Starting off with the End in mind -

General
1

It is clear to me we have an advantage if we create a new cultural layer between the corrupted systems and the systems that swarms control.

For example - for food - if we created a new supermarket that independently tested our foods to a much higher standard than the FDA did, we could make that the cultural center of the business. We are more transparent, and more ethical.

For governance systems, the same.

As I mentioned I love the idea of doing a network of businesses. I also love the idea of gamifying this quest to decentralize capitalism

So here is a rough outline - helped by AI to outline it so keep scrolling because spacing is weird - of a game I call The Guild of Guilds:

**I have not read this deeply yet but wanted to put here to criticize now and for later:

THE GUILD OF GUILDS**

A Constitutional Swarm for Building, Preserving, and Backing Up Civilization

THE PREMISE

Human societies once experimented with how they organized power.

Guilds were not a metaphor — they were infrastructure.

We are restoring that idea using:

Radical transparency

  • Collective swarm intelligence

  • Decentralized decision-making

  • Pooled resources

  • A constitution that protects individual rights

This is not about replacing existing systems overnight.

It is about building parallel capacity — so failure is survivable.

THE STRUCTURE

THE GUILD OF GUILDS

A meta-organization composed of many autonomous but aligned guilds.

Each guild:

  • Specializes in a domain

  • Self-governs locally

  • Operates under a shared constitution

  • Contributes to and draws from a shared resource pool

The swarm coordinates across guilds rather than ruling over them.

EXAMPLES OF GUILDS

Tech & Infrastructure Guild

  • Food & Hospitality Guild

  • Combat & Security Guild

  • Media & Arts Guild

  • Health & Wellness Guild

  • Construction & Trades Guild

  • Education & Research Guild

Guilds may form, merge, fork, or dissolve.

Creation is permissionless; participation is voluntary.

TWO PATHS WITHIN EVERY GUILD

Every member selects a path — not as a caste, but as a phase.

:crossed_swords: THE WARRIOR PATH

(Action, execution, protection)

Levels

  1. Cadet

  2. Skill Sharpener

  3. Apprentice

  4. Protector

  5. Warrior

Warriors:

  • Execute decisions

  • Build and maintain real assets

  • Defend people, systems, and values

  • Respond when systems fail or are threatened

:scroll: THE SAGE PATH

(Knowledge, strategy, governance)

Levels

  1. Conscript

  2. Student

  3. Apprentice

  4. Scholar

  5. Sage

Sages:

  • Analyze incentives and systems

  • Preserve institutional memory

  • Design governance frameworks

  • Guide decisions through evidence and reason

PATH FLUIDITY (THIS IS CRITICAL)

Members are strongly encouraged to experience both paths.

Why:

  • Warriors who’ve studied govern better

  • Sages who’ve executed think clearer

  • Separating thinkers from doers creates fragility

Path-crossing is not optional for leadership.

THE SWARM COACH (HIGHEST HONOR)

:globe_with_meridians: SWARM COACH

A Swarm Coach:

  • Must complete both the Warrior and Sage paths

  • Holds no unilateral authority

  • Facilitates collective intelligence

  • Maintains constitutional boundaries

  • Detects corruption, capture, or drift

They are stewards of process, not rulers of people.

GOVERNANCE PRINCIPLES (NON-NEGOTIABLE)

  • Radical Transparency
    Budgets, votes, rationales, and outcomes are visible by default.

  • Decentralized Decision-Making
    Authority flows from process and participation, not titles.

  • Collective Swarm Intelligence
    Structured group cognition outperforms individual hierarchy.

  • Constitutional Individual Rights
    The collective may not override specified individual freedoms — ever.

Majorities are limited.

Rights are firewalls.

THE CONSTITUTION

The constitution defines:

  • What decisions are allowed

  • What decisions are forbidden

  • How disputes are resolved

  • How power is revoked

  • How members exit safely

  • How systems evolve without collapse

This constitution binds the swarm itself.

SHARED RESOURCE POOL

(“Skin in the Game”)

  • Contribution: $25 per month

  • Funds are pooled transparently

  • Uses include:

    • Business acquisition or creation

    • Infrastructure and tools

    • Education and training

    • Mutual aid and resilience funds

    • Legal and operational defense

Every dollar is auditable.

There is no dark treasury.

ECONOMICS OF THE SWARM

The Guild of Guilds may:

  • Own productive assets

  • Employ members

  • Share upside proportionally

  • Offer privileges based on trust and contribution

Rank earns responsibility first — rewards second.

PARALLEL ECONOMY & BACKUP SYSTEMS

If the swarm chooses, it may design and operate:

  • A custom currency or token system

  • A barter and credit network

  • A parallel economic layer inside the guild network

Purpose:

  • Reduce dependence on failing systems

  • Enable trade and coordination when institutions break

  • Function as a backup civic infrastructure

This is not ideological.

It is redundancy engineering for civilization.

Participation is voluntary.

Exit is always allowed.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This is not:

A popularity contest

  • A cult

  • A political party

  • A tech buzzword DAO

  • A replacement state (until or unless people choose it)

This is a sandbox for governance.

THE POINT

We do not need to overthrow systems to outgrow them.

We need parallel systems ready when the old ones fail.

Power does not disappear — it reorganizes.

We are choosing to reorganize it consciously.

2

@DannyM you like gamification, yeah?

3

I always have a problem with wording like “decentralize capitalism”, it’s like saying “make water wet.”

Real capitalism IS decentralized by definition. It’s just what happens when markets operate without controlling forces. The early web before big tech monopolies? That was capitalism. The FOSS ecosystem where the best ideas win through voluntary adoption? Also capitalism.

As some of you know, I’m a staunch agorist. To me, capitalism means complete free markets without a controlling force. Hence the wording “decentralize capitalism” makes little sense; capitalism IS decentralized by definition. What we see today in the world, is, being as charitable as I can to the state, cronyism, or more accurately, various forms of state-controlled economies.

In case the terminology isn’t clear to you, an angorist is one who advocates and wishes for counter-economics and parallel voluntary exchange networks that operate outside state control, because we believe that trying to reform or capture the existing political structures is impossible.

This brings me to why the guild structure, while appealing, fundamentally contradicts free markets. Guilds.

Guilds work in fantasy series, and video games, as they essentially replace the state with a bunch of “smaller states”/unions that usually have more “skin in the game”, given that they themselves make regulations that their own people have to follow, and their use of power is a clear benefit to those that are part of the guild. But if you delve into fantasy novels that follow those guilds, and the people in them, soon you will soon realize that it creates the same political game as what we have now in the real world, except on a smaller scale.

Let me walk you through an example of what I mean:

an inventor discovers a way to create plant-based paper, which is much cheaper an faster to produce than traditional animal parchment, so she begins selling it to merchants who are thrilled to have an affordable writing surface. The Parchment Guild immediately recognizes this as an existential thread; their members have spent decades perfecting their craft and creating parchment workshops and equipment, building their entire livelihoods around parchment production. So the Parchment Guild brings the matter before the Guild of Guilds (the nobility), leveraging their political connections, and their relationships to argue that plant-paper cannot be sold as it’s an existential threat to their livelihood; eventually reaching the compromise that paper needs their own guild, and the two need to be in constant collaboration on all business decisions, pricing and distribution channels, to prevent either of them to undercut the other.

And the guild of guilds you’re describing, is often represented in those series and games as the nobility, another word for the state :slight_smile:. Of course any of us would take the nobility in a fantasy series over our governments today, at least they have some sense of value and honor, and in some series their power comes from something inherit about them, such as the fact that they have mana that for various reasons their world needs to survive… But it’s just choosing the “lesser evil”, isn’t it? Aaand we don’t live in those worlds anyways :slight_smile:

The hierarchies that you’re describing in the guilds and eventually the GoG are just that hierarchies, agreed, better ones, but hierarchies anyway.

At the end of the day, all that this achieves is creating smaller more manageable governments, that work as a parallel economy, which I’m all for and would take ANY DAY over the existing systems of government. But it certainly doesn’t get the world to free markets or “decentalized capitalism”.

4

Point taken, but to have a conversation about capitalism today requires a clear definition. If you ask 100 random people you might get 100 different answers. The most common form being the structure we have today which includes Wall Street, Government, The Federal Reserve, the big banks, the invesntment structures, and all the centralized and corrupted enitites which control our market.

I call what you are referring to as “the free market.” And “capitalism” I use as the more commonly accepted term of whatever it is we have now.

5

But I counter your argument - a guild of gulds if it used decentralized swarm decision making would never decide “leveraging their political connections, and their relationships to argue that plant-paper cannot be sold as it’s an existential threat to their livelihood.” In fact there would be no connections to make without group labels once a swarm was in decision mode.

Also a proper alternative society would protect individual freedoms against the state and other guilds, and anyone should have the right to create any new competing products, and alternative systems.

I consider myself an agorist too. But the defitiion I hold is “An agorist believes society should move toward freedom by building alternative, voluntary markets outside of state control - rather than by voting, protesting, or seizing power.”

If those markets have guilds it would be my decision to enter them or not. And to me there is two important caveats -

  1. Who has the final say? A centralizaed authority? Or the decentralized group of all the members togther? (called the “last hand on the bat” theory of centralized vs decentralized systems)

  2. Are new parallel systems allowed to freely form? Are they protected?

Anarchy does not mean free from rules. It means free from rules. Should a group decide to make rules, that would be up to the members to feel free to join, leave, or create a new guild.

Collective intelligence cannot arrise without some structure to help it organize. While I share your apprehensions, I just think the problems are both solvable and can exist in a way that does not boomerang back to the same problem we have today. And that main difference is 1) Better protections not just for individual rights, but also for the abilty for new competing groups to form in the market and 2) who has the fnal control of the systems - all of the people (the decentralized ecosystem), or some centralized and easy to corrupt entity?

In a wise swarmed society there would not be an animal parchment guild vs a plant based guild. Instead there would be a Communications Guild, with all of the evolving ways for humanity to communicate with under the same umbrella, existing in competition for the shared goal of improving communications for humanity - or in ths case for the guild of guilds.

6

Also what do you think Eve would be used for? A closed community - a guild - a business. There is no difference besides in their names. Thre can, however, be a major difference in HOW they are run. Centralized vs decentralized.

You have built a tool (Eve) for a group of people that forms into a community of cooperation. So you built a tool for guilds, or sub economies, or alternative, voluntary markets. Guilds do not need heirachies any more than governments, businesses, or alternative voluntary markets do.

Sure in fantasy they always have. But so have governments and markets.

7

Honestly I do think that you bring up good points all around.

I just think that the more layers you add, the closer you get to political games, and eventually get back to a government with too much power. A single “guild” is fine, maybe a guild of a few small guilds is fine too, but as soon as it gets to higher levels than that I think that it’s inevitable that political games will happen.

But at the end of the day neither of us know what’s true, and the only way to find out is to try!

And even if it turns out I’m correct, I still believe that it will be better than anything we have now, so it’s still a win for the world

1 Like
8

I might have more to comment on later but wanted to single this single statement out as a terrible idea. And that i hope you’re not actually considering it.

We already have been presented with such a hypothetical grocery store. It’s called “Whole Foods” and look what happened to it.

The “Organic” food label already goes beyond FDA standards. All it does is kick the can down the road and make healthy food more expensive for everyone. Further worsening the divide between the poor and rich.

We dont need even more labels and more complexity on our food. We need more small farms, and more community bonds protecting the source of our food. I need to walk into a grocery store and know that everything sold in it has been grown or raised the “right” way. No shortcuts, no ulterior motives. Coming from real families who have a reputation in their community to maintain, not corporations who will only answer to lawsuits.

this obviously cant happen overnight. It will take time but this is how bitcoin helps. It’s that “digital gold” that can be spent and received as easy as cash. It’s the common denominator that makes free markets work. It’s that “voluntary opt in system” that youre talking about.

Fiat doesnt do the best job anymore because, well, look at what it really is. It’s fake money backed by promises and IOUs that replaced the real money backed by real value and scarcity. It worked for a while. It made debt issuance easier, it made society “produce more”, it helped us “advance” - tho only in 1 dimension.

But now all the things that matter most:

  • Our homes
  • Our schools
  • Our healthiest foods
  • Cost of starting businesses
  • Our healthcare
  • Our “American Dream”

Are hit the hardest by inflation. Now if we want those items, we must ask permission from the systems that were birthed from “all the productivity”

Ask permission for nearly a lifelong loan from a bank

Ask permission for the state sponsored school to educate YOUR child the way you think is good and right - otherwise go spend thousand of more dollars finding an alternative private school

Ask permission/worry/pray your insurance carrier will cover a procedure that you cant afford otherwise. Putting further mental fatigue and worry about even just going to get a second opinion. “How much is that ‘second opinion’ gonna cost me?” “Will my insurance deny the test?” Leading to moments of:

“I didn’t take advanced mathematics or economics to help me make highly complex life altering risk/reward/ cost-health optimized mental calculus decisions, shit”

“Oh well, at least basic healthcare is ‘free’”

Ugh it’s terrifying honestly. Free healthcare for all in a society plagued by inflation. Oh! AI will make things better! Yeah AI! that thing that isn’t human will take care of me better than a human! That thing that’s programmed to protect “my safety”. It will surely understand my needs better than my family and community :roll_eyes:”

And on the point of healthy food. In that point it’s the farmers who now must ask permission. They must ask permission to put an Organic label on their food. A label that makes healthy food more expensive and harder to access, yields private equity backed corporations that can find clever ways to get around the rules of the label while still profiting. Clever things the honest small family didn’t consider either because of the scale needed to execute or because of their own moral compass.

It begets the same problems for food but recycled in legally different ways. New processing techniques to sterilize, new chemicals to preserve, new industrial inputs to grow the monocultures - all of it becoming more prohibitively complex and expensive for small family farms.

1 Like
9

I don’t want to say that we disagree because maybe this requires a discussion.

But people don’t trust any food anymore. Just because it was local doesn’t mean I would trust it. I would want it tested - not by me or the FDA - but rather by an indepentant and transparent entity. Or multiple ones.

There must be a way for consumers to trust their products. Especially someone like me who gets sick when I eat glyphosate. We can create a place where that food is open to scrutinty. The label wouldn’t really be a sticker. But it would be a certification of transparent and decentralized food.

If we sell your products in our establishment then it will mean something. Just because Whole foods lied and betrayed themselves, and didn’t adapt. Doesn’t mean the idea is wrong. It means their level of scrutinty wasn’t authentic, willing to adapt, and/or decoupled from Wall Street enough to be real.

Here is the thing, we are already doing this with a bakery and we shall see if it is right or wrong. Savage Wheat bakery uses all clean organic ingredients, locally raised eggs, we make doughnuts in fried local tallow, lard or environmentally conscious sugar can oils - so we are 100% seed oil free. It uses anchient grains, no refined sugars (we sweeten with honey, maple, dates and coconut only, and is scratch made with as many local - but also TESTED (like in a lab) ingredients as possible.

Farmers don’t need to”have permission” to be sold in our stores. Instead, they must meet a level or transparency and authentcity that we require. To join our swarm of healthy foods, yes it requires an uncomfortable amount of transparency. But so far sales are going very well. Last weekend it sold out of almost all fresh baked goods in a few hours. Again.

10

But why do you trust the grains from Savage Bakery. Is it because you’ve met the farmer and built a relationship with them or is it because the farmer is getting the grains tested and verified?

11

There are 2 kinds of trust:

  1. Trust in a system
  2. Trust between people

Trust in a system is based on 2 things:

  1. transparency
  2. results

I trust my food systems because they are tested. So my answer is getting the food tested.

Then for trust in people - that is based on :

  1. vulnerability
  2. reciprocated with effort

So it best comes face to face like you mention. That interaction should be built on a transparent system - transparent enough to test your foods.

for example:

Savage Wheat uses honey as its main sweetener. The honey comes locally from several sources. A new supplier and bee farmer wanted to sell Savage their honey. Savage made them test it and they refused. So she refused to sell it. It turns out that honey was full of chemicals.

Just because Whole Foods doesn’t uphold their standard, doesn’t mean we won’t. Especially if it is run by our customers, the swarm.

And this swarm will also include our suppliers, our employees, and our communities.

12

This is the purity award. I can eat all these foods with no reactions. As a store, we could pay the fee to do the testing, and then carry it. And if the farmers fail we could help them make better products and pass. Make regenerative farms a standard.

13

I think we agree on a whole lot. I know you err on the side of trustless systems. and I actually do to a point too. But I also think humanity’s highest potential requires us to be a little vulnerable with each other and build long term trust where I got your back and you got mine. And I think we can scale it if we understand it better. But as you said, only one way to know for sure. We gotta build a high trust community that builds something together.

14

It’s a good case you bring forward. Can you elaborate more? I think an elaboration could help other readers or others who would like to better understand the food system.

  • Are you 100% sure the source was straight from a single origin apiary? Or was it from a distributor? (Distributors might be mixing honey, contaminating good-origin with questionable adulterates.)

  • How was it later determined that batch of honey was loaded with chemicals? Who tested it and who reported on it?

  • What chemicals were discovered? Chemicals that would have been transferred from the pollen the bees pick up in a contaminated field? Or chemicals the beekeeper was using for some reason?

15

This is a start, I guess. But the more a system grows → centralizes → grows → etc. the more corrupted it becomes overtime and the more helpless “the people” will feel in being able to do anything about it. Then, who will the people turn to? They will turn to state agencies of power to help them because they cannot help themselves. And we are back to the corrupted cycle we’re currently in.

Instead, my preference for food choice currently lies with the Amish community. The Amish community has proven to be a resilient community that will maintain their strict standards despite external pressures.

I see value in testing food product - on occasion, but to make that a forever-commitment and a cost that must carry over to the customer is definitely less than ideal. Designing, investing, and constructing a costly layer that places additional stress or complexity on the most important market to literally everyone just doesn’t seem like where I would want to put my priorities. I don’t think it’s good to make farming anymore complex than it needs to be. Farmers need to own their land, not have debt, and new farmers need to feel like it’s a sound decision to get into farming.

Instead, I would want to build a community where every member part of the supply chain has reputation and skin in the game; where transparency exists because of the social structure already within the community. This is a model that can scale in a decentralized way and lower costs for the customer. Anyone can copy the model whether they live in New York or the West Coast.

Maybe random testing of vendor products where all costs are sponsored by the community’s pool would be a better solution? Why ask a select few investors to risk building what might feel like an adversarial brand to some, when you could ask the entire community to help keep itself clean?