[MG] "good country" disappears down the slacktivism rabbit hole...

[Scott Raney]

The "good country" project was very interesting to me when it first
launched several years ago. What they produced was a ranking of
countries using objective criteria to assess the living conditions of
the population (standard of living, crime rate, measures of individual
freedom, etc.). I thought this might be useful as a tool for
evaluating existing governments and informing people about when they
needed to be changed.

Unfortunately they've decided to pivot and join the ranks of
slacktivism organizations like Avaaz, MoveOn, and change.org which are
based on the premise that the way to change the world is to give up
the hope of wielding any actual political power in favor of limiting
us to begging the elites for a little consideration on individual
issues. Worse, they've jumped on the AI bandwagon such that no one
really can understand how "The Will of The People" is determined. Oh
well. I guess we can at least be thankful that they didn't drink the
blockchain Kool-Aid:
https://goodcountry.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Good-Country.pdf

Anyone still working on a system that will give The People *actual*
power instead of just reinforcing systems whose fundamental operating
characteristic is deference to elites?
Regards,
Scott

[Patrick Millerd]

This message has a big spam warning on it, even though it's a
g-mail account, g-mail could not verify it really came from you. Might be a
reason for inactivity?

As for my own activity, it's fairly dormant but alive. Ready to participate
when required.

https://www.needpedia.com/ This guy is still actively pursuing his project,
though I don't know how he intends to really bring power to the people, an
attempt is kinda being made.

Post by Scott Raney
The "good country" project was very interesting to me when it first
launched several years ago. What they produced was a ranking of
countries using objective criteria to assess the living conditions of
the population (standard of living, crime rate, measures of individual
freedom, etc.). I thought this might be useful as a tool for
evaluating existing governments and informing people about when they
needed to be changed.
Unfortunately they've decided to pivot and join the ranks of
slacktivism organizations like Avaaz, MoveOn, and change.org which are
based on the premise that the way to change the world is to give up
the hope of wielding any actual political power in favor of limiting
us to begging the elites for a little consideration on individual
issues. Worse, they've jumped on the AI bandwagon such that no one
really can understand how "The Will of The People" is determined. Oh
well. I guess we can at least be thankful that they didn't drink the
https://goodcountry.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Good-Country.pdf
Anyone still working on a system that will give The People *actual*
power instead of just reinforcing systems whose fundamental operating
characteristic is deference to elites?
Regards,
Scott
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Start : a mailing list of the Metagovernment project
http://www.metagovernment.org/
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org

[Scott Raney]

This message has a big spam warning on it, even though it's a g-mail account, g-mail could not verify it really came from you. Might be a reason for inactivity?

Yours had that message too in my gmail reader :-(

As for my own activity, it's fairly dormant but alive. Ready to participate when required.

I had to mothball proxyfor.me when my free trial on AWS expired and
they started charging me almost 40 bucks a month for it (most of that
was for ELB, which I didn't really need but that they require to
provide HTTPS support). I'm looking at the various alternatives: It'd
be good to port it at least once anyway to prove that it's not tied to
any particular platform. I also got the Colorado voter database and
started hacking that to create a way to authenticate voters without
risking exposing their information, sending them a postcard, or
require them to provide a credit card (like most of the other systems
have). Next round I plan to shadow the Boulder and/or Denver city
council proposals with authenticated voters, which ought to be
illuminating...

https://www.needpedia.com/ This guy is still actively pursuing his project, though I don't know how he intends to really bring power to the people, an attempt is kinda being made.

Looks to me like he underestimates the amount of "government" required
to keep a system like that working. Wikipedia is kind of a nightmare
because of that (lots of topics where the foxes are guarding the
henhouses).
Regards,
Scott

Post by Scott Raney
The "good country" project was very interesting to me when it first
launched several years ago. What they produced was a ranking of
countries using objective criteria to assess the living conditions of
the population (standard of living, crime rate, measures of individual
freedom, etc.). I thought this might be useful as a tool for
evaluating existing governments and informing people about when they
needed to be changed.
Unfortunately they've decided to pivot and join the ranks of
slacktivism organizations like Avaaz, MoveOn, and change.org which are
based on the premise that the way to change the world is to give up
the hope of wielding any actual political power in favor of limiting
us to begging the elites for a little consideration on individual
issues. Worse, they've jumped on the AI bandwagon such that no one
really can understand how "The Will of The People" is determined. Oh
well. I guess we can at least be thankful that they didn't drink the
https://goodcountry.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Good-Country.pdf
Anyone still working on a system that will give The People *actual*
power instead of just reinforcing systems whose fundamental operating
characteristic is deference to elites?
Regards,
Scott
_______________________________________________
Start : a mailing list of the Metagovernment project
http://www.metagovernment.org/
Manage subscription: http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org

_______________________________________________
Start : a mailing list of the Metagovernment project
http://www.metagovernment.org/
Manage subscription: http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org