Are we better off materially? Food, longevity, freedom from pain and disease etc? Absolutely. Politically, are we “better” people? Doubtful. Much of apparent political progress like abolition of slavery was really a positive externality of material/economic progress.
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Going by responses so far, it sounds like people think I’m pointing to a design imagination gap. Like there’s a way to put existing tech together in a new thingocracy or thingarchy that will get us to “post democracy”. No. Nothing ending in -cracy or -archy can fit the bill.
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There’s an *invention* gap here. We need a new breakthrough technology that makes new classes of design possible. Writing was one. The printing press was one. Radio/TV too. Most recently cryptography. Your -cracy or -archy is just a remix unless it uses a new tech in a new way.
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The mark of that is the creation of new political/spiritual freedoms that didn’t even exist before. For example: Literacy (printing press) liberated minds to explore new intellectual domains. Literate politics organized that new freedom.
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Cryptography might create new political freedoms, but this isn’t some trivial extension of economic affordances like blockchain voting. What new freedom does it create and how does it organize the collective use of that freedom? What’s the new freedom literacy?
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My favorite candidate new freedom that could be organized by new political models is mobility. Live/travel freely anywhere in the world. My preferred post-democratic human condition would solve for vastly enhanced mobility.
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About ~60% or more humans live in meaningful democracies today iirc. But only 3% of humans travel beyond national borders today. The tech problem is zero-carbon transport. The economic problem is making it orders of magnitude cheaper. The political problem is open borders.
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End of conversation
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