Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

"Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Things fall apart, and we have the prospect of additional further shocks that seem very likely to cause many things to fall even further apart. For example, there are several supervolcanoes on Earth that have, in the past, caused lengthy ice ages and devastated landscapes. One of these is at Yellowstone, and can be quite vigorous, though it sometimes erupts at less than supervolcano intensity.

Vast earthquakes can hit the West coast of North America and devastate many things. An enormous amount of communications traffic goes through cities on that coast and while the communications would continue, there would be difficulties.

A giant solar flare or a distinct but also very powerful disaster, a coronal mass ejection, hitting the Earth would potentially take away much in the way of unshielded and not-radiation-hardened integrated circuits, including the ones in your recent model year car. A deliberate electromagnetic pulse (EMP) explosion in Earth's upper atmosphere over, say, North America or Europe, or one over each, could devastate communications as well as integrated circuits.

Even simple things like bullets can destroy electric power transformers, and if the ones at power substations are taken out, it may take years to replace some of them. Very large transformers are not made routinely, and the electric power grid depends on them but lacks immediate replacements for most of them. So the power grid is fragile.

Healing Our World

To heal our world we need much less trauma, and since most of the trauma of the 20th and 21st Centuries has been caused by governments at war, governments enslaving their populations, and governments using genocide and torture and death camps to slaughter their own people, it stands to reason that we could reduce trauma by withdrawing support from central government systems. Centralised systems are inherently fragile, so it makes sense to create decentralised systems.

Happily, that has been going on for quite a while. There are now thousands of competing currencies rather than just a few dozen major national currencies. There are many new systems of encryption that provide for actually private communications. Power systems can be local rather than regional or national, so you can get off the grid. Many technologies provide opportunities for decentralisation, for independent operations, for people who are not part of the oligarchy to do something good.

Consider your car. It was made by one of a dozen or so car companies somewhere in the world. Everything that can be done to make it fragile and make it useless to you if you don't keep up the payments has been done. It can even be shut down remotely using its onboard computer system, and there are numerous examples of cars being deliberately crashed with sudden acceleration and the sabotage of their braking systems. But it does not have to be that way.

When I went to high school in the United States there were about 40 guys in my graduating class of 444 who were " gear heads." If you had taken the best ten of them, and disassembled every car in the parking lot, put all the parts on the football field, and sent those ten out onto the field equipped with the tools they would need, they would have enjoyed putting all those cars back together and getting them all running, and it would have been a pleasure to watch.

Now, multiply that by the ten thousand or more schools across the country, and down through the years, and you have about a million people in the United States who could assemble working cars from the engines and parts in junk yards, and who can work with others on CNC machines and with 3D printers and with other tech to build new cars. They would never be allowed to do so, of course, because of the hateful oligarchy.

When Elon Musk started Tesla, I read somewhere, he spent $2 million or more on permits and regulatory "compliance " before building the first factory and the first Tesla car. My friends who loved working on cars and imaginining better ways of doing things would never have put up with all that paperwork and garbage and bureau-rats inspecting everything, nor should they.

Decentralised Community

No, I'm not starting a car company because I don't want to deal with OSHA, EPA, DOT, and the endless soup of hateful government thugs who work so hard to make enormous profits for the big auto makers. No, I don't want to build the Second Realm car companies of the future. (Audiobook of Second Realm with narration by Silas Soule.) But I am happy to help write business plans for them (for a fee) and find investor capital for them (fees to be paid of course), and happy to write essays about these ideas.

What I am dedicated to doing right now is helping people form new communities. The latest I've heard of is in the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe. I've also worked for some time building a Resilient Ways Foundation (we took our site off line recently) and the Freedom Land Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. Places like FortGalt.com in Chile and the Pine Ridge community in Belize are examples of the possibilities for freedom communities.

Ozarkia, Appalachia, Cordilleria

To help keep the focus on mountains, where I believe people have the greatest chance to stay free and build extensive networks of communities for freedom, I've taken to referring to the regions in the USA by the names Ozarkia, Appalachia, and Cordilleria.

Recently I met with 18 freedom cell activists in Fayetteville. Today I'm going to a meeting of about 14 freedom cell activists in Tulsa. And we have spent quite a lot more time at the VALIANT Ozarkia Eucha (VOE) property.

VOE has four springs we've found. We took video of some of them. VOE has room for 89 or more home sites. There is fibre optic cable from the local phone company that comes right past the front of the property. We have tentative commitments from three lot users and three investors right now, and are looking to work with people who want to build in other areas as consultants.

There are now very active projects in Maine, New Hampshire, Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, four provinces in Canada, and several other places around the country. More are coming to light all the time.

We have the opportunity to free the slaves, stop the wars, and end the state. If we mean to be anti-fragile and free, if we mean to heal our world, we have much to do.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, actor, and director. He is the vision director of HoustonSpaceSociety.net You can find him on Twitter.com/planetaryjim as well as Pocket.app and Flote.app also as planetaryjim. He appreciates any support you can provide as times are very difficult. See the Paypal link on this page. Or email your humble author to offer other choices. SubscribeStar.com/planetaryjim is working, so he'll be adding new things there soon. Visit IglooLuau.com for more information. Those seeking a multi-jurisdiction multi-hop VPN for communications privacy please visit https://secure.cryptohippie.com/houstonspacesociety.php For those seeking colloidal silver try ppmSilver.com/Jim Ask Jim about CryptoWealth. Recently arrived: FreedomLandDAO . com — under construction. Just arrived: FreedomDeFiSoftware.com