It's a governance mode that was heavily used throughout the European colonial period and it resulted in the rape and theft of the local populations and underclasses of all the nations involved. When you put things in the proper historical context, the hostility is rather well-reasoned.
What happens when you move there and some local strongman with the most weapons decides he needs slaves? Government exists because the majority of people got tired of being hassled by warlords, and they got banded together to create and enforce laws they could all abide by or one warlord was able to create a stable coalition for a time by taking responsibility for the justice of the land.
Why would anyone in their right mind, other than a warlord-wannabe billionaire, assent to this idea?
Maybe they won't. You are, in a certain sense, assenting to it right now. Websites have exactly this governance model. Hacker News is run by a king. We all choose to spend time here anyway, because he does a good job responding to our needs.
A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there, but you choose which restaurants you patronize. There is no, in principle, reason that the same cannot be applied to where you choose to live.
The primary difference is the transaction costs of relocation and the cost of mistakes. It's easy to go to a different restaurant if you don't like the menu. It's less easy to move. But some people are willing to make that tradeoff for more efficient governance.
>A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there.
The problem isn't that someone else might choose something for you. That's not what anyone is worried about here. An incredibly silly comparison.
The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.
This is the environment, as it exists, for hundreds of millions around the world right now. So even if your critiques are true, we're no worse for trying.
> The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.
Explain to me what you think the difference between "undemocratic" and "people choosing things for you" is.
Do you understand that if these types of fiefdoms are built, they will be able to attract people with misleading claims or by dangling short-term economic relief in front of desperate people who they can then ruthlessly victimize?
Maybe you do, and you just think "ah fuck em"
Which is in character for the types of people who want to start a fiefdom in the ocean.
I'm gonna have to recommend you pick up BioShock, for real. It's on sale for 5 dollars.
Some people like to try new things, and they're ok taking risks to do so. They should be allowed to do that. If you want to make a rule that says "such and such amount of disclosure is required for people moving there", i'd be fine supporting something like that. But just saying "well theoretically it could be exploited in this way" is not a very strong argument against trying it.
The original question I responded to is "why the fear of opt-in competition to the current model of governance?"
The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.
Yes, indeed. That is the essential question for Patchwork-based ideologies. However, that is something they actively try to think about
> The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.
Ok, but how exactly does an experiment lead to that? If that is the outcome that it generates, and people do not prefer that outcome, then they simply will not move there. So, if you are correct in your diagnosis, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The only thing you do have to worry about is discovering that your preconceptions were not accurate.
In addition, the eventual children of the people who moved there won't have made this choice, and the example of history says they won't easily be able to leave.
Unless you're a victim of human trafficking. Or, for example, read up on how scientologists use their cruise ship [1].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/world/scientology-cruise-ship...
Perhaps the problem is humans, not a particular system of government.
Can you list a few historical cities founded under a similar model that had the awful results you claim?
Perhaps it's mostly selection bias on articles like this one that brings out the comments we see around us?
In my recollection, HN has always been pro-YC and pro-venture-capital-in-general, for obvious reasons :)
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.
http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
This sort of attitude is definitely not the one held by most coders at BigStartupCo today.
HN culture has always seen multinational companies like Amazon as something to aspire to become, billionaire investors as heroic risk-taker allies, and lauded small companies that get brought out and shut down for achieving an exit.
There's nothing wrong with that, HN's culture is still perfectly valid. But HN hasn't lost an anti-authority ethos, it never had one, from the moment the URL ended with ycombinator.com
Honestly, this is the huge problem of our time - globalization has happened and the concepts of tax laws and taxation of value production haven't properly adapted. The US should be taxing all the value legitimately made in the US - if a designer in the US makes something that is then mass produced in China the value taxes currently only comprehend the physical good value, not the intellectual value of the good - for things like fashionable clothing nearly all of the value is created domestically and the actual material value is inconsequential.
Over time the ability to dodge taxes in this manner has placed unfair downward pressure on countries to lower taxes in an effort to attract the revenue that can be freely moved around and hence we've got spiraling wealth inequality due to insufficient taxation.
People opting out of taxation while reaping the benefit of educated populations (or their personal education) along with security and the laundry list of the benefits of society is simply ethically unacceptable.
The point is to improve life for the 99% of the world who can't just move to a tax haven, by building prosperous cities they can move to. This is not just a theory - China lifted 500,000,000 out of poverty using Special Economic Zones to transform their economy over decades. Many countries aspire to the same advance in prosperity for their people.
Then people and their taxable assets will gladly stay.
The “good value” should hopefully be a well functioning nation full of healthy and happy people. Unfortunately that’s not the goal of most people with that kind of money.
Huge tax loopholes being accepted by central world players like the US puts pressure on smaller countries to accept them as well.
Only because the laborers are being horrendously underpaid, no? If globalization had really fully happened you wouldn't be able to pay people in china slave labor wages to make your clothes for you.
And yea, I think we do have some twisted and perverse version of globalization - rather than bringing the world up we seem to be perpetually exploiting the third world... eventually that might piss of the third world enough that they do something about that but it hasn't happened yet.
It's a gradient from country to country. Overall, for individuals in absolute terms, things are getting better- although for certain subpopulations in relative terms (e.g. blue collar americans) they've gotten worse.
We still have centuries of third world countries to exploit until they are fully developed.