So I’ve spent a bit of time over the past few years trying to reason my way trough society breaking away from our capitalist overlords.
Let me try to summarize some of my thinking as simply as possible; you start a second economy, one founded using Blockchain technologies and algocracy, with an utter focus on human welfare and ensuring resistance to tampering and unjust accumulation of power and wealth. You siphon the global population over to this new economy effectively stifling the old economy where the totality of the 1%'s wealth resides and is therefore rendered worthless.
The above is by no means a complete summary and there are a bunch of other concepts loosely associated with this such as environmental sustainability, transhumanism, degrowth, fostering small communities etc.
I’ve written about DACs, one of the components of the above here: https://sturlabragason.github.io/blog/2023/07/04/Decentralized-Autonomous-Communities.html
Honestly, I don’t think the data structure we store financial information with is the problem.
Agreed. It is not the main problem.
Of course what I’ve written about here above and in my link is not a complete picture. I mention Blockchain less in relation to financial information and more as a way to store data in an immutable and transparent way, as opposed to the current proprietary closed systems. More public decision making, how funds are spent etc. For example if you go to a doctor in Denmark, you can read what he wrote about the visit in a private portal afterwards, or another example, where some municipalities in the Nordics make financial data available to the public trough easily digestible websites. I would imagine that if we were to store most financial information in a form where it could be easily accessed and understood it would likely lead to better financial practices. “The Blockchain Revolution” by Don and Alex Tapscott has some more to say about similar thinking -> https://blockchain-revolution.com/.
What I am proposing are blueprints for betterment, not magic beans. Sorry 😊.
I just don’t think changing the way data is stored has any effect on public decision-making or how funds are spent. Any relational database could be used to do the things you propose and make data more transparent or immutable. It’s the way we use technology that needs to change, the technology itself is completely agnostic. Before we change the way we think about public decision-making changing the technology is useless in my opinion.
Yeah I agree with, the essence is how the technology is used. There exist currently better ways technologically to achieve this. My point isn’t entirely to change decision making by making the data available to the public. Every modern politician and is absolutely shameless and hides in plain sight so any exposure wouldn’t do a damn thing.
I am more about using algocracy to replace as much as we can of government and decision making, continually improving the process and then conviction voting as another layer.
I think you have some very good ideas. I had been on a similar line of thinking a couple years back. I think the thing that gave me pause was that I became more wary of technology in general, and humanity’s ability to master it and make it a force for good. Nonetheless, we don’t really have too much choice, if we refuse to use technology we consign ourselves to extinction.
I look forward to discussing these topics further, but I don’t feel I have fully marshaled my own thoughts at this stage. I expect to remain on Lemmy until the end, so we will have plenty of time to talk.