This is something of an angry post, because my opus (a 5,000 worder on what it would take to start a bar) was lost by the blogger interface. Like most things I am mad about, it was totally preventable and my fault for not using google docs and hibernating my computer for a week which makes it all the more frustrating. But I bet you are wondering what this has to do with revolution. Well, the answer is very little, that is what the next paragraph is for.
We live in startling times. People in northern africa and the middle east are dying in droves for a fairer government, people in China are fighting long legal battles for the freedom of their information technology, people in some smaller countries are struggling just to save up enough money to buy the goat that will be their livelihood for the next ten years. There are peoples in the deep amazonian rainforest who know nothing of the hyperconnected world around them but for the glass eye of an unmanned drone. There are peoples in a house nearby who have neglected their corporeal form to live out their existence in World of Warcraft or Second Life. We have drugs that make you sleep, drugs that make you dream, drugs that make jump, drugs that make you want to rub a carpet for hours, drugs that make you kill, drugs that make you ride a bicycle off into the sunset without a care for your previous life. Whole cultures rise and fall in matters of years.
There is so much good in the world. Science has found so many answers and smart innovative people have more power than ever, especially through the mouthpiece of the internet. If every good idea could be brought to pass, most known diseases would be under heavy attack and the average household would be converted into a zero-emissions bastion of convenience, health and design. Cities would be lit by bioluminescent trees and hovercars would be powered by algae tanks. Everyone’s eyes would be bright and everyone’s bed would be warm at night.
So why not? What has gone wrong? Why, in an age of exploding talent and education and assets, are we still quagmired in politics and finance and even genocide? The answer is that we are badly organized.
Our resources are inadequately allocated. Pure math can show this. There are 12 million square miles of arable land (farmable land) in the world. That is 7.68 billion acres. (640 acres to a square mile). That means there is more than an acre of farmland in the world for every man woman and child alive. Given advanced farming techniques, even sustainable farming techniques, that is more than enough to keep a person well fed. So why is there starvation? Some say greed. People in richer countries eat more because they can. True, but an an acre and a half of land for one person is actually huge and will give more calories per day than a person needs. No rich person sits in their dining room, eating a frisee salad and thinking “Hmmm. . .I really must make sure 1,000 children starve next week. Waiter! bring me ten more courses!”
This has always been a problem, it’s why capitalism exists, it’s why communism was so popular, it’s why socialism seems to be making a name for itself. But none of these ideas are perfect. communism has the “real world” problem and doesn’t account for its inherent bureaucracy. Socialism leads to weaker incentives and hasn’t been shown to work with a heterogeneous population. Capitalism leads to unbelievably income disparity and a despotic oligarchy of corporations. I’m not complaining about the existence of these systems, they have brought us where we are today. But why haven’t we had an original idea about government for 50 years? Where is the grassroots movement to overhaul the way things are done on this planet?
Let’s brainstorm, people. Post original ideas. Its not like we are going to immediately enact a government system just because it was posted on this blog. I don’t care if your idea says that the value of our currency fluctuates with the phases of the moon. Anything new is worth checking out, insights can be gained from the most outlandish of ideas. I myself will attempt to come up with as many new systems as I can, and I’ll re-examine some of the old ones too. Karl Marx didn't wake up one morning with the idea for communism. Lets see if we can’t get the powers of the internet to work on something big.
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