Extropians believe that DRM and the concept of intellectual property are nonsense, do recall. So no, an Extropian fabber will [i]not[/i] be DRM locked. The limits on fabbing something with an Extropian fabber - which will be the same kind you find on out-right anarcho-collectivist stations - will be acquiring the resources to feed it.

That would be extremely. [i]vigorously[/i] hypocritical of the an-caps, since their whole thing is that they'll sit pretty in places like Extropia, vigorously breaking the DRM schemes on things that came out of Sunward blueprint shops and taking the credit (and rep) for breaking those blueprints and broad-banding them to the solar system.

Sure there are some Extropian crackers that would take pride in their ability to decrypt and steal blueprints, but just as much there would be others that are themselves makers and creators who define what they see as reward for their work. Some want monetary gain, some want recognition, some want both, others want neither. Extropians are not one monotonous mindset with the same goals and ideas of proper reward. We agree on the right to private property, and that no government should impede on an individual's choice with what to do with it; and that's where the consensus ends.

And exactly what almighty contract did you have with the person who hacked your blueprint prohibiting him from doing just that, hmmm? No contract? Oh, welp! Looks like what we have here is a conflict of interest, then. It's in your interest to try and enforce some DRM scheme, which is inherently anathema to Extropianism (to say nothing of the Autonomist Alliance.) But you don't have a contract in play. You can't get one of those judges to sign off on having him "not"-coerced into paying you back or infomorph slavery. So you're going to have to resort to [i]other[/i] measures; namely, just paying your security contractor to straight-up whack him as an example. But he has a contract with a security company, too. Now his security company is fighting yours, and you've just paid for an attack on him. So he retaliates, and sends some folks to sabotage your hab module so it starts cycling pure helium instead of oxygen, and detaches from the spar. Assuming you survived that, or you didn't but you resleeved, you find your security company is locked in a rapidly-escalating all-out war with his, as each of you attempt to retaliate. To you, you're in the right, as he "Attacked" you by choosing to willfully and flagrantly knock off your design and thumbed your nose at your desire to be paid - no contract, after all, no obligation to do so. He, of course, is also in the right, because you attacked him by sending armed goons to break his legs. Wait a minute, isn't that what the PC did to Locus - sent a fleet to break their legs for hacking their blueprints?

And what about when you can't agree on a neutral arbiter? Why would either of you have an incentive to pick a neutral arbiter instead of a biased one? Furthermore, why would a neutral arbiter even exist? Most people would have known stances on DRM and copyright, and since all you're having arbited is the validity of your copyright, that opinion is the only one that matters. So why would this hacker agree to have the case judged by someone known to be pro-copyright? Why would you agree to have it judged by someone known to be anti-copyright?

Yeah, I'm a little confused about how an-caps resolve the tension between the anti-authoritarianism and libertarianism of their political ideals and the authoritarian and anti-libertarian nature of their economic ideals. It's sort of like, "I want to have the freedom to be the potentate that can extort a starving subject, but I want to call that freedom 'free contract' and pretend that it's not authoritarian." It's like arguing for King Louis to have the freedom to his rightful property of all the serfs and peasants and other subjects of France, and I kind of thought the whole idea behind anarchism was to remove the "freedom" of authoritarians in political and economic spheres to impose conditions on others. Wage slavery is crappy now. Wage slavery under an-cap economics is "free contract" for your labour from an owner of a business when you should just be able to get what you need for free under all proposed theoretical anarchist economic systems besides an-cap, making the an-cap formulation a bit of a head scratcher. A "free contract" between two an-caps sounds fine (but perplexing), both are consenting. But a society where an an-cap has to associate with any other variety of anarchist would strike that anarchist as a society with an authoritarian power dynamic that they'd want to resist as surely as they'd want to resist any modern capitalist attempt to extort "surplus value" from things, whether products or property or labour. Surplus value is just saying, "rather than having a participatory, democratic economy...how about one where market forces are dictated from above by industry leaders?" and laissez-faire economics, American right-libertarian economics and an-cap economics all seem to share this aspect with regular ol' as-is capitalism. Given that, I'm not sure I see why an-cap fabbers would be anything but DRM'd and locked except where an individual an-cap polity might freely choose to make exceptions (as Steel Accord says, it seems likely that basics like food could be, but then again there are a lot of an-cap economic theorists who would argue that's not letting the market have a fair shot at your basics).

an-cap vs. an-cap, with Locus and the Consortium both muchin' the popcorn watchin' the vidfeeds.

Nah, there's lots of options. I mean, my understanding of the polities involved in the main belt Extropian enterprise is that they largely let each polity set their own policies. It's why the Autonomists count 'em as comrades. I think they'll probably stick together fairly cohesively. But I could see minor conflicts flaring up between individual microcorps within a single polity or between polities with directly oppositional views on what one can and can't "freely" contract and what constitutes theft vs. what constitutes a smart business idea (i.e. cracking DRM).

Yeah, I think it'd vary polity to polity. Different habs, different rules. But an-cap/right-libertarian/Extropian economics has me leaning towards most being DRM and locked.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

So it basically boils down to that it's okay for Extropians to pirate from sunward entities, but not okay for them to pirate from other Extropians? Because the refusal of Extropians to enforce IP is one of the big reasons most sunward hypercorps are wary of dealing with Extropian corps.

It doesn't "boil down" to anything simple. Basically different polities could decide differently, so while it might lean in one direction or another (and, if the setting is faithful to current economic theorizing by an-caps and right-libertarians, the lean would be DRM and locked), that would in no way hold for every Extropian tin can in the main belt. By definition they're not as monolithic as the PC. Hell, they aren't monolithic even within any given hab if future Extropians can be seen on the sharpest, furthest point of the rugged individualistic thrust of these ideologies! It's important to note that there are reasons they didn't sign up with the PC, and reasons why that decision alone, while placing the Jovians in Civic Net, places the Extropians in the @-List.

I would put forth that an extropian fabber is not locked, or things would be locked by the captain of the ship. However, the captain or anyone who wants to use the fabber would still need to get their hands on any of their blueprints. @-rep and g-rep would still be needed to find pirated blueprints, @-rep or r-rep for open source blueprints, et cetra. On Extropia, any fabbers would have to comply with Extropia Now's terms and conditions of rent. That would probably include no WMDs, things that threaten hull integrity, and threaten life support, as Nulldragon noted. Extropian companies could claim a short duration monoploy on blueprints or IP by creating short-duration copyright contracts with other companies in the sector. The real issue is extended unlimited copyright. Restricting copyright from its current 110 years (or whatever it is in 10 AF) to something reasonable allows for more innovation while promoting individuals to actually create new content. In a capitalist society, not being able to make intellectual wealth from copyright would kill artists. For example: some splicer on Luna could write a book and have it for sale on the mesh, only to have some Extropian company pirate the book and undercut the splicer's sales. That's an issue. Sure some of those who pirate the book or buy it from Extropians could toss some c-rep or useless @-rep her way, but she'd much rather have the creds. An octomorph in the Jupiter Greeks could write a book and just distribute it and rake in the @-rep or f-rep without worrying about being undercut by an Extropian company, because it is already 'free'.

Couldn't put it better myself. (And ShadowDragon would concur. XD) Keep in mind that 110 years of copyright protection might not be considered as unreasonable when everyone is immortal. Though you are still correct in that such stifling restriction of creative content kills artistic motivation; just speaking as a writer. A solution to your theoretical splicer's problem might come in the form of a private investigator. Granted, I'm not sure if contacting an Extropian firm from Luna would be feasible given their restrictions, but for our purposes we'll say she can. Between all the claims of "I thought of it first" and "I'm not getting my due!" that is sure to be thrown around in a deregulated creative market, it would make sense that the demand for some kind of service would result in someone supplying. These investigators would examine things like creator files, publishing dates, and other evidence to determine if the person claiming to have created something was legitimate. Come to think of it, that might actually make a good player character or campaign adventure! "Investigate a claim of artistic theft."

Oh. Forgive me, I haven't read the books in a bit. I thought "C-Rep" meant "criminal rep." All the same, I regard the Consortium with the same caution a zookeeper does with his animals. If they know you, you can take a calculated risk in getting close enough to work with them. It's always that though, a risk.

Mandella, that's a fast way to tank your @-Rep.

If you're an Extropian who doesn't give a damn about their @-Rep as long as they have money, you'd better [i]never[/i] plan on going anywhere that isn't an Extropian habitat. Your c-Rep will be tanked by virtue of being Extropian, and the PC will probably be glad to grab you off the streets if you 'cast in, and if your @-Rep is completely in the shitter, nobody will raise a finger to protect you if someone with a hate-on for Extropians decides to airlock you on an Anarchist habitat.

I can see ShadowDragon's point on this. Whether you are concerned with your @-rep or not, you might loose a customer basis with that policy. Many crackers might not bother when they could get a close to quality blueprint much more easily from someone else. Plus, you would have to spend more for that increased encryption, and that would mean you'd have to charge more for the actual purchase. (Unless you could figure out a way to mitigate the cost and still sell at a reasonable price.) I do see your case though. Disregarding rep score, it's a very "safe" policy. Better perhaps as a long-term side investment to more immediate ventures.

I get what both you guys are saying. But I also see Extropian living as having to constantly balance and trade one type of rep for another. It is a place of compromises, with possibly even less safety than places more "purely" Anarchist or Capitalist... In this case, for instance, am I setting a reasonable price in the first place? Am I gouging the market, or am I just obviously trying to cover my costs and make a reasonable profit? Misjudge the market too high and not only do I lose @rep fast but I encourage the crackers to crack. Too low and I suppose I could lose Crep -- and the damned anarchists are still going to work at cracking it, just for the principle of it. Being a businessman on Extropia would never be dull...

You are totally right. I guess I was just advising by my last posts. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, right? :) I do agree with you though, a constant adventure of intrigue, entertainment, ethics, and maybe more than a few physical conflicts here and there. I'd gladly sacrifice some personal safety and stability for the utmost of individual liberty and prosperity.

This is why I wish this site had a "thumbs up" function. Given the prevalence of rep systems in the setting, the lack of one here seems like a missed connection.

There are four points in your excellently written post that I have a quibble with: Point One: "but more a reflection of the fact that an-caps are smart enough to understand that rewarding creative work and invention is useful to keep getting more of it," I both agree and disagree with this point. I agree with this point that a fully rational an-cap or any other fully rational business owner that sees their employees and competitors as people would react in such a way. However, human beings are not terribly good at being rational, and ascribing universal intelligence and rationality to a socio-economic movement and then predicting behavior based off of that ascription seems to be a bad idea (i.e. "it works for spherical humans in a vacuum" levels of abstraction). There will always be individuals who see other people not as a people to be rewarded for their work, but as resources to be exploited for their own maximum gain without regard for the consequences to those other individuals. There have been numerous examples in history of creative people being taken advantage of by businessmen who dazzle them with high finance terms and then get them to sign exploitative contracts that give the artist pennies on the dollar. The infamous "Hollywood accounting" practices are a classic case in point. Point Two: " ideal free market is one which provides everyone with everything for a cost of nothing (and the reason markets in general are awesome is that, uninterfered with, they push hard in that direction)" I would like to see documented examples of this, because, historically speaking, when you have unfettered, unregulated markets, you get boom-and-bust cycles, exploitative wages and contracts, mass accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority that then leverage that capital into making more capital and other practices that use every means available in order to accumulate more capital. A current example is High Speed Trading, where the high speed traders seek rent--they do not add any value to the process, they are simply using a loophole in the current system to jack up prices and skim the difference for themselves. Several of the banks are currently creating an artificial scarcity of aluminum in order to raise prices and cash in on that. So, by what method would an uninterfered-with market avoid issues with hydraulic despotism (where one group has a monopoly over a necessary resource, such as water) or artificially created scarcities in order to drive up costs and cash in? Point Three: "Well, this an-mostly-cap will answer that one for free: 'cause so far as we're concerned there isn't any, and it's the an-non-caps who are backporting a bunch of coercionism (mostly theft, but some straight up coercion, like, ugh, democracy) into their political anarchy to make their economic authoritarianism work, while we're drinking anarchy juice straight." I would ask how the other varieties of anarchism are "backporting" coercion, and examples of how democracy is coercive (aside from the usual strawmen examples of "men in dark uniforms that come and put you in a cell" if you fail to contribute for benefiting from communal resources). Point Four: "The dark secret of an-cap economics (I say dark secret because we're absolutely terrible at communicating this, the more so because we're often talking near-term economics where it's arguably less relevant) is that it doesn't require you to use any economic system in particular. It can't. We're libertarian anarchists, after all. Prescribing an economic system is un-libertarian, comrade." I find this surprising, as you are the very first AnCap that I have ever met that did not immediately prescribe a non-governmental (and therefore Anarchist) and Capital-based (hence "Anarcho-Capitalism") system of private courts, legal contracts and finances, as well as other related details. I find this to be most unusual, especially since most discussions of AnCap start getting into the nitty-gritty details of the intricate contract systems and how they would theoretically function to prevent abuse. If you say that "prescribing an economic system is un-libertarian", then why is "Capital", which presupposes a specific type of economic system, part of the very name of the movement? Also, one final issue that I have, is that you used a strawman argument, an argument from adverse consequences and finally a double standard with this statement: "At its most ideal and benign, this would be something like the Committee of Absolutely Everyone organizing everyone to take their equal share of the Shitty Job Rota, but even on the off-chance that it started out that way, most of us an-caps are much too cynical about power structures to ever assume that it would stay that way. And then you're working 12-hour days for the People for your crust of sawdust bread, da, tovarich?" The strawman is twofold: first that you have created a caricature of Anarchism, and then had that caricature inevitably devolving into Stalinism (that's the sentence with the setup to "da, tovarich?"), which is the argument from adverse consequences (making the implicit argument that any sort of communism will inevitably descend into Stalinism or similar, so therefore it should not even be tried), and the double standard being that you make the implicit statement that an-caps believe that communistic systems will inevitably devolve into such authoritarian structures, but that AnCap itself is somehow immune to the abuse of power structures through some unspoken means. To me at least, using those logical fallacies diminishes the strength of your argument, as you are attempting to dismiss competing ideologies with poorly made statements. On the positive end, I do find it very interesting that you do break from the typical AnCap mold of insisting on contracts and a very specific legal and judicial structure in order to make it work, and I look forward to further discussion on this topic with you. Additionally, given your propositions on your own perspective on AnCap, I could definitely believe that an AnCap CM constructed by your ideological brethren would be unlocked and presented in the fashion that you have indicated, which gives me a different perspective on how to potentially run AnCap characters in my own game, a position for which I thank you for. (Also, welcome to the forums; you might want to head over to [url=http://eclipsephase.com/den-introductions-general-socializing-thread]The Den[/url] to introduce yourself ^_^) EDIT: Also, I realized that I inadvertently and unintentionally threadjacked into Yet Another AnCap Debate. So, let's move any replies and further discussion that's not pertinent to EP and Extropia, but is pertinent to AnCap over to the [url=http://eclipsephase.com/big-thread-anarcho-capitalism-discussion]AnCap Discussion thread[/url] and let this one get back on course.

bibliophile20 wrote:

There are four points in your excellently written post that I have a quibble with: Point One: "but more a reflection of the fact that an-caps are smart enough to understand that rewarding creative work and invention is useful to keep getting more of it," I both agree and disagree with this point. I agree with this point that a fully rational an-cap or any other fully rational business owner that sees their employees and competitors as people would react in such a way. However, human beings are not terribly good at being rational, and ascribing universal intelligence and rationality to a socio-economic movement and then predicting behavior based off of that ascription seems to be a bad idea (i.e. "it works for spherical humans in a vacuum" levels of abstraction). There will always be individuals who see other people not as a people to be rewarded for their work, but as resources to be exploited for their own maximum gain without regard for the consequences to those other individuals.

That's fair. Of course, in the Eclipse Phase future, we can hope that at least some of the work done by the transhumanizing has been in making smarter and more rational people, heh. But also, there might well be something of a sorting effect. I suspect that people who have that sort of attitude probably gravitate towards the Planetary Consortium, rather than Extropia, simply because it has so many more handles to use to exploit people with. After all, from the ancap point of view, the point of their setup is to remove as many of those handles as possible - big, exploitative corporations and individuals thrive on the power of pull they can buy from one source or another. In Extropia (or an even purer ancap society), without centralized power institutions, who do you buy? You can't bribe all the people all of the time... In Ancapia, you can certainly be screwed by individuals - but it's a lot harder if not (ideally) impossible for people to set up a system, like, say, "Hollywood accounting" to systematically screw folks over. But, in general, I suspect that while Extropia has people like that, they're in much the same place as the people out in the AA who see rep economy manipulation as a good way to stiff their fellow man. Yes, a minority of them exist, yes, they prosper for at least some time and in some places, but in general, the enlightened self-interest of society drops a hammer on them before too long in the name of the general enlightened self-interest. (For the sake of length, I'll spare you the discussion of the assorted ancap-style methods for so doing, from reputation networks through hortation to market ostracism.)

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Point Two: " ideal free market is one which provides everyone with everything for a cost of nothing (and the reason markets in general are awesome is that, uninterfered with, they push hard in that direction)" I would like to see documented examples of this, because, historically speaking, when you have unfettered, unregulated markets, you get boom-and-bust cycles, exploitative wages and contracts, mass accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority that then leverage that capital into making more capital and other practices that use every means available in order to accumulate more capital.

Well, it's rather tricky to provide historical examples of things that, well, haven't existed historically. (As far as I know, anyway, but I've never seen any examples.) We're extrapolating from trend-lines, here, which over the grand sweep of history I think we could agree that general prosperity and economic freedom (competition, easy entry, ability to innovate, level playing field) correlate pretty well. A really good example here would be the Nordic economies, who have done a damn good job of letting the red-in-tooth-and-claw competitive market roar in order to pay for their social services - a much, much better one than, say, the US ever has. On specific points... well, we have a pretty regulated market in most places these days, and it's hardly free of boom-and-bust cycles, and certainly isn't free of exploitation - and most of the truly grotesque examples of minority capital accumulation that I'm aware of are the direct result of the ability of the accumulators to manipulate the legal and regulatory environment to keep out competition, obtain subsidies and tax breaks, socialize their costs, avoid their liabilities, etc., etc. (Just making all those cheating buggers have to try and survive reality would, to my mind, be a glorious victory for free markets!) ...and at least some of those changes would also make it harder to obtain the kind of monopsonic situations that permit that sort of wage-and-contract exploitation, too.

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So, by what method would an uninterfered-with market avoid issues with hydraulic despotism (where one group has a monopoly over a necessary resource, such as water) or artificially created scarcities in order to drive up costs and cash in?

Well, I'd have to say up front that I'm not a great believer in hydraulic despotisms as market structures... (The unchallengeable monopoly of Ashurbanipal over the water supply was less because he'd cornered the market in water but more because if you tried to build your own independent aqueduct, Ashur's boys would turn up to tear it down and set your family on fire, etc.) ...and not all artificial scarcities are bad. (In a properly functioning commodities market, what they do is move the effects of upcoming shortages into the future to let people prepare and preserve material to ameliorate the actual shortage when it arrives; i.e., reducing overall volatility, which is good for business, and in some cases, good for the people who now have two grain shortages to deal with rather than a good year and a famine.) But not all of them are good, either, sure. But for that kind - well, the thing I note about them is that they tend to crop up in industries with high natural or unnatural costs of entry, which make it hard to compete. Here and now, that's easy to arrange (examples: in Missouri, opening a moving company requires the consent of every existing moving company in the state as a matter of law; and a study I read suggested that no new copper smelters will ever open in the US, because new ones have to comply with [costly] environmental regulations that the existing [grandfathered-in] ones do not). On Extropia, where anyone can open up Fat Chang's Aluminum Refinery and Tea House without consulting anyone at all, using parts that came right off the fabber yesterday... this is much, much harder.

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Point Three: "Well, this an-mostly-cap will answer that one for free: 'cause so far as we're concerned there isn't any, and it's the an-non-caps who are backporting a bunch of coercionism (mostly theft, but some straight up coercion, like, ugh, democracy) into their political anarchy to make their economic authoritarianism work, while we're drinking anarchy juice straight." I would ask how the other varieties of anarchism are "backporting" coercion, and examples of how democracy is coercive (aside from the usual strawmen examples of "men in dark uniforms that come and put you in a cell" if you fail to contribute for benefiting from communal resources).

To answer in reverse order: Well, I don't think that's much of a straw man, inasmuch as that's hardly the only thing they'll do it for. And you might not even have wanted the supposed benefit in the first place. (Yep, I totally wanted to benefit from the TSA and the NSA's happy fun times, etc.!) But it pretty much tells you right there in the name, with the -cracy bit, referring to the same force that backs up all the other -cracies. The only thing that distinguishes it from the other -cracies is who gets to wield the force, that being everyone rather than your king, your dictator, your etc. But that doesn't help very much, because in anything except a unanimous-consent-of-the-people situation (I'm with Proudhon on this one), the 51%-or-more get to make the 49%-or-less swallow whatever they fancy. Democracy is what throws people in jail for smoking pot all by their lonesome. Democracy passed Jim Crow. Democracy enabled those happy fun times I mentioned just above. I mean, srsly, look at most of the history of victimless crimes and/or minority rights, and what you'll see is a long, long history of democracy fucking the people on the short end of the demographic stick over. And that those people were implicitly presumed to have consented to the process by their involuntary membership in the demos certainly doesn't mean that they would have consented or did in any meaningful sense did consent to the outcome. Ergo, coercive. Although, really, just the fact that a democracy can issue orders _that have to be obeyed on pain of consequences_ should be enough, period - for the same reason as pretty much any other form of government that retains that sovereign privilege is coercive. (I might even be inclined to argue that most of the good parts of democracy can be attributed to the constitutional law of most modern democracies including an extensive series of things that democracy can't do, even if the popular will says otherwise.) Now, as for the other varieties of anarchism - well, that's because in many of them, like those other forms of government, there's some sort of coordinating body that can issue orders of that non-consensual kind. If a syndicate, or a worker's council, or a direct democracy, can issue me orders and, for whatever reason, I can't just tell 'em to go screw, well, that's coercion same as it was under -archy, and there goes my freedom. I hold to my ancap school because - with the sole arguable exception of requiring that I fulfil my contracts/keep my word when I give it - it's the system that requires that people secure my consent for absolutely everything they might want me to do/to do to me, and can't require a damn thing of me otherwise, and - equally importantly - vice versa. (More controversially, I'd also claim that any system that doesn't support the option of private property is intrinsically coercive because anyone who is of a mind can restrict my freedom of choice by depriving me of, or preventing my acquisition of, whatever tools I need to follow through on the choice I want to make. But that's controversial even among my lot.)

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Point Four: "The dark secret of an-cap economics (I say dark secret because we're absolutely terrible at communicating this, the more so because we're often talking near-term economics where it's arguably less relevant) is that it doesn't require you to use any economic system in particular. It can't. We're libertarian anarchists, after all. Prescribing an economic system is un-libertarian, comrade." I find this surprising, as you are the very first AnCap that I have ever met that did not immediately prescribe a non-governmental (and therefore Anarchist) and Capital-based (hence "Anarcho-Capitalism") system of private courts, legal contracts and finances, as well as other related details. I find this to be most unusual, especially since most discussions of AnCap start getting into the nitty-gritty details of the intricate contract systems and how they would theoretically function to prevent abuse.

We do love our theorizing, not that I've ever met an anarchist of any school who didn't. Part of it, I suspect, is because if you have to answer any questions about how things would work under your system, you pretty much have to invent an implementation in order to answer - especially when your central dogma is so very permissive wrt how things could work. But also just because tinkering with ideas and worldbuilding and otherwise constructing castles in the air is kinda fun. I'm no different from any other ancap in that regard, really - I can talk your ear off for hours and hours about possible ways in which assorted non-governmental systems might work, and since I also have my own setting I use for my writing that has an in-some-respects-ancappy system, I can also talk your ear off for days and days about certified commercial obligators and meta-review boards that review the review boards and adhocratic snap-together initiatives to replace corporations and how to implement the good parts of limited liability better in a consensual system and and and and and... But I think that while we're happy to theorise about how it could work and how we think it would work, I'm pretty sure we also have a consensus that prescribing that it does/must/will work that way is very much Doing Libertarianism Wrong. A few annoying dogmatic Rothbardians and Randian goldbugs notwithstanding.

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If you say that "prescribing an economic system is un-libertarian", then why is "Capital", which presupposes a specific type of economic system, part of the very name of the movement?

'Cause it's a terrible, terrible name? I'd probably call myself an agorist or maybe a market anarchist if the terms hadn't already been used by other people, but arguably, we're too argumentative to come up with a better one. More seriously, I suspect because a lot of the more old-fashioned ancaps came out of that sort of background, and thus a lot of the terminology sticks. And, in fairness, we're very fond of some aspects of it. We're all pretty fond of private-unless-publicized-by-its-owner property, it's hard to have many kinds of industries without some degree of capital accumulation, and competitive markets do seem to be great tools for producing prosperity. (Although I for one would happily cheer the end of wage labor.) And there are a lot of the old-fashioned kind still around, old and new - oh, the arguments I have with the aforementioned dogmatic Rothbardians and Randian goldbugs - too. But the jeune ecole, I suppose, of ancaps that I tend to hang around with/talk to, while we have our central dogma of Property and Consent and Contract and their concomitants, we're are pretty open to other ideas. Many of us, of course, have notions of what we expect to work, but we're pretty open to the notion that there are plenty of possible ideas out there that could work, and pretty much want to see 'em tried. I have no beef at all with cooperatives and syndicates and collectives (so long as they're consensual) and unconventional currencies and non-currency economies and goodness knows how many other ideas (many of which, to give credit where it's due, we're happy to lift from other schools of anarchism) that can be implemented inside a Property-and-Consent-and-Contract framework; and given that different things work better for different people and groups, I'd expect quite a lot of them to co-exist quite happily were Ancapia to be declared tomorrow. And, to give them credit, the old guard are at least okay admitting that yes, such things are obviously permitted, even if they personally don't like 'em.

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Also, one final issue that I have, is that you used a strawman argument, an argument from adverse consequences and finally a double standard with this statement: "At its most ideal and benign, this would be something like the Committee of Absolutely Everyone organizing everyone to take their equal share of the Shitty Job Rota, but even on the off-chance that it started out that way, most of us an-caps are much too cynical about power structures to ever assume that it would stay that way. And then you're working 12-hour days for the People for your crust of sawdust bread, da, tovarich?" The strawman is twofold: first that you have created a caricature of Anarchism, and then had that caricature inevitably devolving into Stalinism (that's the sentence with the setup to "da, tovarich?"), which is the argument from adverse consequences (making the implicit argument that any sort of communism will inevitably descend into Stalinism or similar, so therefore it should not even be tried), and the double standard being that you make the implicit statement that an-caps believe that communistic systems will inevitably devolve into such authoritarian structures, but that AnCap itself is somehow immune to the abuse of power structures through some unspoken means.

Well, I do apologize for my simplistic hyperbole there. But, in fairness, the majority of other forms of anarchism of which I am aware do involve various kinds of coordinating body, even if non-hierarchical, and while obviously Stalinism isn't a necessary end-point, there's some pretty convincing evidence from public-choice economics that organizations which have coordinating bodies (governments, corporations, non-profits, collectives, all) tend to end up increasingly run for the benefit of the coordinating bodies. (Book recommendation: Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which among other things examines this happening on anarcho-syndicalist Anarres.) Which, yes, is an argument from adverse consequences, but it's an argument from a pretty well-studied class of demonstrable adverse consequences. :) Such immunity as ancap systems have from these effects is mostly because the primary feature ancap systems have is explicitly _not_ having such coordinating bodies, and even while it would probably be possible for PPLs and/or judicial associations to metastatize into them, the risk is substantially lowered inasmuch as their function is entirely negative (rights protection/contract enforcement; they never initiate anything) and because they're explicitly polycentric; a PPL that started acting like a state would hemorrhage subscribers to its competitors and go out of business rather more easily than the Syndic of Hab Administration can be replaced if it starts throwing its weight around. IMO, anyway. So, in all seriousness, while I don't think ancap societies would be immune from this failure mode, I do think they're substantially more resistant to it than societies which include coordinating power structures right from the get-go.

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On the positive end, I do find it very interesting that you do break from the typical AnCap mold of insisting on contracts

Well, I do sort of insist on contracts, but I interpret contracts rather more widely than the legal definition to include assorted informal varieties. By my version of ancap ethics, as it were, one should always fulfil one's legal contracts, just as you should not break your word, always keep your promises, and do for others, friends, the community, etc., what you said you'd do for them. In exchange for freedom from involuntary obligations imposed upon you, you're ethically required to fulfil all the obligations you voluntarily undertake. Which is not what most people mean by 'contracts', but y'know, it's a useful term.

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and a very specific legal and judicial structure in order to make it work, and I look forward to further discussion on this topic with you. Additionally, given your propositions on your own perspective on AnCap, I could definitely believe that an AnCap CM constructed by your ideological brethren would be unlocked and presented in the fashion that you have indicated, which gives me a different perspective on how to potentially run AnCap characters in my own game, a position for which I thank you for. (Also, welcome to the forums; you might want to head over to [url=http://eclipsephase.com/den-introductions-general-socializing-thread]The Den[/url] to introduce yourself ^_^)

Thank you kindly, and I'll do that. -c

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Anarcho-syndicalists, etc., do., who're usually considered ancols. And, setting-wise, it's right there in the Autonomist Alliance Points of Unity, page whatever: "• We support direct democracy and forms of organization where sapients collectively decide their own future." They could, I suppose, just be talking about Titan, but it doesn't read to me that they're talking about just Titan. YMMV.

Minor point of order: The autonomists alliance is mostly not anarchists. IIRC, the majority of the population is Titanian. Of the anarchists, I think there's about as many an-caps as an-cols. (Or maybe more an-caps). So I don't find it at all odd that they would put "We support direct democracy" in that point just for the Titanians, especially if it's just to clarify that they consider direct democracy to be a valid form of self-governance. (Rather than being anarchist-only).

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Ah, no, see, that doesn't mean they're free . That means they're extremely cheap. Like you said, there's maintenance. The total work required in providing all those necessities may have gone from 10,000 hours to 2 hours, but those 2 hours are still damn important.

Fair point. I guess I was being slightly hyperbolic. I was, however, responding to your "12-hour days for sawdust bread" comment, so there being 2 hours of maintenance work every month or two is something I'd consider pretty unimportant, especially as it is handled by volunteers. (And it's not like the volunteers aren't compensated. A boost to rep is still compensation.) As to the 'dirty jobs' like the black water tanks... First, in setting, nobody would be putting on a diving suit. They'd be jamming a bot. Much less unpleasant. Second, people would volunteer even if that weren't the case. In part for the good of the community, but also because *rep economies still reward labor*. If you can't find an an-col willing to do this job for a big enough rep boost, why do you think you could find an an-cap willing to do it for enough credits? (And who pays them?)

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Well, for myself, I generally find positive reinforcement (we'll give you stuff for doing this unpleasant thing) preferable to negative reinforcement (we'll punish you if you don't), which I suppose is mostly if not entirely an aesthetic preference. Especially since the former scales as the society becomes richer in general, 'cause there's not an upper limit on the former. (You can pay people more a lot more easily than you can ding them further down from "total asshole", unless you're willing to go to hard coercion and let them starve to death.) While probably not true in AF10, as general wealth increases, I can see the guy who supervises the robots mucking out the honey tanks on Extropia being paid ridiculously large amounts of money for being willing to do a stinky job no-one actually wants.

I never said there was only negative reinforcement, only that that was the closest one gets to coercion in EP an-col systems. An-cols still produce things. They still get rewarded for their labor. You do something that helps other people, your rep goes up. Your rep goes up, people will help you more if you need it, you'll have better access to luxuries, etc.

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There is - but it's a matter of genuine voluntary compliance, since the people in question all agreed to pay you/reward you in some manner, being signatories of the EaNRIPCAC. Where this promotes innovation, from the Extropian point of view, is that you get assurance in advance. In the autonomist regions, some people will reward you and some people will just take your work for free and you have no idea what the proportions are. In Extropia, you can look at the number of signatories of the EaNRIPCAC and say to yourself, well, I can be confident that x% of my customers will reward me for this in money/rep/trade/favors/barter/whatever, so it's worth my while to polish this up for public release rather than doing whatever other things I could be doing with my time. It reduces uncertainty for entrepreneurs, and uncertainty is one of those things that notoriously kills innovation - so at the margin, you get more people choosing to innovate for the market rather than polish their rep or whatever in some other way.

To your last point, I think we're just going to disagree on that. I think uncertainty would be far less of a contributor if necessities were not scarce. And I think that people being able to reward you for your idea without paying a personal cost, as in a hypothetical an-col society, would more than offset what remains. Of course, neither of us can test any of these hypotheses.

[color=orange]Gentlemen, ladies, honorable herms and assorted other gentle-sophents, might I politely suggest that we take discussion of general AnCap to the [url=http://eclipsephase.com/big-thread-anarcho-capitalism-discussion]AnCap Discussion thread[/url], and allow this thread to continue discussing on how Extropian-produced fabbers would be DRMed or unlocked? At the moment, the posts are sort of a varied mix, but we're definitely trending towards a threadjack to Yet Another AnCap Debate. Thank you all for your consideration.[/color]