Idea Labs! An open thread for collaborative worldbuilding
Let's brainstorm the future together.
In addition to writing prompts and salon discussions, another way I thought we could participate in collaborative worldbuilding together is to host regular “Idea Labs.”
Here’s the idea: I’ll create an open thread crowdsourced with your ideas from the comments and discussion threads. We can discuss them here and even come up with new ones!
Here’s our first Idea Lab sourced from your comments and notes:
1. Each voter gets 100 votes that they can allocate to issues/candidates
A single binary vote for a particular candidate doesn’t communicate anything more than “I like him better than the other candidates.” It doesn’t communicate a voter’s passion regarding specific issues. How can we communicate passion for specific issues with votes? One way would be to give each voter 100 votes which they can then allocate to issues and candidates in any way they want.
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2. Instead of debates, presidential candidates defend their plans like a thesis
[Candidates] submit plans as part of filing to run, and in lieu if the idiotic debates we currently have, we televise them presenting their plans and taking questions for experts and citizens, almost like defending a thesis.
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3. We make congress enormous
The House of Representatives is meant to be the voice of the American people at the federal level, but the House has been capped at 435 members since 1913, when the US population was less than 1/3 of what it is today. Practically, representative democracy doesn't work well when there are so few representatives to represent so many people… ChatGPT tells me that if representation matched what we originally had at the start of the country (roughly 30,000 people per representative), we'd need about 11,000 reps!
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4. An annual holiday where we shut off the internet for a week
Maybe it will be a holiday from our phones and we will all turn off the entire internet for one week every year.
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5. What if social media was owned by its users as a DAO?
There is no board, there is no centralized directive. All the people who are on the social media decentralized application could be DAO members, all make all the decisions by, for example, voting.
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6. Make companies pay for the entire lifecycle of their products
Tax people for producing things that go to landfill or otherwise pollute the planet and use the revenues for remediation and sustainable poverty alleviation.
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Let’s talk about these ideas in the comments. Or propose your own!
Ahhh I love these so much! It feels amazing to see is exercise our imagination like this. Gives me so much hope — and reconfirms what I've believed for a while now: we really do have everything we need, right here btwn our bodies and brains. We just need the time and space to figure things out.
Love that you included my digital holiday idea! For #2 Andrew Yang proposed something similar, said public deserved detailed power points and real data on presidential candidate plans.
And for #3, in addition to Congress, make the Supreme Court substantially larger so that we can get more done and have it be less politicized and each justice won’t have to work until they fall over dead.