Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

The entire idea of representative government is to outsource the governance of your everyday interactions with society to a third party.

Instead of outsourcing it, people have tried to insource it, by pushing for a flat model of direct democracy.

My suggestion is that we crowdsource democracy: let those who want to participate do so with no barrier for entry, and let those who are apathetic or uninterested sit on the sidelines. Let everybody control their own level of participation.

The island of Forvik in the Shetland Islands, formerly Papa Stour, has declared dependence, as of three days ago. This came into the FOME (Federation of Microstate Entrepreneurs) a few days ago but I only just saw it now.

What does this mean? Well, essentially, the claim is that while the Shetland Islands are currently pawned to the crown of the United Kingdom as part of a dowry dating back to the end of the Viking era, the UK crown has limited authority and the UK government and the European Union has none. This is a really amazing stance.

For decades the Shetland Islands have been cheated out of billions of thaler by the UK government through the rich and plentiful oil fields of the Shetlands. Now, if the rest of the islanders follow suit, this will stop.

Read this.

I wish Stuart Hill and the other Forvikings the best of luck in their endevours, and offer my assistance as needed. I also wish to extend an offer the Forvikian nation and the Shetland Islands Council membership to the Federation of Microstate Entrepeneurs, which has already been extended by other members of the same, no doubt.

The Lisbon treaty was not ratified by the Irish. Good.  The European Union is possibly the single biggest threat to personal freedoms in Europe since a certain elementary school classmate of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s managed to ascend to power.

Those who want real democracy will not support the EU. Say no to the Lisbon treaty.

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.

In response to my podcast of the other day, Fenn asked:

How should one go about building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate?

There’s no easy way to answer this, as the answer is neither obvious nor uniquely defined. I can posit three suggestions that I think are deeply related:

1. First, one of the things that will inevitably happen over the next decade, which has been going on for the past three decades, is that the idea of copyright will change. We are accustomed to an extremely rigid system for copyrights, born out of a greed which no longer really has any place in the realms of man in our new digital reality. Those who wish to uphold the old form of copyright are increasingly having to criminalize children and family folks, and any system which marginalizes the majority of the population (by stamps of unethicality, criminality, or whatever) is doomed to die (in the cybernetic sense) eventually.
2. Second, there has been a lot of talk about manufactured scarcity on Global Swadeshi recently, and in a number of other places. This has relevance here: We already live in a post-scarcity society on a number of levels. We haven’t achieved full cornucopia yet, but for all intents and purposes nobody should be want of anything. The only thing stopping us from having this kind of global equality is the patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate of which you speak. But that intellectual climate isn’t self-organizing. Rather, it’s a result of the assumption of scarcity, which leads people to believe they can’t survive without property, which leads to greed. This may sound simplistic, but it needn’t be more complicated. So if you want to build a post-scarcity world, start by breaking the current system and replacing it with something better. This can be done in a number of ways and I don’t support any single one more than any other, but as a rule the less violence applied the better.
3. Third, there is the option of doing the subversive hack. Nokia, amazingly, heralded this in the hardware market by saying that their patents were free for use in free/open source projects without royalties, and that they would not allow companies that did not follow the same guideline to use their patents. This was a big win, and completely parallel to the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons licenses. Basically, these licensing schemes are viral in nature, and the more you spread the meme the stronger it becomes. Because of this I have been discussing open hardware licensing with a number of ‘big guys’ over the last couple of months, and I happen to know that Richard Stallman and Neil Gershenfeld have been discussing this issue (Neil told me the other day…).

Or, taken into short form:

1. Just wait, the problem will solve itself.
2. Encourage the problem to solve itself by political activism. (And btw, anarchism is the way to go)
3. Push for subversive licensing methods and adopt free hardware licenses that are hostile towards patents.

On the third note, I think I’ll take the liberty of posting a few highlights of the mails thrown back and forth under the topic “Open Hardware License” a couple of months ago. I hope nobody minds.

The discussion started with Michel Bauwens asking about Open Hardware Licenses, or more generally, Open Source Physical Objects,

What do we need to have “economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts?”, i.e. true Distributive Production. Marcin Jakubowski proposes a set of OSE Specifications to judge such efforts.
Key entries: Free Hardware Design, Open Development, Open Customization ; Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Innovation, Open Source, Open Source Product Design, Open Source Hardware
See also: Citizen Product Design; Co-Creation; Co-Design ; Desktop Manufacturing ; Peer Production Entrepreneurs ; Self-organized Design Communities
Open Source for Appropriate Technology: Instructables, Honeybee Network, Appropedia, Howtopedia, Demotech
Sixteen Key Technologies for an Open Habitat. Marcin Jakubowski [3]
Key organizations: Open Design Foundation ; Open Hardware Foundation
Typology by degree of openness: Closed Hardware; Open Interface, Open Design, Open Implementation
The Open Source Product Design platform has a list of Open Design projects
MAKE magazine “has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace”
The Village Forum focuses on how we design and build our habitat.
The P2P-Design Delicious tag monitors the topic

Vinay Gupta said:

The issue is patents. Open Source derives it’s power from copyright law - they use the property right of “copyright” and then pool it by using the GPL and other such licenses which rest on copyright.

Patent is a huge pain in the ass. You could do an open source patent pool, but that’s a very expensive and hard to manage undertaking.

So… one option is to work in the domain of no property rights - public domain - which is where a manufacturing technology goes if it is disclosed without patents, or is patented but the patent has expired.

But then what if you publish your design, then somebody makes a small tweak which kind of perfects your design, and then patents their tweak - without a patent on the original item, you can’t require them to release their changes for general use, because there’s no property right that you hold which applies to their work.

A problem, for sure, in terms of doing Open Manufacturing in the same vein as Open Source.

And later followed up:

I’m not sure we need an open hardware license. I’m also pretty sure that we need to investigate other approaches to protecting IP other than copyright and patent, because neither one really expresses the essence of what we’re trying to get at here. Copyright and Patent are two forms of Imaginary Property: we could easily create a third form of Imaginary Property that suited our needs, although it wouldn’t have legal status unless new laws were passed, or old ones amended.

To which I responded:

The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

I consider patents to be harmful by design. Their original purpose, to spur innovation, worked to a certain degree but it certainly doesn’t scale (much like the republic) - as soon as you have a certain number of innovators, they find their options limited by the number of existing patents, and the patent system becomes counterproductive. Bounty based systems may be better for certain purposes, but this is an issue I haven’t seen anybody nail properly yet.

Which brings me to my point: What we need isn’t just a new license, it’s a new terminology for dealing with “objects”, both physical and imaginary, something that encompasses both snugly, fits in with modern legalese and does the job patents were originally intended for without artificially stifling innovation or stepping on anybody’s toes.

Once we have that kind of framework, a license that applies in general terms to all these things will probably follow somewhat naturally, and that has the potential to handle software, hardware, biomass or whatever humans need to possess.

Marco Fioretti joined the conversation, with:

A much more effective and easier to implement solution may be to simply:

- reduce duration in time of patents
- do not allow them in some fields: software, living things…

if it ain’t completely broken, that is if there is an intermediate
solution that puts an end to all or almost all the harmful
consequences, why make the effort to fix it completely?

Michel Bauwens then replied:

Concerning the new terminology, are you aware of Spimes as a concept,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Spime, explained in this video,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Bruce_Sterling_on_the_Internet_of_Things_and_Spimes

The only beef I would have with Bruce Sterling’s concept is that it relies
on paying for online designs, which I think is not realistic,

some other license related links:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Talis_Community_License

http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Design_License_Agreement

Here is the perspective of the TAPR open license people, taken from
http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence

I hope Lawrence is not objecting to being copied on this, busy as he must
be?

Michel

From http://www.tapr.org/OHL.

You can download pdf versions of the proposed licenses through this site.

“The TAPR Open Hardware License (”OHL”) provides a framework for hardware
projects that is similar to the one used for Open Source software. This
isn’t as straight-forward as it seems because legal concepts that work well
for software (such as copyright and copyleft) don’t neatly fit when dealing
with hardware products and the documentation used to create them. The OHL
deals with Documentation, which describes a project using elements such as
schematic diagrams, CAD/CAM files, and Gerber files, and Products which are
based on that Documentation.

Like open source software licenses, the OHL permits Documentation to be
used, modified, and distributed to third parties. Unlike software licenses,
it also addresses how Products based on the documentation can be made and
distributed. The OHL’s requirements are aimed at encouraging the community
to develop, use, and improve open source hardware — and to prevent others
from turning that hardware into closed, proprietary products.

The OHL does not address software, nor does it address firmware or code
loaded into programmable devices such as FPGAs. These fit much more closely
into a software licensing model than do the physical objects that the OHL
attempts to cover, and we encourage developers to use open source licenses
like the GPL for them.

One important, and unique, component of the OHL is a patent immunity
provision. In short, the OHL requires each person who uses the Documentation
to promise that they will not sue others who make Products based on that
Documentation for infringement of any patent they control. This ensures that
the community is protected from patent claims by those who benefit from the
community’s contribution.

Another unique aspect of the OHL is a provision to provide feedback about
modifications. Open source software licenses steer away from obligating
those who make modifications to pass those changes back to earlier
developers or other users. For a number of reasons, particularly our belief
that hardware fixes and improvements, especially for safety issues, should
be made known to those who may be making or using Products, we felt that a
public feedback provision would be valuable.

At the same time, we wanted to minimize the burden of such a provision, and
the loss of privacy that would result from requiring developers to provide
their email addresses. So, TAPR will provide a mechanism to report
modifications to a central archive that will be visible to anyone. The
requirement is structured so that if the mechanism fails (if, for example,
TAPR should disappear), the rights granted by the OHL will not be affected.

The Open Hardware License allows Products to be used for any purpose. An
alternative version, the TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License, is identical
to the OHL but limits Products to noncommercial use only. While open source
licenses normally don’t allow restrictions on use, there is a big difference
between software and hardware that we believe justifies offering this
option.

While there is no real cost in compiling or copying open source software,
someone who wants to make Products available to others confronts upfront
costs of making circuit boards and obtaining parts. It’s often
cost-prohibitive to do this in small quantity, so the developer who wants to
make his or her Product available, even on a non-profit basis, has to make a
substantial up-front investment. That investment is at risk if others can
compete commercially with him. The Noncommercial Hardware License addresses
this concern. ” (http://www.tapr.org/OHL)

[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence?title=Open_Hardware_Licence&action=edit&section=2>
]
Context and Commentary

From Instructables at http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/

“Recently, people over at tapr.org released drafts of open-source hardware
licenses. I got the following message from Jonathan Kuniholm at Duke asking
for comments on the drafts: “I have spoken with each of you regarding our
interest in the infrastructure for the sharing of hardware designs. An
organization with its roots in amateur radio and open source software has
released a draft of two open hardware licenses ( http://www.tapr.org/OHL ).
I believe that the inspiration is primarily electronic hardware, but the
concept addresses issues we have encountered in our work with The Open
Prosthetics Project and its parent organization, the newly incorporated
Shared Design Alliance.

We have been interested in the ways that we might protect those who choose
to share designs for public good from the possibility of having those
designs patented out from under them or otherwise removed from the public
domain, as well as helping them avoid the cost and time delays of patent
protection for efforts from which they are not trying to profit. These draft
licenses also address liability issues, which are another can of worms. I
would be interested to hear thoughts from folks more knowledgeable than I
about the effectiveness and potential pitfalls of such measures, given the
difference between the issues surrounding physical designs and patents (for
which there is currently no open license option outside of patent-related
measures), and those surrounding items traditionally protected by copyright,
which can currently be released under Creative Commons or GNU licenses (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ , http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html,
http://www.fsf.org/ ).

The TAPR folks have invited comment on their draft, and I think that this is
as good an effort as I’ve seen so far. If you have interest or expertise in
this area, please submit comments through the TAPR site, and please forward
this to anyone else you know who may be interested.” (
http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/)

I piped up again, saying:

Thanks for that link, I wasn’t familiar with Spimes. But I’ll agree with your beef. I had a conversation with my good friend Dhananjay Gadre of the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology in India about exactly this issue - I was pitching to him a concept I had for a “Sourceforge for Objects”, like the flipside of Make Magazine that was intended as a warehouse for digital design patterns. Originally, I had intended for authors of objects to be able to have people pay for downloads, going for the GNUesque stance of “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” trend.. but Dhananjay objected, pointing out a very important fact:

- Most innovation done in the world today is being done By the developed world For the developing world, and this is clearly the wrong way to do things. Enabling people running a collective warehouse of digitized objects to demand money from one another for use of their intellectual possessions would only widen the gap between the developing and developed, instead of reversing the innovation cycles and putting the power in the hands of those who need it, which is essentially my end goal.

In the end I came up with two methods of addressing this. On the one hand ask for donations rather than demanding money. The other method was applying a PPP-valency matrix to pricing schemes. Let me coin the term: A PPP-valency matrix is a NxN matrix, V, of the ratios between regional PPP’s (with tr(V) = N, and prod(V) = 2N, by design.).. the concept is to take the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” mantra and apply it to the actual economy, so the amount of money you get from objects is relative to the ability of people to pay for them. The problem with this method is it’s extremely hard to implement in a way that doesn’t beg for abuse, and after doing a few paper napkin Monte Carlo simulations (yes, I’m a geek), I’ve seen that there’s an inherant feedback loop in this thing that could cause instability in the long run. It can be fixed, but I’m not sure how.

Regarding Spimes on a more technical level, there’s an AI point here. Searching physical reality for objects is NP-hard. If we were to apply Bruce Sterling’s idea at face value, we’d end up with a world where you Google your toaster, and it just goes through all known reality searching for the RFID that matches your toaster. This would be stupid.

AI researchers fit into two categories these days: the people who want the AI’s to understand everything, know where everything is, and use deep searching to solve their problems, and the people who want the AI’s to understand context. The first group would just search the entire space for matching concepts. The latter group would narrow the search down to kitchens at first and expand only if necessary. The problem is, despite the best efforts of smart people ranging from John Von Neumann to John McCarthy to Noam Chomsky, we still don’t understand the nature of “context” well enough to actually implement this kind of thing. And actually understanding context might lead us to a far smarter way of doing this that is currently obscured by our limitations.

… after which the conversation pattered out into pointless chit-chat. We didn’t reach any useful conclusion, but I think there were a lot of very good points in there. What I’d like to do is get the big names in the game to stick their noses together and come up with a Much More General Public License - one that doesn’t just apply to software, but to anything. If that seems unreasonable, then I’d settle for a GPL-lookalike that addresses the key issues of free/open hardware, which is definitely one of the things that’s going to be hardest to fix for the purposes of a post-scarcity future.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how the game has been played so far, or that it’s being played unfairly, but only that we are in the unique situation that we can change everything, forever, by playing the game right now. In a world where everything can be a bitstream, what are we going to do?

Earlier this year a group of people in Reykjavík started a not for profit organization called Lindy Ravers, for Lindy Hop dancers in Reykjavík. The purpose of the organization is to increase awareness of swing dancing and Lindy Hop in particular, and create a social forum for practitioners of the dance.

When the organization was founded I managed to convince Þórgnýr, one of the key people involved, that we should make a very different set of bylaws than are commonly adopted by similar organizations. After almost four months of success I think it’s time to describe the concept here.

The laws are available here in Icelandic. I’ll translate the significant ones into English:

Article 6. [All] the members of the organization form a council that governs the organization. The organization chooses four representatives, thereof one foreman, by way of election, at every council meeting. No member can be a representative for more than three years in a row.

This law is interesting because of the words “at every council meeting.” But those words aren’t important without the context of the other laws, so I continue:

Article 7. The foreman of the representatives calls representatives together as justified by need and interest. Representatives take care of everyday execution of the organization, such as organization of singular events, financial organization, etc.

Nothing interesting there really, except that you can note that the “representatives” are more like unpaid elected employees of the organization than any kind of authority - they aren’t given any right to make large scale decisions.

Article 8. Laws can be changed at council meetings. Any three members of the organization can request that a council meeting be called, and shall this be done at least once per year. Representatives oversee organization and advertisement of such meetings. Council meetings are open to all, but only members have right to motion and vote.

Put this into context with  article 6. The representatives are elected at every meeting (if no changes need to be made then unanimity will make this a formality) and you only need three people to cause such a meeting to be called. The barrier for revolution is lowered significantly, and one could even suggest that it is encouraged.

Article 10. There are no membership fees. The organization is granted authority to accept and retain money for any sort of workshop, class, or other events that members organize and allocate funds on behalf of its members. Any surplus funds at the end of the year remain in the organizations funds.

The last sentence is a legal formality ordered by Icelandic law. What’s interesting here though is that it isn’t the representatives that are granted the authority to manage funds, but the organization as a whole. This means that any transfer of funds is open to democratic debate, but as per article 7, if no debate arises then the representatives can continue with everyday business.

Article 11. Funds from the treasury may only be used to pay for the business of the organization. This includes but is not limited to rent of premises, hiring of teachers for longer or shorter periods of time and purchase of any essentials. Should any dispute arise a council meeting should be called. Representatives are obliged to seek good deals for all costs.

Here the frame for representatives executive power is clarified. The point that any dispute should refer to a council meeting is another option for revolution.

The idea, in case you missed it, is simple: The people have the power, and they do not give it away, they just refer tedium to a subset of the polity with the safeguard that any misuse of the severely limited power granted to the subset can be called out and fixed with minimal hassle.

Further, unlike a lot of organizations, the “executive body” does not have a monopoly on organizing events. Rather, each member is able to start an initiative on his own accord and has the organization as a supporter and a framework (both legal and social) for these initiatives. Initiatives are run by individuals, not by the organization.

The idea of building revolutions into the system as a method of self-correction is one that conventional authority is deeply afraid of. People who are in power in countries and so on today know that if the people had the authority to call for re-election if there were any suspicion of misconduct, they would quickly loose their jobs. (There is an issue of scale here: how big can the polity be before the re-election rate becomes so high that it is essentially impossible to remain stable? The obvious answer is to enlarge the number of members needed to call for an election, but not too much - in most countries this power exists, but the number of people needed for such a demand is so high that it is unattainable in practice.)

So far there has been one revolution in Lindy Ravers. Since the organization has this built into the legal framework this was an entirely peaceful revolution, and all others will be. The change made in the representative body was that yours truly was removed from the subset of representatives on account of being unfit - since I currently work in Vestmannaeyjar I’m not able to fulfill my duties as a representative in Reykjavík, so I got swapped out. Quick and easy. Perfect.

Þórgnýr informed me tonight that there is one organization that has had similar laws for more than six decades, and most people don’t realize it: Alcoholics Anonymous. Indeed, their charter’s first bylaw states:

1. Final responsibility and ultimate authority for A.A. world services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole Fellowship.

The rest can be found here. This is an extremely social cry: let the people be governed by the people for the people. It is grounded in a faith in the ability of the individual and the ability of individuals to work together. Whilst most political theories put either the group or the individual first, the anarchist way is to recognize the inherent symbiosis between individuals and groups and acknowledge that one cannot function without the other.

This realization is important, and may matter a lot in coming years.

On another note, this is interesting: Gresham’s Law and Alcoholics Anonymous.

I have said this before: Technology is about people. Why does this catch-phrase seem so important to me? Because, simply, it stabs so many holes in the fabric of that which we have come to accept as truth.

The assumptions made constantly and persistently in our social, political, and economic environments have been left untouched for so long that many or most no longer think to question them: While mathematicians quarrel endlessly over the truth value of the axiom of choice, in any other field – particularly those fields which touch on our personal freedoms the most – the axioms laid out unknowingly by the thinkers of the last generations are never questioned deeply. While many will disagree with Smith or Marx, none or few would disagree with those assumptions that both made and neither mentioned.

Scarcity.

Throughout history, throughout politics, social theory and economics, one of our purest unquestioned assumptions has been that of scarcity: The inherent limit on available things. And within certain dogmas prevalent in the western world, the more immediately dangerous counter-assumption of the infinity of nature.

This assumption did make sense, at first, just like Euclid’s axiom of parallel lines made sense, at first.

Before the industrial revolution the human species simply did not have enough technology to actually make a significant impact on our natural environment: While the odd forest would disappear and the odd mine would deplete, there would always be another forest and another mine. There were enough fish in the sea, there were enough buffalo on the prairies.

Likewise, we did not have enough technology to immerse ourselves in relative cornucopia – fishing and hunting was hard work, farming was a slow and difficult process. The trees certainly didn’t chop themselves down.

But with the mechanization of our fundamental processes, a development starting with the plow and continuing on into the unforeseeable future, we started to make an impact, our rate of fabrication grew, as did our rate of consumption, and now we have reached a time when nobody need starve, but many do.

Many do starve. Many are want of water, food, clothing, education. And yet despite all our technology there are three billion humans who live in abject poverty. That’s half of our species. One billion live off less than one US dollar a day.

Yet it has been estimated that roughly half of the agricultural produce of the western world goes to waste. Why is this?

The truth is that while we have, as a species, transcended in a number of ways many of those scarcities that may define us, we have built a plethora of systems to deal with these scarcities that have refused to give way to more egalitarian systems. The assumption of scarcity has caused us to build systems of ownership, systems of priority, property, greed. The obvious solution to the problem of famine is to redistribute that which would otherwise go to waste – transport that which is not needed to where it is needed. Or in Marxist parlance: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

This idea was hardly meant to be enacted at a personal level, but rather at a societal level, where varying resources of different places would supplement each other; where geography would be a function of possibility rather than desperation. Where humans could move forward in synergy.

Smith saw the same problem and found a similar solution, albeit far less egalitarian: the free market was intended as a negative feedback loop on a global scale, an ideal for maximizing the potential of each environment by leveraging value: a concept that we cannot accurately model, for it is fickle. And while the idea of the free market is truly a beautiful one, I have yet to see a market that is truly free.

Indeed, in a free market one would have expected the problem of distribution of agricultural produce would solve itself, on a system-wide scale, eventually. But it hasn’t. Everybody and his mother has had a go at explaining why: Perhaps Africa is too poor (despite having immense landmass and far more natural resources than Europe). Perhaps Asia is too uncivilized (despite having several thousand years more experience in that field than the west). Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Perhaps people are looking in the wrong places, laying blame where it doesn’t belong. On this subject I could talk endlessly.

But in all this exposition on the assumption of scarcity, I have not once mentioned digital fabrication, the subject of this flurry of words. So now I shall.

People must realize that digital fabrication is not a revolution. It is not a wishing wand that will make the problems of the world go away. It is merely a technology, a greatly hyped one at that. Trust me – I have contributed greatly to the hype.

Digital fabrication, the idea of building machines that can assemble anything from the atom on up, including copies of themselves, is a natural progression of the industrial revolution. It is a natural step from where we are now. It’ll take a while to come into fruition, but it is interesting today for two distinct reasons.

The first is that, unlike the so-called digital revolution that put a computer on every desk and changed the way we do communication and computation, the effects of the advent of digital fabrication have been predicted to some degree since von Neumann. And while even the most absurd predictions have certainly underestimated the effect of being able to make anything at the touch of a button, at the end of the day this is just another technology. It will change how we live, but not who we are.

Nothing fundamental will change in our perception of the physical world by our being able to assemble a stuffed turkey atom-for-atom. We already have access to stuffed turkeys, so we already know what having them does for us as a people. Yes, certainly, there will be new options available to us, like growing skyscrapers out of diamonds, but that is not where the greatest entry point for discussion of digital fabrication lies. Rather, it is in the economical impact, which is hard to quantify.

Which brings us to the other thing: although we somehow managed to emerge from the industrial revolution with two major economic theories, both of which are built on the same faulty assumptions, it will be the economics that will have to be largely rewritten in a post-scarcity world. The technologies that have been popping up over the last two decades in free peer-to-peer distribution have become a model for this: suddenly you can share anything that can be converted into a digital data stream, be it music, movies, or the recipe for your Grandmother’s famous stuffed turkey. It will be having to face the potential digitization of everything that will be the coup de grace for our current models.

Capitalism will not work, for there will be no capital. Communism will not work, for there will be no need for the commune.

Rethinking scarcity is difficult, and I don’t think it’s something that the true believers of the current economic models are mentally equipped to do. People who have become indoctrinated into a certain type of thinking will always have a great difficulty thinking outside of that particular box. But the 12 year olds who are sharing music today, the hackers who made this all possible, the people who are heralding the digital fabrication movement, the free software, free hardware and free culture movements, these are the people who will break the arbitrary rules made up by those who didn’t think hard enough before making assumptions. These are the people who can really make a difference.

And you know what? These people are you.

Vinay blagged:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/4109

IEEE article suggesting that Metcalf’s law (value of a network equals the square of the number of users) is wrong, and the truth is more like n log(n).

Seems to me like this ought to be something one can check with, say, sale prices or other financial performance metrics.

I immediately had a thought on the subject: It may well be the case that both are right. That is to say, Metcalf’s law may be a “maximal value theorem”, while the IEEE article suggests a “mean value theorem”.

Let’s face it: Networks are rarely fully utilized, and indeed most networks grow more slowly as more users join them after a certain threshold point - one that your yacht club has far surpassed, and your national democracy has always been far beyond, but one that Facebook doesn’t seem to have slammed into (yet), and one that seems far off the horizon for the Internet in general.

The core question, I suppose, is one of connectivity: how well are individuals within the network connected and how strongly are the possible synergies within the network being utilized? If we assume that n log(n) is the average utilization, then we are talking about full utilization in small groups (under 4 people), but on average there is less than 7% utilization of possible communication pathways by the time you hit Dunbar’s number (150 individuals).

There’s definitely something there worth looking at.

Patrick Hickey, head of the European Olympic Committee, is quoted on Wikipedia as to have said, “Under no circumstance will we support the boycott. We are 100 percent unanimous. Not one government leader has called for a boycott. A boycott is only a punishment of the athletes.”

First off, I’d like to nitpickingly chastise him for being redundant: If a decision has any less than 100% support from those making it, it is not unanimous.

More importantly, he seems to be under the impression that a boycott is only valid if it is called for by government leaders. However, the fact that the athletes themselves should choose this course of action, which they haven’t officially done yet (but allegedly many were considering it), tells us that our government leaders are too weak, indifferent or corrupt to make the same kind of stance as the athletes and the many thousands of people who have been protesting over the last couple of weeks.

Weakness in this case would be an unwillingness to take a stand which the Chinese government may choose to use as cause to break trade relations

Indifference would be an inability to see the global context of the Tibetan struggle for independence - echoing the indifference these same leaders have shown towards a multitude of issues over the last years.

And corruption in this case would be, on the one hand, the choice of leaders not to act, lest they inadvertently fuel further separatist movements, such as the separatist movements in Basque, Catalonia, Quebec, California, etc, etc, which these same people would deem not to be in their own personal best interest, since power to the people implies less power to the ruling class. And on the other hand, corruption in this case would be the decision of the leaders not to act on the basis that China is a powerful country and that keeping them at peace is more important than any ethical or liberal considerations. This mode of corruption has been seen before, for example in the United States’ Coalition of the Willing.

The European Union - another ethically weak organization - has said that sports should not be linked to politics. I agree. But they are, and have ever been. The Olympic games, called for and reestablished by Baron Pierre de Coubertin around 1894 and famously modernized by Adolf Hitler in 1936, have been since Hitler a symbol of strength for the nation hosting the games, with numerous cities competing for the right to host them each round. As a symbol of strength, it is a strongly political symbol, and as such it is only fitting that opponents of the hosting country attempt, as they can, to undermine that symbol.

Consider it civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is generally not a protest about the establishment of a nation - although that does sometimes occur - but rather, it is a protest about a certain facet of the establishment that has gone awry for any number of reasons, that civilians are simultaneously powerless to change and deeply dissatisfied with. Civil disobedience is the editorial process for society.

As a result I deeply hope that as many athletes as possible very openly and visibly boycott the Olympic games. To make a suggestion: Go to Beijing, attend the games, but just stand there in the stadium and refuse to participate in the games until Tibet has been granted independence. That would be a strong statement.