wombatron,

Thank you for the kind notice. I agree that there’s an important distinction to be made between the likely short-run results of freeing markets and the long-term results that you could expect as we move deeper into the anarchic future. (On the other hand, I’m also much less confident predicting anything specific about what deep anarchy would look like, because the far future is hard to predict in general, and in particular because predictions about short-run results can hook into your knowledge of how coercion is pushing things in the actually-existing world, whereas predictions about deep anarchy depend on feedback loops and developments that get increasingly unpredictable because they increasingly involve innovations rather than just repairing existing damage.)

I will say that, while I expect global forms of organization to proliferate and flourish as communication gets better, and State barriers to communication and interaction are knocked down, that needn’t necessarily imply “large-scale” voluntary organizations, if “large” refers to the number of people involved rather than the geographical expanse. One of the things I expect to see is a lot more little voluntary associations with global reach. As we get deeper into anarchy, people may develop more in the way of federations and “associations of associations” out of these small pieces loosely joined; on the other hand, I also expect that a lot of coordination will fall back on massive global spontaneous orders, more than it will on massive global organizations, even if the latter are decentralized and full of caucuses and scrupulously federative in structure.

freeman:

Glocalism, y’all. Glocalism.

I first heard the word “glocal” back in 2001 as part of a delegation from Auburn heading up to SURGE, a counter-globalization conference in Chapel Hill, No’ Carolina. At the time, I thought that was the pug-ugliest bit of political neologism I’d ever heard from someone whose project I was broadly sympathetic to. 8 years have passed, and I still don’t think I’ve heard anything more ill-constructed. (Although “heteronormativity” comes close.)