How to Build the Civilization of Tomorrow

Applications are open here at Human Respect Labs. Here's the grand strategy.

At Human Respect Labs, we fund people with liberation projects. The following article, originally published at Underthrow.org, articulates our grand strategy.

We stand at a crossroads. Our institutions struggle under the weight of economic complexity, corruption, and social fracturing. Yet emerging technologies offer unprecedented potential for cooperation. We, the remnant, have an opportunity—perhaps a duty—to work toward a consent-based social order.

Or die trying.

This isn't about a grand political movement or revolutionary upheaval. It's about something more practical: building alternatives people can choose, systems that work better than what we have now, developed through collaborative networks that respect our dignity and autonomy.

The Foundation: What We Share

Before we can build anything together, we should acknowledge what unites us. Despite our differences—whether in background, geography, or religious beliefs—enough of us share fundamental values that transcend political divisions.

We value peaceful freedom—the ability to live our lives without fear of violence or coercion. We believe in civilization: the accumulated wisdom, rules, and practices that allow humans to flourish together. We also understand that power concentrated in a few hands, regardless of ideology, tends to be abusive.

These shared values form the bedrock of our collaboration. When we recognize that certain neighbors, colleagues, and even strangers worldwide seek the same basic things—opportunity, dignity, and choice—we find possibilities for cooperation that cross borders.

We also bring diverse talents. Some of us are technologists who understand how to build systems. Others are organizers who know how to bring people together. Still others are entrepreneurs who see opportunities where others see problems.

Such diversity isn't a weakness to overcome but a strength to harness.

The sobering reality is that those who benefit from the current system, especially those with concentrated power, won't relinquish it because we picket or vote. History teaches us that entrenched interests resist change, even when that change would benefit the many. This doesn't make them evil. It makes them human. However, it means we have to be strategic about creating alternatives, that is, parallel solutions and systems. Exit by declaration will be less effective than exit by design.

Fortunately, we live in an unprecedented era of global, digital collaboration. We can work together across distances and time zones, sharing knowledge and resources in ways previous generations could never imagine.

But as we move forward, we must resist the temptation to let perfect be the enemy of motion. Ideological purity tests and endless debates about theoretical frameworks paralyze action. Instead, we need pragmatic idealism: holding fast to our principles while staying flexible about the paths to realizing them.

Most importantly, we must concentrate more effort on building from the bottom up rather than always trying to reform from the top down. Entrepreneurship and innovation create new possibilities; politics and policy are almost always dead ends. When we create something beneficial, people will opt into it. The partisan pendulum becomes a wrecking ball when we try to force change through politics.

The Vision: Where We're Heading

Our ultimate goal is deceptively simple: move toward a world where human relationships are based on consent rather than compulsion. This doesn't mean eliminating rules or systems, but rather ensuring that the rules people live under emerge through peaceful human action, not central plans or designs.

In a consent-based order, individuals and communities have real alternatives. They can choose which institutions to support, which systems to participate in, and which leaders to follow.

When exit is always an option, loyalty is earned.

This contrasts starkly with compulsion-based systems, where participation is mandatory, alternatives are prohibited, and exits are prohibitively expensive. Too many of our current systems—economic, political, and social—trap people in arrangements they never chose and wouldn't freely accept.

If your system is so great, men shouldn’t have to threaten us with guns and jails.

But we can't build new systems through philosophical abstraction. We must focus our efforts on something concrete that can start small, test, and scale. We need a thousand projects that can succeed or fail quickly, allowing us to learn and adapt without betting everything on untested theories or purity tests.

Whatever we build must be inspiring. It must capture the imagination of people who still believe in human potential and voluntary cooperation—the true liberal remnant scattered across the globe who refuse to accept that coercion and conflict are humanity's permanent condition. Our Original Sin.

The Path Forward: What We Must Do

To recognize our shared values and articulate a vision marks the beginning. Then, we must coordinate our action, and coordinated action requires systems for working together effectively within better rules and incentives.

Our first task is to develop a process for identifying concrete projects we can rally around. This means creating spaces for dialogue, experimentation, and collective decision-making. We need ways to surface ideas, evaluate them together, and commit resources to the most promising ones.

This discovery process must be genuinely collaborative. No single person can see all the possibilities or understand all the constraints. We need diverse perspectives to inform our choices, as well as a singular commitment to the mission. Before that, though, we need mechanisms that allow the best ideas to bubble up from anywhere in our network.

Once we've identified promising projects, we need simple, low-cost ways to collaborate across distances and time zones. This means building infrastructure for asynchronous communication, project management, and resource sharing. It means creating protocols that allow people to contribute according to their abilities and availability.

The systems we build must parallel existing institutions, not merely reform them. We're not trying to capture the state or fix the bureaucracies. We're creating alternatives that people can opt into. These should work so well that they make the old systems obsolete. Our parallel systems must offer real leverage—the ability to accomplish more with less, to solve problems that current institutions can't or won't address, and to create value that attracts voluntary participation and support.

The Design Principles: How We Build

Everything we create must serve a threefold mandate that addresses the core problems of human cooperation.

First, we must reduce transaction and collaboration costs. Current systems often make it expensive and difficult for peaceful individuals to collaborate, trade with one another, or coordinate their efforts. By applying technology and thoughtful design, we can significantly reduce these costs, making cooperation easier and more attractive than politics.

Second, we must raise the costs of predation and parasitism. Too many of our current systems reward those who take without giving, exploit others' efforts, or use compulsion to gain an advantage. Our new systems must make such behavior unprofitable and unsustainable.

Third, we must lower switching costs and exit costs. People must be able to leave systems that don't serve them without losing everything they've built. This isn't just about technical portability; it's about ensuring that participation is genuinely voluntary and that competition among systems drives continuous improvement in each system.

These principles aren't just technical requirements; they're moral imperatives. They ensure that what we build truly serves human flourishing rather than merely replacing one form of coercion with another.

The Moment is Now

The tools exist. The need is urgent. The opportunity is unprecedented. What we lack isn't capability but better coordination; not vision but action.

Around the world, people are already building features of this future. Entrepreneurs are creating new forms of organization. Technologists are developing tools for collaboration and coordination. Communities are experimenting with alternative governance models. We must connect these efforts, amplify their impact, and build bridges between isolated innovations.

This is not a call to revolution but to construction. Not to tear down but to build up. We cannot impose our vision on others, but we can create alternatives that are so attractive that people flock to them.

The future we want will not be given to us by politicians or their functionaries, nor will it emerge from corporate boardrooms or academic conferences. It will be built by ordinary people working together as tinkerers, creating systems that enable our flourishing after testing and retesting.

The question isn't whether this future is possible—it's whether we have the courage and commitment to make it a reality.

The future is not something that happens to us.
It is something we create.