Vinay Gupta of Hexayurt fame, has written an intriguing paper that explains the state in a box concept to create state services in the absence of a state.
Read the whole paper here.
The State In A Box concept:
“State In A Box (SIAB) is a set of interwoven concepts which relate to the idea of rebuilding the State from the ground up, from scratch, on modern technological infrastructure.
Much of our thinking about the State derives from historical accidents like monarchy, gold and paper ballots. The structures of our democracy rest on foundations built when travel was slow and before the invention of public key cryptography. Taxation rests on a framework which predates credit cards and electronic bank records. Security rests on organizational structures which are still recognizable from Rome or Babylonia.
In the commercial sector, areas which have these kinds of deeply embedded but no longer valid assumptions go through periodic restructuring. These processes of “creative destruction” re-optimize the business processes, frequently by moving the divisions between one business and another through processes like integration and disaggregation.
In government, short of the collapse of nation states, the pace of innovation is much, much slower.
It is my contention that this fact obscures one or possibly two order of magnitude cost and capital savings in providing State services to citizens. The price paid for stability, in this instance, is inefficiency.
However, in countries that do not even have stability, this inefficiency can scarcely be afforded. By thinking about redesigning the structure of the State around modern technology, we may be able to design a robust new technological infrastructure to run a State upon.
This effort is called State In A Box because the likely form factor of a deployable solution is actually about 20 trucks, and State in About Twenty Trucks is somewhat unwieldy.”
It strikes me that this same architecture could be used by an association of entirely voluntary participants, as well–perhaps combined with a virtual community network like the one in Gupta’s story “The Unplugged,” or an electronic LETS system.
And the strong encryption would make it possible for such a network to include a combination mutual bank/LETS system that would bypass both the state’s banking monopoly laws and its taxing power. Imagine a society operating on interest-free credit, free from both usury and tax-supported bureaucracy!
In the past, the state has jumped with both feet on attempts to organize mutual banks that would issue interest-free currency against the properties of their own members. One of the central functions of the state is to enforce market entry barriers that keep credit artificially scarce and expensive for workers, so they have to depend on capitalists for employment. An encrypted electronic barter and credit network might be the singularity that would finally make the money monopoly unenforceable.
Wow, thanks for the write up, Michael.
Kevin, the issue is that mafias are quite likely to be the largest problem that any group doing cryptographic money will face. If you set up your groovy tax-evading E-currency, and then discover that somebody is, say, using it to take payment for shipping slaves across international borders, who are you going to call?
If you call the State to help you, they’ll also bust you for tax evasion.
So now you’re in a prolematic relationship with this notional mafia – you can’t get the State to protect you from them, and you can’t morally tolerate supporting them by letting them use your currency system…. can you?
The primary arguments for the State have always been those based on Collective Defense against other States, and against Organized Crime.
I do think you could use some aspects of State In A Box in a utopian community. Blind, authenticated contracts, for example, are very useful. But as soon as you step into a position where you cannot turn to the State for help in a crisis, you make yourself extremely vulnerable to a wide class of extremely evil people.
I was quite anti-state, then I got a much better perspective on the role of the mafias in the world. After that, I was quite respectful of the State, largely because I could now clearly envisage what a mafia-dominated society would be like.
I’m not saying anybody should *trust* the State, but until you have independent capability to protect yourself, you need it.
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The thing about Mafias, though, is that to a large extent they feed off of black markets created by the state.
But we may be quibbling in part over semantic differences over the meaning of the word “state.” I have no quarrel at all with your architecture serving as a nucleus that is adopted by a majority of people in a given area, or even of their thinking of it as akin to a “government” in the services it provides. My only caveat is that it should not be able to impose its protection services on nonmembers or impose its currency as a legal tender, and that it not be able to support itself by collecting funds from unwilling third parties. And I suspect that if the advantages of such an architecture are sufficient to attract a sufficient number of people, they will be able to organized networked defenses based on neighborhood patrols, militias, guerrilla warfare, etc., that will cut the mafias to pieces.