Geopolitics

Proposed one-sentence definition of democracy (or liberalism?) that's different from any I've seen:

**The government feels more like a game than like a player.**

That is, it's an environment for different people to interact, cooperate, compete etc, and not an actor exercising its own agency / intentionality.

Autocracies have seen bloody wars, marriages, alliances etc. - indeed, many older board games are inspired by these. Or, anarchies or weak democracies were autocrats swoop in to fill the power vaccuum. 

So, it's a game regardless, but what makes democracies unique is the game includes all/most of its citizens

I like this:

"The government is 95% LARPers and 5% coordination warriors."

Its definition could evolve, but right now liberal democracy feels to me like “an opaque form of governance where financial capital and retaining power are the goals and not the wellbeing of the citizens”

I like to think of the role of government as trying to deliver an attractive standard of living to people in a certain geographical area. Democracy is the mechanism whereby the allocation of resources is aligned with the general population.

🕯️They/them. Scaled cos from 0-$300k in arr, 7-35 employees, 0-100k users. Now I make candles that give people love, joy, and delight at humankind.place

What if it’s both? Like the matrix 😜

Great philosophical word that government is a game who were the player

Agreed. For me, it is more like they are playing farming SIMS using everyone as a utility/commodity

This is akin to cells in a body that may have individual agency to some extent, but the collective can have a separate and inscrutable agency (to the individual cells).  Same for individual ants having agency, but the swarm also has agency that exceeds the capacity and comprehension of the individuals.

Modern democracy is a bureaucracy.

I think it is incorrect to assert that a bureaucracy doesn't have agency.  While we may not understand it or be able to control it because it doesn't look/behave like us, I do believe that it has goals (both hidden and expressed) and it can take action to achieve those goals.

So one-player, one-game is singularity. Many players, many games is plurality. there is some curvature so when you move into one direction is becomes easier to keep going in that direction. 

Players could be defined in terms of their informational uniqueness. So one autocrat with an arm of human robots counts as one.

When I think about democracy v autocracy the differences imo are superficially information/control (power) but more deeply how systems of feedback and adaption are structured to surface richer, information signals, and adapt themselves in structure. (Eg one-game surveillance states degrade or homogenize information)

Maybe try two axis?  (one player —> many players) and (one game —-> many games). 

One game feels too monolithic. And agency and cooperation aren’t mutually exclusive (agency even increasing at intersections with divergent signals from different cooperative groups).

Not a huge fan of this

Maybe “all can design the game”

It's a good definition of politics. Liberalism is more a set of rules that enable the supporters of all the different teams to get along without each match turning into a riot.

futarchy

dev, armchair economist & crypto tea leaves reader - 

/futarchy /network-states

i've created a /futarchy channel & made a thread about the experiment we are running here 

https://warpcast.com/nicovrg/0xf3969b3b

direct democracy is markets

people expressing their opinion through their consumption

ex: people vote for local ecology regulation on agriculture but buy the cheapest veggies that are imported from non regulated market

shows they either don't realise or don't care

Not quantifiable, democracy cannot be defined from the algorithm program.