The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Misfit Ideas.'
We're used to hearing things discussed in a certain way. Ideas that don't fit in are relegated to the fringe or ignored entirely. This shuts down many potentially productive conversations before they even begin. It imposes limits on our imaginations.
I personally harbor several misfit ideas, particularly when it comes to how economic and power relationships are described. For example, I don't think it makes sense to directly compare capital and labor. In my view, capital itself is a meaningless term for simple property, and it's much more appropriate to compare the labor of financiers with the labor of their workers directly. From this perspective, it quickly becomes clear that the labor of financiers is valued much more highly than the value of the labor of their workers by our society. This is an important truth that gets glossed over by more customary ways of talking about the subject.
Perhaps less controversial is my characterization of society as a set of social agreements. The government is a social agreement. The law is a social agreement. The economy is a social agreement. Money itself is a social agreement. Individuals in official or informal capacities may impose these agreements upon us in some circumstances, but we're really only party to these agreements when we choose to accept their reality. Otherwise they amount to nothing more than the choices of other people.
The biggest implication of this way of seeing things is that it acknowledges the space there is to radically revise societal agreements at any time. Like, if everybody just woke up and decided that we should be a representative democracy, we could become a representative democracy in short order. Or if everybody decided to dismantle the war machine, we could do that too.
There's nothing physical stopping us from dramatic improvement. And there are fewer technical barriers to such improvement with every passing year. The world isn't stopping us from fixing the world. Social reality is.
In some ways, modifying this reality has become much more difficult as social interaction has migrated to the web. Online, we're atomized and manipulated by the control regime, with few opportunities to participate in meaningful change. Even so, there's an unprecedented opportunity here. The opportunity to create massive self-governing networks that renegotiate social agreements on our behalf.
Imagine politicians only voting in accordance with the will of their constituents, as expressed by secure polling. This is coming, if it's not already here. Taking the idea further, imagine perpetual elections, where voters could change which candidate they support at any moment. This would necessitate perpetual campaigning and would all but guarantee that elected officials would keep their promises.
There's value in tradition, but there's also constraint. The status quo serves a purpose, but it also stands between us and progress. Nowhere in public discourse have I heard calls for revising the social agreements underpinning society. Maybe it's time.
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