(2020-06-12) Hall Defund And Redesign Everything

Jordan Hall: Defund (and redesign) everything. We have now reached a very interesting point. At least at the narrative level we have reached the point that “defund the police” is a real proposition

I would like to propose that this idea is very good in two ways and very bad in one. And I would like to suggest how to get the best out of it.

Moving beyond corrupt and obsolete institutions

Broadly speaking, “policing” in the United States has become a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete. This is not, however, a problem that is either exclusive or unique to policing. Quite the opposite.

When I say corrupt here, I do not necessarily mean things like bribery

Corruption at its most fundamental is the simple consequence of time and entropy working at things.

Our institutions become self-serving, bloated, out of touch, and inhumane. Time is corrosive and the forces that tend to push all institutions into corruption have been hard at work across every aspect of our social field for decades. (pathological)

At the same time, the context in which those institutions were born is also far in our past.

It is not stretching the truth to say that effectively all of our social institutions are a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete. Our education system. Our healthcare system. Our food production systems. Our banking and finance systems. Our journalism and science systems. Our political systems

They are all beyond the pale and they all should be defunded and redesigned.

Moving to Local Experimentation

One extremely good aspect of “defund the police” is that it appears to be substantially increasing the consciousness of what should be (and to a significant extent used to be) a strength of the United States: different approaches for different people in different places

First, we know that what works in one place (like pine trees growing in the mountains) might not work in another place (like the desert). Second, when it comes to things as complex as human society, we should always proceed with humility

This approach seems likely to be the de facto one used around policing in our near future. With luck this same principle will be applied across the social field. Schooling and healthcare and food and banking could and should all benefit from having as much responsibility held “at the edge” and only (carefully) managed at a higher level when it is strictly necessary to do so.

Thinking about whole systems

The primary risk that I see in the defund the police movement is that it (might) fail to take into consideration the intrinsic complexity of human systems.

The problem isn’t really that much about funding — the problem is that the institutions are corrupt and obsolete. On the one hand, taking money from the policing system doesn’t really address the deep question of how we might really go about radically upgrading the presence of lived justice. On the other hand, giving money to the education system doesn’t really address the deep question of how we might go about radically upgrading how we support healthy human development.

The effort to redesign policing should be an effort to really rethink (and re-live) our whole set of institutions

We are at one of those “big shift” points that seems to come around every few generations. The New Deal, Reconstruction and the Constitution happened back then and something of roughly equivalent magnitude wants and needs to happen now.

Therefore the whole system needs to be replaced. Not burnt down, but carefully and thoughtfully replaced.

while things like social media and smart phones can seem terrible (and in many ways they are), they also give rise to incredible potentials for coordination and auto-poesis.

Proposed principles for big change

The Principle of Choice. Designs should be oriented towards increasing the capacity for choice and building on top of that increasing capacity.

The Principle of Wholeness. Designs should be mindful of creating and working with well integrated wholes.

The Principle of Relationship. Designs should endeavor to place responsibility on real human relationships and endeavor to support the construction of strong, trusted relationships and infrastructure around relationships.

Principle of Development. Designs should strive to build capacity from the ground up, rather than over-ride failures at the ground level with top-down capacity. Make people more capable of being responsible, rather than taking their responsibility away. Build structures at the human scale that can carry more responsibility, etc.

The Principle of Subsidiarity. Designs should push as much responsibility and authority at the most immediate level that is consistent with their resolution. (SmallWorld, Network Society)

Principle of Unbundling. Designs should take care that no choice should be bound to any other choice, unless this binding is strictly required by the nature of the choice itself.

Principle of Rights and Responsibilities. Designs should make rights symmetric with responsibilities. (e.g., the right to free speech should be replaced by the the right and responsibility of meaningful communication; the right to private property should be replaced with the right and responsibility of stewardship of property).

The Principle of Fiduciary Responsibility. Designs should ensure that whenever a relationship is highly asymmetric (e.g. when AI is on one side of a relationship and not the other) that the relationship be returned to symmetry by establishing a fiduciary responsibility on the part of the stronger party.

The Principle of Network Optimization for Collective Intelligence.