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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Asklemmy
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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
You've just described an HOA.
This was what I came here to say.
My HOA is thankfully decent, but I know many have but had positive experiences.
When we're talking Lemmy instances, packing up and moving is one thing, but when we're talking residence, who's going to want their local dictator running things?
People like to hate on things like McDonalds or Budweiser and so on, but with that massive oversight and standardization, you gain a consistent product. With laws and their enforcement, it's nice to have that consistency.
Worry about red/blue states is bad enough, let alone if we're talking red/blue streets! Some things are better big and boring.
I wish. Sadly, voting on issues that directly impact you is not a reality yet.
Have you ever lived in a building block?
I don't know in other countries. In Spain we have horizontal property law, that means that a building block is managed by all it's members. Probably the same in other countries but IDK.
The thing is that it is a NIGHTMARE. We have not one, but two of the most famous spanish comedy shows are about how hellish building block communities are.
I know cases were old people have to walk stairs everyday because other members of the block refuse to put an elevator. I wouldn't want to know what would happen if a few buildings could just choose not to put plumbing, or not to put traffic lights.
And if I'm correct the US equivalent would be this communities in the suburbs that make "law" that you cut your lawns at 3 inches tall exactly every sunday a 7:03 am, exactly. And become extremely anal to everyone complying to their ridiculous aesthetic ideas.
People in small communities can be incredibly shitty. I feel like bigger communities tend to grant more rights to people and ensure those rights are applied.
That's totally unworkable. Almost everything in society would completely stop functioning
Okay. How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Because there are enough people who are selfish, short sighted, or disinterested, and an enormous number of things in society require coordination, long term thinking, and decisions made every single hour of every single day.
Okay, thanks for elaborating.
I agree. There are many selfish people out there. But they dont live in a vacuum. In a world where you have the repsonsibility for your surroundings, many people could rise to the occasion. Also, if a water pipe breaks in front of my home and you decide to vote against fixing it together, what do you think will happen to you, either when you need help or if I‘m vindictive, sooner?
We dont have anything to compare our living conditions to because we have never lived any different than now. We dont attempt to test self governed communities. What do you think why that is?
One hint that shows me that it works are coops. They work without central oversight because its not the oversight that makes us interact but our own intellect.