Idea Labs! An open thread for collaborative worldbuilding
Let's brainstorm the future together.
In addition to writing prompts and salon discussions, another way I thought we could participate in collaborative worldbuilding together is to host regular “Idea Labs.”
Here’s the idea: I’ll create an open thread crowdsourced with your ideas from the comments and discussion threads. We can discuss them here and even come up with new ones!
Here’s our first Idea Lab sourced from your comments and notes:
1. Each voter gets 100 votes that they can allocate to issues/candidates
A single binary vote for a particular candidate doesn’t communicate anything more than “I like him better than the other candidates.” It doesn’t communicate a voter’s passion regarding specific issues. How can we communicate passion for specific issues with votes? One way would be to give each voter 100 votes which they can then allocate to issues and candidates in any way they want.
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2. Instead of debates, presidential candidates defend their plans like a thesis
[Candidates] submit plans as part of filing to run, and in lieu if the idiotic debates we currently have, we televise them presenting their plans and taking questions for experts and citizens, almost like defending a thesis.
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3. We make congress enormous
The House of Representatives is meant to be the voice of the American people at the federal level, but the House has been capped at 435 members since 1913, when the US population was less than 1/3 of what it is today. Practically, representative democracy doesn't work well when there are so few representatives to represent so many people… ChatGPT tells me that if representation matched what we originally had at the start of the country (roughly 30,000 people per representative), we'd need about 11,000 reps!
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4. An annual holiday where we shut off the internet for a week
Maybe it will be a holiday from our phones and we will all turn off the entire internet for one week every year.
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5. What if social media was owned by its users as a DAO?
There is no board, there is no centralized directive. All the people who are on the social media decentralized application could be DAO members, all make all the decisions by, for example, voting.
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6. Make companies pay for the entire lifecycle of their products
Tax people for producing things that go to landfill or otherwise pollute the planet and use the revenues for remediation and sustainable poverty alleviation.
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Let’s talk about these ideas in the comments. Or propose your own!
Elle Griffin wishes to brainstorm the future together on her blog full of idealistic visions. Good plan, let's do that.
Imho, the bottom line problem standing in the way of a better future is the marriage between violent men and an accelerating knowledge explosion. As nuclear weapons so clearly illustrate, whatever one's hopes, dreams and plans for a better future might be, they can all be swept away in just minutes by that marriage.
There's an excellent new documentary series on Netflix called: Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, which lays out the case is considerable detail. Here's a link to the trailer on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHuuLo-CSRo
Those allergic to doom and gloom information might look at this question from the happier side. If we can solve the problem of violent men by some method that would result in two very important positive outcomes.
1) A radical reduction in violence at every level of society all over the world.
2) Once society was liberated from the cost of responding to violent men, vast new resources would become available for life affirming projects like education and health care etc.
Imho, we're at a historic crossroads today and the future will go in one of two directions:
1) We'll solve the problem of violent men and the future will be dramatically better than today. Or...
2). We won't solve the problem of violent men and the future will be dramatically worse than today.
One of the key obstacles to a utopian future may be our assumption that the status quo is sustainable, that we can keep on going more or less as we always have.
I'm so sorry to report, that era ended at 8:15am on August 6, 1945 over Hiroshima Japan.
Violent men + Knowledge Explosion = No Future Worth Living In
These are all great ideas! How are we gonna make them happen? If people are interested in a toy-DAO to exercise what it would be like to be a part of one, I could probably make a simple one with 100 votes per person to allocate as they wish. We can come up with fun things to vote on, and when your 100 votes are gone you are done. Something like that... What could we form a DAO around?