OMG, I'm an exceptionally fast reader and I don't have anywhere near enough time to read all the "terms of service" contracts for all the software & services that I use. I hate it but I'm forced to "skim" many of them because there's just no friggin' way in hell that I could possibly read all that. The only way I could see this possibly working is if there was a standard rules agreement and people had to list where there rules deviated from that. Otherwise, it's just not happening baby - it's a pipe dream.
It's likely entire communities would adopt similar contracts, sort of like Blue Sky laws. Thus you'd only need to know what's common in that area and anywhere that points differ could be automatically pointed out for you.
Gee, maybe I should bring this idea up at the next home owners association meeting. Having a slightly more restrictive set of laws, enforced by a small additional fee, that everyone agrees to when they buy in is such a novel concept.
Really, guys?
Tell me again how this scheme differs from what I am living in right now. I have the US law, with the local state law (CA) layered on top of that. Then the local county law and, in my case, the local homeowners association "rules". If I don't like the HOA, I sell and buy elsewhere. If I don't like the CA state laws, I move to a different state. If I don't like the US law, I immigrate to a place with "better" laws like Cuba (free medical) or Pitcairn Island (age of consent is 16 or perhaps lower). Personally, I like my current location better than my experiences in the Pacific Orient, Europe or the Middle East.
Awe TomUnderSea, you're silly.
But hey Anenome5, I think I'm starting to warm up to this idea. So how many communities will there be? Oh IDK, uh, say... how about 50 or so? And what will we call these communities?
50? I should say at least that many for an average sized community or town. Since this idea is designed to encourage as well as facilitate rapid legal evolution and experimentation, I would expect such communities to develop organically into whatever sizes are suitable and seem right to the people involved.
As for what to call them, I've begun calling them 'Tuatha' after the Irish name for independent communities which feature from their legal history as an independent nation.
I think communities would form along the lines of people's highest values in terms of how to live. There may be some who value quiet above all else, and they will form a community which caters to this value. That's virtually impossible in today's world outside being rich. Visitors to such areas would be asked to respect decorum and quiet as a condition of visitation. Since the streets would be privately owned as well, kicking out an offender is really easy compared to living in a modern city, where again, nothing short of being rich or rather well-off will get you a gated community. In a tuath, every community is effectively gated.
You might have a community of people on ketogenic diets, where the only food sold is extremely low-carb. Imagine that.
Naturally there would be communities stratified by age, by interest, party-going college-town type wild places where partying into the night is expected and celebrated and you'd never get the cops called on you.
You'd have large places where people raise families and look out for each others' kids in that way.
The possibilities of how to setup such places are really endless, and that's very exciting to me, to see what people would do with such a place.
Anyway, I've been quietly building a client program to facilitate this, to allow people to serve contracts to others effortlessly, using the web, and I call it "Bitlaw." Uses P2P messaging and decentralization to send out contracts either publicly or privately, allows instant editing of contracts and back-and-forth negotiation of contracts, digital sales receipts, and more.
Law is the last major bastion to escape the impact of the coming digital age. I intend to change all of that with Bitlaw and unleash a revolution of creative legal development.
I think of it as the revenge of individualism. 150 years ago the socialists believed socialism as a principle for ordering society would be an effective way to order economic affairs. They produced communism and it failed spectacularly to produce economic gains over the free market--which was intrinsically individualist.
Now I want to take the next step and introduce
political individualism taken to its ultimate extreme--individual sovereignty as a social system.
This has never been tried before. It's going to change everything.
