDE was not a random, disinterested bystander in all this. Hernandez gutted the Supreme Court because they had blocked the ZEDE law. Yes, with enough capital and power the ZEDE backers were able to force the law through and crush the court into compliance. But then voters elected a new govt that said it would roll back the ZEDE and the ZEDEs are fighting it as if they’re some sovereign entity. They’re appealing to the court at the World Bank which is an incredibly ironic thing for libertarians to do. We started this conversation talking about consent and opting in but none of this allows even for democracy, let alone opt in consent.

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I am happy to get into all that, but I did want to align first on one question: do you agree that Xiomara Castro and the family running the new Honduran government are crooks? https://apnews.com/article/xiomara-castro-coup-carlos-zelaya-honduras-corruption-60fc69e941f8b8ed55b770da530468bf

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