Anarchy
Speaking of systems laced with draconian rules that claim to offer freedom, let’s dive into the modern interpretation of anarchy that has been used as an organizational structure by organizations like Antifa and Occupy Wall Street. (There are about a hundred radically different political systems that call themselves anarchies, so we will focus on the governance structure in a broad sense that will apply to most.)
The goal of most modern iterations of anarchy is to create an environment in which direct, opt-in democracies can organically form and dissipate. Anarchists want people to be able to leave and join new voting bodies whenever they feel it is in their personal best interest. This system is not that different from that originally pushed by the Seasteaders, a group of people that wanted to create floating cities made up of modularized housing units that could split off from city states and join new ones whenever it became optimal to do so (with the caveat being that in the Seasteaders’ case, not all of these city states operated on a direct democracy model).
We suspect that people who promote this view of anarchy do so as they imagine this is the way human societies organized themselves before state-level government existed. To an extent, they are correct. What they miss is that these early governments also had a survival-of-the-fittest dynamic in which stronger groups would raid the weaker ones, kill their male members, and enslave their female members (a practice common across geographies, see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for evidence of this widespread practice).
This type of practice disproportionately selects for dictatorial tribes that feature strong central governance structures. This stands in contrast to the types of governments anarchy selects for when you have hidden rules, like “no killing someone for leaving your tribe” and “no stealing resources from other political units.”
The reason why we have almost no example of anarchy staying functional outside of cases in which it is surrounded by large, peaceful democracies is because it is inherently unstable. Most forms of anarchism cause hundreds of small political units to form within a constrained geography. Those political units that tend toward strongmen with a tendency to physically dominate their neighbors typically end up snowballing in power, which results in the entire political structure being controlled by one strongman. (This is as true for Seasteading as it is for CHOP.)
Can this proposed governing structure be made to work? Like communism, anarchy always seems to end the same way when tried. Instead of ending in single party dictatorships as communism does, anarchy-based governance structures consistently lead to dissolution within a decade or a single strongman in power. Unlike communism, anarchies do not appear to be stable even at small scales (families can run well on communism … we have yet to see a family that runs well on anarchy).
In the same way communism inevitably leads to a snowball of power consolidation, anarchy inherently can either go in that direction or lead to a snowball of power decentralization to a point at which it offers nothing to connect its members or features so many norms of conduct that it becomes prohibitively difficult to interact with. However, like communism, the inevitability of anarchy’s flaws are largely reliant on human nature and therefore might be fixable with an AI lattice in the background.