No, not "leader."  "Market maker", perhaps (and that's me talking).

Also, these folks have been working on this for decades.  They're preparing to survive the collapse of the internet, as we know it.  For fictionalized accounts, read Cryptonomicon and Halting State, for example.

Not always.  Sometimes the cost to the greater society is harsh from an experiment gone wrong.  Two such examples would be Easter Island, which destroyed itself and erased any possibilites of the rest of humanity from learning from their mistakes along the way; and the Wiemar Republic, which destroyed itself and begot a society with a very destructive meme that nearly infected all of Europe and Asia.

And it doesn't appear to me that humanity learned all that much from the Wiemar Republic, either; since we appear to be starting down their same path again in the modern world.

http://vimeo.com/9968399

This video is interesting.It explains how a community can take steps toward claiming back some self government.

never heard of that


The way I heard that joke was, in heaven the british great you, the french cook, the italians provide the entertainment, and the germans keep things running smoothly.  And in hell, the french greet you, the british cook, the germans provide the entertainment, and the italians keep things running smoothly.  I had never heard it with the addition of the swiss.

I lived in Brazil during the mid-1980's.... and it was as bad as the Wiemar Republic or even worse with a relative national debt (to national GDP) owed to foreign countries as bad or worse than what America is currently facing.  I keep hoping that America and/or Europe isn't going to discover runaway inflation like I experienced in Brazil or all of the screwy government programs to try and keep prices under control with the "Plano Cruzado".  The amazing thing would be to see how Brazil pulled it self out of that quagmire.... which was decidedly a different approach than what the Wiemar Republic used in a similar situation.  Of course some would say Brazil pulled it off by sacrificing the rain forests of the Amazon River basin, but that is something for another thread.

As for Easter Island, since we are talking about it I would say humanity has at least been able to learn at least something from that experiment.  Using other historical analogies, England faced a very similar kind of crisis in term of running out of wood to sustain its industries, but there was one thing that ended up saving England from a similar fate (or super-charging the engine of destruction.... you can argue the difference if you like):  Coal from Wales and south-western England.  That in turn sparked the Industrial Revolution which is still working its way throughout the world.  Nuclear energy has looked like it might be the "solution" to resolve the problems of burning coal, but there are decidedly some problems with that alternative to save the next step.

Here are counter examples to the two that you mention, but at the same time the social experiments were performed and a bit of a warning to mankind is also in those examples too.  With the current world economic crisis, is the result going to be something more like the end of the Wiemar Republic of the 1930's or the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1990's?  The consistent thing to learn from both lessons is that the governments which caused the crisis (speaking of governments like the American government rather than parliamentary governments... although that may also happen) usually fall apart in extremely stressful economic environments.  This is a sobering thing to think about.

The problem with the solution to the Wiemar Republic problems is that the resulting government was intolerant of other viewpoints to the point of genocide and they were willing to extend that intolerance world-wide.  I hope I haven't invoked Godwin's Law just now either.  Those guys usually have a funny way of creeping into any conversation on the net eventually, don't they?

Some would say the pre-war German government was financed by industrialists in the US such as Henry Ford and Prescott Bush.The same people control things now so I think history will repeat itself.China likes to take over countries economically rather than militarily.

Some people are following this model

PNNAC.ORG The Canadian Free Man On The Land Society - they accept bitcoins as their preferred donation model.
http://www.pnnac.org/index.php?page=about


The Shire Society - A voluntary society based in New Hampshire that will accept online signatures soon.
http://forum.freekeene.com/index.php?board=30.0