Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy(sovereign.software) |
Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy(sovereign.software) |
Thus, when these people make progress they cast it in those terms (radical social change). This becomes a feedback loop which attracts more radicals to the blockchain space and also amplifies the current radicals belief that they really can make a difference. This has both negative and positive effects:
* the negative effects are hype, the desire for ideological purity, expectations which can't be met, and irrational optimism,
* the positive effects are large numbers of smart motivated people who are willing to think big and irrational optimism.
I think spaceX and the startup world in general operates under a similar feedback loop (see "making the world a better place").
Because bitcoin is attractive to antagonists.
Just take it all with a grain of salt.
The 'Articles' of the statement I think are also objective - they're making what they think is a 'politically neutral, all inclusive' statement, when really they're not - their pushing a specific kind of ideal.
I think that technology can enable democracy, but that the two don't need to be really tightly bound.
True, but I wouldn't be surprised if the early days of the printing press saw more pages of crudely drawn penises sporting moustaches and bowler hats than actual manifestos, so we're possibly making progress.
But that all gets turned on its head once somebody doesn't want to play ball. In a weak regime, they simply ignore the decision and do whatever they want. Example here might be a group of friends playing tag. A slightly stronger regime might be a role-playing game. Here if someone doesn't like an outcome, there's a bunch of rules you can fall back on, but if they still don't like that, then they can make enough noise and kill the game altogether.
Skipping up a few levels, a still stronger regime would be something like an HOA, where legitimacy is granted by contract law and precedence and the broader housing market. If someone doesn't like it, there are escalation procedures in place, and if all else fails, they can try litigation.
On and on all the way up until you get to heads of state wielding hard and soft power backed by nothing more than the threat of extreme violence or trade sanctions and such.
Technology can't solve the legitimacy problem. You can't force people to play by rules just because people voted on those rules. Without something to give those decisions teeth, a would-be democracy platform is really nothing more than an overblown webforum.
Unless you are the head of state of your regime, willing to give up power to let your peons make decisions on their own, the pathetic rubes, then nothing like this will be seen as legitimate. Maybe an HOA can use something like this as a platform for owners to make their preferences known. But everyone's going to know where the real power is, and it won't be with the app.
It's not government if it doesn't have the power to compel.
The voting system determines the class of proposals that can be decided without voters needing to model each other's behavior to get what they want. Voters are forced to choose between what they want and what they think they can get; "I prefer candidate/policy A, but I think B is OK and stronger; I definitely don't want C. So I guess I'm voting B."
FPTP is only good for deciding boolean proposals. For selecting from a larger set of alternatives, STV allows voters to be more fearless ("First pick is A, second is B"), and so more honest.
Block chain-style distributed verification is good, but that shouldn't be the killer feature of this app.
Better tooling and awareness around collective decision making is valuable for groups at many levels. Such tooling and awareness does not have to be linked with large changes to country- or world-level governance. It can start with replacing an unstructured Slack discussion with a lightly structured collective deliberation tool, for example.
Political change is hard. I support people who want to better their situation through political means. At the same time, I advocate for better collective user experience design, so I want to see small victories around social and deliberative technology.
Also, I would appreciate responses and feedback on an old post of mine titled "Better Online Voting": http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/42305919307/better-online-voti...
Some areas I've followed include... papers about blockchain technology applied to voting... cryptographic consensus algorithms... I'd like to see what else people recommend. Thanks.
For example, finding a date for a meeting can easily keep a few people busy chatting in a WhatsApp group. A link to http://doodle.com/ is ignored. It might help, if WhatsApp integrates a simple pool mechanism into group chat.
Annotation: Please, use a good UI. Not a chat bot, which leads to even more messages.
IMHO they need a marketing guy.
>> I declare the planetary social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
>> Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Funny, right after disclaiming the concept of property they remember to protect their project with an MIT license ... a concept baked in western IP traditions.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the planetary social space we are building to be naturally "
This is comedy gold.
edit- Also, keep in mind there are billions of new humans coming behind you that have no deep feelings about any of the things you think about. Good or bad. They hold none of the complexity of this world in their minds that you use to navigate now with minimal effort ("How does a bill become a law?"). Some revolutions are born from the generations that see leap frogging as an easier and better way forward than repairing the old model built for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
And political evolution is not political revolution. Sure, the 100th generation after ours won't care how a bill becomes a law, but that doesn't mean the underlying political truths are going to become obsolete.
Revolutions don't really change anything, they just shuffle things around on the surface. Things might evolve after the revolution, but it's by no means sure.
Nope, that is not how it works :D. Yes, people vote, but then whatever gets the most votes is enforce with violence on everyone regardless of whether they agree or not. Slavery was legal, criminalisation of homosexuality was (is) legal, sending people to jail for soft drugs is legal. Democracy is a dictatorship of the majority, not a just system. You could say it oppresses the less people than any other system but it inevitably oppresses people.
Unfortunately, our/their bodies are made of matter, and are subject to laws and government enforcement. That kind of ruins much of the logic of the manifesto.
> We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
That seems somewhat overstated compared to the reality, in light of recent events (great firewalls, DDOS attacks, and online attacks based on viewpoint).
> We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
Yeah... that "rule over our bodies" turns out to actually affect cyberspace.
To be fair, the manifesto was written in 1996.
Too soon to judge as we are in a moment of backlash against these trends, lets see how 2196 views the manifesto.
That guy is going to have a great 40th Birthday party as his buddies whip that one out, and make him chug a beer for every time someone laughs out loud.
Regardless of how naive (or even misguided) it seems, it's part of the culture of the internet and it's a bit sad that more people on hackernews aren't aware of it.
MIT does have stipulations:
"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
"A group of people, within a geographic region marked by invisible lines drawn by human aggression, all gather once every 2nd rotation of the Earth around the Sun to put papers in a magic box. The people believe once an arbitrarily large number of papers are put into the box, it grants the owners of those papers the right to force their will and ideas on others within the invisible lines. The box does amazing things, for instance: the very minute before all the papers are counted, it could be immoral theft to take something from others without their explicit, individual permission, but just after counting the papers, magically, if by some form of mobtastic incantation, it becomes 'legal' and totally accessible to take that thing from others via harm and violence."
Holy shit folks, if you don't find that to be magical comedy gold, I don't know what is. It's like a bad M. Night Shyamalan script, except humans actually do it.
Whoever wrote this manifesto is both naive and arrogant: he doesn't speak for anyone but himself, ergo, it's just a 'youtube comment rant'.
It's funny unless you take it seriously, in which case it's maddening.
Most people in the world actually work for 'governments and semi-large to large corporations' and are fine with it. In the real world those are 'communities and groups working together to 'make stuff and services' and to create positive outcomes'.
The childish ranters can go off to an island and create their IP-free and 'big company-free' utopia if they want. Good luck with it.
Why does a significant share of the comunity criticizing the existence of a state uses property as the go-to example of right-that-shall-not-be-infringed ?
yes, i'm aware it can sound funny at a first read.. but 'first they laugh at you, etc..'
Surely, we benefit from having some people here and there 'rail against big corporations'.
There are granules of truth in it.
But it's the hyperbolic and crazy statements that are funny and spooky.
Self-defeating example: betting on red in roulette is a bad idea. Having your friend bet on red is a better but still bad idea. Having a stranger bet on red, and buy you a drink if he wins... It's free money.
Applied example: starting an electric car company (at least looked like) a bad idea.... trying 1,000 different approaches to a light bulb, especially after 500 failures (at least looked like) a bad idea... etc.
I worry about a Blockchain winter, then again AI has made fantastic progress despite the AI winters[0].
Would fusion as a power generating technology be further along or further behind if it had followed the AI model (progress -> hype -> winter -> progress)?
What makes you think so? As far as I can tell, it's over and the idealists lost.
Could be true, could not be, I don't know. The present often seems like the end of history because it is very difficult to see beyond it.
Some lost cause today will be a dominate ideology tomorrow, with the "nutty-idealists" reframed as visionaries ahead of the curve.
Fun game: if history remembers RMS, what role will he be cast into, what future trends will try to claim or denounce him?
Now we can see that it was just another medium that would in (short) time come to be dominated by the same forces at play everywhere else. Those particular dreams are dead and they aren't going to be revived now that we know how the Internet is actually used. The Internet revolution has played out. It is now part of the background, just like the printing press.
But, it does raise interesting questions regarding whether there are limitations to a system that is ultimately bound by the system that it seeks to disavow/displace.
And they still might be overturned, it is much too early to call it in either direction.
>The Internet revolution has played out. It is now part of the background, just like the printing press.
The Gutenberg printing press was invented in 1440, the protestant reformation didn't start until 1517 (77 years later). The growing impact of the printing press was still being felt 200 years later. Imagine someone writing in 1480 about the printing press being played out.
"People always overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of a technology in the long term."
Having seen the promise of the early Internet turn into a vehicle of control, surveillance, consumerism, and whatever you want to call Facebook, there is little room left for optimism.
Has it made life easier and more convenient? Yes. Will it empower the oppressed and create a more equitable, a more enlightened world? It sure isn't looking that way.