Othernance: A New Constitution

~ alternative protocols for government and markets ~

TL;DR — I am NOT claiming that “we can turn the US into ___.” Instead, I outline a contrast to the existing political and economic buckets, because I suspect that there will be new nations forming in the coming decades. We should start the conversation now, to explore what options may become available to those baby-states. This is one of those new options; I’ll refer to it as ‘Othernance’.

Sections:

Internalizing Externalities; A Market for Externalities; The Wealth Feedback Loop; Self-Declared Valuations and an Open Auction; Capital-Backed Currency; Aggregating Concerns & Interests; The Concern & Interest Mandate; Law’s Stated Goals vs. Real Impacts; Ethical Divisions are Outside Governance; Trees of Admiration & Trust; Admirable Representation in Dialogue; Record of Merits & Labors; Human Bias & Review Protocol; No Exclusion from Capital after Verification; The Lease-Schedule Auction; Allocation as an Operating System; A Monarchy of Algorithm

Fundamentally, these topics address “What are Governments and Businesses designed FOR, as their valued Outcome? And how might we achieve those outcomes in a more general and adaptive way?” Othernance is a set of protocols for achieving those goals which are explained below.

Internalizing Externalities

“What is an Externality?” — Any time a business produces an impact that it did NOT include in the sticker-price, that impact is called an ‘externality’. If a chemical company dumps toxic sludge in the river, then locals are harmed, while the business did NOT pay the cost of that harm; that’s a ‘negative externality’. That company is a detriment. Or, if an oatmeal-cookie company is so beloved that people eat their cookies fervently, leading to better health and longevity, then those distributed benefits to the customers’ health are NOT paid-back to the business; that’s a ‘positive externality’. That company is a beneficent force.

All governments concern themselves with ‘internalizing’ various externalities: the risk of war and subjugation is a cost to all of us, an externality, which the Government internalizes by taxing us for defense-spending; the value of education is so great for the economy that governments subsidize education, too; the harm of unchecked criminal behavior is internalized when a government prosecutes crimes and incarcerates the bad actors. Everything a government does is an attempt to ‘internalize’ externalities, in some way or another, so that SOCIETY and the MARKET can account for the cost or benefits of a behavior, without distortions or fraud to mis-represent that accounting.

Unfortunately, the current way in which governments choose *which* externality to address, and the *way* they choose to internalize that externality, are the product of the individual WHIMS of partisan and corrupt representatives. That is a failed protocol for internalizing externalities; the Senators pick an issue and a method of subsidy or enforcement which they know will favor their team or their friends; each externality is decided separately, with no consistent criteria for making their decision; and WORST, they only assume that their choice will generate its stated benefits, before they’ve even looked at reality to see the actual consequence!

We can do better than that.

Here I describe an example of a generalized protocol for identifying positive and negative externalities, without waiting for corrupt officials to pass each loophole-filled-spending-package:

A Market for Externalities

Imagine this alternate governance, the Othernance: I have a recipe for really-tasty oatmeal cookies that are also quite healthy. I expect I can sell the cookies, and that they would also provide added health benefits. I write-up the business plan, and I send it to our Othernance’s “Market for Externalities”, which is kinda like a Stock-Exchange-meets-Kickstarter. Once the proposal is listed, Investors can choose to ‘pledge’ an amount of money towards my proposal. That money is NOT transferred, until the total pledges meet or exceed the COST that I listed for the Proposal. Once that happens, the funds are transferred, and my Oatmeal Cookie Proposal goes into action.

Those Investors are the owners of this operation; they choose the Board of Directors or oversight. I could work *at* this Oatmeal Cookie company, on a salary, but I am NOT the one winning profits by ‘being the founder.’ The Investors are hoping to get their money back, plus a hefty profit. Watch how that happens:

We sell those delicious cookies, gathering more and more customers over the course of time. And, because we are a funded Proposal, it is the job of this new government, the Othernance, to MEASURE how much of a health impact these cookies have on the customers. That metric gives an estimate of the Positive Externality from these cookies — how much money on medical bills and lost wages from illness, cost of suffering, are we talking about?

Suppose, for simplicity, that the estimated value of these cookies is an average of $100 per person, per year; roughly $8K in their lifetime. (Any randomly selected American may or may not be an oatmeal-cookie-consumer, yet averaged across all of us, the nation’s total health bill is pushed down by these oatmeal cookies’ consumption.) Then, the next step is for our alternative government, the Othernance, to add a tax to us in proportion to the benefit those cookies created — for example, a 25% return on $100 per person would be $25 taxed, averaged across the population. (Which tax? Income, wealth, property, sales? That part is a separate debate, and it does not change how the Market for Externalities incentivizes the investors.)

Now that the Othernance has all those tax-dollars, representing 25% of the benefit from our oatmeal, then the Othernance transfers that money into two buckets: the first bucket pays any remaining expenses of the cookie-company (a subsidy up-to-zero; no profits) while all remaining dollars go to the Investors, as PROFIT.

Because these cookies are providing a benefit to each customer, then an increase in reported sales would result in additional returns to the Investors from the tax-transfer. A company can operate below-cost, recovering the remainder from the tax-transfer, and the Investors keep the rest, which incentivizes Investors to look-for Public Benefits — Positive Externalities!

[Investors are not ‘inherently evil and selfish’; they’re seeking a profitable return, and we fail to give them a vehicle to retrieve profits from Positive Externalities… as a result: they DO NOT seek to create Positive Externalities. If we give them that means to profit from the creation of Positive Externalities, then Investors will look-for and fund those benefits! Preventative Medical Care costs pennies per dollar in benefit — it’s a better investment than most tech stocks. Investors would streamline the medical industry and invest in the best per-dollar-care, IF they received a proportional Dividend for their efforts!]

This Market for Externalities is distinct from Privatization, especially when considering their incentives. Privatization hands monopoly power to an industry, and then that industry is ONLY able to increase their profits by diminishing their quality of service or using legalized scams — leading to Pacific Gas & Electric causing multiple wildfires in California, after Enron was price-gouging everyone for distorted electrical grid prices. Privatization also doesn’t concern itself with how much *actual* benefit was produced; Legislators decide how much to allocate, without any measure of the real outcome! That is insane. In contrast, a Market for Externalities ONLY awards funds *after* a measured benefit, and it awards the same percentage of that benefit to Investors, across all externalities, without deciding-for investors which externality they should address, nor waiting for Legislators to notice their importance or opportunity.

Almost every function which governments claim to serve could instead be handled by Proposals on a Market for Externalities, which are funded by Investors, then re-imbursed through our Othernance’s taxes, in proportion to the benefit measured after the work was done. An investor-backed start-up that seeks to provide all the services of the DMV would have a strong incentive to automate the process, and switch to a simple app. Investors are incentivized to maximize the benefits per dollar spent, and they would be glad to use newer technologies to make that happen. I would trust them with every aspect of government services except the Courts, Diplomacy, and Defense. Othernance.

The Wealth Feedback Loop

Above, I mentioned that the way our Othernance taxes is a separate issue; here it is.

The Core Concept, from electrical engineering, is to Dampen any Positive-Feedback. I know that sounds hostile and depressing, but electrical engineers mean something totally different when they say ‘positive-feedback’! Positive-Feedback is when you hold a microphone next to a speaker system; the hum of the speaker feeds-into the microphone and loops back to the speaker where it is AMPLIFIED, and that hum is sent-out again, LOUDER. The Louder-Hum goes back into the microphone, continuing on that loop, getting louder each time, until the circuits melt. Ouch. ‘Positive-Feedback’ is guaranteed self-destruction to electrical engineers.

So, whenever you are designing a system of ANY kind, you want to keep an eye out for these ‘loops’ of Positive-Feedback. If you find any Positive-Feedback Loop, then you MUST insert a DAMPER into that loop, to suppress the feedback. If you don’t insert a damper, then the circuits will melt and everything stops working.

Unfortunately, we currently DO have a destructive Positive-Feedback Loop in our economy, and we DON’T have a damper on it! As a result, that loop keeps getting louder, just like the microphone and speaker, and it WILL destroy the economy. Wealth is that Feedback-Loop.

How? If a rich person were in a coma, their money would still be making more money. In contrast, everyone else loses the majority of their income if they stop working. Wealth loops-around, multiplying itself, accruing more and more towards the few who already had some. I am not advocating elimination of differences in wealth — that would be called an ‘over-ride’ of the circuit, which would ignore all the important information that pricing-signals send. What we need is a DAMPER on that feedback, to prevent the economy from short-circuit.

A Wealth Tax, in order to act as a DAMPER, must start-out as a low percentage of wealth for small-holders, then slowly and steadily increase to a higher percentage of wealth, as a person’s total wealth rises. A simple example: folks with $500,000 in wealth might be asked to pay 0% per year, steadily rising to 1% per year at $1Million, 2% by $2Million, 3% at $4Million, rising further to 12% at $2Billion, and going steadily higher after that.

Considering that the best average returns an investor can make are ~12% annually, then whichever wealth triggers a 12% wealth-tax would be the asymptotic limit of wealth. Max_Money. Legislatures would be setting that wealth-limit at whichever maximum wealth they want; I don’t want to decide for you all. Yet, we MUST put SOME limit there, or else the feedback will destabilize everything.

This Wealth Tax MUST exempt a person’s primary residence and the primary property of any business they own. Otherwise, you would be required to slowly parcel-out and sell small sections of your farm, until no farm was left.

Additionally, if the wealth tax begins as a ‘negative’ rate for people with NO wealth, then it functions just like a Basic Income. And, being determined by wealth, NOT income, then this does NOT discourage people from working!

[In most cases, a tax dis-incentivizes whatever activity or holding that you are taxing. Taxing income reduces our incentive to work. Meanwhile, taxing wealth does NOT discourage people from becoming wealthy, because the tax is still levied even if they do nothing. As a result, a rich investor in a Wealth-Tax-Only country is incentivized to re-invest vigorously, to ensure that their wealth does not shrink! The old trope of ‘wealthy people would flee the country’ only applies when that country’s Legislature intentionally left such a loophole open, for their friends. France, for example. An ‘Exit Tax’ is sufficient to close that loophole, and every political hack knows it, even while they claim that Wealth Taxes would fail.]

Self-Declared Valuations and an Open Auction

To assess how much wealth a person has, we can let them declare each possession’s value themselves. “But folks will lie!” you say. Not with a good protocol, they won’t!

Suppose you are asked to list the value you ascribe to each of your properties, investments, and possessions. You list a collectable item as being worth $10,000. Now, with our Open Auction Protocol, ANYONE can try to out-bid you for a small discouragement-fee to the current owner, offering MORE than $10,000 to take possession of your stuff! You cannot STOP them from taking ownership, unless you raise your valuation. So, I bid $10,100 for your stuff, and then you must out-bid me in order to keep possession; you raise your bid to $10,200. I raise again, and so do you. Eventually, one of us is the winner, and that person has ownership. If I had won the bidding-war at $11,000, then I have to pay you that amount, plus the fee to you for each increasing bid that I made.

Once that possession has been bid-up, you cannot simply re-assess your stuff to lower its value quickly; only a fractional percent decline is allowed within any given time-period (the nation can decide the specific percentage yourself; I don’t suppose there is a particular ‘correct’ rate of price-decay). Then, your assessed Wealth Tax is based upon the total listed value of all those possessions. You don’t need to re-list everything each year; just send them your receipts, for any item you value at the market rate. If you didn’t list an item on your Wealth Tax Form, hoping to dodge that chunk of tax, then you have LEGALLY voided claim to it, and courts will be happy to let anyone take it or destroy it, without lawsuit or incarceration. I don’t claim that it’s perfect; yet it will capture the vast majority of investable wealth, which is what counts. That’s definitely more straight-forward than the current tax code.

So, you might *like* to list your possessions at a low price, in order to reduce your Wealth Tax. Yet, by listing those things you own at a low price, then you invite others to out-bid you and take possession for themselves! As a result, you must raise your valuation until competitors don’t want it. That naturally ‘equilibrates’ toward the most accurate, fair price for assets, without the Government deciding for us by politicians’ writ!

Let’s look at how the dollar itself could work differently, as well:

Capital-Backed Currency

National currencies of the past were ‘backed-by gold’. That meant each paper-dollar was only a ‘receipt’ for the REAL dollar, which was a gold coin. Eventually, they got rid of the real gold-coin dollars, leaving only the receipt-papers as dollars — ‘fiat’ currency.

Currency ‘backed-by’ real objects is a more durable, reliable store of value than the fiat-currencies we have today. And, among all the items we could possibly use as a backing for dollars, our best choice would be CAPITAL: equipment that *does* things, with durable annual revenue creating real-world outcomes that we value.

Yet, whichever capital we choose to back the dollar, then that capital will be over-supplied as a result. If we chose cars to back the dollar, then we would end-up producing a surplus of cars, which means that each car would be used for less stuff, on average. We can avoid that problem by selecting a form of capital-equipment which never stays saturated for long, due to continually increasing demand: Computer Chips.

Here is how that process could unfold:

Step One: You are an investor who wants to put some of your wealth into a stable, durable bucket, earning a decent return reliably. So, you pledge $1,000 to your local Computer Server-Bank (so long as they are accepting more funding; they will close their doors to dollars if they think that they have received too many).

Step Two: That Server-Bank takes your $1,000 and adds it to the pool of funding that they send to the Government. The Government receives this pool of cash from all the accredited and allied Server-Banks, to buy large blocks of computer chips from fabricators located anywhere in the world. When the government receives those chips, they are stamped as dollars and dispersed to the Server-Banks in proportion to the funds they provided.

Step Three: Those Server-Banks use these chips from the Government to run the internet, business services, apps, and Artificial Intelligence, which all earn a revenue. The Server-Bank keeps their agreed-upon share of that revenue, with the remainder transferred as a DIVIDEND to you, the original investor! If you want, you could have them print a paper-receipt of that Chip-Dollar; it has an issued-date which allows you to account the percentage interest you’ve earned, when you turn that paper-dollar back into the Server-Bank. Either way, you earn your dividend in regular paper dollars (because those were the ones collected by the Server-Bank from customers) and you can choose to re-invest those dollars into Chips, for compounding returns.

As a result, you are able to earn money from the explosion in demand for computer chips, by investing into the chips directly. That high-return is proven by companies’ current willingness to buy chips: they already prove that the returns are higher than the costs, with their own frantic purchases, and so you can expect a decent profit-margin. You have a strong incentive to buy-in.

At the same time, the Server-Bank is able to increase its share of capital, at NO COST to itself! Scaling does not require financing debt or traditional investment rounds. And, the Government gets to accredit Server-Banks, adding our nation’s allies to the list in return for diplomatic leverage. The Government can also incentivize this capture of chips by providing a few percent of the cost of the chips as subsidy; this would allow the Government to out-bid its adversaries, to ensure that our side has the lion’s share of computing capacity. Both Server Banks and the Government have a strong incentive, as well.

Chip-Backed Dollars would be superior to German and Japanese bonds (which actually LOSE a small percentage of their value each year) as well as Foreign Currency Reserves and ‘real estate as a hedge against inflation’, which have abysmal yields. All of those classes of asset would be drained, to buy-into computer chips instead. Chip-dollars’ higher returns would funnel a few $Trillion from investors around the world, feeding the Government’s capture of chip-sales into our own and allies’ countries. If you know anyone who knows Sam Altman, I would be glad to tell him: “This will fund your computer-chip explosion that you expected will cost $7Trillion.”

There are numerous other specific policies we can consider. Yet, in general, they can be decided using a broader, universal policy:

Aggregating Concerns & Interests

Aggregation is just ‘putting every different thing into the pile of things similar to it.’ This is distinct from Consensus, which requires that ‘everyone agree on the same thing’. Aggregation is also distinct from Majority Voting; voting systematically ignores 49% of the population! We have the clearest view of the peoples’ actual values when we aggregate all of them; that aggregation would produce the fairest and most agreeable outcomes, compared to Democratic Votes, Republican Representation, Consensus, and the rest. Here is how:

Every person has their own, encrypted account on a Concerns & Interests App (you could snail-mail it, too, if you prefer). On this app, there is a singular list for you to fill-out; you rank your own Concerns & Interests on that list. (It must be *one* list, so that we know the *relative* rank of a given Concern against a given Interest.) A Concern is anything that you “don’t want to happen” or “want it to stop”; and an Interest is anything that you “want to keep happening” or “want it to start”. Update your list at any time; a nightmare might drive you to list a new Concern at the top, or an inspiring video boosts the rank of one of your Interests. Don’t wait four years for an election; update as often as you like!

With all the lists from everyone, we can Aggregate all of those Concerns & Interests! We would see that 95% of the population has “Parking” as a Concern, “Earning More” as an Interest. (For ease-of-use, you could let an A.I. bucket your Concerns & Interests according to similarity with others, yet it is essential that you be able to correct that A.I. at any time, or to place them in buckets yourself, to prevent accidental misrepresentation.) We see what actually matters, right now, on the whole, instead of ONLY listening to the team that won an election years ago.

We then Weight these Concerns & Interests by four factors: 1) the number of people who listed that Concern, 2) the average ranking of that Concern, among those who listed it, 3) the dollarized value or cost of all Impacts of that Concern, 4) the estimated Ease of addressing the issue (dividing by the dollarized costs of implementing a solution). Multiplying those factors all together, we have an estimate of the Importance of each bucket of Concerns.

Income, Safety, Bias would be buckets of great Importance, for example. Parking is a common concern, but it ranks pretty low on average, and solving the issue has only a moderate impact on the average person, even though some solutions might not be difficult or costly.

We can use that Importance-Weighted list of Concerns & Interests to decide our Government’s operations, *without* Representatives… and without a VOTE! Here:

The Concern & Interest Mandate

In our Othernance, opposite to regular Governance, we let the Aggregated Concerns & Interests decide policy. America’s current paradigm of Government is to ask “which person will always choose best, even though we give them free-reign to pursue their whims or corruptions?” Instead of relying upon one person to be best, we can ask the people in Aggregate what they value most, using their stated Concerns & Interests. Then, we can test numerous solutions in small-scale roll-outs. Whichever solution we try which performs best according to our Aggregate Concerns & Interests MUST be the solution that we follow as the rule. (That is, until we test other options, and one of them performs better — that is when we switch. No waiting for Legislatures to bicker and bargain!)

Imagine how that plays-out:

One of the high-ranking Concerns happens to be “Housing”. As a result, our Othernance is tasked with testing many different solutions to the housing problem, in various regions of the country, on a small scale. That is the Scientific Method, collecting real-world data, comparing the real outcomes of many different options. We’ll need lots of creative input from the population at this stage (and I recommend DARPA’s funding model, to support the basic expenses of folks who design such solutions).

With dozens of options for improving the Housing-Concern, our Othernance tries each option in multiple cities and towns, scattered across the country. We’ll need to measure as much as we can; if we don’t measure something, then that is what will come back to bite us. Critically, the most nuanced and valuable data is what people tell you about their own lives. Longitudinal studies, with detailed interviews, are the best way to understand if Othernance is doing what people actually value.

After those various Housing-Options have been tried and measured, then we must compare them to see which one is best. We look at each solution’s impact on peoples’ housing-situation, AND we do the same with ALL of their other Concerns & Interests. For example, if a particular Housing-Option improved the issue of Housing… yet, it made Parking much worse, as well causing Health to decline, and it increases Bias and lowers Safety, and — heck! That’s not really a good Housing-Option, because it makes everything else worse!

So, that list of all of the Weighted Concerns & Interests we had Aggregated is the same weighting that we give to the importance of the impacts from our Housing-Options. As a result, we might select a Housing-Option which did NOT perform best at housing-by-itself — yet! That Housing-Option provides additional benefits in many other areas that people value, at the same time. We want the “best-all-arounder” solutions, not “best-in-one-way/worse-in-others”.

All these criteria and comparisons are done by real-world measurement; none of them is decided by the whim of a single person. We escape the tyranny of ‘trusted officials’, for the certainty that ‘this solution actually DID work best, over-all, compared to all the other suggestions.’ That is a government I can trust.

Another wrinkle to Othernance: the Concern & Interest Mandate insists that our Othernance devote resources to solving the TOP issues, FIRST. This prevents the government from ‘passing an investment-banking law that no normal person ever wanted, which accidentally causes a financial crisis.’ Our Othernance must address what matters to you, NOT what matters to hidden and corrupting influences. This also diffuses polarization, because our Othernance must solve our 90% problems, then our 80% problems, then 70%, 60%, BEFORE ever touching those hot-button issues which DIVIDE us. Othernance solves the problems we agree-on, to get those successes out of the way, before any conflicting needs are decided.

Law’s Stated Goals vs. Real Impacts

Most of the laws passed today have a ‘hidden agenda’ that is not stated in the law itself, to provide pork or privilege to some group that those Legislators serve. Protecting from ‘hidden agendas’ and ‘unstated reasons’ is easy when a law has to state what goal it is supposed to achieve. Then, our Othernance is responsible to collect the data — does this new law actually achieve the goal it claimed that it would? If not, the law is immediately void, and legislature must address the issue immediately.

This concept has been described as ‘Deliberative Democracy’, where the intention of the law is made plain. For example, the U.S. Bill of Rights says that Americans have “a right to bear arms.” That law does NOT clearly state the intended Goal of the Second Amendment: the Founders wanted each citizen to have the power to defend themselves from their own government! So, using Deliberative Democracy on that more substantiative criteria, “defend yourself from the government” clearly does NOT allow a person to walk around a WalMart with an assault rifle, because that does NOT defend the gun-wielder from their government. They’re intimidating regular folks, and putting others in potential harm. Instead, “defend yourself from the government” allows you to shoot-down a government drone that follows you, and to hack the NSA when they try to hack you. THAT is the modern version of “defend yourself from the government” that is left-out of the Second Amendment.

By requiring that laws state their intended objectives, and then automatically voiding any law which does not meet its objectives, we avoid the ‘hidden agendas’ that corrupt laws and serve private interests. We also avoid bad policy, which gets left on the books long after it has proven itself problematic.

Ethical Divisions are Outside Governance

There is a deeper issue with some laws passed by governments: the laws are an attempt to legislate ethical issues… even when the country is divided on the topic! One team wins the election, and passes a law regarding ethical issues, using their government as a bully-stick to beat-up their enemies. In the next election cycle, their enemies win the election, and they pass laws in reverse, to use the government as their own personal God declaring justice. Each side takes turns making government behave like a God, taking turns beating-up BOTH sides. A government that ‘abuses everyone in turns’ is NOT justice!

Instead, whenever there is an ethic issue that divides the people, that division is the PROOF that we, the people, have NOT found the best answer yet. It is wrong for government to involve itself as ‘the decider’ when the people still fundamentally disagree. In our Othernance, ethical issues can ONLY be decided by law once there is a super-majority — say, 80% support. In the US, that policy would immediately legalize abortions in every state, and laws which criminalized homosexuality would have been stricken from states’ legal codes in the 70’s, when support for gay rights was beginning to rise. “You people need to talk this one out, and come to an agreement, or else this Othernance should NOT be passing laws on the topic.” It is a cautionary principle, to prevent government from enforcing persecution.

Trees of Admiration & Trust

Our ethical principles, our shared values and goals, and the dialogue around them all can and should be met with good protocol. An example of how to find and coordinate the people who best-represent and best-understand each group and issue is a simple math-trick with a funny name: Directed Acyclic Graphs.

In this Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), each person is linked to each other person they know; it’s the Social Network, like your Facebook friends. And, each person marks which friends they admire for their wisdom or compassion or insight. This can be a gradient of points that you assign to them, across multiple parameters, combined. Together, these marked connections gather ‘weight’ toward certain members of the community; they are generally trusted to make wise decisions, or listen well, or form key realizations.

Now, those Admired members of the community have their OWN admiration for others, across the broad social network. We follow that chain of admiration upwards! At the top, various clusters of people from around the globe will be found, each of them admired by a group of admirable people cascading down to a wide swath of the population. And, because you gave some points to a few different people, and they did the same, then each person at the ‘bottom’ of this tree is represented by a few different clusters of admirable people at the ‘top’. Those clusters of admirable folks at the top might be called ‘representatives of your interest-groups’, though they form naturally around their members’ interests, rather than being imposed by society’s categories.

Those admirable people would be best-suited to lead dialogue regarding our ethical concerns, uniting us around common goals and methods which do not sacrifice the principles of the members.

Admirable Representation in Dialogue

The most important role for these Admirable Representatives is to listen to the people who have no voice. Whenever a subset of society is denied a voice, then the problems which currently harm them invariably spread to harm everyone, and solutions are not discussed with an eye to each need. Problems worsen, unaddressed.

There are a few other results of this admiration-DAG: Admirable representatives would be able to devote enough time to hear each side, and to speak on behalf of them when addressing everyone else, as their advocate. The various clusters of admiration at the top of our DAG would represent the core divisions of belief and values, to clarify the issues that divide us, bringing together the voices which can speak best on their sides of the issues. And, because these representatives are selected automatically by the cascade of admiration flowing upwards towards them, then there is no ballot or campaign to sway the results, no donations from election-funds. The people found by this process can come from any country on Earth, to act in service to all of us who admire their devotion and insight.

Record of Merits & Labors

Another component of good protocol is *signal*. If we plug our ears, close our eyes, and ignore reality, then we are doomed to make poor decisions. Instead, we must be receptive and sensitive to signals. Those signals inform us, to guide our decision-making. The most important signal within the operations of government: “Are our Bureaucrats actually Working, and are they doing the Job Correctly?”

That is the crux of Transparency & Accountability; we need the information that Transparency provides, in order to make an informed choice about who to hold Accountable and how. To do that, we must record the government’s internal operations, for review.

Human Bias & Review Protocol

“Who watches the watchers?” This is the engineering-problem which arises as a stumbling-block, whenever we try to implement Transparency & Accountability. How do we ensure that the folks tasked with review are doing a good job? There are protocols for that!

First, we are now able to train A.I. such that it can imitate a person’s historical decisions; for example, training an A.I. to imitate the rulings of a particular Judge, based upon their past rulings.

That Judge-Imitator A.I. can then be tested, by giving it various samples of court-cases, all different in just a few ways. Identical court cases, changing only the gender or nationality or political affiliation. If that Judge-Imitator gives a different verdict for two cases which are identical in substance, then it has revealed that the actual, human Judge is biased in that way!

By removing every biased Judge, then those who remain are more trustworthy, and they can act as the ‘human-in-the-loop’ who review the performance of A.I. systems. Trustworthy humans can be verified.

A near-term possibility in tech makes another method viable: Voluntary Brain Scans!

No, the government should not ever be able to require a Brain Scan of citizens; nor should your employer. Instead, any person who WANTS to be scanned can pay to do so, in whichever country allows it. And, people who know that they have made virtuous choices in their lives would be glad to prove their credibility! With that Brain Scan to prove that those few folks are trustworthy, then we can entrust those volunteers with monitoring and reviewing other processes. A.I. Judge-Imitators and Voluntary Brain Scans are able to select for reliable HUMANS; “A.I. watches the watchers, and the watchers can then watch the A.I.”

I hope these examples demonstrate that it is possible to avoid corruption-traps, with good protocol. These last few sections deal with the way Othernance can structure economic activity for good signal and allocation of resources.

No Exclusion from Capital after Verification

There is a disparity in power within Capitalism; the owner of a piece of equipment can hire wage-labor to use that equipment, and the laborers MUST produce what the owner tells them to produce. As a result, capital-equipment cannot be used by normal people to make their own goods; you have to make what the boss tells you to make.

With the rise of robotic automation, that disparity in power will worsen inequality. Unless you can own those robots, you lose-out on the productivity boost that they provide! To combat that, and to incentivize entrepreneurial activities, we must allow capital-equipment to be used by anyone who proves their qualifications to use it, for the products that they themselves choose to make. For example: a woodworker would be able to rent expensive tools, or rent time at a facility, to create their OWN projects. This lowers the ‘barrier-to-entry’ for people to create their own value, and it liberates people to pursue their own goals. That lowered barrier allows experimentation and innovation, and those individual workers will be able to target more niches of interest, instead of mass-producing a single, sterile design.

To coordinate all that rental demand, our Othernance can rely upon a Vickrey Auction. (Vickrey Auctions are fast an efficient; this isn’t an Auction for a painting — those sorts of auctions are specifically done that way for entertainment purposes.) The folks who bid the most for rentals get to set the schedule. At the same time, if you want to rent equipment at odd hours or off-season, then the equipment rental has few competing auctions, and it becomes cheaper. This encourages people to find new value-streams with that equipment, and it leads to a higher ‘capital-utilization rate’; the equipment is in-use for more hours every day. All of that boosts productivity and economic growth!

Here is how that Auction works, in our Othernance:

The Lease-Schedule Auction

Suppose I own a cafe and the equipment inside. In our Othernance, I am not allowed to offer wages to take all the profits for myself. Instead, I post a schedule, and anyone who is a qualified barista can bid at auction for the slots-of-time on this schedule, weeks in advance.

You are a barista who out-bid everyone else for your favorite slots of time. When you come to work, you pay for your own beans and electricity. And in return, every single dollar that comes across the counter goes straight into your pocket: 100% commission! There is literally no stronger cash incentive possible.

So, because you keep ALL of the money, you are able to get more cash by performing a better job. This is the exact opposite from the Incentive Structure of wage-labor. If you are only paid a wage at the cafe, regardless of how well you perform, then you have no incentive to work harder.

In the current wage-capitalism, employees’ lack of incentives threatens the cafe-owner’s profits. Workers try to slack-off! So, the cafe-owner has to spend money on Management, who keep employees diligent. Yet! In Othernance’s Lease-Schedule Auction, there is NO NEED for any management; if a barista slacks-off, they still pay the cafe-owner the rental fee. That barista is the only one who suffers from it.

Managers constitute roughly 10% to 15% of a business’s costs. By eliminating the need for managers, our Lease-Schedule Auction would make the average business two to three TIMES more profitable, on the same volume of sales and price. That would cause the business’s stocks to triple. Othernance’s Lease-Schedule Auction makes the entire economy more efficient, more valuable.

No managers also means no Union-Boss Fights! If a crew is needed to run the cafe, then that crew is responsible for their own agreement to divide-up the profits from their shifts. As the cafe-owner, I get paid the rent either way; I’m not harmed if you decide to strike. You decide what’s best for you, as a team, and I’m not involved.

Most importantly: suppose you have just a little cash, but you know how to make delicious coffee-syrups that you can sell online. You could rent my cafe from 10pm to 4am, making syrups all night, by bidding for that block of time in the Auction. No one else is bidding for the ‘night-shift’, so the cost per hour is minimal. You are renting the equipment that you need for your business for pennies on the dollar, avoiding that large initial cost which sinks so many new endeavors!

So, you can see the multiple specific value-streams of a Lease-Schedule Auction: workers are incentivized to work harder, no one needs managers, no worker-boss fights, savings from lack-of-managers makes business multiple times more profitable, and people with limited resources are able to be entrepreneurial and inventive by renting their tools at odd hours.

Allocation as an Operating System

Fundamentally, our ability to decide which resources to extract, where to send them, what to make with them, and who receives them, are all an Allocation Problem. And we have selected an Algorithm which performs that allocation-problem, called wage-labor and exclusive rights to use capital–equipment. Othernance, in contrast, replaces wage-labor with 100% commission, and exclusive rights to capital are replaced by a requirement to rent to the highest qualified bidder in a schedule. That algorithm Aligns Incentives, so that it directs activity toward more productive goals. It’s a superior allocation-algorithm.

A similar protocol from far earlier in this Othernance constitution aggregates everyones’ Concerns & Interests. That is allocating based upon the stated values of the people at large, to decide legislation, policy, funding of development and programs. And the Market for Externalities allocates investments toward activities which generate Positive Externalities. Each of these concepts in Othernance is a way to address the Allocation Problem. And I don’t pretend that these are the ‘perfect’ algorithms. Instead, I expect we will see further exploration and development of specific protocols for specific domains.

And Ai might find those algorithms for us…

A Monarchy of Algorithm

In the future, some people may decide to let reliable Ai select new protocols. This would not be some fickle, omnipotent overlord. It runs on a computer, and spits-out an answer in text. We humans read that answer, and we choose what to do with it. The Ai has NO direct control of any part of our economic activity; it offers suggestions.

Each of those suggestions it generates must declare the expected outcomes, so that WE Humans can evaluate the importance of those outcomes for ourselves. Based upon our own assessment of value, we choose the option we prefer.

For an entire people to collaborate in work and spending and governing, they do not need a bloody revolution. No need to capture lands from someone else. Their entire self-governance can happen through an encrypted app, a voluntary network of collaboration and coordination. If you cease to see value in participation, then stop using the app!

We will form new nations, new societies soon. Those people who listen to the various suggestions of an Ai, weighing each possible protocol’s valued impacts, to make their OWN assessment by good methods together, are most likely to succeed. That will be the real Othernance.