Seems like mostly a semantic disagreement, then. I’m not particularly tied to the “contemporary definition of democracy”, and I’d call any system with a guaranteed right of exit to be “democratic” since the most important decision is still made by the individual citizen.
But again, uncanny that you guys came up with the same exact solution as the dark enlightenment guys.
Oh yeah, I personally think choosing your government with your feet is the ONLY truly democratic choice, but that’s not what people think when they hear democracy, y’know?
Are you talking about the movement? The Fascist one?
Because I’m not seeing much overlap with the Co-opernation concept. Here’s a couple of components that are heading in the opposite direction.
Basic ethical hiring creates the ability to place a ‘lower bar’ on citizenship. If somebody can’t follow a basic ‘how not to be an asshole to other people’ flowchart then they’re not invited and can (if there’s no interest in living without ruining other people’s days) be let go back into their original nationality.
Society is a choice, even if you’re born into it you’d be ‘taken to the edge’ and have to choose it on your majority, and you can always leave if you want.
There’s a mechanism (Scribes…an HR offshoot) designed specifically to prevent ‘racism-land’
Lots of the ideas on the neoreactionary/dark enlightenment side require people to consent to being in crappy situations. The whole point is to give people options so they’re NOT trapped in situations where they’re not happy (and the scribes are moving about to make sure everybody is aware of the other options)
No, nrx bloggers seem to be pretty thoroughly anti-fascist.
This is exactly Moldbug’s idea of formalism/neocameralism. Corporations offer services to consumers in an attempt to get them to sign on as citizens. No one has any guaranteed rights except a guaranteed right of exit.
The only difference I can see between this and the coopernation idea is that Moldbug believes market forces are enough to make the governing corporations “nice”, whereas you guys seem to think a little bit of extra machinery is required. They’re fundamentally very similar solutions, though.
Neither do I. The answer is the opposite of that. Getting MORE people involved. Making local political processes less opaque and more open to a wider swath of the population.
There are very easy subtle things communities do to lock out middle and working class people from such systems. Meetings during working hours, not bothering to advertise or publicize local government efforts, closed sessions…
Cool, I had NO idea about this and I’d covered a ton of bases research-wise!
Thanks for the heads-up, can’t have too many options in the toolbox, y’know?
And I always figured more than a few people had similar ideas and just never had a real chance or impetus to implement.
And oh yeah, I’m kind of the opinion that basic ‘competing by sucking less’ might be enough to keep the process going just fine actually, but we had a staged implementation plan going anyway it wasn’t hard to add in the ‘and we don’t bother hiring assholes unless we run out of everyone else’. Plus that gave me the ability to have one more backup plan, y’know?
So…neat! You’re a peach, and I have research to do!
So how do we get less privileged people to participate?
But the Dark Enlightenment folks are pretty obviously pro-fascist.
I got confused there too.
The neo-facist weenieheads are THIS Dark Enlightenment
The cool folks are THIS Dark Enlightenment
Unfortunate name choice, sadly. Totally threw me.
Edit: Well, now I’m seeing lots of confusing overlap. I’m going to have to read a LOT to understand what’s going on here.
Either way. I’m SUPER anti-facist.
Okay, now that I’ve done some reading I see some fundamental differences, but also lots of interesting bits.
First: Did Moldbug and Nick Land diverge at some point? Because I’m seeing a sort of coherence issue.
Second, one HUGE difference is that on both sides they’re talking about having multiple corporations competing for people where there aren’t any guaranteed rights and I’m proposing a single corporation that contains all the components within. There’s a lot of emphasis that the only right is to leave, but that doesn’t give people anywhere to go TO if corporations don’t turn into something that is the opposite of what we see now.
I don’t think the concept works at all if the ability to transition from one place to another (and even depart) isn’t as safe and easy as possible. That’d require (from the dark enlightenment standpoint) a very strong government that’s guaranteeing tons of rights to the people if they leave the corporation. Since that’s not currently available or an option I have the corporation as the strong government that guarantees safety and stability and the units within having no need to be capitalistic. The only capitalism necessary is where the corporation is competing with other corporations for resources, wealth, and people.
Other than the mechanical bits (of which I’m not seeing much, honestly)…I’m also seeing some things that are heading very much in the opposite direction. When I go to the reddit forum I honestly don’t like what I see. It makes me not even like the association.
I see a LOT of differences though, with the only similarity being that corporations are used to grant people whole-life solutions. I think that’s a good strategy, but really it’s not a new things. Company Towns, the Googleplex, Universities, and many more have been doing the same things for ages.
Have you read much of the co-opernation stuff? Am I missing something obvious or is there similarity really only the corporation bit?
Early evening, provide childcare, AND simple food. Doesn’t have to be expensive, but if the kids can eat and be watched over while the parents are in the meeting (preferably eating as well), then you’ve got a good chance at a more balanced turnout.
My city council (Oakland!) streams their meetings and broadcasts them on a Comcast channel. These are in the evening on a weekday. They don’t provide food or daycare, AFAIK.
Aren’t they the same group of folks?
Yeah, you’re right and I was totally wrong.
I was confused at first because that Moldbug person and Nick Land seemed to be on TOTALLY different pages…but then as I started to dig I saw the overlap and honestly other than the ‘use a corporation to provide for somebody’s entire life rather than force them to go back to Detroit or wherever’ strategy I’m not really liking what I’m seeing there.
Plus they’re all angry, grumpy, and definitely not pro-people-have-equal-dignity from what I can tell. Their reddit forum is basically a list of people that are the opposite of the people I’m targeting.
That is the good and important question. I don’t know the answer, but thinking about it reminds me of a friend telling me about having jury duty: she couldn’t afford to take a few days off. My partner said that legally employers can’t fire or otherwise punish you for attending jury duty, and she pointed out that realistically she cannot afford a lawyer to take an employer to court if they fired her anyway regardless of any laws there might be.
So what would a system look like that would enable my friend to attend jury duty, city council meetings, etc. without losing her job?
nrx and dark enlightenment are nearly synonyms. Are you sure you’re not using “fascist” in the sense of “political beliefs that I don’t agree with”?
Fascism denotes a very specific phenomenon. By most reasonable definitions, fascism is a form of progressivism (though it’s a form of progressivism that pays a lot of lip service to traditionalism).
But dark enlightenment/nrx folks are about as anti-progressive as it gets. They are truly conservative. Most of them seem to agree that fascism is an unstable political system, whereas they favor stable political systems.
Many of them are outright monarchists. A lot of others are anarcho-capitalists. Maybe a very few are pro-fascist.
Now, are they racist? Most of them advocate “race realism” in one form or other, so pretty much any liberal would agree that they are indeed racist. But racist and right-wing is not identical to fascism. US and UK in the 19th century were both very racist and right-wing by our current standards, but neither was actually fascist.
Those are the same people.
This is mostly true. A lot of them are really nasty. They have some interesting ideas, though, so I’m willing to wade through a certain amount of their bullshit to get at those.
Perhaps they do not share your opinion of what “makes life worth living”. In San Francisco, for example, they apparently do not think that street lights which topple due to urine corrosion are on that list.
I think it’s not a unified movement with specific goals so much as a hazy cloud of anti-liberal/anti-progressive intellectuals and their followers (many of whom are exceedingly unpleasant people). My impression is that Land was inspired by Moldbug’s writing to go off in the dark enlightenment direction, but that’s not guarantee he’d arrive at exactly the same places.
That seems like a reasonable criticism to me. Even Moldbug concedes that modern corporate governance leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a lot I disagree with him about even if I find him and his ideas generally pretty interesting.
I don’t know how much is “much”. I remember reading a bunch about it when @Kimmo started talking about it a few years ago.
What struck me as structurally almost identical was the fact that you said that internally these corporations/governments aren’t necessarily democratic except that they guarantee the right of exit, which is pretty much exactly how Moldbug described formalism/neocameralism.
In both cases, it seemed like the details were being left to the organizers of the corporation/government in question, so it seemed to me reasonable to say that the solution writ large was essentially the same, or at least compatible. Left-inspired coopernations could compete for citizens and resources with right-inspired coopernations. Personally, I’d certainly rather be a part of the Market Basket Cooperative than the Walmart Prosperity Federation.
Laws are meaningless if they aren’t enforced, and in America to get anything but violent crime enforced you basically have to hire a lawyer. Governments need to think about better ways of getting compliance with laws. This is much more of a cultural problem than a legal one. It would be easy legally to empower a few inspectors to hand out massive tickets to employers who even had gave a faint whiff of fire-for-jury-duty, but that could only happen in a culture where people didn’t think having more money entitled you to treat other people badly. America is “capitalist” as a parallel to “racist” or “sexist”. It discriminates, marginalized and belittles based on (lack of) ownership of capital.
So how do we get poor people to participate in local government? What’s crazy about this study is that it says that participation in city planning produces extreme wealth segregation, which is leaving out an obvious cause of the problem. Extreme wealth disparity produces extreme wealth segregation. Get rid of the former and you cannot have the latter. The problem is that there are “poor people” to talk about, and by poor we mean marginalized and relatively powerless (as in your example, where even the law doesn’t protect them).
I think fascism was a form of progressivism in the 1920s and 1930s. Anyone who is fascist now is pining for good old days that never were and is very conservative. But colloquially “fascism” means you have to fear a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
It seems to me like you’ve figured out that people aren’t smart enough to make democracy work, so you’ve come up with an alternative system that gives even more power to the individual to act on their own behalf. We’ve been tilting the balance away from society’s interests and towards individuals’ interests for decades and it has produced the situation America now finds itself in where oligarchs get to pretend laws the protect their interests also protect the interests of the many and the many buy it. They will still be that stupid under your system, and you’d find that instead of people using the power to leave to abandon bad situations for good ones, millions will abandon good situations for situations where they can be told what to do by hateful demagogues. That is what people want.
Being stuck in society is “coercive” but so is ownership of property and having to respect other people’s right to live. We are all in this together, we cannot walk away.
Okay, so I was on the right track.
So now what I’m not seeing is ‘exactly the same idea’. I do see that they advocated the ‘a corporation can provide solutions for an entire life and a nation does not’, but that’s an old idea (Company Towns, Planned Co-operatives, Mondragon, etc.)…and it’s really just a variant of the same sort of structures and systems we saw ages ago with trade guilds and religions.
Mind you, I saw a couple of risks of creating an ‘assholetopia’ and there was a lot of work put into avoiding that, and these guys help accentuate the need for those decisions…but I think that guaranteeing people a lot of dignity and stability as the move around covers the first part of that (who would be a peasant unless they chose it over all the other options?) and the second part is done with the scribes (If you try to make racist-island then it’s going to be hard with the primary external authority being deliberately designed to push all of your buttons)…not that there aren’t several other mechanisms set up to prevent that from happening.
I think the best-case scenario for their approach is something closer to 'Jennifer Government’, and that only with luck.
Or am I TOTALLY missing some clever mechanisms they’ve got buried in there?
They come at it from a very different angle. They’re right wing and you’re left wing. They think your mechanisms are superfluous or undesirable, and you would think the same about theirs because you have different political and moral values.
Well, think of it more as a multi-tiered thing. The top tier is ‘give every baby all the options to have every amazing life available’ while ‘moving consistently forward as a cohesive unit’
Everything that’s in play was developed towards those goals, and some variant of that is what everybody hears and is constantly communicated coming in.
I think people are more complicated than that, but then we get to the second layer…which is, essentially, to enable our advantages and even be willing to exploit our flaws rather than to let them exploit us. We humans are predictably irrational, especially in groups and the few controls that are in place are specifically designed to prevent just that. I probably hit on those components best in ‘Dr Who and the Rightly Broken Rule’ but the whole documenting process involved mostly leaving lots of bits out to get things read since hundreds of pages of documentation and links wasn’t doing me much good.
I think one of the biggest keys is the way the principles are set up. I’m being VERY coy with them because I hate the idea of finalizing anything like that without getting many more people involved. But there are at least two aspects of them (everybody having equal dignity and using your brain more responsibly as you influence more people) that are in play to make being a ‘charismatic authoritarian preaching hate’ something that is not just discouraged but downright fireable.
NOW I’ve got some people helping me so I’m hoping we’ll have something better out there soon, and you’re welcome to join if you’re worried about something that goes awry…but this is being done with the intention of doing right by memory the kindest, gentlest, most amazing human I’ve ever known and I’m beyond sensitive to that sort of risk.
I’m just leaning more towards emphasizing the individual benefits during the first phase until I’ve got my critical mass. The other stuff doesn’t go away but trying to preach a hippietopia is a quick way to get shot down, and the people who I’ve tried to work with who are more awesome-nifty-friendly-society friendly are also vehemently anti-corporation and tend to be more focused on creating tiny, fragile communities that can’t gather people sadly.
As a data guy I’m both amazed and slightly disturbed by the implications of the Gini index and how well it correlates to so many things on the awful/awesome axis.
The starting point for the co-opernation thing was very much along the ‘everybody has the same respect and wealth’ lines…something gleefully stolen from Valve, Mondragon, and a host of worker co-operatives.
