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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Ryan Grim pfp

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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Ryan Grim pfp

I’ll do 2 separate replies, one on Honduras (that description of yours leaves out a lot of important and brutal info!) and the other on your interesting point here about William Penn, etc. When I said the utopian communities failed, I was talking about the ones that cleaved themselves off from society and tried to build a utopia from scratch and did not have ambitions to spread themselves to new territory. The ones you refer to that did succeed did so because they massively expanded. The conquest of Pennsylvania and New England enabled the members of those communities to win new land to cultivate and the ever growing wealth soothed class conflict. And so on for the rest of America. If it’s truly the case that you see these network states as similar to those early expansionist colonies in America, where do you see them expanding? That’s where the opt in thing stops becoming voluntary.

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balajis pfp

(1) How does it stop being voluntary? No one is forced to live in Pennsylvania. (2) In terms of digital expansion, a modern startup society expands like any internet service. People voluntarily join the cloud community. Some join as individuals, while others come as families, companies, or groups. In terms of physical expansion, note that a tech company doesn't have to conquer anyone to build datacenters and offices around the world. Similarly, if someone doesn't want their investment, or if they hate immigrants and foreigners, a startup society just buys property elsewhere. This is 100% consensual.

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Sam Griffin pfp

The fact that humanity doesn't really have much available, unsettled territory where new, experimental societies can start from is a great tragedy. Ideally, the next step in liberal governance would be to codify and allow situations where territories could secede and start their own governments or join other existing ones

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