Backstory for the Distributed Nation

Inspiration comes in unlikely places… (DN 2.8)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8

Chapter 2.8:
Lessons from Fiction, 1

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We should not have to move to be free.

Once you really think about it…once you say it aloud…you see how true it really is.

Some framework efforts are indeed focused on building territory-based polities—to which one must relocate in order to benefit from the area of freedom that they have carved out. That is great, and very much needed. We support their efforts.

But morally, logically, we should not have to move. We should be able to be free right where we are. That is where the distributed nation comes in.

Getting to the point where we can be truly free, right we we are, is going to take time. But it’s a job worth doing, and someone needs to start it. That someone is us.

Throughout this chapter, we have been laying the groundwork for a definition of a distributed nation by describing the broader context in which we are arising: one effort among many working toward a future of free lands and free people. We now have a pretty good picture of that context, aided by our helpful chart:

We can easily begin by stating that, in the most generic sense, a distributed nation is a type of consensual polity with a geographically dispersed membership. That tells us a lot, but it also tells us next to nothing. There are many details to fill in before the picture becomes clear.

Instead of starting out with pure prose—with definitions and bullet points—let us begin with a picture. I want you to see in your heads some of what I started to see in mine when the idea first began to occur to me.

Believe it or not, it all began with a work of fiction…

Backstory

Libertarian: What’s the difference between a minarchist and an anarchist?
Other libertarian: I dunno—what?
Libertarian: About six months.

Believe it or not, that joke is actually funny in libertarian circles. Though it might seem abstruse from the outside, it represents a truism…

If you believe in the principles that brought you to minarchism¹, and you then carry those ideas out to their logical conclusions, you end up realizing that nothing more than anarchism is logically or morally supportable. The joke is amusing because many anarchists recall that that process did indeed take them just about six months.

As many of you know, that is pretty much what happened to me. Over the course of 15 years of slow-writing my book (of the same name as my Stack), the wisdom of classical-liberal principles slowly, fully coalesced for me. By the end of the process, the amount of government that I deemed acceptable had gone from the “limited government” supported by the typical mainstream conservative to the tiny scrap of a government that minarchists desire.

But then, about five months after I was done writing that book, I finally “ran out of excuses” (as another libertarian slogan runs). I realized I was, for lack of a better term, an anarchist.

As I have written previously, the gateway to that realization was opened by Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s masterful work, Democracy: The God That Failed. (As an aside—for years, I had been stuffing little ideas and snippets into a folder on my computer labeled “Problems with democracy.” Hoppe allowed me to accept all those inklings I was having, but was not yet fully ready to face.)

So, in the late summer of 2022, I made the final swim to Anarchist Island.

It is a beautiful place. Its ideological wellsprings are crystal clear. Its moral logic is as crisp as a blue sky on an autumn day. I was surprised—and maybe just a little melancholy—that I had not gotten there sooner.

What I lacked in having been a longtime resident, however, I made up for in single-minded intensity. The instant I accepted the conclusions that brought me there, I began grinding my brain away on a singular problem: how do we make this place a reality?

When I arrived, I knew some of the basic theory behind the idea that private agencies might be able to provide the desirable services we normally associate with government, but I had yet to read about it in detail. I had heard of Próspera and Ciudad Morazán in Honduras. I knew a little about seasteading.

I had read Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, whose concept of a “framework” laid important mental groundwork for me, and I had read some Rothbard. But I still had yet to read David Friedman or the Tannehills, and I had not even heard of Paul Émile de Puydt’s Panarchie or Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State. I set about absorbing as much as I could as fast as I could.

And yet…the first kernel of an idea for a “distributed nation” had actually occurred to me before any of this. And the inspiration came not from a theoretical treatise, but from two works of fiction.

Between late 2019 and the middle of 2021, I read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by cyberpunk pioneer Neal Stephenson. In these, Stephenson envisions a near-future world in which government has withered away and people live in various private polities of their choosing.

In The Diamond Age, these polities are called '“phyles” and “claves.” They greatly vary in character—from the upright Neo-Victorians to the communist Sendero Luminoso to the Confucianist Celestial Kingdom, among many others. (Of course there are also people who are not part of any phyle.)

In Snow Crash, the American government has been reduced to nothing but a pathetic little gang holed up in a building on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The world has passed them by. In The Diamond Age, there appears to be no government at all—just an inter-polity system called the Common Economic Protocol.

Stephenson’s vision in these two books is what first set my mind alight. Yes, it is fiction, but a word-picture of a possible future was exactly what I needed to prime the pump for future realizations.

Here was a world in which people are not forced into nonconsensual allegiance to an imposed government, but choose to be part of a tribe. These tribes do have some territorial enclaves, but they often also coexist in the same geographical area. Polities are been built on, and even under, the sea. The story has conflict, just as any good story does, but Stephenson also paints a very plausible vision of a world of consent.

The similarities to real-world anarchist theory are striking. Stephenson depicts a world in which the ideas of Nozick, Hoppe, de Puydt, and others are in actual operation. From everything I have read and contemplated since, it is a highly plausible picture for a real anarcho-libertarian future. He showed us (albeit with a fair amount of cyberpunky flair) what the framework might actually look like.

(The clarity of this picture is not entirely surprising, given Stephenson’s prescience in envisioning things like cryptocurrency and his continued involvement in the decentralized space.)

I strongly commend these two books to you. And in general, I earnestly caution you not to reject ideas just because they come from works of fiction. There is much inspiration to be found there. (This is a subject to which we will return.)

It was about a year after finishing The Diamond Age that everything finally clicked. Once I realized that a condition of voluntary order ought to exist, my mind raced back to Stephenson’s vision of what one could look like.

One of his phyles in particular—the “First Distributed Republic”—had stuck in my head, not so much for what he did say about it, but for what he didn’t. Stephenson refers to it only obliquely in The Diamond Age, leaving me free to muse over the question of what a real “distributed republic” might be like. And I have been thinking about it ever since.

Eventually, thinking turned to planning, and planning has now turned to laying it all out for discussion.

And discussion may one day lead to implementation.

I have told you this origin story for a reason. As we begin to define and refine the concept of the distributed nation, I want you to see it. Don’t just let it be a wireframe of abstract concepts. Put some color in there. Feel it. Imagine it actually happening.

A little vision will help us get to where we need to be.

1. For context, minarchism is the belief that governments should exist, but they ought to be as small as possible—a “night watchman” state that secures against force, fraud, theft, and breach of contract…and does nothing else. A government that “barely escapes being no government at all.”