Comment on An invitation to agree
ex_06@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
i kinda agree on everything and i also think about social networks with a positive outcome quite a lot myself so i’ve read it interested in the topic. The main issue is the old ‘‘the devil lies in the details’’.
sharing agreemement, easy; sharing them with technology, easy; creating communities around those agreements, kinda easy and so on. What’s the hardest bottleneck? actually recreating a whole legislation of agreements. All of this stuff doesn’t require a single platform, we already live deep down a form of this social network governed by game theory. Every platform we use every app every club we go to every group have implicit agreements.
So the question is: does making them explicit help or not?
My answer is… Not really. We have rules everywhere, also on this lemmy instance. I wrote them kinda carefully to be based on easily agreeable principles and to set a tone and, most of all, to be brief. Having agreements for everything goes against being brief and easily agreeable. The skii example is a good one: what if i don’t skii? i just don’t partecipate in the agreement and so weaken the power of those who do? What if all poor people agree on universal healthcare but rich people don’t? This brings us to the part of ‘‘convincing people to agree’’ and so we are just making politics from scratch again.
I think this comment is a bit chaotic but i’ll try to make a tldr: a platform like that would be overhead and in some cases also dangerous; we need to raise the common ground by talking to people, there are no tech tools to hack this (no, AI could just parrot an emphatic leader, can’t actually choose the words to connect to the person we have in front of). We can’t escape the political spade work :O
p.s. i also have on my mind to write a blog post about this, how people keep trying to solve the moderation problem with tech instead of just making it sustainable to resolve it socially
PatrickJohnCollins@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Thank you so much for that reply! I appreciate all feedback, including criticism. The proposal may well prove to be redundant, I need to listen to the opinions of others to decide how/if to proceed.
Is creating agreements difficult? I imagine them springing up over time, proposed by different people to meet different needs, some gradually gaining adoption, others falling into obsolescence. Much the same way as open-source software over on GitHub. It’s the bazaar vs the cathedral.
If you don’t ski, then you wouldn’t sign the ski safety agreement. Not signing doesn’t weaken the agreement. What matters is that people who do ski decide to sign the agreement, which they would do, because no-one wants to suffer a collision. Stated differently, the power of an agreement is proportional to the percentage of people who partake in the activity and who adopt and adhere to the agreement.
If many poor people agree to universal income or universal healthcare, then we help each other within our limited means. Powerful people may choose to adopt the program when they can see benefit to themselves, although I suspect that the most powerful people in society would be the last to adopt this paradigm, because they have the least to gain.
Yes, this is politics from scratch, but very different politics. Law applies to everyone over a defined geographic area, whether they agree or not. The system I propose applies to everyone who agrees, without geographic bounds. You pick and choose the agreements that you believe in, and therefore the people you want to associate with, and the way in which you want to associate with them. It’s consent vs coercion.
A system such as the one I proposed simply wouldn’t be possible to implement prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet and personal computing. These technologies do provide new possibilities for human interaction on a global scale. However, the proposal is as much technological as it is social.
I’m curious to know in what way you think the system may prove to be dangerous? Or any more dangerous than the current system barreling towards global warming and biodiversity loss and maybe even a nuclear exchange.
ex_06@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
English speakers internet literate and we have already cut down most of the world
So it doesn’t solve the problem that is the fact that the richer(s? 🤔) need to pay for the lasts and we are just in a worse situation than now (at least here in Europe would be much worse than status quo, in US idk)
Yep I got this part right and I’ve also had the same idea in the past. But never tried to implement it because of the stuff we already saying + if someone is already paying 40% of their income in taxes how would they live agreeing to another set of law for another 40% of the remaining? Either all reclaiming some sort of indipendence from their country (and now we asking people much more than just following the rules, but to live as outlaws in their countries) or idk living with almost no income. Reclaiming land by grouping in an area and slowly taking political control by consent still looks more realistic and less dangerous to me (but it requires people to move and looks like no one wants that lol)
People that want this could agree on this and could be the people that have the power to do that while us agreeing on not doing this with 0 power over them, for example. Or just most of the world agreeing on “there may be only 2 genders and 2 only” and stuff like this :o
I find myself wishing to exclude me and my people from the system but that would be just a way to protect us during the future events, not to actually change the world
Btw check out the, I think abandoned, basisproject.net in the meanwhile
PatrickJohnCollins@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Thanks again for the feedback!
The proposal does not assert the primacy of English, for agreements may be authored in any language and translated into any language. Agreements are more likely to be adopted that the average person could quickly understand. The Basis Project looks to me like a rather complicated trade agreement, which I didn’t fully understand after 10 minutes of consultation. I would break that into several discrete agreements.
While toying with the many agreements that I have dreamt of, I keep asking myself "How can I make this simpler?"and “Would anybody agree to this?” I wander the supermarket and look at people and ask “Would this person agree to this?” Maybe they would, if someone they knew well had already adopted the agreement and explained the benefits. I would be very curious to see how fast particular agreements could potentially spread. Asking people to host the network at home is a big hurdle.
Great wealth inequality exists in the global economy, both between states, and between individuals inside states, and the inequality appears to be increasing consistently for decades. An elegant trick. A parallel and more fairer economy could capture an increasing share of human activity and value over time. By choosing to trade with those who adopt a more ethical approach you could encourage this economy. You may over time find yourself able to meet an increasing array of needs through established agreements, hopefully without breaking any laws. That said, agreements go beyond the scope of trade, potentially encompassing all facets of social interaction.
I wholeheartedly support the movement towards eco-communities, but many people can’t uproot and gather for many reasons. The proposed system provides them with the opportunity to stay put, while also engaging in increased collaboration and cooperation with like-minded folk close to home and far afield.
On the subject of state-on-state violence, peace can be achieved once enough people have organized. It is a long road.