Permissionless Politics
You can just do stuff.
I have always been “interested in politics” but for most of my adult life that interest meant nothing more than occasionally voting for lizard people and getting mad at headlines. This wasn’t “doing politics”; it was vibing, and vibes do not build civilizations.
It won’t surprise you that building a good civilization requires good government, but the open secret is that good government requires good citizenship. We are the fundamental source of political will and we can do a lot more with citizenship than vote occasionally and tweet mean things at The Bad Guys™.
This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that neither government nor civilization are likely to improve if *you* are not improving them1, and that vibing is not enough. The good news is that there’s a lot you can do, and it’s easier to get started than you might expect.
You’re probably skeptical. We tend to think of anything touching the realm of “politics” or “government” as nasty, slow, and ineffective. This is often true, but only for a desperately incomplete definition of “politics” and “government”. You don’t have to get stuck and have a bad time. Opportunity is abundant if you know where to look.
Citizen, I need you to understand that you can just do stuff.
An Invitation to Permissionless Politics
Welcome to permissionless politics - the world of politics2 available to each of us without external permission. Permissionless politics is the political opportunity that depends only on you - your skills, knowledge, and effort. It does not require permission from the “government” or “system”, so those things cannot slow you down or hold you back. In other words, permissionless politics is all the politics you can just do.
Things you can just do
There’s a surprising amount of things you can just do and I’m discovering more all the time. Here are some of them:
You can just learn how government actually works
You can just read about political history
You can just go to City Hall
You can just go to City Hall and watch government in action4
You can just watch government in action online - any time, anywhere!
You can just find data and use it to build things
You can just join your neighborhood association
You can just go to events and meet mayoral candidates, commissioners, and more!
You can just talk to your supervisor
You can just do lots of things, if you learn how.
What happens when you do Permissionless Politics
If you commit yourself to permissionless politics, first you will change, then the world around you will change.
At first you’ll be appalled by how little you knew, and how little you knew about how little you knew. Then, with a bit of effort, you can acquire a set of tools that make you powerful. I can help you. You’ll start to see the system whole, and the world will start to make a lot more sense. From there, you’ll be able to see the many affordances available to you and everyone else in our representative democracy.
It’s very often not that something can’t be done, just that you don’t know how to do it. But you could know, and you could do it. You wouldn’t expect to debug an application without looking at the code, or bake a good cake without knowing the ingredients. The same is true for politics and government.
Applied properly, permissionless politics is a serendipity machine and it has changed the way I experience San Francisco. The city feels richer and it has more texture. I know more people, I’ve been to more places, I understand more about how things happened and how they happen now. I also see how they might change and what it might take to change them. This is available to you, me, and everyone and I hope that you’ll join me.
You don’t have to do it alone! Doing citizenship is better with friends!
It’s important to be concrete about the word “politics.” I use this definition: the process of social rule-making in a given group. This includes everything from official laws to social norms.
Witnessing government is extra fun to do with friends.
Hm this is a nice read, slowly starting to peak my interest(and belief) in changing my env 😀 excited to read further
I really like your post. You've inspired me to think about citizenship. I've discovered that being a good citizen means getting to know my neighbors and local business people by name and saying hello to the kids who look like trouble on the corner. It's fun to see how government works and to get to know representatives. Community is a network. Making a difference happens through relationships. Through listening to, learning about, and appreciating what people are doing. A community or a city works when people care, literally care for their neighbors, customers, buildings, trees, streets, everything. When not enough people care, when people expect it all to be done by government or by someone else, all falls into entropy.