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by tomrod 480 days ago
Right now the theory of network states has a built in "Agree or Leave" policy, which I expect if network states actually come from this pitiful Butterfly Revolution will devolve into "Agree or Die." And the 20th century taught us that these sorts of glorious revolutions keep going until the policy is "Agree and Die!" through famines, resource depletion, and counter revolutions

The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.

Further, they still focus on a geographically based monarchy, which is stupid when you could have a federal platform handle the geography issues and evolve the nonessential services to subscriptions provided by any sort of group: multinational, union, church, local community, legacy geographic states and cities, etc.

The focus of any movement from status quo must be in terms of improvement of lives and capacity to handle global challenges, like global warming, space mining and settlement, etc.

2 comments

> The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.

Motivated reasoning makes it difficult for most of us to realise why someone else may call us a mortal enemy (unless we ourselves are severely depressed), and the super-rich are no better.

Outside-the-box thinking is also always difficult. Empires fall when the ruling classes begin to assume the empire's power is the natural order of the world and begin fighting each other to extract wealth from the empire rather than to grow it.

Even to the extent there is historical precident specifically of a threat to business leaders: talk of personal threats to those winning at capitalism has been around continuously since the Communist Manifesto, yet with the fall of the USSR many may think such talk is just talk, that Brian Thompson was a fluke rather than an indicator, etc.

> The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob.

Luigi Mangione aside, hasn't it? Their wealth gets spent on getting the hungry mob to fight amongst themselves about trans rights and abortion and government efficiency and it seems to have been pretty effective because we're no longer talking about taxing the rich and making life better for as many people as possible, instead we're talking about Elon Musk.

No one's storming the terrace at Mar a Lago over the price of eggs.

There was another, recent incident in which some guy shot a few rounds to a healthcare exec's window in the night...
The funny but tragic thing is why would you even try to do it that way rather than skip past all this nonsense by building a new separate equitable system that is dictator-proof.

Why not literally leave them in the dust, rather than negotiate with terrorists or try to change their mind?

The more they try to push back, the more we'll fix it to be resilient to it, and despite the resources and threats at their disposal we have to realize we actually have more.

What would that look like?

My jaded, knee jerk response was going to be "build a dictator proof system and the world will build a better dictator". I don't want to be hopeless on this so I'm honestly asking about your ideas about it.

We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective. Large concentrations of power emerge because we haven't yet discovered how to make effective decisions democratically. Representative democracy is not good enough. We need a robust system of direct democracy capable of producing decisions that are at least as good as those made by a skilled small group.

Innovations like blockchains and LLMs might finally enable us to develop such a system.

> We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective

Getting rid of First past the post voting systems will reduce incidents of extremism. Ranked choice voting, multiparty systems amd coalition governments would be an improvement on the current American status quo.

None of that prevents extremely wealthy people and organizations from buying enough politicians and media to corrupt the system. Europe has a lot of those things and is struggling with the same issues as the US. We need to either prevent such concentrations of wealth or create a democratic system that money can't corrupt.
Yes this is correct - which is why the crypto infrastructure is just bootstrapping a much more important piece of political infrastructure.
Social Choice Theory begs to differ that we don't understand voting structure in great detail.