A Plan to Do Something about Climate Change
Anyone who cares about the earth in North America is feeling pretty uncomfortable now with how hot this winter is getting. It’s feeling like there might be nothing to be done. The problem we have is that nothing will get done unless it is paying someone’s bills. However it’s possible to get something done while paying people’s bills.
Here is a step by step plan to do something about it. It might not be the perfect plan but it should be at least feasibly achievable at every step of the way, without relying on the magical cooperation of more than a few dozen people at a time. The path is roundabout, but all straightforward paths have failed.
First I will simply list the steps very succinctly. Then I will provide a justification for why this is a viable path. The path is
(1) Build an application that enables “policy as code”
(2) Prove it and scale it via a contractor social network platform
(3) Allow it to create nested, collaboratively-governed organizations, funded via pooled resources
(4) Use such an organization to run & build the platform
(5) People encourage their companies to adopt it
(6) Create new organization (& possibly new platform) which is a direct democracy political party
(7) Run the party in hyper-local elections, focusing in single area, prove out capability.
(8) Move to state legislature, propose collaboratively-authored legislation, use pooled money to fund lobbyists
(9) Coordinate across several organizations, pooling money and putting pressure on legislators and companies from several angles.
(10) Now there’s a foothold for popular opinion to be directly turned into action, as well as ways for large organizations to collaborate in an effective way to work toward a common goal. Climate change and the environment is by far one of the most popular issues of today, across the aisle. Simply providing a mechanism for this to be turned into action at all on a reasonable scale will result in more action than we’ve seen in our lifetimes on the matter.
This is the plan. It does rely on trusting that people will prioritize climate change, but there is good reason to believe that this is the case. It’s not directly confrontational to any organizations. It competes with each system on its own terms, which is critical to a practicable plan. It is voluntary at every step. It serves to increase human freedom. I believe these properties are necessary to get coordinated action at the scale we require.
The first step is to build an application which allows us to treat organizational processes as code. This step probably requires a lot of clarification to most people. What do I mean by “policy as code”? I mean a system which allows institutional policies to be maintained as if they were a codebase. This brings version control, the ability to test and refactor, pull requests, etc. It allows collective decision-making to scale. If I think a policy should be changed, I submit a PR. If people believe I’ve submitted a good change, they approve it and it gets merged in and becomes policy which is automatically executed according to the triggers that have been decided upon.
It’s commonly understood that a single human making decisions by fiat is much more clear and unambiguous than democratic decision-making. A human brain has been necessary when an immediate response by an institution is required. That’s fine, but that single human making these decisions is ultimately at a disadvantage. They lack the information that is available in a more democratic decision-making process. A process which can combine the better information of a democratic process with the speed of an individually-driven process has the potential to outcompete existing institutions on both fronts.
Our democracies are all hybrids of collective action with a lot of delegation to individual human decisions. This is where corruption can be injected currently. Policy as code cuts out a lot of those individual human decisions, but it also makes progressive automation easy, allowing more and more of them to be cut out. This eventually provides a much more direct route between the participants’ intentions and the outcomes. I’m voting directly on the process, not on one person to hopefully propose a process that hopefully represents what I want, and another person to hopefully enforce that process in good faith.
However scaling collaborative decision-making to the required scale is a process. It takes time. I believe all the theoretical pieces are there, but they need to be combined into an app which is intended for use by the general public. I think it will essentially be a visual language with dependent types and content-addressed expressions like those in Unison are necessary. These are somewhat esoteric concepts which haven’t been used in any user-facing yet. It’s not impossible, but to get it done quickly requires a concerted effort.
This would be equivalent to the system I describe in https://spacechimplife.com/how-to-keep-humans-in-the-loop/. Yes, it’s the same basic solution I’m proposing to 2 different problems, because the root cause is ultimately the same. The key functionality is that people should be able to create a group, collaboratively create a set of processes, and then trigger the execution of those processes, which should in then add a series of tasks to their todo lists. As they check their tasks off, more tasks which were dependent on the previous ones appear on their lists. So they can collaboratively create and execute a complex plan. I will provide a more technical rundown in the future.
Once this software is available and open source, it can be used for any number of organizations. However there’s 1 organization that should be created with it — a combination personal productivity + freelancer / contractor network, where people can easily create partnerships, subcontract tasks to each other, automate some tasks. The key here is that the ability to collect payments should be added. If a freelance web developer wants to subcontract work, they should be able to to create a task, and another person should be able to choose to execute that task and get paid. A group should also be able to choose to execute that task, and distribute the pay amongst its members according to the rules it defines. If larger institutions want to adopt this tool for organizing work subcontracting it should also be possible. If people are getting paid through the app, they will sign up. If they can make money off of it, there will be users.
Let’s take a leap of faith that the platform has gained a significant number of users. Once there are enough users on the platform, one type of organization which should be created is a group which pools money together, and people vote on what to do with it. Sort of like kick-starter, except one where something like quadratic voting can be implemented, and where those who donate to the kick starter are involved in executing the project. These sorts of groups can also be used to run small organizations, like even HOA’s, very small city councils, neighborhood associations etc. as well as small cooperatives ventures. At this point it can start to serve as a sort of next-door app that has an actual impact. In my opinion this is the endgame of social networks. Right now they serve mostly as a repository of butt pics and engagement bait, but the unhealthiness of social media has something to do with the lack of actionability of anything you see on there other than advertisements.
A next step would get work done on the platform through the platform. During this period there would likely be all kinds of regulatory hurdles to get over and pitfalls to dodge, but in the end you have a platform which can attract people not just through functionality, but also through directly paying people to participate. It can become its own economic engine. This is essential to quickly scale the collective decision-making processes. People will be requesting UI changes and features, voting them up, and getting paid to execute them. One particularly important process issue to work out during this period would be how to avert deadlock that we’ve seen in our political process.
Once a large group has worked through the kinks of a larger collective organization like the one described, we can create a directly democratic process that can feasibly scale. At this point, one of these self-funding voting organizations can be spun off into a self-hosted entity which is registered as a political party. In this political party, the representatives must do actions that the users agree on. These actions includes voting, proposing bills etc… anything a self-directed representative can do. Since this decision-making is collective and strategic, presumably they would focus their efforts on a small area at first. A place where they could feasibly get involved in several local elections and gain some momentum. Users would log in and vote and discuss issues they want proposed. Meanwhile other actions can be done as well, for instance people can pool money together to hire lobbyists etc.
If there are several of these parties, too, they have a convenient mechanism to coordinate together toward common goals.
Hopefully it is clear from this that a mechanism such as this would allow popular priorities to be addressed more quickly and effectively. If not, please feel free to point out holes you see in the ideas.
The next leap of faith is that climate change will be one of the primary concerns addressed. There’s certainly a significant probability that other priorities will get pushed up first, just like in our current systems. However, the mechanism by which other priorities get pushed up in our current system is by a sort of false dichotomy that doesn’t exist in this system. In our current system, all opinions are projected onto a single dimension of left & right. This dimensions doesn’t even really mean anything at this point, other than the alignment that the 2 parties happen to take at the time. The system I’ve described doesn’t inherently flatten the space of possible opinions into that single dimension. It allows users to express their political desires directly in terms of process, which allow much more subtle and complex ideas to be expressed.
I am currently working on this project by building the policy as code platform, as well as fleshing out the theory of institutions with information theory. Any support on Patreon, or even just sending a message on the contact form to express support or interest can help me keep working on the project and get this going sooner. Unfortunately I may have to pause work on this and find a job soon, adding potentially another few years delay. I’ve already been putting this off for a few years while saving up to work on it full time for a while.