What if a bunch of people:

• agreed to contribute, say, 1% of their disposable income every month towards a common pot
• voted (via self-hosted software) for how the money should be used, using range-based consensus voting
• e.g. they could use it to hire one or more people to work on particular things they all agree would be a good use of that money
• if particular problems required a lot of study and decisionmaking, they could delegate individuals to make those decisions
• ...with the caveat that if the group decided they didn't like the decisions that were being made, or the level of transparency into the process, they could replace that person at any time (subject, perhaps, to reasonable guarantees of adequate warning and income stability)

And then: what if there were a lot of groups like this, and they hired people to work out collaborative deals across multiple groups where they would each share a portion of their resources in order to produce something that wouldn't really have been affordable for any individual group?

And then... do you see where this could be going, or should I spin it out more?

(This is a thing I've been working towards since forever, but it only just now occurred to me to try explaining it like this.)

#InstaGov #coAgitate #fediGov

Regardless of what happens in November, I think it's inescapable that we need to start reckoning with the fact that democracy as currently implemented is deeply flawed and needs some redesign work.

The election outcomes will only affect how urgent this is, not whether it needs to happen.

Even if the GOP is routed on all levels (which seems possible but unlikely), we have to reckon with the fact that for decades they were able to manipulate sectors of the population into supporting awful and destructive policies, and therefore voting for the despicable powermonsters who advocated and implemented those policies.

Even if we "win" in the best possible way, we won't have fixed and secured the system that allowed them to get so close to destroying it and us.

(In this sense, and this sense alone, the GOP is right when they say that democracy doesn't work -- because they've been breaking it for decades and by now it's pretty well broken. The center cannot hold, the system cannot defend itself against the chaos of selfish manipulators, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. You know the drill.)

There are a lot of ways to look at the problem, but I tend to default to the lens of "how to ensure that people actually understand what they're voting about -- and don't vote if they don't understand".

On the surface, this goes enough against the grain of "everyone should vote" that I think it at least suggests I'm not just falling into groupthink here... but I also need to make it clear that the obvious solutions to this view of the problem -- such as literacy tests ---tend to create more power-centers which can then be used by the powerful to (again) disenfranchise the people least likely to vote for them.

In other words: much like widening highways leads to more congestion, gatekeeping to keep out the ignorant leads to more ignorant voting -- more votes from those who have been misguided into amplifying the voices of the oligarchy instead of voting in their own interests (much less the interests of society overall).

We need better solutions than that.

I have ideas; I'll try to start writing about those soon, because -- as I started out saying -- we need to start working on solutions sooner rather than later, regardless of how this goes.

#ReinventDemocracy #Coagitate

(This post is kind of a sequel to this election-fret, but hopefully more useful.)