Make the Agora Great Again

georgedonnelly (59)in #dtube • 7 years ago

Nation-state power is declining.

Trust in national institutions is faltering across the globe.

The specter of collectivism, nationalism and racial identity is on the rise.

What if there was another option? What if, instead of a return to early-20th-century-style strong-man protectionist regimes, we could create something better? Something less likely to lead to war and recession?

What if we could create a global market anarchist order, a swarm of self-governing jurisdictions that effected security, lawmaking and conflict resolution via freed markets outside the nation-state?

What if we could do it right under the nose of the nation-state, incrementally decentralizing its power, in the form of a private organization?

Why does such an organization not yet exist today?

There are political parties for every statist ideology, from the environmentalists to the Nazis. There are advocacy organizations for human rights, for the rainforest, and for the poor.

But there is no organization whose purpose is to plan, execute and support a global market anarchist evolution.

It’s time to start such an organization. Let’s call it Agora.

Goals

What are the goals of Agora? Here is an initial draft:

to support our members in our individual searches for liberty, prosperity and self-realization, and to come to the aid of fellow members in times of crisis or need;
to spread liberty across the globe and end the reign of nation-states by planning, executing and supporting a global market anarchist evolution;
to incubate the institutions required to provide law, security and dispute resolution in a stateless world;
to educate all of mankind in its birthright: liberty;
to support and incentivize radical accountability, responsibility and integrity for every human being; and
to cooperate with other private societies that share compatible goals, methods and standards.

Operations

What does Agora look like?

It is managed by dApp (smart contract), perhaps via Aragon or district0x.
New members are admitted via an application process.
Membership has a price and carries benefits.
Members must post a bond to ensure good behavior.
Members who engage in coercion or fraud can be removed from the organization.
Members vote on the rules (laws) of the organization. This is how lawmaking is bootstrapped.
Members are obligated to come to the support of each other in case of crisis or need, in a way to be determined at the discretion of each member. This is how member security is initially bootstrapped.
There is a mechanism for the resolution of disputes among members. This could be an arbitration panel or a simple vote. Members who refuse to respond to arbitration requests lose their bond, or some portion of it. This is how dispute resolution is bootstrapped.
Members have access to an exclusive communications channel.
Members vote on how to spend the organization’s budget in pursuit of the organization’s goals.

The Agora organization is the base layer. Other layers can be built on top of it in the form of projects. Here are some examples that come to mind:

Mutual Aid: Members can join a mutual aid society within the organization.
Incubator: Members can compete to receive seed capital for entrepreneurial projects that serve Agora’s mission.
Education: Members can receive funding to educate people around the world in market anarchist ideas via personal improvement training, entrepreneurship workshops, activism training, and more.
Crisis Response: Members can create projects to respond to some crisis in the world, as a means of experimenting with market anarchist ideas, supporting allies, for public relations or some other reason.