More efforts from tech bros to build Rapture.
Interesting quotes:
it had backing from tech heavyweights such as billionaire Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, and venture capitalist** Fred Wilson**, a Coinbase board member who sold his shares in the company for $1.8 billion after it went public in 2021.
“Bitcoin, if it wins, completely changes the world, because it changes the ability of centralized states to do what they’ve been doing,” Srinivisan said in a presentation delivered to a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam in October.
The Bitcoin-based Network State will be based on “internet values” such as “open source” and “peer-to-peer,” Srinivasan has written.
An utopia run on Bitcoin? What could possibly go wrong?
Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.
This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.
This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.
Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.
Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.
And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.
Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.
any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.
This is a feature, not a bug
This is the far right libertarianism, which has essentially become an extremist, authoritarian form of capitalism. In essence, those with immense power tell us that nobody has any right to oversight and regulation over others. Their power becomes insurmountable, and their control over the economy becomes absolute. We live according to the standards they provide, because we have no alternative.
Every system of government becomes corrupted like this when thieves and liars take control. This is not libertarianism, it is simply the flavor of authoritarianism this go 'round.
Real liberterianism comes in many forms, along the left to right spectrum. On the left, there is a belief in redistribution of natural resources to the community. Personally, I believe we should be embracing local cooperatives for food, energy, medical care, and beyond. On the right, there is more allowance for imbalance by embracing business to drive innovation. Those who innovate succeed, and accrue wealth. But a true libertarian should support a near 100% estate tax, which would limit the imbalance, because you should have what you’ve earned for yourself.
The thing that we lost that leads libertarianism to fail, is our sense of community, a sense of humanity. A responsibility when you see your neighbors suffering, to help them. Once the rich went off to live in their ivory towers, they lost sight of the rest of us.
I don’t see how any system could succeed, considering the circumstances.
[Edit] And honestly, we need to stop vilifying entire philosophies because they were previously corrupted. Just because communism was implemented in a manner that oppressed millions, doesn’t mean there is no good to the philosophies behind it and socialism.
We should be borrowing the good from everything, and remembering the bad. A blanket condemnation of failed experiments makes both impossible. No singular philosophy will be effective in this imperfect world, only in theory is that level of refinement possible.
‘Tech Billionaires give all wealth away to end world hunger.’ ‘Tech Billionaires lobby for wealth tax with national governments.’ ‘Tech Billionaires realize they are normal people like anyone else, not super smart world-saving geniuses, and finally shut the fuck up.’
Now these would be news.
deleted by creator
Quick! Call the press!
The basic idea is that the West has declined irrevocably, beginning with what Srinivisan calls the birth of the centralized state that disempowered wealthy industrialists with antitrust laws, securities regulation, central banking, and adversarial journalism. Now, the thinking goes, we’re on the backswing with wealthy individuals reclaiming their power over supposedly corrupt public institutions, and we have the internet and its currency—Bitcoin—to lead us out of the darkness.
So the billionaire techbros feel powerless (wtf) and are offended by criticism (oof) so they want their own techbro dictatorship with no free press. Also please no peasant to support, only exploit. Got it.
I pull the same quotes you bolded to rip into that. They’re about to rediscover things like pricing cartels, company script, and child labor. Either they all pool all of their money together and collaborate to take advantage of everything together or they fall apart as they get fucked by each other and start reinventing the same rules we’ve made over the last several centuries. I kinda feel like the latter is more likely given how much ego all these coffin dodgers have and how close pooling resources + working together for the common good is to nasty things like socialism.
Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.
Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.
Lets just call them what they are, oligarchs
I feel like they are more dangerous than oligarchs.
Look at Russian oligarchs. They don’t try to change the world. They know they are not welcomed so just buy properties at London, buy yachts, etc. and then enjoy what they have.
Tech libertarians seem to view themselves as savior of the world and attempts to change it (for the worse).
Add that whiff of eugenics from the pronatalism mixed with the longtermism and, if they get what they want, we have something closer to good old blue blood monarchs.
Ya know what? I hope they do it. That many rich assholes with more ambition than brains in one place? It’ll burn from the inside.
Target rich environment
Did you mean “target-rich environment” or “target: rich environment”?
Wait, they want to put all the assholes in one place? We should let them, it’ll make it easier later.
But part of it is decentralized! Can’t we just slap a blockchain on anything and declare the whole thing immune to coercion? /s
I wish them luck. It’s good for people to try new things. I won’t be moving there though.
I hope they get eaten by bears.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
I bet Wish Version Lex Luthor in the thumbnail photo is extra crunchy. Bears like that because it helps clean their teeth.
This is the classic example.
Below one is also super fun: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/colorado-springs-libertarian-experiment-america-215313/
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
FREEDOM TO STEAL!!!
Srinivasan has floated the car-free Culdesac private community in Tempe and the Peter Thiel-backed Próspera in Honduras as examples of currently-existing proto-Network States.
“Suppose you found a new startup society like Culdesac on the basis of car-free living…which is an innovation in parallel transportation.
Is “fuck cars” libertarian?
Maybe in a twisted thought process: privatized public transport for the masses, and because the rich have no actual restrictions in reality, I’m sure they can drive a car if they want to.
Good question. Since “libertarian” in practice always becomes some form of authoritarian state. They just jumped a few steps ahead.
On the other hand though, car-free city sounds so nice.
Until a Libertarian decides he wants to drive a car. You can’t expect discipline from these assholes.
Nearly all pollution violates the NAP
And yet…
didn’t they try this in el salvador and it flopped?
I feel like I already watched this Documentary. It did not end well.
We can only hope that, like the citizens of Rapture, the rich tech-bros go insane from their own fumes and start eating each other.
While also doing body horror.
Libertarians (n., plural) - Sooo…. Conservatives.
Perhaps they can take all the asshole Republicans (leaving the reasonable ones…I know, not many left) with them and we can be left with a society that doesn’t suck and is instead filled with leadership that may have opposing viewpoints, but are willing to compromise — like, you know, mature, scientific, educated adults would.
