Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained;
and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The crux of my problem is I can’t stop believing real systemic change is possible. Our political and economic systems are clearly not working well. Who even understands what sort of developmental effects the Internet is going to have on children who grow up with all the information in the world at their fingertips.
A change is going to happen. What I am trying to figure out is what I can do to help. Charging off and trying to do everything myself was a good plot for a book, but it isn’t how the world actually works.
In two weeks (October 16&17) the 10thGrassroots Technology Conference will be held in Boston. I just finished up my workshop proposal. I kept trying to tone it down and make it more practical, but I’ve not got the idea worked out well enough yet that I can do that well.
Hopefully they’ll accept it and I’ll get the opportunity to give the presentations I’ve been working on to actual people. ☺
I’m going to try to massively alter society if I can get enough followers on Twitter for access to the people and money to do it.
I’ll launch a new type of media called a “collaborative series.” The basic idea is to do something interesting on a massively monitored site managed by a net-controlled AI. People mix whatever shows they want from the footage online.
Your news and your reality show will be the same thing except you’ll be able to influence the environment on the reality news as you’re watching.
On one of these sites, I’ll start a shell company for pumping money into open source projects called the Technoanarchist Revolution. I’ve designed a pub/sub filesharing network for persistently distributing signed XML documents that, when properly filled with data from 4G mobile devices, is essentially a low-resolution simulation of all human thought.
If you can satisfy the assumption that the number of authenticated signers in the dataset close to the number of actual physical users, it’s possible to design replacements for all sorts of public exchanges from banking to voting with ecologies of competing systems. Efficiencies in these systems are things like ending the 40 hour work week or direct democracy — revolutions.
The biggest problem at this point is I’m the only one who knows the details. I tried to explain it on Wikipedia, but was banned. I was doing it as a collaborative public art project by essentially writing a vision of the future. I wanted to emphasize that this future touches this world at some point and in an electronic world that moment is very close.
I think if enough people follow me on Twitter, I’ll manage to find the help I need to get the art out of my head and the show off the ground. You can help make that happen with fifteen seconds of time. Retweeting http://bit.ly/h2w7G would be awesome.
I could be the scientist who later people know as the person who came up with the end of poverty. It’s worth following me on Twitter just in case that’s true.
I’m back in B’more working on getting the DoH off the ground as an actual organization. Fortunately, the dozen times I explained my idea in my wander around the South just about has it to a point that people who don’t have access to the inside of my head can understand it.
There was a study where they showed a webpage for a period of time, then took it away and asked how reliable the page was. How much do initial appearances matter? A designer gets four seconds before the reliability decision is made with 90% reliability.
So, my next big step is doing animations for each of the steps so that I can hold people’s attentions long enough to convince them to give my idea a try.
The other major hurdle is getting a 501(c)(3) registered, and that requires jumping through a few more hoops.
I got my EID today, but I have to go down to the city offices tomorrow and redo my Articles of Incorporation because I abbreviated Limited Liability Corporation as LLC on my application.
It’s tiring dealing with bureaucracies, but I’m getting closer to actually launching something and that’s certainly exciting.
I was initially planning on using the DoH directly for political purposes, but that would cause both media and tax problems. It makes more sense to develop it as a separate research and charitable organization and work at developing Technoanarchy as a legitimate political party when the time comes.
So, for the purpose of the DoH, I went with:
“The purposes for which the corporation is formed are as follows: scientific research into the nature of human satisfaction and associated charitable projects to increase population-scale enjoyment of life.”
I finished my draft of step five today: make everyone self-employed. I did a graphic to describe what the process might look like:
Right now I can’t wander my way from town to town because I’d quickly run out of money. That wouldn’t be a problem in a society where in each town I could get a list of all the available jobs and wherever I applied could reliably know who I am and what I can do.
I spent the bulk of yesterday screwing around, so decided I’d get right to work this morning. Since I’m currently stuck on an idea, the game plan was meditate, get high and settle in with my jumbo Crayolas. The plan actually worked pretty well. I came up with a revolution in six steps to use as the basis for the website:
Declare WWIII
Design Communications Network for Data Duplication
Develop Reliable Virtual Identities
Pool Excess Wealth and Distribute It Via Total Democracy
Create Scalable Job Markets Optimized On Self-Reported Metrics
Net Access as a Universal Human Right
That ought to do it, right?
It’s cool to see it coming together as a plan. I was thinking that it is kinda cool to get to be the guy to change the world, but then I was thinking what would be even cooler? Being almost anyone fifteen years from now.
Jenni and I are back home again in Baltimore, and I’m starting my new job of fixing the economy.
Honestly, I’ve been thinking about assassination. I’m setting out to become a peacemaker and peacemakers don’t live for very long. Gandhi managed to make it to 78, but he wasn’t messing with radical Christianity or Islam.
A guy walked into a children’s play in a Unitarian Church in Knoxville and opened fire with a shotgun. There’s just to much crazy in the world for me to ever really mitigate the possibility that someone is going to decide I’m the Antichrist and want to save the world by taking me out.
If my plane should go down over the ocean and I don’t make it back to America, I really think someone else ought to try my idea of creating a recommender system for employment allocation.
We consider maybe a couple dozen possibilities in our employment search. It’s unfortunate for both the individual and society. Individually, many people have jobs they don’t find entertaining. Socially, we have massive imbalances in production and consumption because these factors are fundamental elements in the distribution systems.
Those ties can be loosened though by making productive work readily available. We are in the middle of a massive population explosion. We are getting right to the edge of where our population growth curves spike off into infinity.
Communism was a good idea because it capitalized on the idea that market forces tend to create shitty jobs that afford the people with them with few opportunities.
Imagine this. Imagine that you play around on the computer with some games for a while and then the computer gives you a list of 20 open jobs available anywhere in the world that you would be a good match for. The rating is done in terms of people who are similar to you who have done a similar transition.
