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Archanarchy
Technology > Application > Augmentics
Culture and Society > Metaphysics > Philosophy
Culture and Society > Politics & Government
Culture and Society > Metaphysics > Philosophy
Culture and Society > Politics & Government
 Image from Bernd Helfert |
In short, one who believes that laws imposed by, say, thermodynamics are no more just nor absolute than the ones imposed by the state.
Politically, Archanarchists share many views with anarcholibertarians, and reject all forms of coercive government and structured legal constraints on behaviour; but they also strive to be free from any physical constraints as well.
In practice this means archanarchists refuse to define themselves in physical terms, sometimes incorporating their mentalities in bodies derived from baseline human DNA, at other times switching to vec bodies or incarnating as sentient clouds of utility fog. Quite often they take up existence as virtual reality beings, generally living inside artificial universes which bear very little relationship to real-life. The closest most modosophonts can get to the archanarchist ideal is a virtual cosmos set up so that those inhabiting it are free to alter its rules at will.
In the case of such a virtual universe the computronium on which the virch is run is still subject to the laws of the universe in which it physically exists.) For this reason some hard core archanarchists choose to have all knowledge of the non-virch world edited out of their minds, upon being uploaded to such a space. These virtual archanarchists inhabit what amounts to a lucid dream, unaware of any larger reality.
A number of archanarchist societies exist independently of the Sephirotic empires, and in the Outer Volumes and Periphery several archanarchist colonisation start-ups are proving successful; but the great majority of archanarchist polities are found in Keterist space or associated with the TRHN or in the Free Zones. Limited contact with the Diamond Network and Solipsist Panvirtality seems to indicate that some sort of archanarchy is favoured by several of the cultures within those meta-empires.
A respectable number of transapients appear to have archanarchist sympathies, and perhaps the ultimate expression of archanarchy is manifest in the technology for creating basement universes which most god-watchers believe exists among the greatest archailects. While different universes may have different vacuum properties (and thus different fundamental particles and forces), they are still subject to the laws of physics. In particular, the laws of thermodynamics will apply to any universe, as will general relativity. Ultimately the quest to escape the more fundamental laws is doomed to failure for this reason. But the opportunity to choose the initial conditions of a basement universe is probably the closest any entity can get to existential freedom.
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Development Notes
Text by Steve Bowers, additional material by Luke Campbell, Michael Zimmet and Mark Ryherd
Initially published on 31 December 2007.
Initially published on 31 December 2007.
