The Techno-Canton - A Vision of a Free Future

INTRODUCTION

There is a growing consensus among the right - in all its various flavors: conservative, libertarian, deist, traditionalist, etc - that defeating the totalitarian visions of the WEF and the woke will require more than being AGAINST their visions of granular surveillance and segregation. We must provide a more compelling vision of our own. 

There are a lot of ideas floating around. I’ve seen a few are well developed ones (that I can’t find again to link to), but most are sketchy standalones. I have yet to see anything presented as a holistic picture of what life could be like. 

Here is one attempt to contribute to that vision by stitching some of those ideas - and a few of my own - into a coherent pastiche of a brighter future. It is driven first and foremost by radical decentralization - as a counter to the abuses that centralization of policy, money, technology, and media have enabled. As a counter to total atomization, it also imagines a re-invigoration of strong local communities. I call it the Techno-Canton after the successfully idiosyncratic Swiss cantons. 

The Swiss cantons, not for nothing, also reflect a staunch neutrality, underpinned by martial capability and geopolitical position. I am not neutral on policy, and the vision reflected here is optimistic from a right-of-center perspective, but is largely policy neutral. A better vision will have room for more people, not fewer; I hope that classically liberal  (“live and let live”) people on both sides of the culture war can imagine living happily in their own cantons. 

(The Techno-Canton. From Midjourney, naturally.)

The problems this vision addresses are different than those chosen by the left. We are concerned with the disintegration of families and faith, loss of heritage, destruction of capital and economic agency, and ideological capture of centralized institutions. Does this preclude addressing climate change or structural racism? Far from it. Strong local communities will adapt faster if/when climate ever changes than communities that lose a singular role in a top-down economy.  Reducing reliance on a “structurally racist” central structure seems to have obvious benefits, as does enabling broader participation in production and wealth generation. 

It is not any sort of prediction. It’s an exercise in optimism. It asks of a group used to planning for the worst, “what if things go right?” Where a situation might result in good or bad outcomes, I’ve intentionally, specifically, blithely chosen the good outcome. We can debate odds and oughts later. 

What would it look like? 

A DAY IN THE TECHNO-CANTON

You wake up at 8, a little later than usual. Your spouse still has a corporate job with an internet satellite company and is already on a conference call in the office across the hall. You get the kids up and head downstairs for breakfast. Your father, who moved to the Canton shortly after you did, has already gathered some eggs from the chickens out back and a few ripe bell peppers from the garden bed, so you whip up few omelets. 

The farm robots are moving an enclosure on your quarter-acre plot to prepare for the next rotation. One of them is out of commission - it says it needs a hinge replaced. You fire off a quick order to your neighbor, who runs a small automated CNC shop. The order is confirmed - you can pick it up in the market later. 

After breakfast, your father heads to local rotary club and you walk the kids across the street. Your neighbor was crippled by a childhood disease, but now gets around with an exoskeleton. The tech isn’t ready for heavy duty, so running a school was a good option for her. Today’s lesson is robotics. You add a note to your calendar to drop into the webcam later and catch some of the lesson. Maybe the kids can practice this evening by installing the hinge. 

It’s a warm day, but the tree-lined streets make for a pleasant walk to work. Most of the city center is relatively new, but a renewed sense of civic pride led most builders to choose a neo-traditional style that feels like it’s been there for ages. 

You’ll spend your day at the brewery, where you are part owner, before running out with a hand truck to do some deliveries. You take some to the main market in Canton square, to be sold tomorrow. While you’re there, you pick up your new robot hinge. The man who made it had some free time and added some beautiful detailing. 

Next you take a product donation to the Canton Council for this weekend’s Bell Pepper Festival. Your teenage niece is on the planning committee and you are looking forward to it. You run into your council representative. The council is discussing nullifying a new inspection process for beverage production - it might temporarily raise your brewery’s materials costs, but you see the value in keeping compliance costs low to maintain your independence. You support the nullification and are grateful for your representative’s attention.  

You walk back from the brewery to pick your kids up from school and meet one of your friends. The weather is lovely, so you decide to have dinner together. His children attend a religious school, so you split up and meet again a new fusion. They have a playground so the kids can play while the grown-ups catch up. 

After staying out a bit longer than planned, it’s time for bed. The robot repair can wait until tomorrow. The kids brush their teeth and watch a bedtime story projected by a little robot. The AI it contained generated some very dull stories at first, but after tweaking its settings to weight local sources and some key religious texts, the stories have felt much more relatable. The kids love it. 

How could it happen? 

WORKING FROM HOME

Imagine that working from home remains a major component of white-collar work. What kind of changes will the drive in a generation? Many trends that emerged in 2020 would likely continue, albeit at slower rates of change. Financial pressure will gradually pull people into more, smaller metro areas. Being able to work from anywhere will let people shop for a mix of characteristics they prefer: policy package, proximity to family, climate, and more. 

When changing jobs no longer means changing homes, people will build deeper, more stable relationships and IRL social networks. Families will tend to cluster together, providing more robust group identity, increasing intergenerational transmission of values and culture, and providing greater social support during difficult periods like raising children, illness, or economic trouble. Lower transience will contribute to a greater sense of local identity and culture.

Taken further, as commuting drops in importance, so too will cars and highways. Zoning and infrastructure will gradually resize itself to accommodate people who no longer expect to stop in on the way home from work. Walkable infrastructure - already an area of growing interest - will rise in importance. More walking and more time in neighborhoods will add to the immediacy, accessibility, and value of localized social networks. 

DEMOCRATIZATION OF PRODUCTION

As white-collar workers settle into to long-term homesteads, surrounded by family and friends in walkable neighborhoods, opportunities for local services and production will increase. 

Technologies like 3D printing and robotics will revitalize small-scale manufacturing. Small-scale energy production from micro-fusion reactors or even next-gen solar panels will make movement and transformation of materials clean and cheap. Sensors, rotation farming, vertical farming, and greenscaping will produce high quality, local crops. These products will be made available via neighborhood farmers markets and local delivery routes reminiscent of yesteryear’s milk man routes. 

Most of this will be automated, leaving local producers more time to spend with their increasingly deep social networks or developing skilled artisanship in fields not replaced by on-demand AI. AI and the rest of the internet may, of course, be localized too. 

THE LOCALIZED INTERNET

Driven by widespread surveillance, censorship, and possibly even persecution, massive segments of the population will seek alternative methods for communicating across the internet. Encryption and privacy-by-default solutions will explode. Readily-accessible mesh networking, supported by competitive, commercial, encryption-tolerant infrastructure, will route comms around easily-controllable chokepoints. 

AI will initially be centralized, but as the internet returns to its decentralized halcyon days, cheap, standalone AI instances will become the norm. Artisans may spin up localized creation engines connected to CNC machines or other devices to create products for market. 

The growing privacy-focused segment of the market will intersect with proliferating deep-fakes and filters and the value of digital content will fall rapidly. Many ad/surveillance-driven business models will be permanently unprofitable. Teens and young adults will be rapidly disenchanted by a flood of synthetic “influencers.” Screen time will soon be seen as desperate, cheugy escapism. The real world of accessible venues and production opportunities will quickly be more appealing and provide a deeper sense of community.  

The combination of privacy and small-scale manufacturing will force an end to gun control as an issue. It will be no easier to control small arms than un-PC opinions and soon everyone will have some of both. In this regard, American culture will reset to the 1920s or 1930s, where owning a gun was common and uninteresting. Mass shootings may rise at first, but dimming effectiveness among a widely-armed population, greater connections to local communities for troubled youth, and better science on psychoactive medications (see below) will largely put an end to the phenomenon. 

Given the last 30 years of consolidation in every major industry (in the US especially), why believe that local producers will be able to compete or that local economies will be able to capture and hold profits or market share? Because the financial incentives will change. 

FIAT CURRENCY COLLAPSE

Debt and inflation are at unsustainable levels for most of the world. Major currencies will collapse and will need to be reset or replaced with something different. CBDCs will be tempting, but increasingly localized economies and skeptical populations will kill them in their cradles. Local economies matter because no one will need dollars if their neighbors are trading in bitcoin or gold (or some Texas-flavored mix of both). 

The collapse will be rough, but will further entrench local economies that have begun to take advantage of technological advances and working from home. It will also have the benefit of putting people off of fiat currency for at least a generation. 

Without access to a hose of freshly-printed, 0% interest-rate dollars, top corporations will no longer be able to hoover up or undercut smaller competitors without end. Large corporations will still exist, particularly for capital-intensive new ventures like space exploration, but it will once again be possible to buy a coffee that isn’t Starbucks without hiring a private eye. Profits on that coffee will stay in the Canton. 

A return to sound money will allow regular people to save and invest in their local economies. Many more people will find capitalism accessible once their capital base is no longer eroding under their feet just by sitting still. 

RESEARCH

A rebirth of capitalism and a wider distribution of its fruits will reduce wealth inequality and, at the same time, create a larger number of independently wealthy citizens with capital-supported leisure time. 

One such use of this leisure time could be independent study and research that resembles the era of Victorian science, in which a wide array of petty aristocracy - and not a single, massive bureaucracy - drove inquiry and invention. If government monopolists of research were to be casualties of a currency collapse, so much the better. “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and once the piper isn’t getting paid, we’ll be better able to learn some different tunes. 

True inquiry might answer some long-standing questions: What is causing obesity and declining testosterone levels? How about autism and allergies? Do flu shots work? How many violent criminals are on psychoactive medication? 

Answering these questions will boost lifespan, fertility, and mental health for the entire world. 

CIVIC REBIRTH

Fiat currency issues will drive a collapse in many centralized systems. Increases in residential tenures and business ownership will also increase the number of people who have a stake in the system. Some people will use their technologically-enabled leisure time to build strong civic organizations - churches, charities, clubs, schools, governments, and militias. 

These organizations will create strong local constituencies. Strong locales will counter-balance Olson’s logic of collective action and reclaim rights and privileges that had been ceded over time to regulatory bodies or higher echelons of government. 

Just as sound money will reclaim capitalism and remote work will reclaim a sense of place, local civics will reclaim politics. 

As civic territory is won, these bodies will become more and more interesting places to be. The wrinkled khaki and stale coffee palette of modern municipal proceedings will be gone. The meetings will be filled with energy and interesting decisions to make. This will fuel something of a reverse Curley effect, attracting the most effective and productive families to the Canton, making it more productive over time, attracting more productive people, and so on. But this vision isn’t just about attracting the “right” people to a jurisdiction - that way lies bankrupt cronyism - it’s about building the right jurisdiction to begin with. 

CONCLUSION

I’ve had many of these ideas floating around for a bit. Bits of this vision have already made their way into my work in children’s books. Robots that haven’t replaced people, space exploration, and small-scale production show up in the Bopbot & Bowbot universe (as well as privacy-invading, data-centralizing baddies). 

As calls for some kind of alternative vision continued to build, I thought it was worth the work to offer up what I had floating around. The visions we set this against barely bother to hide their ambitions to control what you can do, say, eat, sell, or even think, but as long as they remain the only visions of the future, they will come to be simply by virtue of setting the default. 

Obviously, this vision is not even fully-baked, much less a roadmap or a plan for realization, but hopefully this sparks some imagination or provides useful raw material for something bigger. Let’s switch the conversation from a totalitarian-by-default to free-by-default. If you would like to collaborate, drop me a line.