Now it has a name
Alek, thanks for a great post, which introdued us to some of the Eastern Europe thinkers of alternative social systems. I especially like this “Parallel Polis” concept – have thought much into the same direction recently, but did not know the idea already has a name.
I guess we can go a pretty far way within European representative democracies with this concept: when demonstrably building something for the public good, you will hardly get stopped, as the government is essentially supposed to do the same. There will of course be marginal conflicts about building codes, product certification, intellectual property etc., but these can largely be avoided by being friendly, or evaded by being mobile (for which I like Petros’ approach).
What is however a real, unsolved issue in “Parallel Polis” (if we want to see the Open Everything movement as that for a moment) is economic sustainability – just as you mentioned. In my view, the biggest part of the issue is that, as long as the set of open alternatives is incomplete, we still depend on legal tender for some part of our daily lives. Which transforms “economic sustainability” to a much harder issue of “financial sustainability”, given the scarcity character of legal tender money …