Building an Opt-In Society

An anonymous reader writes "In a talk at Y Combinator's startup school event, Stanford lecturer Balaji Srinivasan explained his vision for governing systems of the future. The idea is to find space to set up a new 'opt-in' society outside existing governments, and design it to take full advantage of technology to keep people in control of their own lives. That means embracing tech that subverts existing industries and rejecting regulation on new ways of doing things. '[N]ew industries are simultaneously disrupting existing ones while also exiting the system entirely, he says. With 3D printing, regulation is being turned into DRM. With quantified self, medicine is going mobile. With Bitcoin, capital control becomes packet filtering. All of these examples, Srinivasan says, are ways in which technology is allowing people to exit current systems like physical product production and distribution; personal health; and finance in favor of spaces of their own creation.' Srinivasan's ideas are a natural extension of a few proposals already in the works — Peter Thiel has been trying to build a small tech incubator city that floats in international waters, outside of government control. Elon Musk wants to have a Mars colony, and Larry Page has wished for a tech-centric Burning man that's free from government regulation. 'The best part is this,' Srinivasan said. 'The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there.'"

Re:no thanks

[Kjella]

So then what is the purpose of the EU? And why does it grow more and more powerful and centralized (e.g. the adoption of the euro) as time progresses?

Mostly equal access to markets, capital, labor and resources. The main reason to start a war (outside racial/religious wars) is because the other side has something you want and can't have. If you can run the same business in the same market under the same rules from Germany as you can from France, what's there to have a war about? While there's quite a few intra-EU foreign workers when you look at it from a grand picture most people want to stay where they are if the job market and wages are decent there. Despite the freedom to travel and take jobs elsewhere most want to stay in their own country.

When I talked about a US of Europe I thought mainly about culture, language and identity. I'm sure there's differences between California and New York but they're nothing compared to Portugal and Bulgaria. Totally different people but if you want to sell Portuguese goods in Bulgaria or Bulgarian goods in Portugal the same inner market rules apply. As for the euro, the idea was to lower trade barriers because if you live somewhere like in the BeNeLux countries you have like five countries inside an hour's drive. No currency exchange means cross-border trade and shopping is easy as pie. The downside is that it was like having a joint checking account without ever agreeing on the rules for using it.

Yes, there's a lot of proverbial saber rattling but in the grand scheme of things it's very far from actual saber rattling. Worst case I think the EU will have to shed a few countries down south that have mismanaged their economy too horribly from the euro, but I think the union would stand and they'd return to a position like the UK, Denmark and Sweden which are in the EU and outside the euro. The rest is a lot of scare mongering to make them realize the seriousness of the situation, they both stand to lose on a collapse and as long as they don't play chicken on who takes the bill there will be a solution.