Infoliberalism, or how the Internet can replace the traditional political order

The development of new Web functions, especially well-designed tools for sharing and processing information about trust between users, would logically result in a new kind of political order of the society, with more efficient, flexible and coherent ways for building consensual definitions of, and naturally enforcing,

the general interest

, and efficiently preventing frauds and abuse. Independent of any geographical division, based on the generalized principle of free adhesion, self-implementable

by the only "force" of software usefulness and well-informed freedom

, this new network of multiple and decentralized powers would make obsolete the traditional designs of State and powers.

Basic principles

Liberty is not a mere absence of coercion. Rather it is something positive to be built: it requires some necessary information to be provided to people to let them take the decisions whose consequences will most likely fit their real purposes. Imagine a train station with no information on where trains are going: people would not be free to go where they want. A world without the useful information would still be a dictatorship of chance and swindles rather than a place of true liberty.

Among the different sorts of useful information, a crucial one is the information on trust. Indeed, it is the necessary condition for any other information to be considered reliable.

To provide the useful information, it is necessary to gather some properly defined raw information from many people, and process them adequately in large databases with new Internet features.

It turns out that the whole political powers and monetary systems that our economies depend on, can be understood as an information network (especially information on trust), thus working based on the value of its information much more than on any brute force; and their defects, such as "money has no smell", can be understood as consisting in ill-defined or falsified information that is relied upon just because it is the only readily available information.

Therefore, new, better designed information networks would naturally overcompete and thus suffice to subvert all our existing political and monetary systems, resolving most injustices, letting people live under their own law as long as it does not harm others.

For a very abstract and general philosophical background (which is too general to effectively specify any particular solution and thus prove the possibility to indeed find one that works, but to provide a perspective about the general meaning of problems and solutions, and even eliminate a number of wrong kinds of solutions considered by others), you can see:



List of the main concepts

The implementation of the whole project is by software for web servers and starts by developing new features for the Internet

Political theory, decribing the logic of the P2P trust system to implement and how it can replace justice and governments, among other uses

Monetary theory, describing mathematically the foundation of an online money and financial system that could work without banks nor any legal warranty

More anecdotical details may also be helpful to complete the picture, like Open markets, business models for copyleft projects development, and electronic voting systems.

Abstract

This theory describes concepts which, once implemented by making and using new software online, would provide a new, better political order of the society without government. These ideas are inspired by a search for "perfect logic" like the one of economic liberalism.

The present free market system has practical defects, but also some ideas of perfection, which can inspire us to invent the following more global and complete "perfect" solutions to old problems that had no good solution before, like those of expressing and enforcing the general interest and resisting corruption. The solution consists in rebuilding everything on communication freedom instead (unlike the traditional foundation of anarcho-capitalism on private property, though private property will be most often respected, even more than now); in particular, money will be defined no more as a private property but as a social information, though it will have most often the same use as now except that banks and banknotes will disappear.

From liberalism, is kept the idea of not using force (precisely, to make the use of force unnecessary for the political order). This makes it possible to implement the new system anywhere with no need of any support by the existing political system.

The core idea is to have databases of trust declarations and complaints between users, and to handle them logically: everything can be considered subjectively, only trusting the declarations of trusted people. Disagreements will be discussed online until the coherence of information is reached (which should logically happen). A new power system completes this, with special trust declarations which delegates anyone's "powers" to anyone else.

Indeed, money is a mere social convention, and, thanks to its virtualisation, it can take any value the rest of the society freely considers to be fair. A new monetary theory is developped, based on credits between people.



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