Radical Politics & New Ideas

High Ecological Standards

 - Set goals for ecological preservation

 - Put people to work regularly auditing industry and life support systems for adherence to ecological standards

 - Increase funding to ecological improvement programs as needed

 - Use standards as a labor motivator. High standards makes life difficult to be lax and wasteful.

Allow Entrepreneurship

 - Provide jobs instead of forcing jobs, use soft standards for ecological improvement. If labor force is not meeting ecological standards, increase rewards for effort instead of sanctioning.

 - Allow people with ideas to get funding to make ideas happen

 - Requires speculators and investment sciences to develop, and should rely heavily on automated expert systems to perform speculation and evaluate risks and benefits.

 - Use rating system to rate usefulness of products, instead of wealth exchange.

 - Social web and encyclopedia can facilitate qualitative review of innovations.

 - Free information, no patenting. This paired with archive of qualitative information about innovations allows people to pick up ideas long into the future if innovations weren’t as popular or practical when originally introduced.

Gamify Wealth Attainment to Reward Achievement

 - Collectively hoard objects of wealth (such as mansions, vacations, etc) to provide incentives for labor. These things already exist, we could destroy them, or maybe utilize them as prizes for people who attain goals. The prizes can thus be shared temporarily and reused for many achievers. This suggestion sounds kind of douchey to me, but looking at the way people are motivated by contests, as corny and ridiculous as it seems, it can be extremely useful in motivation, we should all realize this and utilize the principle within a constructive democratic equalized context or else it will be used in less ethical schemes. When one analyzes the nature of contests, they reward incentive and are yet equitable, in that there is typically a randomized aspect to the assignment of awards, in the cases when there are many who have qualified for the award under the rules of the contest.

 - Use democratic rating system to evaluate achievement and choose winners.

 - Work auditors can form field-specific panels to help determine what constitutes “good” work in their particular fields. These decisions would need to be open to public scrutiny and democratic revision.

 - The arguments for the use of any wealth inequality as motivators are controversial in discussions about socialism and socialist arrangements. I agree, this is a tough call, maybe all objects of inequality should be abolished instead of introducing any wealth inequality even if temporary in nature. Research and discussion is needed around this subject and possible implementations concerning motivators.

Distribute Work Load So That It Is Easily Digestible

 - Use technology and networks to break up complex problems into smaller problems and let people pic up the small problems as they are motivated to. Reassemble the work into a finished product. Do this in as many work systems as possible.

 - Reduce work load so that it is easy to sustain and minimizes personal aggravation. Try to automate work as much as possible. We have the technology to do this now.

 - Decentralization of work and infrastructure provides a defense against concentrated attacks. i.e. You won’t be able to blow up one building and take out an entire work force, because that work force will be distributed geographically and  each point of labor will be autonomous.

 - Try to utilize network systems as much as possible to reduce transportation costs and pollutions, and  provide incentive for technological development. People should work from home or localized base stations whenever possible to avoid long commutes.

Provide Robust Social Services

 - Provide proactive mental health programs, that are active in all social systems, such as schools, work places, hospitals, etc.

 - Mental health programs are proactive in that they operate with regular group therapy sessions driven by the group, and therapists can request group members to take additional therapy, although they cannot force therapy upon any individual.

 - Provide physical health programs that operate on preventive measures that are judged to be helpful while maintaining a regulated ecological footprint.

 - Emergency or restorative health assistance will be guaranteed regardless of ecological impact.

 - Reward experts and innovators in these fields to provide incentive.

 - The outreach policies of these systems must be controlled democratically, and not by beaurocracy, and must never push any subjective agenda. The moment a policy can be identified as pushing a subjective agenda, it must be discontinued. This can include when any principle a policy operates on is dis-proven in the field using scientific methodology.

Identify Ecological Limitations

 - Identify absolute societal limits in regards to ecological sustainment, such as population size

 - Keep track of these priorities in a universal fashion

 - Institute life effecting/culture diminishing regulations only through large scale democratic consensus, such as birth control, or energy restrictions on things like air conditioning, heat/hot water, etc. Any hard regulations must be temporary and recallable.

Reject Authority

 - Never use destructive or restrictive methods of authority such as imprisonment or censorship, except in a very limited number of severe cases, like prevention of murder, theft, violence, or sexual abuse.

 - Authoritative systems are always open to investigation by the public and must publicly provide all information pertaining to the structure and operations of these systems.

 - Never penalize laborers for failure to meet societal goals. We are better off letting the entire system collapse than resorting to authoritative measures that are designed to preserve one system of societal organization over others.

Take Regular Consensus and Prevent Leadership

 - Consensus is an essential step in forming community, forming comradery and evaluating the needs and desires or aggravations of the general public. In addition to providing a true system of democracy that also considers the minority, it allows communities to participate in discussion that is not controlled or manipulated hierarchically (which is the problem with our current system of leadership and media manipulation due to centralized wealth)

 - Consensus is participatory, not mandatory in all communities.

 - Separate consensus communities can be formed but their decisions must be recorded and made publicly available along with the number of participants present for each decision and a log of the discussions that lead up to the decision. This information should be tracked using an open and universal tracking system that uses time/geo-dependance to evaluate the integrity of the information recorded (i.e if it takes too long for information to be input into the system after a decision is made, or if information is coming from unlikely geographic locations, it is likely to be forgery. Using this mechanism instead of identity to verify integrity preserves anonymity of participants).  The consensus of many enough other groups can prompt investigation into decisions and the identities of their participants, to prevent relatively small self interest groups from undermining the democratic value of the system of federated consensus.

 - Consensus systems should include automated and networked systems that protect anonymity within the consensus group and break down geographical boundaries.

 - Participation in consensus cannot be denied, although abuse should be identified and there should be a democratic system of temporary suspension from group activity. The suspension functionality should be robust enough to prevent abuse that freezes up consensus in the case of an attack on the consensus process itself (…maybe, this is a tough problem to solve. Has it been solved yet? I don’t know, please provide feedback…)

Adhere to an Amendable Constitution

 - Constitutions are important because they give universal rule sets and recommendations for people to fall back on in case they start to loose direction or forget the reasons why they are doing something in the first place.

 - Amendment allows the constitution to evolve with its environment and as flaws are discovered.

Wiki-based lobbying.

Any lobbying communications to politicians get placed on the politicians wiki.

Lobbys are open to comments, notation, scrutiny and revision.

Gifts to politicians are prohibited.

All the information they need to make decisions can be hosted on the web, and made open to the public.

Tactical or brainstorming discussion between politician and lobbyist also made open. 

Lobbyist must publicly disclose ties to employer if they are being employed to lobby.

To enforce the disclosure, any author of information on a wiki can be investigated. Formal investigations may be called by the request of a large enough portion of the public.

They’re our responsibility too

Consider, for example, the complex social relationships that are established during a session of shopping.

The consumer can’t simply place markings on product or packaging, say like when information becomes available about the makeup of the product or its history, and so on, because the product is considered property of the provider, like the grocery store, or manufacturer, or whatever deals the Property Owners worked out with each other.

We can see that example behavior as is described above could be of immense social value, and the simplification of the social interaction due to adherence to the rules of the concept of property ownership, and subsequently the rules of shopping become detrimental to the pursuit of the optimal product consumption or attainment scheme.

Of course, the over-simplification due to the prevalence of the concept of property ownership gets in the way again when we consider the limitations that would be necessary to allow people to mark products with useful, and not socially destructive markings. An example of something that is socially destructive if one were to simply invert the concept of property ownership would be the ability for a competitor of a product provider to place false information and propaganda, or destructively cover up any useful information on the product or its packaging.

The ability to form complex schemes of social interaction that can allow the useful and prevent the destructive without causing collateral damage to other social systems is severely limited when the problems at hand are constrained to narrow rules.

The concept of property is thus flawed as it is antiquated and this as well as other over-simplistic or historical social constraints must be replaced by flexibility of concept and openness to problems as they comes as well as unlimited imagination in solutions to working with problems.

It is possible to view human networks, and societal groupings of humans, as a computing machine, and thus, to develop a system of programming that machine, defining rules that have to do with networks of semi-autonomous components (which in this case would be humans themselves and their machines) and identifying prevalent designs that are known to have certain effects.

In computer science, we can break down designs of certain parts or aspects of a program into cataloged patterns, so that we can quickly assemble programs by using patterns in conjunction with each other, and be able to ascertain the behavior and effects of the program well at design time.

In computers today we typically use centralized processing, like in the case of a home computer, a CPU. In actuality, nowadays we use multiple CPUs like a standard CPU paired with a Graphics Processing Unit, and multiprocessors within those CPUs. We have been able to identify limitations and develop programs for those setups by studying the way they fundamentally work.

Of course, CPUs behavior is quite predictable, because we made them that way to make the job of figuring out how to develop for them easy.

However, networks of autonomous and semi-predictable entities can also be viewed and studied in the same way we can view and study digital computer CPUs, even though they may lack some of the predictability of computer CPUs.

Studies may lead to discoveries like certain limitations in our ability to develop programs in which we can predict all results of “processing” within the autonomous network. Like black holes around certain parts of behavior we may see that there are certain aspects of the system which we can’t control, and thus implement measures to allow us to efficiently handle the possible outcomes at those points. The black holes may even be huge, taking up most of our ability to process predictably within the network, but we may find regions of behavior that actually are predictable.

Take over Take over Take over Take over the government.

Just as we define standard and accepted protocols to govern and coordinate efforts on the internet, we can define protocols surrounding the addressing of politicians to the people of the United States.

Politicians must be forced to conform to citizen defined standards that have been built and maintained by the public, and agreed upon by consensus.

Protocols should enforce optimal use of media real estate.

For instance, a television screen contains much space which is poorly utilized or not utilized at all for optimal political address to the public. We take up much of the space just looking at the politicians, their podiums, and the people standing around.

Political panels of decision making that are present for the address must present information pertaining to the matters being discussed. If a politician or government entity is queried for a Fact by a political, government, or non-government non-political entity, then they must present a Factual answer, and if the politician does not have the fact on hand or in mind, they must contact panel members in order to produce a factual answer. Non-adherence to this protocol will be subject to immediate, documented and severe scrutiny.

We have technology available to facilitate this retrieval and organization of information, and we can use it to asynchronously follow up on facts using many different forms of processing.

For a government or political entity to fail to use these resources will be looked upon as an extreme abuse or misuse of power and position, and should be subject to immediate, documented and severe scrutiny.

Screen space or available space in media must be used to present statistical or graphical data.

This data or and visuals must provide all references used in their creation.

Non-adherence to this protocol should be subject to immediate, documented and severe scrutiny.

Scrutiny may be a function undertaken formally by non-government society members in the form of democratic consensus or open forum that is formally documented and carried out.

Social networks can be utilized to facilitate quick consensus, asynchronous consensus and forum, and paired with location specific components, such as in-person meeting and consensus.

The use of rhetoric should be identified using some media real estate, and open, non-biased, citizen built systems of rhetoric detection, classification and representation should be implemented in the media.

The failure to use these systems should be subject to immediate, documented and sever scrutiny.

Most people tend to think of Market Anarchy as being the Forces of the Market, driven by human desire and necessity, that drive the production and innovation that happens in the absence of rules, or the activities as such which subvert or are conducted contrary to the rules establshed to regulate the Market.

Of course this is what Market Anarchy is, and most would agree by empirical study of the effects of Market Anarchy (especially when contrasted to Market disrupting effects of Market control techniques, like through centralized decision making implemented by totalitarian state socialist countries such as Cuba and U.S.S.R.), that free Market Anarchy is in many ways, and maybe overall, beneficial to the growth and versatility of the existent Market.

One Force many overlook as being outside the domain of the Market, and somehow a different Force, is the free will of the people to limit certain aspects of the market through preventative, disruptive or destructive means, some which subvert established rules governing behavior of Market participants, rules that were established in an attempt to enforce what is thought of as safe or proper behavior in Market interactions.

Particularly, the will of the people to shut down Market entities, such as supply side entities, is thought of as being improper, and laws are established to discourage this behavior. For instance, if your protest activity or other activities cost a supplier a certain amount of money to sustain, then you and the participants in the destructive behavior will be breaking the law. An example of a real life organization that has been targeted for these types of activities is the Animal Liberation Front. This organization is labeled as a terrorist organization in the United States, so that now even associating with the organization will put you in danger of being penalized by authority. I personally know one of the members who has spent time in prison for activities such as shut downs, and sabotaging animal testing facilities to free animals.

We should look upon these types of activities as being legitimate however, maybe best if there is enough democratic support from other people, say a certain threshold of democratic support which can justify many means of Market Destruction such as industrial sabotage (in the case of freeing animals from a research facility, breaking down deforestation equipment, smashing big bank ATMs, etc), extremely disruptive protest activity, democratic shutdowns (like the Occupy Oakland port shutdown), theft, exposure of sensitive or proprietary information (probably best demonstrated by Wikileaks), free sharing and replication of information when it is cheap enough to do so (like in the case of Napster, Megaupload, bit-torrents, and other forms of information “pirating”), and spreading awareness through graffiti (which probably is best exemplified by graffiti placed in the physical locations where Market transactions, like a message about health issues, factory farming or deforestation on spray painted the wall of a McDonalds).

These types of activities actually serve to regulate the Market in a way that stimulates the development of the most useful products, and products that integrate the best with the available ecosystems and social landscapes. Without this type of regulation, other contextually inferior Forces, such as the value-profit Forces facilitated by the use of money, exert dominance within the operating Market Forces. This is a problem, because forces such as money have no environmental context, or at least such a small environmental context, that it causes Market decisions to be made that have no consideration of ecological issues. The same happens with social issues, money has very little social context and its dominance in the Market generates long term social issues. Both these environmental and social issues undermine the integrity of the Market and the products and relationships, and societal organization which it creates.

Maybe a good way to put the money example, particularly, is that:

Money is blind to society and the environment, as such its dominance in the Market is detrimental to both society and the environment, and as the Market itself operates within society and the available environment, and relies of the health of both, money’s dominance in the Market is detrimental to the Market itself.

And as such, we need to use Democratic Industrial Sabotage to regulate the Market and balance the detrimental effects of other Marker Forces.

The absence of such anarchic Forces paired with the presence of legal Forces in the favor of special interests could be part of the Market problem that caused the 2008 Financial Crisis, for instance, and is certainly the cause of widespread unsustainable ecological destruction, and societally disruptive distribution of wealth within industrialized nations and among nations they interact with.

In the same vein the absence of the Market Force of widespread and graphic coverage of the operations in the Irag and Afghanistan wars allows the Market transaction of war to the American people to complete. If the American people were to be stimulated by the graphic reality if what they are buying with their tax dollars, they may not wish to complete the transaction. Other forces are at play in the war scenario, that convolute any speculation about the possible definite outcomes of the Market Interaction that is taking place, such as political rhetoric, which creates the pretense for security in effort to stifle war coverage. 

The actions taken by free people to limit Market activities can be destructive, however the compliment that direct action aimed at prevention and willingful sabotage provide real and useful compliments to the other forces that distort the Market, in many cases to the overall detriment of society, if left unbalanced or unchecked.

Cameras on the Battlefield, Transmuting Suffering into Peace.

The next time you find yourself in the courthouse, explain this:

“Respect has no place in the Court House. Respect is a cultural construct, and as such it transient across culture. Culture is ever evolving and new , constantly being created and redefined.

The symbols of class, institution and the concept of respect are irrelevant to the justice system and the function of the court and are thus perversions of its definitions of justice and purpose.

It is the obligation of the court and the American judicial system to evolve with ever new and perfected knowledge of the workings of culture and society, as well as nature, logic and science. 

It can only be looked upon as an intended cultural manipulation and coercion of the people processed by this system in that the symbols and concepts of the court are enforced by the means of authority. The use of dominant cultural symbols rather than operate with completely neutral behavior in presence of definite knowledge of cultural persuasion, its manifestations, its physical presence and its effects, is completely despicable and unworthy of a free people in an age of definite knowledge and proliferation of information.

We have to face it, laws that were created years before you were born or ever had a say, or were passed even though you were extremely opposed may not be wise to follow, and its not serving justice to a people to not understand systematically fair rejection.

Cultural symbols are used as a system to repress dissent and discourage reaction.

These symbols also serve the purpose to enforce a dominant culture or societal structure, class structure, method of behavior.

One example is the use of the phrase “In God we trust.” in American court houses. 

The use of this phrase was instituted in the American courthouse during the Cold War to discourage communism because of the belief of communists at the time and direction of Marx’s communist manifesto, which criticized religion as a distraction from physical reality and corruptable tool of manipulation and advocated the abolition of religious institutions.

The phrase “In God we trust.” is still in the courthouse.

This is not fun and games, this is our government and the fact that they have left this religious phrase above the judge of each courthouse is a direct attack on the American people and the victims of its court system. It is insultful and despicable gesture and an indication of the incompetence of our court system that in an age of commodity and information our court would not proactively remove religious symbols from their walls.

This is a direct violation of the separation of church and state clause of the 1st Amendment of the United States constitution.

How can I respect an establishment that so blatantly breaks its own rules to get what it wants, and procrastinates removal of these policies under the pretense of difficulty and lack of resources or what excuses they have opinionated to be in the pursuit of good intentions? The use of these symbols in this instance is no step taken to ensure safety, this is an attack on our freedom of choice of government being that it was instantiated as an effort to fight communism. 

Of course, one can make similar arguments over the use of the suit and restrictions placed on attire for legal workers and its subsequent imposition upon all of the participants of courthouse affairs. 

Respect has no place in the Court House.

Intrinsic systems of identification, may end up being part of the features of next generations of the internet provides.

Identity storage has become commonplace on the internet, as well as storage of information, like posts, uploads, and communications, which can essentially be viewed at as and extension of the identity, like a large fingerprint of activity.

Consider the fact that social networking is such a large and integral part of the modern web. Protection of identity is questioned all the time and not always transparent. Control of information is present and not always completely transparent. For instance, if you post something, the transparency of your being able to see who is manipulating your content and have control over censorship is left up to the website developer to articulate and implement, there is not built into the internet itself much control or transparency mechanisms for high level transactions such as posting and deletion or alteration of content. Also protective measures are left to be implemented by site developers and managed by them. A good protective and transparent high level protocol could make this an indestructable feature of the internet itself for all sites.

We could then designate roles and view officers and force them to identify themselves n the case of a breach of information or intrusion within communication channels, keep better track of politicians, who maybe would have to register under stricter transparency measures than regular citizens or free people, to track activity in an easy and useful fashion. Citizen/Free roles may have high support for transparent and highly controllable degrees of privacy and protection, to ensure safety from authoritative bodies or intrusive or malicious traffic.

You may not realize but even nowadays you only have a (limited) number of privacy rights and protection rights built into the internet, and you give up your information each time you access it. The simple patterns of you interaction build up to a likeness which when compared to fragments of identity information that is in actuality captured in pretty large amounts during regular web use. All this builds up to an accurate profile, or choice of a certain number of possible profiles in the case where information is blurry.

Systems intended to more universally and intrinsically handle this type of information may also have the effect of optimizing the web (as well as the process of web development) for these kinds of applications. This means things like collaborative effort can be conducted at a much more fast paced, concentrated and easily configured way. Logging in can be conducted more instantaneously, and maybe log-in information can be more centrally managed by the individual and more well protected across many sites and applications. Like, picture having like five different passwords, and being able to assign them to whatever sites, or switch them between sites you use or services you subscribe to, and being able to see the all the sites one password is used for, in an easily manageable way (instead of having tons of passwords for different sites, and different levels of faith in security in each site. Centralization and focus on the identity as a thing across sites, or site transient, could also more easily prevent breach of multiple sites by the discovery of one identity. Like, the identity could know when one of its site’s security became compromised, and automatically change or mask itself on other sites that identity is used for, thus preventing further security breach. Your passwords, themselves, may also trigger alerts to mobile devices, etc that subscribe to alerts from whichever identity or password…

Things like passwords and security features surrounding remotely stored account information were not really built into the original web. We see nowadays so many instances of the usage of this type of personal identification and profile representation that its use is almost pervasive on the web. Tunneling, like as in virtual private networks (VPNs), is a technology that requires extraneously built and configured clients to operate on protocols which have been built into the web, but these protocols are somewhat basic and low level, lacking definition of higher level activities such as commenting, censorship, profile definition, storage, etc. and still difficult for the average user to configure or become aware of.