Infoliberalism, or how the Internet can replace the traditional
political order
The development of new Web
functions, especially well-designed tools for sharing and
processing information about trust between users, would logically
result in a new kind of political order of the society, with more
efficient, flexible and coherent ways for building consensual
definitions of, and naturally enforcing, the general interest, and efficiently preventing frauds and
abuse. Independent of any geographical division, based on the
generalized principle of free adhesion, self-implementable by the only "force" of software
usefulness and well-informed freedom, this new network of multiple and
decentralized powers would make obsolete the traditional designs
of State and powers.
The present page gives a general overview of the whole project of
infoliberalism in its main components. However, to be able to grasp
how it can effectively work it remains necessary to visit the more
detailed explanations in the several pages where they are developed.
Basic principles
- Liberty is not a mere absence of coercion. Rather it is
something positive to be built: it requires some necessary
information to be provided to people to let them take the
decisions whose consequences will most likely fit their real
purposes. Imagine a train station with no information on where
trains are going: people would not be free to go where they
want. A world without the useful information would still be a
dictatorship of chance and swindles rather than a place of true
liberty.
- Among the different sorts of useful information, a crucial
one is the information on trust. Indeed, it is the necessary
condition for any other information to be considered reliable.
- To provide the useful information, it is necessary to gather
some properly defined raw information from many people, and
process them adequately in large databases with new Internet
features.
- It turns out that the whole political powers and monetary
systems that our economies depend on, can be understood as an
information network (especially information on trust), thus
working based on the value of its information much more than on
any brute force; and their defects, such as "money has no
smell", can be understood as consisting in ill-defined or
falsified information that is relied upon just because it is the
only readily available information.
- Therefore, new, better designed information networks would
naturally overcompete and thus suffice to subvert all our
existing political and monetary systems, resolving most
injustices, letting people live under their own law as long as
it does not harm others.
For a very abstract and general philosophical background (which
is too general to effectively specify any particular solution and
thus prove the possibility to indeed find one that works, but to
provide a perspective about the general meaning of problems and
solutions, and even eliminate a number of wrong kinds of solutions
considered by others), you can see:
List of the main concepts
Moreover you have here a series of answers to
some questions. When I debated this project orally, I could
usually answer all questions. So if you see more issues than those
addressed in the texts and this thread, you can ask ! I'll most
likely have answers (you can write me by email: trustforum at
gmail).
Abstract
This theory describes concepts
which, once implemented by making and using new software online,
would provide a new, better political order of the society without
government. These ideas are inspired by a search for "perfect
logic" like the one of economic liberalism.
The present free market system has practical defects, but also
some ideas of perfection, which can inspire us to invent the
following more global and complete "perfect" solutions to old
problems that had no good solution before, like those of
expressing and enforcing the general interest and resisting
corruption. The solution consists in rebuilding everything on
communication freedom instead (unlike the traditional foundation
of anarcho-capitalism on private property, though private property
will be most often respected, even more than now); in particular,
money will be defined no more as a private property but as a
social information, though it will have most often the same use as
now except that banks and banknotes will disappear.
From liberalism, is kept the idea of not using force (precisely,
to make the use of force unnecessary for the political order).
This makes it possible to implement the new system anywhere with
no need of any support by the existing political system.
The core idea is to have databases of trust declarations and
complaints between users, and to handle them logically: everything
can be considered subjectively, only trusting the declarations of
trusted people. Disagreements will be discussed online until the
coherence of information is reached (which should logically
happen). A new power system completes this, with special trust
declarations which delegates anyone's "powers" to anyone else.
Indeed, money is a mere social convention, and, thanks to its
virtualisation, it can take any value the rest of the society
freely considers to be fair. A new monetary theory is developped,
based on credits between people.
The title of infoliberalism that I recently gave to this
theory expresses its similarity of logic with some radical
liberalisms like agorism (see the new
libertarian manifesto) or anarcho-capitalism, of which it
would constitute somehow an effective method of realization; with
the difference, that it is rebuilt on a new foundation : instead of
the postulate of private property (but while most often respecting
it), infoliberalism is built on the postulate of communication
freedom, which only needs proper software on the Web for developing
all its logical consequences up to rebuilding the whole political
order.
All is redefined in term of information. The currency itself is no
more defined as a private property, but as an information, namely
that of the consensual opinion that the rest of the world formed
about the amount of goods and services that it grants the right to
each member. And as any opinion, it can be disputed, discussed and
revised. This makes it finally possible, without State, to fully
satisfy (without denying them) the purposes which are currently
those of the States. Namely, the institution of a common monetary
system, and the definition, judgement and enforcement of the general
interest.
In the talk of the details of the project, it is necessary to
distinguish on the one hand the economic and political concept (what
is meant), on the other hand the technical method of implementation
(how the data are distributed between independent machines). The
meant concept is formulated as if all the data were gathered in a
central database, which, if this formula were taken literally, would
raise the problem of who controls it. But there are solutions to the
problem, in particular by distributing the database between multiple
independent servers exchanging only the necessary (without personal
data) so that the global operation leads to the same effective
results as the calculation which was explained in terms of a central
data base. And this conformity of the results of the operations to
the logic of the theory, is what guarantees that all the meant
economic and political realities that the data express (the powers,
the currency…) will indeed be decentralized and working by its
intrinsic power as information.
Here are the main data at the core of the system, that users can
freely put in and update at any time:
1) Trust: The trust
declaration is stated “I guarantee that this person is honest,
respecting the general interest” and is supposed (recommanded) to be
granted only to those well known by the declarer in real life, in
order to be sure about them. Aside these data, come a contrary type
of declarations, those of complaints. A declaration has value only
relatively to the trust granted to the declarer, and so on
intersubjectively along the trust chains (calculation of indirect
trust, as the transitive relation generated by the trust
declarations). A false declaration induces the risk for the declarer
to lose the trust which is granted to him, which would destroy the
effect his declarations.
2) Social contract: the free statement of what each one
understands by “respect of the general interest” and of the
recommended criteria for deciding the declarations; in search of
consensus.
3) Credit:
basic data of a new decentralized monetary system, able to work
without bank. The credit is a kind of declaration of trust of a user
to another, that reads “I allow this user to borrow from me up to
this amount until this expiring date, i.e. I commit myself to carry
the loss up to that amount if his debts finally proved
unrefundable”.
Its operation resembles that of the trust declaration, namely that,
once granted by each user to a very few mates, the effective total
fluidity of the system is obtained through automatic calculation of
the connectivity of the whole graph of these declarations, according
to some sophisticated an quite mathematical theory which I did not
develop.
See link above for details. These necessary details for the money
system are highly mathematical and thus most essentially interesting
just for mathematicians and programmers.
4) Powers: acts of delegation of
decision, namely the free decision by each one, to let someone else
make such or such kind of decisions for him if he considers that he
could't handle this decision himself. The one who received a power
can either exert it by taking such decisions, or delegate once more
this power to someone else. He thus precisely has the powers granted
to him by those who naturally had these powers and choosed to grant
them to him, as long as this choice is maintained; and from there,
his influence is just the one that those people he represents
had. The "force" of this power relies in information on these
delegations, and the automated logical deductions that computers
make out of them.
There is a diversity of powers, according to natures of the
concerned decisions. From this new precise structuring by
delegations and their strict informational nature, these powers will
be of very different realization from traditional powers, and thus
no more subject to a large part of their defects, even if they have
sometimes the same object. The main categories of powers are:
Legislative power (development of the social contract),
Power of judgement,
Power of public expenses (while only green taxes would be
obligatory),
Power to grant credis
Media power (granted by the viewer who looks at what he is
interested in),
Power to grant diplomas.
As an example to explain the nature and the “force” of these
informative powers: the power of granting diplomas comes from the
employers or recruiters, because anyway the existence of a diploma
is subjective to the employer who freely chooses to take into
account or not in his hiring decision, the diploma of a candidate.
Information on these delegations, will have in itself the “power” to
orient the curriculum of the students who get informed on it,
towards preparing to the diplomas that are “powerful” or granted by
“powerful” jurys, i.e. known to have an actual value in the eyes of
the employers.
5) Lawsuit: a lawsuit is a Web forum where people discuss to
try to solve a conflict, namely a case of contradiction between the
declarations of the ones and the others (between complaint and
trust, and/or in the monetary data). In a lawsuit, the users in
direct relationship (in the graph of trust or credit) to the
concerned parties, are gradually invited to join the lawsuit and to
give an opinion for one or the others. Logically, sooner or later,
the lawsuit will happen to conclude (resolution of the
contradiction) when a party becomes isolated, and thus either
excluded from the system, or in the obligation to give up something
not to be so.
Most often, solutions to general or specific disagreements can be
found this way without any vote for the majority to impose its
choices to the minority. Instead, everyone remains independent and
responsible, and agreements are found by debates and consensus. If
some people were seen "outlaw" by this concensus, resistance against
them could be done by boycotting them in all their economical
operations, in particular, not accepting their money seen as having
no value; or instead of speaking about a money without value, we can
speak about having the society consider the monetary account of that
person as having a lower balance.
So, how can all this replace the States ? Concretely, the different
private and other independent solutions for education and social
security, could suffice to finance and organise better most of what
the states are now doing. The rest could be financed, on the one
hand by green taxes, on the other hand by voluntary payments by
people who would control the use of their payments, making
unnecessary the present tax-oriented regulation of work, sales and
production.
Technically, the implementation takes the form of a project of
free software for Web servers, which starts with other
functionalities to develop in first, on the basis of which the
functions mentioned above could be developed then. Let us now
describe its main features.
The first function at the base of the project, will be a single
sign-on solution (that I called "global login system"),
characterized as follows:
Each user has needs only one login (“mylogin”) and a password on
only one server (let us say myserver.com), where he must log in
prior to any action (an action = an operation on the Web other than
viewing public pages, so that it requires the authentication of the
user). By this same account he can have several pseudos (for example
“pseudo35” and “otherpseudo46”). From his account in myserver.com,
if he has several pseudos he chooses one of them (among
“mylogin@myserver.com”, “pseudo35@myserver.com” or
“otherpseudo46@myserver.com”) to be authenticated automatically to
any other site of the Web (recognizing the protocol) which he will
want to use, or to carry out an action in myserver.com with effects
visible by other users.
To make possible this automatic authentification to another site,
the account board in myserver.com will include as a kind of “virtual
navigator” the functions of address bar and bookmarks (which will
thus be kept by the user independently of the computer he is working
on).
The second function, will be a system of public and private
forums, where the private forums will be used to replace
email, by the fact that, on his account, the user will see the
list of his forums, with in particular the list of the forums he
“subscribed to” that have new messages. The links from these
lists to the forums, will give automatic authentication as we said.
Naturally, other usual functions will be integrated there:
publication of Web
pages that can work as wiki or blog…
Some functions are designed to put an end to spam in all its
forms by excluding the spammers from the network. This is based on
the principle of registering new users by invitation.
But there is a less “usual” function though in fact used by many,
that I intend to integrate very quickly into the project (motivated
by my personal situation…): an online dating system. See more comments
there. Some aspects could be re-used to effectively organize
the matchmakings for other types of contacts or markets online, such
as the job market.
As I am not myself programmer, the advancement of the implementation
of this free software will depend on work that others will make.
This work had been slown by lack of good programmers (bad luck with
the few programmers that joined until now, that were unreliable).
This is very ironical, since one of the goals of the project will
be, once done, that it will make much easier the search of reliable
people for any purpose in general.
No developer is currently working on it. A few ones for a few years
may suffice. See the specifications
in the short term for the details.
Ifever you could contribute in any way: brainstorming, criticizing,
promoting, reviewing, defining more technical advice or guidelines
(choice of programming languages...), programming, or searching for
more programmers (that hopefully can do good work while not
requiring a Western salary), please write me at trustforum at
gmail.com. Thank you very much.
Interested in these ideas, want to discuss further and maybe do
something about it ? Just write me : trustforum at gmail.com
Interesting discussions can be then published or linked to here.
One try of discussion started
in a google group but then died out, I don't know why, maybe
people are just too busy with other things for ever investing any
significant thoughts to... something that can really change the
world but, for this, requires people to bother thinking.
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