Whack-a-libertarian

(mini-hiatus over, coming out from the spell of grading and of wandering around the woods for a couple days...)

Once again, the resilient, nervous, and loopy Right proves more convinced than us of our capacity to break the stale present, here on the "dropout economy," and its Hackers meets urban garderning-Warriors meets Twin Oaks futures. This is from Time magazine, no less. More practically, a plausible further indication not that things will "go this way" in the least, but that that the looming shadow of "libertarian" will perhaps develop a louder voice. (And Salam actually does a decent job painting the middle ground: somewhere between more compoundish gated communities and families trading cage-free eggs for pilates lessons. Mutual aid coupled with mutual hostility and distancing.) All the more reason to insist that secession is not, and never has been, enough, insofar as it remains an expression of "individual" choice.

That said, enjoy the feverish phantasmagoria of Salam:

The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian "hacktivists."