Remember your mom warning you about total strangers addressing you? In particular about middle aged men? I hope not.
Well, hi there. I just wanted to tell you that you have to save the world, because, you know, nobody else will - or can for that matter. I know that is kind of tough, you being a geek and all. But it has always been like this. Geeks prefer to be left alone but end up changing the way we live. Ever heard about this guy Laozi or Confucius? I bet Jesus was also a Geek, that or just crazy - tough distinction that one. Copernicus and Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, Darwin, Marx, Edison, Freud, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Zuse, Turing, Neumann, RMS, Gates. Geeks.
And now you. So what's the mission? Planet Earth is threatened by the empire of intangible evil. We bastards let children die by the millions, try to wipe out every higher life form in reach (except for some selected lifeforms that can be used in agriculture, experiments, zoos, or factories), eradicate every ancient culture and their achievements, and steam up the boilers to raise the Flood that will cleanse the traces of these crimes that nobody committed. Yes, that's right, that is the best part: it is nobodies fault, the ``world'' just happens to work that way.
When the survivors stare back at history with glazed eyes, blinking away tears of rage, not comprehending how that could happen, all they see is us, staring into the future with glazed eyes, blinking away tears of frustration, not comprehending how this can happen. Not knowing what one human could do. Because one human can do so very little. Therefore we have to become many, we have to organize!
[the sound of air escaping that balloon, leaving just a wrinkled hull]
Trouble is, organize we did, and look at the mess! The proven forms of human organization have either failed or led us here into the empire of intangible evil. And that's where you come in. Your mission is to provide an alternative form of organization. The good thing is you're not alone. It's a cooperative MMOG. Each guild develops its own favorite form of organization and looks for followers. People looking for a guild do so on the fair (see section II). And that's one way how the empire of intangible evil might be overthrown - by luring it's constituents into less destructive forms of organizations. The Geek's secret weapon in this quest is modern technology that catalyzes new forms of organization or makes them possible in the first place.
You doubt that approach will lead anywhere? So do I. But until somebody convinces me of another approach I hope this one doesn't do too much evil by itself. The organization of any society can be considered a set of rules. If geeks from around the world can develop the extraordinarily intricate set of rules that makes up GNU/Linux, than you can develop a set of rules for a better society - hopefully with a fraction of the effort. At the very least society is dealing with much more intelligent building blocks than an operating system.
When I started writing this, few people understood the terms blog or wiki. That was only a couple of years ago. Now these tools by themselves have changed the way society is organized. But Wikipedia will not save the world by itself. We will need such tools and others that we haven't thought of yet. But we also need visions of how to employ them to get us out of this mess fast.
Let's throw in a bit of meat. I told you it's a MMOG, but no game code has been implemented (like a Website for starters), no players have subscribed. If you are a technical geek, that would be a good starting point.
The kernel of the game engine is the fair, the meta constitution. Any adventurous thinker can tackle that problem, no technical knowledge is required for that. It is not merely a fair, it is also a compatibility layer that allows interoperability of different implementations of human societies. Knowledge of standards development may be an advantage here.
The real fun may be coming up with as many different implementations of society as you can imagine. Some are already there, but I think at least my culture's implementation is incompatible with cultural diversity. Thus it has to be adapted. Adapting your personal favorite ideal to be compatible with other ideals might be a good start to approach this task. Only the final stages of such development may profit from sound judicial knowledge.
I have started working on all these issues. You may find the following positively inspiring. Great, please make it happen, I'll join your guild. You may find it negatively inspiring. Great, please provide an interesting alternative. I believe that diversity will be the only way to success. Monoculture is a central part of the problem.
A state controls and coordinates social effort in various domains. It is always about creating a framework for social life. Sidenote in case ``social'' gives you the creeps: I just use it to neutrally refer to human interaction. Exploitation is a social act in that sense. Are we talking shop?
According to the classical view a state can among others cover the following task complexes or it can at least contribute in these areas:
The other tasks of the state are even less geographically bound. State is mostly about creating and enforcing rules for its citizens and about redistributing the resources of its citizens.
Thus I propose to decouple social organization (i.e. states) from geography. This proposal has several very important implications. For the first time in history people could actually freely choose their society. They don't choose between mostly similar synthetic flavors of the same old thing, but they actually choose their state independently from their residence. This was never before possible because the infrastructure was not there. Big nations always suffered from the distance of the government to the further reaches of the empire. The problem of this distance was less of a geographical nature than of a temporal one. It is hard to govern if you have to deal with a time lag of weeks before your orders reach the outskirts. If everybody has instant access to information from around the world and can reach almost every remote corner of the planet in a couple of hours, then things suddenly become possible that nobody ever even dreamed of.
So why should some religious fundamentalist be forced to endure our modern Gomorrah? Could he not live in a society governed by the book as long as he leaves me alone? Why should people that still entertain some kind of social conscience be forced to live by the rules of neo liberalism? Why must conservatives watch their values - family, unborn life, whatever - being defaced by their fellow citizens? This list could be extended considerably, but I guess the point is made.
If every man could choose his society without having to abandon his home, his friends, his job - in short: his life - then social life could be much more satisfying for everybody.
Social evolution would accelerate considerably. If people have new ideas about how to organize society, they could just try them. I guess the critical mass for a functional society is in the order of a couple of hundred thousand people or maybe a couple of million (that is the size of the smallest nation states in Europe). So any idea that can attract one out of ten thousand people (divide the world population of six billion by ten thousand and you get a sizable society of 600.000) has a chance to be tested. Opposed to that it is all but impossible to test radically different ideas in a democracy. You don't need one out of 10.000, you need half or two thirds of the population (well actually you need the yellow press, but that is rather similar). And good ideas would presumably spread and be adopted by more societies. The development of society would be continuous rather than making minor leaps every couple of decades during social crisis.
A very important problem with this idea is that the resulting systems might be inherently unstable. People have a tendency of not leaving each other alone. Tolerance is still a rare virtue. The system might result in social tensions between members of different societies. These tensions might discharge - as they did in the past - in riots, pogroms and even civil wars. But the system might also educate people toward tolerance so that these problems become less severe in the long run.
There is however a need for preventing these problems. There are also still some geographically bound issues that need cooperation between different - potentially many - societies. To address these issues a Meta Constitution is required. I am not talking about something like the UNO. The UNO addresses mostly global issues and something like the UNO would still be required in a system as the one proposed here. But the Meta Constitution also has to regulate the decision making process of where to build that bypass road (for example local committees that are constituted democratically could decide that) and whom to bill for it. The Meta Constitution also has to regulate which law applies in inter society matters, e.g. the criminal law of the victim's society, in civil cases the law of the buyer, the complainant or whatever. There have to regulations to prevent territorial expansion, e.g. Meta Constitutional rules to prevent land lords from enforcing their society's law with the lodgers. And there are probably many other things a Meta Constitution would have to regulate.
Creating a functional Meta Constitution is certainly not a trivial task but it does not seem impossible either. Especially since criminal law and constitutions around the world are already mostly similar in most countries.
There are however many things, a Meta Constitution does not have to regulate. It does not have to care for human rights or civic duties. It only has to grant the protection of the individual by his/her society's constitution and it has to enforce its first Article:
No man must be bared or impeded in choosing a society of his liking as long as the chosen society accepts him. Accordingly no society must be bared or impeded in accepting an individual that chose the society.
Infrastructural politics work in developed countries, thus I assume this poses no real challenge. If a Meta Constitution can be devised, covering infrastructural inter-social politics will be technical problem that can be solved by lawyers and politicians. Some democratic scheme that is as localized as possible (since infrastructure is often a local problem, the according policies should be local) will do the job.
Protecting the environment is another matter completely. This works only thoroughly in countries that already have removed most of their natural environments and replaced them with cultivated land. And even those care little about the havoc wreaked by palm oil plantations or their CO2 emissions for that matter. I think we'll barely escape to fry, drown or poison ourselves. Hopefully we'll also manage to not blow ourselves to smithereens. But if mankind survives, Gaya will have taken major blows. We'll shortly have exhausted much of the world's forests, fishing grounds and fertile land. We might get by, but we'll extinguish 90% or more of the world's species in the process. This is no pessimism, it is an extrapolation of a development that goes on for millennia already. And there is no sign of its stopping.
So what can be done? I think it is not possible and not even preferable to save the environment while many people starve or die of nasty diseases. Environmental protection cannot be enforced on people in any kind of social organization that I would like to live in. So the problem of saving the environment is one of feeding and educating people.
No problem there. Let's just spend a trillion dollars on nourishment and education of the world. Each year. The first hundred billion will easily cover the nourishment problem, UNO estimates more like thirty to fifty billion yearly to quench hunger. The remaining 900 billion could probably cover enough education to get even environmental protection in place in a decade. Oh and the world would be a much better place. A trillion each year. That is economically quite possible, it is the amount the world spends on weapons each year. OK, I know it is utterly ridiculous to expect people will stop killing each other and instead start feeding and educating each other. It mostly worked in western Europe, but even if we pushed hard the development in the rest of the world would probably take decades. It will hopefully happen eventually, but Gaya will look rather ragged by then.
So I propose something else. Unknown species cannot be revived. Incomprehensible ecosystems cannot be rebuild. Actually it looks as if ecosystems cannot be rebuild at all. But as long as we do not know what we loose, we should try our best to close no doors that we cannot open again. We should lobby our governments to spend a couple of billion to research biodiversity, to deep freeze samples of every species we can get hold on and to study ecology while it is still there to study. Then maybe at least some parts the Biosphere can be rebuild (probably in a very different fashion from now) once we decided on the survival of mankind.
Let me elaborate this a bit. If you are an environmentalist: you do a great job (hopefully), but you are going to loose most of the battles. There is no chance in hell, we'll preserve even fifty percent of the current biodiversity even through the next fifty years. Biodiversity is very likely of significant value to mankind so we should start some desperate measures as well. This work is already in progress but more money should be spend on it. It would for example suffice to relocate the funds on fusion power research to biodiversity and ecology research. We would gain granted value in exchange for something that is not proven to work at all ... or even very likely to work in the foreseeable future. OK we don't have to abandon fusion power, the point is we are not talking terribly much money. Think Human Genome Project. A similar effort on a similar timescale would get the job done.
In the meantime capping total emissions and use of natural resources would suffice. The scheme of trading emission concessions looks very promising. But all that is worthless as long as the masses don't care for the environment. It is again a problem of education. The measures are there, the political will is not. I think this will eventually change by itself. As soon as neo liberalism and its formidable propaganda machine (see section 5.1.1.3) are not the overly dominant system anymore, such things will change automatically. I assume that humans like nature, enjoy it very much and are willing to preserve it if they are not subject to massive propaganda that says otherwise. And if they are not busy starving.
Environmental destruction is a symptom of our social problems. Once we solve the social problems, the environmental problems will vanish. Sadly most of the environment will vanish before we get a grip on politics, so we should try desperately to save what we can.
This manifesto proposes to establish a new social order, really. Can I be serious?
Let it be said for the benefit of those of you who don't know me personally, that I commonly say things I don't really mean. Irony is an essential part of my communication, and irony translates badly into letters. I don't really mean many things I say, but I rarely say something that I judge to not hold some truth at its core, or which I do not see as a warranted allusion, at least.
I lamented a lot about our society in years gone by and I was not kidding. I was perpetually mouthing the r-word - ``revolution''. That was from the domain of half kidding. When I criticize society, I have to believe that things could be better. I held that believe, but I could not articulate how to improve the situation. And if I believe in a better mankind, I have to believe that revolution can make sense.
This here manifesto is a rather palpable proposal of how to improve society. I do not fancy having found a solution to all our problems, maybe not even a single one. I do not consider myself a visionary that believes his visions without reserve. I am not exactly deadly serious about this document. But I hope that my propositions contain elements that prove useful and be it only in provoking thought.
My approach is practical. I view the organization of society as a problem for which solutions can be searched. My proposed solutions consist of a couple of mechanisms that - taken together - are supposed to lead to an efficient self organization of society. I think about it a bit like the programmer I am in real live. But I only know one opinion about this - my own. That is no foundation to judge this proposal.
If my readers discuss this I might start understanding what I proposed. And I do hope there really are some useful elements in here. Yet, even if every single point on the following pages turns out to suck big time, I hope this manifesto can still serve the purpose to question much of what we take for granted about our social organization. And thus facilitate discussion.
Two years have passed. The first edition was discussed in a small circle which led me to abandon some of the propositions from the first edition. Other propositions were added, but much of the essentials remain in place. I am in the process of translating the whole thing into English (forgive me for abusing your mother tongue). The structure has changed, and - that's the most important part - with it the priorities.
The babble about the Meta Constitution was much extended and moved from rear to front. I now think that alone would save us if it does not happen to kill us in the process.
The first edition ignored some central social problems (unemployment, environmental protection) and contained inadequate propositions for others (criminality). I spent a lot of time thinking about these problems and I am disappointed about the turn out of new ideas. But maybe I am asking too much. I think it is time to make this document available to a larger public. Welcome to my mazy mind.
Most of the work on this document consisted of thinking and talking. Most people who contributed don't know about it. I tested various of these ideas in a couple of discussions without having the time to present the whole thing. Fragments of countless discussions formed this text and I cannot name every single contributor. If you remember me saying something you now read here, or if you yourself said some such thing to me, then you definitely contributed.
Beyond this section you'll find concise statements about how I think society could be organized. You'll find no arguments. You'll neither find many arguments in this section - strictly speaking. However, this section lays out some of the basic convictions that led me to develop my ideas into the direction you'll find in the following text. You don't have to share these convictions to share the following ideas. But if you at some point think, I went completely nuts, this section might help you to understand my special form of insanity.
To put the title quote in perspective:
now we're busy making all our busy plans
on foundations built to last
but nothing fades as fast as the future
and nothing clings like the pastThe thought that started this manifesto had to do with legislation. I had read a bit about demarchy and I was active on kuro5hin.org which used a rating system to rate user contributions (and at some point users). I added the two together added some madness and had the basics of the legislative process proposed here. The requirements for the rating system that would make the legislature work did not seem to be feasible if used for legislature alone. Thus I expanded the concepts and added ideas to hypothetically solve many things I perceived as contemporary major problems. You are reading the result now - (in fall 2008) six years after I had the first legislature process worked out.Peter Gabriel, lyrics of More than this
The three main problems I saw with western democratic legislation were the selection process for our leaders, their motivation and the behemoth law systems created by the democratic apparatus.
The selected rulers are people who tend to be more aggressive than the average, simply because they have fought their way to the top against many competitors. I'm utterly amazed how sane and capable many politicians are after 40 years in that rat race. This is indeed a major argument in favor of democracy: it selects strong, sane competitive people. It has however been empirically demonstrated, that the narcissists who commonly seek power are not better suited to make decisions than the average person. I believe that selecting more peaceful less competitive people as our leaders would make the world a less aggressive, less competitive place, which I would appreciate.
Once the narcissists are in power the only motivation that the system imposes on them is staying in power, i.e. winning the next election. Therefore the decision making processes are slowed during communal, state, and federal elections. At any time real public debates are rare among politicians: any member of the ruling party always defends even the greatest bullshit while any member of the opposition reflexively tramples on even the most marvelous of political achievements. The party is everything, individual democrats are not supposed to have individual opinions. This apparently inhumane behavior makes it hard for the public to identify with their rulers.
Perceived power is for a good part proportional to the number of subordinates a functionary has. This counteracts lean administration. It is always harder to let go some long established advantage then to make some new restriction, or provide advantages to others. This leads to ever more laws. Both effects combined lead to bureaucracies that are more complex, expensive, and restrictive than they have to be.
So I set out to design a process that may result in a lean government that twists few but strong levers and has competent rulers that are only motivated to server the common good. And while I was at it I tried to solve all other problems of society that came to my mind as well. And somewhere in between I must have lost my mind. I swear I saw it just then. Where is the damn thing?
Yeah granted. Well with some exceptions. I'll only mention the issues that might not be expected from somebody from Europe.
I live in Germany, a nation with an infamous bureaucracy. There may be worse bureaucracies but probably not in western nations (the Swiss deserve honorable mention). But I believe every existing bureaucracy is too big and inefficient. I don't want the state to get in my way, I want it to run as invisibly and smoothly as possible. Current bureaucratic systems seem to have a built in tendency to blow themselves up ever more. This tendency is counterbalanced by insufficient pressure from the media and the public.
This is why I put much effort into designing a system that has the built in property of keeping the administration as lean as possible.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E. B. White
Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
UnknownThat sums my feelings toward current implementations of democracy quite nicely. I admit they are the best political systems that I know of that were ever implemented, but they still suck big time.
I am a believer in John Rawls ``A Theory of Justice'' which is a main work of philosophical liberalism (and has nothing to do with socialist or capitalist libertarianism). It is a central message of ``A Theory of Justice'' that it should be the single goal of society to relief those of its members that are in the worst situation.
Rawls' central argument for this is that such is the society people would choose if they did not know their position in society. I don't know about that, but without firsthand knowledge about such a society it is the one I would choose even knowing that my position would be rather comfortable. I have two reasons for this. The first is simply my conscience. I simply hate to know about diseased junkies, outcast from society only craving one thing. I hate to think about the people sleeping drunk on park benches ... That does not mean I am morally superior or anything the like. I consider it a decadent wish of mine. Chocolate would taste better yet if I would not have to witness people starving on the prime time news.
The other reason is a bit more philosophically entangled. A society from the perspective of this manifesto is nothing but a system of rules. Such a system can only be in actuality (in contrast to theory) if the rules are followed. Thus a society's (a rule system's) instinct of self preservation implies that it has every interest of its rules being followed. If the rules are not followed the system is naught.
Breaking the rules though implies a statement. Somebody who commits a crime is doing something beyond his actual offense. He's saying loud and clear: ``I don't accept the order of society, I do not accept the rules you impose on me and I am not part of the system.'' I believe society should listen to such statements. What could people drive to that conclusion? There may be cases that simply cannot be helped - e.g. extreme passions (love, hate, greed ...) driving people to extreme and unforeseeable deeds. But the majority of crimes seems to be not so passionate. And the majority of notorious criminals seems to come from that layer of society that Rawls identifies as the one the situation of which has to be improved.
I do not think everybody could or should be equal except concerning the law. But I believe everybody should have equal chances to become what he is capable of and desires. Final remark: Rawls philosophy does not contradict the formation of elite. It is indeed desirable for the disadvantaged to profit from gifted individuals.
It might just be a peculiarity of my personal life. But I do not believe that. I believe there is something more to it: I know surprisingly few assholes. And of those few I do have the questionable pleasure of knowing, there are some where I believe to know why they are assholes. Those people are not inherently evil, they seem to live their lifes in the only way that appears bearable to them and I don't envy any asshole I know. The same is true for saints in my acquaintances: I know none. But I am not concerned about the saints, I am concerned about the assholes, because they mean trouble for society. I know people who cheat the state or their insurance - indeed most seem to do so in some cases. But I cannot really blame them. Those are not bad people. So where does all the bad come from that I see happening in the world? Who is it that lets people starve, wages wars, sells weapons, produces drugs ... ? The mystery of the missing assholes has riddled me for a long time. The disturbing answer is - or rather part of it - it's me. I definitely let people starve that I could save easily.
The blood in my veins, the culture in my head: both are descendants of the Nazis. Only two generations ago these people committed the most horrible crimes in the history of man. Many of my people committed these crimes and most of the others let it happen. At least they closed their eyes against the evil that was going on. My grandfathers both died before they could tell me their thoughts about these days. Not so my grandmothers. But you don't want to hear them talking about the dark days of greater Germany. Let it suffice that they revealed an ugliness in their souls. Still I refuse to see them as bad people as I refuse to see me their grandson as a bad person. Even if there were such a thing as bad people, it still is a statistical impossibility, that - independently from genetic propagation, or Germany today would not be the land I know - such an enormous concentration of bad people should suddenly aggravate in Germany and disappear again as if it had never been there.
I do not believe in people being bad - or good for that matter. I believe that people are people. So what should it be? And why does this matter so much that I spend pages on it?
The kernel of a modern society is its rules. Actually this whole text is exclusively about rules and how to determine them. A central issue of social organization is how the society deals with people that break the rules. If society does not care, or if the basic assumption is that some people will always break the rules because they are bad or whatever, then society can cheerfully punish anybody that does not respect the majority vote (or the dictators or parties decree or whatever). But if one does not believe in people being bad, society has a problem - every act of breaking the law implies an unuttered statement: the delinquent does not accept the rules that the society dictates. Sure, a society can simply ignore such statements, we have a millennia long history of doing so. I do however think that society should not ignore these statements. It should always ask itself, why the crime was committed, if there is something wrong with the way the society is organized.
The reasons for committing crimes can be split into two categories: Temptation and hopeless social circumstances. As a side note it should be mentioned that in my culture those from higher social classes that succumb to temptation are treated much better on average than those from the bottom of the social latter who partly act out of desperation.
Temptation happens when a potential gain through an illegal act is high compared to the chance of being caught. Thus there are two levers to fight temptation: Make the punishment harder (I am against this) or increase the chance of being caught.
The other problem is much harder to address. Let me give an example: A heroin addict is in a completely hopeless situation. He needs his poison. Heroin is banned in any nation on earth, thus he is outlawed. And black market prices for heroin are very high. His only chance - apart of giving up his addiction which is very hard especially in desperate social circumstances - is to break the law to get the money for illegally purchasing his drug. It might be assumed that his situation is his own fault. But what makes somebody choose drug induced happiness over reality? I think something must have gone terribly wrong there, long before a drug addict commits his first crime to buy another shot.
Those that are worst of in a society are most likely to commit crimes that are a result of their lack of faith into that society. If a society wants to prevent crimes from happening because of desperate social circumstances, it must follow John Rawls principle of philosophical liberalism. That principle states that a society should be organized in such a way that those worst off profit the most.
A modern society is - in every sense that this text is concerned with - nothing but a set of rules. This makes no sense if the rules are not accepted. Thus a society cannot accept its laws being broken without loosing credibility and logical consistency. It must react to crimes by asking itself what part of the crime was due to malfunctioning social organization.
And by the way, I think life would be better yet, if one would not have to ignore the drastic social injustice, the suffering in modern societies.
Part of me is a programmer. I am a barely controlled messy in real life but when writing program code I sometimes become a raving maniac that spends hours, days and even weeks on ordering and beautifying his code without adding any functionality.
The German laws add up to 80,000 to 90,000 rules. Every one of this single rules is a multi-word or rather multi-line statement. Yet the organizational complexity of all these rules is very low. Basically all the rules are operating in parallel. Thus people confronted with the laws have to know all the rules if they want to be sure to conform to all of them. This is simply impossible. A law system is ridiculous when it is not enforceable because nobody understands it. The complexity of the German law system is far beyond the point where traditional programming paradigms break down. And these programming paradigms - I am referring to procedural programming - have a higher grade of organization than the German law system.
The rapid development of processing power has taught programmers how to organize rule sets beside which the German rule system looks puny. It is hard but possible to write rule system of the same complexity as the German law system that are intuitive to understand, simple to read and a pleasure to work with. The know how is there, it is just in the wrong positions. Laws should define abstract interfaces. The more than hundred tax laws (tens of thousands of single rules) alone come with almost two hundred forms that dedicated tax payers are supposed to fill out. Imaging using two hundred Internet protocols for transporting different kinds of information (you mostly use two, one for email and one for browsing the world wide web, plus a hand full of protocols for multimedia applications in the world wide web). And all the Internet protocols you use are build on top of a basic protocol. The information revolution would not have been possible if people had not been restricted to a few selected standards and protocols.
Law must learn from this. Part of the problem is the law making process which seems to encourage adding laws rather than removing existing ones. But even if the law were simpler, a complex society probably needs a complex law system. A lot of effort should go into beautifying the laws. In programming beauty is not only beautiful to behold, it also pays off in the long run. It would definitely pay off in laws.
It is impossible to write a rule system of the size of the German laws and avoid logical inconsistencies. Indeed there are few programmers who can write a thousand or even a hundred rules without building in a couple of logical inconsistencies. This is not due to the inability of the programmers. Indeed few people are as well trained in logical thinking as programmers are. The trouble is the human brain which is not at all suited for logical thinking. The philosophers who have been claiming the contrary for millennia were very mistaken. The human brain can emulate logic but it is not good at it.
So how can programmers actually write rule systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than common law systems? The programmers have electronical help. The programs that are used to translate the human readable computer code into computer readable code check the code for simple inconsistencies. The programmers themselves write more programs with the sole purpose of checking the code of their bigger project for more complex logical inconsistencies.
All this is pretty straightforward on computers that know nothing but logic and are pretty good in it. Laws are run on a completely different machine though: on a society. The building blocks of society are humans. Humans carry around brains which are considered the most complex systems in the known universe. Since society is a system build of such brains, society is in some sense actually more complex than a single brain.
It will very likely be impossible to simulate the effect of laws on society for a long long time - if it will ever become possible at all. But it might be possible to formalize juridical rules in a way that they can be run in a computer which checks them for logical inconsistencies, loopholes and some simple undesired side effects. If this is possible, this would improve the law making process a lot. Thus this should definitely be attempted.
The process of building complex software is divided into several levels. The customer determines what the software should do. Top level executives and designers lay down basic principles on how the software should achieve its tasks. And technicians and engineers write the actual code. Most of the rules written by the engineers are completely independent from the requirements made by the customers. And many rules are still independent from the guidelines laid down by the executives. There are infinite ways of achieving the same effect in a computer. This is where the beauty comes in: the best way to solve a problem is usually the most elegant and logically beautiful.
The law making process is partly similar. In theory the public decides for a broad direction, government politicians make more detailed requirements and state secretaries and ministerial clerks write the actual rules which are finally approved or disapproved by the parliament. In law making though, it does not seem to be considered that the actual implementation is independent from the functionality. A state could and should have civil servants whose task it is to refactor (change) laws without changing what the laws actually do. Thus law could be optimized/beautified/simplified without parliament having to discuss every change. If the civil servants occupied with this task happen to find ways of simplifying the law a lot while changing the functionality a bit, they could ask parliament to approve such a change. If this strategy was to be followed, it would help if laws were not formulated concretely but in a more abstract way. For example a law concerning child allowance would not state a family receives 200 EUR child allowance. It would rather say any family receives about n % cash of average income from the state. It is then left to the ministerial clerks if they write the law as child allowance, as a tax refund or whatever. They could then put all state subventions for citizens into one pot and optimize the laws and the forms that citizens have to fill out.
If the laws are logically inconsistent, as I claim, then why does the system - the society - not break down? Because society is not a logical system. Society is very adaptive and self organizing. But few or no governments seem to make use of this. Most democracies try to regulate too much. This is probably due to the fact that for every existing law there are lobbyists whose clients profit from it. On the other hand nobody applaudes if a single rule is abandoned. So the laws tend to grow all the time. Politicians also seem to perceive themselves as law makers rather than social engineers whose task it is to optimize existing laws. Stalinist-Communist governments tried to control virtually everything. They seemed to be mortally afraid of things sorting themselves out. Part of the reason for their collapse is probably the impossibility to control the most complex system in the known universe. Neo-liberalists claim that economy will completely organize itself better than any government could. They are probably right, but I would not want to live in the resulting society because of the known problems. Marxist-Communists like neo-liberalists are almost anarchists claiming that once the according culture is established things will self organize into heaven on earth.
So the problem is that the existing concepts of society either want to control too much or too little. The classical social democracies in particular try to leave the market's ``natural'' laws intact to harvest its power but try to control it all the same. They try to put breaks, accelerators and steering devices into the market without changing its principles. I will propose to change the principles by applying drastic laws, but leaving the resulting system mostly to its own powers of self organization.
I will propose relatively few and simple but drastic rules. The idea is to establish a simple framework for society without wanting to control everything. The hope is that in the proposed framework the system will develop/self organize into the desired direction of high economic efficiency combined with social justice.
I will give an example of this principle that is more limited in scope: In Germany the traffic laws are not enforced. Basically you can exceed speed limits (which are generous) by 20 km/h without fearing any sanctions. Exceed it up to 40 km/h and expect to pay fines up to 40 EUR, exceed it up to 50 km/h pay up to 150 EUR. Only if you exceed the speed limit by more than 50 km/h you will really regret it, cause you will loose your license (do not try this at home, commonly applied tolerances for speeds of 100 km/h i.e. 10% and out of settlements rules were assumed). Speed limit signs are everywhere. You will find two per junction, one for each direction.
Now the problem with this is not the low fines or the lax tolerances. Higher fines and closer tolerances would certainly help, but they do not really fit into Germany's law culture. The trouble is the enforcement. There are too few controls of the limits.
Imagine you drive a car and you have a pot of tomato soup in the trunk, some major plant on the back seat, an indisposed acquaintance on the passengers seat or an undamped trailer at your back. Most drivers will have driven in some such situation. I can ensure you one drives miraculously well under such circumstances. Wide safety margins are maintained and a very fine grained resolution of adapted driving is achieved, much more fine grained than is enforced by one speed limit per junction. One does not go through turns too fast, one does not accelerate too fast, one does not break too suddenly. As far as safety is considered ideal driving is achieved.
I do not however propose to put a pot of tomato soup in every trunk. But I do think an important lesson can be learned from this. A lot of traffic signs could be economized while at the same improving traffic safety if one principle were changed: instead of controlling velocity, the law should control acceleration. This is regardless of the direction of acceleration: it does not matter if one goes into a turn, breaks or accelerates, physically all this is acceleration.
I propose to put a gyroscope and a transmitter into every car. This would cost below a 100 EUR per car. If the acceleration limit is exceeded too many times in too short a period of time, the transmitter will send out a signal that allows the police to track and finally the society to sanction the delinquent.
The system was changed in two ways: By the use of modern technology it is ensured that you will definitely be caught if you break the law and by changing the parameters which are controlled by the laws, the problem is simplified and the system improved. This is a good example of what I will try to propose for other more important aspects of society.
Wolfs have got such a bad lobby. They are social animals like humans and humans might gain from behaving a bit more like wolfs do. Mankind has a long history of pointing out the difference between man and animal. It has become harder to find things to point to since the age of enlightenment. We still do the pointing but a lot of former pointings have turned out to have been misdirected. What we found were lots of similarities between man and animal. I do not believe there is a qualitative difference between man and animal, but that does not matter all that much. It suffices if you agree that there are many similarities.
So what kind of animal is man? Or since this is about society, what kind of social animal is man? Prehistoric men lived in groups ranging from small families to tribes of a couple of dozen individuals. Man is extremely adaptive to whatever circumstances require but that is probably his natural way of living. Humans do not breed distinct alpha animals. Individuals can take the lead but this does not seem to be grounded in biology. Humans cooperate, individuals are not fit for surviving on their own. Humans care for each other. A lot. Privacy for anybody but the higher clergy and nobility is a very recent invention.
Humans can be most anything they choose to be. But Borg like hive societies or atomizing worship of individualism is not grounded in human biology. I think a society should respect human biology. It should allow humans to be almost anything they choose to be, but it should make use of human biology and make the default life in the society conform with the way humans lived before they started to look down on their fellow animals.
Rule systems are by far the greatest improvement ever made in our way of living together. But they cannot replace what humans had before. Rules are a great supplement. I believe they are indispensable for a modern society. But we are today witnessing that the former base of social organization is disintegrating leaving only the rules. That will not do.
So what was there before laws? The only check to keep people in line with the social (tribal) system was social pressure. Humans are social animals and most of us need company. One does not piss off his peers. Easy as that. There is more to it though, even more basic. There once was a time when people were responsible for their deeds, and they were held responsible by their peers, for good or for bad.
Both is still true today, but to a minor degree. I'll generate yawns all around when I ascertain yet again that society is atomizing, meaning we don't even know our neighbors and families count four heads at most. If one really messes up it's easy to go to another city. And in professional (partly even in private) life it is ever more easy and frequent to blame responsibility for anything on some abstract concept like state or company.
I'm not going to chant conservative anthems though. I believe social checks and balances should be strengthened where ever possible, I believe personal responsibility must be reinvented. But it has to be done in a novel fashion that is appropriate for a modern society.
What I will propose is not intended to suit everybody. It is not even intended to suit the majority. The proposed system relies on the Meta Constitution (Part II) being in place, because it is bound to not appeal to the majority. There are issues to be proposed to scare off leftists there are other issues that appeal to leftists and will scare off conservatives and there are issues that will scare off both. And there are certainly ample issues to scare off people from the political center. I do however hope there are some people beside me to whom the proposed system will appeal. A couple of million from around the world will probably suffice to reach the critical mass of a functional society. So we are talking about a few per mill of the total population of planet earth.
This implies that a society of people would result, that agree on many issues. Only thus can drastic rules be proposed that change the way society works. This also lends enormous power to the society because it leads to unprecedent unity. Consensus is a basic premise of the proposed society.
This section is extremely compressed. You'll find rationale or accompanying madness in the adjacent sections. Think of this chapter as a prototypical constitution written in bad prose.
Information is mostly free - since we are entering information age fast, legislation on information gets its own section.
Companies are transparent. Any interested person can request any information about the production, research, organization, financial or personnel issues concerning the company. The company has to yield that information if it has the information. The company cannot be forced to research the information, but the person requiring the information can do the research himself if he refunds any costs he causes to the company.
There is no copyright and only weak patents. I call the weak patents infotags. A company or person holding an infotag can collect a ``tax'' - infotax - from any company that uses the information or similar concepts for production of physical goods. The holder of the infotag can determine the height of the infotax in percent of the retail price of the product. That percentage is bound to the information, not the producing company.
Anybody can use the information. If tagged information is used in other more advanced infotags (i.e. research results building on existing infotags), the advanced infotag does not influence the basic infotag. Companies using the advanced information have to pay the sum of basic and advanced infotax.
A maximum percentage constituting the infotax is determined by the authorities granting the infotag and that maximum degrades over time. That time is relatively short (1 or two decades?). When the maximum hits zero the information becomes public domain. Companies using their own infotags for their products have to pay the infotax to the state. Holders of infotags can always lower the tax but never raise it.
Due to the nature of this arrangement, infotaxes only concern material goods not software or anything that can be digitized. Private use - one manufactures goods for oneself - and humanitarian uses are free of infotaxes since no price is payed in these cases and any percentage becomes zero. Information that is independent of a material goods - e.g. computer programs, texts, recorded media - cannot be taxed.
Propaganda is illegal. Free speech is not concerned. Anybody can say, write or broadcast anything they like including racist or other commonly illegal content.
This apparent contradiction is solved by defining propaganda as ``paying somebody to convince somebody else of something''. Thus you can say anything if you feel like it, but you must not pay anybody to sing your song.
This renders most forms of marketing (actually any I can think of) illegal.
As mentioned in the previous section there is no copyright. There is however no problem with charging for life performances or original work (paintings, sculptures ...). Writers are out of luck - there is no problem with selling printed paper, but writers are no printers - sorry folks.
Traditional media would probably not work in this setup, since they are mostly in the business of selling audience awareness to advertisers rather than content to their audience. Traditional media are an infamous propaganda machine under above definition. Media might however be able to survive with a different business model that relies on compiling information for their customers. I doubt that though.
Information flow is not publicly controlled.
There is no public protection of privacy. Anybody is free to encrypt electronic communication or try to scramble surveillance gear. Anybody is also free to try to tap anybody else.
Convicted felons can be forced to carry gear that enables others to remotely monitor them and the felons must not impede these monitoring capabilities.
Everybody has a publicly accessible electronic Xin.
In search of a catchy name I stumbled over the Chinese word Xin. I believe it to translate to something like: heart, soul, conscience, moral nature, intent, idea, ambition, kernel, center.
The Xin is a kind of electronic diary (like a blog, or weblog) that is not written by its owner but by other people. Everybody can write new entries in anybody else's Xin. Entries are rated by yet other people for relevance or personal taste or what ever matter to the rating person. Entries can be threaded and sorted by topics.
Any other personal data like financial records, medical records, criminal records, records of professional career are also available through the Xin.
People can assign Kama to other people. The notion Kama covers a special concept that is some kind of mixture between karma and competence. Kama is split up into several specialized areas. Your accountant will hopefully sport lots of accounting Kama, a doctor should be competent in medicine and should easily gain high medical Kama.
Kama also covers other areas as well though. Everybody can get moral Kama reflecting their moral integrity, religious Kama for their religiousness, Kama for being progressive or conservative and the like.
Kama areas are organized in a standardized hierarchy. Child doctors rated for their pediatric Kama get automatically rated for medicine as well.
Everybody can rate anybody else in any area. If somebody with high Kama in one area rates somebody in the same area his rating counts more than the same rating by people with no Kama in that area. This weighting of Kama rating influence is subject to limited spreading through the standardized Kama hierarchy. That means a child doctors rating of a pathologist weighs more than the same rating of somebody who has no medical Kama but less than the same rating from another pathologist.
Kama in all areas is accessible through the Xin. Xin comments (diary entries) may be associated to Kama categories. If so the comment rating is subject to Kama weighting as above. Comments might also be subjected to discussion digistion as explained in section 7.3.
What kind of state is proposed here? This chapter covers all the classical aspects of statedom.
It is a constitutional state. There are laws that govern the lifes of all members. The constitution is the most basic law. It governs the most important aspects of the state including the way laws are modified added or removed. The state is not a nation state (see II).
It is not a social market economy, but it is more social and more market oriented than the former. It is not a democracy in any common sense but it is more democratic I suppose than what we have now - and it's hopefully a hell of a lot more efficient. You'll read more on this in the according subsections.
The state is as decentralized as possible. It is a hopefully self-organizing mess only held together by the constitution and the derived laws. There are not even public officials, or rather every member of the state is also a public official. Public officials are not payed though. That means many members will have two professions: one as a clerk and one for the money. More details on this particular piece of weirdness can be found in sections 5.2.5 and 5.2.6.
The family was branded kernel of society. Marriage was encouraged by legislation. No more.
If you want to marry, make a civil contract or ask your favorite god for blessing or do both but don't bother the state. The kernel of society is the clan. And you are not encouraged to have one. Belonging to a clan is mandatory.
Your clan is the people whom you choose to be your clan. Your clan has a minimum size m and a maximum size n as specified by the according law (I'd propose m = 5 and n = 50 ... out of the blue). Every relationship has a designated strength with values from zero to one. The sum of all relationship strengths of one person is 1. The minimum of the strongest relationship in your clan is 1/m (i.e. 0.2 if my number for m is used). The maximum of the strongest relationship in your clan is another given value p (say 0.5).
Relationship strength can be infinitesimal but a total strength of at least 1/m has to be connections that lead ``outside''. That means you cannot have a group of five people that are clan wise isolated from the rest of society by having only each other as clan members. The ``1/m outside strength'' rule applies to any given group except for groups that are bigger than whole state minus whole state times 1/m. That means if you sample any group of people, at least a 1/m * group-size connection strength has to lead outside of that sample. This last point poses a serious computational problem. If it is not solvable the rule is modified or abandoned. It should also be disabled in the beginning of the revolution because it looks kind of hard to build a global society from such premises.
Relationship strengths cannot be changed in a way that violates the law: ``The sum of all relationship strengths of one person is 1''. If one person wishes to lower a relationship strengths and doesn't find somebody else (potentially another clan member of the other person) to take up the relation, he cannot lower it. After a certain time however he can file a complaint which can result in a fine for the person who lags relations.
Some slag has to be build into the system or changing strengths would become impossible because changing one value would require changing many many others. I propose to allow plus-minus 1/m slag for every individual. The strengths (incoming and outgoing) will then be normalized to sum up to one.
In the long run the connection strengths should be computed automatically based on how you interact with whom - but the required AI is not here yet.
Beautiful numbers, so what? You are in many ways responsible for the people in your clan. See sections 5.2.5, 5.2.4, 5.2.11.
There are two taxes: infotax a small fraction of which might have to be payed to the state (section 5.1.1.2) and capital transfer tax (payable for gifts and inheritance). Good news, isn't it? Right, it isn't. The latter tax is one hundred percent.
And now for something completely different.
Having really bad Xin entries is a significant punishment. But that will likely not prevent crime. There are no jails. Delinquents can be grounded by courts. Electronic shackles help enforcing the punishment. Detainees can be forced to carry devices that allow authorities to monitor them permanently. Dangerous criminals get implants that can be activated by anybody by voice command and temporally paralyze the delinquent. Misuse is obviously punishable.
It was already mentioned that the Xin lists the criminal record. That means that official Xin entries can be a significant punishment. People are supposed to look after each other. In order to ``encourage'' that, sentences spread through the clan links. The sentence spreading is weighed by link strengths. If a major clan member of mine (say we have link strength 0.5) breaks the law then I will receive link strength times his punishment. If he/she is grounded for 20 days I'll be grounded for 10 days in this example.
... or lag thereof: I cannot discuss the social security system without discussing the market system as well. So this is the gist of the gist of it. I don't see this section as particularly interesting, but history seems to hint at minds howling here at these humble musings. I promise I did my best to piss off everybody equally.
The market is mostly free. A libertarians wet dream. Except for the lag of copyright, the infotags instead of patents, the ban on propaganda. And the collective labor agreement. Collective indeed: Everybody works on the same tariff. The loan depends on two things: Total working time (calculated yearly and low pass filtered) and the education.
The higher the working time the higher the loan per hour. The time spend in education relevant to the work is set in relation to the life time expectancy and the hourly loan adjusted accordingly. That means if you have a live expectancy of 80 years and spend 20 of those years in education relevant to your job, you earn 1/3 more than somebody without any education. If you have 40 years of relevant education you earn twice as much as the uneducated. If you have 79 years of relevant education you earn 80 times as much.
The education-based loan is just for keeping the system fair. The increasing hourly loan for workaholics is supposed to do the magic. There are no laws governing working times. Thus it is in the interest of the employers to distribute the work they pay for on as many people as possible. The social system largely depends on employing everybody rather than on subsidies. The slope of the hourly-loan / working-hours should be adjusted by the government to achieve the desired effect. Kind of like in the saying: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day / Teach him how to be a fish and he will never need a bicycle. Only it's rather ``Allow him'' than ``Teach him how''.
The other pillar of the social security system is the clan network. One is supposed to support one's clan members if they are in social distress. One is not enforced to support his clan members, but considering Kama (section 5.1.3.2) and the criminal law (section 5.2.4) it might be a good idea. If finances allow it (section 5.2.3), such support might be subsidized.
There are no public pension fonds. Everybody should invest money as he sees fit for is old age.
There are no full time public clerks. Everybody has to do public work. The working time is as flexible as possible while keeping the system running. That means one might continually work 5 hours a week for the state or one might work a month full time and then eleven months not at all.
The amount of work to be done depends on the total amount of work that has to be done for the state by the whole population and on the actual work. One has to work less if he chooses unpopular work.
The kind of work one has to do depends on the current requirements of the state, on the personal competences (see Kama in section 5.1.3.2), and on personal preferences. If Kama requirements cease to be met the clerk looses his position and gets another one. The position in the organization of the state depends largely on Kama.
The bureaucracy is project oriented, not hierarchical. Large open source projects like Debian might lend much inspiration. If there is to be the one big boss of it all than his position is rather representational. Where personality matters a lot, people can hold fixed long term positions. ``Foreign'' policy works better with personal relationships. Thus diplomatic positions are given to people who (can be expected to) have good relationships to the regarding ``foreign'' representatives. For example the foreign minister for France would be someone with a friendly relationship to Sarkozy. The foreign minister for the US would be someone who can bare Bush (or the US Foreign minister if they don't cancel that position). When Sarkozy leaves, the foreign minister also leaves.
See section 5.2.6 for the recruitment of the police force. Like everything in the state the police is much more transparent than in current societies. Every recorded detail of the police work is published right after closing the investigation. Police personnel like every other public personnel looses its public job if their Kama does not meet the requirements anymore (police work requires moral integrity, composure, clemency ...).
There are no secret services.
There is no army. Everybody gets training in being ungovernable. This might include certain forms of civil protest and even terrorist and guerrilla tactics depending on legislation.
Again, see 5.2.6. Anybody with the right Kama (moral integrity, moral integrity, moral integrity, knowledge of law, good judgment ...) can become a judge. Whether a judge works in arbitral court or at the constitutional court depends largely on his Kama.
If it turns out that judges get Kamaly rated out of court because they have to condemn people, some counter-mechanism has to be build into the rating system. The same comment also applies to the police force and maybe some other positions.
Legislature consists of three main steps:
Everybody can potentially experience or see something go wrong and blame the laws. To get the process of lawmaking started one has to collect legislative Kama - once enough people with high enough (high enough to break a total legislative Kama threshold) legislative karma support the lawmaking request (in effect forming something like the contemporary lobby) the next step is initiated. For that matter the request must formally describe the law failure and it should identify competences that could contribute in solving the problem.
Once this initial phase is over only people with high moral Kama get involved in the law making process.
Trying to initiate the same or similar laws over and over again is punishable under the propaganda prohibition (see section 5.1.1.3). Detailed rules must be implemented to spot such attempts to break the system.
A group of people with higher than average competence in the fields identified by the request is randomly chosen from all citizens. The only task of this group is to compile a list of competences required to solve the problem at hand. If this group feels it requires more competences for compiling that list than are listed in the request, then this group can be extended accordingly (again with a randomized sample). This list thus compiled is authoritative.
Using this list a second and third group is sampled from all citizens. The second group works out detailed proposals on what to change (laws to make, change, and/or abandon). The second group can use any counselors of its choice. It can, but does not have to coordinate. Every proposal requires one official sponsor from this group.
The third group democratically votes on which proposal to accept. Simple majority decides on simple laws, absolute majority is required to change the constitution. The third group can formulate a statement of why it did not choose any of the proposals. If the majority votes for this statement, the second group can work out new proposals based on this statement.
Talking to a member of the third group about the lawmaking process that member is involved in is punishable if the member did not initiate the dialog by itself.
Maybe the second and third group should be the same.
The constitution should incorporate guidelines on lawmaking. Simplicity of the law system should be regarded as a value in itself that can outweigh minor problems that could be solved by making much more complicated laws. There could also be a federal office of law refactoring. The clerks would continuously browse the laws and try to weed out superfluous laws, condensing multiple laws into other - maybe more abstract - laws and so on. In short that office would do what programmers do when they refactor their code.
Laws have to fulfill higher standards than German laws: they have to be enforceable and enforced. Tax, drug, and traffic laws that are broken by major parts of the population and thus criminalize many people are unconstitutional.
There are no schools but there are teachers - who, like all clerks aren't paid (see section 5.2.6). Children and teenagers go to work at the same places where grown ups go. Their ``work'' is solely learning, though. They are tutored by the people who otherwise do the work. Obviously small children will have to start with businesses that can teach something to children with very limited skill sets while older teenagers can visit any business. The children can choose the places they visit themselves. They have to do tests on a regular basis. These tests serve the purpose of avoiding specialization. When the skill set of a child starts becoming lopsided its choices of places to visit will be limited to places that can counteract the partial education.
Here I'm trying to make up some arguments for a change.
The whole Xin business is a major pillar in this manifesto. It is essentially formalizing personal responsibility and introducing accountability for that concept. I guess the idea is most prominently put forward by anarchists of all kinds (communists and libertarians alike, though I did not hear them proposing accountability for it). The idea was also advocated - and used - by blogs from the start. It was then called mojo or karma and such things.
The concept of personal accountability - honor - worked pretty well in ``primitive'' societies ... too well at times. However, it suffers from obvious problems in modern society where everybody is honor wise first and foremost anonymous. The Xin can bring personal accountability back. It may work even better in a networked society than in a pre-information-age society. The biggest problem with traditional honor is that it was an extremely rigid concept that was dictated by the narrow minded world view of small enclosed societies. Our impression of honor largely dates from the Victorian age. That age was the first to offer some personal recesses to significant numbers of the people involved in the honor business. Such personal recess combined with the need to comply with a very rigid concept conveyed hypocrisy.
The modern networked society allows everybody to choose his own peer group with its own ideas of what conduct is desirable. The transparency of the proposed society would probably encourage tolerance even more than current western societies while it would at the same time discourage hypocrisy. The concept should thus bring about all the good consequences of personal accountability without including the downsides usually associated with it.
This whole manifesto actually began with the Xin (or rather Kama) idea - then I did not call it Xin/Kama and I merely considered it to be a good instrument for determining who governs the rest of us, i.e. choosing the legislative. If it were restricted to that application though, I believe it would turn out to be much too costly. When it's part of everyday life it has many other desirable consequences and is much more likely to actually be used. Yet its role in government is crucial.
The top level of government is the legislative. In the proposed model there would be no leaders as those of each and every modern state. Instead the best individuals would only ever make one or - over the course of their lives - a few laws. Since laws usually impact many people, people who may give some feedback on what they think of a given law, the quality of a law can have a very significant impact on the lawmaker's Xin.
The best individuals for solving a given problem (making a requested law) are chosen through the universal rating mechanisms of the Kama and because of the impact the law may have on their Xin they are motivated to do the right thing - the right long term thing, because they'll spend their lives with their Xin. Since they only make one law in mid term, misuse can easily be corrected and could only have undesirable consequences for lawmakers who try to misuse their power.
Obviously different laws would be made by different people and there would be no classical leadership that could imprint their governance style on the nation. It is just competent people doing what is necessary. This is bit different from how things work today which is one of the reasons why I think, that my proposals would need a lot of careful testing and polishing were anything of it ever implemented.
Yet this volatility of personal power is another cornerstone of the manifesto: it allows disregarding most conventional safeguards for protecting the people from their governor's power. After all, Big Brother is only big for a very limited period of time and has a very limited scope in which to apply his power.
Since data protection is notoriously of great public concern, the ever present fear of the Big Brother might be one of the major objections to the manifesto. You can indeed mostly forget about data protection in the proposed society. I do not however judge this a show stopper.
1984, the book that injected Big Brother into public consciousness was not primarily about a police state spying on its citizens. 1984's main concern was governance through fear - something that is already much more systematically practiced than spying on the citizens. The information gap that is so prominently exposed in 1984 is rather a means for inducing fear. This notwithstanding there have been notorious police states and they are apparently not very desirable. These police states did always and must always work with an information gap between government and citizens.
The society proposed here does not have such an information gap. Quite to the contrary it is more transparent than any other society system ever tested on a major scale.
There is another safe guard against this turning into a police state and it is just as important as the transparency: there is no continuous legislative or military that could seize power. The system is from the ground designed to be resistant against turning into a police state, it's not like current systems where such safeguards are second thoughts after bad experiences.
What remains are big nosy business, naughty neighbors and the impertinent paparazzi. Big nosy business has to crap its marketing departments. What remains of a companie's marketing is its reputation and public coverage. Those companies - as every entity in the proposed society much more transparent than any current company - do good with not pissing of their customers by spying on them. Currently the collected data is supposed to be mostly used for market research - in this case anonymous data would suffice and it would protect the companie's reputation - and for selective advertising. Advertising is forbidden as propaganda, thus no trouble here.
The business model that supports impertinent paparazzi might not work under extreme governing. The shots paparazzi make are not protected by copyright. And the media that publish these shots are not allowed to sell slots for advertising. The only way this could work might be in big daily yellow print media, which I assume will share the fate of the dinosaurs rather sooner than later. The paparazzi has a Xin like everybody else. And his victims will be really mad at him. I don't think there are that many shots that are worth ruining your recorded reputation (i.e. Xin).
Ugh, well the neighbors. Remember what I wrote about being paranoid about your wanking habits? Since you are reading this you must have decided to read on beyond that point. And here it is. This is the price that is to be paid for extreme governing. I assume the consequences to be rather mild though. Spying on your neighbors will probably be considered a very bad habit for a long time to come (and if it isn't people obviously have learned to live with transparency). Doing it might isolate you socially since it reflects in your Xin. Plus, one has the option of retaliation - just spy back. Plus it might have positive consequences, too. One thing that is commonly bemourned in current western democracies is the atomization of society, the excessive individualism. Knowing a bit more about one's neighbors counteracts this trend as does the clan system and the mutual responsibility.
The atomization of society is a rather alarming trend. That is not alarming because partly destructive heritages like ``family'' are disappearing. It is mostly because more and more people are left behind by modern societies - old people, ill people (like drug addicts, but also people with other severe illnesses) and the white, black or beautifully colored so called trash. Criminality is established as a long term lifestyle in not so minor a part of society. Much of these problems were avoided by a tight social network in historical societies.
Because of its lag of flexibility, this network did however crush many of the more liberal minds. The proposed clan system tries to find a balance that combines the advantages of tight social networks and individualism by allowing anyone to choose his network himself.
The clan system is the lowest level on which society is organized. It allows a much more fine grained social security network than current systems. One's personal social security network depends on one's clan, not on the state. This emphasizes personal choices over the ever present mother state that takes care of its citizens.
Together with a modern police force it has the potential of mostly crushing crime. The only exception is passionate crime, which I assume can never be completely avoided. The clan system works against crime with two mechanisms: Since people are responsible for each other, they need to be informed about what their clan members do and can thus prevent crimes before they happen. The potential criminals on the other hand will earn punishments not only for themselves but also for their clan - their chosen friends or family. This will greatly discourage criminal activities.
Crime is also counteracted by the pursued equality of chances, the availability of work and the lag of propaganda that proclaims consumerism as the only lifestyle that brings personal satisfaction and social respect.
Apart of encouraging crime this ever present propaganda has other adverse consequences. A common human trait seems to be an insatiable yearning for more. Advertisement tries to encourage this trait without ever satisfying the yearning. This might be a major reason for our current very energy and resource intensive lifestyle. This lifestyle has to change in order to safe at least a bit of our biosphere. (hush, sub prime crises is intentionally not mentioned here).
Advertisement is a large scale deployment of disinformation. Disinformation should be regarded the archenemy of information society because it strongly decreases the efficiency of such societies. Indeed advertisement seems to not provide any common value (apart from being a money dispenser for creative projects). Thus all labor invested in this market sector is wasted when considering the whole national economy. It is a very harmful waste of resources.
It has been amply demonstrated that wealth doesn't really buy happiness. What helps though is more wealth than thy neighbor's. If you are both poor buggers but you're a bit less poor you're likely just as happy as if you were both well off but you yet a bit better off. So this is not really about wealth but about social status. Modern western societies correlate social status with wealth and commercial propaganda does everything to foster this correlation. It does that because the drive for social status seems to be one of the stronger motivations in humans and the propaganda wants to utilize that drive. This comes down to two consequences: firstly it drives people to economically perform at their personal optimum - which in itself is not bad, in particular it was not bad when people were really poor, though today it may be a bit over the top - secondly it drives people to appear just a bit better than their peers - which can have detrimental effects on the common good.
The Xin system strives to harvest the social status drive as well. But it does not take that circumvention through wealth but allows individuals to directly harvest esteem from their peers through their words and deeds toward others, others who might manifest their esteem (good or bad) in a Xin. While the current model of western societies drives people to maximize economical gains, the Xin system would drive people to optimize social interactions.
However, the Xin system is not the only factor in the manifesto. You could still do economically better than your peers (maybe not as grotesquely better than today, but that depends on the actual adjustment of some parameters). And I assume their exist reasons outside of social status to pursue economical wealth. Thus taken together, the manifesto proposes something that is in my opinion a bit better balanced and better suited to contemporary economical reality than our current way of doing things.
I do though (give a shit about information being free). Banning propaganda is only one measure of enhancing the efficiency of national economy. Traditional economies are about distributing limited goods/resources. Information economy is about distributing information. Unlike traditional goods information is never a limited resource in a digitized infrastructure. Information can be copied and distributed at almost no cost at all. Therefore traditional market rules do not necessarily apply to information. Information seems to have the amazing property of multiplying best when it is freely available.
When the traded good consists purely of information the production cost depends heavily on the availability of other information goods that are used in the development (creative work is an exception to this rule, but it partly applies to e.g. music and visual arts). In fact almost any modern computer program would be next to impossible to develop without the help of numerous development tools like modern programming languages, debuggers, compilers and so on or without ample ready made parts (``libraries'') of tested code for the creation of graphical user interfaces, database/Internet access and the like. On the other hand the development of many programs (like e.g. email clients, CD-burner software ...) is a trivial task today that can be achieved by one experienced programmer within a week.
Since the development-cost of new informational goods depends mostly on the availability of other such goods the efficiency of the national economy is maximized if the availability of such goods is maximized.
I do not assume, that hobbyist will completely take over the software sector. But hobbyist developments can already completely cover the market for home desktop systems. Business applications is a very different story though. But business applications are mostly very company specific. Thus copyright rules do not affect the market for business applications as it does markets for more general purpose software. Companies can and will still for example pay programmers to automate their business processes or implement the newest Sim apps that run on mobiles. There are ample examples where companies will still pay programmers to develop rather specific code even if copyright is history.
The development of hardware differs significantly from software development. Many aspects of the hardware development process cannot be automated or simulated, because the underlying physics are not known or are too complex to simulate. Since the development of hardware always requires the production of prototypes it always implies some monetary investment. Such investments would probably not be made if the investors could not expect a return on their investment. Thus patents are beneficial in the context of hardware investment.
Patents do also have undesirable effects on the national economy though: Patents are frequently used to monopolize or even completely prevent the production of patented goods. Thus the production of these goods is not subject to the efficiency and production price optimization which is the the most important advantage of market economy.
Infotags are an attempt to distill the advantages of patents while leaving the disadvantages out of the system. They encourage investment in hardware development while making it impossible to foster production monopolies.
The enhanced transparency of companies is another measure for improving efficiency: Novel ideas that proved useful in one company can easily be used by other companies to improve their efficiency.
As is the ``transparency'' of people as facilitated by the Xin and Kama. These mechanisms make it much easier to choose somebody to do some work for you - a craftsman, clergy, worker or babysitter. It simplifies decisions about whom to make monetary deals with. More importantly / generally: it creates trust. The Xin holds the promise of being able to trust total strangers to unprecedent degrees. Just read the portions of their Xin that are relevant to the matter at hand and do your own well grounded judgment of that person.
Obviously some people will be worse off in a system like this, some people will find nobody to employ them, right? Yes indeed, only I think it's not just some, it's the vast majority. The reason is - fanfare for the great final of blunt talk about wanking - almost all men are wankers at least until they reach a certain age (120?). I believe that ``nobody is perfect'' might be the one greatest euphemism humanity indulges in. I believe a system like the Xin network would encourage tolerance rather than marginalization. But I also think that arguments are probably vain in this matter: only trying out will tell.
The Kama system is also essential for the organization of the state as proposed here - see above. For now let's
You may or may not have realized it but the world is full of musicians, writers, photographers, filmers, actors and any other imaginable creative crowd. Most are hobbyists but even the vast majority of the professionals (with the possible exception of writers) is not affected by this whole discussion. Professional musicians teach music and make some small money with live gigs. Actors work at theaters and so on. Only a very small minority of the professionals earn significant money through copyright. Everybody's right to publicly perform cover songs is supposed to have a lower value than the morally questionable right of an infinitesimal minority to make Money for Nothing. I don't agree.
In the light of the contemporary creative onslaught, the copyright laws and public discussion smell a lot like hysteria. When those laws were devised, life was pretty tough and few could afford to act upon their creative inclinations. If our culture wanted to afford some culture it had to grant creative people an income from their creativity. That is not true anymore.
So you aren't going to make any money from your books, your songs, your movies or any other creative informational product, right? Well mostly right, see above, but putting the nitpicking aside: yes right enough.
So nobody's gonna write any books, make any music, movies or other creative stuff? Quite to the contrary. Indeed, nobody will make any ``art'' for money and that implies that we will be spared a lot of trash. I would really like to make excessive use of this argument that nonexistent copyright laws are supreme trash filters. I believe it's true, too. But I think the effect will be more than made up for by marauding creative masses that - robbed of classical television and most of the other cheap commercial entertainment - will start creating like crazy and make it even harder to locate quality in that vast sea of posh poo.
Not only will these frighteningly creative masses be robbed of cheap entertainment, they will also have more time on their hands, because there is much less work (marketing gone, administration much simplified, law simplified, reinventing the wheel the zillionth time over to find it patented: obsolete, letting loose the hounds - aka lawyers - zilch). One will not find much work designed to catch and hold attention, though. This is currently the main purpose of the mainstream, since it's the only way to sell enough commercials. People will only create what they find worth creating for it's own sake. I assume that is indeed an effective trash filter, but it's not nearly enough to cope with a swelling flood of creative products. But computer programs that solve this problem already exist and will likely improve considerably in the future.
Talking of programs: it may have stricken you that this whole Xin/Kama business that is the backbone of the proposed society will heavily rely on computers and programs. Now if you happen to have used a computer, since uncle Zuse heard the first tell tale clicking of his darling Z1, you may have concluded that computers are not to be trusted. Let me just mention fully digital, networked voting machines. Hear any alarm bells? When the shivers that sent down your spine, abated sufficiently for you to continue reading, consider what a meltdown of the Internet would do to the proposed society.
Yes, what indeed? It would send that society back to the caves until the network is recovered ... just as it would our current society. If the communication networks stopped working today, money and with it the lives we used to know would vanish. Europe would break apart for lag of communication and maybe so would bigger nation states - which would become hard to govern with fast communication gone and anarchy breaking loose everywhere. And the revolution that is the Internet is only 30 to 40 years old if you count it's earliest beginnings, fifteen if you only count the mass phenomenon. We become more dependent on the network with every day at an amazing speed.
That doesn't help at all with the voting machines though. Voting machines are relatively few, presumably uniform, and meddling with them has a relatively huge impact. The machines running the Xin would have to be everywhere (e.g. everybody's mobile), very heterogeneous and redundantly mirroring each other. That makes attacks harder and limits their scope. Still the Xin system would have to be more secure than today's commonly used networked devices.
Did you hear that they developed quantum cryptography to the point of large scale deployment? That provides one technological cornerstone for a secure Xin system: rock solid meddle safe communication. A safeness that is guaranteed by nothing less than the laws of nature - laws that will not be talked into submission by hackers and won't fall before ... before ... ugh ... they get that damn LHC thingy running again. Next topic.
So even if this IT based society would IT-wise be manageable, it still smells a bit of technocracy: the whole Kama system is designed to pick the most competent experts for solving a given problem and those experts are then let loose on the problem. Right? No(t really).
First of all those experts don't rule. Nobody rules. Individuals make isolated decisions that will affect many other people and, most importantly, themselves by influencing their (long term!) social status. Thus the experts would be rather unwise to merely follow rational processes for finding the most efficient solution without regarding the public opinion of the problem.
Yet the decision makers would be more free to make decisions that are unpopular at the time because the long term outlook matters more in that process of decision making - one has to live a whole life with such decisions while today's politicians have to live 4 years with a decision at the very longest.
Then the experts are not necessarily ``engineers'' of one kind or another as you would expect in a technocracy. The skills that are required of the experts are determined in a separate process and those ``skills'' always include the highest moral standards and likely other ``soft'' skills you would not expect of your cursed technocrats.
It's not anarchy, there are rules, people who make the rules, and people who enforce them. Yet there is not a group or a class of people who make the rules. There are no rulers. A small group of people bears the responsibility for a given rule and no more. How can some guidance be instilled into that process?
First of all a special sub-constitution but above law document should provide general guidelines to which rulers have to adhere. This should mention things like:
The final decision on if to make a given law and how to formulate it has to lie with a rather small group of people - like a hand full. If too many people are involved in the decision, the responsibility is spread too far. Yet the group of decision makers should incorporate different views and opinions even though they can and should hear opinions from people who do not vote on the law. The group of voters should have a size that allows discussions between all voters, i.e. below maybe ten or twenty people. A balance has to found here.
The constitution and above document should be subject to the same law-making process as ``normal'' laws. Maybe the group of voters should be a bit bigger though, selected to represent more or less the spread and weight of opinions in the population, and a greater than simple majority should be required.
Some people in the proposed system have to move some very long levers: for example whoever decides on the global tariff. Similar mechanisms have to employed here as for determining the basic lending rate in western central banks. Maybe the characteristic of the total-working-hours/pay-per-hour curve has to be determined through the law-making process and the clergy may ``merely'' set some parameters.
Combined the ability to set the base lending rate, the global tariff, the law refactoring process and possibly other key functions lend immense power to whomever controls this. Some checks and balances may have to be provide to prevent misuse of this power.
Still no rulers. I'm strangely confident that this rules-without-ruler approach might work except for one issue: diplomacy. Diplomacy is and has always been something between people. The system proposed in this manifesto would call for diplomats who handle a given diplomatic issue and then leave the post for someone else. For foreign diplomats this would imply dealing with perpetually changing diplomats - which would probably not do. Instead diplomats should try how they get along with given foreign diplomats and then be assigned to specific foreign diplomats with whom they get along rather well.
Diplomats would thus not be topically or geographically specialized but they would be specialized on persons. Since they have no personified government behind them, it would be harder for diplomats to commit to proposed covenants. Such committal would have to be left to the standard rule making mechanisms. The topic-centricity that I talked about above would still apply to the actual decision makers in diplomacy.
The transparency of the proposed society would make it easy prey for foreign secret services. At the same time this would render that society a particularly nonthreatening and reliable diplomatic partner, which might even turn out to be an advantage (my naiveté stops at nothing).
So we're to have toddlers toddling among the steel rolls and die cutters. Doesn't that sound like more fun than we can handle? That requires massive investments in securing all sorts of workplaces. As a nice side effect workplaces will become really secure for employees as well as environmentally clean. But that is not what this about. On top of the security investments having children at workplaces will reduce the productivity considerably because the employees are more often distracted. And you can hardly have one teacher look after 30 children if they are not tied to their chairs and desks. All this will be so outrageously expensive, why bother?
I don't have any arguments here that I find very convincing, yet I am convinced. I think it is a bad idea to isolate our children's culture from the grown up's culture. I think it is cruel and stupid to force children to learn lots of abstract information while keeping the meaning, the grounding, and the significance of this learning from them. And most of all I think it's a bloody shame for us and for our children to spend so little time with each other. Somebody working full time may see his children three hours a day. Instead we waste our time on producing stupid stuff that nobody really needs. We should provide a place for our children in our lives, a place big enough to accommodate them.
This manifesto proposes fundamental changes. This is rather fearsome. The last two sentences are no rhetoric, I think it is very fearsome. I am indeed a bit afraid of the future.
But no matter what we do, the future will bring changes so radical that I cannot imagine them - no matter if 6 billion scream hurray and subscribe to the manifesto (no I'm not completely nuts, I don't believe anything like this will happen, I'm trying to make a point) or if we continue the way we are currently going. The future is wild (though maybe a bit sparse on wildlife).
A child is dying with about every two words you read here. Ill people do not get medicine because that would hurt somebody's profits. Unleashed human wolves slay hundreds of thousands of people with machetes and AK47s. We display stupefying wealth and detain people at our borders who try to escape stupefying poverty. And many of us have chutzpa to call ourselves Christians, goddamn it. One billion people suffer severe malnutrition and we burn food in our cars.
The temperature will rise some three degrees C, the sea level will rise a meter and we're carrying out one of the biggest mass extinctions in earth's history. The current systems does its best to destroy the planet and it appears to be bound to finish the job if we let it.
Whatever comes from the manifesto, we'll have to try really hard to match that.
The revolution will definitely come. It will change the world we know today so much that I will not recognize it When I'm Sixty-Four - just as I don't recognize the world of my childhood days in what's there outside today. But what specifically will the future bring? "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" (quote attributed to more wise arses than fit between these brackets). But I hope it brings something else than more of what we saw since World War Two.
I hope we'll eventually see something more humane. History moves in cycles, alternating social and liberal times with economical and restrictive times. From the 80ies on the Hippies have been crowded out by the Yuppies. I believe the next social/liberal revolution has been gathering its followership since the 70ies: RMS paved the way for millions of geeks who brought about a revolution of revolutions: The first revolution to start by creating things instead of destroying things. The first revolution to be officially prescribed by governments (who order their administration to exclusively use open formats).
However, the FLOSS revolution is rather unpolitical and is a top secret operation. My telling people that Microsoft is trying to assassinate information society and that they will fucking not get this document in Wordwhatever format from me is perceived as ridiculous - and I can't even begrudge them the ridicule. I believe the reason for this total lag of public perception is that FLOSS is utterly technical. There is no social vision connected to it in public perception. No geek who contributed anything to FLOSS needs to be told about the value of free information. But beyond that, there is little that politically binds the FLOSS community. Even the word FLOSS is a unloved merger of names of two major factions of that community.
However, that plurality of the FLOSS community is a strength, because that plurality allows us to politically reach far more people than the FLS/OSS factions - or developers who don't even care about these distinctions - could reach alone. I do think though the initial ignition has to come from the FLOSS movement because the next major political revolution will very likely make heavy use of network technology. And it will hopefully not be a proprietary revolution. That means FLOSS will have to provide the technology for the next revolution.
Much of it is already there - free OSes, Wikis, Blogs, social networks, trust networks (Debian's key ring) and so on - and more will likely come. On top of these technologies, on certain web sites that provide technological platforms for coordinating the revolution, political groups are forming. Many of these groups pursue pre-information-age ideologies. Most of these ideologies have not been tested on a large scale at all and almost none have been tested in a networked society.
I believe a networked society has a property the changes the game board fundamentally: you don't need a territory anymore to build a polis. All the pre-information-age ideologies should be adapted to this change of the rules (this includes contemporary western democracies!). Information age ideologies should be developed and thrown in for good measure (as I have tried to do above). Everybody should hopefully agree on some kind of meta-constitution and be it only ``Everybody can choose his polis as he likes and may not be physically forced in his choices''. Or something along those lines. Translating that to English would be a good start.
Western societies can hardly take the route of historical revolutions because such revolutions would shatter the global economical system which might take considerable time to reestablish in whatever form. Shattering the global economical system would lead to millions or even billions of deaths. Therefor the only possible route is gradual change. If diversity can be fostered on the way - as outlined above - that would even increase the stability of the global economy in the long run. This by itself would be worth pursuing: The global economical monoculture is susceptible to global crashes as has been nicely demonstrated recently. And a global economical crash comparable to the great depression could blow away western democracies and put everybody's life at a significant risk.
Thus we just start. We aggregate communities who accept their polis' rule on top of their nation state's rules. When the people from a polis are confident that their law system, economy, and social network can stand on its own, rules from the nation state can be gradually removed. In order for this to happen a very significant followership has to be established. Otherwise nation states will never part with their power. Recruiting a significant followership will only be possible by offering diversity. People have to be really convinced by a polis to try it out. Since tastes and convictions vary greatly only diversity can offer something to appeal to everybody.
In the (very) long run geographically and ethnically grounded nation states may just disappear.
As already indicated the Xin system has to be a distributed system. It should also be a heterogeneous systems and the software that runs it should optimally also be heterogeneous. Diversity is the first line of security. Would such a society driving system really be devised it would definitely be subverted. In that case it would be preferable if only a small part of it would be subverted. Yet a protocol has to be agreed upon and that will likely bring its own vulnerabilities. I'm no security buff, so I'm probably the wrong person to argue on this ...
The workings of the Kama system have been explained in section 5.1.3.2. The categories could be taken from an expert database in the net for starters. The expertise tree would likely be subject to much tweaking.
The forumesque entries in a Xin could be made even more useful by ``discussion digistion''. I don't know if that has been tried anywhere yet: If you are or were at some point a persevering blog reader you will have noticed that many comments are redundant. By a combination of techniques from, blogs, forums, and wikis it should be possible to digist (extract the gist from) longish discussions. Instead of adding yet another comment people could modify existing comments and rate modifications, link related arguments, weed out redundant stuff, and so on. I can hardly believe that such a thing could work, but then I could hardly believe that Wikipedia could work. And discussion digistion would be immensely useful. Since nothing would be anonymous in Xin entries this might even be more plausible than Wikipedia.
This immensely inspiring closing sentence will provide you with all momentum you can read into it, all the momentum you need to make it happen.
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The translation was initiated by Thorsten Roggendorf on 2008-11-06