VOUCH NATIONALISM

by Luke Ford

I want to start something new.

This is my gift to the world on my 56th birthday.

I propose that if you want to legally own a gun, the easiest way for you to do this would be to to have ten law-abiding adults with spotless records (including when they were minors) vouch for you. If you choose not to go this way, the state can come up with more onerous rules to incentivize people to form and maintain ties with upstanding citizens if they want certain privileges.

If you want to have a kid with generous support from the state, you should have to have ten law-abiding adults vouch for you and your spouse.

If you behave badly with a gun, or your kids behave badly so that they become a burden for the state, those who vouched for you should have to pay a stiff price.

If you want to have kids without anyone vouching for you, you should have to pay an extra $10,000 a year in taxes as social insurance.

When I renewed my passport in Australia, I had to get a fair dinkum Australian who was not family to vouch for me.

We’re too individualist a society. We need to go in a more corporate direction. Vouching might be the way to go. If people don’t want to get the required number of vouches, then they should have to endure the onerous consequences.

If you want to drive a car, you should have to get ten adults with clean records to vouch for you, and if you become a social hazard, those who vouched for you should be on the hook to clean up the mess.

Big cities may want to up vouch requirements given that anti-social behavior, particularly with guns and cars, may have more devastating effects on more people than those who live in isolated areas.

With vouch nationalism, people will be strongly incentivized to build and maintain ties with others. People should be allowed to withdraw their vouches at any time (and thus reduce the penalty that accrues to them if those they vouched for behave badly), and so people will be incentivized to get many people to vouch for them and stay vouching for them when the vicissitudes of life cause original vouchers to drop away.

Perhaps this could apply to livestreaming and posting on the major social media platforms. If you want to livestream on Youtube, for example, you should have to have a certain number of adults with clean records vouch for you.

Perhaps there should be whole swathes of society that you can only enter if you have ten vouches behind you. Perhaps locales should be allowed to set a minimum number of vouches to enter. Perhaps you should have to have 25 vouches to enter Manhattan or 15 vouches to fly to Los Angeles. Imagine how awesome it would be to go on vacation to a place that requires 30 vouches. It would be a touch of heaven. Knowing you were in a city that required a high number of vouches, you could walk around at night, and leave your phone on the beach when you go swimming. You’ll feel more incentivized to build social trust and social cohesion and social capital. You might even feel like volunteering.

I was inspired to this line of thinking by a May 26, 2022 essay in The Atlantic:

How to Fix Twitter—And All of Social Media:

My purpose here is to point out a logical third option, one that can and should be tested out on a platform such as Twitter. In this approach, a platform would require users to form groups through free association, and then to post only through those groups, with the group’s imprimatur…

Platforms like Facebook and Reddit have similar structures—groups and subreddits—but those are for people who share notifications and invitations to view and post in certain places. The groups I’m talking about, sometimes called “mediators of individual data” or “data trusts,” are different: Members would share both good and bad consequences with one another, just like a group shares the benefits and responsibilities of a loan in microlending. This mechanism has emerged naturally to a small degree on some of the better, smaller subreddits and even more so on the software-development platform GitHub. A broader movement incorporating this idea, called “data dignity,” has emerged in spots around the world, and in nascent legal frameworks. My proposal here is to formalize the use of data trusts in code, and bake them into platforms. 

Groups, as they appear on existing platforms, can be of any size. Some number in the millions. The sort of groups I have in mind would be much smaller as a rule. The point is that the people in the groups know one another well enough to take on the pursuit of trust and quality, and to rid their groups of bots. Perhaps the size limit should be in the low hundreds, corresponding to our cognitive ability to keep track of friends and family. Or maybe it should be smaller than that. It’s possible that 60 people, or even 40 people, would be better. I say, test these ideas. Let’s find out.

Whatever its size, each group will be self-governing. Some will have a process in place for reviewing items before they are posted. Others will let members post as they see fit. Some groups will have strict membership requirements. Others might have looser standards. It will be a repeat of the old story of people building societal institutions and dealing with unavoidable trade-offs, but people will be doing this on their own terms.

What if a bunch of horrible people decide to form a group? Their collective speech will be as bad as their individual speech was before, only now it will be received in a different—and better—social-cognitive environment. Nazi magazines existed before the internet, but they labeled themselves as such, and were not confused with ambient social perception.

We perceive our world in part through social cues. We rely on people around us to help detect danger and steer attention.

 

Also published at LukeFord.net