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Leftists: Political infrastructure may very well be corrupted beyond repair. What are you doing/researching for solutions outside of it?
Myself: Looking deeply into Open Source/Maker communities who have been working to overcome the supply chain issues and redevelop medical supplies for Covid. Now they're aiming their sights at bigger problems too. http://HelpfulEngineering.org is a big one
We built a ventilator http://www.ARMEEVent.com / http://www.ARMEEVentilator.com which hopefully proves useful. We thought the world would need millions by April, and built something that could scale that high that quickly.
But in general: I have long since given up expecting traditional infrastructure/politics/capital/charities to produce anything. If it was functioning properly this pandemic would have been prepared for. We need to rebuild a hell of a lot of it.
So I'm at the point where I think we should just rebuild the government. Online voting, Kickstarter-esque funding (using cryptocurrencies?), and a whole lot of open source hardware design to build infrastructure.
Start by ground-up solving of potholes, roads, housing, food shortages, water availability. Make online democracy for decision making, funding. Eventually this should just outpace the snail-crawl that all public infrastructure operates on - obsolete
Biggest challenges are that trad gov will try and shut these down (cant just go around filling potholes yourself - that's the city's job and illegal), so needs serious anonymity and/or legitimacy from traditional sphere - but that's a rotting carcass at this point, so... tricky
Need to get this infrastructure in place though, as the inevitable further collapse comes. Places to direct the unemployed, public works, bolstering the essentials like food/water/housing, etc.
Needs to have a fair reward structure for participation and or capital investment too - all operating on charity is shortsighted and unnecessary. Just needs to steer clear of the rotting bureaucracies and politics or the current system and stay practical.
Inequality etc arent gonna be solved by this, but ensuring everyone in the world survives the apocalyptic future is doable, technologically. It just Will. Not. Happen. if we keep expecting the existing political/business structures to help at all.
Existing power structures will hinder/sue/crush/claim/denounce/distort/destroy long before they help solve anything. But if they just didnt exist? We could totally do this.
That's my mix of pessimism/optimism. Fuck the system, create a new one.
That's my mix of pessimism/optimism. Fuck the system, create a new one.
