The Beginnings of a Voluntary State Free From the Tyranny of Territory

States are inefficient, with governments subject to severe free-riding (at the best of times) and exploitation by violent psychopaths (at the worst.) They are involuntary - you are in a state, usually, because of an accident of your birth. As animals that take up space and as modern humans dependent on agriculture, we occupy a territory that belongs to us, as does our state. The central job of the state is to maintain a monopoly on violence, in order to protect us from violence. (This is why the Somali "government" is a joke, because they can only protect you if you're within about four blocks of their office. You can emigrate, but at a massive price (learning a new language, new customs, new social network, etc. - ask people who are trained as physicians and leave their home country due to a civil war or persecution of their ethnic group, and end up driving a cab or running a shop somewhere safer.)

Consequently this lack of competition means there is a high barrier to emigration, and states often drag in perpetual suboptimality until invasion, civil war, or economic disaster brings about a fundamental transformation. (More on this here.) Much potential human flourishing is left on the table, so to speak. Charter cities are a partial attempt to free us from the tyranny of territories - if you can go across a bridge and be subject to the courts and business laws of a more sensible successful country than the one that governs your home, that minimizes emigration cost (you don't even have to, you just commute.) The end-goal of such arrangements would be that, if (for example) the DMV sucks in your state, you could announce you were subject to the DMV rules of another state. Of course this sounds absurd, and the tyranny of physical territory overrules this. The political scientist that could solve this problem would go down in history.

Of course there are supranational cultural entities that serve some of these functions somewhat - religions and corporations immediately come to mind - but there's a new attempt to get past this: Safetywing, which aims to become no less than a virtual country. It is starting as a safety net (of the sort that wealthy welfare states already provide.) Read more about this idea here. Of course this will cost money, and if you're already paying into your own country's safety net based on the tyranny of territory, you might not have money for a second one. This is why wealthy (or at least upper middle class) people from developed countries should buy into this early, both to make it sustainable, and also to give it prestige value.

I expect that should this actually take off, there will be massive resistance to it from the mutual-recognition cartel of the legacy states; see here for an example of the kind of reaction one might expect if you have physical territory to attack. The virtualness of the project may protect it in this regard, but I hope that Safetywing has anticipated that. Note that nation states are often openly hostile to supranational entities (see: Islamic states and other religions; China and any religion.) It could be that this virtual state could be the next supranational level of social organization, like religions and corporations, but it should expect to be identified as a threat in the same way that China sees Falun Gong.

I will be joining this, and I strongly encourage you to consider it.