31
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
31 points (97.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43331 readers
2998 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
My personal wet dream would be the street you live on making the decisions for that street like building a traffic light, the block making decisions about say, the plumbing.
everyone voting in a direct manner every week or month via app. Our representative democracy has been corrupted a long time ago so it is time to change that.
How would financing these projects work? Would taxation be on a street level, too? Are you willing to pay for everything that your street needs? A new traffic light or fixing pitholes sounds cheap, but it does get expensive as you scale up. I had to replace four 5x5-foot squares of sidewalk in front of my house a few years ago, and it cost me $5k. Imagine how much it would cost to re-pave a road for an entire block.
Voting purely for your own self-interest is also a double-edged sword. How sure are you that your neighbors will vote to pay for fixing a ruptured pipe that is next to your house if it doesn't impact theirs? I once lived in a condo that had a leaky roof over my apartment alone, and the remaining 20+ units kept voting against paying to fix it literally for years. That's one building. You mtiply that by a.few hundred buildings on a given street, and absolutely nothing will get done, ever.
Thats a really good question! Thank you.
This idea is part of a larger premise so I‘d need to establish a VERY different reality that most of us live in now. Funny enough, your point of people acting out of pure self interest is one part that would go first because these people would not survive the world I‘m imagining.
Federation is part of anarchism and in most interpretations I‘ve heard and read so far, communities would work for their shared benefit so of course you fix your neighbors roof, otherwise they will not help you in the future.
You know what they say about common sense.
Back to my condo story. A few years into my fight with them over the leaky roof, a radiology office opened up on the 1st floor's commercial space. Very quickly the 2nd floor residents came to find out how loud those MRI machines get, and wanted everyone to chip in for installing soundproofing. At that point 3 other units on my floor also began experiencing leaks on their ceilings because turns out water doesn't stop at apartment boundaries. The people who were voting down fixing the leak were very angry at us for voting down installing soundproofing. They just couldn't wrap their brains around the idea of shared benefit until it hit them in the face.
Well that's certainly ominous