[T]hose are the elements that make it a thought experiment, the parts that are… kind of metaphoric, or read as analogy. “Assume you can do these obviously impossible things—what would fall out of it?” … And then that allows us to think about what more stripped-down versions of that might be possible in a more imperfect world where the condition can’t be realized but some pale shadow of it could be.
It struck me several years ago that that’s sort of what we did at the Gulch, except for the part about it being a mind experiment – we did it in meatspace. (“meatspace” isn’t still all cool and edgy, is it? Well, hell. Neither am I.)
The point is, we took L. Neil Smith’s utopia based on decentralized infrastructure and thought, “Yeah, it would be cool to have a vestpocket fusion power plant in the shed, but that’s not going to happen in my lifetime or price range. How far could I go in that direction with existing technology?” And then like a pack of idiots we went out and did that.
Living in meatspace is never as cool and edgy as cyberspace is.
As for the comment about being a pack of fools, I disagree. Each person in the gulch brings a skill, talent or resource to the table. All the people in the gulch, through their actions, agree to interact in an ad hoc system for a mutual desired result, self survival. While they don’t have to they recognize if they don’t interact in this ad hoc system they will not make it.
Look at the people who have moved into your little slice of the big lonesome over the years and how many of them didn’t interact and ended up leaving. The idiots are the ones who were stubborn and refused to see the benefits of this arrangement and they are the ones who fell by the wayside. While you may be a semi hermit you are smart enough to recognize this interdependence and live accordingly.
Hmmm….a self-sustaining, self-selecting bit of society, without even requiring a constitution or charter. I can almost hear the statists and other slaves-at-heart exclaiming that “you can’t make anything like that work without rules & regulations–it would be chaos!”.
The chaos seems to be working, and not to be all that chaotic. Imagine that: decent, free people conducting themselves like decent, free people.