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I got 5 ways...what did I miss?
http://caeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/5-routes-to-anarchy/

from the article:
1 seasteading
2 seasteading with docking
3 cryptoanarchy
4 space anarchy
5 subversive anarchy

and here's one not in the article, maybe the best choice yet: competitive and/or voluntary social contracting

Interesting title, how do 'start' nothing? Ok its not exactly nothing but most definitions of anarchy deal primarily with the absence of X,Y and or Z. Starting the absence of things seems a bit contradictory.

While it's true that a good definition of anarchy would be "no centralized government" that hardly means "no government."
Instead it means something like competitive, voluntary, distributed and/or decentralized governance.

Another definition of government of anarchy is a lack of monopoly on the use of force. Does that mean no one has any weapons? No. It means weapons are widespread, competitive, distributed, etc.

"Anarchy" means "without rulers".

So you can create anarchy by simply refraining from any attempt to rule over other people. Interact with other people via negotiations and mutually beneficial exchanges and you've created anarchy in your personal sphere (http://board.freedomainradio.com/page/books/everyday_anarchy.html).

That's all there is to it; it's not hard at all. The problem for most people is they really have problems with consistency. There's some group of people out there they just can't accept not ruling over with threats and/or violence.

Point 1: That is one way to do anarchy, not the only way. The way you describe amounts to ignoring national/state law and everyone simply choosing to live a certain way. A cultural revolution type of thing. That fits in with #5 subversive anarchy in the article I mention above.

Point 2: Cultural anarchy is not a very resilient form of anarchy for reasons you mention. Certain people just don't want to engage in it. This usually breaks down the larger system very quickly. I'm interested in resilient, functional anarchy.

Point 3: There are ways to create an anarchy despite bad actors, but unfortunately they are not as simple as "simply refraining from any attempt to rule..." They involve networks of distributed legal and enforcement systems to check bad actors. A bit like traditional government, but decentralized. Like bitcoin is to money. In fact, the bitcoin protocol can be used to create competitive social contracts.

Point 4: "Anarchy" may semantically mean "without rulers," but what is a ruler? Under the DIYL mindset (http://caeconomics.wordpress.com/definitions-and-narratives/), my mindset, it doesn't matter what a ruler is in theory or by semantics, but in practice. Depending on what you are referring to as a ruler it might be desirable. Managers, judges, even people wielding physical force to enforce a contract can all be economically, socially and otherwise beneficial. They key behind the power of libertarianism and anarchism is, imho, decentralization of power, not absence of power. Opposition to monopolies on power, law, force...Not opposition to power, law, force...

There are no shortcuts, but I wish you the best of luck with your endeavour.

Anarchy starts with anarchists. Stop paying taxes, burn your social security card, dump your TV, and take your money out of the banks. If most people were to do that, we would get something close to anarchy.

not gonna happen

I agree.

For my personal use while talking to people I use the following analogy:

An atheist = a person who does not believe in an existence of the magical object called ''god''. Noone ever proved the existence of the so called god (a piece of paper called bible proves nothing). what are clergy then? - a gang of pedos, idiots, etc. that just use the uneducated masses.

An anarchist = a person who does not believe in an existence of the magical object called ''state''. Noone ever proved the existence of the so called state (a piece of paper called constitution proves nothing). What are governments then? - a gang of thieves, liars, etc that use the uneducated masses.

Yes, that's why the history of humankind knows of only one type of anarchic organisation: it is the self-sufficient, non-patriarchal, matrilineal organised nuclear community beyond the state, the church and the market.

How do you start an anarchy?  You cannot start an anarchy; the anarchy is always there, just as you cannot create the cold, you can only remove the heat.  Without people, there is anarchy, for the only rulers left of the universe are the various laws we use to explain why things react in which ways to what, and if we can define a ruler as someone with the free will to rule, we cannot accurately call those things rulers.

Rather, to return to the natural anarchy that began at the dawn of time, there would have to be no rulers--or, more accurately, no rulers by coercion, for, it is in my belief, there will always be voluntarily followed people of our world; parents who lead their children; the head of businesses who lead the people they pay for their time; teachers who lead their students; and so forth.

It's not about finding a plot of land somewhere, hoping and praying an invading nation stays out, because lets get real, nations always want more land, and if you wish to seastead, you must only wait for any government to stretch its law to include oceans.  Space is more plausible, but trying to exist around other people who do believe in states will inevitably get difficult (for, even in anarchistic societies, there will always be some society somewhere which believes your anarchy needs to be conquered, especially if those people outnumber you); this is all assuming the people who generally believe government is vital and necessary to life outnumber the ones who don't.

Therefor, to return to anarchy, the people who do not believe in government must outnumber at least the largest government, if not all people who believe in the state.  The revolution occurs first in the mind; the point is to change the minds of people, so they understand why anarchism is preferable.  If you're under the belief that this is impossible, and people will always believe in government, and separatism is the only way; you may as well give up now, because, as all previous attempts at anarchistic societies have ended, it will only fail, and you will be assimilated into the greater group of people who do believe in the state.  (Refer to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XhRnJz8fU) for an example of the most recent anarchism attempt I know of.)  Only until most people of this planet believe in voluntarism will we see a decline in government, and eventually, none; this, I believe, is the only way to achieve a life of anarchy.  The sad truth is, it likely won't happen in our lifetimes, but perhaps our children, or their children, will have something better.

Belief in the validity of government is nothing more or less than a consequence of bad parenting,

Virtually every person who has ever lived has experienced the use or threat of violence in order to compel obedience, typically from before their earliest memories. Because of those experiences they live the rest of their lives believing that it's good or necessary for some people to use extract obedience from other.

It's all just unexamined trauma from childhood, nothing more.

I agree; many parents treat their children as property and otherwise abuse them, which teaches them the behavior to believe themselves lesser than some higher being, whether it's their parents, their God, their government, etc.  However, there will, no matter what society we speak of, be children who are cared for by someone, if not the ones who created them, and so the leader/follower relationship will always be there, even if this leadership is not actually voluntary; I believe Stefan has a lot of information about this, and he theorizes, for the shift to occur, it begins through children raised to believe in self-worth and freedom.  However, for this to happen, parents must first have this belief to pass on, so the change initially occurs through people who once believed in obedience through violence, and then changed to believe in the above, for them to pass those new beliefs to their children.  This does happen, but it happens very slowly, and it's surely not the primary source of people who believe in voluntarism; at least, I know this is not how it occurred with me, for I was the child who was beaten at least once a week, and yet I believe in just the opposite of one would expect.

As for now, our best bet is both to help adults understand, and to help our own children understand; if most of us agree that treating children as property is morally correct (as was treating women and "lesser" men from the biblical days to more recent times as slaves was once morally correct), then beating a person who is a child isn't accepted as wrong.  For the parenting to change, parents must first change, and it's these lengthy shifts in global ideology that affects why I believe it'll take such a long time for anarchism to come about.

Government is a hallucination in the minds of politicians.

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new" - Socrates

yeah okay.
Maybe you guys out to practice what you preach, stop voting, go live in your little communes and stop shoving your socialism down our throats, m'kay?

Sweetheart, socialism is what you're sitting in right now.  Anarchism is the exact opposite of state socialism.  And, if you would read my very first post here, you'll understand what you're asking is impossible: there isn't even any land still in existence that isn't owned by government, and even if there was, the people who tried to develop an anarchistic society would be conquered quickly by the surrounding states.

Interesting title

I'm sure you can find land nobody cares about in the US.
That or you can buy some for cheap from an evil land owner that inherited it from the ancestors of native american rapists imperialist white cis male cowboy.
/sarcasm

Ha ha.

But seriously, no; not even land owners own their land, it's all owned by government.

http://www.usnews.com/dbimages/master/46301/GR_130820_dietz.jpg
Take your pick.

The land known as the United States of America, with its every border, is where government is present; to start a society without government, the USA would need to not be present in a specific area.  There is no land, within American borders, or out, where all the other nations are, where a society without government can take place.

Anarchism = without rulers.

And what I meant before; because you pay property tax on the land you own, you never actually own your land; you are only renting it from the government.

One little thing that might help: Stop calling it anarchy. How about "decentralized capitalism", or even, "decentralized governance".

People too closely associate the word "anarchy" with chaos/disorder. That right there makes people stop listening.

There is a good anarchist website and radio show http://marcstevens.net/ It is fun to read and listen.

Marc is a self-educated lawyer who helps people defend against statist attacks in courts.

They call this libertarianism, but it's still anarchy :P  I agree with you though, there is a lot of confusion about what anarchy actually is; since the schools are biased, anarchy is the death of society, while government is the savior, and that's as much anarchy as anyone really learns.

Libertarianism is actually how I was introduced to anarchy.

Indeed.

In any event, I think it would be more difficult (or at least take a while) to build the same animosity/misunderstanding around the term "decentralized" as there is around "anarchy" today. For one, in software circles, decentralization is obviously considered good, and there are a lot of people in, or adjacent to, the software space who are aware of that. Instead of being turned insta-hostile by the term, hearing something like "decentralized governance" may actually spark a little interest.

Gotta start somewhere. I feel like the term "anarchy" is absolute poison at this point and requires revision to even hope to get the conversation going.

We can certainly try it; I'll go ahead and refer to it as decentralized government from here on out and see if the reaction to there being no central government is any lighter.

Well there is decentralized networks like the mesh network that work on small scale, but for big scale networks hierarchichal topology is a must.

You could gather a group of Bitcoin Talk members and release them into the wild. I'm sure that would work.

I disagree; there's no single overhead ensuring all fast food chains are doing business well.  They all work just fine as their own separate entities.

And even then, non-chain restaurants do perfectly fine without any overhead at all.  Though they are all a part of the same food network, they don't necessarily have to be herded under one ruler.


What good would that do?

like he who has never eaten greasy fast food cast the first bun.

I think the best way to move toward anarchy, or put another way, more freedom, is to stop utilizing the current government and establishing parallel private services which fulfill the functions currently monopolized by the government.

Some examples of ways to get around government functions:

Welfare/charity: Everybody should help contribute to charities, and stop accepting financial assistance from the government. I earn about the median US income, but I am still eligible for some government financial assistance. This is just crazy. The government is making it so more and more people become dependent on them, the people who are dependent on the government will be less likely to let the government go away.

Contracts and wills: Why do I need to have the government get involved with my contract or will, when I can instead us gpg signed documents to do the same thing. Distribute the appropriate public keys to family and friends, make sure they know how to use them to verify the documents, and publish your gpg signed will to a couple different places.

Money: Obviously, we should utilize bitcoins as our base currency instead of the government inflated fiat currencies. Perhaps systems like Ripple can also be used among trusted parties. I like the idea of gold and silver as physical money, but I personally have never used any since they have high costs and demanding storage requirements.

Schools: For those who are up to the task, homeschooling can be a way to get around the government propaganda machine public school system.

Ah come on cheer up mike christ.
maybe I was a little harsh.
Nobody knows what will happen in the future, its all just speculation.
One thing I do know is that people are more open to ideas than they used to.
Having money that's out the reach of the government is a start though.
Also you know what they say, think globally act locally.
Maybe you can start a graphic design cooperative or something.
You wouldn't want a "top down solution" would you?

Good suggestions, but with one huge problem: with federal taxation taking a meaningful chunk of people's wages, that leaves very little left over for charity for most people. My wife and I donate a little - we'd donate a lot more if we didn't have to pay taxes. We take pride in the causes we support, and it'd be great to do that at a larger scale. But taxation crowds out private charity in our lives, and in society in general. People don't help their neighbor for a couple primary reasons: 1 - they don't have much extra money because it's been taxed away, 2 - they assume someone-else/gov will do it.

Chicken and the egg problem. Don't know how to solve it. It cannot be demonstrated (or even real attempts made to demonstrate) that private charity could ultimately take care of the less-able better than government without taxation dropping to near zero, and that can't happen until such private charity success is demonstrated (among many other reasons, obv).

All I ask is that you take the time to understand what you're arguing against before you begin arguing against it.

According to some people, Anarchy is all around us.

According to some other people, Anarchy is limited to small group of people with power/wealth.

According to me, the state is a gang enforcing it's will on us and allowing a privileged group to participate in the market while the rest of us are handicapped

Starting an anarchy is easy, but unless you only have like 2 - 20 well behaved people and a way to get more people from ever joining, it's probably not a good idea.

Here's how to start an anarchy:

1) Save up enough money to buy a private island.
2) Buy said island.
3) Renounce your citizenship of where ever it is you live and go live on that island.

Sounds good, so far, right?  It gets harder.

4) If anyone decides they want to live on your private island, you have to let them live there.  It's an anarchy, that means no rules.
5) If someone steals from you, it's theirs now.  You can't put them in jail because there's no such thing as prisons in an anarchy.  Of course, you can always try and steal it back again.
6) If anyone gets decides to kill someone else, if they have the means, they get to do so without any consequences.  See second point above.  Anarchy means no rules, which means, eventually, might makes right takes over.

Still want to start an anarchy?  Even the societies in the United States before there was a United States had rules and "government", it's just that their government looked nothing like ours does.  They had clear well defined rules, and if I remember my history well enough, if people broke enough of the rules, they get banished from the Native American tribe they were in.  Given how necessary cooperation was to survival back then, banishment usually meant death, unless they could get another tribe to accept them.  I tend to think they had a better system than they do now, but my point is that it wasn't anarchy, they still had rules and government, they just looked nothing like modern day government.  

Anarchy ≠ no rules
Anarchy = no ruling power / no hierarchy / no law (in the sense of "state-imposed" law).

Exactly; halfawake, the largest flaw in your argument is that anarchism necessitates a lack of rules, but it's actually government which leads to a lack of rules (see: North Korea.)  Anarchism means no rulers, which means everyone has rules; because the rulers aren't subject to rules, as they invent the rules, the whole point of anarchy is to stop those people from being above the law.

The other flaw is the private island thing; the island is still owned by government, you only rent the island.

I'm more than a little bit confused by your argument here.  North Korea, lack of rules?  No, North Korea is a totalitarian society, that means they have WAY, WAY too many rules.  I know I'm in the minority on these boards since I'm not a libertarian, but even I would prefer anarchy to that kind of society.  I don't live there though, thankfully.

In any case, I looked up anarchy and the definitions I found seem to back up my arguments.  But I do acknowledge that I was taking the argument to a bit of a logical extreme, I just think the cases I outlined there are the dangers of living in a place where anarchy is the system. 

Here's one of the definitions of anarchy, according to dictionary.reference.com: "A general lawlessness and disorder, esp when thought to result from an absence or failure of government."  Here's another: "confusion and disorder"  Of course, there's also this one, which backs up your logic: "a state of society without government or law."

I don't know why you're stuck on the idea of governments owning all the land in the world.  There are islands that are owned by private individuals that aren't part of any nation state.  Such a concept does exist.  It's just that they aren't that common, so most of them are probably already owned by some rich individual who you'd have to persuade to sell it to you if you wanted to start said anarchy.

No matter where you are in the world, you are subject to the larger nation's laws.  If the larger nation says, "get off this island, we're claiming it", you can never have enough guns to defend yourself against them.

Yes, the definitions take two sides; one implies political disorder and chaos, the other doesn't.  This is because people use the term anarchy in both ways; the first is to indicate a lack of politics, the second refers to the ideology.  The people who make definitions aren't infinitely wise, so it's up to everyone else to figure out what the word means, and there's some discrepancy as to what would occur in an anarchy, so the definitions must reflect that.

Anyways, what I mean by North Korea is, they don't have rules, because the ruler of North Korea can kill you for fun.  That is what I call complete disorder; when your ruler is so powerful, you can die for being accused of a crime you didn't do, that's a point in which there are no rules, since it's all up to the guy in charge whether he'll simply revoke that rule he created to do as he pleases, or not; after all, he's in charge of creating the rules.  Though you are correct to say that there is a maximum amount of law here, just as well, because very few individuals have maximum power, the citizens have no idea if their ruler will have a mood swing that day; that's truly a point where there are no rules, which cannot possibly occur even without government, as there would never be an allocation of power so great without it.  But I agree, I hope never to join them.

There is no real way to start an anarchy, just as you cannot start a religion named atheism.  It is the lack of rulers which indicate anarchy, just as it is the lack of God which indicates Atheism; it wasn't something that was created, it's something that exists only in the absence of something else.

Edit:  Check out this book (http://www.freedomainradio.com/free/books/FDR_4_PDF_Everyday_Anarchy.pdf) for an excellent intro and argument for anarchy.

hey mike if your beef is property taxes that can be worked out.
There was a vote in North Dakota on what to do with their oil profits.
They put ending property taxes up to vote. They voted no and decided to use the revenue for benefits, go figure.
Either way there are places such as parts of Tennessee where property taxes are so low that they're almost negligible.
And if you raise cattle in your land you would also not have to pay property taxes in any state, although I'm not sure.
You're just nit picking.

I have beef with there existing rulers at all; the property taxes are just a (unrelated to this instance specifically) piece of that.  This does not negate what I said earlier:


Are you saying this doesn't occur?  Because I guarantee you it does; the last time any entity said "no" to a larger nation, that nation invaded and forced their hand; of course, I'm referring to Iraq.

Excuse me for saying so but...

Want to start an Anarchy.  Reasonable thing to say if you crazier than dancing goat, don't want to outlive your hamster.

Plenty Anarchy to go 'round.  Just move to Somalia.  Or some other godforsaken hellhole where nobody has both will and ability to rule.

No rulers.  Means idiots with guns can just kick you out of house, shoot dog, rape wife, take food, kill only bull for meat, then burn your house down and laugh.  You can stop them for the price of bullet to your neck.  But no police, no rulers, no court to find them guilty.  Means no crime has been committed.

No rulers.  Means idiot with pair of pliers will go to cut down power lines for trade scrap copper for booze.  And another idiot with pair of rubber gloves will step over burnt twitching corpse and take pliers up pole again.  Nobody can get power.  If power available, nobody can pay for.  Go where might pay bill, some idiot with gun will just stop you take your money because you have it and he wants it.  Try send anyone bill for power, not work.  Mail not go through.  Can hire boy to run courier, but boy look like he have something to do, someone who pays him, will get robbed and shot.  Not long before money means nothing at all, no point even generating power. 

No police, but one in five work as security guard, for food only.  No other pay.  Until money, connections, whatever, to get food for security guards run out.  After that, gets really nasty.   Then you got bigger crooks, build organizations, lead many men with guns.  Most just by lying to them, some by feeding, some by letting rape all women in towns - have to destroy towns afterward, kill all the men, just the price of doing business. Otherwise someone will try for vengeance.

Want to start an anarchy.

You Americans got no fucking idea what anarchy is.

Ah, that old "Somalia is hell on earth" (paraphrased) canard. It isn't.

Starvation and water shortage is the key. Remove essential things that could keep us alive and there you go. In countries that are highly developed that is the best option. Civil disobedience, riots, millions on the street, fall of government and so on.
Or some scenario from a Zombie movie, like Walking Dead.

People I cared about lived there. 

Is nothing to do with ducks.

You don't start an anarchy.  They naturally arise after revolution.  However, the huge productivity of relatively free people quickly creates a "power vacuum" that draws in those who make a living controlling others.

So, the members of the revolution specifically need to have a pact, where anyone who attempts to fill the power vacuum is immediately deported, with all necessary force, a plane, and a shove out with a parachute over the nearest tyranny, who will gladly accept another tyrant and not fire on your transponder. A variant of mutually assured destruction.