So I’ve spent a bit of time over the past few years trying to reason my way trough society breaking away from our capitalist overlords.
Let me try to summarize some of my thinking as simply as possible; you start a second economy, one founded using Blockchain technologies and algocracy, with an utter focus on human welfare and ensuring resistance to tampering and unjust accumulation of power and wealth. You siphon the global population over to this new economy effectively stifling the old economy where the totality of the 1%'s wealth resides and is therefore rendered worthless.
The above is by no means a complete summary and there are a bunch of other concepts loosely associated with this such as environmental sustainability, transhumanism, degrowth, fostering small communities etc.
I’ve written about DACs, one of the components of the above here: https://sturlabragason.github.io/blog/2023/07/04/Decentralized-Autonomous-Communities.html
Blockchain
Honestly, I don’t think the data structure we store financial information with is the problem.
Agreed. It is not the main problem.
Of course what I’ve written about here above and in my link is not a complete picture. I mention Blockchain less in relation to financial information and more as a way to store data in an immutable and transparent way, as opposed to the current proprietary closed systems. More public decision making, how funds are spent etc. For example if you go to a doctor in Denmark, you can read what he wrote about the visit in a private portal afterwards, or another example, where some municipalities in the Nordics make financial data available to the public trough easily digestible websites. I would imagine that if we were to store most financial information in a form where it could be easily accessed and understood it would likely lead to better financial practices. “The Blockchain Revolution” by Don and Alex Tapscott has some more to say about similar thinking -> https://blockchain-revolution.com/.
What I am proposing are blueprints for betterment, not magic beans. Sorry 😊.
I just don’t think changing the way data is stored has any effect on public decision-making or how funds are spent. Any relational database could be used to do the things you propose and make data more transparent or immutable. It’s the way we use technology that needs to change, the technology itself is completely agnostic. Before we change the way we think about public decision-making changing the technology is useless in my opinion.
Yeah I agree with, the essence is how the technology is used. There exist currently better ways technologically to achieve this. My point isn’t entirely to change decision making by making the data available to the public. Every modern politician and is absolutely shameless and hides in plain sight so any exposure wouldn’t do a damn thing.
I am more about using algocracy to replace as much as we can of government and decision making, continually improving the process and then conviction voting as another layer.
I think you have some very good ideas. I had been on a similar line of thinking a couple years back. I think the thing that gave me pause was that I became more wary of technology in general, and humanity’s ability to master it and make it a force for good. Nonetheless, we don’t really have too much choice, if we refuse to use technology we consign ourselves to extinction.
I look forward to discussing these topics further, but I don’t feel I have fully marshaled my own thoughts at this stage. I expect to remain on Lemmy until the end, so we will have plenty of time to talk.
Oof… That’s a no from me on the crypto currency.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are not synonymous 🙂. More here -> https://www.simpleshowing.com/blog/web3-vs-blockchain-vs-crypto
Let me stop you right there. Basing an aspirationally egalitarian economy on the blockchain is like fertilizing your garden with powdered uranium: even IF it sorta kinda works at a glance, you’re poisoning your garden and anything near it as well as the planet in general.
Can you expand on your answer? Why do you say that using blockchain (and I mean blockchain and not cryptocurrency) would be no good?
Also I love the colorful imagery of “fertilizing your garden with powdered uranium” 😄
I had Midjourney draw it up for us:
The technology used to achieve socialism is irrelevant. The lack of technology was never the issue.
We know what we must do. End private property. That’s it.
How we organize the economy in specifics is not important. Not in such details as you go through.
The real system that will be born from the principles of communism and ashes of capitalism will not be exactly what anyone envisions.
I feel Marx understood this, which is why he hesitated to much to prescribe.
Valid points. Regrettably my Donning Kruger effect is not strong enough to allow me to believe I have the solution. However, conceptually, I like to imagine of things working like scalable software implementations. Create a system that can be “easily” implemented such as creating a single DAC, I mean CityDAO is already a few years down the road and they seem to be doing alright. Starting small and scaling up seems like something that could be more easily experimented with, than running whole Marx-derivative states.
Being a very literal person; I like implementation specifics more than only proposing ideals and theories 😊.
It would benefit you a lot to read theory then. That should be the framework, not vague ideas of leftism.
We already spent hundreds of years on theory, work your practice based on that, not on nothing.
#me
Well find some ppl irl that are well versed in theory and have interest in praxis as well. Go to meetings of groups etc. talk to people. Then after some time of absorbing that and coming up with solutions, present them to the group.
Basically if you can admit you don’t have a solid basis for your solutions (theory wise) it means you would gain a lot from listening more. You’d be surprised by how good your own ideas can get after some years of listening to people and their ideas.
Doesn’t mean you can’t tinker and come up with ideas in the meantime. Just have the self-consciousness to recognise they probably are still not it y’know.
Yeah I apologize if I seemed dismissive of theory in general.
Here is my general outlook, which is heavily biased by my background in software development. Everything can and should be improved by iterative process, and can be operated on in a similar manner to open-source software. If my concepts are lacking in theory that is simply because they should be viewed as incomplete and open for MAJOR improvements, in all areas. They should be improved upon by a team of experts, and improvements made where needed. They are living and breathing and currently in release 0.0.1. They can be forked and modified. They can have upstream and downstream dependencies. They should be a part mesh of components, practical, theoretical, physical, digital etc.
Also it’s my garbage answer for anything I can’t answer right now; “it’ll be fixed in the future by iterative process” 😄
The system we abide by is, in part, due to a kind of momentum that keeps it going and there would be a great innertia with a sudden change of direction. But for the most part the current system exists because of the way people are. People are a) totally up in their heads believing the intellect is a human’s highest capability, and b) utterly miserable. We know how to engineer every little aspect of life to further pur convenience except the aspect that counts: ourselves.
We have no idea how to engineer ourselves to be joyful, peaceful, energised and equanimous beings. It doesn’t come from a change of environment. Internal change must be engineered in another way.
