So, me and a bunch of my friends have a local forum that we got just for ourselves to communicate upon. I organized it up, so I am by default Admin of the forum.
As one might expect, minimal power struggles began to emerge, but so far everything was going fine, no real problems. Nonetheless, I began opening the floodgates to experiment with the power structure.
The first attempt was what I would call a "Market". I would act like nature in that I was a collection of natural resources, and people would trade their posts (capital) for my resources, which involved editing and deleting powers to threads of the forum. Surprisingly, this went fairly well, people seemed to understand that if a person started editing someone else's posts, a bloodbath would ensue between the two which would be limited in scope due to the amount of posts each actually had. That is, property rights were held at a high standard, despite the lack of anything resembling a PDA.
However, I soon got calls to just go ahead and give everyone forum privileges, which I did so. For a large amount of hours, things held steady, until this morning when the forum was blank, replaced with images of "POOLS CLOSED" in every forum category.
I of course admired the prank, so tediously worked out, since hundreds of posts had to be deleted one-by-one, and the whole thing probably took well over a couple of hours.
But after this, I shut off the forum privileges to everyone and discussed where we should go from here. In this discussion the fact that I would consider myself an amateur anarcho-capitalist came up, and how the recent events were proof of the instability of anarcho-capitalism. My response was that I would not have consider what occurred in the past event as anarcho-capitalism, after all, I forcibly removed all property rights, money, imposed complete egality, and any semblance of what is capitalism. The Market system I had before was a lot closer to anarcho-capitalism. If anything, I thought that this should be complete proof that anarcho-communism would not work.
Thoughts? (btw, it appears as if most of my friends have decided to just go ahead and have the typical forum monarchy)
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"Even when leftists talk about discrimination and sexism, they're damn well talking about the results of the economic system" ~Neodoxy
This isn't proof of anything except the fact that many people on the internet are vandals.
Perhaps if you want your experiment to look more like ancap you should have defense agencies (moderators).
"I cannot prove, but am prepared to affirm, that if you take care of clarity in reasoning, most good causes will take care of themselves, while some bad ones are taken care of as a matter of course." -Anthony de Jasay
The internet as a whole is a fair analogy of market anarchism in action. Individual websites are more like businesses and other proprietary organizations, which need rules to function according to their purpose.
Pro Christo et Libertate integre!