From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Oct 31 2002 - 07:40:23 MST
On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 12:16:06AM +1100, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> Anders wrote:
> >
> > Most new nation schemes are just idle pipedreams or somewhat
> > suspect economic ventures. The virtual nation idea mentioned
> > earlier in this thread is far more realistic.
>
> I'm not sure you whether your referring to my initial post or to the links
> to Terra Libra.
If you look through the list archives you will see it is a recurring
theme on this list. Targets include building artificial islands on
international water, buying islands or regions in third world nations,
setting up space colonies and similar projects. Usually followed by my
response "get real" :-)
> > Not that virtual
> > nations have any pull per se, but witness the growth of prestige
> > and power of NGOs the last decade. Probably the smart thing to do
> > is to work to create an international NGO with our values, plenty
> > of credibility and money.
>
> I think anything larger would necessarily start with an NGO,
> internationally, or even nationally. I imagine most western countries would
> have similar legal structures for non-profit NGOs as we have in Australia
> for incorporated societies and associations and that therefore the NGO
> structures would be grounded in a legislative framework and a particular
> jurisdiction.
It might be, or it might exist in other forms (like a formally informal
network of local organisations and chapters). Your mention of the CoS is
a good example of a international organisation where much effort seems
to have gone into making its internal money- and power-flows insulated
from outside legal interests. Many of the most successful NGOs seem to
be more for-profit than non-profit, which is worth thinking about.
> > Something like the WTA on par with Amnesty or Greenpeace would be
> > far more efficient at enabling and promoting what we strive for
> > than any number of freedomships and oceanias.
>
> Agreed. But how do the numbers of extropians and transhumanists compare with
> the numbers of members in Amnesty and Greenpeace I wonder and if the former
> are far fewer why is that? Is it that the objectives of amnesty (freeing
> political prisoners and speaking out against torture) and Greenpeace
> (championing "the environment") simpler and easier to grasp than the
> objectives of extropians and transhumanists which include but are not
> limited to improved quality of life and longevity? Is it that these
> organisation have been running longer?
Yes and yes. There is also a feedback effect: Amnesty and Greenpeace
promote certain ideas about open societies and the environment, which
makes society more willing to both implement them and to support the
organisation. So far we have not bootstrapped transhumanism to the same
extent. To get to the state where we could even start something like
this we will need more people participating in the mainstream debate,
seeding transhumanist ideas and discourses among the intellectual
networks. It is probably less efficient to first start an organisation
and try to affect things than to first affect things so that there is
ample members, interest and money for the organisation.
> Would you think that a great organisation is
> more likely to emerge organically without being designed and that attempts
> to distill optimal design principles to save time and effort are futile?
I am a firm believer in spontaneous order, but usually the spontaneous
order has to be created by someone :-) What I mean is that organic
emergence of organisations is an enormously powerful process where
different approaches can compete and interact, allowing the best to grow
and learn from the failures of the others. But each organisation in this
soup of hopeful institutionlets is the creation of somebody. I don't
know if there are optimal design principles that work for organisations
(my hunch is that they only work if you have clear and simple goals),
but it might be worth a try.
> >The organisation
> > would be their careers (and that may be the greatest problem with
> > organisations - preventing them from becoming vehicles of
> > propagating themselves rather than their or their leaders' goals).
>
> Yes. This does seem to be a substantial problem. Nixon would seem to be one
> example of at first a modern failure but latter perhaps of the checks and
> balances build into the US structure proving their worth. Free press.
> Separate legislature. Adversarial political parties.
The problem exists in other organisations too - cliques of researchers
or executives promoting each other, environmentalist groups becoming
more interested in media stunts than the environment, aid organisations
growing into bureaucratic amoebas and so on. We can learn a lot from
political theory here. I think the open society is a good ideal for an
organisation: internal transparency, freedom to criticise,
accountability and so on.
> > Building and maintaining something like this is not trivial. But it
> > is good training if you want to try to build a real nation.
>
> How could you know that? How can we rule out a top down approach where
> perhaps a number of existing successful NGO's are brought together to bud
> off something close to a real nation in one complicated but orchestrated
> move?
I distrust top down approaches for ill-defined problems. If it was a
project to engineer a space station with a self-contained ecosystem for
Mars travel I would trust this kind of orchestration - there is a single
goal (maybe different views on why to achieve it), there are clear ways
of figuring out who to do what and so on. But societies aren't machines
and they are not solutions to any particular problem. They are the
result of what humans think and do.
Just getting a lot of people who roughly agree together is hard enough,
and experience from all those utopian commune experiments in the US and
elsewhere shows that once the initial ideological fervor and enthusiasm
wear off the society tends to crumble - it has no reason to exist beyond
the ideological goal. A far more likely situation would be for a number
of NGOs to step in to help run a region with pre-existing inhabitants
with their own views. Here the issue instead would be to convince
everybody to work together and get along despite very different views
and interests. Lots of data in studies of aid organisations successes
and failures here.
> When before, in the history of the world, has it been possible to say
> without chicanery to rich and poor alike that a better standard of
> living is possible for all. Technologically the imminent wherewithal
> to radically extend life, creates an opportunity to offer something to
> the rich that they do not have, provided we can get the societal
> mechanisms commensurate with existant and emergent technological ones.
> The incentive to cooperation seems to have never been greater. Whether
> we are the "last mortal generation" or "first immortal" depends on our
> organisational capabilities IMO.
Hmm, while I like the tone of this pep-talk, I think the problem is that
you assume the rich are the most important factor. Sure, they have money
and usually influence, but without the support of entire societies you
will not get enough funding and markets to support any move towards
transhumanity. In order to demonstrate our doubtless limitless
organisational capabilities :-) we need to demonstrate our cultural
capabilities. If we can show people that we are approaching a
cooperation revolution where a great deal of desirable, practical and
moral achievements are possible, then we are going to get the social
mechanisms we need to support this.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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