We Do Not Have a Mailing List.

(And we’re never gonna, and you can’t make us!)

If you read the paper contrasting social media and the legacy system on the one hand (they have similar dynamics, after all) and The Straight-Up System on the other (which celebrates individual freedom) then you’ll know where we are headed with this line of reasoning.

If you read ‘The Civic Harassment Industry’ you’ll really get where we are coming from.

One-to-Many, Many-to-One, Many-to-Many, and One-to-One

Right now there is a lot of ‘one-to-many’ communication. Way too much of it. It’s a huge problem. Someone should do something about it. Oh, wait…we are! We are the ones doing something about it!

Many-to-one. This is the protest model under the legacy system. We will the streets, send a message. Or we set up a nonprofit with a big-assed mailing list! The reason we do this is because of the bottleneck created by the legacy system. In the normal course of events, or messages don’t get through. We have to engage in massive acts of high-cost civic mobilization to get ‘will of the people’ messages through the strangle point.

Many-to-many describes war. That’s how battles are fought. But there is an appropriate place for it. In the Straight-Up system, through delegates, factions go head-to-head in the District Assembly. It is a civilized way of ‘going to war’ without dead bodies and shattered lives.

One-to-One

This is the network relationship that predominates throughout the Straight-Up System. Your relationship with your First Delegate is one-to-one. Your Circle can meet as a group, but it doesn’t have to. So even your Circle interrelationships, to the extent you choose to have them, can all be one-to-one. They can be text or phone relationships. Discussions at lunch relationships. Beer-on-the-porch relationships.

Right now we are not looking for passive participants.