Learn more here:

Voice & Exit is about:
•    Advocating non-coercive means of making social change
•    Highlighting people who roll up their sleeves to make change without political power
•    Celebrating the creation of new rules and ways of organizing communities

Voice & Exit is an event in Austin, TX to be held on Saturday, March 9th, 2013—in parallel with the SXSW interactive conference. Eleven fascinating movers and shakers will take the stage to present eleven short-form (TED-style) talks about innovations in social entrepreneurship and radical community. Each talk will be filmed for high-quality web distribution following the event.

The news: 

By a large majority (110 votes to 128), the Honduran Congress approved the modification of three articles of the country’s constitution, giving powers to Congress to create areas subject to special arrangements, referred to as “Model Cities” that were declared unconstitutional last October for being considered “states within a state.”

Laprensa.hn reports that “The law consists of two approved articles. The first amending Articles 294, 303 and 329 of Decree 131 of January 11, 1982 containing the Constitution, which divided the country into departments. These ‘are divided into autonomous municipalities administered by corporations elected by the people, in accordance with the law’.
Without prejudice to the provisions of the preceding two paragraphs, Congress can create areas under special schemes in accordance with Article 329 of this Constitution ‘.

The reforms also include the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court when it has to do with Article 303, which says: ‘The power to dispense justice emanates from the people and is administered on behalf of the State free of charge, by judges and independent judges, subject only to the Constitution and laws ‘. It goes on to say:’ the judiciary is comprised of a Supreme Court of Justice, the Court of Appeals, the Courts, by tribunals with exclusive jurisdiction of the country in areas subject to special regulations established under to the Constitution, and other entities established by law ‘.

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now drone making entrepreneur, has a great article in the NYTimes on how portions of Tijuana and surrounding areas in Mexico are becoming attractive places for American companies to source labor: 

Like many Americans, until recently, when I heard “Tijuana” I thought only of drug cartels and cheap tequila. “TJ,” though, is a city of more than two million people (larger than neighboring San Diego), and it has become North America’s electronics assembly hot spot: most of the flat-screen TVs sold in the United States, from companies like Samsung and Sony, are made there, along with everything from medical devices to aerospace parts. Jordi Muñoz, the smart young guy who had taught me about drones and then started 3D Robotics with me, is from TJ — and he persuaded me to build a second factory there to supplement the work we were doing in San Diego.

Shuttling between the two factories — in San Diego, where we engineer our drones, and in TJ, where we assemble them — I’m reminded of a similar experience I had a decade earlier. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I lived in Hong Kong (working for The Economist) and saw how that city was paired with the “special economic zone” of Shenzhen across the border on the Chinese mainland in Guangdong Province. Together, the two created a world-beating manufacturing hub: business, design and finance in Hong Kong, manufacturing in Shenzhen. The clear division of labor between the two became a model for modern China.

Today, what Shenzhen is to Hong Kong, Tijuana is becoming to San Diego. You can drive from our San Diego engineering center to our Tijuana factory in 20 minutes, no passport required. (A passport is needed to come back, but there are fast-track lanes for business people.) Some of our employees commute across the border each day; good doctors are cheaper and easier to find in TJ, as are private schools, although it’s generally nicer to live in San Diego. In some ways, the border feels more like the notional borders of the European Union than a divide between the developed and developing worlds.

“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”
― Theodore Roosevelt

At least since Ancient Greece have men realized that a perception a person’s character and motivation is key to his ability to persuade. The wily Greeks believed that there were three keys to persuasion – ethos (character), pathos (passion) and logos (logic), only the last of which is strictly about who is actually, factually right.

So it is no surprise that our politics is dominated by arguments over intentions rather than results. Laws are enacted based on what they are meant to achieve – but never are they enacted with measurable goals, and after the fact, rarely does anyone bother to check if the intentions match the outcomes.

It is now early February, which means that we are well into the season of broken New Year’s resolutions. So it should be obvious to everyone that a person’s motivations are not a good predictor of their behavior: What is more likely to be the reason that someone broke their diet last night? Because they didn’t want it enough? Or because the dinner host plunked a big slice of chocolate cake in front of them, and it just sat there staring at them? And was this jovial person at the dinner table, with the randy jokes, the same “kind” of person they were that morning at work? Or at Saturdays lunch with the in-laws? Or the romantic dinner the night before? Does it even make sense to talk about what “kind” of person someone is without context? But we persist with our labels because they simplify life. We even do it to ourselves, we lose our phone and berate ourselves for being stupid for the rest of the afternoon, as if we had just discovered the true essence of ourselves. In our lazy, simplifying minds we ARE the phone loser, that is the “kind” of person we are – until something else distracts us and we are on to thinking about other things.

So does it really matter what “kind” of people we elect to congress, or what the motivations of the President are? Did the President not close Guantanamo Bay because “he didn’t want it enough”? Are our Congressmen unable to agree on a budget because their moral fiber is somehow suddenly inferior to the noble ethics of all previous sitting houses?

Perhaps we need a system that is able to function even if the voting public is unable to pick the saints out from the sinners. A system where a person’s character, motivation or even intelligence is not a deciding factor. Do we have an example of such a system?

Yes. Yes we do. Science doesn’t care how much a scientist cares or about their background, wealth or personality. It doesn’t even care about their relative intelligence! We don’t decide which scientific theory is correct by giving scientists an IQ test and then choosing the theories of whoever got the highest score. Science would even work, albeit more slowly, if theories were scribbled out by monkeys and then picked out of a hat. What science does care about are results. Theories are tested by experiments. Whichever theory is better at predicting the results is king, until a new experiment comes along or it is replaced by a theory that conforms even more tightly to the results. Yes, this is often a messy process, with petty politics sometimes descending into full-scale nerd fights. But because the results speak loudest, the politics is kept in the background, not center-stage.

In science, mankind has discovered a methodology to consistently generate progress, instead of just change. Theories get better, they don’t just switch around. Likewise, in our politics, we need more progress we can rely on and less change we can believe in. If we want to be able to consistently improve our societies, instead of having them lurch from good times to bad, from free to totalitarian, from growing to stagnant, we need to stop basing our choice of government on gossip and start basing it on facts.

We need to experiment. We need some experiments to fail and some to succeed. And we need to build on those successes with more experiments. And what is success? Success is whatever kind of society people want to live in – because that is what governments are for – creating the types societies that people want to live in.

Today we have practically all the governments of the world conforming to just two main methods of government, representative democracy and totalitarian rule. And they all conform to one single model of what a society should look like – a nation state, centrally ruled. Most people can’t even imagine alternatives. But before science, pretty much every society looked the same as well – agrarian and superstitious – and nobody could imagine an alternative to that either.

We can do better. We need a thousand different countries, all experimenting with some theory of good society and we need anyone who wants to leave them and try a different one to have that opportunity. We need to give people the same freedom that we have given our cell-phones, and pop songs and other merchandise, the freedom to go anywhere in the world. We need a thousand different societies competing with each other for the right to please people. And may the best society win… until a better one comes along.

The AP reports: 

Turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has led to a surge of interest in programs that let investors buy citizenship or residence in countries around the world in return for a healthy contribution or investment. Most are seeking a second passport for hassle-free travel or a ready escape hatch in case things get worse at home.

Nowhere is it easier or faster than in the minuscule Eastern Caribbean nations of Dominica and St. Kitts & Nevis.

It’s such a booming business that a Dubai-based company is building a 4-square-mile (10-square-kilometer) community in St. Kitts where investors can buy property and citizenship at the same time. In its first phase, some 375 shareholders will get citizenship by investing $400,000 each in the project, which is expected to include a 200-room hotel and a mega-yacht marina. Others will get passports for buying one of 50 condominium units.

Technology Review reports: 

Belgian cabinet member, Johan Vande Lanotte, has introduced a planning proposal for a man-made atoll placed in the North Sea to store energy.

The idea is to place the island a few kilometers off shore near a wind farm, according to Vande Lanotte’s office. When the wind farm produces excess energy for the local electricity grid, such as off-peak times in the overnight hours, the island will store the energy and release it later during peak times.

It would use the oldest and most cost-effective bulk energy storage there is: pumped hydro. During off-peak times, power from the turbines would pump water up 15 meters to a reservoir. To generate electricity during peak times, the water is released to turn a generator, according to a representative.

The Belgian government doesn’t propose building the facility itself and would rely on private industry instead.

Hat tip to Bill Gates. 

I want to be as charitable as I can to Al Jazeera, and Belen Fernandez, who wrote an impetuous rant against the “charter city” movement in Honduras. If she wants to have a reasoned debate about the ideas animating these projects, I’m willing to hear her out. Please contact me and we can arrange a public discussion. Ms. Fernandez, if you are reading this, here are some points from your article that might make for a thoughtful kaffeeklatch:

• “Charter Cities: Neoliberal Viagra” Look, priapic snark may win solidarity from people who already agree with you, but let’s really deliberate and leave this claptrap to the next episode of Girls. 
• “blantantly colonial charter city project in Honduras” Now this is a strong assertion. I can see how Paul Romer’s original version, which involved the participation of another sovereign, may have led you to this judgment. You would not be the first to arrive at that conclusion. Still, if you had followed the developments closely, you would have known that the Hondurans rejected that model long ago in favor of something that would allay fears of giving up sovereignty.
• “The gist of the project is the creation of free-market enclaves on Honduran territory that are unaccountable to national laws…” This isn’t correct at all. For one, the model cities that the Honduras proposed would still be under Honduran criminal law. Where they would depart from the rest of Honduras would be in commercial and civil matters. But, and this is important, whatever commercial laws were established for a model city would have to be approved by the democratically elected legislature.
• “disingenuously suggests that Honduras is not already one big free-market enclave in the sweatshop tradition” What are you asserting here? That Honduras has a free market? The Index of Economic Freedom is a very reliable indicator for how much a of free market any country supports. You will see that Honduras currently qualifies as “mostly unfree” and is ranked 96th out of 177 countries. On top of that, and sadly, Honduras can be a very dangerous place. San Pedro Sula has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Oppression comes in many forms, sometimes from dictators, sometimes from violent criminals, and sometimes from disaggregated bands of drug lords masquerading as quasi sovereigns (a problem greatly exacerbated by the–ahem!–very unfree US drug war). Such conditions imply the opposite of freedom, and irrespective of what the Honduran state does, many human rights violations.
•  ”if Lobo really wanted to promote a democratic image of Honduras, he might refrain from presiding over an illegitimate regime” Given that the New York Times, the White House, and the United Nations also called Manuel Zelaya’s ouster a coup d’etat, I understand why you might leap to that claim as well. But it would help to examine the facts with greater care. In 1982, after years of military rule, Honduras established a constitution with certain sacred articles that would prevent the rise of a dictator. One of these articles imposes strict term limits on any presidency.  According to Article 239 of the Honduran constitution: “No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.” When Zelaya called for a national assembly to eliminate this article, he violated the constitution in a way that the people of Honduras are very sensitive to and thereby stripped himself of power. They have a phrase for this temptation: continuisimo. The very same Supreme Court that overruled the legislature on the first model city proposal ordered Zelaya’s arrest for disobeying the court orders requiring him to obey the constitution. The democratically elected legislature voted 123 to 5 to remove him from office. Since this event in 2009, there have been open elections where the people of Honduras have spoken. It’s time the media elsewhere in the world see the coup narrative as misguided at best or simply way off track.
•  ”the splicing of national territory into enclaves governed by international investors – who by definition are concerned with maximising profit rather than human rights” Crony capitalism destroys freedom. We are in agreement on that. But the motivation behind the model city reforms are specifically meant to protect human rights and to provide the grounds for all Hondurans to flourish. Start from the assumption that the people involved share the same ends as you: they want to see a better future for Honduras. If the disagreement is about the means, about the way to ensure greater protection of human rights, then let’s have that debate. Since you only seem to tear down and criticize in your article, I know what you’re against, but not what you’re for. Please let’s discuss history and why some countries have developed and why others haven’t.

Ms. Fernandez makes many other bald and unsupported assertions in the article, which I am happy to take up with her if she so chooses.

Welcome to the competitive government movement Michael Arrington. He writes at TechCrunch: 

America is an unsolvable problem, a nation divided and deeply in hate with itself. If it was a startup we’d understand how unfixable the situation is, most of us would leave for a fresh start and the company would fall apart.

America is MySpace.

But leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you’ll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good stuff about America and have to keep all the bad stuff.

I love this country but we have a management team that’s both evil and incompetent. And the way “stockholder rights” are implemented there’s absolutely no way to stop or even slow down the rush to misery. I wish people had the choice of voting with their feet. This tends to keep the individual states somewhat honest in their dealings with citizens because they have to compete against 49 other states. But there’s no escaping the fed. It’s like a startup where everyone is miserable but no one is allowed to quit.

If you haven’t yet, do pick up a copy of Huemer’s latest book, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the RIght to Coerce and the Duty to Obey. But for the short version, check out this month’s Cato Unbound. Here’s a typical Huemerian insight: 

Imagine that someone proposed that the key to establishing social justice and restraining corporate greed was to establish a very large corporation, much larger than any corporation hitherto known—one with revenues in the trillions of dollars. A corporation that held a monopoly on some extremely important market within our society. And used its monopoly in that market to extend its control into other markets. And hired men with guns to force customers to buy its product at whatever price it chose. And periodically bombed the employees and customers of corporations in other countries. By what theory would we predict that this corporation, above all others, could be trusted to serve our interests and to protect us both from criminals and from all the other corporations? If someone proposed to establish a corporation like this, would your trepidation be assuaged the moment you learned that every adult would be issued one share of stock in this corporation, entitling them to vote for members of the board of directors? If it would not, is the governmental system really so different from that scenario as to explain why we may trust a national government to selflessly serve and protect the rest of society?

Daniel Brook recently published excepts from his book on four designed or somewhat cultivated cities–St. Petersburg,  Mumbai, Shanghai, and Dubai. Fascinating bit of history on Shanghai and how market reforms were introduced throughout China:

Two decades ago, when Shanghai’s leaders looked out over the new New China born of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, it seemed history had gone off the rails. It wasn’t Shanghai, the city that invented Chinese capitalism, but Deng’s new experimental instant metropolis, Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, that was brimming with factories and drawing thousands of ambitious young people from across the country. It was as if Deng had held a great national casting call for China’s next business hub and upstart Shenzhen had gotten the part Shanghai assumed she was destined to play. Hoping to set things right, Shanghai officials lobbied their superiors in Beijing, urging them to reopen to the world China’s historic global gateway city and financial center.

Back then even Deng’s pro-market political allies were wary of Shanghai. Some officials worried that unleashing China’s cradle of cosmopolitanism and revolution could upend their rule. Others fretted that the symbolism alone would aid their ideological enemies. Deng was already beset by anti-market factions within the Party who warned that his new Special Economic Zones for international investment would become “foreign concession zones” reborn. Though Deng had been able to overrule them in creating Shenzhen, the symbolism of their critique would be much more salient in Shanghai, a city that had actually been a grouping of foreign concessions during China’s “Century of Humiliation,” from the Opium War through World War II.

But the Shanghai city government kept pushing.

Imagine that you were entertaining a business deal with a man with an supernatural ability to make two kinds of promises: 1) promises that are impossible for him to break and 2) ordinary, breakable promises. Why would you accept anything other than the unbreakable promises from him? If he offered to make  breakable promises you might grow suspicious about his intent.

It’s easy to see how unbreakable promises would be a revolution for contracts and law. Enforcement costs for contracts would be drastically reduced. It would enable a new era of globalization, allowing people to participate in contracts with each other without regard to jurisdiction. The rights promised to a citizen of a country could be guaranteed instead of relying on the benevolence and caprice of their sovereign.

This is why I find Bitcoin so exciting. Sending someone a bitcoin is like making a promise that can’t be broken because the rules governing the transfer of bitcoins are secured by cryptographic algorithms which cannot be broken. Bitcoin is a system of rules for the accounting and transfer of property rights in a way that is completely verifiable and unforgeable. The regulation and enforcement of property rights is a big portion of what governments do so bitcoin opens the door to more efficient and trustable decentralized forms of governance.

In contrast, transactions in the traditional banking system rely on a fragile chain of trust and threats of force. If I try to send you money you must trust that your bank and my bank will not make a mistake or attempt to defraud us. You must trust that the government regulators which oversee banks are reliable, thorough, and honest. You must trust that banks fear the consequences of the law if they break a promise and that they haven’t captured their regulators. And with most methods of electronic bank transfer in the USA, the recipient will not be able to verify that the transaction went through for several days.

But in practice we know that people sometimes write checks that they can’t cover. We know that government banking regulators sometimes freeze accounts. And we know that banks and countries sometimes become insolvent. This year depositors in Cyprus and Argentina have seen their property rights in their bank accounts violated. Cypriots were promised the money in their bank accounts, but then their government together with the EU decided to change the rules. When rules change too often they cease to become rules at all.

Auditing and enforcing promises made in the traditional financial system requires tremendous resources, employing hundreds of thousands of people and costing billions of dollars a year. There are middlemen that guarantee transactions against fraud, regulators that ensure that those middlemen remain solvent and comply with banking regulations, police men and lawyers that prosecute fraudsters, intelligence agents that monitor transactions for illegal purchasers, banks to keep your money safe, and many other specialties. All of that overhead is obsoleted by bitcoin because promises cannot be forged or broken.

The importance of Bitcoin is bigger and broader than just a new kind of currency. It also represents a breakthrough technology in rule-making. The technology underlying bitcoin can be used to create systems for the maintenance and transfer of property rights in other goods, such as domain names (see the namecoin project). I hope that people continue to find astonishing new uses for this technology.

Property rights based on cryptography are a remarkable advance in governance technology for several reasons. First, they are unbreakable. Second, they are opt-in rulesets – nobody forces you to join the bitcoin ecosystem just because you are born in some jurisdiction. Third, it eliminates a mountain of compliance and auditing costs. Far fewer regulators, banks, courts, and cops are needed to maintain order when forgery is impossible. Fourth, it is universal – anybody can choose to opt-in to the system.

Cypherpunks and crypto-libertarians are way ahead of me. For decades they had the vision of property without government and of laws without force. Now that I see an example of it in the wild I finally understand what all the fuss is about.

Mike here. It’s been slow here at Let a Thousand Nations Bloom. But in case you haven’t seen this elsewhere, I wanted to post the Seasteading Institutute’s  Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for designing the first floating city. They plan on working with Deltasync, a Dutch architecture firm with expertise in building floating structures. You don’t have to be Rockefella to help a fella (or to kickstart a new frontier). Please help put the campaign over the top!

The Floating City Project

The strategy behind this project is to accelerate the creation of an actual floating city while making seasteading – pioneering the oceans and creating new societies – accessible to the average person. Our years of engineering and legal research, combined with the input of our community, has culminated in our latest strategy to produce pragmatic plans for the first floating city. We realize that it will be more economically feasible to locate a seastead as close to an active port as possible, instead of international waters. Locating near shore will greatly reduce costs compared to mooring a platform in deeper waters. It will also reduce the cost of transporting people and goods to and from the seastead, making it easier for residents to take the plunge into ocean living.

Balaji Srinivasan speaks at Startup School 2013 about technology that enables political exit

The dream of Seasteading is catching on in the greater Burning Man community. The cultural separatist festival has long held a contentious relationship with local authorities whom they pay for event permits every year. In exchange, the authorities provide law enforcement and emergency services to the festival, some of which, such as drug busts, are not welcome.

In their search for total creative freedom over their own culture and lives, it was inevitable that Burners be drawn to the last Earthly frontier – international waters. The melding of Burning Man’s culture of creativity and self-reliance with the more explicitly secessionist dream of Seasteading was the raison d’être for the Ephemerisle festival in the first place.

Google’s mysterious barge parked at Treasure Island further stokes the imagination of Burners drawn to the creative freedom of the high seas. It is now known to be used for some sort of massive floating art and technology exhibit, to be over 50 feet tall and 250 feet long when construction is finished.

Google has been largely closed-mouthed about its waterborne behemoth. After rumors circulated that it was going to be a showroom, a floating data center that could be used in the event of a natural disaster, or perhaps a big party boat, the company issued a statement Wednesday calling it an “interactive space where people can learn about new technology.”

Asked to comment Thursday on the planning documents, which we obtained from the port under the Freedom of Information Act, Google officials sent us the same brief statement they issued a day before.

Whatever it is, the barge’s backers expect it to draw 1,000 visitors a day as it sails from spot to spot around the bay. Among the envisioned mooring sites are Piers 30-32 and other San Francisco docks, Fort Mason, Angel Island, Redwood City and Rosie the RiveterHistorical National Park in Richmond.

As yet, there is no information as to whether the Google barge backers were inspired by Ephemerisle.

In traditional media, the American political and cultural divide is broken down into two factions – red states and blue states, representing the ends of the one-dimensional political spectrum from conservatism to liberalism (the colors, oddly, being reversed from the typical historical association). But author Colin Woodward finds not two, but  eleven distinct American regional cultures. A writeup in the Tufts University alumni magazine comes with a tantalizing graphic:

The deep cultural differences in the United States prevent regions from coming to agreement on national policy and influence the formation of coalitions. For example, the attitude towards federal government regulation is different between the descendants of communal Quakers and Puritans in Yankeedom and the fiercely independent Scots-Irish of Greater Appalachia.

I’m addicted to secession-maps, so you get one more. This blog post shows what would happen if the State and Federal governments of the USA collapsed and territory fell under the control of city-states. The power that a city can project over each point of land area is modeled as a function of population divided by an exponential function of the distance, with the most powerful city winning dominion.

Balaji Srinivasan makes a great analogy: 

Just like the Amish live nearby, peacefully, in the past – imagine a society of Inverse Amish that lives nearby, peacefully, in the future. A place where Google Glass wearers are normal, where self-driving cars and delivery drones aren’t restricted by law, and where we can experiment with new technologies *without* causing undue disruption to others. Think of this like a Special Innovation Zone similar to the Special Economic Zones that Deng Xiaoping used to allow China to experiment with capitalism in a controlled way.

9) In sum: I believe that regulations exist for a reason. And I believe that new technologies will keep coming up against existing rulesets. I don’t believe the solution is either to change the rulesets (which, again, exist for a reason) OR to give up on new technology. I think instead we need a third solution: a way to exit (whether to the cloud for purely digital technologies, or to a Special Innovation Zone or ultimately a startup nation), prove/disprove these new technologies among a self-selected, opt-in group of risk-tolerant early adopters, and report back to the mothership on what works and what doesn’t.

10) This concept – a Special Innovation Zone – is a new idea. It is really about humility, not hostility. USG is a big thing, it has a lot of responsibilities, it runs a nation of 300M people, and it can’t just change federal laws to permit some crazy tech guys to try (say) self-driving cars without affecting millions of people. A new region – like a Special Innovation Zone – can experiment with this kind of thing without bothering anyone who wishes to live under the previous rulesets.

Again: this is complementary to USG’s own efforts. I don’t see them as competitive, anymore than a startup competes with IBM’s research labs.

I’m going to start writing again here as an exercise. My blogging hiatus has demonstrated to me the intellectually obvious truth that writing helps to clarify your thinking. So for selfish reasons, here we go.

Competitive governance will remain the main theme, but I now see a flawed assumption in the title of this blog. It would be nice of course if more nations bloomed, but recent struggles in various markets between state-protected interests and new entrants have led me to see that perhaps the opt out/opt in model of competitive governance will not occur at the level of the city or region first, but instead cascade industry by industry. To take one example, Uber, Lyft and other similar services let customers opt out of the taxi cab medallion system of governance and opt into a reputation and credit based system of transport. City residents who want to use the old system are welcome to keep hailing cabs with a whistle (or in San Francisco, keep waiting indefinitely), while others may opt out and into the mobile summon at command model.

Likewise, Bitcoin lets people opt out of the fiat money system; AirBnB lets travelers opt out of the regulated hotel industry; charter schools free students from public schools; the Thiel Fellowship, technologists from college, and so on. Or as I recently mused:

@William_Blake smrt phone + strong crypto welds network & individual into single unit capable of opt-out & opt in governance w/out precedent

— Michael P Gibson (@William_Blake) September 7, 2014

I expect I’ll be writing frequently on technologies that enhance the power of exit.

Vitalik Buterin and the others on the Ethereum project have raised more than $15 million for their effort to expand the technology underlying Bitcoin to new uses. (Vitalik is a Thiel Fellow, a program I help run.) Wired’s coverage: 

A year ago, Vitalik Buterin was a teenaged college dropout dabbling in the bitcoin digital currency. Now, he’s the founder of a futuristic programming project that just got backed to the tune of $15 million.

The project is called Ethereum—an effort to transform the kind of technology used in bitcoin into something that can help you build, well, anything—and after a two-month Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaign, it has raised 30,000 bitcoin, or close to $15 million at today’s bitcoin prices. According to Buterin, Ethereum could represent the future of the blockchain—the cryptographically backed distributed public ledger that drives bitcoin—and apparently, many others agree with him.

Ethereum will let engineers build applications that rely on the distributed consensus made possible by the blockchain. One new possible application fits in nicely as a stepping to stone to opt out/opt in governance. With the Ethereum platform, you could build a public ledger that verifies title and the exchange of property. Instead of going to town hall to authenticate a sale of land–or better, instead having no town hall at all as is the case in the developing world–a community could use the Ethereum platform as a system of recordation.  Smart phone penetration is deep in the developing world, and, as M-Pesa has shown in Kenya, people will leapfrog old tech and migrate to the new. 

Wired reports:

Wilson’s latest radically libertarian project is a PC-connected milling machine he calls the Ghost Gunner. Like any computer-numerically-controlled (or CNC) mill, the one-foot-cubed black box uses a drill bit mounted on a head that moves in three dimensions to automatically carve digitally-modeled shapes into polymer, wood or aluminum. But this CNC mill, sold by Wilson’s organization known as Defense Distributed for $1,200, is designed to create one object in particular: the component of an AR-15 rifle known as its lower receiver.

That simple chunk of metal has become the epicenter of a gun control firestorm. A lower receiver is the body of the gun that connects its stock, barrel, magazine and other parts. As such, it’s also the rifle’s most regulated element. Mill your own lower receiver at home, however, and you can order the rest of the parts from online gun shops, creating a semi-automatic weapon with no serial number, obtained with no background check, no waiting period or other regulatory hurdles. Some gun control advocates call it a “ghost gun.” Selling that untraceable gun body is illegal, but no law prevents you from making one.

He writes in a quick Facebook post:

Another attribute of small is beautiful: (what we call) democracy.

The idea of democracy is to take the citizens’ location as fixed, and the identity of those in government as variable, the “representatives” matching the preferences of the people. But you can get similar results of representation, even under dictatorships, by varying the people’s location instead.

Assuming you are able to move to the canton or municipality where you feel the dictators represent your tastes & beliefs, such competition would put pressure on local municipal dictators to please taxpaying constituents so they stick around.
So the smaller the size of political units (and the larger their number), the more democracy we get in the system.