The Peer-to-Peer Economy

Technology has allows us, as a society, to move further away from centralization. Now that we are able to communicate with anybody in the world, perform pseudonymous transactions, and ship products we can more easily avoid the crushing state and its regulatory bodies. This is an excellent article that discusses how activists have begun to remove themselves from the system and create their own communities:

The Occupy Movement recently celebrated its second anniversary with very little fanfare leaving many to wonder where all the activists went. It seems they, and many anti-establishment activists, are vacating the system rather than occupying it.

Progressives may call it the “sharing economy” while Libertarians may refer to it as Agorism – a “society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging in a manner with aspects of peaceful revolution.”

Whatever it’s called, together, they’re opting out of the current socioeconomic matrix and creating a new alternative economy where trading occurs peer-to-peer and increasingly without government-issued currency.

It’s a space where mutual trade occurs without burdensome taxes, regulations, or licenses. Simply put, it’s an underground black market enabled by the Internet and regulated by social feedback mechanisms — and it’s growing exponentially.

As I progress down the path of anti-statism it has become more apparent to me that eliminating the state isn’t a winning strategy. Instead we need to create “underground” communities that exist within the state. If we want to win against the state we must make a community that people prefer over the one controlled by the state. When enough people move into the “underground” communities the state with die without the need for civil war.