Wherein The Doctor Explains How to Save Us From Ourselves

Anarchy has a few too many emotional connotations, though you’ll note that by letting people break up into their own little groups and encouraging them to . . . to be blunt. . mind their own business. . we’ve accomplished all the same thing without any overtones. :wink:

Of course I’m aware it needs to be re-branded, but we’re talking about bottom-up vs top-down here, let’s be clear.

I was staring a web site initially but . . . well, it’s complicated, but because the courts decided that my first wife was a horrible mother (I understate dramatically) I ended up a single dad at 21 and got myself a lifetime stalker. She’s bipolar and when she goes overboard well. . .when Rebecca passed away she dedicated a week or so a month to trying to get me to commit suicide (and to her credit, when she’s devious. . . she’s very good). So when I tried to create one in my name it got. . . a bit much to handle.

That should be a step, I was hoping that by posting here better and less traumatized people could run with it and put it out there in a better way!

Also, I really do hate the idea of it all pointing at me, it feels wrong somehow, this idea should be from dozens, not one. So I was hoping Cory or one of the others would bite and run with it (If nothing else, I bet he’d love the gleeful destruction of patent and copyright law from the inside!).

We should have a good way to connect all the interested people and get this out there in a better way, I’m just NOT the man for the job, for about seven different reasons!

Sorry to hear about all that drama, yeesh.

But yeah, I’m a bit disappointed with the lack of response so far… I might spam this address in the comment threads a bit.

…Okay, there’s a rallying cry.

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I love this idea. Of course it can be difficult to wrap one’s brain around it, but writing it as the Doc helped tremendously.

I have the honor of attempting to build a web presence for this idea, to break it down for the masses and get it out there in a very public way. We do need a name for it (the url at the very least), so any suggestions, msg me or Will please! I’d love to get this functional sooner than later.

I agree, a lot of those who participated, or at least empathized with the Occupy movement would be ready to embrace this. It’ll be the government and corporate people that will run resistance, I think. Though, I could be wrong, they could surprise all of us.

Though I’m new to boingboing, I’m spreading the word in the development circles I know as much as I can. I agree, having a name behind the idea would be awesome. And I’m hoping an easy-to-understand website can at least bring people in, and inform.

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Ah! Got a couple of useful questions. The problem is we had to take so much OUT, this is the excessively condensed version.

And I overcondenced a key part of the intro!

Returned. . . a really important reality check I forgot we had to emphasize.

"Of course, it’s not all quite that simple, and we run into different issues depending on approach, but once we’ve got a good vision out there that’s really inclusive and takes advantage of who we really are, and we’ve got a couple of paths there that exploit existing systems, then it doesn’t take long before we run out of major issues. It’s not just that we’ve got solutions for all of your problems, but you do too.

Because let’s face it, this is easy mode, the bar is set so very, very low."

Once it gets to the stage where government and corporate types see it as a threat, it’ll be pretty tough to impede, I’d say…

If it’s a company that employs people and doesn’t do any harm, what possible avenue for resistance is there?

Plenty of malevolent companies get to survive; it seems the only metric that matters in business is success.

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  1. To create corporation that’s owned by all of us

  2. Turn that corporation into our very own nation, to turn ‘employment’ into ‘peaceful citizenship’

  3. Offer up a variety of amazing sorts of ‘life packages’ that will only get better,

  4. Hire EVERYBODY who can agree not to hurt anybody else in exchange for safety, support, health, and awesomeness, and

  5. reset the world, making all other governments and corporations irrelevant and putting the innocent and gentle in charge.

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See the boldy part of Will’s original post.

The first online discussion of these ideas took place on TED Conversations, and then Project Hieroglyph.

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To be fair, I think I added that later :slight_smile: Partly because we got a couple of good questions.

MORE GOOD QUESTIONS PEOPLE!

That’s the only way they can be answered to your satisfaction, right?

This IS kind of important, unless the idea of solving all of these doesn’t appeal? Because those are covered in spades, and that’s just a few right off the top of the main site!

Ooh! Ooh! Here’s the trick:

Hiding a revolution inside a wrapper that says ‘business as usual’.

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SHHHH! :wink:

We has layers!

And actually that’s part of why the exemplars came into play as well, to give us another buffer to prevent being portrayed as something that must be fought because we’re different.

As Jen would say, we’re not just thinking win-win, we’re going awesome cubed!

While I didn’t expect to have a story about this, it looks like Gawker might have tossed up a softball!

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GENES -> HUMANS -> CORPORATIONS

The humans are the only part of this flow chart that have no right to expect to see the world be tailored to what they need.
Read Dawkins’ ‘The Extended Phenotype’ and come back to me if you disagree.

GENES -> HUMANS -> CO-OPERATIVES

Humans still barely have a right to expect what they consider to be important to, on the kind of time scales in which life is fluid, matter.

IMO the only hope we have is manipulation of individual human intelligence and networking of the kinds of qualia that deeper (think Jungian) levels of perspective offer. Which essentially (and I guess there’s no comfortable way of putting this) equates with the annihilation of being human, of humanity (human-ness) and humanity (all of you).

If a co-operative (or even a a damn corporation) was literally intelligent, you might, if you were equally intelligent, be able to arrest, detain, charge and prosecute the fucker.

Distribute my distributed foot up your distributed ass!

How an could I possibly disagree with that, on a fundamental level you’re absolutely correct.

But who cares? I like the planet, and I want to save it from us. Do you have a better way to save us from ourselves that doesn’t involve waiting or destruction, because we peeps are ALL ears! Every problem is a whole bunch of solutions waiting to happen, and this is about solving problems.

I found some of Aaron Swartz’s ideas interesting, reading his work I found after I learned he had died.
Specifically the decentralization of political motivation which is, without the billions of dollars that big business has to throw around, the only power that grass roots movements can hope to wield in the face of such monstrosities.

And even then, I disagree about what is potential achievable if you are able to motivate such a significant portion of the population. I don’t see a perpetual change on the horizon, just a very narrow window in which you can reset the expectations of legal ramifications for wealth generating entities, which are probably to be expected.

I say you get a few years grace, maybe even a couple of decades before it’s business as usual.

You need;

A massive ground swell of public opinion (which even now, is barely concerned, so you have your work cut out for you) that can be motivated into generating a nationally recognised political dialogue which defines the landscape, terms and talking points and effectively drowns out the multi-nationals memes.

You must be swept into power, whatever that means in the political landscape so defined.

A quick and unimaginably skilful manipulation of the definitions of many major tenants of international business practice and law, with near immediate results showing positive gains (read as new technology, there are no more gains to be had).

The real solution is just responsibility, creating a corporation centralised on responsibility and humanity is still apt for mutation at the higher levels of interaction of it’s interacting, processing systems.

Some kind of limit on the extension of one’s phenotype, or of the phenotype of your collective. We need rules for meta-humanity that have barely been touched on in the net’s young life, never mind formalised.

If your new corporation isn’t to turn into another monster that just swallows individuals whole, there are a lot of uncomfortable considerations to be made.

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But wait, don’t most people want a better job? A better life?

What happens when somebody can offer that up to everybody? It’s kind of min/maxing the corporation to win at the recruitment process.

And who else is talking about that in this context? You’ve got to admit there’s at least an interesting angle in there.

And that’s where we got into overwhelmingly unreadable! I bet with some of the new structure we’ll be able to address some of that now, but one of the main reasons for this thread is to get more fingers in the pie, so to speak, to give us a more creative set of ideas and options and quite a bit of help, actually (which is kicking into gear! Though you’re right, we need a bit more to really get rolling.)

I can partially address that, however, because you have NO idea how much work and obsession went into this part of the problem. I’ll expose a bit of the thought process behind it too, because that helps, right? A lot of this info was in older versions but I think it can be tighter now.

People talk about ‘failed Utopias’ all the time, and there are many . . . but you dig into them and you find out that there are a LOT of pretty decent one-generation-long success stories . . . but things totally fall apart once they have to hand off to another group. And while living a better life for our short lifetimes sounds nice, that’s also . . . lame.

So, who the heck do we trust? We’ve kind of got no choice but to trust the children, because they’re the ones who are the next generation, right? But I’ve both been a child and raised one to adulthood (with two others working their way up), and that idea just gives me the giggles in the context of the world today. :wink:

So, we ended up with a goal within a goal. Taking over our lives, environment, and putting a framework around us that is designed to get the best out of us and make it easier to be better people in general with a multitude of mind-hacks and such sets the stage for raising better people than we are. Education is a MASSIVE part of the focus, and all those mind hacks and the rest apply to the kids too, right?

But they have advantages we don’t, we just have to get to them early and raise them to be un-brainwashed, to value reason and logic and fun, to value kindness over cruelty, the list goes on . . . we can’t just shift gears like this, most of us are too old. We’re pretty screwed up by the time we hit our teens because of how we’re raised, true?

And therein lies a huge point. The reason this idea’s designed like it is . . . there’s no way we’re going to get this right. We’re too broken, the best of our ideas are tied to context. If we don’t raise better people and encourage them to be exactly what we never could, then we’re not going to get anywhere. No solution we have is going to be better than half-assed, at least when looked at from a lens from the future.

So . . . we raise better people, and we design the system to allow (or even encourage or force) them to take what we’ve got and use it to create something better. We can’t know what that is, because most of us are mad. Cognitive dissonance is too powerful a survival trait to allow us to take these steps ourselves.

I’ll stop there to avoid density, but is that showing a bit of that part of the evolution properly? Like I said, VERY humble, scientific method on top, very aware that we’re completely screwed up, luring us with honey and using positive biases not to fix everything ourselves, to give them a big reset button.

Because . . . yeah, I’ve got nothing else. I think we’ve got something very solid here, but I’m not going to pretend I’m not a bit of a broken toy myself. If we don’t have a plan for that next step then we’re just taking too many risks IMHO.

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So, this is a draft (and a new structure to make it easier for Fay to cut and paste!), but does this angle help a lot more?

This actually was kind of our starting point, it got left out when trying to go from absurdly huge to readable, but I think now we can break things up into different angles and weave them together through the common sources and solutions we have. (and are getting, man people are creative)

https://sites.google.com/site/coopernationv2/home/valve-to-awesome

Oooh! Oooh! An early concept map!

For all you lovely VISUAL type folks (and perhaps you TL;DR type folks, though maybe nothing’s short enough for you), may we present…

https://sites.google.com/site/coopernationv2/home/rebsway-where-it-all-began

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