Viva PorcFest and the Free State Project! Now With More Ice Cream!

Updated July 4, 2014, 11:00am (see below)

Last weekend, I traveled to speak and hang out at the Free State Project‘s annual
hootenany, which is called PorcFest (short for Porcupine Freedom
Festival). It was a great and excellent time and I hope to write up
something about in the next few days.

Here’s
a nice writeup of the event and the FSP by The
Economist‘s Emily Bobrow:

In the jovial atmosphere of PorcFest, where idealists bond over
their shared mistrust of rules and big institutions, the prospect
of a future New Hampshire that can do without such things seems
far-fetched. Tech geeks (who still dominate the Free State
movement) enjoy home-made “bananarchy” ice cream while prattling on
about the power of crypto-currencies. “Bitcoin can topple
governments and end war,” gushes one fan.

Others are more realistic. “I’m an incrementalist,” explains
Jason Sorens, the subdued intellectual who dreamed up the Free
State Project while he was getting his PhD from Yale. Now a
lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, he is eager to use New
Hampshire to test libertarian theories about enlightened
self-interest and reciprocal altruism, small government and large
networks of voluntary institutions. “We don’t have all the
answers,” he says, “but it’s worth the experiment.”

The “Bananarchy” ice cream was pretty damn fine, btw, but even
better was the “Who Will Build My Rocky Road.”

Read the whole thing.

Here’s an account by C.J. Ciaramella of the
Washington Free Beacon.
A snippet:

For a first-timer at Porcfest, walking through crowds of armed
anarchists and clouds of marijuana smoke is like sneaking into an
R-rated movie when you’re a kid—a world only hinted at is suddenly
right before your eyes.

As keynote speaker and libertarian activist Nick Gillespie would
tell the crowd later in the week, “You’re a demonstration project
for what it’s like to live in a way that’s less uptight.”…

At Porcfest, 1,500 heavily armed libertarians, tea partiers,
anarchists, secessionists, and doomsday preppers got together in
the woods for a week with a large amount of alcohol, illicit
substances, and children, and no major incidents were reported. I
did not see a fight, or even a hullaballoo. A couple of kids were
separated and reunited with their parents. A topless woman was
asked to put a shirt on after several complaints and complied,
despite the statist encroachment on her individualism. One guy
couldn’t handle his hallucinogens and got stuck in the bathroom
repeating over and over, “I am a god. I am logic. I am a perfect
machine. I am forever.” The volunteer security eventually got him
back to his tent. The peace was kept.

I plan on going back to Porcfest next year—if they’ll have me
back after the publication of this article—not because I’m an
anarcho-capitalist, but because I made a bunch of friends and had a
blast. 

Read the whole thing.

In my experience, PorcFest wasn’t so trippy, though it was a
delight on every possible level, especially intellectually, where
the speakers across the board were smart and engaged with the
audiece. Buzz’s Big Gay Dance Party was great, too, featuring
wonderful music, dancing, and come-as-you-are attitude that the
world always needs more of.