So the important thing about @slatestarscratchpad‘s vision of Archipelago is that it is just a single liberal society with a relatively-decent welfare state.  Any potential traits that might make it not-that-thing, that might push it in the direction of being genuinely a collection of different polities with meaningful power over their citizens, have been pointedly scrubbed away for posing too many obvious problems. 

I mean, to start with, there’s the whole bit about the system being run by an omnipotent dictator who can unilaterally impose his will in order to keep the wheels turning.  But focusing on that is kind of cheap; we can dismiss it as a historical artifact of the fiction from which Archipelago arise.  Beyond that –

You can’t employ coercive power in order to keep your citizens, or even your children, from leaving your society.  You can’t even impose (meaningful) limitations on the dissemination of information that might make your citizens or your children want to leave in the first place.

You can’t avoid paying taxes to the central government.  And it will use those taxes to further its own policies and to support its own welfare state – whose functions include carting off your own citizens and children, if they ask it to do so.  This explicitly includes redistributive taxes specifically imposed on people who find that they no longer wish to pay their local taxes and wish to employ exit rights. 

So what can you do, as one of the “islands” of the Archipelago?

You can impose whatever rules you want on your citizens, so long as they agree to follow them.  If they stop agreeing, you stop being able to make them do what you want, because you can wield neither coercive force nor economic restriction against them. 

This is exactly the situation that you’re in now, as a citizen of the United States of America.  Nothing is stopping you from forming a little conservative Christian club whose members all swear to follow the laws of God and to accept punishment if they sin.  For that matter, nothing is stopping you from declaring yourself to be God and issuing divine commands to anyone willing to heed them.  Nothing is stopping you from forming a radfem commune or an anarchist commune or a we’re-making-Plato’s-Republic-for-realsies commune.  Nothing is stopping you from raising your children according to any cockamamie ideology you want, or from getting together with a bunch of your friends and collectively raising all your kids according to that cockamamie ideology. 

…except that you have to pay your taxes, and you have to let go of anyone who wants out, and you have to let the state make sure that your kids receive a sufficient dose of publicly-endorsed counter-brainwashing normalizing education. 

Anyone unhappy with this state of affairs is not going to find that Archipelago solves his problems. 

Similarly: “capitalism for some, post-scarcity Fully Automated Luxury Communism for others” is not a meaningful position.  If it’s possible to go live in FALC-land, the logic of capitalism will collapse when you attempt to apply it to your own life, even if some of the trappings of the capitalist lifestyle (jobs, status-through-money, etc.) might be psychologically appealing.

…this topic really deserves a much longer and more substantive discussion, but it’s late and I am super tired.