Some value comes from inherently rivalrous goods, such as physical objects. These are goods where one person having them means everyone else doesn’t. Managing these with exchange economics makes sense.
Some value comes from inherently non-rivalrous goods, such as information. These are goods where one person having them doesn’t detract from others’ enjoyment at all. Managing these with gift economics makes sense.
Intellectual property law is a crude hack to make non-rivalrous goods rivalrous so they can be incorporated into an exchange economy. This makes sense if the vast majority of value comes from rivalrous goods.
But as technology advances, non-rivalrous goods become more important, and this becomes backwards. Incondnosa is founded on the idea of taking the academic publishing / open source / folk art model of unrestricted distribution and reputation reward as central, and then awkwardly bolting crude hacks to handle rivalrous goods they’re stuck with.
Similarly, when dealing in exchange world, automation faces pushback as it “destroys jobs”. This is backwards. Less work, especially less drudgework, is a good thing. Any system that makes destroying it unpopular has gone badly astray.
Roughly one Incondnosan in a thousand is part of an Infrastructure Team. These teams manage everything from factories to roadlaying, all of which are extremely automated because they need to be. Infrastructurists rarely visit their projects in person (especially industrial infrastructurists, as much industry is quarantined on the pollutable continent).
People join these teams to support their society, or to gain prestige, or to play with the biggest toys, or because they want more say in how infrastructure is laid.
Infrastructure teams are self-governing, with their own bylaws about how to determine who has a voice. Often whoever is doing a thing has the power to do it however they choose. This is loosely overseen by the Standing Committee on Awesome, which will step in if a team completely departs from serving the public needs.
Where applicable infrastructure teams do apply quotas, but it is generally understood that most people should never encounter one except by typo (ice cream – and only ice cream – is traditionally measured in gallons and if you request 1gl instead of 1gal you will be told that a gigaliter of ice cream exceeds your quota; the UI designers refuse to fix this because of running jokes).
The Meta Infrastructurists are the team that tries to get all the infrastructure teams fully staffed. They spread word about what’s needed, and manage the systemic honoring of infrastructure teams that might otherwise be underappreciated. There’s often a dual-honor thing here: being the xylophone band chosen to perform at the Tap Water parade means you can brag about being the world’s best xylophonists.
Particularly famous among the Meta Infrastructurists are the Sacred Whores. Their mission is to ensure that those who dedicated themselves to keeping the world running can satisfy their sexual fantasies more easily than those dedicated themselves to learning seduction.
The Standing Committee on Awesome is probably the closest thing Incondnosa has to a central government. The deliberately undignified name exists to discourage it from taking itself too seriously.
The Committee’s resolutions are (with a few exceptions) non-binding, but are taken seriously, as they speak with the auctoritas of the entire planet. For example, the Committee issued guidelines on when land should be regarded as “belonging” to someone, and the House-Building-Robot Infrastructure Team as well as various police forces followed them. There’s a general understanding that if something would benefit from a standard, or if you simply don’t want to think deeply about a policy question, their guidance is the guidance to follow.
The Committee does have the power and responsibility to oversee the infrastructure teams. Since infrastructure teams do their own governance, usually with only contributors having a voice, there is a possibility that one will become completely detached from the public interest which they should serve. If the SCoA finds that this has happened, they have the power to take administrator privileges from the existing team and grant it to someone else. When a project becomes widely-used enough to qualify as Infrastructure, whoever’s running it has the choice of whether to become Infrastructure and accept oversight, or let the SCoA spin up their own version of the thing. SCoA-overseen Infrastructure teams may also have special statuses with other Infrastructure teams or the Environmental Police.
The Committee has seven members, each of whom serves a three and a half year term, staggered so there’s a new member every six months. No individual can serve multiple terms.
Those desiring to join the committee must first secure one thousand endorsements to ensure the system isn’t overrun with candidates. Then a suite of ninety-nine Electors are chosen pseudo-randomly. The Electors meet with the candidates and have detailed discussions with both the candidates and each other before scoring. The candidate with the highest average score joins the Committee.
(The pseudo random selection is run by a merseine twister initialized by meteorological data from the previous day. The order in which the data is to be concatenated is determined two days before, kept secret, but published as a hash. Therefore anyone within the Elections Team wishing to corrupt the process would need to perfectly predict the weather worldwide, and anyone in meteorological reporting would need to falsify many data points and gain access to the Elections Team’s secrets. But the results can still be independently verified. The Elections Team is full of mathematicians and cryptographers who take pride in overkill.)
The fundamental principle of Incondnosa is that people should do things they want to do. The fundamental problem of policing is that no one who wants to be a police officer can be trusted with the job. What now?
The first rule is that there is no single police force. If you simply want to “be a cop”: too bad. Instead, there are separate organizations dedicated to stamping out their respective social ills. Some of those organizations are authorized to use violence, and that authorization is passed on to its more senior members.
Anyone can create an organization dedicated to eliminating a social ill, but this does not bring any privileges. For example, suppose you were opposed to littering. You could announce the Anti-Litter-League, pick up litter, invent litter-picking robots, write anti-litter propaganda, or assist city planners in trash-can placement. In fact, you would have to do things like that to convince the public that you were serious about litter and not just looking for an excuse to boss people around.
Once your league had been running smoothly for a while, you could apply for police powers. You would write a precise charter, specifying what litter is, what sort of violence you want to use to prevent it and under exactly what circumstances. As a new police force, you would also specify who would be granted these powers. You would also be expected to explain why this is worthwhile, and how those people have proven their trustworthiness. The charter is then put to a general vote. Three quarters of the population must vote yes for the powers to be granted.
The charter is then good for five years. It is traditional to put it up for renewal every four, so that if it gets voted down you have another chance. Once a police force is ongoing, new members may be granted violence privileges when the existing violence-authorized members think the new recruit has proven sufficient dedication to the cause. This requires at least a year of dedicated nonviolent work. No person may hold violence authorization for multiple agencies.
Once a person is authorized for violence, they are not granted discretion. They have an affirmative duty to enforce the law evenhandedly. If they cannot do this in good conscience, they may resign in the field. After resigning, a person cannot rejoin for a year unless the charter is revised to address the reason they resigned. (Field resignations are rare, and when they occur, they usually result in revised charters.)
There does not exist an anti-litter police force. There have been occasional attempts, but none have kept enough people with enough determination for long enough. The longest lasting tried an interesting hack to keep their caseload down: littering is forbidden if your official name concatenated with the date and cryptographically signed is divisible by 256. The cryptographic signatures and public key are released so there can be accountability, but the private key is not so that no one knows they’re immune to enforcement. Even with this, eventually they couldn’t keep their numbers up and dissolved themselves. Those who remain upset about litter use robotics or propaganda, and it works pretty well.
Some cities do have anti-litter ordinances, backed not by violence but by expulsion. Similarly, there is no anti-theft police. Theft is frowned on, but no one cares enough to form a police force. There does exist a dedicated core for an anti-drug police, but they have never succeeded in getting the votes for police powers.
There exists an anti-violence police, with a straightforward charter and broad powers: to intervene violently so long as the injury they cause is less than the one they were preventing, and to punish proportionally to the extent of an injury done. There exists a separate police force for violent rape, since the normal metrics of severity of violence don’t apply there, and many of the investigative tasks are different. The exists yet another force for nonviolent rape, with a much longer and more contentious charter spelling out exactly what wrongs warrant what intervention. On the opposite end of charters, the anti-pollution police have a charter that spells out the mechanisms by which they can make regulations – but they have only minimal violence privileges.
Police are watched over by meta-police. Crimes include violence-beyond-charter, preferential enforcement, and using their police status to pressure others. These are very serious matters.
Meta-police are watched over by three small meta-meta-police agencies, known as red, green and blue. Each agency is responsible for policing both the normal meta-police and the other two agencies. The constant concern is that two of these agencies will get too close and start overlooking each-other’s transgressions. Each agency watches vigilantly for signs of closeness between the other two.
Trials are managed by fact-judges, also known as qadis out of respect for both Islam and Scrabble. Qadis report their results as numeric probabilities, which are then compared to thresholds in the law. A small percentage of cases are frame-ups, to test the qadis’ calibration. Qadis compete (in a friendly way) for glory of being both well-calibrated and able to reach confident conclusions, and when one finds a useful epistemic hygene hack, other copy it.
If there is an ambiguity in the law, this goes to a panel of law-judges, and their conclusion is included in the charter next time it comes up for re-election.
Punishments in Incondnosa can include community service, public shaming, barring from positions of responsibility (e.g. police forces), revocation of adult status (and bar from re-entry for a period of up to ten years), restitution, vulnerability, exile and death.
Restitution is used when there is a single unambiguous victim who is willing to forgive. Anything can be offered, and the matter is negotiated between them. If an agreement is not reached, one of the other sentences will be applied. (If the restitution is a promise, the court’s punishment can be held in abeyance until it’s clear whether the promise was kept.)
Vulnerability is a uniquely Incondnosan punishment, in which the convict is fitted with a highly visible collar. The collar has a command word written on it, which causes it to apply a crippling electric shock. Attempting to tamper with the collar will cause it to explode. This is used for severe violent criminals to prevent them from committing additional crimes, without needing imprisonment or full time guards.
Exile is rarely used, as Incondnosa doesn’t really want to inflict its criminals on the rest of the galaxy. It is, however, used as a punishment-of-last-resort for people who refuse to co-operate with lesser punishments (e.g. simply don’t show up for community service).
Death is reserved for mass murder, sabotage of key infrastructure, and abuse of police power. It is carried out by volcano.
After the F’nar raid, Incondnosa eventually decided to get its military a bit more organized.
There is a military infrastructure team, which ensures sufficient drones and hyperspace interdicters remain in appropriate orbits, and contains the Commanders of the Armed Forces. These commanders have a rotation of being Supreme Commander, who actually commands everything. At any moment, there is a Supreme Commander, who is awake and reachable. If the Supreme Commander of the moment needs help, he can call any other commander who will (if available) be subordinate until shift-change. This is as close to a command hierarchy as Incondnosans are comfortable with.
The actual combat forces are entirely roboticized. Incondnosa does not believe in putting humans into combat zones. Any Commander can command the forces, though the current Supreme Commander can overrule this (this protects in case the Supreme Commander rotation fails). All Commanders are treated as law enforcement for metacop purposes.
The military infrastructure team also provides assistance to neighbors and allies, in co-ordination with the diplomats. Incondnosa is conveniently bordered by the Terran Empire on five sides with the sixth facing the League of Independent Systems. If the Faroic ever make good their threat to invade, they’ll need to go through the League, and Incondnosan strategists would like that to be difficult.
(The Faroic practice slavery and have demanded Incondnosa cease all aid to escaped slaves. Incondnosa’s diplomats, deliberately underpowered, dutifully put up for election a law against angering galactic foreign powers and a police force to enforce it. It was voted down 93% to 7%.)
How would Incondnosa handle a pandemic?
The boring answer is: with superior technology. Viruses aren’t one-off threats. Generic antiviral technology like gene sequencers, RNA-vaccine-assemblers and automated antibody makers are in every home.
In general, Incondnosan medicine is much more do-it-yourself. If you’re sick, the last thing you want to do is leave the house and see a doctor and pharmacist. Just stagger into your bathroom, sequence the pathogen, print yourself an antibody, then post the genome to your blog so all your friends can vaccinate. Incondnosan doctors help diagnose confusing cases.
But suppose that didn’t work…
The Incondnosan population would be a big help. By law and custom, you must master basic mathematics and the learning of new skills in order to qualify as an adult. This is reinforced by a general expectation of these skills much as the real world expects literacy. Everyone already knows what exponential growth is. Everyone is capable of reading a wikipedia page and understanding R0. And, given reasonable motivation, will do so.
The Incondnosans do have a Medical Fraud Police force, but it operates entirely on a responsive basis. Literally anyone can devise and recommend a medical device or treatment. If the MFP find that the recommendation exceeds the evidence, they can require a correction (both in copy and pushed to existing users). If this requirement is ignored or the boaster is found (by a qadi) to have acted in bad faith, then the MFP can punish him with public shaming or (in extreme cases) loss of adulthood. This means that Incondnosans can respond to emergencies fast and dot the i’s later.
There is also a Quarantine Police force, which is authorized to physically restrain people in emergencies. The definition of emergency is in the QP charter and is in terms of QALY loss vs the standard deviation of the death rate. Declaring an emergency is a task for the head of the force, elected by the force’s members (those who have contributed significantly in noncompulsive ways for at least a year).
Declaring an emergency incorrectly is punishable by ineligibility for violence powers for at least five years. Doing so dishonestly is punishable by death.
Every Incondnosan citizen or guest is given a unique official name. Typically this involves adding a middle name to their common name. The first person to register a common name doesn’t need a disambiguating middle name, but the second gets Ba, the third Ca, eventually Za, Beh, later Zoo then Baba, etc. You can change your official name (up to ten times a year to prevent DoS) but the old name remains used and unavailable.
There exists a publicly queryable database with official names, preferred shortenings, nonsecret nicknames, acknowledged public keys (annotated with security level), salted hashed passwords (low security level only), adulthood status, and brief additional notes under the individual’s control (often url of personal webpage). Anyone tracking people is welcome to use this as their identity management and authenticate with the published keys. Anyone handling any sort of per-person quota is strongly encouraged to do so.
People are generally encouraged to keep their high-security private keys on special-purpose devises that cannot reveal the keys, only decrypt or sign when given a password or crude biometric. These devises generally cannot withstand truly determined attack, but should slow down any attacker long enough to cancel the key. Lower-security private keys (with limited permissions) are often kept on devises without passwords, or even on normal computers. Higher security keys can be used to establish or cancel lower security keys, and may be required for high-stakes actions.
There also exists a secret database of IDs and biometrics. Someone who loses access to their highest-security key can go in person to an identity management office, have their biometrics measured on trusted equipment, and gain access to their account (whereupon they should set a new key).
The secret database is also accessible by emergency medical staff for use on unconscious or nonverbal patients only, and by some police forces (including anti-violence and anti-forceful-rape) as specified in the police charters.
Anyone with access to the secret database, including its own sysadmins, qualifies as Police for purposes of Abuse of Power investigations by metacops.
There is no age of majority on Incondnosa. Instead, a child becomes an adult by passing the Adulthood Exams and Ordeals.
You may attempt the Ordeals at any age. Most people attempt them around 20. The youngest to succeed was 12. Some see little need for formal adulthood, and put it off until their parents grow infirm, or never attempt them at all. The only restriction is that if you fail you must wait a year minus a day before trying again.
The Exams are fairly straightforward, testing basic proficiency at logic, statistics and reading comprehension. The latter includes texts which are designed to be misleading. Most get them out of the way long before they are ready to attempt the ordeals.
They do have one twist: when you declare readiness, you must list dates on which you are not available to take the exam. You can add to the list, but must do so at least three days in advance. When your actual exam date comes, you will be given no warning. Ninety percent of exams are issued within a hundred days of request (evenly distributed) and the rest are administered at an exponential decay (20% chance each day).
The ordeals are more complicated…
To begin, you must go to the Temple of Adulthood. Its entrance is hidden. By sacred custom, no one writes the location down nor volunteers information about it. You must ask. Most adults will answer plainly, but this is their choice. You may need to ask several people. There is some disagreement as to whether this is mere preparation, or is the first of the ordeals.
Inside the temple, you first find the antechamber, where there is a sleeveless robe of plain white linen and a garbage chute. You must throw your existing clothing, and anything else you have, down the chute, and don the robe instead. It is traditional to enter the temple wearing clothing you were fond of, which symbolizes your childhood, or with some symbolic possession, but this is not required. Some people simply don’t have anything appropriate.
Once you’ve done that, you must go to the courtyard to collect the tiles. The tiles are porcelain, laser-etched with instructions, and placed in torches. The torches are dilute isopropanol. maintaining a temperature of 140F. By the time you reach them, the tiles will also be that temperature. You must reach into the torches and then carry them out of the courtyard with your bare hands. If you shift your grip frequently, you will only suffer first degree burns. If you drop the tiles, they will shatter. You may gather up the pieces and continue, but the Temple will not provide replacements. At the edge of the courtyard there is a basin of water to cool the tiles with (they’re designed not to crack from thermal shock).
One tile describes a location on the borders of developed territory. That is where you must live for the next week. The other describes a skill. You must learn it. The skills are chosen for obscurity, and for taking a bit less than a week to learn.
When you reach the location, there’s nothing there but basic infrastructure. There is a standard data pad in the pocket of your robe, and you can connect that to the data line to access standard services. Then you can start ordering standard manufactured goods. Like a house.
For the next week, the only rules are that you must use this plot as your residence, and that you cannot receive human help. You can visit elsewhere, and interact with people, but if they help you with anything you fail. It is traditional to wear your ordeal robe when in public so that no kindhearted person accidentally ruins your trial.
It is up to you to balance creating and running a home against studying. You are welcome to order all the manufactured goods you like, and to use library patterns. Similarly, you are welcome to use any published tutorial or exercise set – even previously written things on answerboards. The only forbidden resources are actual human beings.
Likewise, you are welcome to maintain your social life or even throw a giant party. Doing so may distract from your studies. Managing your time is part of the test.
At the end of the week, you will be called upon to demonstrate the skill. If you succeed, you are now a full adult.
It is traditional to keep the tiles, and many people assemble decorative frames for them. The house, however, is usually abandoned and autocollected. It’s not really where you’ll want to live anyway.
Shortly after arriving in Incondnosa, people realized the planet did not have as many gorgeous beaches as they had people who would like to live on gorgeous beaches.
The Standing Committee on Awesome, in their capacity as fixers of last resort, took three actions.
First, they set aside large tracts of beach as public, and created a Beaches Infrastructure Team. Next, they set aside more beaches at Managed, and created the Temporary Committee on Beach Allocation (the “Temporary” was aspirational: at the time it was anyone’s guess whether the committee would ever dissolve). Finally, they declared that first-come-first-served land claims on beaches would last only five years, and that claiming one for personal benefit was discouraged. This last was meant as a safety valve, in case the first two teams missed a use case.
(In fact, they did: very large private gatherings such as weddings. Several years in, a marrying couple decided they wanted such a thing, claimed a beach, built a banquet hall, held a lovely wedding, and then handed over the used hall to the TCBA, which, recognizing a good idea, made hundreds of copies.)
The Beach Infrastructure Committee operated pretty straightforwardly. They built changing rooms, showers, lockers and lots of light rail. Like most infrastructure teams, they were self-governing – when anarchy, consensus and a/b testing failed. The Standing Committee on Awesome kept an eye on them to ensure they were acting in the public interest, but never felt the need to interfere.
The Temporary Committee on Beach Allocation was less straightforward. It was their job to manage trade offs. So, for a start, they had a real leadership structure. The committee had seven members, elected at large with dithering from people who had used or wanted to use private beaches, declared by self report. (The risk of failing to heed a constituency by heuristic was seen as higher than the risk that people with no interest in beaches would lie to control beaches.)
A dithered election meant that any candidate who won a seventh of cast votes received a seat and the votes were removed. Remaining seats were the chosen pseudo randomly (by the same randomness as SCoA Electors), with each candidate’s odds equal to their remaining fraction of the vote. If a candidate gained multiple seats (either because they gained more than two sevenths of votes or because they had more than once seventh and got lucky in dithering), that candidate got to name who would hold the additional seat.
As a first pass, the TCBA divided the beachfront into 20’ x 100’ sections (trapezoids where the beach curved) and built 15’ x 70’ cottages on each of them. This maximized the number of cottages, on the logic that having a beach is the point.
They granted each individual a quota (initially one cabin-day per year, quickly raised) and established a lottery for who got first pick.
After a few months of this, they opened complaint forums. Various forums were created where past beachers could make complaints and vote up or down each other’s. Forums were sized so that a latecomer could read all preceding comments before adding new one. Some had concrete prompts like “How can we improve the lottery process”, some vaguer like, “How would a truly private cabin that belonged to you have been better?” and some had no prompt at all.
The Committee was well aware that they were in violation of the No Sacrifice principle and wanted to minimize that as fast as they could.
The biggest complaint in the first round was that the rows of near identical cabins were institutional and creepy. This was a common complaint in the first few years of Incondnosa, when too few architects strove valiantly to fill an entire planet with buildings. A new policy was announced that anyone who contributed a cabin design got a week in the new cabin not counted against quota. New designs were encouraged to include four bedrooms, three bathrooms and an outdoor shower, and most did. Soon they had enough designs to make the neighborhoods feel natural. (Some Designs)
There were, predictably, complaints about the crude lottery system. It soon gained a satisfactory feature set.
There were more interesting complaints about the temporary communities that formed around the cottages. Many felt that being packed like this gave less of a feeling of independence than a hypothetical large personal estate. So the Committee formed neighborhoods with a commitment to ignore each other except for practical necessity. And, in response, neighborhoods with a commitment to being sociable and friendly. Similarly, clothing optional and high-modesty neighborhoods. And, as inevitable consequence, friendly-but-no-seeking-romance neighborhoods, and then yes-seeking-romance neighborhoods which broke into so many fractal pieces that each threatened to become unmanageably small.
The Committee ran with this by extensive surveying, automated packing algorithms, strong willingness to slice time as well as space, and an early decision not to attempt any sort of cartesian product.
Despite all the special neighborhoods, the largest block of beach-houses remained “ordinary”, with no special codes of behavior, but all Incondnosa-wide norms and taboos in place.
Once things settled down a bit, many beaches were low-demand enough that people could make them permanent homes. Only the most beautiful beaches were exclusively time-sliced.
And then, several decades later, a geo-engineer figured out how to make long narrow islands in shallow water. The number of beaches in gorgeous tropical waters skyrocketed, and the Temporary Committee on Beach Allocation fullfilled the first word of its name. The time-sliced neighborhoods were passed to the Beach Infrastructure Team, and the TCBA disbanded. There were celebrations of all sorts throughout the planet honoring the geo-engineer who achieved this, which went on to become annual traditions. Members of the TCBA were also honored, because stepping down is hard and important.
Every case of allocation is different, but this hopefully illustrates some general principles.
Wiring in Incondnosan houses does not acknowledge a distinction between “residential wiring” and “extension cords”. Everything connects with plugs, up to and including the house itself plugging into the infrastructure transformer with a 100 amp extension cord. Plugs which really shouldn’t fall out are augmented with small plastic hooks and pegs. Plugs which might create scary sparks have switches: plug then switch. And all plugs have embedded circuit breakers set to slightly less current than the cord (or appliance, for a non-extension cord) itself is rated for.
Furthermore, wiring is never hidden inside a wall. It may be recessed into a wall, and even hidden behind a plastic vanity cover, but such covers are easily removed so the wiring is accessible. More often such recesses are colored and form artistic patterns. Other houses use cable trays, dropped ceilings, or raised floors. A “wall outlet” is simply a multiple that sits flush with a wall.
When a wire must cross a wall, the standard solution is a small block of springy high density foam with a horizontal split in the middle. This allows cables, including with heads fatter than they are, to pass through without breaking sound isolation.
A cord’s supported amperage is written on the plugs at both ends and apparent from the thickness of the wire. Meanwhile the purpose of the cord is indicated by the coloration of the insulation (though this convention is sometimes ignored). Classically, the base color indicates the room it serves (green=kitchen, blue=bedroom, white=moves around) and speckles indicate specific appliances (red=stove, orange=stove reverse phase, yellow=toaster, black=miscellaneous). This makes it easy to trace a line when necessary.
All of this is in accordance with an early epigram delivered by the Standing Committee on Awesome: “Rewiring your house should be easier than making an appointment for an electrician to visit in the Terran Empire, not counting the money spent”. This has led later generations to wonder just what making an appointment for an electrician was like.
The same principle applies to plumbing, which often passes through the same spaces. Incondnosan plumbing favors hoses over pipes where possible, making it easy to run them in whatever space is architecturally convenient. Said hoses are typically thick silicone reinforced with a sparse stainless steel mesh, which makes it possible with some effort to see where a blockage is. Most fixes are a simple matter of closing two shutoff valves (there are lots of these), draining a segment into a bucket, and replacing one hose.
Some in Incondnosa expected these designs to filter back into the Terran Empire and other such spaces. They haven’t. Most likely because the people constructing houses there are themselves professional electricians and plumbers, and it’s in their interest to ensure future work for themselves. From an Incondnosan perspective, this is just another example of how Terran Empire does everything backwards.