Wherein The Doctor Explains How to Save Us From Ourselves

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Hi folks. I could use some help fleshing this out, and you guys could use some help saving the world, right?

The basic idea . . .instead of fighting all these problems and losing, to turn our biggest monster into our pet and win. To turn a corporation into a nation that’s not stuck to a chunk of dirt, to turn employment into peaceful citizenship, and to take everything to the logical next level.

That’s where it gets a bit complicated, because you can’t cover the entire scope of life without a lot of nuts and bolts, but it’s really not that difficult in the end. We have prototypes and pieces. TED talks, Valve Mondragon, and so very much more. This is just connecting the dots that are already out there, and giving people something to protect them while they take their lives back.

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.

This isn’t a script, yet it is. I spent over a year on the science but had difficulty communicating such a complicated idea except in conversation. In desperation, I tried something silly, and it’s working amazingly well. I want no credit and consider myself fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, I’m just good at lateral hops and have been motivated by the best person I’ve ever know.

It’s an explanation of how to exploit a gaping flaw in the multinational corporation and use it to take our lives back and to break away from our corrupt governments and businesses, but it does it in the nicest, most peaceful way possible.

A quick summary (it’s overspecific, there are other approaches, but this should plant some seeds) would be. . .

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.

Keep in mind, it’s only got specificity because the vague approach didn’t click with people. If you don’t like it, figure out how to make it work for you. That’s the point. It’s not a singular vision, its’ a way to create MANY visions without having to worry about the mess we’re currently in.

Any help would be appreciated . . . spread the word, help flesh out the characters, whatever it takes. This is just a seed to help crowdsource a revolution. This idea’s way too big for the few of us who’ve been working on it.

And lastly, feel free to toss in questions or solutions!

[Update: The doc still has info, but it’s slowly getting ported (along with new info) to a temporary cut-and-paste friendly website. Definitely a better place to get started!

The Coopernation

Here’s the Google Doc (old, but sometimes useful)
The Doctor’s Way

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Any chance of a TL;DR summary on this? I got 3 kids, man.

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With all of us having different contexts and assumptions it’s tough, since you can’t really hit on ‘all aspects of life’ without people assuming it’s just some naive utopian dream unless you know what parts they need to understand.

That being said, yes! At the bottom I was just going to have reference links, but a friend convinced me to do a bit more of a conversational summary, so if you have any questions or think things are missed then we can just start adding them there!

Is there a way to make one of those links that goes to a part of a document in Google Docs? Because if so then I’ll do that too! Whatever helps!

Or if you’re savvy, we can start with. . .
Valve+Mondragon+The Venus Project+The TED ‘Work Smarter’ solutions+The TED ‘Our Brains, predictably irrational’ solutions+Dunbar’s Number/Monkeyspheres
With a dash of Citizen’s United thrown in if we feel like being particularly clever.

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Will,

The Doctor is exactly the right spokesperson to spread this message to the spec-pop-fic masses (:

I’m starting to think about what sort of symbol I’d like to wear, and what sound or words I’ll start cheering at 10am and 10pm each day…

~ Amanda

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I’ve long maintained SF is the highest form of fiction, and not only that, but also that this fact should be blindingly obvious; anyone who disagrees simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

The passage that concludes with this little exchange is a good case in point:

CRAIG: [slightly disappointed] And I thought I had a good original
idea there.

THE DOCTOR: Craig! Craiggy-poo, you silly, silly man, don’t you see?
They’re from your future, not only did you have an amazing, clever
idea, but it got big!

CRAIG: [Brightening] I. . . wow.

Just re-reading that bit doesn’t do it justice, but when I got to that part reading the whole thing, I was overcome by a sense of giddy enthusiasm, quite in spite of the impossibility of the scenario and the vicariousness of my participation…

It made me hunger for a reality where we’ve actually kicked out the fucking jams, and ideas can stand or fall on their merits.

I think there’s been some great work here collating some of the answers to our existential problems, and I’d love to see a systematic approach brought to bear somehow… but that idea of The Cooperation - whose is that? It’s fucking brilliant.

I’m sold.

That Venus Project had a pretty good spiel (if a bit long at 40-odd minutes), but I thought they were getting a bit ahead of themselves envisioning the end of private property; they even cited an example I’d use against that idea - the bike. For a start, I want one in my exact size. And I already have a couple, painstakingly built and fettled to perfection, thanks… and what about clothes, family antiques, etc? It’s pretty hard to wrap my head around that idea… but anyway, despite the existence of institutions like the Venus Project, the number of people who’ve seriously turned their minds to such important questions is laughably small. I’m sure there’s room for quite a bit improvement in such ideas once they’re not doomed to be impotent thought experiments…

It also seems to me that pretty much everyone who strongly sympathised with Occupy would be almost automatically on board… the idea of beating corporations at their own game is just way too fucking delicious.

For quite a while, I’ve felt almost everybody struggling against the establishment is putting their energy to Quixotic use; worth little more than a statement of brave defiance, because such actions mean very little to the system…

This notion of cutting off the monster’s oxygen by giving it cancer is just the sort of bootstrappingly clever trick I figure it takes, and is precisely what I’ve been waiting to come across. There had to be an end-run around the rules, because according to the rules, hope is impossible.

How do we get this snowball rolling?

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For the words, I submit kick out the jams!

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Flagged.

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It’s all kind of obvious in retrospect, isn’t it? I really wish I’d thought of this approach a year ago, but . . . well, better late than never, right?

As for how, just spread the word! This is just a seed of something that should get a lot better, the framework allows far more than just the limited vision I put in there, but I’m glad it helped inspire! I have no pride, I’m just one person, this idea, and all the potential within, belongs to you and everyone else.

Originally I was thinking that it would be good to collect a group of people to really add more to the vision and the get it to a Gates/Buffett type somehow, though maybe now Gaiman or Moffat would be just as good? I wasn’t actually thinking of it as an episode, but whatever works.

One you guys are done with it, I bet it’ll be so awesome the vision I and a few friends had will be almost unrecognizable, because it’s gotten so much BETTER!

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I’m thinking there isn’t a whole lot of point trying to refine many of the prescriptive aspects at this point, since they’re kind of in a vacuum until they’re actually attempted in practice… there’s very little context available here.

Maybe someone can adapt a Simcity-style model where we try out various combinations of ideas to see how their implications stack up? Is such a thing a practical proposition yet?

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Ahh, I should provide some solutions there too, shouldn’t I?

We have a slightly different approach, not to impose a specific vision, but to provide another option (that’s kind of the point, lots of options!).

Our idea was that everybody should get a few treasures, and what those treasures are is up to them. As I’m guessing you surmised, we’re NOT trying to wait for everybody to become magically enlightened (hence ‘exploiting our flaws’) but instead to do the best we can with who we REALLY are. Saying ‘a few treasures’ is a great mind-hack, it lets people focus on what’s really important to them, and we all have different priorities, right?

And with intrinsically motivated people who aren’t worried about getting some specific reward creating things that are designed to interact well (oh I’ve got some rants about the quality of our medical technology especially!) we’re going to have far better toys. And part of your job should be to give away whatever you’re bored with (or hand it off to somebody like Griff to take to the next group!)

Sound a bit better?

I think the Venus Project people had the same struggle we did. . . specific digestible vision vs. hard to comprehend open framework. We’re just embracing the uncertainty gleefully.

Ahh, yeah, here’s kind of what I was talking about. We need people to just invent and create and not worry about rewards, this is designed to encourage that!

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I’m trying to be humble here, and I’m assuming/hoping that it can get a lot better, because it feels really weird imposing that kind of vision when dealing with so many other people, you know?

I’ll accept that we might have a few bits of goodness that are really good and maybe that’ll be our starting point, kind of the equivalent of an evolutionary slam dunk like the body plans of the shark or the millipede, but I’m going into this with the mindset that nothing is sacred and every idea can get better, because that’s how we should be approaching this, right?

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I’m never gonna find out what this is all about…

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OMFG
I’m going to read ALL of this, all of the links that lead to further elaborate and labyrnthine descriptions that lead seemingly nowhere, contain attenuated shaggy dogs and ultra tight concrescences of vital inference-data you need to decode the rest of the filler.

If I can’t Neitzche all of this crap into at most one paragraph, I’ll… eat my hat, Oliver Hardy stylee!

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Feel free! Err, except the hat bit!

How about ‘forming a coopernation and taking the beast over from the inside’?

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As an aside, before I reply, I should say; I’ve often thought about a specially empowered corporation that is granted world wide rights to write new loopholes directly into law, and assume and absorb the assets and functions of other corporations.

Now, I realise that this would just be a formalised legal construct of what Big Business essentially amounts to anyway but I can’t help but feel if there was an out and out Socialised Corporate Entity whose official purpose was to hunt and kill other bloated game, the conceptual landscape would shift so much more than the tiny and sometimes backward, increments that presently seem possible…

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That’s why we bring up Citizen’s United! It’s not about the elections, it’s about the PRIMARIES! What happens when people are voting between Colbert/Stewart and Stewart/Colbert?

It’s not a necessary part of the process, but you’ve go to admit there’s a certain appeal to turning our biggest monster into our legal mothership!

However, I will confess that I’m anti-stuck-to-dirt, and would just as happily be based in Macroeconomica! Because that way we can be snarky by design (Thank you, Zach Weiner! You’re a hero of mine!)

Yup, you nailed it! The only difference is we’re embracing EVERYBODY, even the people we don’t like, because we have a moral imperative to do so. Doesn’t mean they get to influence our lives or anything, though.

Also, not fighting them and instead cheerfully collecting all the people they oppress makes it really hard for them to oppose us, and when all their servants are gone they’ll likely start to consider other options. We can be gracious and generous in victory. Plus, that defuses the heck out of them, it’s kind of funny in practice.

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Okay, and also added summaries and updates, how’s it look now?

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And more! I don’t believe I forgot to point out why all of our democracies are failing so badly.

Basically, it’s because people can’t choose what they’re part of. They’re just born into it and forced to care.

Really, Nations never were going to work terribly well. They were just a bridge.

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If you ask me, it’s not so much that our democracies are currently failing so badly; they’ve always failed. We can just choose to be more aware of it these days thanks to the net.*

IMO, any democracy that doesn’t embrace anarchy as a foundation is doomed to corruption.

*And I suppose also, that as growing wealth inequality feeds greater corruption, you get a hockey stick graph of the positive feedback effect.

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I was thinking we probably want to get a bunch of marketing and Hollywood types, ad men and so forth, on side as a priority, in order to minimise spinning the wheels trying to gain momentum.

Also, is this it for a forum (aside from the edits on the Google doc - how do we get access BTW)? Maybe somebody can knock up a free BBS?

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