What Are Our Next Two Stacks?
How might we govern well together?
Transcript
What are our next two stacks?
I'm borrowing the idea of a "stack" from the world of software development. You've probably heard of "full-stack software developers" that all these companies are looking for. Well, the most popular stack originally was the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, Perl, or Python. This is a set of pieces of software that work together as a suite, really quite elegantly, to let you build out websites, web services — a whole bunch of things. A full-stack programmer knows how to run them all together.
I'm going to borrow that and use it to describe our society. I'm going to focus on two stacks that matter a lot right now. One of them is The Civilizational Stack and the other one is The Organizational Stack.
In the civilizational stack in the West, you would put in there things that would describe liberal democracy. There's democratic process, courts, separation of powers, capitalism, free press, a whole series of elements that are in that stack, the civilizational stack.
In the West, the organizational stack tends to be C corporations, 501(c)(3)s, government services, NGOs, and a couple other things, including a bunch of little vestigial organizational forms like L3Cs, special purpose corporations, and B corps — the little mammals trying to not get killed by the dinosaurs.
Now, every element I just described in both stacks, there are great critiques about all of them. All of them are crumbling. All of them are not working well. The social contract seems to be broken everywhere.
People everywhere are rising up because they feel like the social contract really has been compromised. They feel like their children's lives are going to be worse than their lives. Many of them are actually in poverty now, and that prospect is not good.
They're rising up around the world, and everything from the Arab Spring, to Caserolazos, and the Gilets Jaunes in France, the Tea Party movement, the MAGA movement, Occupy Wall Street, movements on the left, on the right, everywhere. These folks are out en masse protesting because they think that the social contract is broken.
I think of this as an involuntary renegotiation of the social contract.
I think they're renegotiating the social contract in part because every attempt to change things so far has failed. If you focus in on the Arab Spring, most of the regimes across northern Africa were toppled. How many of them are better off now? Pretty much none.
Why is that? I think in part it's because there was nothing that these people, these citizens, could reach for and "install," and I'll come back and try to elaborate on that in a second, that would actually help them create a better society. They didn't have a stack of things that they could implement.
Now, I don't mean that you go out and study governance around the world, and software around the world, and figure out best practices, and then tell people to just do exactly this. That never seems to work anyplace. What I do mean is: how do we figure out what's working in the world? How do we make it very openly available so it's easy to copy and appropriate and make your own, and how do we describe that in a way that somebody could at least conceptually add water and stir?
There are a lot of platforms out there that do open governance. There's Pol.is from VTaiwan. There's X-Road from Estonia. There's a bunch of things. I'm not sure any one of them is the right answer, but I think that the piece parts for our new stacks are already on the table right now. We just don't know which ones actually win.
We don't know what the new stacks are going to be made of, and so we're trying to explore what those might be and are incredibly interested in what you would suggest we put inside those stacks.
This is the conversation I would love to open: what do you think belongs in the new stacks, and then what principles should govern the new stacks?
For me, one of the principles is not top down, mostly bottom up with a little bit of top down, meaning how do we make this so that people can try a piece of the stack, figure out, oh, that really worked for our community. I'd like to try the next step, and make it painless, inexpensive to try, provide some expertise for people who are trying to adapt and adopt, and then see where this goes.
That's the broad idea of the next two stacks or the next stacks concept. Please leave your comments below and let me know what you think.
#thesocialcontract #nextstacks #self-governance
This post is the first in How Might We Make a Better Future? Here's a map of how they fit together:
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.