> It seems to me that the primary difference is your ability to reverse course once you have relocated if you aren't the guy at the absolute top. Rather, it's not the switching cost going in, so much as the switching cost going out - it's the same problem you'd face joining Scientology.

Yes, indeed. That is the essential question for Patchwork-based ideologies. However, that is something they actively try to think about

> The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.

Ok, but how exactly does an experiment lead to that? If that is the outcome that it generates, and people do not prefer that outcome, then they simply will not move there. So, if you are correct in your diagnosis, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The only thing you do have to worry about is discovering that your preconceptions were not accurate.

Look into the slave labor situation in the Middle East for an example of how people are lured into a voluntary working situation that quickly becomes slavery. Desperate people make poor choices mostly because of information asymmetry.

In addition, the eventual children of the people who moved there won't have made this choice, and the example of history says they won't easily be able to leave.