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I was referring to Mastodon, didn't even think about Lemmy 😅

I was referring to Mastodon, didn't even think about Lemmy 😅

in theory i'm happy but in practice i'm going to need to wait like actually 3 years to get the chance to buy it

Hey mate, so sorry for not seeing this before. I responded to this in a response to another commentator who asked the same thing.

Hehe sure! Just be informed that I am not mentioning a great many details here (cuz I have a headache rn because of a cold lol). But here's the general idea: A constitutional direct democratic institution that is an alliance between worker coops around the world that meet certain conditions. The state of politics in the representative democracies around the world is such- whoever can bid more money for a politician effectively wins an election. The objective of the said alliance would be to thus either outbid the other capitalists/ make the other capitalists go broke/ run alliance candidates. Running alliance candidates would be at much much later stages, which makes us have the first two options: either get more money, or make the others go broke.

The objective of the alliance in the short term would thus be to act as a malevolent entity for any competing businesses while being absolutely benevolent for its own workers/customers. As all alliance businesses (or projects as I call them, as many would be non profit to gut the for profit competitors) are worker coops, they would by definition be much better workplaces than their competitors. Also, compulsory open sourced licensing for all these project + wealth caps for both, individuals and projects would ensure a flourishing competition within, thus making the alliance very competitive. The obvious starting point for such alliance projects would be software. The biggest resource that open sourced software requires is time. We have seen that obtaining this resource is not that difficult (think of all open sourced projects in existence). Now think of what could happen if all these projects were integrated into one giant ecosystem. With a little bit of planning and objective setting, we already have a very very large starting point. I myself am working on such a project that combines lemmy and a few more open sourced projects and packages them into an absolutely beautiful frontend. This would be for profit without running ads and without charging users for using the software. I'm hoping to get the lemmy part of the MVP ready before year end.

Also, the entire constitution too uses a very interesting approach for additions/deletions/law making etc. I wish I could go into more detail about it, but it would take too much time right now. Trust me, I am working on a proper writeup for this (although I'm focusing more on the software project that I mentioned earlier). But in short, the constitution revolves around two postulates (described very roughly here): 1) All "experiments" (any governmental policy/law would be called an experiment) must increase an "individual's" "freedom to have freedoms" to exist. 2) Definitions of the highlighted words above.

Basically, the alliance's constitution would work around a central, very important principle of the "freedom to have freedoms". In this context, "freedom" would be the probability of an individual to do a given act. Let's say my "freedom to eat a cookie". In the conditions that I am in, what is the probability of me successfully eating a cookie? That would be the "freedom of eating a cookie". However, many different freedoms clash with each other. For instance, my "freedom to kill children" clashes with the "freedom to stay alive". How does the constitution decide which freedom weighs more? If you noticed, we are getting into ethics now. But which ethical framework is right? Morality unfortunately is not objective (no measurable scientific constant in the universe showcasing the objectivity of morality). What we do we do now? The answer is to set one "freedom" as the basic standard of measure. The first postulate establishes this freedom to be the "freedom to have freedoms". The weightage of all freedoms would be decided on what percentage of an impact they have on the freedom to have freedoms. For instance, if I kill someone, my "freedom to commit murder" would have say a -0.99 impact on the "freedom to have freedoms", as 0.99 people would see the "freedom to live" as equivalent with the "freedom to have freedoms". Now, how would my "freedom to drink and drive" factor in with all this? Well, perhaps the "freedom to drink and drive" would statistically have a +0.2 equivalence with the "freedom to commit murder". This in turn has a 0.2*(-0.9) impact on the freedom to have freedoms. This is how the government would decide which freedom is more important.

"Experiments" would be actions taken by the government to increase an individual's freedom to have freedoms. These actions. ie., the government's freedom to do the given actions would need to have a positive experimental effect on the average individual to justify their existence. To start a new experiment, the legislation would have to promise a certain positive impact (which would be a number) within a given timeline. If this experiment fails to meet the promised impact, it would automatically go back to voting. Again, it is a bit more complicated than this, but this is kinda the gist of it.

Then, how do we define "individuals"? Humans? Aliens? What kind of creatures can be "individuals?". Do transhuman spiders count as individuals? Do they have rights? Do anthropomorphic animals (you'll definitely see this phenomenon when the tech becomes available) get to vote? What about AI that claims to be sentient? I've kinda tried to provide a definition for this by tying it up with the freedom to have freedoms, by comparing the given individual's freedom graph with the alliance's already existing freedom graph. Equivalence above a certain decided limit would mean that they are an "individual".

The alliance would have four main branches (remember, this is not a postulate now, but an experiment itself):

1. Legislative: Direct democratic in nature, with different projects having their own legislative with more/less power to pass bills.
2. Executive: "Projects" are necessary to bring experiments into reality. The entire electorate cannot micromanage projects. You need executive officers to manage these projects who are appointed by the given legislative. All working members of the alliance are essentially these "executive officers".
3. Observative: A body that collects data. All individuals are automatically part of the observative. There is no established hierarchy here.
4. Judiciary: A body that calculates the impact that an experiment (which is essentially a governmental freedom) / individual's freedom (say someone committed murder) on the freedom to have freedoms. This impact is calculated using hard data collected by the observative. Judgement is declared by taking the impact, postulates, ongoing experiments, impacts of the judgement, etc. into account.

Anyways, gotta go now. Sorry if this is badly written, as I had to gloss over MAAAANY important topics like how a direct democratic legislative would pass sooooo many bills, how it wouldn't be a bureaucratic nightmare, why we need any of this, etc. Hope you have a good one! :)

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