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PERSPECTIVE

Hacking LeviathanSEPTEMBER03, 2013 by THE FREEMAN

˙Libertarian populism˚ is all t he rage in the Beltway blogosphere. The idea, more or less, is that something of a political p latform is

emerging. Everybody hates cronyism and the rigged game that sustainsit . The game keepsgood people back and diverts money into

the coffers of the wealthy. People would hate the system if they knew more about it . All the center-right has to do is explain

everything and promise to dismantle the infrastructure of cronyism. This will usher in a new-age love fest for libertarian messages

among the laity. That s a sketch, anyway.

 All well and good. We re not particularly sanguine about the idea of dismantling the corporate state through old-fashioned

democratic polit ical means. But we re happy to let the Beltway types have their conversation and hope the votersget wise to the

game. Who knows?Maybe it will become a platform. Maybe people who care more about must-see TV right now will finally start to

care about public choice economics. We re just not going to sit around and wait for that fire to catch.

We d prefer to get behind what we call ˙hacking Leviathan.˚

If you re worried because ˙hacking˚ has a negative connotation, please know we re not suggesting people do anything illegal. That s

between you and your risk-benefit analysis. What we re suggesting is that ˙hacking˚ has positive connotations and tremendous

potential to liberate people.

Consider so-called ˙life hacking˚: Wikipedians refer to it as˙any productivity trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increase

productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life; in other words, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious

way.˚ Sounds good. What about a form of hacking that uses shortcuts, novelty methods and innovation in general t o circumvent or 

shake up the status quo?

Hacking Leviathan taps more into this spirit than into the notion of becoming a virtual safe-cracker. Government is slow, not very

innovative, and its rulesare becoming increasingly obsolete. ThisState sclerosis is due largely to special interests that accrete and

harden around old ways, old laws, and old public troughs. They re going to protect the gravy train, and they re pretty good at it,

usually. But if enough people are developing creative workarounds and new good things, the State and its functionarieswill simply b

bewildered by it all. Thatˉs the hope, anyway. By the time the technocrats (and their cronies) catch up to the action, it will hopefully

be too late. Large constit uenciesw ill have formed around, say, Bitcoin (peer-to-peer private payment), Bitmessage (p2p private

messaging), Airbnb (p2p temporary apartment rentals) or Uber (p2p cab services).

 And a Leviathan-hacker needn t be a techie, even if a lot of the jargonˆ to say nothing of the general att itudes comes from that

world. There are doctors who charge small sumsand are developing ˙concierge˚ modelsto ditch the Obamacare-industrial complex.

Hondurans have amended t heir constit ution so as to upgrade their social operating systems, making room for startup cities (officially

known by the acronym ZEDE). Someone might reject abad system simply by opting outˆ for example, simply by choosing a diet that

isn t based on the government food pyramid. Our own distinguished fellow Jeffrey Tucker has made a cott age industry out of t elling

people how they can seize their showerheads back from the State, or raise glasses of bourbon to Michael Bloomberg at 8:30 a.m.

Whatever people do, we are excited by the prospects of creative collaboration in an age of rapid social and technological evolution.

 And that leads us back to this question of libertarian populism.

James Poulos, writing for Forbes.com, suggests a form that dovetails nicely with liberty hacking, particularly when we move from the

merely political to the anthropological. He writes:

The anthropology I m proposing [is all about] unforeseeable transformations, at the personal level and t he human level. Thatˉs

the essence of a game thatˉs anything but zero-sum: inherently creative, open-source, universal, and unable to be captured by

planners and forecasters.

Such an anthropology is consonant wi th what we have called ˙networked libertarianism.˚ And it is certainly a libertarian populism

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suitable for a small-but-inspired army of Leviathan hackers.

SHARETHIS

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September 2013

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