[P2P-F] Future of Free Cities conference

[Michel Bauwens]

Thanks Amaia,

there is interesting context in David De Ugarte's history of
alt.sovereignities, at http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Nations_to_Networks


Part two of the book has a fascinating history of 19th cy. Segregationist
attempts, i.e. refusals of the nation-state such as Mormonism and
alternative Zionisms, and of 20th cy. Libertarian and other microstates.
Their common mistake is to want to ground alternative socialities in
derivatives of imaginary nation-states. But early attempts at internet
‘societies’ like Freedonia are also failures, because they lack a viable
shared economy, which coincides with the human network.


Thus, after this vital and interesting history of post-national attempts,
comes a very interesting passage:

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The Freedonia story represents the transition and continuity between the
Randian segregationism and the new world of trans-national communities. The
segregationist temptation appeared repeatedly in virtual networks in the
second half of the nineties. It was the easiest option. When network life
occupies the identitarian space and explains more about who we are and who
we speak to than the nation, the immediate temptation is to replicate the
national model, seeking a territory and building a customised micro-state.
Segregationism was always there, underlying, inviting us to occupy a distant
island or build a floating city where the real community can be accommodated
and new forms of social organisation can be tried. And the myth of Mormon
success is still powerful.


But the 20th-century groups were no longer like 19th-century ones. Randian
attempts are unlike those of the Mormons, a presential and real community.
With their form of shareholders' society, Randian experiments resemble more
the failed colonisation societies than John Smith's persecuted and cohesive
religious parishes, where, despite their being more people, everyone knew
each other, worked alongside each other, and personally trusted each other,
generating, in so doing, an economic basis and emotional tries which were
strong enough to support the gigantic efforts and sacrifices which proved to
be necessary. Actually, when we think about it, Sealand, once the mythical
layer of Cryptonomicon and Wired is stripped, is nothing but the adventure
of a family of British squatters who kept some bad company.


Freedonia, the first internet-era community that sought its own
territoriality, was, in its naivety, both a forerunner and a frontier. Its
scarcely 300 members led a real and intense political life. They built a
conversation that provided them with an explanation and a meaning. They
shared their daily lives and built a common identity which bound them
together more than their respective national contexts. Briefly put, they
constituted a trans-national community. But they never had an economic
basis, a map, a common space between the conversation flows and their own
way of making a living.


It is true that a community can be based on collective conversation and the
consequent political play. In an extended and interesting experiment51,
Dutch ethologist Frans de Waal showed how a group of chimpanzees all whose
members enjoyed unrestricted access to food not only preserved power
structures, but experienced them more intensely than ever. Politics does not
arise in politics as a result of scarcity: it is not only an organised
struggle for the surplus, as Marx thought. It is there before and after
abundance.


But maintaining a conversation and social game does not equal supporting a
human community. Beyond conversation, nothing generated the need or the
possibility of a headquarters territory in Freedonia. There was no
persecution forcing them to do so, not a prior economic activity among its
members which justified their settling in a specific place. Randians
likewise lacked both. That's why Freedonians and Randians sought their
destiny from the settler's logic. Believing that the territory would
generate its own economic structure, an economy hardly sketched out from
libertarian principles which would ground a community which would not longer
be trans-national or virtual but territorial. This is a mistake.

…

Segregationism fails. Without a shared economy, there is no human community
which will endure in time. That's why unfaithfulness, transitoriness, and
temporary alliances are, as Juan Urrutia points out52, common to all network
conversational identities.

After Freedonia, trans-national conversational communities evolved
dramatically, both in number and in form. Some of them, like Second Life,
included as an extra attraction a small parallel economy – which
artificially produced scarcity – and a certain political space. But, for the
time being at least, they are merely a game and a representation, a pastime
and a simulation of a world which can already be intuited but which must
come from elsewhere.


New identities will only emerge when trans-national conversational spaces
are superimposed onto economic spaces within a similar domain and they
interact.


On different scales, from the networks constituted by tens of thousands of
Neonomadic individualists to the great corporate Venices, this is exactly
what we are starting to see this decade, and what prefigures the forms of
the great future postnational map.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)


On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Amaia Arcos <amaia.arcos at googlemail.com>wrote:

> https://freecity.ufm.edu/index.php/Videos_of_presentations
>
> I have no idea whether this is good or bad. Just found it.
>
> Universidad Francisco Marroquín is proud to have co-hosted, along with The
> Seasteading Institute, the first Future of Free Cities conference in April
> 2011 on the tropical island of Roatán in Honduras. This event brought
> together leaders from several different fields and countries for a series of
> high-level discussions that focused on how to establish successful
> politically autonomous communities.
>
> Interest in free cities continues to grow as more and more people recognize
> their potential to expand individual liberty throughout the world.
>
> --
> “We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if
> we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
>



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