If we solve the 'Tyranny of The Masses' Problem, we can harness the most powerful force available to us. But can it be done safely? .... Yes. In fact, it already has.
All starts with handshakes and doing good deeds for your next door neighbors. Howeever this is why it's important to live around like-minded individuals, as similar frequencies are multiplied, rather than nullified, by those around us. Love the ideas here.
Agree on close nit communities. the people corrupting our systems are scaled way up and not afraid to harm us. So it is our goal to find the same trust and relationship in downscaled communities and upscale that. There are a bunch of really good ideas coming down the pipeline using technology to create highly aligned trustworthy webs of people.
Unfortunately, the "bad guys" own the media and are thus able to sway popular opinion through their widespread use of propaganda. I will guarantee a vote on lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, etc., would have passed early on in the pandemic due to the fear porn and propaganda that was out there. Maybe now, 3 years into this debacle people would finally vote on the rational side of things.
Substack, as great as the community can be...isn't decentralized.
It is great that many of these tools lower the barrier to entry, but in many ways they are only minor deviations from what has already been.
Also keep in mind, that while the authors may be more independent on average, they are still beholden to the incentives around them. Competing for the job of keeping the masses under narrative control is not the same as liberating them from information tyranny.
Decentralized compared to the media conglomerates? We disagree. As long there isn't a centralized control of the narrative it is a massive improvement. Can it be better? Surely. But it is wounding the people that controlled the narrative.
Agree. Most truths I have learned over the past 3 years have come from writers on Substack. iGov sounds like a brilliant way to move forward. Been having meet ups with a small group in my town and I will present this to them! Thanks for this hopeful, possible way forward!
The threat of the WHO sovereignty-grab by the 2023 IHR and 2024 International PLANdemc Treaty: we’ve got until November 2023 for Congress to repeal IHR modifications!
Well, you haven't spelled out what corruption actually is, so you might have people looking to fight corruption who have different ideas of what is corrupt, ultimately based on their bias.
Yes especially the lobbyists--the Supreme Court actually went the other way recently, allowing corporate donations to be counted as individual donations or something. Also maybe term limits for Congress.
Many comments I see from different articles and authors often are filled with violent anger. Unless we can find a method of reform that focuses on as little violence as possible we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Again aggressive folk with self-righteous desire to control will push their agendas believing they have the answers for everyone.
It's a bold, outside the box plan. It has potential. But finding candidates who are willing to turn down lucrative contributions goes against human nature. It seems to me it's the highest hurdle to overcome.
Get in touch with James G D'Angelo he may have ideas for where to push first. I think a citizen initiative in every ballot in every state where possible that is simple enough to put in the title may be the only way to get change fast enough to matter. It would be bipartisan as they want to prevent the others or look like scum for not doing it. My initiative would be simple Votes in all tiers of government are AGGREGATED BY PARTY before recording or publishing, no possibility of recording individual votes, it short-circuits the ability to sell your vote or suffer from party retribution.
Option 4 is what I have tried to preach to people because the other options bring pain and suffering.
Ex-Military should not be a automatic reputation point, to many it is a disqualifyer, I suggest you consider the value in promoting it.
I love the idea of built in resilience. I like to promote the search for systems that gravitate to the desired outcome without needing permanent HARD work, the default should be where we want to go.
I also would like systems to be considered with a longer time scale. China has 50 year plans, they are the worlds biggest megacorporation the size of a big nation state, their export companies have a large parent company because that is how they designed it. Any good system should be at least as strong as the Chinese system ad able to compete with it on equal terms.
Verification has to be personal as well. You need two neighbours to vouch for you. There must be multiple levels of verification, perhaps 3, some that are NOT DIGITAL and subject to trivial hacking. Assuming you can vouch for only 10 people your ability cannot be monetised and if a bad apple is found and removed then their sponsor and complete down-line can require reverification. It will make people choose their sponsors appointees with care. These referrals can be recorded in the block chain ledger. The system MUST be fault tolerant and work across any platform. I will not participate if I HAVE to use a closed system phone for example. I am prepared to spend extra time managing passwords on a desktop computer to navigate a secure web app or use an open source client I trust.
Verification has to be careful. The people most suited to help us is the crypto community. And they love anonymity. We think you could enter the system with different levels of trust. Some anonymous some not, and have to earn your trust in the community. Like a rating on Amazon. If you choose to be transparent you will earn that much faster.
Good points. However we need to remember this IS about anti-corruption and the only real weapon against it is that we trust EACHOTHER because we don't trust them (any more). It is about people so people trust should be a component. Not the only component and making use of Digital and Personal trust may be the solution to solve humanities problems, one half of the trust is blind like justice and impersonal and the other is face to face and resistant to automated/hacked gaming.
I would trust a system more when people are real and not bots. Needing to seek out sponsors means people will talk and it will grow community. I forgot to mention that the personal trust certificates should be shared face to face, perhaps even with witnesses. Sure that may be only needed to gain a gold check mark but I would want to know if there are bad apples and those who cannot judge character amongst us in the resistance.
The crypto people can safely infiltrate the system with someone who is prepared to associate with us plebs and then distribute the trust amongst their less visible members.
I was adding that we are happy to have the trust local because that is the end goal of distributed local government. We do not want random internet stranger deciding on the parking laws in our home owners association from many states away anyway.
The time may come that the bad actors will limit the ease of communication and we may have to use face to face communication and verification mechanism to continue operation with trusted open source crypto apps and memory sticks (that have been made harder to use on new devices).
We should also allow, even promote, distributed mesh networks (Meshtastic was one) to transport essential key exchanges and authentications into the ledger, the protocols must be made to use what is cheap and secure, local data storage is available (abundant and cheap) but network bandwidth may be controlled and should be limited to token exchange in emergencies or when attacked.
We have many solutions to digital trust. Decentralized. It sounds like you fear some of technology, and rightfully so. But as long as it is decentralized and transparent and open sourced, we can formulate trust. There can be many levels to this, including physical. We foresee a fusion of the two. For example "trust tokens" that you can only give away to others on the platform and have a limited amount to give. They can (and should) be given for real life trust act. For one, if you met and know, and vouch for the person in real life. But also for doing things anonymously as some people may be vulnerable and not want to be known. It will be harder for them to earn trust on the platform, but it shouldn't be impossible. What if they write code or make videos or raise funds or whatever. Also, think of how you trust strangers on ebay or amazon. Peer to peer reviews. One can come with every token you receive. All on chain and all connected, and limited.
Yes. But we aren’t right now so we need to clean house. Think of America as a limited direct democracy that has been corrupted. We need to loosen that limit a little to fix it.
I so appreciate your focus on solving the continued slide toward tyranny here in the US. It's refreshing, as so many others dwell endlessly on the monumental problems.
My own concern with The Rationalist's approach has to do with cultivating the most important element of your solutions: trustworthy individuals. As you've pointed out, technology is only a tool, and in the wrong hands, it can destroy just as easily as it can elevate.
How do we inspire honesty and morality, when the opposite is rewarded? I tend to lean toward the "spiritualization" (probably not a real word, but you get the idea) of society. God knows (ha!) we've been pounded relentlessly with materialism over the past 100 years, and where has that led?
To a relatively minor extent, yes, we do "trust" some of the strangers on Amazon and eBay when we're making a purchase on those platforms. But for the most part that goes only so far as the completion of a single transaction. We wait to see if the item shows up and is as described before considering any future relationship, right?
Meanwhile, we are expecting the "merchants" (either "Marketplace" sellers on Amazon, who are functioning in complete subordination to the Amazon's tech and TOS environment, or Amazon, itself; and eBay sellers, who by definition are also subordinate to eBay's tech and TOS environment) to be held accountable if they act fraudulently. The "threat" of Amazon's or eBay's built-in modes of reprisal for sellers' bad behavior factors into how sellers behave and how much customers are willing to "trust."
Would similar "threat" be required for a trustworthy decentralized digitization like you are proposing?
You refer to the "Bill of Rights" problem, but just referencing it doesn't solve it. The fact is, the Bill of Rights simply doesn't work. After 250 years, blackrobed hairsplitters are still "discovering" that Americans have always had "explicit" rights that somehow the government has been allowed to oppress for all or most of that time by "interpreting" those rights badly. (NYSRPA v. Bruen is probably the best example.) If the Bill of Rights actually worked, those rights would never have "gone lost" for so long.
What is the actual MECHANISM that prevents your direct-democrats from voting on issues they don't understand or don't even care about, and which are couched cryptically or even openly as attacks on any of those rights? Who decides even whether they are or aren't attacks on those rights?
Hey, voters, wouldn't it be great to criminalize "hate speech?" Enact "common sense" gun laws? Impose a "fairness tax" on inheritances? Where is the firebreak in your new system? Ironically, our current representatives have not acted on this issue, not necessarily because "they're not listening to you," but maybe because they understand that what you're asking violates principles of which you are wholly unaware.
Hm, a conundrum... the disconnect between the representative and the voter may be as necessary to prevent ignorant legislation as it is likely to promote non-representation.
I did some reading on the 'tyranny of the majority'.
Here's what I found:
What they addressed with the term and the 'solution', in the Constitution, was that the Southern States had enough population, but much of it were slaves, who -of course- didn't vote.
So, the election outcomes favored the non-slave States, who held the majority.
And since the majority wanted people to be free, not slaves, the slave owners -including some of the Founding Fathers (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison)- would lose their 'property'.
Of course, having to give up their wealth because the people didn't want slavery, felt to them like 'tyranny'.
The political Parties in the US, are private entities, not beholden to their voters.
Practically, when the people make a decision with which the members of the private corporations that are the Parties don't like, the individuals appointed by those corporations as the Electoral College, nullify the will of the people.
In the 2016 DNC primary, the Electoral College of the DNC rejected the popular-vote presidential candidate Sanders and replaced him with Clinton.
When, Clinton earned the popular vote on the presidential election, the Electoral College elected Trump instead.
DNC Lawyer Admits They Weren’t Required to be Impartial Between Clinton, Sanders
So, when you say that we don't need to change anything in the system, we only need to clean it from corruption, do you agree that the Electoral College has to stay in place and be able to nullify anything the people decide on?
"We can have iGov Democrats and iGov Republicans and iGov Libertarians and iGov Green Party peeps. It doesn’t matter. It would be an overarching platform."
What is the necessity of political Parties and candidates in a system called 'igov'?
If "i" (WE) govern, why do we need others to govern us?
Why not people making the decisions and interview managers to apply them?
In order to plug into the existing system. That's how it is set up. We have to game it back. We don't get to make the rules until we control the system. Otherwise we will be stuck outside looking in.
'Outside looking in' is how I would describe having a representative without any power of change or even acknowledgement of their existence by the media, observing their 'colleagues' 'fighting' but, in the end, uniformly passing legislation written by their bosses. Coming across a number of corruption instances that they cannot prove or expose.
Reminder: We HAD that experience. There was a representative, Sanders, that was 'out of the system, playing in' in 2016. No matter if one's ideologically opposed to his policies, the story stands true.
Despite the spin that the media was weaving against him, he was very popular, and the policies he ran on are literally 'what the people want', that never become policy.
Clinton's thousands of emails, exposed by someone 'on the inside' of the Party, showed how she and the DNC colluded to stop the 'outsider' from becoming the nominee.
If just having Sanders 'on the inside' had any value, Clinton would have completely disappeared for rigging the Primaries, and the DNC would have been disbanded and replaced by a new Party.
Instead, the whole world was twisted into thinking about 'outside intervention by 'Russian hackers' and not about the inside corruption.
For the people voting, after that, it was either Clinton or another questionable candidate.
Even so, among young people, 2.05 million voted for Sanders that year, with 829k for Trump and 766k for Clinton. It didn't matter.
They control the media, they control the narrative, they control the outcomes.
Alternatively, if we, as The People, start making our decisions and acting on them massively, 'they' will be on the outside. And they are a tiny number of pathetic sociopaths, compared to our hundreds of millions of citizens. ;)
A big number of highly organized individuals and groups discussing, deliberating and deciding on a leaderless, non-partisan, non-ideological, non-corruptible Direct Democracy Platform will change the world.
We will start by identifying our urgent issues, choosing which one to address first, then pooling our 'wisdom of the crowds' intelligence and our resources, conducting our investigation, deciding on the best course of action, then acting.
Once we develop trust, cohesion, identity, consensus, capital, getting someone on their 'inside' will be very easy, highly empowered, and a part of the solution.
And they will NOT be able to silence them or rig against them. They will be watched by millions in real time, from all sides. They will be constantly on OUR media, and under investigation from our researchers. Inside information leaking out WILL be the narrative.
We take over the narrative, we change the world.
The platform is on the way, but we need all good-willing help we can get, to bring it all together.
Article on how we will use the platform for massive change, coming soon!
It’s good you’re trying to think of solutions. But the way things work now, only the party leaders have real power in Congress to bring bills and make changes. We saw that with the Kevin McCarthy votes to become speaker.
I think it’s worth listening to what Justin Amash says would help clean up Congress since he’s seen the corruption first hand. And Matt Stoller shared some ideas.
I fear that it will be very difficult to take the reigns of power from the deal makers and turn Congress into iGov vote followers. And iGov alone can’t inform on what laws people want/need enacted or the substance of them, unless frequent polling and votes were happening, but it’s unlikely a large number of people would become actively involved.
But in Roman Republic times, there was the Consul who could hold government accountable and perhaps if iGov could force a Consul type role (with higher authority than the Attorney General and other agencies) to initiate investigative committees to take action on corruption. And perhaps if iGov also had an outside vote after those committee findings led to a vote on what to do about it.
There are going to be two ways we do this. Remember how the WEF said they "penetrated" governments? Why can't we do it with a new type of persons. If iGov spans all parties and has one goal, it could happen very fast.
I repeat what I placed in a comment above. We need to put a leash on lobby power.
"Reach out to James G D'Angelo he may have ideas for where to push first. I think a citizen initiative in every ballot in every state where possible that is simple enough to put in the title may be the only way to get change fast enough to matter. It would be bipartisan as they want to prevent the others or look like scum for not doing it. My initiative would be simple Votes in all tiers of government are AGGREGATED BY PARTY before recording or publishing, no possibility of recording individual votes, it short-circuits the ability to sell your vote or suffer from party retribution."
R, there is no such thing as a perfect governmental system because man is in himself corrupted and as the scriptures say, sinful. I have my doubts that any system created by man is beyond corruption. So I would dissuade the thought that it is superior and free from tampering with. Second, how do you keep TPTB from digging into the foundations of this system before the system before it is "closed off"? TPTB are not going to give up voluntarily the status quo gravy train they have grown rich in for doing very little. They control a lot of the guns and weapons of war and could train those weapons upon those constructing the system. The third, if this is built, this could be construed by God as the ultimate tower of Babel which He condemned because this would be the ultimate human tool of rebellion. God bless.
I love all of this, but I'd be in favor of building it as a stand-alone system. It's a monumental job to directly oppose the giant political forces (e.g. banks, NATO, campaign finance, etc.) and it will usurp a lot of our energy. (Plus, who wants a system predicated on 9 people divining the wishes of 'founders' who have been dead for centuries?) Is it possible to quietly build a parallel system and beta test it with a few thousand of us? Then scale up. When the inevitable (speaking historically) collapse happens, people will be looking for a system to switch to.
The threat of the WHO sovereignty-grab by the 2023 IHR and 2024 International PLANdemc Treaty: we’ve got until November 2023 for Congress to repeal IHR modifications!
All starts with handshakes and doing good deeds for your next door neighbors. Howeever this is why it's important to live around like-minded individuals, as similar frequencies are multiplied, rather than nullified, by those around us. Love the ideas here.
Agree on close nit communities. the people corrupting our systems are scaled way up and not afraid to harm us. So it is our goal to find the same trust and relationship in downscaled communities and upscale that. There are a bunch of really good ideas coming down the pipeline using technology to create highly aligned trustworthy webs of people.
Unfortunately, the "bad guys" own the media and are thus able to sway popular opinion through their widespread use of propaganda. I will guarantee a vote on lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, etc., would have passed early on in the pandemic due to the fear porn and propaganda that was out there. Maybe now, 3 years into this debacle people would finally vote on the rational side of things.
We need to be careful who we align with. They need to be part of the code.
Also the media has lost 80% control during the pandemic to the decentralized media of substack, podcasts, YouTube and more
Substack, as great as the community can be...isn't decentralized.
It is great that many of these tools lower the barrier to entry, but in many ways they are only minor deviations from what has already been.
Also keep in mind, that while the authors may be more independent on average, they are still beholden to the incentives around them. Competing for the job of keeping the masses under narrative control is not the same as liberating them from information tyranny.
Decentralized compared to the media conglomerates? We disagree. As long there isn't a centralized control of the narrative it is a massive improvement. Can it be better? Surely. But it is wounding the people that controlled the narrative.
Agree. Most truths I have learned over the past 3 years have come from writers on Substack. iGov sounds like a brilliant way to move forward. Been having meet ups with a small group in my town and I will present this to them! Thanks for this hopeful, possible way forward!
We have new meeting places as well. Online. iGov will have a discord and more soon
True, but if we can get that info out there to like minds, and delay the inevitable, the inevitable will be less potent once it comes.
Shirt - typo for short - happen to me too often.
Right on spot! especially when they plan to censor 10x more than now:
The 2020 and 2022 rigged and stolen elections (it’s the machines!):
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-2020-american-coup
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/david-rockefeller-illuminati
J6: what THEY don't want YOU to know
The fake riot was mason-planned, incited and guided by FBI agents, who broke into the Capitol !!!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/j6-what-you-need-to-know
Dominion over US
You can’t make this stuff up. Do they laugh in our faces? Was the name Dominion chosen to prove their dominion?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/dominion-over-us
A Republic or a Democracy? Are we crazy to accept demo-crazy?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/democracy-democrazy
It sucks! We need to improve democracy… how about REAL democracy?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/reinventing-democracy
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
Politics got us in, politics is the way out ... after prayers!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Gates-WHO: vaccines can’t reduce population, except by murdering
Proof: they were never for reducing mortality, only for murdering!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depop-vaccines-no-myth
The threat of the WHO sovereignty-grab by the 2023 IHR and 2024 International PLANdemc Treaty: we’ve got until November 2023 for Congress to repeal IHR modifications!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-the-international-plandemic
FREE “wake-up” MOVIES !
15 million watched the first one in 3 days!
Watch as if your lives depended on it: literally!
Share to save lives: not sharing is not caring!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
I doubt that even now - we would be able to get a majority - the lethargy and shirt sighted gullibility if the majority would overwhelm us.
It reminds me of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer with Pete and Dud. Fine comedians - makes me sad to say it even so
Alignment is the key to solving this problem. Our system will be only for those who are self aware and aligned with our movement
Count me in.
And we must not lose hope!
Well, you haven't spelled out what corruption actually is, so you might have people looking to fight corruption who have different ideas of what is corrupt, ultimately based on their bias.
Help us spell it out. For starters - transparency in government, removing money from politics, and getting actually representation to start.
Yes especially the lobbyists--the Supreme Court actually went the other way recently, allowing corporate donations to be counted as individual donations or something. Also maybe term limits for Congress.
Many comments I see from different articles and authors often are filled with violent anger. Unless we can find a method of reform that focuses on as little violence as possible we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Again aggressive folk with self-righteous desire to control will push their agendas believing they have the answers for everyone.
We need to have a code. The nonaggression principle should be part of that code. Although "aggression" can be hard to define, it must be considered.
Did you ever live in Seattle? Just wondered.
No, Oregón
It's a bold, outside the box plan. It has potential. But finding candidates who are willing to turn down lucrative contributions goes against human nature. It seems to me it's the highest hurdle to overcome.
To us that is the easiest. We have loads of them. We need the tech built
Thoughts as I read.
This is great and I love it.
Get in touch with James G D'Angelo he may have ideas for where to push first. I think a citizen initiative in every ballot in every state where possible that is simple enough to put in the title may be the only way to get change fast enough to matter. It would be bipartisan as they want to prevent the others or look like scum for not doing it. My initiative would be simple Votes in all tiers of government are AGGREGATED BY PARTY before recording or publishing, no possibility of recording individual votes, it short-circuits the ability to sell your vote or suffer from party retribution.
Option 4 is what I have tried to preach to people because the other options bring pain and suffering.
Ex-Military should not be a automatic reputation point, to many it is a disqualifyer, I suggest you consider the value in promoting it.
I love the idea of built in resilience. I like to promote the search for systems that gravitate to the desired outcome without needing permanent HARD work, the default should be where we want to go.
I also would like systems to be considered with a longer time scale. China has 50 year plans, they are the worlds biggest megacorporation the size of a big nation state, their export companies have a large parent company because that is how they designed it. Any good system should be at least as strong as the Chinese system ad able to compete with it on equal terms.
Verification has to be personal as well. You need two neighbours to vouch for you. There must be multiple levels of verification, perhaps 3, some that are NOT DIGITAL and subject to trivial hacking. Assuming you can vouch for only 10 people your ability cannot be monetised and if a bad apple is found and removed then their sponsor and complete down-line can require reverification. It will make people choose their sponsors appointees with care. These referrals can be recorded in the block chain ledger. The system MUST be fault tolerant and work across any platform. I will not participate if I HAVE to use a closed system phone for example. I am prepared to spend extra time managing passwords on a desktop computer to navigate a secure web app or use an open source client I trust.
I have a few ideas collected on my substack.
https://cholecalciferol.substack.com/s/open-source-government
We started following you and will read soon
Verification has to be careful. The people most suited to help us is the crypto community. And they love anonymity. We think you could enter the system with different levels of trust. Some anonymous some not, and have to earn your trust in the community. Like a rating on Amazon. If you choose to be transparent you will earn that much faster.
Good points. However we need to remember this IS about anti-corruption and the only real weapon against it is that we trust EACHOTHER because we don't trust them (any more). It is about people so people trust should be a component. Not the only component and making use of Digital and Personal trust may be the solution to solve humanities problems, one half of the trust is blind like justice and impersonal and the other is face to face and resistant to automated/hacked gaming.
I would trust a system more when people are real and not bots. Needing to seek out sponsors means people will talk and it will grow community. I forgot to mention that the personal trust certificates should be shared face to face, perhaps even with witnesses. Sure that may be only needed to gain a gold check mark but I would want to know if there are bad apples and those who cannot judge character amongst us in the resistance.
The crypto people can safely infiltrate the system with someone who is prepared to associate with us plebs and then distribute the trust amongst their less visible members.
Arrgh, clicked on cancel instead of post.
I was adding that we are happy to have the trust local because that is the end goal of distributed local government. We do not want random internet stranger deciding on the parking laws in our home owners association from many states away anyway.
The time may come that the bad actors will limit the ease of communication and we may have to use face to face communication and verification mechanism to continue operation with trusted open source crypto apps and memory sticks (that have been made harder to use on new devices).
We should also allow, even promote, distributed mesh networks (Meshtastic was one) to transport essential key exchanges and authentications into the ledger, the protocols must be made to use what is cheap and secure, local data storage is available (abundant and cheap) but network bandwidth may be controlled and should be limited to token exchange in emergencies or when attacked.
We have many solutions to digital trust. Decentralized. It sounds like you fear some of technology, and rightfully so. But as long as it is decentralized and transparent and open sourced, we can formulate trust. There can be many levels to this, including physical. We foresee a fusion of the two. For example "trust tokens" that you can only give away to others on the platform and have a limited amount to give. They can (and should) be given for real life trust act. For one, if you met and know, and vouch for the person in real life. But also for doing things anonymously as some people may be vulnerable and not want to be known. It will be harder for them to earn trust on the platform, but it shouldn't be impossible. What if they write code or make videos or raise funds or whatever. Also, think of how you trust strangers on ebay or amazon. Peer to peer reviews. One can come with every token you receive. All on chain and all connected, and limited.
The Constitution is the best safeguard against tyranny of the majority (ochlocracy). We need to take it far more seriously!
Yes. But we aren’t right now so we need to clean house. Think of America as a limited direct democracy that has been corrupted. We need to loosen that limit a little to fix it.
The constitution stays in place 100%
"Too big to fail" should be restated as "too big to be allowed to continue".
I so appreciate your focus on solving the continued slide toward tyranny here in the US. It's refreshing, as so many others dwell endlessly on the monumental problems.
My own concern with The Rationalist's approach has to do with cultivating the most important element of your solutions: trustworthy individuals. As you've pointed out, technology is only a tool, and in the wrong hands, it can destroy just as easily as it can elevate.
How do we inspire honesty and morality, when the opposite is rewarded? I tend to lean toward the "spiritualization" (probably not a real word, but you get the idea) of society. God knows (ha!) we've been pounded relentlessly with materialism over the past 100 years, and where has that led?
There are ways to use technology decentralized to instill trust. We trust strangers on Amazon and EBay all the time.
To a relatively minor extent, yes, we do "trust" some of the strangers on Amazon and eBay when we're making a purchase on those platforms. But for the most part that goes only so far as the completion of a single transaction. We wait to see if the item shows up and is as described before considering any future relationship, right?
Meanwhile, we are expecting the "merchants" (either "Marketplace" sellers on Amazon, who are functioning in complete subordination to the Amazon's tech and TOS environment, or Amazon, itself; and eBay sellers, who by definition are also subordinate to eBay's tech and TOS environment) to be held accountable if they act fraudulently. The "threat" of Amazon's or eBay's built-in modes of reprisal for sellers' bad behavior factors into how sellers behave and how much customers are willing to "trust."
Would similar "threat" be required for a trustworthy decentralized digitization like you are proposing?
Smells like Hopium to me.
You refer to the "Bill of Rights" problem, but just referencing it doesn't solve it. The fact is, the Bill of Rights simply doesn't work. After 250 years, blackrobed hairsplitters are still "discovering" that Americans have always had "explicit" rights that somehow the government has been allowed to oppress for all or most of that time by "interpreting" those rights badly. (NYSRPA v. Bruen is probably the best example.) If the Bill of Rights actually worked, those rights would never have "gone lost" for so long.
What is the actual MECHANISM that prevents your direct-democrats from voting on issues they don't understand or don't even care about, and which are couched cryptically or even openly as attacks on any of those rights? Who decides even whether they are or aren't attacks on those rights?
Hey, voters, wouldn't it be great to criminalize "hate speech?" Enact "common sense" gun laws? Impose a "fairness tax" on inheritances? Where is the firebreak in your new system? Ironically, our current representatives have not acted on this issue, not necessarily because "they're not listening to you," but maybe because they understand that what you're asking violates principles of which you are wholly unaware.
Hm, a conundrum... the disconnect between the representative and the voter may be as necessary to prevent ignorant legislation as it is likely to promote non-representation.
You seem to be thinking in the realm of the old system. Imagine a new one.
If you can't take the time to describe it persuasively, it's not my job to imagine it for you.
Take the L and go back to the drawing board.
Full description here: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-corrupt-government-in
Also we are building the actual software.
I did some reading on the 'tyranny of the majority'.
Here's what I found:
What they addressed with the term and the 'solution', in the Constitution, was that the Southern States had enough population, but much of it were slaves, who -of course- didn't vote.
So, the election outcomes favored the non-slave States, who held the majority.
And since the majority wanted people to be free, not slaves, the slave owners -including some of the Founding Fathers (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison)- would lose their 'property'.
Of course, having to give up their wealth because the people didn't want slavery, felt to them like 'tyranny'.
The solution was the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is NOT elected by vote.
It is assigned by the two Parties.
https://www.procon.org/headlines/electoral-college-pros-cons-procon-org/
The political Parties in the US, are private entities, not beholden to their voters.
Practically, when the people make a decision with which the members of the private corporations that are the Parties don't like, the individuals appointed by those corporations as the Electoral College, nullify the will of the people.
In the 2016 DNC primary, the Electoral College of the DNC rejected the popular-vote presidential candidate Sanders and replaced him with Clinton.
When, Clinton earned the popular vote on the presidential election, the Electoral College elected Trump instead.
DNC Lawyer Admits They Weren’t Required to be Impartial Between Clinton, Sanders
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/dnc-lawyer-reportedly-said-they-could-have-chosen-between-clinton-sanders-over-cigars-in-back-rooms/.
So, when you say that we don't need to change anything in the system, we only need to clean it from corruption, do you agree that the Electoral College has to stay in place and be able to nullify anything the people decide on?
We are saying that once the corruption is gone all of these problems will be clearer and more easy to solve.
How many candidates in each private corporation that presents themselves as a Party are enough to make corruption go away?
How do they do that?
"We can have iGov Democrats and iGov Republicans and iGov Libertarians and iGov Green Party peeps. It doesn’t matter. It would be an overarching platform."
What is the necessity of political Parties and candidates in a system called 'igov'?
If "i" (WE) govern, why do we need others to govern us?
Why not people making the decisions and interview managers to apply them?
In order to plug into the existing system. That's how it is set up. We have to game it back. We don't get to make the rules until we control the system. Otherwise we will be stuck outside looking in.
'Outside looking in' is how I would describe having a representative without any power of change or even acknowledgement of their existence by the media, observing their 'colleagues' 'fighting' but, in the end, uniformly passing legislation written by their bosses. Coming across a number of corruption instances that they cannot prove or expose.
Reminder: We HAD that experience. There was a representative, Sanders, that was 'out of the system, playing in' in 2016. No matter if one's ideologically opposed to his policies, the story stands true.
Despite the spin that the media was weaving against him, he was very popular, and the policies he ran on are literally 'what the people want', that never become policy.
Clinton's thousands of emails, exposed by someone 'on the inside' of the Party, showed how she and the DNC colluded to stop the 'outsider' from becoming the nominee.
If just having Sanders 'on the inside' had any value, Clinton would have completely disappeared for rigging the Primaries, and the DNC would have been disbanded and replaced by a new Party.
Instead, the whole world was twisted into thinking about 'outside intervention by 'Russian hackers' and not about the inside corruption.
For the people voting, after that, it was either Clinton or another questionable candidate.
Even so, among young people, 2.05 million voted for Sanders that year, with 829k for Trump and 766k for Clinton. It didn't matter.
They control the media, they control the narrative, they control the outcomes.
Alternatively, if we, as The People, start making our decisions and acting on them massively, 'they' will be on the outside. And they are a tiny number of pathetic sociopaths, compared to our hundreds of millions of citizens. ;)
A big number of highly organized individuals and groups discussing, deliberating and deciding on a leaderless, non-partisan, non-ideological, non-corruptible Direct Democracy Platform will change the world.
We will start by identifying our urgent issues, choosing which one to address first, then pooling our 'wisdom of the crowds' intelligence and our resources, conducting our investigation, deciding on the best course of action, then acting.
Once we develop trust, cohesion, identity, consensus, capital, getting someone on their 'inside' will be very easy, highly empowered, and a part of the solution.
And they will NOT be able to silence them or rig against them. They will be watched by millions in real time, from all sides. They will be constantly on OUR media, and under investigation from our researchers. Inside information leaking out WILL be the narrative.
We take over the narrative, we change the world.
The platform is on the way, but we need all good-willing help we can get, to bring it all together.
Article on how we will use the platform for massive change, coming soon!
It’s good you’re trying to think of solutions. But the way things work now, only the party leaders have real power in Congress to bring bills and make changes. We saw that with the Kevin McCarthy votes to become speaker.
This was a worthy listen/read:
https://open.substack.com/pub/systemupdate/p/who-holds-power-in-washington
I think it’s worth listening to what Justin Amash says would help clean up Congress since he’s seen the corruption first hand. And Matt Stoller shared some ideas.
I fear that it will be very difficult to take the reigns of power from the deal makers and turn Congress into iGov vote followers. And iGov alone can’t inform on what laws people want/need enacted or the substance of them, unless frequent polling and votes were happening, but it’s unlikely a large number of people would become actively involved.
But in Roman Republic times, there was the Consul who could hold government accountable and perhaps if iGov could force a Consul type role (with higher authority than the Attorney General and other agencies) to initiate investigative committees to take action on corruption. And perhaps if iGov also had an outside vote after those committee findings led to a vote on what to do about it.
There are going to be two ways we do this. Remember how the WEF said they "penetrated" governments? Why can't we do it with a new type of persons. If iGov spans all parties and has one goal, it could happen very fast.
I repeat what I placed in a comment above. We need to put a leash on lobby power.
"Reach out to James G D'Angelo he may have ideas for where to push first. I think a citizen initiative in every ballot in every state where possible that is simple enough to put in the title may be the only way to get change fast enough to matter. It would be bipartisan as they want to prevent the others or look like scum for not doing it. My initiative would be simple Votes in all tiers of government are AGGREGATED BY PARTY before recording or publishing, no possibility of recording individual votes, it short-circuits the ability to sell your vote or suffer from party retribution."
how do we reach out?
I have occasionally got brief responses to various email addresses I have found.
https://www.congressionalresearch.org/JamesDangelo.html
The usual social media suspects are worth trying.
Maybe if incorporated into the Government Accountability Office (GAO)?
That doesn't sound decentralized to us
R, there is no such thing as a perfect governmental system because man is in himself corrupted and as the scriptures say, sinful. I have my doubts that any system created by man is beyond corruption. So I would dissuade the thought that it is superior and free from tampering with. Second, how do you keep TPTB from digging into the foundations of this system before the system before it is "closed off"? TPTB are not going to give up voluntarily the status quo gravy train they have grown rich in for doing very little. They control a lot of the guns and weapons of war and could train those weapons upon those constructing the system. The third, if this is built, this could be construed by God as the ultimate tower of Babel which He condemned because this would be the ultimate human tool of rebellion. God bless.
You are absolutely right, we cannot trust people. That is why the actual system needs to be better.
Decentralization works in ways that dissolve guns.
It has been 611 days since this article came out.
When are you implementing this technology?
I love all of this, but I'd be in favor of building it as a stand-alone system. It's a monumental job to directly oppose the giant political forces (e.g. banks, NATO, campaign finance, etc.) and it will usurp a lot of our energy. (Plus, who wants a system predicated on 9 people divining the wishes of 'founders' who have been dead for centuries?) Is it possible to quietly build a parallel system and beta test it with a few thousand of us? Then scale up. When the inevitable (speaking historically) collapse happens, people will be looking for a system to switch to.
Right on spot, but that won't be enough:
The 2020 and 2022 rigged and stolen elections (it’s the machines!):
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-2020-american-coup
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/david-rockefeller-illuminati
J6: what THEY don't want YOU to know
The fake riot was mason-planned, incited and guided by FBI agents, who broke into the Capitol !!!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/j6-what-you-need-to-know
Dominion over US
You can’t make this stuff up. Do they laugh in our faces? Was the name Dominion chosen to prove their dominion?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/dominion-over-us
A Republic or a Democracy? Are we crazy to accept demo-crazy?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/democracy-democrazy
It sucks! We need to improve democracy… how about REAL democracy?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/reinventing-democracy
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
Politics got us in, politics is the way out ... after prayers!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Gates-WHO: vaccines can’t reduce population, except by murdering
Proof: they were never for reducing mortality, only for murdering!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depop-vaccines-no-myth
The threat of the WHO sovereignty-grab by the 2023 IHR and 2024 International PLANdemc Treaty: we’ve got until November 2023 for Congress to repeal IHR modifications!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-the-international-plandemic
FREE “wake-up” MOVIES !
15 million watched the first one in 3 days!
Watch as if your lives depended on it: literally!
Share to save lives: not sharing is not caring!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos