Infoliberalism

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.

List of the main concepts

The implementation of the whole project is by software for web servers and starts by developing new features for the Internet
Political theory, decribing the logic of the P2P trust system to implement and how it can replace justice and governments, among other uses
Monetary theory, describing mathematically the foundation of an online money and financial system that could work without banks nor any legal warranty
More details may also be helpful to complete the picture, like Open markets and business models for copyleft projects development.

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.

This page can be accessed by : http://infoliberalism.info/

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Some philosophical considerations which can be taken as a set of premises and motivation to the above solutions, though people don't need to agree. All what is needed, is that the software be made and used, because it will be so useful.