This works so long as DOGE doesn’t get into the IRS offices and start turning off all the APIs.

Secession is anarchist in the sense that it rejects and fractures a dominant power in favor of one that better represents folks.

When has this actually happened?

What if you had just been annexed? Not allowed to try and leave?

Are you describing a country where a significant powerful plurality embraced annexation (a la Texas under Polk or Hawaii under the The United Fruit Company).

Or one that’s been liberated after a terrible Continental war, a la the Eastern European states after WW2?

Because these are very different situations.

But more importantly, would Hawaii benefit somehow if the island’s residents staged an armed insurrection? Secession does nothing to fix the underlying economic problems of the island. It doesn’t even address the popular impulses of the proletariat.

You’re putting the cart before the horse.

In those instances splitting may have been an important step forward

Again, particularly with regard to Vietnam, you had a country that was fully embracing independence against the French colonialists and Japanese invaders, when the US stepped in an installed a coup government in the south that leveraged a large Catholic population to resist de-colonialization. And what followed was some of the most horrifying years of the decades-long war. A war that spilled into neighboring Laos and Cambodia thanks to machinations by the Kissinger state department and Helms CIA.

Similarly, the Korean peninsula - which had liberated itself from Japanese occupation only years prior - was spit under the same model. Catholics in the south were galvenized into a coup government to resist anti-colonial forces allied with China in the north. In Japan and Indonesia and the Phillipines, the island was fully dominated by a cartel of Opus Dei affiliated business leaders and junior officers.

Germany’s division was maintained by splitting the old Nazi military into competing fascist regimes on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

If you’re an anarchist, I cannot imagine how a western religious institution propping up a fascist regime’s military dicatorship over half the old nation’s territory benefits you in any way. It’s not as though the Cold War was kind to either side of the border.

I think the world will always be in flux. Do you think we’ll eventually just have a static set of countries with static borders and all of the people will be happy?

I think that conglomerates like the USSR, the EU, the US, the BRICS, and the nascent African Union demonstrate paths out of the rigidly policed micro-states and their endless boarder feuds. We’ll always have some degree of flux, but there is a huge difference between Bush v Gore and Lincoln v Jefferson.

For example, I’m not so sure the legitimacy of North Korea is affirmed by the existence of south Korea more than it is affirmed by their allies

The US intervention in Korea and the militarization of the 38th parallel has dragged out what could have been a post-WW2 era decolonialization period into nearly a century of clandestine warfare and bigoted propaganda. A country that should be comfortably on par with its unified neighbors is trapped in a state of suspended hyper-policing and dominated by a handful of oligarchical interests in the name of national security.

FFS, the Far-Right South Korean President just tried to have Parliamentarians arrested on the accusation they were North Korean spies last December.

How on earth does this benefit any kind of anarchist cause?

I’d say progress is progress, even if it isn’t perfect

I would not call splitting the baby progress. Vietnam, for instance, wasn’t liberated through division. It had to be reunited before either half was free from civil war. Same with Germany. Or Korea, for that matter.

But that’s just my perspective

It all depends on how governance works in the state. Leaving could make a lot of sense with a monarchy for example.

Rejecting the authority of a monarch is very different than putting up hard borders along an arbitrary line of demarcation and reinforcing residency by birthright.

Secession, in this instance, affirms the rights of the monarch at a distance.

I think a central authority regulating global citizenship could work out. But to me centralization means having one big point of failure.

The legal concept of global citizenship does not require a single capital city. Just look at the EU. No one country rules all of Europe. No one politician dictates residency. You have a confederacy of democratic(ish) states operating under a single rule of law.

This is the principle of Constitutional governance. Power isn’t embodied in an individual, it is a social contract between all residents.

I can’t imagine coordinating the whole world, but maybe I’m not optimistic enough.

We have a piecemeal arrangement via the old NATO alliance and the various international trade agreements. You can travel without visas between various states. You can conduct business without doing more than declaring what that business entails. You can change residency (temporarily) with minimal hassle to pursue work or education.

We have a number of frameworks already in effect. The OG neoliberal dream was to expand that system globally.

Obviously it didn’t work. But more because neoliberalism valued trade over civil rights and private profit over public prosperity.

Then you’re fucked coming and going, and what you need is an internationalist revolution.

Seceding is a problem on its face, because it functionally strips citizenship from dissenting residents.

The slavery fight was an extension of this problem, as emancipation grants an individual full citizenship.

What we ultimately need is a global citizenship that doesn’t bottle any population cohort up in a single territory or deny civil rights based on place of birth. Secession functionally moves us away from universal human liberty.

Texas has been a fascist state practically since its inception.

A big part of the “Texit” movement finds its legs as soon as the presidency changes to an insufficiently fascist bureaucrat.

‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

…

“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”

Andrew Yang also championed hiring a management consulting firm to identify areas of inefficiency in the federal workforce and cut 15–20% of current government workers, assigning KPIs and sunset clauses to all Congressional legislation, and assigning AI life coaches with Oprah’s voice to people in need of marriage counseling.

So, a very mixed bag of ideas. Few of them had a serious implementation behind them. Yang loved to noodle, but failed to explain where the novel technologies and extra-constitutional authorities would come from.