Sharing a podcast with Jeremy Lent, tech CEO turned author, about the idea behind his new book Ecocivilization: how we can redesign our economy, democracy and technology so everyone can thrive.

Covers:

• Why, despite the many problems of our civilization, saying it’s “malfunctioning” isn’t accurate
• Why typical metrics of progress like GDP don’t provide a full picture of how people are actually doing
• How we can design a better society for everyone taking inspiration from how ecosystems work
• Ideas to improve our democratic systems, with real world examples
• How we could distribute wealth more widely, from ownership of companies to the benefits of AI

sounds like you are navigating a very modern cultural minefield: the gap between the

practical reality of public services and the ideological battles that surround them.

Are there any political scientist out there that recognized It was a good thing that no one was able to control the spread of the printing press?

I’m sure they all have perfect hindsight now, but they probably would’ve done anything to stop it at the time.

Now we’re going through the same thing with the Internet.

Are there any political scientist out there that actually believe the uncontrolled spread of the Internet is a good idea?

Are there any of them out there that can see past the present chaos, and recognize that it will be a good thing in the long run?

Meritocratic Socialdirigisme (MSD) is a political and economic framework I developed to explore how a state could combine meritocratic governance, strategic economic direction, social responsibility, and constitutional oversight into one coherent system.

The central idea behind MSD is that the state should be organized around competence, public welfare, and long-term national development rather than allowing political interests or market forces alone to determine the country's direction.

1. Political Structure

MSD explores a system of governance built around:

• Meritocracy: Public officials should be selected according to competence, qualifications, and performance.
• Constitutional limits: Government power must be constrained by law and protected rights.
• Collegial executive: Executive responsibilities are shared among a seven-member governing council rather than concentrated entirely in one individual.
• Legislative oversight: A national legislature makes laws, approves budgets, and scrutinizes the executive.
• Independent judiciary: Courts protect constitutional rules and provide checks against abuses of power.
• Citizen participation: Citizens should have meaningful ways to influence and scrutinize public decisions.

2. Economic Structure

MSD proposes three broad economic areas:

• State Core: Essential strategic sectors are publicly owned or operated.
• State-Directed Zone: Businesses operate with greater state guidance to achieve defined economic and social objectives.
• Competitive Market Zone: Private businesses compete and make commercial decisions within the law.

The intention is to combine public control where considered necessary, coordinated development in selected sectors, and market competition elsewhere.

3. Social Responsibility

MSD places importance on the state's responsibility to secure essential public services and improve living standards. Its proposed priorities include healthcare, education, housing, food security, infrastructure, and social protection.

4. The Main Objective

MSD attempts to answer a central question:

Can a country combine competent government, strategic economic planning, social welfare, market competition, and constitutional safeguards within one political-economic framework?

MSD is a developing framework, not a claim that these goals have already been achieved. Its institutional arrangements would need to be tested against practical challenges such as corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, economic miscalculation, and the concentration of political power.

I developed MSD because I wanted to explore an alternative way of organizing the state and the economy beyond treating capitalism, socialism, and communism as the only available reference points.

Discussion questions:

1. How does MSD compare with existing systems of political economy?
2. What are its greatest theoretical strengths and weaknesses?
3. How could meritocratic administration be reconciled with democratic accountability?
4. What would need to change for MSD to work in practice?

I welcome serious criticism, questions, and alternative perspectives.

Suppose a government argues that maintaining military capacity and international influence requires its population to accept higher taxes or reduced public services. Even if the sacrifices achieve the stated goal, a separate question remains: what makes the demand legitimate?

Protecting people from aggression is a strong justification. But preserving a state’s international position can mean several things: defending its population, meeting obligations to allies, retaining influence or protecting the authority of its leaders. These purposes don’t carry the same moral weight.

One possible standard is that a sacrifice should serve a defensible public purpose, be necessary and be distributed fairly. The hard part is what each condition requires. Must a government show that less burdensome alternatives won’t work? And fairness could mean everyone contributes proportionately, or that those with the least are shielded even if others pay more.

Democratic authorization matters, but majority approval doesn’t settle it. A majority can back a policy whose costs fall heavily on a minority, and today’s voters can accept sacrifices that restrict the opportunities of future citizens who had no say.

Rawls’s difference principle and just savings principle bear on both concerns: the position of the least advantaged and obligations to future generations. How should those principles apply to sacrifices demanded in the name of security?

The strongest objection runs the other way. Protecting a political community sometimes requires serious losses now, and refusing every sacrifice can leave people exposed and weaken the institutions that protect their rights. Immediate welfare can’t be the only standard.

Still, asking people to bear hardship to preserve the conditions of a shared political life is different from asking them to sustain power whose benefits they can barely reach. The task is to draw that line without assuming that security and public welfare always align, or always conflict.

Two questions:

1. What obligations must a state meet before it can legitimately demand these sacrifices?
2. Can democratic approval justify preserving national power at the expense of those least able to bear it, or are there limits a majority can’t authorize?

This might be controversial topic but I figure I'll get your thoughts. Fork vs Chopsticks is the perfect analogy between Capitalism and Socialism.

One is a complex invention with a thought-out design to best serve the needs of the user.
The other is a simple tool that serves its purpose but requires user to be skilled.

In a capitalist country, tools are invented to make people lazy.

In a socialist country, tools are invented out of necessity.

Capitalism creates lazy dumb people to feed the rich. But Capitalism is also why we have guns, cars, and AI.

https://x.com/neuroratio/status/2109279644813869084?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2109279644813869084%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=

I'd like to hear your guys thoughts on this article.

Here's how I understand it. Politics still runs on Hobbes's bet that only a sovereign with a monopoly on force keeps order, and that bet made sense under scarcity and weak coordination tools, which are both changing. A cybernetics of liberation asks of every rule, sensor and institution whether it expands what the people inside can do, feel and become.

Good institutions are enabling constraints, the way grammar or a cell membrane is.

Freedom is navigational capacity, meaning reach, legibility, agency and trajectory over time. A trap is an arrangement where that capacity falls while leaving gets costlier. A commitment is the opposite... you chose it, you can revise it, it grows what you can do, and you'd endorse it looking back.

A healthy polity is semi-closed. Measurement goes back to the person being measured first and watches shared conditions, not individuals. Two layers replace the Leviathan: thin rules over shared land, plus law that comes with membership you choose. Enforcement is modeled on how the body corrects itself. All of it arrives through opt-in pilots, never by seizure, and it stays unproven until those pilots exist.

What do you think?

I know this may controversial but people that are going to a country who are not citizens should not be allowed to say potentially destructive things about a country while within its borders especially if they are refugees taken in by the country

Hey, y'all. My name is Vinyu Vinyu.

I'm a philosopher and writer, with knowledge on various social and natural sciences.

For several reasons I'll tell you later, I came across a radical, new, philosophical and political theory, that places nature and our coexistence with it at the center. Its name is "mediuma," which comes from "medium" -our place in the planet.

With help of a couple of friends, I wrote this proposal for a new political system, that could allow humanity to harmonically live inside our biophysical environment and in coexistence with all other living beings. In essence, a mediuma is a natural-human settlement, in which society, politics and the economy are organized and act so that the dynamic equilibria of the physical dimensions of matter, space, time and energy, is mantained.

To build this theory, I had to take a step back to look at the foundations of our perception of reality in a different way. I propose that we can understand how we perceive our reality (not reality itself, which we cannot fully grasp, given our physical and cerebral limitations) in terms of systems of dimensions.

Regarding the physical realm, this theory proposes "dimensions" as the tangible (measurable?) infinites we perceive. Those that we are able to perceive are matter, space, energy, time and another ambigous one, something like "consciousness." What we see, touch, listen, etc., are sets, conjunctions... systems, that combine, interact and limit those dimensions in possibly infinite ways. Thus, our perceived materiality is composed by systems of matter, space, energy and time, which change and evolve permanently.

While establishing a formal, simbolic, language to express these ideas, I realized that this was another way to look at mathematics. Of course, I don't claim to creat new maths (I'm nowhere close to being a mathematician). But I think here is an interesting, possibly innotive, language, that allows to make different calculations. I propose a simbolic language that represents dimensions and how they recursively build the superior dimensions of their system. This offers another way to understand how dimensions interact within a system, both in the mathematical and physical realms.

After exploring the epistemological and mathematical theory proposed here, I try to construct a political-social-economical system that is based on these premises. The mediuma aims to mimetize how our perceived physicality sustains its existence and its internal balance. Through human eyes, that would imply to try to mantain changing ("dynamic") equilibria of our fundamental dimensions: matter, space, energy, time and (the mysterious) consciousness. In a mediuma, economic growth is no longer the ultimate goal, and now is natural-human balance, equilibrium, coexistence.

Drawing from political ecology ideas, the mediumatic theory proposes new political principles that aim to push our human ways of living onto the dimensional equilibria of our settlements, environments and utimately, the whole planet. Also, it sketches five political spheres, "institutions," that try to update (and upgrade) the traditional tripartite division of power: legislative, executive and judicial power. These spheres are the following:

• Dimensions sphere: What we can do. Establishes limits to the economic and human activities, based on the current state of the environment (dimensions).
• Systems sphere: What we want to do. Debates and proposes public policies, instruments, actions, social and natural investments, etc., to be implemented within the defined dimensionals limits for the term.
• Political sphere: How and with whom we are going to do it. More traditional politics and bureaucracy that bring to life the decided initiatives.
• Balance sphere: The enabler of the others. In charge of coordination, information transfer, and evaluation of all the spheres' work. Thus it imparts justice, both within spheres and individuals.
• Garden sphere: The caregiver beyond humanity. A power branch (with full budget, spending, decision and action freedom) solely dedicated to care, grow, heal, sustain, the natural world besides the human world. It serves the ecosystems, climate, non-human living beings, etc.

This is a theory that tries to radically address the ecological crises we are facing and the biophysically impossible future we're heading to. It is a proposal that leaves behind the traditional political systems theories and tries to build a new political-social-economical form of organization, based on the dimensional systems view of our perceived reality. It pushes to stop the planetary debacle that some few are causing for all of us. It tries to fuel the fire of change.

The thing is... while developing these ideas, I also found some perilous implications of the theory. The dimensional systems view points to the interrelatedness of the (portions of) dimensions within a particular system. That is, the matter, space, time and energy of a system (say, a city, a human, a planet) are dependent on each other, and also on their combined subsystems. We see this clearly in climate change and its consquences. To mantain a sort of "frozen" equilibrium (business as usual), systems can distort some of their subsystems to compense for one or several subsystems that are altering the equilibrium. For instance, in an energy excess situation, the space and time of a subject can distort, until its matter cannot longer stay in its state and shape, and collapses. This compensation, at some point, will no longer be sustainable, and at least one dimension of the system will stop to function normally or even collapse.

If these premises hold, then our excessive extraction, consumption and disposal is leading not only to terrible ecological and climate crises, but worse, to dimensional disequilibria. In particular, two dilemmas stand out:

• The matter-energy problem: The excessive energy consumed and expelled from the sum of all human activity, may be distorting how our fundamental dimensions interact in our local system (the planet). This could be extended to if our balance within the solar system is altered by the excessive energy, with its matter also altered. What if we are distorting how our magnetosphere and atmosphere protect us from being burned by the sun, in addition to how we are changing how energy moves on the surface.
• The energy-information problem: The enormous amounts of data stored all over the world, in addition to the ever-ending computing, could be distorting the energy dimension of our system. Each datum processed or stored is an amount of energy, but also each bit of data transformation liberates an amount of entropy. The dimensional systems view would see here an massive problem, in which dimensions are being distorted so the whole system doesn't collapse. This may imply that we are distorting our matter, space, time and consciousness, so that the current internet and AI exponential growth (i.e. energy and entropy) could be mantained. The problem is, the system can't hold nor distort itself indefinitely.

So this is all that mediuma proposes, dear friends. I think that this idea has the potential to help stop the imminent destruction of life and the planet as we've known it. Nature and life deserve that we, humanity, think ways to radically change ourselves and our actions. If at least the base of this speculation is true, then we should be making a u-turn right away. But here we could also find valuable ideas to build the new world.

Mediuma need friends. We want to discuss these ideas, to start bringing them into science and then into practice. Please read us at mediuma(dot)io and let's try to elaborate this speculation.

Also, please send me a message, comment, whatever, if you want to reach out about these ideas. We'll be glad to talk.

I have recently was thinking about a better way to run a government and had a discussion with my family about it so anyways here is the idea: (i haven’t really thought this out please feel free to suggest things or poke holes in my idea)

a voting system where you can use your voting power through an app. in this app you can decide to do two things.

A: vote for someone that will vote on bills and allocation of tax payer money for you.

B: vote on all of these things yourself.

In this world you could change to whoever you would like to give your vote to at anytime, you could change to remove your vote from a party to vote something else on a bill that you may of disagreed with on your party.

You could vote for the allocation of tax payer money to change, say decreasing military spending to get rid of homelessness, or fix the potholes in your city.

In this scenario you would have complete say on absolutely anything. it would remove “powerful” people from government and make it so the government workers are truly public servants.

Lets use trump as a scenario in this world. If trump was in power and this app was introduced, instead of spending 40 billion dollars on a war with iran, the country would vote (if they chose to) on how much of the budget went to this war. maybe half the population decided they wanted money spent on this war. only $20 billion would be spent on it, and the other $20 billion could go to making healthcare more affordable or something.

in my opinion this would be a very effective way of running a government as voting every 4 years does give you a say, but why should you have to wait 4 years to vote again if you decide you dont like what your party is doing?

thank you for reading, feel free to tell my i am stupid and this wont work but i would love to have a discussion about it!

Just had a thought and would love your feedback if you have a second. I’ve been interested in designing a system that works for everyone regardless of who they are, but it's still just a draft so feel free to criticize it !

would you rsther live in progressive dictatorship where your life is stable or a freedom country where your life is on stable but on constant pressure to be better

disclaimer this is just a would you rather not mentioning any country