OpenBazaar: Another Step in Invigorating Humanity's Breath of Life
https://fee.org/articles/with-openbazzar-everyone-can-be-a-retailer-without-permission/
To me, this is like a sudden, unexpected breath of life...finally: mounting, runaway pushback against the otherwise inevitable march of centralization. OpenBazaar, Uber, Lyft, Bitcoin, Airbnb, KickStarter, Blockchain, etc...
As Norman Barry once said: "Despite the complexity of the social world, which seems to preclude the existence of regularities which can be established by empirical observation, there is a hypothetical order which can be reconstructed out of the attitudes, actions, and opinions of individuals and which has considerable explanatory power. What is important about the theory of spontaneous order is that the institutions and practices it investigates reveal well-structured social patterns [such as language, common law, morality, markets], which appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind yet which are in reality the spontaneous coordinated outcomes of the actions of, possibly, millions of individuals who had no intention of effecting such overall aggregate Orders".
I once thought that the mastery of the encroaching State over the levers of coercion/violence (and its willingness to use it at every opportunity) was proving too effective a tool in strangling this breath of life. Most importantly, I once believed that the State would resort to applying these levers of power on an increasing scale (the adage that: "when all you've got is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail"). Now, it appears that the momentum can be sidestepped, and that the coercive momentum may help determine the scale and quality of the pushback to free and, ultimately, to enhance the power of that very breath. In other words, the "nails" that the hammer can strike simply cease to exist within range of the hammer, and are multiplying geometrically.
Author Max Borders once wrote: "Technology that changes the incentives can change the institutions. The rules and regulations we currently live under came out of our democratic operating system (DOS). It used to be that these institutions shaped our incentives to a great degree. Now we have ways of coordinating our activities that go right around state intermediaries, [crony-]corporate parasites, and moribund laws…We’re becoming cultural cosmopolitans... Most importantly, we’re freer than ever before. As my colleague Jeffrey Tucker writes on the workers’ revolution, “This whole approach might be considered a very advanced stage of capitalism in which third parties exercise ever less power over who can and cannot participate.” In this infinite space, there will be little room for political progressives with big plans. They’ll find it difficult to impose hierarchy on the new frontier folk who will run among network nodes. The incentives for social change are strong, so strong that the gales of creative destruction can finally blow apart much of the state apparatus, which seemed impervious to reform. And that’s a good thing for a self-governing people".
My faith in the tenacity of decentralized, life-enhancing emergent order is being refilled, and quickly at that.