Binding Chaos: Mass collaboration on a global scale

BINDING

CHAOS

MASS

COLLABORATION

ON A

GLOBAL SCALE

HEATHER

MARSH

With grateful appreciation to my patrons and my invaluable epistemic community:

Adam Kendall

Douglas Lucas

Fabiana Cecin

Connie Beckerley

Join the Binding Chaos community!

www.mustread.press

The Binding Chaos Series

A look at the world

Binding Chaos

The Ontology Quartet

Self – The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Life - Abstracting Divinity

Will – Free Will and Seductive Coercion

Consciousness – Shaping Reality

The Sociology Quartet

Person - The Theft of Self

Power - Great Men, Commoners, Witches and Wretches

Nation – The Fourth Age of Nations

Governance - Autonomy Diversity Society

The Institutions Quartet

Economy – The Power Economy

Law – Law and Chaos

Knowledge – Political Science

Technology - Code Will Rule

www.mustread.press

Copyright © 2013, 2020, 2023

Heather Marsh

Author photograph by Tryston Powers

All rights reserved.

Ebook: 978-1-989783-35-1

Paperback: 978-1-989783-11-5

Hardcover: 978-1-989783-12-2

Note to reader

Ten years ago, I collected a few of the articles I had written since 2010 into a short book which I published online with an open copyright. The purpose of these articles was to explain my viewpoint to people I had been working with around the world, exploring ideas around political representation, the economy and other aspects of governance and collaboration. At that time, I had no idea that the daily downloads of this book would increase every year and it would be widely read by a much broader audience over a decade after its publication.

While I am grateful that this text is increasingly considered relevant, it contains a few archaisms and has its own formatting quirks. For this edition, I have kept the text intact and changed only the formatting and illustrations to be in keeping with the rest of the books in what is now a series. Archaisms may still exist, but the book is a product of its time and it seems wrong to change it now. There is a new Afterword where I contextualize some of this work. I have also added the new glossary which contains terms from the entire series. Binding Chaos is now the precursor to a much more in depth analysis of government, society and the universe itself.

I hope this book and the rest of the Binding Chaos series continue to be useful to others on their journeys!

- H.

Defining boundaries

Chapter 1

The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance. If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.

Corporations have the freedom to live in a world without borders or social responsibility, to own property no individual can claim and to control a one world government and legal system. This has had insupportable consequences for the world’s resources and individual rights. People are locked within arbitrary national borders by ever increasing surveillance, military and xenophobic propaganda, crippling our ability to collaborate and frequently, our ability to survive. Our naturally migratory species are being caged like zoo animals, increasingly even as technology makes it more possible for us to interact. Immigration has become a privilege of the elite instead of a right of the desperate. The world’s people are being divided, not into naturally forming communities, but into corporate controlled economic markets. Governance by nation states is now as arbitrary and illogical as city states were earlier found to be.

The accelerated pace and power of global communication strains and bursts the old systems of control. People can walk en masse across borders, shun the current financial system, establish our own trade, create transparency and provide emergency assistance to each other. This power to dismantle the structures we have relied on is terrifying to many because there is no clear path ahead, and few structures have yet formed to replace the ones that are crumbling. The growth of extreme nationalists and traditionalists worldwide, the buildup of militaries and intelligence monitoring are indicative of this fear of our unknown future. Old authoritarian systems can no longer bind the natural chaos of a free society, but we can show the power of chaotic order, the beauty and creativity of collaborative freedom, if we build the right structures now.

The transference of old ideas to our new capabilities has so far mostly served to prove the ridiculousness of the old ideas, not provide alternatives. The hilarity of the Bitcoin stock market is a funhouse mirror of the old stock market but does not provide a marked difference in approach. The instant celebrity and celebrity power of social media is a more transparent and gameable but no less ridiculous version of celebrity influence. We now have the opportunity to create real alternatives for both economy and influence, for communication, collaboration and all tools of society. If we are unaware of the potential before us, we will not achieve everything we are capable of at this moment. What we are building with our software and laws at this time is nothing less than a completely new social structure. It deserves all of our attention.

This text is in no way meant to be a definitive answer to any of the questions before us. This is just a documentation of what seems apparent at this moment, what ideas have not worked and why, and what ideas seem to be working in isolated instances and may be able to scale to help us on a much wider basis in the future. A lot of these ideas are not what we thought would work only a couple of years ago when we tried for consensus on all things, anonymity, meritocracy, all decisions by assembly, peer to peer trade and the hive mind. Those ideals are all still wonderful and useful but require modifying to reflect what we have discovered in practice. Hopefully, we will evolve rapidly enough that the ideas here will also require modification immediately.

This text is also not a suggestion to usurp regional control or assembly and consensus process among local governments. It is looking for methods of mass collaboration which would allow us to effectively communicate and create on a global scale while still allowing us autonomy and regional choice.

Many ideas in this text are far more easily understood by the free software and hacker community than the world offline. The internet created an environment where it was possible to collaborate in ways that had never been tried before, to experiment with global participation, anonymity, a money free society, idea driven projects and many other methods that are still impossible or difficult in physical life. While the internet has many current structural problems that are hindering collaboration, the internet community is yet a generation ahead in experimenting with many of these concepts.

OEBPS/images/image0007.png Humans are not machines, but their capabilities and inclinations will be guided by the limitations of the systems they are given to collaborate with. The structure of the code and the laws we write and the tools we create will decide the structure of our future societies as surely as landforms and villages decided societies in the past. The search for methodology in this book is more systems analysis than philosophy. We need structure we can actually code or build and the limitations of the internet, as our primary location of mass communication and collaboration, must be considered. It is not possible to have a pure data driven hierarchy in an ocean of data. There must be a method for us to filter out and fact check the most accepted ideas. All voices cannot be heard equally in an environment polluted by spam, astroturfing and sock puppets as they would in a local assembly, but they must all be heard. Decisions on how and what voices we amplify must be made carefully.

We need to recognize immediately the effect our future online tools will have on our future governance. Corporate ownership of our communication tools will cause us to yet again relinquish control to a landlord. Corporate sponsored voice amplification will lead to corporate controlled oligarchy. The ties of server based systems and registered domains make censorship possible and hierarchy unavoidable. The limitations to speech we allow to be imposed on us now will impact our governance as surely as moats and mountains did in the past.

The problem with democracy

Chapter 2

Around the world, people lamenting the demise of democracy, or fighting for the birth of ‘true’ democracy need to take a closer look. Democracy is a universally failed concept, not because we have not implemented it properly but because the ideas were flawed to begin with. Advocates of democracy as a system of governance usually hold that it will produce the greatest satisfaction among the governed by allowing the voices of all to be heard. If democracy was implemented in the way it is intended by any common definition to be implemented, the resulting society would not allow all voices to be heard and it could not be considered either fair or enlightened.

‘True’ democracy is at best only one step removed from ochlocracy or mob rule. In a society where the majority create the laws, the laws can always be changed to allow for the Salem witch trials, the current Guantanamo military commissions, or many other examples where mass panic allowed the revocation of years of law in order to persecute a minority. The celebration of democracy in Burma did not prevent the genocide of the Rohingya people i,  democracy in the United States does nothing to protect non-US citizens being attacked by the US military, and democracy in Egypt leaves almost half the population living under a social contract they are vehemently opposed to. There are two options commonly held to be our democratic choices: direct or representative democracy.

i. Burma: End 'Ethnic Cleansing' of Rohingya Muslims", Human Rights Watch, 22 Apr. 2013.

Chapter 3

Direct Democracy

A pure direct democracy is a pure tyranny of the majority. When a majority rules, there is no need for compromise and a minority will have their needs unrepresented, resulting in governance by the majority, not governance by the people. As in all systems where groups hold the highest power, individual rights are always at risk.

A direct democracy is impossible in actuality as no one can have the time to participate in every decision concerning them, and certainly not to educate themselves to provide meaningful input in every decision. To make the best decisions, expertise is required on each topic. Direct democracy does not always provide the best solutions. It provides the most popular, the most expedient, or even the most advertised solutions, more frequently as the decision becomes more complex.

Direct democracy gives equal weight to all votes, the expert and the novice, the completely dependent and the unaffected. Expert opinion is overshadowed by volume, which negatively impacts the resulting decisions. Allowing votes by people unaffected by the issue at hand results in not just uninformed decisions but also persecution of minorities.

Direct democracy is very susceptible to a hidden oligarchy, as those at the bottom of the social classes have no time available to represent themselves or to study the issues being OEBPS/images/image0010.png debated. Secret clubs and block voting are difficult to combat and also do not lead to decisions of the most benefit to all. At its most pure, direct democracy is mob rule, or governance by decree. This system will allow the mob to override the decisions of constitutions and law, and does not allow for a reliable and consistent social contract for all members of society. In this form, it is hard to argue that direct democracy is even a system of governance at all. Governance by decree is governance by whim, and not just or fair governance under most definitions of the words. If an individual is to enter a binding social contract with a society, it is essential that they see and can rely on the constitution of the society they are contracting with.

Direct democracy is very popular currently as an alternative to the more widely attempted, and therefore more obviously failed, representative democracy. The Pirate Party uses liquid democracy as an idea to tie votes to expertise and incorporate some aspects of direct democracy within a representative system. This is a recycled idea from historical democracy that was replaced for a reason. Before secret ballots and one vote per person became the norm, people were regularly intimidated out of their votes by tyrannical spouses, employers, or others in a position of power. Liquid democracy is not a new system. It is a return to a previously failed system. It allows both an accepted rule by demagogues and a fertile ground for corruption, vote buying, and intimidation. These are things that were fought and exorcised in earlier times. There is no logical reason to expect a different result from a system that has been tried. Women and the economically disadvantaged fought far too hard to overcome this system to allow it to return.

Chapter 4

Representative Democracy

Representative democracy evolved as a means to overcome some of the obvious flaws of direct democracy. Representative democracy has become a cripplingly paradoxical system which celebrates nouns over verbs and is far more concerned with representation of every conceivable group than the governing actions being taken. The result is a system where individual rights are negotiable, bigotry is integral and action is carried forth with no public debate. Representative democracy is designed not to care about individual rights but to care about what noun each person can identify with and how strong is the lobby group associated with that noun. Representative democracy is divisive, ineffectual and based on impossible principles.

There are two underlying concepts which must be universally accepted for representative democracy to function: groups may act as individuals and individuals may act as groups. These two ideas are fundamentally unsound. While these contradictions were required in earlier attempts at representative governance, the idea was always flawed and recognized as being flawed. As we have progressed to the point where we can eliminate these weaknesses, we have instead greatly increased their use and stopped questioning their appropriateness. Presently, these two concepts contribute to fundamental paradoxes throughout the current system which can only be remedied by rejection of the underlying concepts.

A group is a collection of individuals united for a certain time and space by a specific idea, experience or other common bond. Individuals have the ability to associate, to exchange ideas, to agree, to cooperate, cohabit and in any other way to collaborate, but the group they form does not become an individual. It cannot logically be granted a voice, a vote, or political or legal power. It is only in a