The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance
Binding Chaos Chapter 1: Defining boundaries
Excerpted from Binding Chaos: https://www.amazon.com/Binding-Chaos-collaboration-global-scale/dp/1489527680/ref=pd_rhf_pe_p_t_1_CWPB
Defining boundaries
By Heather Marsh
The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance.
If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.
Corporations have the freedom to live in a world without borders or social
responsibility, to own property no individual can claim and to control a one world government and legal system. This has had insupportable consequences for the world’s resources and individual rights. People are locked within arbitrary national borders by ever increasing surveillance, military and xenophobic propaganda, crippling our ability to collaborate and frequently, our ability to survive. Our naturally migratory species are being caged like zoo animals, increasingly even as technology makes it more possible for us to interact.
Immigration has become a privilege of the elite instead of a right of the desperate. The world’s people are being divided not into naturally forming communities but into corporate controlled economic markets. Governance by nation states is now as arbitrary and illogical as city states were earlier found to be. The accelerated pace and power of global communication strains and bursts the old systems of control. People can walk en masse across borders, shun the current financial system, establish our own trade, create transparency and provide emergency assistance to each other. This power to dismantle the structures we have relied on is terrifying to many because there is no clear path ahead, and few structures have yet formed to replace the ones that are crumbling.
The growth of extreme nationalists and traditionalists worldwide, the buildup of militaries and intelligence monitoring are indicative of this fear of our unknown future. Old authoritarian systems can no longer bind the natural chaos of a free society, but we can show the power of chaotic order, the beauty and creativity of collaborative freedom, if we build the right structures now.
The transference of old ideas to our new capabilities has so far mostly served to prove the ridiculousness of the old ideas, not provide alternatives. The hilarity of the Bitcoin stock market is a funhouse mirror of the old stock market but does not provide a marked difference in approach. The instant celebrity and celebrity power of social media is a more transparent and gameable but no less ridiculous version of celebrity influence.
We now have the opportunity to create real alternatives for both economy and influence, for communication, collaboration and all tools of society. If we are unaware of the potential before us, we will not achieve everything we are capable of at this moment. What we are building with our software and laws at this time is nothing less than a completely new social structure. It deserves all of our attention.
This text is in no way meant to be a definitive answer to any of the questions before us. This is just a documentation of what seems apparent at this moment, what ideas have not worked and why, and what ideas seem to be working in isolated instances and may be able to scale to help us on a
much wider basis in the future.
A lot of these ideas are not what we thought would work only a couple of years ago when we tried for consensus on all things, anonymity, meritocracy, all decisions by assembly, peer to peer trade and the hive mind. Those ideals are all still wonderful and useful but require modifying to reflect what we have discovered in practice. Hopefully we will evolve rapidly enough that the ideas here will also require modification immediately.
This text is also not a suggestion to usurp regional control or assembly and consensus process among local governments. It is looking for methods of mass collaboration which would allow us to effectively communicate and create on a global scale while still allowing us autonomy and regional choice.
Many ideas in this text are far more easily understood by the free software and hacker community than the world offline.
The internet created an environment where it was possible to collaborate in ways that had never been tried before, to experiment with global participation, anonymity, a money free society, idea driven projects and many other methods that are still impossible or difficult in physical life. While the internet has many current structural problems that are hindering collaboration, the internet community is yet a generation ahead in experimenting with many of these concepts.
Humans are not machines, but their capabilities and inclinations will be guided by the limitations of the systems they are given to collaborate with. The structure of the code and the laws we write and the tools we create will decide the structure of our future societies as surely as landforms and
villages decided societies in the past.
The search for methodology in this book is more systems analysis than philosophy. We need structure we can actually code or build and the limitations of the internet, as our primary location of mass communication and collaboration, must be considered. It is not possible to have a pure data driven hierarchy in an ocean of data, there must be a method for us to filter out and fact check the most accepted ideas. All voices cannot be heard equally in an environment polluted by spam, astroturfing and sock puppets as they would in a local assembly, but they must all be heard. Decisions on how and what voices we amplify must be made carefully.
We need to recognize immediately the effect our future online tools will have on our future governance. Corporate ownership of our communication tools will cause us to yet again relinquish control to a landlord. Corporate sponsored voice amplification will lead to corporate controlled oligarchy. The ties of server based systems and registered domains make censorship possible and hierarchy unavoidable. The limitations to speech we allow to be imposed on us now will impact our governance as surely as moats and mountains did in the past.
Heather Marsh is currently working on Getgee.xyz as well as the next book. All of her work is in open license (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). She is supported by your donations. Thank you.
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