https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyynwm/barrett-brown-what-is-to-b... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOoPyovqk2Q https://pursuanceproject.org/ It is time to consider alternate systems of governance. Impactful, agile, secure civic collaboration The Barrett Brown Review of Arts & Letters & Civil Strife is written monthly by Barrett Brown, winner of the 2016 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. Selections... The pursuance system is the world's first comprehensive framework for process democracy. That is, it allows individuals with no prior relationship to self-organize into robust, agile entities governed via a "proceduralism of agreement." These entities, called pursuances, in turn engage and collaborate among themselves to whatever extent they choose, leading ultimately to a vast and formidable ecosystem of opposition to institutionalized injustice. Over 40 years ago, a vastly criminalized presidential administration was brought down through a combination of leaks, reporting, and Congressional action. Twenty-five years later, two former Nixon administration officials, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, managed to take firm control of yet another presidential administration. This one, too, was marked by revelations of unconstitutional and criminal acts, including torture, mass surveillance, the unprecedented negligence of emergency preparedness functions, the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys, and the most disastrous military engagements since Vietnam. Ten years later, many now regard the Bush Administration with actual nostalgia. It has become more and more difficult, as the years proceed, to maintain the fiction that the American republic is fundamentally sound. An associated myth—that the great majority of the American electorate are decent people who are entirely capable of overseeing the single most powerful apparatus in history—has also become less viable. The "establishment," as we may as well join in terming it, has likewise lost credibility, for reasons ranging from nonsensical to inarguable. The end result is a crisis of moral authority, and even of amoral authority; this is a society that cannot even produce a proper strongman. But it can certainly produce a disaster, for ourselves and for the world. Recall that the baseline of 21st century America involves a sort of constitutional police state with unprecedented incarceration rates, increasingly militarized law enforcement, an unaccountable intelligence community with a long history of unconstitutional behavior, and a judicial and legislative culture that, all told, has officially rendered tens of millions of Americans criminals Rumsfeld understood the real lesson of Watergate: the risks of violating our Constitution are vastly eclipsed by the rewards. The consequences of a morally failed American republic, continuing on its present course for even just another decade, would be irreparable. No competent observer of our current trajectory can today disregard this scenario, or others far worse. Years ago, I created a group called Project PM, billed as a "distributed think tank" and intended to build a platform for vastly improved civic collaboration and media analysis. The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now collaborate with any other individual on the planet. It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel civic ecosystem Since my release from prison eight months ago, the Pursuance System has been explained in broad terms via outlets like Wired; it will be detailed further in broadcasts by NPR, PBS, and VICE, as well as the upcoming documentary Sensational. This media push will culminate next year with the publication of my upcoming book, a "memoir-manifesto" that will make the larger case for why the Pursuance System is not only necessary, but inevitable.