Thanks to the covid-19 virus, or more accurately, the hysteria that came as a result of it, we are facing a great many changes in social interaction for the foreseeable future. As agorists we ought not sit idly by merely allowing these changes to happen to us. Instead, let us take positive action to make changes that we know will improve society. Agorism is not only about basic respect for persons, and freedom from the state, it is about finding voluntary solutions to whatever problems exist in society. The recent lock-down of much of the world has created a multitude of new problems, which have in turn created a multitude of opportunities for voluntary solutions.

Peer-to-Peer Solutions in Uncertain Times

While we now know that this particular virus was nowhere near as threatening as the officials and media told us, real threats from disease do exist and given the speed of modern world travel, a real pandemic is entirely possible. This cannot justify the over-reactions and draconian restrictions that were put into place, but it is a real world possibility that we must face. With the governmental restrictions in place we have seen not merely the official “social distancing” of staying 6 feet away from our fellow humans, but also a destruction of the economies from local to global — through simply avoiding getting together in stores or other places to exchange goods and services. Entire businesses have been shut down, preventing the sales and in some cases even storage of goods. When those who are staying home are most in need of shipping and delivery services, companies such as Amazon are being forced to change the way that they work so that quality and timeliness of service both decrease.

The market being fairly resilient even when ham-stringed by regulation, has responded to fill needs of consumers in these strange times. Some of those solutions to these problems have taken a form close to true peer-to-peer exchanges, where an individual simply hires another individual directly to provide some goods or to carry out a task. These already exist in most facets of our lives. Most people are familiar with Uber and Lyft, the ride sharing services, but many other peer-to-peer solutions exist as well.

Banking: Peer-to-peer lending sites range from micro-lending sites that are simple charity sites that let you loan money with no interest, such as Kiva, to for profit sites such as Peerform, LendingClub, Upstart, Prosper, and Funding Circle. The last of these loaning amounts up to half a million US dollars.

Food: With restaurants being forbidden from allowing eat-in options, delivery and to go orders are all that are keeping some restaurants going. Services such as: Uber Eats and Grubhub provide an opportunity for restaurants to keep the doors open, while providing much needed food to customers who are ordered to “shelter in place.”

While grocery delivery was common 50 years ago, the cost of such services became too much for grocery stores to handle so the delivery services all but disappeared. To fill this void, particularly during this time where many people have stayed home out of fear of either the virus or the police enforcing stay at home orders, peer-to-peer services have stepped up to fill the very basic need of getting food to eat. Businesses like Instacart, Shipt, and FreshDirect have brought back grocery delivery by working for the individual rather than for a single grocery store. Stores found it was not profitable to maintain a delivery service but innovative people found a way to create the same service, but in a way that would be individually profitable. Reacting to current market demands, some provide special services such as “no contact” services where the client and the delivery person never interact personally. While the in-house model of grocery delivery is essentially dead, these new platforms that allow shopping from many different stores have stepped in to fill a consumer need.

Even before this hysteria, there have been moves toward the peer-to-peer economy. Ebay was created to buy and sell beanie babies, but exploded into a massive online peer-to-peer marketplace. With seed and gardening companies caught off guard and thus overwhelmed, some even refusing to take orders at this time, eBay has become a good peer-to-peer resource for seeds and other gardening needs. The flexibility of the platform allows for quick response to consumer needs. China based Alibaba has followed suit, and more platforms for peer-to-peer retail seem to be created each year.

Other examples of these near to peer-to-peer exchanges include a site that connects truck and van owners with individuals and businesses who need large items delivered on demand, and there are several more that are designed to allow you to be paid for delivering items along the route you already plan to travel, whether this is domestic or international travel, pleasure or business.

So while this age of near peer-to-peer exchanges seems to be thriving, there are drawbacks. Some are the expected negatives found in any new model: drivers complaining about not being paid enough, customers expecting a higher quality of service, even technical difficulties due to either programming issues or simple internet issues. These will be overcome as they have been in standard models of the past. However, there are problems that are unique to the agorist community. Each of these businesses is centralized, providing a location that can be easily targeted by regulations, including tax regulations. This fact more than any other means that these are not true peer-to-peer services. However they are tantalizingly close to the models agorists need. Furthermore they have shown what is essentially proof of concept as well as the fact that there is a demand for the peer-to-peer economy.

Since we, as agorists, have no desire to feed the state’s coffers, we need to create a decentralized marketplace for peer-to-peer services, one going far beyond mere grocery delivery or ride sharing. Such a marketplace could offer up opportunities to hire or sell any service, well beyond any of those already mentioned. For instance, do you need a house painter? Well, just plug that into the search and up comes a list of painters who will work with you voluntarily, outside of the normal system.

Adding even greater flexibility, each individual could post what forms of payment they are willing to offer or accept, from barter to crypto-currency, to facilitate the exchange. As it develops further, technology such as Ethereum could ensure contracts are upheld on both ends. Every transaction would be determined only by the individuals involved. End-to-end encryption could ensure private interactions remain just that: private. This of course denies the state an easy way to track and control our purely voluntary interpersonal interaction.

Think of it as a sort of clearinghouse. The purpose of which is simply to connect the individual with the person that is capable of fulfilling their need. Instead of one centralized business which would be subjected to the state’s tyranny, we would have countless individual transactions between individuals. Perhaps each member could act as a node so that if one node is removed, the system as a whole remains. Not only is this more personal, but it is much more difficult for the state to detect.

The Power of Barter

This approach could create a unique situation where we have just about come full circle back to bartering, or perhaps to a more refined form of barter, say barter 2.0. Though cryptocurrency serves even more carefully as a marker for value than gold, salt, or any other commodity or currency of the past, it is literally only useful for marking value. It has no intrinsic value apart from its role as a marker. This is not necessarily a negative, but it does differ from all previous forms of money and so this deserves to be noted.

It deserves to be noted because of the history of money. One of the reasons that money came to exist was that bartering was so limited. If you needed shoes but the shoemaker did not need the whole cow that you had to offer, reaching some agreement was difficult. To a large degree this has not changed. What has changed however is the ability to communicate and the pool of potential customers for your product or service. Instead of having just one local shoemaker or butcher as your only potential trade partner, today with the speed and spread of the internet we have billions of potential partners. Computing power allows for even complicated multi-person trades that were simply too difficult in the past.

But how is this a good thing when money too is getting to be more flexible and more powerful? Cryptocurrency is still very much in its infancy and the overwhelming majority of people lack the knowledge of how to use it. For this reason cryptocurrency isn’t a viable option for most people. This will change, but during the transition period barter can step in to fill some of the gaps.

While the notion of bartering may cause some who read monetary theory to cringe, this hypothetical platform would be a step closer to bartering as it would allow each set of individuals to determine what is acceptable payment. That payment may take the form of money but it need not, meaning that money is just one of the barter options. Perhaps because of this, it is time for us to rethink the power of bartering. Bartering is the epitome of peer-to-peer interaction.

There is another very practical and empowering way in which this system of barter is a practical step forward: It opens up options. Just as with farmers selling “farm shares” that would be paid off with future harvests of fresh vegetables and fruit, sellers or service providers can offer up their products and services directly when they lack the money to buy what they need.

Cutting out the step of acquiring money first has two implications worth noting. The first of course is that it gets the trade done. The agreement is more quickly reached allowing each party to move forward with their own specialty. The second is that this direct trade makes the effort of the state to steal a part of that trade very difficult. There is no common value that the state can point to in order to demand a given percentage. What is the currency value of a trade of, say, mechanical work against three deliveries of fresh fruit and vegetables? How does the state determine how much profit comes from a trade of a cord of hardwood against laundry services?

Imagine the stereotypical hardship case used today: the single parent. This single parent is struggling to afford daycare, food, shelter, and all necessities of life. What do they have to trade? Maybe they have editing knowledge but have not found the opportunity yet to get set up in a traditional job, in part because they cannot afford the daycare necessary to be out of the house for hours on end. A new restaurant has started up but cannot afford to pay for someone to design their menu. Both put out their needs and the decentralized network connects them. The restaurant gets a new menu, and perhaps some articles edited for journals to promote the restaurant. In turn that restaurant provides the less-than-pretty vegetables and other food to the single parent. The result is that both are better off while the cost to each is negligible. Without going through the getting money first step, they have boosted the economy while denying the state the opportunity to take a substantial portion of the trade from each of them.

None of this is to deny the flexibility of money, particularly the modern forms of money that are coming to exist. But unlike the past the emergence of money, or rather these new forms, does not ring a death knell on barter. With the improvements in markets and communication money and barter can live side by side, each working where they are most efficient.

Finally for those not convinced about the viability of the peer-to-peer economy consider this: The peer-to-peer economy is our natural fall back anyway. When we are in need and the usual avenues are shut down we turn to each other, our neighbors, our families. We turn to individuals. That is our baseline, our economic foundation, with centralized business (and government) being the anomaly.