We need to infiltrate our own governments with people who will actually listen to their constituents, and give The People a seat at the table once again. But how?
Plenty of sci-fi movies became reality. The biggest lie they ever told was it is not that easy. I guess we shall see. We are looking for a place to try and prove this idea
I've always found it laughable how all these people get in office to implement there own agenda rather than the will of the people - or one better yet, rather than fix all that is already BROKEN!
Secondly - you should be Bobby Kennedy's campaign manager because everything you wrote in the first seven paragraphs he should be stating verbatim!!!!
We like Bobby a lot. Also Vivek. Because they are having long form tough conversations with people and are open to the idea of decentralization of their own positions
We are building The Network State. (https://thenetworkstate.com if you don't know what that is). Some of the ideas discussed here are things we also talk about but you might be interested in that as well
It will likely take a multi pronged approach to regain the ground that has been lost.
One thing that was said to me recently was that it is difficult to win elections. It's not as difficult to win politicians.
So ... many years ago in a financial newsletter a guy suggested one way to make the banks more honest. Get a bunch of people to put a bunch of money in the same bank. Let it sit there for a couple months and then everyone pull it out at once. Due to the how banks operate on very little reserve, they will have moved about 90% of the monies deposited on to other things to which they are committed. Sudden withdrawal of a lot of money will hurt them as their reserves won't be met. I don't recall how little money was needed to accomplish this feat but it wasn't that much. $100,000? $500,000 I have no idea if there are new rules to prevent this but the idea that we do have ways of fighting back is fantastic! We just need to work en masse and get the evil foundation to crumble.
I will definitely be following everyone's thoughts here. Just got Francis Boyle's book on Resisting Medical Tyranny and it lays out ways to fight locally.
The problem is Linda Steele herself. Any representative will be the focal point for corruption. The way forward is to completely eliminate all political offices. Let citizens do ALL of it...debate about what is important, reach a consensus on how much to tax and how to spend it. Write simple laws that anyone can understand, and provide for the enforcement of these laws.
While this is true, we cannot go from A to Z and skip the rest of the alphabet. This is step 1 on getting there. If you have a better way please share. But so far this seems like the best plan to us
Anybody clearly going against current corruption at any level will be "taken out of the game", perpetrators and overlords never having to face any kind of accountability ...
This would require a long conversation, but it seems apparent that having a good grasp on decentralized and transparent systems needs to come first. May we recommend the book The Starfish and the Spider? The power of leaderless organizations.
The best coordinators are always the wisdom of the group. This is something we can prove, and we will.
Thanks for the reply and literature-recommendation!
How about: Holacracy, The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World by Brian J. Robertson, ISBN 978-1-62779-428-2 ??
Despite being designed for enterprises, with various modifications, it could be applied to larger societies.
The regeneration of body-parts means that ALL (or most) of the starfish-cells are stem-cells that have the genetic panoply to grow into any kind of starfish-, axolotl-, flatworm-, etc.-cell.
How and who could accomplish the seemingly impossible task to let every member (or at least a huge %) of society "enjoy" the consciousness and perception-capability with the adaptive power of stem-cells ??
Character and up-bringing (which, for obvious reasons, is being heavily sabotaged since at least five generations) are essential to roughly approach a more civilized society.
All starfish-cells have one common goal: to thrive as one complete organism.
Also current humans have one common goal: recklessly reap and hoard in the most egoistical way as much as possible for the survival of their personal, individual genes.
THAT is quite a different and utterly wrong interpretation of the word "common". With current technical possibilities, this could even lead to the demise of human civilization in a very short time.
The term "civilization" is an euphemism for the current kind of mass-societies.
Unfortunately, the news that NOBODY can survive on this planet as a reckless individual didn't make it to the MSM or educational entities. yet.
The GOP is obviously not the best at coordinating. When I say the best I mean qualitatively the best at organizing representation of constituents.
There is no President of the Internet.
In fact we didn't even vote. But the IETF gathered the best of what they had and developed standards (laws). If you want to be on the internet you have to abide by their standards. Fortunately, code is self enforcing because it is dumb and has no aspirations to take over the world (yet, at least).
I recently had the idea to run as a candidate who would promise to vote exactly in accordance with what my constituents voted on through an online liquid democracy interface. Most people would delegate their vote to someone whose opinion they trust, so in theory it wouldn't require a ton of engagement.
Some problems I foresaw:
- to be fair and secure, registration for participation in such a system would require verification of government issued ID, just as online financial institutions require for KYC law compliance. This creates a lot of administrative overhead.
- the most highly motivated voters will dominate the system, and these tend to be partisans. A campaign by either major party (spontaneous and viral or centrally coordinated) could lead to dogpiling. Such would probably be temporary since the other party will react, but it would likely still leave the >50% of independent voters underrepresented.
- to win initially, in most jurisdictions one will have to run inside one of the major parties. These have myriad mechanisms and cultural norms in place to keep outsiders out and hinder their chances, mostly centering around communication with the public. In races requiring a primary run, the party leadership can propagandize their primary voters against the new upstart with weird ideas. This would be mitigated somewhat where primaries are open, but that is not most places.
I would be happy to hear any ideas for dealing with these challenges.
These problems all have solutions, but are absolutely good to see. You wouldn’t need an ID per say. There are lots of different trust options for digital systems.
What we need is some kind of easy to use Sybil resistance mechanism. Govt issued ID seemed like the simplest and most familiar for most people from a UX perspective. I know there have been some proof of personhood proposals for distributed ledgers but they either require participation of some central issuing authority (i.e. Some org like the govt or a credential certifying body vouches for your ID on a public blockchain, see e.g. Atala Prism) or an in person mutual personhood vouching ritual (see e.g. Encointer which allows people to create local currencies potentially with UBI-like features). The US govt will not participate in the first kind of system any time soon, but a third party organization could take that role and amortize the effort across many use cases (maybe this already exist? Do financial institutions outsource identity verification to third parties?). The second type of system requires high engagement and doesn't scale very well or prove membership in a particular polity or region.
We need to keep government out of this. Our favorite solutions are decentralized trust ratings like Amazon or eBay use. We rate each other. But for voting, all that is needed is to prove that you are in my district. So I send you a postcard with a unique code on it and you plug it in verifying you received it. This is what Google does when you try to list a new business on Google maps.
But we could have different levels of trust. The system could send you a card. Different groups or even individuals could send you another card - or hand it to you if they know you in person.
All of these parameters can be different for each person running for office. To control Politician A - he might require anonymity. Politician B might say if you want to control him you have to be brave enough to be your real name in the online systems.
This allows many of us to create all kinds of different systems and plug them in and see what works best.
But we need to keep government out of it. Control our own tech and systems. In a decentralized and transparent way. If not, it will just be corrupted again.
It's a laudable idea, but I fear it would never work past local politics - you definitely have a chance there. You'd need a highly engaged constituency, and for local matters of import, people are willing to get engaged.
National - not so much. Your constituency might not even have time to go to work, and they'd have to be insanely motivated to sit through the 90% of ritual, bullshit, etc. that comprises most of what politicians do to get to the relevant bits.
I do hope I'm wrong about that, but I just don't see it happening.
Debate would be nice to hear. Obviously they are not budging. Trudeau was asked to leave he’s still here. The sooner we implement a sane head honcho, the sooner we can pass sane legislature, fix the constitution so this never happens again. Leaders are being killed for not following WEF rules,....so now what?
The idea of transparency is not new. But information security is the major issue with the idea. Representatives have meetings that are sealed under various classifications. The critical information from those meetings could not be shared in the way that these ideas require. In other words, unless every constituent is perfectly trusted, it is not possible to decentralize at higher governmental levels. At best, you can turn a single representative into a small group sharing power in the same position, but this seems like a way to increase bureaucratic bloat more than it offsets possible corruption.
That said, streaming the individual, unclassified meetings a rep has is interesting. It would give a massive disadvantage of course. The realpolitik of governance means that getting things done often requires you to trade on asymmetries of information. Streaming meetings is akin to playing poker with all your cards on the table while the other players keep theirs up. Everyone but you benefits.
If we are to consider decentralisation of politics as a viable course to take, maybe we might also consider the merits of returning to the original form of democracy...?
Those who hold power will never give it up willingly.
Part of the issue is the state monopoly on violence. Once the psychopaths and parasites get control, there is no "legitimate" way to push them out. They will just take everything they can.
One can posit any number of organizational variations, mass strikes, etc... all of which would, of course be met with heavy handed violence from the authorities. And, let's remember that one cannot even organize in US any more; that too is controlled by the state.
We're stuck until the grid goes down. The control requires cheap energy and that's ending. Absent cheap energy, life must become decentralized.
In the meantime, ANYTHING that can force electeds, appointeds, whatevers to resign is maybe the best that can be done. Think about what it would take just to force one idiot senator to resign. And don't pretend that would be non-violent, btw.
This idea would make the perfect movie. A fantasy of sorts. The only change thats going to happen is not going to be this tidy.
Plenty of sci-fi movies became reality. The biggest lie they ever told was it is not that easy. I guess we shall see. We are looking for a place to try and prove this idea
Two things:
I've always found it laughable how all these people get in office to implement there own agenda rather than the will of the people - or one better yet, rather than fix all that is already BROKEN!
Secondly - you should be Bobby Kennedy's campaign manager because everything you wrote in the first seven paragraphs he should be stating verbatim!!!!
We like Bobby a lot. Also Vivek. Because they are having long form tough conversations with people and are open to the idea of decentralization of their own positions
Vivek says he wants to get back in TPP and I think he missed there.
Have you looked at Vivek history? Appears he was in the habit of starting and stopping companies just for the money, not for useful business. Here's what one person found - I have not fact checked ;) https://thegoodcitizen.live/p/candidavant?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
We are building The Network State. (https://thenetworkstate.com if you don't know what that is). Some of the ideas discussed here are things we also talk about but you might be interested in that as well
It will likely take a multi pronged approach to regain the ground that has been lost.
One thing that was said to me recently was that it is difficult to win elections. It's not as difficult to win politicians.
We love this. We know all about it. Balaji is a hero of ours. Can we talk?
I'd like that. I mentioned y'all as soon as I read this.
So ... many years ago in a financial newsletter a guy suggested one way to make the banks more honest. Get a bunch of people to put a bunch of money in the same bank. Let it sit there for a couple months and then everyone pull it out at once. Due to the how banks operate on very little reserve, they will have moved about 90% of the monies deposited on to other things to which they are committed. Sudden withdrawal of a lot of money will hurt them as their reserves won't be met. I don't recall how little money was needed to accomplish this feat but it wasn't that much. $100,000? $500,000 I have no idea if there are new rules to prevent this but the idea that we do have ways of fighting back is fantastic! We just need to work en masse and get the evil foundation to crumble.
I will definitely be following everyone's thoughts here. Just got Francis Boyle's book on Resisting Medical Tyranny and it lays out ways to fight locally.
These are the kinds of ideas we need to be discussing. And organizing
I think that's what just happened at Silicon Valley lol
That was a run initiated by a public push from elite. What a mess. What a circus!
The problem is Linda Steele herself. Any representative will be the focal point for corruption. The way forward is to completely eliminate all political offices. Let citizens do ALL of it...debate about what is important, reach a consensus on how much to tax and how to spend it. Write simple laws that anyone can understand, and provide for the enforcement of these laws.
Ever person who shares your sentiment has never given us a path there, just an end goal. Can you see this is a tangible path? To exactly that.
While this is true, we cannot go from A to Z and skip the rest of the alphabet. This is step 1 on getting there. If you have a better way please share. But so far this seems like the best plan to us
Anybody clearly going against current corruption at any level will be "taken out of the game", perpetrators and overlords never having to face any kind of accountability ...
The American Way of Politics is finished.
If they take one of us out, pick up the flag. They cannot stop us all if we do it many places at once. From anchorage to Miami.
The American experiment already proved everything.
There are no excuses.
{... it in many places at once.}
Who coordinates ?... a new GOP, funded by the same, notorious overlords ?
The human genome is not made for societies that are that far larger than the Dunbar-# ...
We are no longer restricted to contiguous spaces. The internet already proved that these things are possible. That's why they are panicky.
Whoever that's best at coordinating is who coordinates.
{...Whoever that's best at coordinating is who coordinates...}
There we are (as I wrote before): a new GOP, funded by the same, notorious overlords ...
This would require a long conversation, but it seems apparent that having a good grasp on decentralized and transparent systems needs to come first. May we recommend the book The Starfish and the Spider? The power of leaderless organizations.
The best coordinators are always the wisdom of the group. This is something we can prove, and we will.
Thanks for the reply and literature-recommendation!
How about: Holacracy, The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World by Brian J. Robertson, ISBN 978-1-62779-428-2 ??
Despite being designed for enterprises, with various modifications, it could be applied to larger societies.
The regeneration of body-parts means that ALL (or most) of the starfish-cells are stem-cells that have the genetic panoply to grow into any kind of starfish-, axolotl-, flatworm-, etc.-cell.
How and who could accomplish the seemingly impossible task to let every member (or at least a huge %) of society "enjoy" the consciousness and perception-capability with the adaptive power of stem-cells ??
Character and up-bringing (which, for obvious reasons, is being heavily sabotaged since at least five generations) are essential to roughly approach a more civilized society.
All starfish-cells have one common goal: to thrive as one complete organism.
Also current humans have one common goal: recklessly reap and hoard in the most egoistical way as much as possible for the survival of their personal, individual genes.
THAT is quite a different and utterly wrong interpretation of the word "common". With current technical possibilities, this could even lead to the demise of human civilization in a very short time.
The term "civilization" is an euphemism for the current kind of mass-societies.
Unfortunately, the news that NOBODY can survive on this planet as a reckless individual didn't make it to the MSM or educational entities. yet.
Perhaps you misunderstood me.
The GOP is obviously not the best at coordinating. When I say the best I mean qualitatively the best at organizing representation of constituents.
There is no President of the Internet.
In fact we didn't even vote. But the IETF gathered the best of what they had and developed standards (laws). If you want to be on the internet you have to abide by their standards. Fortunately, code is self enforcing because it is dumb and has no aspirations to take over the world (yet, at least).
If Tucker Carlson decided to do this, the entire system would implode overnight.
We can think of dozens of other people too
This is the only feasible solution that I've heard.
Is it perfect? No. Can we work together and make it happen? Let’s see
You actually given me a little hope regarding my duty as a voter and I didn't think that was possible. Thank you for that.
I recently had the idea to run as a candidate who would promise to vote exactly in accordance with what my constituents voted on through an online liquid democracy interface. Most people would delegate their vote to someone whose opinion they trust, so in theory it wouldn't require a ton of engagement.
Some problems I foresaw:
- to be fair and secure, registration for participation in such a system would require verification of government issued ID, just as online financial institutions require for KYC law compliance. This creates a lot of administrative overhead.
- the most highly motivated voters will dominate the system, and these tend to be partisans. A campaign by either major party (spontaneous and viral or centrally coordinated) could lead to dogpiling. Such would probably be temporary since the other party will react, but it would likely still leave the >50% of independent voters underrepresented.
- to win initially, in most jurisdictions one will have to run inside one of the major parties. These have myriad mechanisms and cultural norms in place to keep outsiders out and hinder their chances, mostly centering around communication with the public. In races requiring a primary run, the party leadership can propagandize their primary voters against the new upstart with weird ideas. This would be mitigated somewhat where primaries are open, but that is not most places.
I would be happy to hear any ideas for dealing with these challenges.
It is possible that a win isn't even needed to effect change using these systems.
Yes if someone who is already there is willing to decentralize their current positions
What do you have in mind?
These problems all have solutions, but are absolutely good to see. You wouldn’t need an ID per say. There are lots of different trust options for digital systems.
What we need is some kind of easy to use Sybil resistance mechanism. Govt issued ID seemed like the simplest and most familiar for most people from a UX perspective. I know there have been some proof of personhood proposals for distributed ledgers but they either require participation of some central issuing authority (i.e. Some org like the govt or a credential certifying body vouches for your ID on a public blockchain, see e.g. Atala Prism) or an in person mutual personhood vouching ritual (see e.g. Encointer which allows people to create local currencies potentially with UBI-like features). The US govt will not participate in the first kind of system any time soon, but a third party organization could take that role and amortize the effort across many use cases (maybe this already exist? Do financial institutions outsource identity verification to third parties?). The second type of system requires high engagement and doesn't scale very well or prove membership in a particular polity or region.
What kinds of solutions are you aware of?
We need to keep government out of this. Our favorite solutions are decentralized trust ratings like Amazon or eBay use. We rate each other. But for voting, all that is needed is to prove that you are in my district. So I send you a postcard with a unique code on it and you plug it in verifying you received it. This is what Google does when you try to list a new business on Google maps.
But we could have different levels of trust. The system could send you a card. Different groups or even individuals could send you another card - or hand it to you if they know you in person.
All of these parameters can be different for each person running for office. To control Politician A - he might require anonymity. Politician B might say if you want to control him you have to be brave enough to be your real name in the online systems.
This allows many of us to create all kinds of different systems and plug them in and see what works best.
But we need to keep government out of it. Control our own tech and systems. In a decentralized and transparent way. If not, it will just be corrupted again.
Thanks, I appreciate concrete ideas! I'll think on these.
It's a laudable idea, but I fear it would never work past local politics - you definitely have a chance there. You'd need a highly engaged constituency, and for local matters of import, people are willing to get engaged.
National - not so much. Your constituency might not even have time to go to work, and they'd have to be insanely motivated to sit through the 90% of ritual, bullshit, etc. that comprises most of what politicians do to get to the relevant bits.
I do hope I'm wrong about that, but I just don't see it happening.
Start local, make better systems around it and it will be unstoppable
It's because the traditional constituency doesn't organize like their opposition.
That’s the whole point. We can and we should and we will.
Debate would be nice to hear. Obviously they are not budging. Trudeau was asked to leave he’s still here. The sooner we implement a sane head honcho, the sooner we can pass sane legislature, fix the constitution so this never happens again. Leaders are being killed for not following WEF rules,....so now what?
Start local
The idea of transparency is not new. But information security is the major issue with the idea. Representatives have meetings that are sealed under various classifications. The critical information from those meetings could not be shared in the way that these ideas require. In other words, unless every constituent is perfectly trusted, it is not possible to decentralize at higher governmental levels. At best, you can turn a single representative into a small group sharing power in the same position, but this seems like a way to increase bureaucratic bloat more than it offsets possible corruption.
That said, streaming the individual, unclassified meetings a rep has is interesting. It would give a massive disadvantage of course. The realpolitik of governance means that getting things done often requires you to trade on asymmetries of information. Streaming meetings is akin to playing poker with all your cards on the table while the other players keep theirs up. Everyone but you benefits.
If we are to consider decentralisation of politics as a viable course to take, maybe we might also consider the merits of returning to the original form of democracy...?
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/giving-democracy-a-chance
They are corrupted. We know this. But strengths will tell you weaknesses and vice versa. Their weakness is the same. They can be corrupted.
In fact this is the problem with corruption. "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways".
So how do we corrupt the corrupted to serve our interests?
Tyranny always ends in violence.
Those who hold power will never give it up willingly.
Part of the issue is the state monopoly on violence. Once the psychopaths and parasites get control, there is no "legitimate" way to push them out. They will just take everything they can.
One can posit any number of organizational variations, mass strikes, etc... all of which would, of course be met with heavy handed violence from the authorities. And, let's remember that one cannot even organize in US any more; that too is controlled by the state.
We're stuck until the grid goes down. The control requires cheap energy and that's ending. Absent cheap energy, life must become decentralized.
In the meantime, ANYTHING that can force electeds, appointeds, whatevers to resign is maybe the best that can be done. Think about what it would take just to force one idiot senator to resign. And don't pretend that would be non-violent, btw.
Not always. The only thing more powerful than tyranny is the tyranny of the masses. It is dangerous but we must harness it.