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I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,
My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.
If so, what's going on here?
I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.
And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.
Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.
Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...
But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.
I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.
Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.
One of the reasons I tend conservative is the different views towards exit rights.
For most conservatives, the reaction to liberals who want to go start a communist paradise elsewhere is "Good. Go do it!". This is a sincere wish. The presence of communism elsewhere is the surest bulwark against it happening here. The idea of communism so alluring that we need constant reminders about its failures, which are guaranteed.
But liberals have more of a "yous can't leave" attitude. The grand experiment can only work if everyone is forced to join. If the ants go somewhere else, the grasshoppers won't have any food to eat. Thus, states like California are considering exit taxes to trap the high-performing people in the state. And obviously the Soviets had to keep people inside with barbed wire and guns.
Did you just rewrite atlas shrugged in 2 paragraphs?
I would rebut, and say the issues is socialized losses and costs while privatizing the profits/tragedy of the commons/extraction without due compensation/collusion/fraud/monopoly/rivers on fire/cancer clusters/disgusting food/dangerous drugs/pinkertons/unsafe air travel. To pretend that there are not serious and almost endless downsides to unregulated commerce and exploitation is crazy.
Classically, libertarians always seem to want all the benefits of a stable state with a monopoly on powers, as long as it doesn't realllllllyyyyy apply to them, and they don't have to pay for it. Laws for thee and not for me etc....rich people already kind of live that life, so it is an attractive philosophy for many, I run into them every day.
True believers can always move to the libertarian paradise that is Somalia!
As far as keeping a tax base of people that have immensely benefited from the state apparatus to generate their wealth. It is perfectly fair to incentivise them to keep some of their wealth in the place that helped create it. Again, wanting all of the benefits while shirking the costs.
Libertarians often want a state powerful enough to create and enforce property rights, and to raise a defensive military when needed, and not really anything else.
This would need taxes, of course, but much less.
Somalia doesn't do a good job with maintaining property rights.
Maybe so. That is a terrible idea. I think I pointed out the pitfalls of a minimalist state pretty well in my previous post.
You did, hence why I'm the other upvote here.
That said, I don't know that I agree that all of those would be serious problems. I'll run through what I think of each.
This is only really a problem when there are commons. With expansive enough property rights, there would not be many commons, and so not much tragedy. That said, some things are hard to keep separate (like air). In such cases, while, strictly speaking, it may be regulated as an infringement on property rights, really it should probably just be treated as a commons with no property rights, and subject to regulation accordingly.
Not really a problem with good property rights, except in cases of bad decision making/desparation (and the market should sort out the latter).
Yup, this is a problem. It shouldn't get worse than monopoly pricing, but this isn't great, and regulation is probably reasonable here.
Yeah, I'd want this regulated. But I would assume that many libertarian states (should such exist) would care about things like this? Breaking contracts like this should fall afoul? Maybe violate property rights?
Yes, bad, though not always worth getting rid of, if the alternative is worse.
That said, I'm not sure that we'd have more of these. Competition should try to keep these away, and the reduced regulation should lower barriers to entry for competitors.
See tragedy of the commons.
The market might sort this out to some extent (in that people won't want to be in harmful situations, and so would have to be compensated accordingly should they know), but yeah, this is a problem.
What? There are no laws requiring that our food, as it exists today, tastes good. It tastes good because they want us to buy it. This wouldn't change.
Yup. I'm not a fan. I suppose libertarians could try to regulate nonconsensual use of them as a crime; it would be infringing on the rights of others?
Not okay. The state has the monopoly on violence. That doesn't change.
Well, airlines have a pretty strong incentive to make air travel safe: they want people to fly. I don't think this would be too large of a problem.
Overall, I don't think it's nearly as hellish as you suggest to go with the minimalist option, though there are several things that I would prefer be regulated.
Regarding the food, I'm thinking more along the lines of gutter oil and listeria outbreaks. The consumer simply cannot judge if a certain restaurant is safe to eat from, they will never have perfect information. That is the problem with a ton of libertarian policy ideas. LTs have to assume an almost omniscient consumer/citizen for most of their ideas to have even a small chance of working. There isn't enough time,energy, information, or intelligence in anyone's life to make choices like that, we need regulatory bodies of experts with enforcement mechanisms and bureaucracies.
Re: Air travel. The 787 Max kinda disproves your point there. Before regulation basically everyone who flew regularly eventually died flying. We probably shouldn't have to let 100 more planes crash before consumers decide that getting to california for cheap isn't worth going on a certain type of plane. Not to mention the ongoing issues due to regulatory capture and just underregulating/poor oversight that have lead to deaths and serious problems, it is getting so bad that it is undercutting national security and economic progress in a vital industry.
Thanks, those are both good examples.
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