Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

The diminution of irregularity is exemplified, amongst other things, in the case of staple products which supply our necessary food and clothing. With respect to them, famine and scarcity are by comparison almost unknown now, at any rate in tolerably civilized communities. As a consequence of this, and of the vast improvements in the means of transporting goods and conveying intelligence, the fluctuations in the price of such articles are much less than they once were. In other directions, however, the reverse has been the case. Fashion, for instance, now induces so many people in every large community simultaneously to desire the same thing, that great fluctuations in value may ensue.

- John Venn, The Logic of Chance (p 370-371)

 Written by John Venn (of Venn Diagram fame, unfortunately little else of his work has receive popular attention) in 1866. It shows that scarcity wasn’t even very real back then.

FSFÍ’s awareness campaign leading up to our conference on the 5th of July was accidentally started today, six days early, with an extreme amount of impact.

In fact, the impact was so great that at 15:45 UTC we had a fairly major earthquake near Ingólfsfjall, not far from where the conference is to be held. USGS reports it to have been 6.7 magnitude (Ms/MLs), with local sources stating it to have been 6.1 ML. (ML scale ends at 6.0 so I’m expecting revised numbers later on).

Anyway, what a great way to set off a campaign! Go freedom!

Register to attend the conference here. (free!)

First, think about free cultural projects. Think about what happens when people disagree on the direction the project is taking. The project forks, right? Now, hold that thought in your head for a bit.

A new type of voting system

Now, lets talk about voting systems. When voting, a voter is presented with two functions: vote for one of the options, or don’t vote. I suggest we add a third: forward your vote to a third party.

This is the essence of “representative democracy”, but I’m talking about expanding it - in representative democracies everybody forwards their vote to a predefined subset of the people, and each representative has an equal weight in subjects. Here I’m saying anybody can forward their vote to anybody, and forwarding votes increases the weight of that individual’s vote.

The three functions of the vote:

1. Abstention
2. Direct vote
3. Elected proxy

So, for example, if Bob doesn’t have any particular interest in agriculture, he can forward his vote in an agriculture related issue to his friend Sam, whom he trusts to make the right decision about agricultural issues.

What’s more, Bob can choose to automatically forward his vote on all agricultural issues to Sam. And Sandy, who isn’t very political, but trusts Bob a lot, can choose to automatically forward her vote on all issues to Bob, except on issues about education, because she thinks her friend Tanya knows more about that.

The three options of the proxy:

1. Single issue electorate.
2. Categorical electorate.
3. Arrant electorate.

Importantly, they are all free to change their mind at any time. An agricultural matter may arise where Bob has an opinion - it’s not that he doesn’t trust Sam. It’s just that he wants to make his own call on this one. To make this viable, we need another feature: overriding. Until the closing of the polls on a specific issue, a voter may change her mind as often as she wants, and only the last decision is counted.

Changing your mind is allowed, within a generally accepted timeframe.

Consider that every single system of authority on Earth exists as a possible state of arrangement within this voting system. I should draw pictures to illustrate, but suffice a few examples:

1. Dictatorship:  Everybody forwards their vote to one person. (Let’s not hang ourselves in discussion on why this situation would arise)
2. Parliamentary democracy: Everybody forwards their votes in equal measure to the same group of people - in Iceland, 63 people.
3. Bicameral democracy: The social network is disconnected into two groups, one significantly larger. Within each of these subsets there is a parliamentary democracy configuration.

And so on.
For all of this to be viable, you need software that provides this functionality. Solving this sort of voting may be arbitrarily complicated and can only be done in a reasonable amount of time by a computer. This means, for security, we want everybody to use strong crypto - but that’s just a devil in the details, so let’s not go too deep into implementation.

For now, just assume that this software will be written. Now on to the juicy stuff.

Forking the Legal Codebase

It turns out that most countries leave their laws in the public domain. This means that by copying the laws in entirety you do not infringe on copyright. This is good. It also has the interesting side effect that there is nothing that stops you from making changes. Obviously these changes are not law, but they are still legal code.

Think of society as a running program, where the laws are one of the underlying logical components. If you change the laws, you change how the system works.

So take the voting system described above, and put it on a website. Call this your Shadow Parliament. Now, encourage every citizen of your country to sign up. Make some mechanism to ensure their identity - avoid giving people more than one account, and avoid giving people accounts who aren’t actually citizens of your polity. Now start the most interesting social experiment of all time. Two steps:

1. Every bill that appears on the real parliament is copied automatically onto the Shadow Parliament, where is undergoes the electoral process.
2. Bills can be proposed by members of the Shadow Parliament in the same way as they are proposed by delegates at the real parliament, and undergo the electoral process as such.

Slowly but surely, the two legal codebases will diverge.

How to bootstrap a Shadow Parliament

When you fork the legal code, obviously your Shadow Parliament needs to obey the laws on it, at least to the extent of the functionality of the parliament itself.

As a result, you first need to make, using the traditional legal process as described in your country’s laws, a legal parliament running on the copy. This means host general elections. There are probably some loopholes you can use to make that process fairly painless, but I suggest consulting some lawyers on how to do it “legally”. Remember that the polity you’re running is a clone, so size restrictions and other things might be a lot easier to overcome.

As soon as you have a working base of parliamentarians running on the copy, make a lot of changes to the laws (the first divergent steps) - and to the constitution! - to make a networked system legal on the law codebase. Make sure you change the laws so that forwarding votes is legal.

This is formality, but it’s something that needs to be done right in order for the experiment to work. If you botch it, somebody will call foul later on.

Making the claim

Every country has its fair share of controversial issues. These are the leverage for the next step. As the experiment continues, the legal system will diverge more and more as the real parliament and the Shadow Parliament show that they are representing the parliamentarians, the lobbyists, and the corruptors on the one hand, and the people on the other.

When you’ve got enough divergence, there might be reason to suggest that perhaps the legally elected legislature of your country isn’t actually doing its job properly, if indeed its job is to be the face of democracy. At some point during the divergence process, if you get enough traction, you’re going to have at least a few parliamentarians who start acting on the results of the Shadow Parliaments own votes. (By all means be careful to have closing dates on issues at least a few hours before they close in the real parliament!) These parliamentarians will be representing democracy, yes, but they will also be fueling the fire, because if they’re just doing exactly what the Shadow Parliament wants, why have them there at all?

So, when you have enough divergence, you might suggest a global merge of the two legal code projects - that the “real” parliament merges the differences from the shadow parliament into their own. This will mean that the Shadow Parliament’s lineage of law will legally supersede the old Parliament’s laws, and will effectively take over the legislative wing of your country’s government.

The cool thing

This is my hack. The beauty of this is equivalent to the beauty of the GPL. Richard Stallman recently chided me for using the word “viral” to describe the GPL… so I’ll refrain from using that word… but essentially, this idea has a few features that make it bulletproof.

The first is that the people in power won’t like it at all, but they cannot (legally) stop it from happening.

The second is that even though it is inherently subversive, the more people that know about the idea and understand its implications, the better.

The third is that it leads to more freedom, far more freedom, a kind of freedom nobody has ever experienced. It isn’t even Utopianism, that’s the great part. Proof of concept exists, right here, in this article. Now we’re only months away from running code.

Microstate co-conspirator Patri Friedman talks about Seasteading on Gizmodo. For more information on Seasteading and related projects, check out these e-mails that floated back and forth recently (hope nobody from the mailing list minds! - it’s open anyway on Google…):

>Patri,
>
> Can you comment briefly on the legal connections to the mainland for your
> Bay Area community? Are there any special provisions for legal status, or is
> this just a physical prototype that is planned? I’d like to hear some
> comment on the type of legal status that you will be aiming to attain.
>
> Marcin
>

The Bay Area prototype will of course be under local, state, and federal
regulations.  Trying to get special legal status for a floating structure in
the SF bay would make no sense whatsoever.  Its purpose is to demonstrate
our design, get practice with the engineering, and serve as offices for the
organization.

Autonomy is for structures that are > 200nm from land.

I’ll refrain from divulging more for now. Just check out the Seasteading Wikibook instad.

Also check out the Floatingman project, a group looking at buying a small island in central America:

Trae Spear wrote:

its actually trying not to be political. the original idea called for
floating barges and other giant ships out in international waters... but the
upkeep costs defeated us. one of the issues i always see in these types of
projects is the massively ambitiousness of them, and the massive resources
required. with FM we were looking to go with the very minimum infrastructure
required. fly under the radar as much as possible, and not do anything more
then absolutely necessary to keep the project going.

it was only the first step. once the first project of this nature succeeds,
the next will always be easier.

so, towards that, yes, the state would be the real owner. sovereignity is,
in my opinion, too ambitious at this point. whats the next best thing? a
state that is unable/unwilling to do anything. which is why we were looking
at third world countries. as long as we kept to ourselves, the island should
be enough to insulate us from them, and vice versa. and on the other hand we
should be bringing in a significant 'tourism' cashflow to the local state,
which is looking at tourism as its main source of income. and really, they
probably have more important things to do with their limited resources then
bother some eccentric foreigners off on their island (as opposed to the US
which really should have better things to do, but doesnt, and has the
resources to do something)

the biggest thing is that it could all be done for less then the price of a
townhouse in SF. even if the project only succeeded for a brief time, it
would make the next easier, and little overall would be lost.

the website www.floatingman.org has the main info, as well as a link to our
discussion board. things are somewhat in the air right now, weve run into a
few problems we dont have answers to yet. so the end outcome might be
slightly different, but thats the basics

total price is 500k (if i recall correctly), that initial 300k included
operating costs for the first bit. for the acreage it isnt cheap (though
there is some arguement on the actual size of the island, the official
survey was done in a slang local measurement that doesnt equate well with
acres. my math had it at closer to 24 acres), and even more so on third
world country scales; but as far as islands go its well on the cheap end.
most islands of comparable size were in the millions, or much more. if you
have something in mind i would definetely like to take a look at it, but
there are other factors then simply price. i personally really liked a few
canadian/northern islands... but most people involved didnt want to deal
with the cold. phillipean islands were decided against as too far from the
US, which, unfortunetely, is where most of our cashflow would come from.

So there you have it. Micronations are just around the corner. Seriously.

My friend and colleague Friðrik Björgvinsson did an interesting paper on the fuel expenditure of the Icelandic fishing fleet compared to the amount of fish caught. He focused on capelin (mallotus villosus), but I have recently seen a different paper with a similar result for cod.

According to Friðrik’s data, over a six year period the Icelandic fleet spent 5.204.249 liters of oil fishing for capelin, and caught over the same period 209.803.115 kilos of capelin, giving on average 40,31 kilos of capelin for each liter of fuel. The paper goes more deeply into monthly averages and shows trends in fuel consumption and relative efficiency, which can be used to try and heighten efficiency by fishing on particular months more than others.

Considering the price of oil is one way to view this. Another way would be to look at the carbon footprint involved on a per kilo scale. 0,02 liters of oil for each kilo gives us, assuming diesel @ 2,772 kg CO2/liter, roughly 69 grams of CO2 emitted per kilo of fish.  Oddly enough, this number increases almost tenfold for cod (I’ll post exact numbers when I have them handy).

Calculating the environmental impact of food production is something that needs to be done regularly, and figuring out new ways to improve efficiency and reduce waste - both greenhouse gas emissions and all other kinds - are paramount to our survival as a species. Iceland currently has one ship that runs off hydrogen fuel cells, but it’s a whale watching boat. Two quick suggestions would be to fit ships with wrankel engines and throughflow tesla turbines to improve efficiency of fuel expendature and to utilize the laminar forces of the sea against the hull when at speed, and secondly to consider deploying high altitude kites as a propulsion method.

Marcin and Vinay did a great dialogue over on Global Swadeshi, out today. Check it out.

This is a nice reminder of how fun mathematics is. Thanks Vinay for the link.

From the country of madness, from the makers of Star Wreck, from the depths of the Digital Freedom revolution, comes Iron Sky, a new movie with the best tagline ever.

“In 1945 the Nazis fled to the moon. In 2018 they are coming back.”

Trailer on Youtube.

Yes. Nazi’s in space. Some might say Evil Nazi Aliens. You’ve gotta love it. Two pictures that I really liked [creativecommons.org and ironsky.net]:

Link

Naomi Klein never fails:

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric.

Link (Thanks Gummi and Herbert)

Halli pointed out this great article.