How to create a startup country
kurzweilai.net
kurzweilai.net
For eg. the open source movement hacked the legal system to come up with an awesome solution. It was different from capitalism, which assumes that innovation happens only if people see financial reward. In a communist system, you are "expected" to innovate by an order from the top. But these systems never thought that people could do stuff like writing things like Operating systems, Compilers, browsers, databases... medicine... electronics, architecture, movies, novels and even ads "just for the sake of doing it."
Our current systems are tied to labor as a critical cog for the economics to work out. In the future automation will significantly reduce the need for labor in manufacturing and services. This will be a disruptive change. Right now the labor that gets outsourced to cheaper countries will finally be outsourced to machines. A lot of services like mechanical turk will even take up skilled jobs like even that of doctors.
Right now though machines do most of our manufacturing, we have invented absurdly complex services to keep 6 billion people busy. But at some point we can stop and ask... is this the best way to let 6 billion people have what they want/need.
Right now we technically have driverless cars. It is not inconceivable we will automate most of humanity's grunt work. The rest is FUN to do "just for the sake of it". So it will be a time to ask whether capitalism+voter elected oligarchy is the best way to live in such a world.
Watching this video from the venusproject was a real eyeopener: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3932487043163636261#
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
Another interesting take on the effect of automation on the way we live is this short story at http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Carl Marx codified communism, The French revolution gave us the modern democratic framework, Stallman and others gave us the skeleton for open source. It just shows radical changes are possible. Maybe we will invent something totally different from what we currently have. Maybe not. But why ridicule a guy like Thiel who wants to sail west to reach the east. Maybe he will end up doing something very different from what he set out to do.
There are already organizations which try to increase the efficiency of doctors by maximizing the time they see patients and increasing their throughput. My experience is that many manage to increase profits while depersonalizing care.
You're confusing communism with totalitarianism. It's a forgiving mistake considering that most nominally communist systems in history were actually totalitarian states with a communist ideology for the masses.
Of course, it's a whole separate discussion whether a true communism can ever really arise from the people, i.e. bottom-up, as opposed to being "declared" by the ruling class.
This woman, Kristina Gjerde, was giving a talk at TED about the UN landgrab (called "making law on the sea").
http://www.ted.com/talks/kristina_gjerde_making_law_on_the_h...
It's fascinating to watch this sort of mind at work; the consternation that political authority does not extend everywhere yet, and how to work to accomplish it.
If humanity is to become more civilized, there has to be a space for alternative political systems to develop.
That's just giving up on all the land we already have. That, for a starter, seems pretty defeating.
edit: We keep on forgetting that our government (the US) was created on purpose to be very slow but ultimately fair. That's the inefficiency, yet it's still a great place for startups. That, coupled with our 300m citizens, makes something like this harder to do in a country like this. That's why we haven't been too successful in creating startup communities outside of 2 or 3 places in the entire United States.
Yet, this can work in a lot of places. Or, rather, we can try to start applying it in a lot of places. Smaller places that have seen similar successes. I'm thinking Dubai, Israel, etc.
History suggests that when countries fail, or at least when the machinery of civil society fails, things can get very unpleasant.
It's like, when you have a database engine written in Cobol and you're asked to improve it by implementing latest ideas in database technology, sometimes that code base is written in such a fundamentally broken way that a better solution is to write it in C.
The problem with improving current system is that the system has all the power and will resist change. The people who can change the system are people who're benefiting from the system being what it is. It's not like there aren't people aware of the problem and trying to change it (see Lessig) but they are not having much success. The laws are created by Congress and many see corruption of Congress as the main problem and Congress will not vote itself from the island any more than Kim Jong-Il will.
Which is why the only realistic way to really experiment with new governance systems, especially ones with radical ideas, is to start from scratch.
tl;dr I think the Israeli army if anything is a massive contribution to the success of their innovation economy.
(1) http://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic-Mirac...
The fact is, that Jewish peers outside Israel has more success, than in Israel. It can easily be explained by the fact that they didn't wasted 3 most productive years of their lives to the army service.
The Jewish population in Israel is more a less of the same size as Jewish population in US. Yet Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg were generated not in Israel, but in US. If their families had immigrated to Israel and they had spent 3 years in the IDF, I doubt Google and Facebook existed today.
[1] http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2010/07/hummus-ma...
"No I had an itch."
Fight and cure corruption here on terra firma first. That's the real utopia and exactly there is where money should be spent.
These sorts of laws could even conceivably offer some protection to such a venture.
If your vessel is flagged, then this isn't a problem, but you must abide by the laws of the flagging nation. And, in international water, you are still vulnerable to random searches by the Coast Guard if for any reason they get their back up.
The world outside of developed countries is still a very unhappy place to live. Many micronation island projects failed badly in a few years being taken over by pirates.
Real political progress would entail policies like legalized drugs, freedom of information and ideas, physical currency, etc. that would likely raise the ire of powerful states.
Like the article says, these kinds of political experiments have the potential to act as competition toward established nations. Sadly, I think that nations would realize this and attempt to preempt the challenge through force if they could, this being their main advantage.
That seems to be patently false. If better ways of governance really were infectious, governments would be roughly converging in their policies. At the very least, for example, similar governments (let's say western democracies) might all have universal healthcare.
Oh that pesky constitution, getting in the way of startups ...
Regarding the American Revolution, it is interesting to note that tax rates immediately after were higher than during British rule. Even George Washington part-took in the centralization of the American state afterwards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion . (The Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that the new national government had the willingness and ability to suppress violent resistance to its laws.)
Of course, the idea of a centralized state (with imperial ambitions if it has enough power) is thousands of years old.
Instead of building ridiculously complicated, expensive structures in the middle of the ocean, to experiment with a new government it would be substantially easier to carve out a small chunk of territory in a place where land is cheap.
I think seasteading has its merits in terms of vacation resorts and perhaps fisheries or mining, but beyond that who wants to live out in the middle of the friggin ocean, especially if its going to cost as much as it would to live in a condo in san francisco?
The point of this project is to create a startup country, a place where greater risk--in terms of the system used, not necessarily within the system--can mean greater reward. Yes, Thiel is a libertarian, but TSI quite explicitly concentrates on enabling anyone to partake of their output. This isn't Galt's Gulch in the Water, nor is it intended to (maybe in Thiel's private dreams, but definitely not in the way TSI is run).
I'd love to find out if the common modes of living we're used to are local maxima, or if we'll find that the various experiments converge again towards familiar clusters.
To be content with what's out there is the same as saying "well, pick one of the many companies out there and join as an employee. What's the point of starting your own company?"
Not only that but you don't even get to pick your company. (unless you consider immigration but well, it's not as easy as switching job)
I beg to disagree.
Just in recent days we read on HN about cops assaulting 15 year old and throwing in jail 17 year old who filmed that on tape. We've been assaulted with Assange/WikiLeaks stories, where government officials are calling for assassinations, scramble to find existing/create new laws to prevent their dirty laundry being known to public. US is waging two unjust, unprovoked wars, started under made up pretenses (and that only few years after Vietnam disaster). Health care costs are spiraling out of control in US, while at the same time the quality of service is bad. Broadband in US is worse than in South Korea. Law making process is out of control, with mega-bills stuffed with unrelated rules bought by lobbying. War on drugs, terrorizing war on terror, prisons population out of control (compared to other countries). I could go on (and no, other countries are no better in that regard).
What I like about that talk is that it talks about governments serving the people. On paper that's what it is but in practice the government is the master and it behaves like one. The government has all the power and the way it feels is that it is on a relentless drive to get even more power and it's a rare act of short lived triumph where some of its power is stripped away and sanity restored. The examples of power grab abound (expanding search and seizure at borders and in the airports, trying to silence whistle-blowers by e.g. bullying private sector, criminalizing behavior like recording police at work (so that they can abuse their power more freely), unconditionally accepting content industry propaganda about terrible losses from piracy and enacting censorship legislations that try to go around due process).
So no, things are far from being good and I for one would welcome a government that tries to serve its people in reality, not just on paper.
Now if out of all the other countries in the world you can't find one that's even close to your ideals maybe there is a reason for that, maybe your utopia is not possible. Thiel as a CEO got to tell people what to do, he seems to have this idea that he will setup his government and people will just follow his rules. So I guess he's thinking of being some kind of benevolent dictator. In some other of his social writing* he has said he doesn't believe in democracy anymore. But even in a dictatorship you have to get consent from at least your security.
In his effort to escape politics he doesn't seem to realize that politics is what happens when you get a lot of people together making decisions. What happens when charismatic socialist or conservatives leaders rise up in his country? What happens when special interests start competing with each other?
If he were somehow able to solve the technical, economical, security and legal issues the whole thing would just devolve into the same political mess that every society goes through. How do I know? Because that's what happens everytime a government has been formed, it's what's happened to every single other country in the world.
* http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-educa...
It's always the same struggle for power.
You see, power and money are related to each other pretty much like matter and energy: they are two forms of the same thing, interchangeable from one into the other, and behaving in mostly the same ways.
As long as there is some power to accumulate you will find some people who are better ad doing it than the others, and you're getting a power imbalance which is easily abused. So there is no guarantee that any nicely engineered utopia won't become warped after a while -- if anything, human history pretty much guarantees that it will.
Human society can't be engineered, it's a living mechanism, and in the past millennia we've been through pretty much all we could (although that heavily depends on technological advances, such as communications and the like). So far, we can safely say that there are two extreme forms of society when it comes to laws: a totalitarian state, where a small group of people keep the rest in control, and a total anarchy, where there are no set laws and rules. At each point in time, any society is at some point between those two extremes, and the larger the society it's more probable that different rules apply to various subdivisions within it.
So no, it is not possible to set up an ideal society (of any form, libertarian or socialist or whatever) and keep it such for a long time -- unless perhaps for very small, heavily regulated and closed groups, isolated from the rest of society which tolerates them (as is often the case with religious cults and small but wealthy totalitarian countries).
What if there are other configurations as much better than the current best, as the current best is better than the current worst? Or put more concretely, compared to North Korea, South Korea is already a 'utopia'. Maybe there's another solution as much better again, which makes South Korea look like a retro prison state, and would to its vurrent residents be a comparative utopia. (Of course, this utopia's residents, once inured to it, would still find plenty to gripe about. C'est la treadmill hédonique.)
Most existing states have strong incentives to send the message: "Current tradeoffs are as good as it gets; this is already the best of all possible worlds — so get back to your station." They're lying.
These aren't exclusive. Certainly there are limits, but human society is engineered every day on many scales and the effects are all around you. Just look at the the differences in culture between a new tech startup and IBM. Aren't these human societies? For a larger scale, compare North Korea and Iceland.
"...in the past millennia we've been through pretty much all we could"
No, we've been through all that we've been through. Before democracy, there was no such thing and your reasoning would have deemed it impossible to live under any system but autocratic despotism. Even though we have a long way to go, humanity has created political innovation for its entire existence, and the rate of this innovation has continually accelerated. Why would this change?
I believe it comes down to culture. If the members of a society are instilled strongly enough with the right values, it isn't necessary for a central body to enforce these values. It would actually be counterproductive. For companies, these values relate to ingenuity, productivity, cooperation, ethics. For countries, the same apply, but replacing a central legal authority also requires strong judicial values. These already exist to an extent. Try punching an old lady on a crowded city street and see what happens to you--it won't matter whether there are police around.
Compassion and charity are also necessary. Luckily, in spite of the bad news we see constantly, these values are also quite pervasive in the world. Pervasive enough? I'm not sure. But I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility that humanity could make great strides in improving its political systems, and perhaps reach a point that would look utopian to our present day, even if it takes a hell of a long time to get there.
My whole point was that it's impossible to create a "frozen", immutable form of society. There is no ideal form, it's always a compromise of some sort, and it always changes.
Human society is probably the most complex system in the known universe. How can you understand it well enough to claim that no better configurations exists ?
Of course your use of the word "ideal" gives you an out since that is an absolute asymptotic concept, similar to that of "God", which bears no relation to any observable reality.
For my part I believe that solutions exist to the organization of human society which are undeniably better than the tiny set that has so far been tried in the short history of human civilization.
People should be thinking of governments/countries/cultures this way anyhow. Vote with your feet.
If your country fails, people will probably suffer and/or die.
Am I missing something?