Those wanting to keep up on the latest in communication,
practice, and argument in the “liberty movement” writ large might
want to check out the new-ish site Liberty.Me, the latest brainchild of
hyperoptimistic liberty lover Jeffrey Tucker. (See
here for an older Reason.TV segment on Tucker. To me, Tucker
will always be the man who taught me
that shaving cream was a lie, saving me double-digits in
Barbasol bills over the years.)
I chatted with Tucker about what he’s trying to accomplish on
the site a couple of weeks back by phone. “The
Internet is our frontier, exactly like the west was in
18th century,” Tucker says. “There’s always
migration to free spaces as old spaces are corrupted by
government.” So he wanted to create a “community-based one or two
way or one-million way conversation, a living arrangement for
people who love liberty of all sorts.”
The costs of creating this sort of “multiblogging
multisite” have finally fallen to within the domain of the
possible, Tucker says, so he saw an entrepreneurial space that’s
more limited in its ideological scope but wider in its uses than
most current social spaces on the internet where libertarians might
be trying to communicate.
It’s what Tucker calls a “hybrid” model, subscription based but
with “more free content than most. This is outreach on one
hand, an attempt to get ideas of liberty into the mainstream, but
on the other hand there is a huge private space where everybody has
skin in the game, differences between public kinds of engagement
and private are really the difference between a dinner party and a
day in the park” and he hopes to create a space where communication
will be both more open and less negative and trollish with
“a core civility to engagement that comes with
ownership. Everyone has a mutual interest in enhancing the
value of overall communication” on the site, like a self-selected
subdivision for publication and engagement in the vast wild
Internet.
Though it is ultimately a web site where people post words and
images, in essence, Tucker hopes it becomes an engine of
“a culture of praxis” in the libertarian movement, “so
we are focused on doing liberty, not just theorizing about it. An
attempt to take it to stage two of building real institutions. To
my mind this is how liberty is being won in the world; not through
big public protests—politics has amounted to so little” but to
“innovate, get creative, find ways around the system, find a flaw
in the system and exploit it to make your life freer.” This is why
he’s a big promoter of “Bitcoin and Uber and AirBnB.
“I feel like a beautiful model for liberty minded activism
is to empower people in their own lives, work on making their own
lives freer…rather than narrowly limiting the scope of
imagination to attacking the system that is.”
It’s a combination of an old Karl Hess “living liberty”
vision and some Richard Cornuelle “we have to show the world how a
libertarian polity would work” ideas and its worth applauding.
Available on the site, amongst many interesting discussion boards
and personally produced content, and sets of “Liberty Guides” on
practical matters ranging from Bitcoin to dealing with police, from
gun purchasing to rhetoric, from job hunting to peer-to-peer
lending to “digital couponing.” It has an interesting groovy
counterculture feel that tries to root itself not just in
talking—as interesting as talking is—but to
life-as-lived.
Tucker says they were at 3,000 paid users a couple of weeks ago,
a virtual “city that is both public and also brilliantly private in
actual mechanics and operations.”
Check it out yourself to
see if it’s worth your time. 30 day free trials are available for
the pay parts.
“Everything I’ve ever done has taught me three things
are amazing in the world,” Tucker says. “Commerce, technology, and
crowdsourced information. Those are three things I think are the
driving force of history. What I tried to do with Liberty.me is put
all three in one piece of digital real estate.”
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