The anarchist thought experiment
Let’s suppose that starting tomorrow, the entire US government disappears. The police, the soldiers, etc… are still there but the leadership is all gone. Imagine the borders are gone, and all laws are suddenly void. What happens next? Obviously chaos. But after that? People will want to rebuild rule of law.
Several problems need to be solved: protection, money, and justice.
Protection
We might think that people with guns would take over. They’d make everyone into slaves. They’d be able to force anyone to do anything. This is true. This might last for a long time (think oil rich countries). Or it can last a short time (think historic agriculture economies). Armed people can only take so much from a labor-based economy. The most valuable asset is the people, and you wanna keep them happy. But if all the value comes from putting a pipe in the ground and pumping oil then labor is only valuable if it helps you pump.
Money
You need a currency. Without a government-backed currency, you need alternatives. The currency would have to get buy-in from the armed people. Why? They’re not economists. This is because they’re responsible for keeping physical borders protected. Within those borders, you don’t want multiple currencies. What would you gain for the added confusion? You also don’t want to share your currency with other armed groups if you can avoid it, though you still want to be able to trade. People like gold. Suppose you choose it. What happens when another armed group somehow finds a trove of gold somewhere? They can wreck your economy by flooding it with foreign currency. No, you want to control the supply. The armed group would like supply decisions to be made within the borders.
Justice
What about a judicial system? You need to create laws. But laws on their own have no value. You need enforcement. Your armed people should therefore believe in the laws. But we don’t want might makes right. Having a bigger gun shouldn’t mean that you always get your way. However, this depends on the economy. A labor economy doesn’t work if cheaters can always get away as long as they have more “might”. A different group that put effort toward being fair would have a more thriving economy and would outperform the might makes right economy. Would you continue to work hard plowing your fields if you knew that your neighbor can take everything at any time? Of course not. Your incentive to work is diminished. There need to be consequences.
Suppose you’re Apple
Now that understand the basics, how would this actually play out given the players we have in the world. Suppose you’re Apple during the government apocalypse. You know your products are valuable, but how do you ensure that you can continue making iPhones? You need to hire armed security. And you need this security around your headquarters and around your factories. You also need to protect your employees. You might wanna arm a certain perimeter around your HQ so you can protect your employees at home too. You want to protect your factories too. It would be bad if other armed groups could raid the facilities and just take things. They could steal IP and make their own factories. Ideally, you’d want your HQ and your factories on the same contiguous plot of land. If you’re Apple, you might wanna move your HQ employees to China right next to a Foxconn factory. It’ll be easier to protect the entire company this way.
Supply lines and travel could be huge. Many electronics companies are in Shenzhen, which borders with Hong Kong which is surrounded by water. If enough American companies wanna move their people to Shenzhen, this could be a problem for both the US and China. Bad for the US because many companies would be incentivised to move entirely to China. Bad for China because the immigration may come in the form of an invasion into China. Let’s suppose Apple instead decides to build its own factories near the HQ. This likely won’t work because the company would starve before it had a chance to ramp up. And there would be a massive shortage of factory labor.
However, software is still in the US, so what good are the products on their own and without iOS? Apple could technically brick all iPhones via a software update. This means China takes a big risk by holding manufacturing hostage.
What about software companies?
Suppose you’re a software company like Google. If you’re protected by an armed group, this group wouldn’t want any other group to have access to Google Maps. However, Google is a big and expensive operation that only makes sense at scale.The company wouldn’t be able to exist if only 50,000 could use it. It would cost too much to keep it running.
Nukes
What about nuclear weapons? The nukes are dangerous, but who would you bomb? If you bomb Shenzhen, then the world loses precious factories that we all need. If you bomb Moscow, the world loses little. The Russian economy is based on oil and raw materials, so killing people does little harm. As an individual, you’re ironically incentivised to live within the blast radius of a globally valuable human resource. Since the world is very interconnected, bombing Shenzhen is stupid.
You also want to live in a diverse city for this reason because it disincentivize countries from nuking you. China could be more weary of nuking SF because of Chinatown. It’s not a guarantee though.
Localism
It’s possible that government disintegration would actually disincentivize much work that is done in tech. Much of this tech depends on international supply chains. It depends on people working together, but if they’re not, then localism becomes the prevailing philosophy. This means modern tech goes backwards simply because it’s not needed.
