Barrett Brown Pursuance Project AMA and AltGov Manifesto

[grarpamp]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyynwm/barrett-brown-what-is-to-be-done
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.