Re: An Experiment

MacFall — Sat, 03 May 2008 06:48:04 GMT

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.

Re: An Experiment

Solid_Choke — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:23:34 GMT

Perhaps if you want your experiment to look more like ancap you should have defense agencies (moderators).

Re: An Experiment

Morty — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:06:30 GMT

This isn't proof of anything except the fact that many people on the internet are vandals.

An Experiment

Fephisto — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:59:13 GMT

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)

Political Theory

Re: An Experiment

Re: An Experiment

Re: An Experiment

An Experiment