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RE: The Nth Society - A voluntaryist roleplaying game and decentralized project
Wow, this is an interesting concept, and here is why I say that. In most conversations with libertarian/anarchist thinking people, it falls apart when it comes to imagining what a voluntary, or even vastly more voluntary world and society might look like. You're proposing a way to model it. I like that. Not being a dev, I'm not much use, but should you need any writers, I'd love to talk with you about what you need. @markrmorrisjr
Right, one person's imagined society differs from the next, and they end up fighting over the details. Well let's test it instead of trying to plan it the minutia. Sure we need the game infrastructure, but I don't want to proscribe how we organize a free society, I don't know how to. Even if I did, that would be my free society, and maybe not yours. So playing it out together and be a way to bridge some of that gap.
Sure, join in the conversation here, feel free to join the Slack. I am as much interested in the ideas at this stage as the technical details.
but, until we have some sort of model to work toward, removing the existing structure would be fool hardy, as revolting as it is, it does provide some safeguards.
How exactly we will start out and what will first emerge, that's not entirely sure. This may take several attempts and the first may prove to be nothing but a valuable lesson in not taking things for granted.
What's important however, is that the simulation is somewhat realistic in that we do not simply recreate the existing world order of politics or that we are not careful enough to implement realistic object properties and avatar abilities.
Ya, no one is smart enough to plan exactly how society will work. That's essentially the heart of why voluntarism is better than central planning. It recognizes that the "right" answers need to emerge and that nobody knows exactly what they are.
So trying to explain how it will work can be a fun imagination experiment, but any one person's answer doesn't mean much.
Great, but, as age will teach you, not having any idea at all of where you're going, is a great way to go nowhere fast. If we're going to do away with the structure we have, some sort of agreement about how that's going to work is necessary, because you won't just be hanging with a bunch of easy goin dude bros. There will be bigger issues to solve.
I didn't say anything about "not having any idea at all". It's perfectly realistic to have good guesses and general ideas. It's unrealistic to think you know exactly what it will look like.
People coordinating is too dynamic for any one person to be able to predict perfectly. Hopefully age has taught you that.
It has, my complaint, in general, is that most anarchic/libertarian thinkers want to pretend like we can just erase the state, then make it up as we go along. That mindset is what I'm referring to.
I guess I can't argue against your anecdotal experience, but to me it seems like it's usually that the statists like to play "gotcha" with trying to explain how exactly everything will work, and eventually the only sane response is that there's no way to know
you're using an application that an anarchist built to help coordinate without central oversight
without the weight of the state, coordinating is really easy.. we probably COULD make it up as we go.. but fact is people are constantly planning and plotting decentralized/peaceful ways to connect (it just doesn't mean there's any way to have an answer to the "gotcha" questions, because it has to happen before you know for sure that that works)
You seem to have a good grasp at what the project entails. We would be happy to have you lurking in the Slack =)
Cool I will! I love to lurk 🤓
Have to create a slack or remember how to login or whatever, will be there soon-ish!
lol me too... ^
We are looking at using Discord instead because of the built in limit on messages, but this is by no means settled yet.
While the platform was built by anarchists, we all arrived inside a structure, with immutable rules in place before we were even invited. So, I think you've proven my point. Within the structure, anything is possible, but the limits are set by an oversight, governing committee, democratically elected to that position, so there's that. That process was also in place before we arrived to live out our digital fantasy.
No, because your point wasn't "rules make things work smoothly".
If that's what you had been saying, I'd have agreed and these posts wouldn't have happened.
Your point had to do with the mindset of anarchists and whether they plan things out ahead of time or they believe we can wait until the state is gone.
And now you're trying to pretend your point was something different so that you can accuse me of having proved it.
#GotchaGames
All anarchists would agree with you that rules are important.
The rules that govern us in a voluntary world are emergent, and not perfectly knowable by anyone ahead of time.
"I don't know exactly what the rules will be" is different than "rules aren't important"
So no, this did nothing for your point.
If I understand you correctly, you are trying to convey the concept that the game world itself will always be dependent on real world circumstances that existed before the game was created.
This is accurate, but as you can see from us suggesting the game in the first place (working withing our current structure) there is nothing that is definitely preventing us from creating a new concept or "space" for our ideas.
That's what we are doing here. We are creating this new "space" where we can try out new things. The only reason it is worth doing is because by us designing it and creating our avatars "early", we are being able to set our priorities before others that might want to see a different society form join up. That is the only reason we have more influence over this particular structure.
Apart from that, it should become as much a microcosm of the real world as possible. But without it, there would certainly be little to no opportunity in the first place.
My last comment was in reference to an earlier comment and referred to the steemit platform altogether. I realize the anarchical element is, I don't HAVE to participate in steem, but its hard to model real world conditions, because everyone HAS to live somewhere. Sorry, caps for emphasis, not volume.
I think your game is a great step toward modeling voluntary society, steem on.