And you would be welcome. In fact, if you have some knowledge you would like to share, we would be happy to organize a discussion around it, with you doing the sharing. We are going to file these events with the tag learning-program. It is going to be minimal overhead, no social media hustling, no nothing.
The next event is already scheduled (see). It concerns Witness, because we feel that, in order to support the kind of economic thinking we want, Witness needs its own social science, the functional equivalent of economics but fit to operate in a multi-paradigm world. We call it aethnography, and are even trying to build a piece of it with ethnography + graphs (white paper, work in progress).
And this brings us nicely to open vs. closed economies.
Look: it’s a participatory, fictional world. We can make it anything we want. If you want to have a go at a closed distrikt, we can make one and build it from the ground up. It would have firm border control (an island, trawled by the larger body of Witness?); there would be no station for the Migrant Train, or perhaps a ghost one, closed, patrolled by guards like the U-Bahn under East Berlin when the Wall was still up…
But me, I would like to look at open economies. “Open” does not need to be wide open. Already in The Assembly we imagined an economy where
This model is inspired to what Cuba was trying to do in the early 1990s, looking for a way to interface with capitalist economies that would not be Washington Consensus-style total surrender. In those years I visited both Cuba (who tried to hold some kind of line) and Albania (who did not, and its public services vaporized: if you wanted to send a letter, you needed to use DHL, because the postal service no longer operated and post offices had been pillaged).
And the same is for migration. In practice, the Distrikts of Witness are subject to the same temptations as the countries of Earth. They want some migrants, but not others, and they would not mind getting rid of some of their own residents. Take Libria:
The reason why I like open economies: because another, slightly more respectable side of Edgeryders is trying to convince the Powers That Be to experiment with different economic paradigms. And all those experiments will fail if they require that the entire world switches to some other regime. So, we need to think through scenarios like yours:
But that’s the entire beauty of the thing: deep, coherent worldbuilding! What do you think?