There is a trending discussion on X about Ayn Rand's 1959 Claim: Free Markets Prevent Monopolies (
https://x.com/i/trending/2053589247001608560). Many argue that centralization and monopolies are natural. Yes, because there was a long historical period when Return on Violence (ROV) was high. Centralization, monopolies, and the very idea of the state with its monopoly on coercion and violence all emerged when violence became highly profitable:
- Hunter-gatherer societies had low ROV. Nomadic, with little to seize and easy escape, violence rarely paid. This kept them decentralized and resilient.
- Agriculture flipped the equation. Fixed assets and stored wealth made conquest profitable, fueling empires, feudalism, and colonization. High ROV built the centralized world we know.
- The Industrial stage further amplified high ROV: with advanced weapons, bureaucracy, and mass organization enabling even larger, more efficient centralized states and state adjacent monopolies.
- Now the Information Revolution is driving ROV down again. Tech, cryptography, and mobility make large-scale coercion less effective.
High ROV can change (and it IS changing!) but only with the right tools and only by and for people who value freedom more than comfortable inertia. Individuals who actively build and participate in parallel/counter economies are the ones CREATING SPACES where ROV becomes low and, in the long run, can become obsolete. Not for everyone. Only for those who choose it.
Decentralization isn’t a trend. It’s the next stage of (at least part of) human society.
***
Full Excerpt from The Sovereign Individual (
https://www.lopp.net/pdf/The%20Sovereign%20Individual.pdf):
THE FOURTH STAGE OF HUMAN SOCIETY
The theme of this book is the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentieth century nation state. Innovations that alter the logic of violence in unprecedented ways are transforming the boundaries within which the future must lie. If our deductions are correct, you stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating new forms of social organization in the process. This will be far from an easy transformation.
The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past. Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life. (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.
Each of the previous stages of society has corresponded with distinctly different phases in the evolution and control of violence. As we explain in detail, information societies promise to dramatically reduce the returns to violence, in part because they transcend locality. If the new millennium, the advantage of controlling violence on large scale will be far lower than it has been at any time since before the French Revolution. This will have profound consequences. One of these will be rising crime.
When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will grow in scope. We explain why.
Another logical implication of falling returns to violence is the eclipse of politics. There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century nation state is rapidly eroding. The death of Communism is merely the most striking example. As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments is not a random development. It is evidence that the potential of the nation state is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others.
History Repeats Itself
This is a situation with striking parallels in the past. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism.
Notwithstanding popular belief in "the sacredness of the sacerdotal office," both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt-not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today.
We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics.
The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today.
We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution. Technological developments created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs. A similar technological revolution is destined to downsize radically the nation state early in the new millennium.
The Information Revolution
As the breakdown of large systems accelerates, systematic compulsion will recede as a factor shaping economic life and the distribution of income. Efficiency will rapidly become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. An entirely new realm of economic activity that is not hostage to physical violence will emerge in cyberspace. The most obvious benefits will flow to the "cognitive elite," who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.
The Sovereign Individual explores the social and financial consequences of this revolutionary change. Our desire is to help you to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact. If only half of what we expect to see happens, you face change of a magnitude with few precedents in history.
The transformation of the year 2000 will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change. Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution. its impact will not be spread over centuries.
The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime.
What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.
Context: https://xcancel.com/chaserxy/status/2053497160746856713
Read Crypto Agorism: Free Markets for a Free World by Anarkio: a true 100% agorist living his vision and quietly building XmrBazaar behind the scenes. https://agorism-archives.medium.com/crypto-agorism-free-markets-for-a-free-world-d9c755e6ef11
Link: sci-bot.ru
View quoted note →
source: https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf
View quoted note →
