The Evolution of Fragaria - Tamias Nettle's Storytelling

Fragaria is my imaginary country. I've been working on its constitution off and on for several years. This year I'm getting somewhere... I think.

Your Socials 11 class is shipwrecked on a remote tropical island. Walking around the island, you soon notice that there is no other land in sight. You find abundant fresh water and coconuts, mangoes and seafood to eat. Your lifeboat has enough supplies to build shelters and start a fire.

Your teacher and the parent chaperones either went down with the ship or got blown far away by the storm, in the other lifeboat. They'd taken away all your cell phones and laptops; you have no communications equipment at all.

Write a code of conduct to help you live and work together while you wait for rescue.

Well, I was taking Grade 11 Social Studies online, so there were about 600 students in the class. We'd never met in person. We'd only interacted via the strictly moderated class discussion forum. The timeline for rescue was not specified at all. I chose to plan for the long term, taking into account that within a year or two there would be babies on the island.

I don't remember what I wrote, or whether the teacher liked it. What I learned, the only thing I learned in Socials 11, is that I like writing constitutions.

Weeks later, we were hulling strawberries for freezer jam and I was working on a constitution out loud. When I wrote it down, I called it "The First Laws of Strawberryland." That was Version 1.0. My Mommy soon pointed out that I might as well call it Fragaria.

Fragaria is a fairly large island or archipelago in a temperate climate, ecologically very similar to my home bioregion. I haven't invented any plants or animals for it. The point is to invent ways people could live together, in greater health and happiness, in more or less the same non-human environment that I live in.

I decided early on that I was working on how I wanted the country to run on an ongoing basis, not how to get it started. I wanted it to be realistic enough to think about coherently, but not so realistic that I'd be distracted by details of real-world politics. Here's the scenario I chose to work with:

Fragaria starts with all my familiar wild plants and animals, and no humans. Some thousands of humans are in the process of moving there. They arrive with enough tools and supplies to set up whatever permanent infrastructure they choose. What they don't have is a coherent culture, or vision. They are individuals and families from diverse places, cultures and demographics, leaving modern civilization because they don't like it and moving to Fragaria in hopes that they'll like it better. They have no idea how to work together, no idea what they want instead of what they grew up with --- only that they want something different, and they believe that a fresh start will help them live more in alignment with their values. Coming from diverse cultures, they all hold different values. To make the thought experiment work, they all choose to ask me, "Hey, Tamias, there are several thousand of us who want to make a new country on this island that's big enough for all of us ... how do we do it? How do you think the new country should work? We have physical skills, we have tools and materials. What are we trying to do here, anyway? And how do we do it? What is a wholesome, fun, sustainable way for humans to live and learn and work together?

I soon switched from writing to typing so that I could more easily expand and rearrange what I'd written. I worked on it for three or four years. I remember having a lot of fun designing a supermajority voting system, and noticing that my dad's system of land value taxation was by far the best I'd heard of for managing everything from housing development to fisheries to assigning radio bandwidth, with the added benefit of backing the Fragarian dollar. I remember really struggling with questions of citizenship...

[Zworb wrote:] I struggled with citizenship, even then. As I write this, I'm trying out sociocracy (the current governance system in Fragaria) in waking life, and the question of who's in and who's out has almost killed our new organization twice, which is a lot considering we've only had three meetings.

[Note added later: The question of who was in and who was out did kill our organization soon after that, maybe at the very next meeting.]

I remember typing a law, which I called a metalaw because it was part of the system for changing other laws, stating that each law could be no longer than 1000 words, and had to be in simple English or Esperanto. Around the same time, the Fragarian constitution's word count peaked somewhere near 2000 words. I was trying hard to keep it under 1000.

I remember including a universal basic income (UBI) to be issued to citizens in Fragarian dollars, though I didn't have a definition of citizens yet. My dad helped me design an education system without factory schools, though in retrospect, it had some of the same issues as factory school. People of all ages were paid to pass academic exams, with parents receiving the payment when young children passed exams. There was a branch of the government that designed and administered the exams, and any person could attempt them in any order at any time.

The Fragarian government had a judicial branch, a healthcare branch, and a disaster response and fire rescue branch that might also have functioned as police and military. I would be curious to read over Fragarian Law 2.0 again, but I've lost the file.

Presenting the Fragaria thought experiment to friends and family was instructive in a way that was not at all what I'd hoped for. I wanted people to engage with it, play with it, write constitutions for their own imaginary countries and share them with me. The only person who did was my sister, and her imaginary government soon ran into financial trouble because it had healthcare expenses and no revenue.

Everyone else said something along the lines of, "Oh, come off it, that doesn't make sense. There's no point thinking about it." One person used the term "social engineering," and another, "Utopia," in tones of voice that implied disgrace, wrongdoing and subtle danger.

These were people who would talk all day about the distinction between geeks and nerds, the Monty Hall problem or fine details of the back stories of computer games. They would also happily discuss some of the most difficult, emotionally fraught questions in the realms of politics, philosophy, ethics and cosmology. The Fragaria project couldn't possibly be too frivolous or too challenging --- and yet, it was apparently both? It was simply, oddly, taboo.

A few years later, I went travelling in New Zealand and had some experiences that shook up my world view, no thanks at all to mainstream Kiwi culture.

While I was there, the government of new Zealand was considering starting pilot projects to try out a new approach to public education. To my unschooled ears, the new approach sounded much like the old one. People I talked to were strongly opposed to the change. Was the new system that much worse, I asked? No, I was told; it was so much better that kids in the pilot project schools would have an unfair academic advantage over kids in the old system, and Kiwi culture values fairness and equality. If I recall correctly, even introducing the new system in all New Zealand schools at the same time was unacceptable, because it risked creating an "elite" generation of young people who, Goddess forbid, might even outperform older children at some academic tasks. Therefore, it was better to keep everyone in the old system.

What the bleep?

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to encounter perspectives that did prompt me to revise my worldview and my laws of Fragaria. I remember presenting the Fragaria thought experiment to someone I liked and respected very much, and they replied, "What's the story you're telling people? People can't live a rule book. People organize their lives around stories."

I'm still integrating that. Until then, the constitution of Fragaria was very much a rule book. I abandoned Version 2.0 and thought instead about the core of my vision for Fragaria, and how Version 3.0 might be expressed as a story.

Either in New Zealand or shortly after I returned to BC, the Fragarian constitution hit a minimum word count, with about two sentences:

Pursue intensity of lived experience, conscious engagement with life.

No one has to be a slave, not even to their kids, their memes, their gods, their parents or their past or future self. Let each entity, person or group make its own decisions.

The words in bold were the minimal constitution. I left it that way for several years.

Fragaria in Waking Life?

In early 2020, I joined a meeting titled "Seeding Cortes Community Council" about creating a local government for Cortes Island. No one at the meeting objected to the idea, so we went ahead and formed a research committee of 9 people, with the tasks of researching options and planning a meeting that would attract enough interest to fill the community hall, to present our findings and publicly launch the new local government, or at least, get more people engaged in the next step of the process.

I joined the research committee, of course. Here was Fragaria in action! I showed up for meetings, with our without my toddler. Min has always been very patient at adult meetings.

We talked about models, we talked about needs, we talked about what was already controversial in the community and what would draw the most people to a meeting. We didn't talk much about why some people who weren't at that initial meeting objected to the whole idea. We didn't talk at all about how to govern ourselves as a research committee.

When COVID came along in March and derailed the plan to fill the hall, we were mostly relieved to be let off the hook. The committee had become so dysfunctional, there was no rescuing it.

If I were doing anything like that again, I'd ask the committee to try out sociocracy from the beginning. Then at least the note-taker wouldn't've felt so frustrated, because with sociocracy, we could've made real decisions to take notes about. It would also have given us first-hand experience with sociocracy. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

The research committee disbanded with hard feelings and pointless email rants about what had gone wrong and whose fault it was. That was how I first found out that the notetaker felt frustrated. That was when I first found out that anyone on the committee other than me had felt frustrated. No one expressed their complaints until it was too late to address them and get on with the project.

Giving up on local governance in waking life for the moment, I returned to the Fragarian constitution with renewed interest. In 2021, I was thrilled to come across Deep Democracy, and in 2022, I got excited about sociocracy.

I went back to work on Fragaria, bringing in sociocracy as its basic governance system. No more majority or even supermajority votes! Now Fragarians make decisions by consent. No more centralised national government, either; almost all political power is distributed to regional, city or neighbourhood councils.

An Economic System for Fragaria

With no national government, what happens to the Fragarian dollar? What is money for, anyway? I read that money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Well, maybe Fragarian money is different, because I don't want people using money as a store of value. I'm not sure I want people hoarding valuable things at all, but if they are going to, what about food, blankets, books, tools and building supplies? Having typed that, I realize those are the things I hoard myself.

I wasn't sure about a unit of account, either. With bit more reading, I encountered the idea that maybe it's problematic to assign linear values to a huge range of goods and services, across huge geographic areas and diverse human populations, using a standardized unit of account.

It didn't take me many hours of reading about economics to decide that our modern global capitalist economy is incredibly #!!$!??$#@ing messed up. On the bright side, that leaves lots of space for inventing systems that are less messed up.

If Fragarians are also happy without a medium of exchange, then they can live without money, and that's okay with me. On the other hand, Fragaria is supposed to be able to welcome and integrate people who arrive from mainstream civilisation with their cultural programming. I think people still want a medium of exchange.

Now I have a diverse economic ecosystem of many currencies, some issued by governments and some by private individuals or organizations, some electronic, some paper-based and others simply objects like gems, shells or non-perishable food.

All the currencies issued by regional governments are backed by the environmental resilience of the region. For example, there are fish tokens representing permission to catch fish, territory tokens for permission to maintain a fenced garden, garbage tokens for permission to create objects that we wouldn't want left just anywhere and tree tokens for permission to cut trees. These tokens depreciate at 10% per year, and new ones are issued to keep the total supply less than or comparable to the carrying capacity of the region. They function as both a medium of exchange and a unit of account, because I do want people to keep track of collective environmental impacts.

Currencies issued by other organizations or by individuals are generally backed by goods or services. For example, a blueberry store issues coupons that are each worth 1kg of fresh blueberries in season in the year they're issued. Each season the coupon is redeemable for 100g less, so that after ten years it's useless. These are intended as a medium of exchange; anything in the store can be bought for some number of blueberry coupons, and people go ahead and use them as currency in other places.

All the electronic and paper-based currencies lose their value at a rate of at least 10% per year, to discourage hoarding.

I haven't figured out how to discourage people from hoarding precious metals or precious stones, except by making it culturally unacceptable. Gold is problematic as a currency in that it is so physically and chemically stable, it never loses its value. One idea I'm toying with is that any minerals that are scarce, durable and valued are taxed like land; anyone with a substantial pile of gold in their basement could be expected to give ten percent of it to the regional government each year, to be redistributed as UBI. If they lie and hide their gold to avoid the tax, does that invalidate their ownership, making the gold available for anyone to take? Does Fragaria have legal ownership of gold in the first place? Or a culture of not valuing gold as money?

Citizenship in Fragaria

I have not answered all the questions about citizenship. Sociocracy requires consent to membership in each decision-making circle. What about people no one wants to work with as circle members? How can they advocate for themselves? What about people no one wants to live with? Where can they live?

Deep Democracy offers some pieces of solutions to these questions. Thinking of individual humans as discreet, continuous units with limited capacity for learning and change is part of the problem, and it is not cross-cultural. Is anyone inherently hard to live with, or is it that we assign demeaning labels to individuals whose surrounding culture is hard on them? How can Fragarian society help people develop habits that make living with them enjoyable? How can we help people regulate their nervous systems and connect with others? How can we see disruptive behaviour as a valid protest, and learn from it in order to generate a more inclusive, cooperative, diverse and vibrant society where everyone is genuinely welcome and appreciated?

In my current system, each neighbourhood has a neighbourhood council which has the power to accept or reject new members by consent of current decision-making members. Some neighbourhoods may have non-decision-making members who are welcome to live there, but aren't on the council. What are a neighbourhood council's obligations to a potential member they're rejecting? That might turn into a whole other essay. It is close to home for me. I've been rejected from a number of organizations in ways that were hurtful, and yet I believe in the right of any organization to exclude people and I have needed to exclude people from groups that I was participating in.

The neighbourhood council can reject a current member by consent minus one, the consent of everyone except the person being rejected. Maybe the neighbourhood council can reject a household with consent from everyone outside that household. Otherwise a household of two people who stop caring or cooperating but don't want to leave could really disrupt the life of the neighbourhood.

Since it takes three people to form a circle in sociocracy, it takes three households, each with at least one decision-making member in the neighbourhood council, to form a neighbourhood. A neighbourhood council that doesn't have decision-making members in three separate households loses its government status and goes back to being a group of individual households with the regional council (or city council if they're in a city) as their smallest level of government.

On the other hand, the neighbourhood council gets to define what counts as a household. Living as multiple households doesn't have to mean living in separate buildings.

Anyone who is a current, accepted resident of a neighbourhood has citizenship in the region that includes that neighbourhood. If they're rejected from the neighbourhood, they retain citizenship in the region, and therefore continue to receive UBI, as long as they live in the region. A regional council can accept a new resident as a citizen of the region without them joining a neighbourhood.

Anyone is free to withdraw from membership in a neighbourhood, and move out. They can also withdraw from a region, or any organization, for that matter. If they withdraw their membership in the region, they don't have to leave, they just stop receiving UBI. Babies inherit their birther's membership in a region or neighbourhood, but not decision-making status. Their UBI goes to their birther until they can handle their own finances.

Where is Fragaria? How does it begin?

Thinking about parenting was where I started reconsidering the process of founding Fragaria. I don't like the North American government monopoly "child protection," "child services," "Ministry for Children and Family Development" or whatever they call it; the branch of the government that comes and takes your baby away if you don't fit into their cultural norms. In my experience, the mere existence of such an organization is so scary to parents, and specifically to parents who are struggling, that the people who most need help parenting are the least likely to reach out for help.

What to do instead? In the long, long term, there might be no "instead." The concept of government intervening between parents and their kids might become irrelevant, and unthinkable. How do we get there?

It feels important to start with hypothetical but plausible people who come from the world I know. That and the ordinary Earth environment keep Fragaria in the realm of political philosophy, and out of the realm of fantasy.

Until these last few months, I had been thinking of Fragaria as a project that gets built in a few years and then continues in a more or less steady state. People can learn sociocracy, decide who wants to live together, decide where, build the infrastructure they need, start getting to know the land and be comfortably settled, so to speak, within a few years.

Parenting is different. Some issues only come up once per generation, or even alternate generations in a given family. It could take many decades to integrate new ways of being with children. Parenting is also one of the aspects of life in which modern humans are farthest from our natural, healthy human continuum, and the first few years of life are when we most need to live close to the continuum.

So, actually, Fragaria needs to evolve over several generations, each generation growing up with less of the emotional and cultural baggage of colonialism than the generation before, and evolving the country accordingly.

Can Fragaria coexist with modern capitalist civilization?

The question of how Fragaria relates to other nations was largely unresolved. I could work on a Fragaria Planet where nations are generally peaceful and free of colonialism, economic, cultural, religious, military or otherwise. Somehow I'd rather imagine Fragaria coexisting with mainstream colonial civilisation --- at a distance, with minimal interaction.

My current idea is that it could be a kind of psychiatric penal colony on top of a toxic waste dump or nuclear test site. Mainstream civilisation could offer people the option of going to Fragaria as a way of getting rid of them without the expense of keeping them locked up. I feel surprised and only slightly disturbed about how much I like this idea. It would mean that I'm not starting off with totally healthy land and reasonably functional humans. What if Fragaria is founded by political prisoners, convicted criminals and mental patients? This is a bit of a different thought experiment than what I was working on ten years ago. The question now is: Can I invent a society that is wholesome enough on the collective level that it allows people to heal, calm down, reorient to the world and learn to function on an individual level? Modern capitalist civilization is an insane society, anyway; inventing a society for the various folks who don't fit in might not be any harder than inventing one for the folks who do. Can we reclaim a radioactive toxic waste dump? Maybe it's no worse than [insert name of big box store here].

So, I'm no longer imagining thousands of skilled and basically functional people arriving all at once, building a country in a few years and then maintaining it in a steady state indefinitely. In the years since I first conceived of Fragaria in that way, I've seen a lot more problems in capitalist civilization and I no longer think I can invent all the solutions at once. Now Fragaria is just one step, the biggest step I can clearly imagine, in the direction of a society that's more aligned with my values and beliefs. I'm now imagining it beginning with a hundred or so relatively functional people, with me as a designated leader (because it is still my thought experiment, after all.) We build infrastructure and culture gradually. We slowly explore, get to know the physical place, get to know each other, try out ways to work together and deprogram from modern capitalist civilisation. Each year we receive a hundred or a few hundred immigrants who know nothing about Fragaria. They come to Fragaria only because they totally reject and/or are rejected from modern civilization.

Other people's ideas and questions

Unlike when I started, I now have friends who are happy to talk and think about Fragaria. At least, they'll ask about it as my project that they're curious about. None of them have told me much about their own imaginary countries yet.

Actually, Min has told me quite a bit about hers. She named it Lilac. Lilac is an island, much smaller than Fragaria and very close by, though Fragaria is in a temperate climate and Lilac is tropical. The geographic paradox of crossing 30 degrees of latitude in a eight-minute cable ferry ride doesn't bother Min at all. Lilac has farms and landshares, vast harvests of tropical fruits and nuts, and no artificial scarcity. The central feature is a playground surrounded by fruit trees. Quite a number of manufacturing functions are outsourced to Fragaria, and anyone who doesn't cooperate with the laws of Lilac is immediately deported to Fragaria. Unlike Min, every child in Lilac is allowed to watch screens and eat sugar.

I appreciate the economic system in Lilac. The official currency is pearls, which are commonly found in the kind of oysters that people harvest and eat there. Hoarding pearls is not allowed. If someone has too many pearls, they have to put some of them in a wooden box that sits beside the playground. If anyone runs out of pearls and wants to buy something, they are welcome to take some from the box.

Friends have posed some questions for me to ponder recently. One was whether Fragaria has a capitalist economy. That's what prompted me to work out the whole section above about the Fragarian economy. Others include: How do people relate to clocks and schedules in Fragaria? Does Fragaria have buildings? Machines? Vehicles? Does it use minerals mined from the Earth? I'm not a fan of modern buildings, vehicles or machines, or the collateral damage from the way they're produced.

I enjoy the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I like his idea that humans can build structures that feel natural and lively and make the world more beautiful, not less. Reading some more of his writing, I was pleased to notice that his basic philosophy of building design and construction has strong parallels with my system of sociocratic governance for Fragaria.

Mr. Alexander points out that every building, every arrangement of buildings and every part of a building can be made to support and enhance the larger environments it fits into and the smaller environments it creates. In Fragarian governance, every level of government has a larger system it fits into, and smaller systems that fit into it. The larger ones include all of Fragaria, the world and potentially the cosmos. The smallest level I tend to think about is each individual human coordinating the parts of their psyche.

Each entity at each level of scale can experience agency, and therefore wellbeing, when it has mutual feedback and cooperation with the entities it interacts with, including the larger whole that it forms part of, the other parts of that whole and the smaller parts of itself. That means no one is perfectly "free" to ignore feedback, but everyone is free to give and to interpret feedback, and make the decisions that make sense to them with the information they have.

I'm thinking about how to generate order without oppression, and freedom without chaos. There's nothing wrong with order per se, and chaos is not the best or only kind of freedom, but Fragaria doesn't have order for the sake of order. It has order for the sake of predictability, agency and beauty. Predictability actually supports agency, because when I have some idea how things work, I can guess some of the effects of my actions. In total chaos, there is no meaningful agency. In strict, perfectly predictable order, there is no agency. So, then, is there an optimum level of complexity, predictability and unpredictability that provides maximum agency?

I decided that each neighbourhood in Fragaria can have a purpose in relation to its region or to the world. Maybe a new neighbourhood is officially established only when a group of several households make an agreement with the regional council outlining where they'll live and how they'll contribute to the region. In that case, the regional council could disband a neighbourhood that blatantly abandoned its role or abused its land. Each region could establish a clear, predictable process for that.

I also did some thinking about how Fragaria can fit into the larger world. This is where the psychiatric penal colony idea came from. Mainstream civilisation has ever-increasing numbers of people to keep locked up, including political prisoners, people convicted of crimes, people with psychiatric diagnoses and people whose combination of age and ability qualifies them for factory school. Keeping a person alive and imprisoned is very expensive. Wouldn't governments be happy to ship off some of these people to a radioactive toxic waste dump, on condition that none of them ever come back and that they don't disrupt mainstream society? Maybe they would be willing to send each person with some resources from industrial civilisation, equivalent to the cost of keeping the person in custody for another year.

I so like this idea. Maybe what I like about it is that in Fragaria, of course, we are not content with a pointless, isolated existence, leaving the rest of the world alone forever. We are working out the interpersonal technologies that allow us to reclaim political prisoners, criminals and psychiatrically diagnosable people as fellow humans, and reclaim a radioactive toxic waste dump as a place worth living in. Maybe in a thousand years mainstream civilization will turn to us for guidance. Maybe in the meantime we set up a VPN and participate anonymously and pseudonymously in the global Internet that we're all banned from because so many of us were political prisoners.

What's Halfway Between a Story and a Rule Book?

Living a story is just as hard as living a rule book, in the sense that it doesn't tell us how to handle the unexpected. When something happens that doesn't fit into the story, that's just as confusing as when people break rules, or when a situation arises for which there is no rule and we don't know what to do.

Reading Christopher Alexander's books, I finally see a middle ground between a story and a rule book. What I want is a pattern language for Fragaria! Here's an explanation of what a pattern language is.

Wow, there are a lot of patterns! It's not enough to name them, either; the whole pattern language will make more sense and be more usable once I describe each one in terms of what it's for, how it works and how it relates to other patterns.

The patterns in bold are headings in the sense that the ones following them are sub-patterns. However, some of the sub-patterns are important parts of multiple other patterns. For example, Tool Libraries help form Cities that Live, and are also part of Mutual Support and Cooperation. I couldn't decide whether to put Honouring All Life Stages under Mutual Support and Cooperation or Continuum Parenting. Maybe Mutual Support and Cooperation among Humans is a more general pattern, of which Islands of Regenerative Culture is a sub-pattern. I guess the pattern language as a whole has a structure that's neither simply linear (like a series of steps) nor simply branching (like a taxonomic tree, or a circle structure in classical sociocracy.) I want to make sense of this structure in some spatial, visual way.

I suppose the format of web pages with hyperlinks handles this kind of structure rather well, though it's neither spatial nor visual. In The Nature of Order, Book Two, Christopher Alexander points out that while using an appropriate pattern language for a design task is intuitive and fun, putting together a pattern language that works is much more difficult. The order of patterns is important, and finding an order that works well is not trivial.

Many of these patterns have sub-patterns I haven't listed. My thoughts on Continuum Parenting could fill a book or two, and they all belong in the pattern language for Fragaria. Hey, it's kind of cool how many ideas I have in my head that I like enough to want to include them.

As I was working on describing the patterns in more detail, I came across Democratic Confederalism as a governance model to look into, and also the Wise Democracy Pattern Language. It looks like I have a lot more reading and writing to do.