A New Heaven 24 comments

2 Jan 2004 @ 20:31, by Roger Eaton At this point, the plans for a voice of humanity are sketched out and time has come to begin coding. Fact is, though, a combination of the flu and the holidays has slowed me down and I'm finding it hard to switch over from the 2 percent inspiration stage to the 98 percent perspiration long haul, so I've decided to recap what has been developed so far before settling down to work. To recap, then, the plan is to create a voice of humanity (voh) by building peer-to-peer internet middleware that will serve to connect online communities and facilitate the sending of collective messages. "InterMix" will be written in Python using the excellent WingIDE Python programming environment, which is free for open source projects. The voice of humanity will be implemented in a bottom up hierarchy of internet communities. Network messages will be rated for interest and approval, and those messages with high marks will be sent up the hierarchy so they will be more widely visible. Messages that reach the top will be globally visible and therefore doubly important, first for themselves, and second because everyone will be reading them. A bandwagon effect will reinforce these messages to the point where everyone will know that everyone knows that everyone has read them, thus creating a global consciousness. Messages that reach the global level will by definition be both highly approved and of great interest, so it will be difficult for partisan and hateful messages on the one hand, or dull and platitudinous messages on the other to succeed. Kind and witty words that finesse a difficulty or point the way to a win-win solution should do best. Over time, a voice of humanity will redefine the "other" in a positive way, and the human race will come to have a better view of itself. Stupidity, hatred and greed will be at a disadvantage in the new conditions, which will validate the global perspective required to solve the great problems of war, social injustice and environmental destruction. Every individual or community will be able to send a message to any other community or individual in the voh network. A message from a community begins as a "suggested" message written by a member of the community. If the candidate message reaches consciousness in the sending community and achieves the pre-agreed threshold of ratings, InterMix will automatically forward the message to the addressed individual or community. When a community receives a message, a "listener" sub-hierarchy of the receiving community will process the message. Depending on the "strength" of the message and on the reaction in the listener groups, the message may rise in the listener hierarchy until it comes to community consciousness. (The "strength" of a message has to do with the size of the sending community and how high the message's ratings were in the sending community.) Importantly, a structured mediation service will be available to handle inter-group conflicts. Where there are two groups in conflict, there can be three voices to resolve the problem, that of each of the groups, and that of the two groups together as one. This bringing in of the common humanity of conflicting groups is an altogether new and promising approach to inter-group conflict that really really needs to be followed up on. There is yet another extraordinary, even transcendent, result to be expected from the voh network: the development of collective personalities. Through the exchange of collective messages, every great community will develop its own recognizable sense of self. We may imagine in today's world that a nation has its own character, but when a country has become truly articulate, when it can crack a joke or make a promise, then its personality will be much more discernable. The possibility of a fantastical new world civilization emerges, where not only humanity, but also Womankind, China, Islam, Academia, Business, Paris, and all the other collectivities have developed each their own immortal personas, forming a lively, buzzing new heaven, where the force of personality will be the currency. A new heaven and so a new earth. We mortals will be fascinated and much impressed. Mankind and Womankind will be King and Queen of the new realm, with nations and cities as peers, and the religions, parties and scholarly trends as advisors. Humanity will overarch all as arbiter and guide. This could be a disturbing picture of the world giving in to an almost medieval authority structure, except that each of these new gods and goddesses will be under our control in a system that gives the grand prize to love and wit. Moreover, this new governance for the world will not be a replacement for the current national and international structures, but rather an addition, holding only moral sway, not directly in control of military and economic might. People, who are now alienated by colorless bureaucracy, will want to be involved, because the issues will have been personalized and so made accessible. Most people have little patience with the issues of government, great or small, but if China snubs Womankind, *that* will need to be discussed and understood, and maybe something will need to be done! Within this hive of activity, the real issues of importance could get lost, to be sure, but under the guidance of humanity, a coherent set of sensible policies for planet earth should be more feasible than under the current nation-state system, which is not coping very well with population and technological advances. It does sound farfetched, this new heaven and new earth, so I was glad when I stumbled on the idea of the Annotated Web. The AntWeb, as it might be called, will enable voh communities to share information about websites on a topical basis. The blogger community will be targeted because sharing information about websites is a big part of blogging, and getting the breakdown by topic right for bloggers has not yet been quite satisfactorily accomplished, so this is an opportunity to get the voh network off the ground without requiring a religious conversion on the part of the users. InterMix will be implemented first in conjunction with the open source Chandler personal information manager. Chandler's 1.0 debut is scheduled for late in 2004, a good target date for the first usable InterMix. Chandler is likely to be quite popular, so InterMix could get a good boost by being Chandler-compatible. I need help, btw, if you have ears to hear! Let's make a voice of humanity to be our fulcrum and change the direction of the world for the better. It's very doable. I need Python programmers, PR people, strategists. Are you from Los Angeles? Let's get together to talk over what you can do. Call me - 310 390 5220. Email me -- rogereaton@earthlink.net.

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