>>112
>About 60 people.
All pledged? I thought pledging was optional. That's 600k with the very generous assumption that they all mean it, not bad. Of course I know that with these things it's one thing to say on the internet that you'd do it, and another to actually do it.
I myself always wondered about the transitory communities. After all, 10k is a lot of money, and just up and moving in the middle of nowhere (even if the plan is to make it not the middle of nowhere) is a lot of commitment.
But say your project involved that everyone move to location 2 hours drive from Manhattan. Even if it doesn't work out, it's not like you wouldn't have any backup options. Of course who wants to actually live in New York, and all the serious projects require serious commitment. Meanwhile, /pol/ or other imageboard community has never meaningfully organized IRL. One would naturally wonder if such an effort would be bogged down by infighting and personal friction, and what steps need to be taken to prevent that.
So there would be at least a two stage process: Before an actual community, such as what you have proposed, is set up, the interested persons can move into a temporary community. This temporary community would not need to be long-term sustainable and won't try. It won't realize most of the interesting goals that such an effort would be justified by. However it would require relatively small commitment, and would be set up such that members can pull out at any time and not be worse for wear.
Say you organize a few dozen people to move to Concord, NH and rent rooms or flats in the same apartment complex. This accomplishes the goal of bringing everyone in close physical proximity, to the point where some self-government can be established. Obviously you can't violate state or federal law, but when everyone living in a building is "us", there's a lot of potential for creating de facto rules for each other. Perhaps even to the point where minor offenses against local customs go unpunished because nobody reports them. Eg. hanging a Nazi flag on your door would probably not go smoothly in most places, but if everyone in the building is a /pol/ack, whose gonna call the cops?
Again in the same example there is insurance against failure. Say it turns out /pol/acks are shit and the whole idea is doomed. You're still in a decent city in a decent state, you can just find a job, move to a new apartment, and forget about the whole thing. Just moving there to begin with isn't asking that much either, most people these days (especially young men that make up the imageboard demographic) move around a lot anyway.
On the other hand, if this doesn't conclude in horrible catastrophe, and these people are able to coexist for, say, a few years and come to rely on each other in various ways, it is now much less absurd to ask them to commit significant personal assets and move away from civilization for a /pol/ project. Even those unaffiliated with this temporary community will be influenced, because you can tell them "look, we've been doing something similar for years and it worked fine".
I don't see much discussion of this sort of transition stage. People always focus on the final goal. New Siberia wanted you to move halfway across the globe to a foreign country and adopt a rural career (farming and raising sheep in Russian wastes, not exactly a great line on your CV if you end up needing to get a normal job one day). Namibia wanted to move to fucking Africa, build a town, and get entangled in conflict with local government. Even you expect a fairly large monetary and bureaucratic commitment.
Meanwhile, "we're all moving anyhow, let's all move to the same place, how bad could it be?" is much easier a pill to swallow.
>it would be foolish to trust a socialist or third world government
True, but I think any serious enterprise in such places participates in the corruption. For instance, companies that do business in these countries will set aside budget to bribe officials, and many organizations readily collaborate with local criminal networks if crime is dominant. If there was a serious project based in such places, I think these would be the rational things to do.