The basic structure of history is simple: From the dawn of civilization, humanity was trapped in Malthusian cycles of poverty and recurrent famine. Everything changed only when the revolutionary libertarian ideal of individual rights began to spread in the nineteenth century. Soon, both free speech and free-market competition eroded monopolies, allowing supply and demand to align more efficiently. This led to vastly improved economic productivity, making it possible—with the help of the Industrial Revolution—to achieve an unprecedented leap in living standards.
Cartels
Unfortunately, the libertarian mission was only half-complete. Eliminating monopolies was not enough, as many cartels persisted. These cartels claimed to serve the public good, only to grow even stronger with the help of the political process. What we need now is a second libertarian revolution—one that dismantles cartels once and for all. But how can this be achieved when the political system itself functions as a cartel-producing machine, constantly spawning new ones?
Luckily, there is a simple solution that bypasses the political process entirely: Thanks to the spread of libertarian ideas, it is now generally legal to circumvent cartels. Politicians do not dare to punish or obstruct consumer groups that simply want to purchase affordable, high-quality goods and services from legitimate producers. All that remains is to find an easy way for people to cooperate in bypassing these cartels.
High Information Costs
Why hasn’t consumer cooperation happened on a large scale? The answer is simple: high information costs and trust issues. Efficiently coordinating millions of people is extremely difficult—so difficult, in fact, that it undermined the Cooperative Movement. This movement sought to bypass cartels by organizing consumers into groups capable of collective action. In the last century, it valiantly attempted to carve out a third way between cartel capitalism and monopoly socialism, but ultimately, it failed.
Objective Values
But wait—now we have the internet. With information costs far lower today, why can’t the internet do more to coordinate supply and demand? The reason is simple: the reputation scores of hyperlinks and other online content are not fully personalized. They are too global or "objective" because they are algorithmically generated and limited to simplistic ratings. While this approach is technologically easier and cheaper, it often results in reputation scores that are inaccurate from an individual’s perspective. This flaw impacts not just search results but also video, article, comment and product recommendations across platforms like CNN, Fox, YouTube, X and Amazon."
Even worse, accurate online rankings of topics, products, information sources, and especially people are now practically impossible. This further isolates internet users, making cooperation and collective action far more difficult and costly.
In practice, the internet repeats the socialist mistake by failing to fully account for and reflect individual preferences. Instead, it relies on global, collective, "objective" reputation scores. The solution is simple: allow people to fully express their subjective individual values.
Subjective values
Imagine if people could instantly see the algorithmic scores of internet links and effortlessly adjust them through ranking. Now, imagine they could also rank other people and information sources. With this capability, algorithms could easily identify the exact types of people, news, products, and services you want and need.
This system would enable web browsers to adopt a "subjectivist" approach by automatically reorganizing web pages according to your personal preferences and recommendations from your trusted network. Each reader would see a customized version of every page, prioritizing articles, videos, and comments from their favorite authors and commentators. Disliked topics, authors, commentators and other sources could be automatically filtered out—effectively creating a personalized internet experience for every user.
The same principle could apply to Amazon or other online shops, where you’d instantly find the best products at the best prices—already vetted and negotiated by your trusted network. Even better, the highest-quality links from Amazon, YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram, news sites, online stores, and beyond could be automatically compiled into your personalized Dream Feed.
Subjectivist browser
Fortunately, this subjectivist-individualist-libertarian vision—where users have direct control over algorithmic scores—is entirely feasible. By developing websites and browser extensions that allow users to view and adjust algorithmic rankings in real time, we could enable precise ranking of virtually anything: topics, people, search results, businesses, products, services, videos, articles, authors, comments, and commentators. Combining your personal rankings with those of your trusted sources would generate highly accurate, personalized reputation scores for nearly every important link and item online.
No longer would people be isolated; instead, they could effortlessly coordinate and fully benefit from each other’s knowledge. Demand and supply would finally align much more seamlessly. All it takes is giving people the ability to express their preferences accurately online. It’s that simple.
