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 5 Jan 2006 @ 14:00, by bapty. Social System Design
Human world society is clearly insane.
There are many attempts to better the world by changing the hearts of people but leaving the basic structure of society the same.
It is vital that structure and heart be changed at the same time, for we cannot be moral in an amoral framework of life More >
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8 Dec 2005 @ 19:57, by bapty. Social System Design
Our institutions, especially those of law and order, finance and politics, do not exist for the prime purpose of benefitting humanity according to moral truth. They are there both to permit and control instinctive behaviour according to Machine reality. More >
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1 Nov 2005 @ 11:03, by bapty. Social System Design
The Prophet Google More >
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16 Oct 2005 @ 13:58, by vector8. Social System Design
Aren't we, humans, clever making up rules as we go along? You can't just receive all good, you have to make sure that what you are asking to receive is also for the good of everyone, or you won't receive it. This is part of the human guilt-trip; I'm afraid to have fun in case someone else isn't. As there is only the One Infinite Intelligence and Love in all, can the One be infinite love in you while being infinite misery in another? Of course not. Of course if you believe in different powers then it is understandable that one power would want joy for one and ignoring another's needs. I believe in the One Power, Intelligence, Love, and Wisdom in all. More >
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13 Oct 2005 @ 14:39, by ming. Social System Design
Hm, that's what it says in the tagline of my blog here.
An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up.
... I'm trying to remember what I meant. Trying to notice if it makes any sense to me right now.
An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Well, I would only say something rather negative like that if I can point to some kind of alternative. I hold myself to be some kind of optimist, after all.
The old civilization is centralized, bureaucratic, moralizing, closed-minded, unsustainable. Not hard to find many signs of that. But yet it is still there. It has become even more surreal, but it hasn't exactly died. I moved somewhere that was less surreal, but the global civilization hasn't changed much.
So, what's the new and exciting part? Well, in part it was based on a trust in collective intelligence. That somehow, to the degree that people are free to be creative and to communicate, new ways will emerge.
Closed can't compete with open. Owned and expensive can't compete with free. Limited and controlled can't compete with free in the other sense of the word. Boring can't compete with exciting.
At least in the long term. In the short term, those who hold power and control can keep things limited, closed and life-less for quite a while. Based on their ability to manipulate, their ability to coerce people through laws, economic pressure, religious doctrine, etc. We have to make a living, have to stay out of jail, have to appear relatively normal. So there are many things we could do, which maybe we would be more inspired to do, but they don't appear in the short term to be economically viable, legal, or socially acceptable.
My optimism came in part from noticing many little trends that point in the direction of self-organization, of freed creativity, of things becoming free. The Internet is still the best example of that. People making open source software, which is free and of higher quality than closed alternatives. People blogging, sharing their mind, reporting on stuff that otherwise wasn't reported on. People sharing their photos, their music, their thoughts.
But it is a fairly even battle. New ways also appear of making things more closed. Copyright laws are closing more things down, even fair use is at risk. Companies patent large numbers of ridiculous items, like self-evident design elements, software algorithms, business procedures, and life forms.
The media industries try hard to lock down any hardware or software that might play or store or transport any kind of media. They come up with ways of controlling what you do with their words or pictures, to suit their business model. They might succeed in having laws passed, and already have in some places, that make it illegal for you to resist.
I'd like to believe that all of those kinds of efforts will fail, necessarily. But I can't say I am sure.
I believe that sufficiently well-informed people will make different choices. I believe freedom is more powerful than control. I believe creativity beats conformity. I believe there's something inherent in life that makes it impossible to squash in the long run.
I guess the thing to do is to shine the light on the signs of life that appear. The new, open, free, exciting stuff.
And I suppose that's what I'm doing here. I'm just a little out of the habit. More >
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 5 Aug 2005 @ 08:01, by redstar. Social System Design
Recently, there was the brief episode of Live 8 and the issue of debt cancellation for Africa, and I noted some references to my own current country of residence ( Malawi) and how it had been bypassed for debt relief etc and seeing how this somehow related to me, I decided to add my two cents worth to this whole debate... People do not need debt relief.... and in the context of very likely oil shocks about to reverberate with ascending scale onto the global economy - those poverty stricken Garden Farmers of the world who get by without running water, electricity and very little or nothing in the way of finances are likely to be in a much less difficult position than the rest of us.
More >
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 4 May 2005 @ 01:31, by rcarratu. Social System Design
Q: Why do we need a Geodemocracy?
A: Right now, people have almost no control over their world at all. The marketplace is the only place they have any say so, and even then, companies pay big money to advertisers because they can guarantee sales, because the advertisers have applied science to the act of simply stating what products someone has to sell. They are so good at making people subconsciously want what they are selling that 'free will' barely exists in most people anymore. (And most people would probably argue that point, even as they buy what they are told to buy. If it didn't work, how could the advertisers guarantee results?)
People are manipulated, controlled, intimated, and otherwise set to what the powers that be want them to do. They think what they are told to think by the media, they buy what the advertisers want them to buy, their attention is set into place like their minds have a coating of cement, and because of the illogic of all the existing systems, the planet is spiraling down into the karma, the results, of that control. This power of the 'rulers' comes from knowing and working on scales of mass control most people are not even aware of.
We cannot afford to let it continue.
If you knew that someday someone would set off a nuclear bomb in the neighborhood you live in, would you live there? If you thought that the water coming from your tap will someday become sewage slush, would you drink it? If you knew that the people who say they represent you would sell you out in a fast flash, would you let them represent you? Or do you just toss your hands in the air and say "So what? I can't do anything about it!"?
We tend to let the future take care of itself. This is suicidal. It far out reaches the damage of drugs and alcohol and all the other social ills we face everyday. And we accept them also. There is nothing we can do about it because there is no system which can leverage sane responses to those problems.
We don't need to accept anything. We can create a system which can something about it.
The existing political systems exist essentially no differently than any monarchy in the past. They are top down hierarchies which use force to carry out their plans. America, Germany, England, China, where ever you look, you find the same kind of hierarchy, just tagged with different jargon and nomenclature. President = King = CEO = Prime Minister = Chairman = whatever you want to call them... they all have some kind of illusion that the people somehow pick them and support them. But the world shows that their decision making is irrelevant to survival, and relevant only to their political agendas. usually those agendas either support someone rich or some ideology which could not work even if everyone held them sacred.
But what would happen if everyone actually had some ability to make the decisions which affect their lives and their children's lives?
You love your children. You work hard to feed them, to clothe them, to make sure they stay healthy... so why can't you see the need to create a world for them worth living in? A lot of people who see the way the world is slowly falling apart say "We can only hope our children will do better..." but why should the children do better? Their parents didn't.
The Geodemocracy is just an idea right now. It is just a way that people could connect together to make decisions together then carry them out with Projects they support. There is no requirement for consensus, no elections of representatives, no way someone can intimate anyone into doing things or not doing things, and religions, politics, and all the old systems are irrelevant to a Geodemocracy.
And most of all, it is uncorruptible by interior or exterior social forces. It's incorruptible because it side steps the forces which are used to control our lives. Trying to corrupt it would be like trying to nail a marshmallow into a stone brick. By it's very essence, a geodemocracy is something that nobody can get purchase on to change in any direction, bad or good. It's made of individuals, but no individual can change it or corrupt it. It exceeds the perimeter of all past ways of doing anything, so it is simply beyond the old grasp of the powerful or the political maniacs.
Yes, there is one real drawback, if you see it that way. It requires more of your attention than past organizational models. It takes two hours a day, five days a week for people to run their world, not fifteen minutes every four years like when you go to 'vote'. In a way, it's an attempt to grow a nervous system for the planet, to apply free will to scales most people never usually even think about. It is the only real expression of "Of the People, By the People, For the People" that can ever exist.
A Geodemocracy makes the decisions, generating Projects which do the work. The Geodemocracy is multi-generation, ever growing and becoming smarter, while Projects last only the time they need to do a task, then dissolve. That way no Project can become a hierarchy and therefore a problem.
It's worth doing, this idea. It's time, past time, for people to take control of their world. That which you ignore and don't care about has a tendency to reach into your personal live and shake you like a dog shaking a bone. Depressions, wars, poverty, crime... how many manage to escape these results of the past ways of doing things? Not many, and more and more all those will become evident in your life, like it or not.
We must break the cycles of stupidity and insanity, and get together to do something more about it than neighborhood watch meetings or mailing letters to our 'representatives' or joining news-grabbing disruptive social protest groups. We can do more than standing holding signs or signing petitions or cursing the decisions by 'elected' political officials and the bureaucracy.
Think about it.
Geodemocracy Site
Created on ... May 03, 2005 More >
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19 Apr 2005 @ 00:05, by vidyagama. Social System Design
Structural Deep Democracy(SD2) is a non-ideological approach to organizing collective action and solving world problems. SD2 uses PageRank as a centrality algorithm to analyze votes to determine the center of TRUST and CONSENT in a human trust network. The top three or five lead such an organization with one of them as the executive. This creates a small and efficient locus of trust and accountability to lead the organization. Frequent rank recalulations are used to keep the leadership accountable to the group as a whole. More >
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 15 Mar 2005 @ 20:50, by tlingel. Social System Design
What if you lived on an itinerant floating city?
What then?
What would your address be? More >
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16 Feb 2005 @ 23:19, by swanny. Social System Design
RETHINKING CITIES
Well all hail the Kyoto Protocol, on this its day of birth.
It'd be your February 16, 2005 and with much foot dragging it seems
the Protocol is now Law and in effect.
It is interesting that its basis is on a somewhat economic model, which is understandable in a capitalistic society and world. Credits to pollute are the order of the day and bought and sold as simply another commodity on the global markets perhaps.
Al-righty then but wait.... We have missed the boat somehow I think.
I think Global warming and CO2 emissions are not the problem but a symptom.
The real problem would seem to stem from the urban jungles and cities.
Cities which by design are unsustainable and serve not people but .... whatever.
Hmmmm really??? What is a city then??? Who does it serve and how many?
Can a city be to big? Can a city be self sufficient? Can a city please all of the people all of the time? Is the city a natural or organic entity or is it a machine or
processor of some sort? What do we really know about cities anyway?
They don't seem to have been around all that terribly long and is there perhaps need to investigate what makes a good and sustainable urban area and what do we base this judgment or reasoning on? Is city designing and building a science or an art? What is the history of the city? What makes a good, sustainable healthy and green city?
A lot of questions true but the questions have to be asked I suppose if we are to do more than just treat the symptom rather than address the real problem. More >
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