Platformer

So instead of plotting yet another “master plan”—really, a utopia—that dictates away all the problems, but falters (or explodes) on implementation, it makes sense to investigate developing parallel infrastructures that complement existing systems whenever possible, and address power imbalances not by seeking to regulate away (or obliterate) the powerful entities that so often work against the greater good, but rather to enable people to direct them in ways that integrate with life as it currently operates.

It has long been recognized that the boycott can be a spectacularly effective means of accomplishing what legislation cannot (or legislators will not). But generally, boycotts are aimed directly at the entity whose activity we wish to change. Activists boycott a fast food chain, say, because their livestock treatment practices are determined to be cruel. Success is measured by whether the corporation changes its practices.

Somewhat indirect boycotts are sometimes implemented. Companies that did business with the former South African regime were boycotted, for example, and this indirectly helped to topple apartheid. Currently, there are efforts underway to spread boycotts of companies who do business in Israel, in an attempt to influence policies there. But still, in such cases as these, we can see the inherent limitation: it is only possible for someone who currently patronizes the target of a boycott to participate. Only people who bought wine could participate in a boycott of South African wine, for example. Further, the only situations that wine drinkers can influence, in the traditional boycott model, are those in which some part of the production of wine is an economic element.

But there is no reason to accept these limitations. Virtually every person alive has some political and/or economic power. Even those people who do not earn income, who live in abject poverty, still possess the power intrinsic to being a human being—they can work, they can refuse to work; they can move, they can stay still; they can speak, they can be silent. And when we consider those of us fortunate enough to have some degree of economic agency, even the slightest amount, then we can see even more obvious power. Even the individual who works in a job that barely covers expenses, and who has little to no choice in those expenses, possesses the power to work or withhold work, to buy or to not buy (even necessities), to speak or to stay silent. If a person sees the possibility to effect real change, even difficult actions in difficult circumstances seem worthwhile.

The problem, generally, is that for the vast majority of us—even those of us in the First World with disposable income—the amount of political and economic power we possess individually is so minuscule in that we cannot use it. We know that if we could get “everyone” together who felt the same way we do about a particular cause, we could make something substantial happen. But the seeming impossibility of contacting individuals who share our interest in just one given issue—especially if those individuals may be scattered across a country or a globe, may exist at different socioeconomic levels from us, may speak different languages, may hold radically different views on other issues—prevents us from even exploring this path.

But it was from a consideration of this state of affairs, and from an immersion in the burgeoning technologies of “social networking” that began to mature and proliferate on the web several years ago, that the notion formed that it might now be possible to organize at this atomic level—to bring together people from radically different “constituencies” (from the perspective of a political party) to unite in common, effective action on specific causes, and to enable anyone to initiate such activities of organization, in a manner and with an ease comparable to that with which we now are able to retrieve and exchange information in multiple media on a limitless variety of subjects, using the technologies we now take for granted as “the web”.

Social technologies have revealed some critical inadequacies of the mechanisms in use in many liberal democracies. Namely, individuals have a variety of concerns, prioritized in unique ways that cannot possibly be represented by a given party platform. Individuals have a limited amount of energy, usually very little, to devote to any given cause. Bad experiences with being misrepresented by political parties cause people to disengage. Bad experiences with seeing grassroots efforts not produce desired effects cause people to disengage. And fear of losing control of private information inhibits people from participating. The bottom line is that an individual’s actual political power, such as it is, is essentially not something that can be effectively wielded by the individual. Either they must surrender this power to some entity that is not likely to make use of it in a way that is maximally desirable for the individual, or they leave it primarily in the service of corporations whose products they buy (and whose causes they thereby indirectly support).

So the notion, here, is to turn this situation around: Put the full amount of an individual’s political power at their disposal. Make an individual’s private data fully usable by that individual without surrendering privacy to a third party. Enable individuals to direct their power toward precisely the causes they care about. To accomplish this, we want to (i) reverse the vector of control so that individuals direct larger entities to advance causes on the individual’s behalf, and (ii) provide an alternate means of organization so individuals can easily coalesce around particular causes, without needing to “buy in” to causes with which they don’t agree.

As we approach more concrete ideas of what might be done, some key concepts begin to emerge. These are outlined in the next section.