Like many of you I’ve been an activist a long time. It’s really not hard to see the system is corrupt, so the hard part’s really been not going insane being surrounded by people who don’t want to do a damn thing to change anything for the better. Come to think of it there’s a lot of hard parts, so allow me to shoot straight for what’s most important.
When rich people decide what the options are on our ballots, we can vote all day long and still be totally screwed. Nomatter what renewable technologies may come, the profitability of exploiting billions of people’s lives for self gain, will simply be too profitable for the moral integrity of politicians to defend. At this point they are literally appointing CEOs of major corporations, they’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
They’re thinking ‘what’re you gonna do about it’, ya know? Break a window? Call a politician? Many of us ask, ‘if any of these things actually worked then, why are we still here?’
Clearly if you’re here you see value in networks of citizens. Because underneath it all we know real solutions will come from the citizens, because they’re the ones with their lives and livelihoods on the line.
Obviously to create something truely functional, networks of citizens still need the input of experts. If they want to build or fund something, everyone benefits from involving related experts.
Ideally the ballots would have relevant, important content in them. Using the net’s ability interact, we could make ballots that aren’t full of “lesser evils”; in fact we could literally fill them with “best possible good”.
All the technology necessary to solve our problems either already exists, or would come sooner if citizens had more control over what’s done with their tax money. (hint: less prisons, more education)
What I’m proposing is the creation of a wiki for all problems and solutions, in all areas (be them political, academic, casual, geographic, or otherwise). I’ve had this idea for a long time and have a pre-development site posted at Lawgen.org where visual and written materials are posted. The truth is the project needs more collaborators though.
Long story short, if an Open Source Governance platform starts getting results, then we could start an international “Open Party” wherein people run for office under a legal obligation to comply with all sufficiently strong consensus reached by their citizens on the Open Source Governance site.
Making a wiki for all solutions to all problems is perfect for this because, ideal, because a government is really just supposed to solve problems. It doesn’t build anything or generate money on its own, it is just a decision making system.
It’s ultimately an information processor. An information processor from before the age of toilette paper. We can do better than this, and we must. Open Source Governance could be used to phase out the old system nonviolently. -as well as for direct action, and to just find solutions to anything from back pain to heart ache. Wikipedia’s been tremendously useful and that’s just a wiki for descriptions to things. -Imagine what we could do with a wiki for solutions to all problems on Earth!
Or at the very least, imagine what we could do if we made our own ballots. Until we decide what our options even are in the first place, we will always be under their control. And ‘they’ aren’t the humans we see occupying the various seats, ‘they’ are cogs in a machine that will destroy the EPA to get away with poisoning your water, then rejoyce when it can sell you water. Then monopolize on water so it can charge you as much as physically possible. We aren’t dealing with mere humans, we are facing the ultimate parasite. Humanities greatest threat. -Of course we need to ban together, and a wiki for all problems, solutions, and proposals is how we ought to do it. Instead of fighing government, we make it obsolete. Help us make it happen.
this post seems to be copied here twice.
re. water… i’ve been thinking of organizing a collective wikipedia hack for their great lakes page to reflect the monsters of administration that are killing the lakes. we could write our own official entry for the Lakes as a collaborative project — then use crowdsourcing to influence the ‘dominant’ description of the Great Lakes. it could be a start re. your idea.
That sounds great. Lawgen would totally help people do something like that. It would help people in your area discover your idea, (because it’d be a high rated solution for a high rated problem in a very large area), And it’d help everyone organize and divide up tasks.
Plus it’ll be Open Source so users and app developers can be in continuous discussion about how to make new tools, or improve the ones we already have.
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a way to edit the listing here, I tried messaging ‘the rules’ but haven’t seem to heard anything back. I should look into that again. In the meantime, if you’d like to know when our project goes online just shoot us an email at TheLawgenProject@gmail.com and let us know if you’d be interested in beta testing or wanna notification for when the finished wiki goes online.
This is a great idea. I have tried my own one woman site but it’s too much work and no way captures all the stuff I come across. https://hopeinthemargins.wordpress.com/home/
The solutions are often there – it’s the will that is missing and we have to fight for.
That’s a cool site you made there.
As much as I agree the options are technically out there, but their placement and coverage is chaotic and often corrupted. For instance a fox “news” viewer might type in the name of the same solution you like, and just end up with a list of articles about why it’s bad.
That’s never gonna unite us, in fact it is MADE to divide us.
When we plainly list all the options, then point out all their flaws, we can break out of our ‘filter bubbles’/’echo chambers’, and start learning from each other more.
Theoretically we could help the best ideas spread like wildfire. That’s our goal at Lawgen