In this article, the author claims that the reason why human civilization is suffering from issues such as poverty, inequality, corruption, exploitation, over consumption, environmental problems, biased and censored media, inadequate education, immigration, discrimination, oppression and tyranny, is the lack of a real democracy in all local, national and international levels. Thus proposes a progress from bottom to top, in which the power-less and possess-less people participate in a gradual movement in order to establish a new social order and a new power and wealth distribution model.
The core believe of proposal is “The people are the system”, in matter of quantity and quality. Therefore they need to find each other and cultivate their common world and apply their wills on real world in order to impose radical changes to system.
Obviously it is not a new peephole. Throughout history, humankind has gone this way many times and failed many times. Sometimes they failed because of oppressive governments, and sometimes they failed because they became the oppressive government. The motives of movement and the threats are remained same as the previous ones. So why this time should be different? The answer is, this time we have innovative mechanisms and tools to carry out and support the movement. The internet, cryptography, blockchain and decentralized governing are our tools. A well designed game theory on top of these tools will encourage people to engage in problem solving in all local, national and international levels simultaneously, and being rewarded (directly or indirectly) because of their participation. The game rules also prevent participants from becoming the new tyrant ruling class, while the decentralization protects the whole system against external adversaries.
Author believes it is very hard and impractical to teach history, philosophy and economy to every one and explain how and why we ended up in this catastrophic human civilization, in order to convince them to revision their value system and reform their assumptions and misconception. Instead, it will be far easier to hack existed and familiar concepts and materials, and trigger an evolution in their definition and functionality by launching a persuasive game theory.
One of these familiar concepts and materials is the money. While money itself, is not really the matter, it seems that everyone believe that money is cause and meter of almost everything in the world, and more money means more prosperity.
The proposal uses money concept to embody its thesis in a tangible concept. It proposes a model, in which every group of people can decide how to create money and how to divide it. The outcome will be a true free market of different communities with different rules and values and different monies (even money-less communities) which are competing for more population in order to increase the value and popularity of their money and their values as indicators of the excellence of their community.
The new paradigm is about a “true” free market of believes and believers, since entering to a community or leaving it has no cost, unlike the current communities, ideologies, political regimes or countries and territories.
“The new paradigm” in deep
The core elements of “The new paradigm” are the software and the people. In other word, every one can download and install the software on her/his personal computer or mobile and start a community of her/his friends or her/his like-minded people. There is no central control at all, so no one can prevent or force people from/to establish, join, branch or leave a community.
We can expect to make millions of different communities and currencies, but in practice only a handful of them will be able to amass a significant population. Then they will compete to convince other people about the value of their money and correctness of their value system, and excellence of their social order and fairness of their rules and perfection of their governing model, etc…
since we already established a real and transparent free market of thoughts, there is no barrier for people to leave a community in favor of joining better one, and there is no barrier for communities to adapt successful strategies of successful communities. This progress and improvement is explained in another post, titled “Redefining exchange rates to excellence index in democracy term” https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/redefining-exchange-rates-to-excellence-indice-in-democracy-term-5303276
Till here , we assumed that we had created a real free market of ideas without outside interference, but creating a truly free market of thought remains a matter of doubt if we cannot guarantee the security and privacy of free and uncensored debating. These are merely the software responsibilities and are explained in detail in “What is wrong with current social networks and messengers app” https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/what-is-wrong-with-current-social-networks-and-messengers-websiteapp-5312087 .
The software is designed to be as secure as possible and as libre as possible.
Another requirement for a real democracy is possibility of running a “free and democratic election”. In this regard, we must answer the following questions.
Who can choose the electable options (people or laws)?
Who can vote in the election?
How to hold election (instant democracy, liquid democracy, Quadratic voting, etc...)?
How votes are counted?
What is the quorum of acceptance of a person or law?
Again it is software responsibilities to prepare all these options for community and communities will decide how to configure elections as it please.
The software is designed to be as flexible as possible.
The polls will lead to the passage of laws. There is a famous motto “code is law” and this law treats everyone automatically and equally. Combination of free market of thoughts plus democratic polling plus “code is law” will cause the “rules without ruling class”, and eliminate the necessity of existence of legislator, judge and executive(government). This can be applied to all communities which are powered by the software regardless of where are the community members living, who are they, and what race or nationality they have.
So far we have explained how to set up online communities that are democratically created and managed. Now the question would be “how can these online societies affect the real world and improve the living conditions of their members”. In addition to what is mentioned in this great article “Netizens: An Anthology” http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Book_Anniversary/Netizens%20An%20Anthology%20part%20I.pdf , here I want to return to the money as a tangible and favorite concept for everyone.
The basic idea is that members of a community will begin to use that community's money in their business dealings. Early, in small amounts of money and temporary jobs (maybe a few dollars for gardening, dog walking, tipping, etc...), but later in more serious jobs and larger amounts.
The communities grow and increase their reputation and expand their common world and embrace new members and increase their market range (in terms of variety and volume of goods and services) and increase their money turn over gradually, until they meet all their day to day needs directly with their money, without need to exchange the money to governmental money and vice versa. The software supports all financial activities such as transactions, remittance, loan and lending (not fractional-reserve), pull and push business models and a subset of smart contracts all in decentralized model without third party. Just having a customized money under your control, and the possibility of providing capital and running mutual systems (e.g. mutual banking) greatly improves the economic situation of a community member. Needless to say, this money is far better than cheap, inflationary governmental fiat money.
A community of capable and minded people and relatively richer that have possibility of free debate and democratic decision making and funding, will lead influential social movements in order to force real changes in real world. This will be the outcome of “The new paradigm” in long run.
Here, in order to delve deeper into the “The new paradigm” potentials and practical details, I intend to explain an early community which is powered by the software as a tangible and real world example. This community is called “imagine”, inspired by the song of Beatles. The first and most important mission of “imagine” is implement, develop and gift this software to the world. The “imagine” motto is “fair effort, fair gain, win win win”, where the winners are the world, the “imagine” community and the participator, respectively.
I have created and enacted some rules according to my own plan for improving this community. Are my rules capitalistic or socialistic or under certain doctrine, regime or school of thought? While the answer is not really matter, my answer is yes and no simultaneously. Indeed, I do not want to fit “myself”, “The new paradigm” and the “imagine” community in any “ism” at all. I made the system which I think will work for my goals, while other people can establish different community and different strategy as they believe, obviously.
So I set proper rules to achieve proposal goals and ship the software, as free as possible, as open as possible, as flexible as possible, as robust as possible, and as un-stoppable as possible. Hopefully successive communities use the released software and ancestors experiences happily.
Are the laws I have passed for “imagine” community the best, fairest and most complete laws? Certainly not, and I have no such claim neither. The first rule of imagine is: “every single decision must be made based on the vote of the community members.”, thus over time “imagine” rules will be changed dramatically and it is very good for community and the software.
Lets return to money again and figure out how money flows in “imagine” community. In “imagine” I created an scarce money. That is, the software is configured to create X fixed amount of coins every day. So the issuance of money is regulated and predictable, and there is no way to increase it overnight. Then I set the rules for dividing these coins between community members.
The mechanism of distribution of coins is pretty simple and straightforward. Whole coins will being divided between participators (aka shareholders or community members) in proportion to their shares. Who works more obtains more shares, who works less obtains less shares, but it is not merely a meritocracy, since it has some complementary mechanisms to moderate it that you can find more about it here:
“Can we imagine an alternative monetary model to recover our current economic fails”
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5305584
“There is no place for feats, beauty and heroic deeds in the modern world”
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/there-is-no-place-for-feats-beauty-and-heroic-deeds-in-the-modern-world-5306920
In this way of dividing money, the following questions come to mind.
- What kind of participation, people can do in this community?
- Who and how measure and evaluate the participation quantity and quality?
Indeed there is no limit for activities or even no-activities (e.g. UBI). That means if the current community members -for any reason and by any mechanism- are convinced that person Y deserves Z amount of shares, then person Y will be a shareholder of system, and because of that shares s/he will be get paid a portion of daily X minted coins, unconditionally. Also person Y will have voting right in proportion to her/his Z shares of system total shares.
So the community members all are proposers and evaluators simultaneously. They evaluate and accept (or reject) the other users proposal. Every single proposal is put to a vote, and “all” community can/will upvote or refute proposal.
So, people can send proposals for participating in “imagine” activities and become the member of community. In this stage, the activities are mainly developing software, test, design, translate, educational stuff, etc. But the community always welcome all new ideas, even if one believes that feeding an elephant in Africa has a positive effect on improving the overall condition of human society.
The way “imagine” create and distribute money prevents “Cantillon effect”, and runs a rational cash flow - not spend it ASAP nor Hodl it forever-. (neither inflationary nor hyper-deflationary)
Regarding the fact that this money and the community around it, are created by the first person who installed the software on her/his computer and invited others to join her/his network, the community members and their horizons are strongly tied to intentions, tendencies and beliefs of its founder(s) and early members. So the benevolent originator, will run the software and will invite like-minded honest people and -probably- will establish and develop an Utopian society, while wicked people will establish a corrupt community.
The evils already have their tools and most probably do not need our new born software, but some of them will try to obtain the majority of shares of our honest community in order to exploit it or destroy it, since they would probably be more motivated for doing so.
Here, the concept of “power of fragility” comes to the picture.
The software that manages community issues is open source and free. It is designed to be fully decentralized, flexible and super user-friendly. So every one without any technical skills can install the software, configure the community settings, monetary mechanisms, governing rules in a couple of hours, and launch her/his own new territory and new money and new rules, etc… There is no monopoly, control or privileges at all.
The software also supports immigration. That is, if some members of a community are not happy with community any more, they can fork it and establish a new community. They can selectively port the history, coins, rules and configurations of old community to new one. They can re-configure new community hoping the new community grow up without malicious members. Good actors boycott bad actors (or vice versa) by running a polling with minimum cost. Both old and new communities will have their money. Probably both will lose a portion of their money’s value, and that is ok too. If the dispute wasn't grave, probably they will find some solution in order to avoid splitting and losing the value of their wealth, since they had cultivate their common world by spending time and strive and faith. Here the “cancel culture” costs far more than tolerate and debate and constructive communication. The splitting impacts directly on every member of community by reducing their money power and their community reputation. It is the conscience of “power of fragility”.
By the way, for “imagine” governing model the doubt can be “It is unlikely and also impractical that everyone would evaluate every proposals and works done by every one else every day”.
Thus we need another mechanism to encourage people to participate in proposal evaluation. So the rule is “every new proposals by default are approved”. So if no one go to vote, the proposal will be approved after polling time frame automatically. Since the issuing coins amount is fixed, new shareholders means less dividend to current members. Thus community has enough incentive to participate in polling and will investigate wisely on every single proposal. It is an instant democracy.
Is it technically possible? In old classical human interaction this kind of decision making was too costly and nearly impossible, but with internet and blockchain technology it is absolutely possible, even for entire world population. By the way, the things could be handled more effective by liquid-democracy or even quadratic voting. Both are apply-able in proposed software/community.
Another critic would be: by this mechanism, There is a perverse incentive for shareholders to undervalue the work by other people (up to zero).
Let imagine the network/community consist of only me myself as initiative shareholder. Obviously I have whole shares and I’ll get all new money, but what is the point? If I do not find somebody whom accept my money in exchange of her/his goods or services, the money worth nothing forever.
Because of human nature, we prefer to keep more coins for ourselves. If it is not possible so we will divide coins between as less as possible people, and if this is not possible too, we will divide it between our clan. But none of these 3 approaches will help the community in sustainable growth. Particularly the value of the money of the community directly affected by quality of the community in every aspects.
The network has to be expanded and embraces new members to raise up the money usability, applicability and popularity in order to advance its market range. Bigger community means less daily coins for each, But also means more usability and applicability for the community’s money.
Hence community has to be grown and every decisions are made by polling, the community has to add more and more honest person and not corrupted one. Otherwise community dies in early steps and their money will never be a valuable asset.
The community grows because of its improvement and vice versa.
Money is just a group hallucination but that doesn't mean it is an easy thing to create.
The community around that money, can be established and grow or just die very quickly. It is a trade off, and the outcome depends on how community members are mature and how much they care about community. What about bad actors? Even bad actors have to follow rules and do something good for system in order to obtain system shares, and these contributes empowers system even more.
There is a catastrophic case in which the majority of system are bad actors and they accept corrupted proposals and gain more and more power. The “power of fragility” is the solution.
The “imagine” community is a prove of “The new paradigm” theory in practice. While the software and the “imagine” community is the product, they are “means of production” too, simultaneously. According to the mechanism of distribution of wealth, power, and software services (financial sovereignty facilities, privacy care messenger and social network, democratic voting system, decentralized domain name service(DNS) and decentralized website, wiki, weblog, video channel service), we can claim that "imagine" and software are also "allocation" at the same time. In summary, in “imagine” community decide what to produce, how to produce, for whom to produce, and why produce.
The "imagine" is not just producing a free software merely! "imagine" cultivates a culture of "decentralized production" (aka "peer production") using decentralized and open money, which will be the basis for the production of other decentralized products such as open hardware, open technology, open medical, etc... under "The new paradigm".
Conclusion:
Regardless of “isms” and labels, “The new paradigm” proposes a complicated system of combination of technologies and people that make a real transparent free market of thoughts (a realization of Agora and “Vita Activa” in 21 century) where people freely can support or reject any idea with minimum cost. People by joining to a community or even accepting the money of a community (in exchange of their goods or services) support that community. Vice versa, people by leaving a community or simply by not accepting the money of a community refuse that community. It is the easiest and most practical way to demonstrate democracy. Free choice of free people determines the communities progress direction. Their choice elevates society or turns it into an abandoned society. No need to argue, quarrel or fight. No need to war.
These communities are not merely online groups since they affect people's real lives in different ways.
Next, we described a realized community called “imagine, which was created by this software and in order to maintenance the software. The “imagine” represents one of the thousands potential ways of generate and distribute money and power, which can be powered by this software.
The “imagine” community looks for active participation of software developers, hacktivists, activists artists, and researchers in order to improve and accelerate the movement.
Hu,
a human, a practical philosopher, a technical thinker