# How to stop the incoming fascism - Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2017/03/13/how-to-stop-the-incoming-fascism/ - Published: 2017-03-13T15:10:17+03:00 - Author: Andrei Draganescu ![](https://draganescu.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/dbf98-1mrh20wdatxszuvsnlg7tlq. png) _.. to be updated, fixed, constructed further, this set of ideas live in my profile until better consistency and meaning is achieved .._ > Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves > will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that > a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone > will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember > that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let > your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big. > _Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1846–1912)_ --- I have a big plan. Not a dream, a big plan. I have a plan about stopping the incoming fascism. My plan is this: 1. **Build a progressivist foundation** 2. **Implement regulated capitalism** 3. **Create a technological democracy** I believe unkempt technological societies give birth to monsters: meritocracies where merit is undefined. Undefined merit in meritocracy is the cornerstone of discrimination. Few people see the link between meritocracy and fascism. Technology without progressivism, in societies built on the status quo, is vulnerable to weak meritocracies who devolve into corporatism. > I think Fascism is inherent in traditionalist technological societies. I think fascism is incoming because we’re not prepared to face the completely technological future ahead of us. I think it happened in the past when great technological advancements caught us unprepared and millions died because of bad politics. _Technology will make any conservative society fail._ _Technology will make unregulated capitalism fail._ _Technology will make representativity fail._ Technology is to life, as life is to time. Technology excels at making everything super stable and predictable. AI and machine learning is merely our contemporary peak. Technology requires an overhaul of economy and politics, but taken together not in a separate and independent fashion. Technology is a great holistic phenomenon so it needs a holistic social response. I think politics are the management of life empowering our survival. This is important. We need politics and policy ready for what we devise. My plan is bout building a wall. A wall of ideas. My wall shall stretch from individual to individual, it will be a wall build upon networking and common effort, and it will keep no one out. I want to make a wall of ideas to guard us against other ideas. --- ### A Progressivist foundation > The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us > temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring > about genuine change. > Audre Lorde From the little history I’ve read it is for me beyond any reasonable doubt that “ our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us”. However, the world is founded on conservative ideas and as long as we don’t update that, restorations will occur. As progressive as today’s children are, without updating our story, our values and what we hold as aim, they will bring about generations that will switch to regressive behavior just because of the natural teen rebel identity search. We need a society founded on progressivism to prevent regression. I suggest we start amending our constitutions, make social communities and construct networking based on the following three basic progressivist rights: the right to** need intimacy**, the right to **want dignity **and the right to **have identity**. #### People need intimacy The state and all the authorities should respect and protect the intimacy of the physical person. _Privacy is merely the time we require to build intimacy._ In nothing else does the human spirit bloom other than itself. Our roots feed and breathe into the soil of our feeble egos. Intimacy is what grounds our personality into our perception of self. A person without intimacy is a lie. Unregulated privacy will lead to destruction of intimacy. Therefore surveillance without warrant, discretionary invasion of privacy, unprotected privacy rights, snooping put into law and non transparent mandates for unweaving human intimacy is what we must guard against. To need is not the same thing as to require. All humans require life support to exist but need is individual, need is entwined in personality and emerges from inner conflict. The problem is we have systems that learn about us so much that they end up knowing more about us than we do. And the problem is governments have access to these data _and we don’t_. I should own my past as well as my future. All predictive AI which binds to personal history should be open for exploration by individual access. We need intimacy in the foundation of our society for true power sharing between the governing and the governed. Only through catering for our human innate need for intimacy will the ruling and governing be by humans for humans. #### People want dignity The state should declare dignity inviolable. Dignity as in “the idea that a being has an innate right to be valued, respected, and to receive ethical treatment”. Life is rare and living time is invaluable. Conscious existence needs to be respected for the opportunity it provides: the opportunity for self discovery. We fail to protect that, that opportunity. We’re throwing people alternative facts since the dawn of civilisation: salvation, glory, bravery, conquest, patriotism and so many others. The fact is you have a one in four hundred million chance to be aware and find out who you are. Every form of state protection for the citizens should be based on the idea of dignity: social protection, economic protection, health protection. We must stop treating humans like merchandise available for shopping by corporations or fuel for the economy. Dignity is what is owned by a human person as opposed to a incorporated person simply because an incorporated person is potentially immortal. We need dignity in the foundation of our society to truly fight inequality. It is only by recognising the individual yearn for dignity of every single human that we will ever be able to grant universal access to the common wealth of our world. #### People have identity The state should guarantee the right to a self defined exhaustive identity that respects the law, but a law which does not in any way restrict personal identity. Only individual humans can define themselves. Property is not the same thing with having. Property is regulated by an agreement between society, its power holders and individual. Three poles guarantee property. But having is primary, it is the inseparable possessiveness. And people have, not own, identity. You cannot separate a human from their identity, neither by rules, nor by law or social custom. No tradition, regulation, revelation or vote should be allowed to redefine or to coerce the free and unrestrained expression of own identity. We need this in the foundation of our society so that no life is lost at the altar of social invisibility. Only a social foundation based on the inalienable individually defined identity can truly support universal diversity. --- ### Regulated capitalism > **The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government.** > On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the “ > rules of the game” and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided > on. > Milton Friedman — The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom #### Are we blind to the fact that we have a religious concept guiding our economical theory? “Invisible hand”? There is no invisible hand guiding free markets. There should be the very visible hand of regulation working to guide free markets. We cannot hope for change by using the same outdated model to look at today’s issues. And we require a fresh perspective integrating our present status as a species, not a warming up of old, sometimes failed, social theory. That means progressivists should shake off Marxism like the plague. Capitalism doesn’t require revolutions, it requires regulation. Only regulation can keep the wealthy’s power in check, not the law. The law concerns the human, regulation concerns the incorporated. Corporations are schizophrenic people and regulation is the medication or sometimes straight on straps we require to help them help themselves. Regulation has been fought forever from the right side of politics. Everything pro- business is against regulation. But when machines make decisions can we still count on a moral compass? I don’t think so. Free market doesn’t mean unregulated market. Guarding freedom means taking all the measures so that individual action is unrestricted, but leading nations and even smaller groups of people is the task of preventing the freedom of some cramping the freedom of everyone. That is what regulation is for. We should only allow exclusively public lobbying. We need to know who wants to influence what so that we can ask questions about the validity of the lobbying. Interests groups are natural, but hiding them should be criminal. We should regulate hoarding (money, resources and market). I don’t want the rich to pay tax, I want them to spend the money, I want hosing down economy, not trickle down. We should favour workers, consumers, individuals over corporations, brands and interest groups and reflect that bias in our laws, based on the simple fact, not principle, of the ephemerality of life. We can always apply the liberal perspective and filters _to _regulations, carefully craft them, but removing them altogether is definitely a bad idea because it is akin to expecting everyone to know everything, and we know that nobody knows nothing. --- ### Technological democracy > [The] system absorbs all opposition which is why nothing ever changes. > Adam Curtis — HyperNormalisation I don’t worry about today’s presidents, or parliament members, or secretaries, or government ministers or even generals. I worry about all those of tomorrow, those ones who will know you so well that they’ll be able to hurt you in ways you can’t imagine. I worry about the children of our grandchildren, because in their lifetime the guesswork of today’s mass control will turn to precision individual manipulation. And I am afraid that will redefine our concept of freedom beyond any hope of getting it back. Algorithms are not objective. We should teach ourselves this simple sentence every day. Democracy as we see it today is based on the same tribal logic of thousands of years ago. The only thing that evolved was the granted liberties of the subjects. The basic tenet of elections, representativity, is an antiquated form of power delegation which made a lot of sense in the past. Today distances shrink, time shrinks, effort to communicate is closing in on none. Becoming fun, reporting is gamified (just look at Facebook live or Twitter live). What role does representativity have in today’s world? Isn’t it time already that ancient and vulnerable democracy got an update? Introducing the democratic technocratic meritocracy. We need to update the government procedure by allowing more involvement from people. This idea gives several actionable future directions: **Paid civic time** Along with vacation people should have the possibility to get involved. It is not enough to relax and work, one must be present in the making of the common shared reality, and for that special paid time off work is required. Time spent petitioning, picketing and participating should count against a basic preset amount of paid civic time. **Extensive civic education** All schools, public and private, should elevate the importance and schedule distribution of civic education. It is time we stop the esoteric approach to how states, government and the world in general works, and allow young humans to step into adulthood prepared and ready for building a better future, instead of befuddled by the complexity of the present their ancestors built for them. **Technological enabled transparency** Money, budgets, people, lobby, costs and expenditures, government reporting and so on, all are easily accessible and searchable through public high availability indexes. We require a fundamental encouragement for the technological enabling of our country and city, not a nice to have future plan but a top priority, a base percept of all new development to be the use and design of communication, storage and access systems who empower citizens with true transparency which is means the communion between easy to query systems, fast data delivery and exhaustive indexes. **Local direct democracy** We can’t answer some questions because we’re not trained to. But if we’re trained to answer them we give unexpectedly successful answers. That is how we humans work. This is why I believe that there is real and actionable possibility of creating local direct democracy via online tools wherein each citizen can fully participate in the political and economic decisions affecting their immediate and extended living spaces.