this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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My opinion is that any large-scale functioning economic system must be inherently hierarchical. The system described is too loose; people do not often enough willingly cooperate and hold themselves to agreements if they are not forced to do so, and thus anything that requires large-scale, inter-community cooperation will be much more difficult to achieve.
I do not even need to look at the details; any decentralised, anarchist structure will not be able to uphold the modern world's standard of living. Our modern lives rely on large-scale cooperation and that cooperation must be efficient. There must be laws and a centralised body able to coerce others to follow them against their will. There must be contracts and bodies to enforce them even when one of the parties doesn't want to uphold their end of the bargain. The more decentralised a system is, the harder it is to uphold order on a large scale. That's why international geopolitics is so chaotic.
The system described works if and only if you're content with a much simpler lifestyle and a much smaller world for each of its participants. You're not going to develop the Internet under this system. You might get close-knit communes where everyone's needs are satisfied, and you might call that a success, but everyone's expectations might be different.
Cooperation by force is inherintly unstable. As soon as the deal is unfair, which is pretty much guranteed if it is by force, the moment the misstreated party can exit it, it will. This becomes a problem as soon as the enviroment for a larger group changes and a lot of people can exit unfair deals.
So in the real world sueing somebody is pretty rarer. The real punishment is a bad reputation and as soon as you have one, you are in trouble, because people are not going to cooperate with you anymore. The only way you can cheat and get away with it is by force and the only way that works, if there is a forced hierachy, with some having access to force, whereas others do not.
I would say something like the internet, which is run on free software and using standards a lot of people just agree on freely, is a perfect example of how these typey of systems can work. Most of the development was done by small groups and people just adopted it, because it was usefull.
I don't think you understand what the nature of coercion is.
Think of a futures contract: I agree to buy something from you for some price at a later date. But when that date approaches, I decide the deal is no longer in my favour, so I decide not to do it. There is nobody able to coerce my compliance.
Suppose you sign a deal with a company to buy a product with a 5-year warranty. The product breaks after three years but the company refuses to honour the warranty. There is no regulatory agency to force their compliance. Even more, if the problem gets big enough, they can close the company, secretly move the assets and start back up again. There is no government apparatus powerful enough to stop this if the company is willing to devote enough resources to keep it secret. Remember the United Fruit Company? The one that overthrew Central American governments and created literal banana republics? They're now called Chiquita, and you can still find (and probably have bought) many of their products in grocery stores everywhere!
"Reputation" is worthless in the corporate world. You can suppress a million small complaints. Word-of-mouth marketing is utterly powerless against large syndicated PR campaigns. In the real world, Wells Fargo opened millions of fraudulent accounts in their customers' names to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. They gained a bad reputation but people still kept using their services. What stopped them was when the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a billion-dollar fine and took legal action against them. The idea that reputation and the free market alone will keep people honest is completely unfounded, and this is the folly of any "anarchist" system.
Or consider an insurance company. A hurricane comes through and wipes out a hundred thousand policyholders' houses that the insurance company must now pay out on. 100,000 × $50,000 = $5,000,000,000. Hmm. Maybe just better to hire a PR firm for a million dollars and default on all the policies. Or even just close up shop and distribute the assets to shareholders.
So then nobody gets insurance.
The Internet wouldn't have developed under an anarchist system. Think of just the process of manufacturing a computer. All the different parts come from every part of the world. The computer chips come from Taiwan, the parts are then assembled in China, plastics from Vietnam, engineered by people in the United States. Suppose you need to deliver finished computers to someone in Germany. Think of all the procedural hurdles you'd have to go through, and then think of how many more interactions you'd have to make under your proposed system. The more interactions, the higher the cost. The higher the cost, the less profitable it is. Oh, and don't forget you can't do shit if anyone you sign a contract with backs out at the last minute. It's not impossible, but the increased difficulty will make the administrative burden so high it'll be unprofitable.
You shouldn't be taking that for granted, but asking "why do they come from different countries?".
The answer? For historical reasons - because that's where capital found cheap labour with a tolerable infrastructure and convenient legislation at a certain time period.
If the goal is to imagine an anarchist society, Taiwan is not the memory factory of the world, and China isn't the consumer electronics factory of the world. It's perfectly feasible to make microchips everywhere and assemble them into systems too.
If the world being imagined doesn't favour (via laws that protect investment) investing huge sums of money overseas - outsourcing won't happen.
As for computers, the first programmable computer existed in ancient Greece (as a toy, of course). You could program a robot's driving movements using knotted rope. :) Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer in the 1800s, which Ada Lovelace wrote the first programs for. Alas, it didn't work - due to the limits of Victorian era manufacturing. Konrad Zuse designed computers using relays, and they worked. Computers are a thing that sooner or later appear, once need for automation and capability to manufacture components has arisen. Networking computers doesn't take an anarchist or hierarchist to figure out - it takes an engineer and coder to figure out.
Without postulating that in anarchy, engineers don't exist, mathematics doesn't exist, or coders won't exist once engineers build programmable computers... it's on very thin ice to say that an Internet can't exist.