[LyndsySimon]

It sounds like what you're really wanting is a freer economic environment - the idea of small autonomous regions having the ability to issue their own currencies, for instance.

That said, though I strongly suspect that we're very close to each other w/r/t sociopolitical views, I don't think your overall assertion here makes sense. As others have said, someone in the Rust Belt can in fact trade directly with someone in Kenya today.

> It is kinda ironic that we went from a more libertarian trade system to a more restrictive one, as technology helped the state exert more control.

I don't think technology has had much to do with this, certainly not until the last handful of decades. My intuition is that tech didn't start having a huge impact on the scale of governments until mechanization in the early 20th Century, and didn't really take off until the advent of databases for managing entire populations' worth of data in the 1930s. Even now, with the seemingly exponential increase in surveillance power driven by advances in tech, I'm not so sure that a century from now that technology will be seen as a force driving the growth of state power. In fact, I believe the opposite will be true.

Look me up on social media somewhere. I almost always use my real name as a username, and it's very nearly unique. I'd love to have a longer-term conversation about how technology has increased the relative power of the individual - from prehistory (when a faction's military power was measured directly in how many fighters it could field) to today (when a single individual can occupy a populated region's police and military forces nearly indefinitely).