Author: Kate Oden

At its core, a transparent organization is a participatory one. This means there must be clear channels for members to express opinions and add their own expertise.

It also means the organization must be responsive to these at all levels, that it must earn participants’ trust by enacting policy to reflect their feedback.

When this occurs, we have a system of checks and balances in flow, a system with rules defining good practice but also a constant flux of member approval or disapproval.

It’s a rather utopian ideal, but governments have come close to approaching it before. The ancient Greek democracy was grounded in mass participation with debates about policy being held in an open forum. Excluding as it did women and slaves, it did not meet the ideal, but it’s still a compelling basis for action: How far could we take the idea of mass participation in the modern age?

Building this website is an initial step in that direction. We hope it will become one forum where any interested party can participate and tell us what they want to see grow here. In the future we hope to gather in person, to create another space for a meeting (or civil disagreeing) of minds.

The wider dissemination of information will also occur here: meeting agendas and minutes, policy proposals, presentation of revenue streams, the draft of a constitution, all open for commentary.

One criticism of a transparent government is that it rapidly becomes bulky and inefficient, with so many potentially disparate opinions to address. We will try to respond to this issue and base our system on equal representation, on voting early and often, using your own ideas to augment the foundation. We’re all only as strong here as a fair majority opinion!

There’s a problem when the average American citizen has minimal (if any) impact on decisions made in Congress, as one 2014 study of lobbying shows. There’s a problem when Super PACs with the extreme views of the very few and very wealthy throw their advertising might behind candidates, effectively commercializing elections. There’s a problem with how essential decisions are funded and influenced in this country.

The problem extends to how lines are drawn in what has become a two-party fight. In many states, the information of anyone who registers to vote is freely available; if I want, I know how you vote and where you live, and this information is most definitely used to redraw voting districts to reflect partisan interests. Gerrymandering is a party trick on paper and an outrage in practice. What’s the point of voting at all if our vote has already been reckoned with, divvied up within a two-color system, and strategically placed within a district whose color can then be called before an election even occurs?

One of the reasons Mark founded the MetaRepublic was that there was no organization he felt he could trust. So he decided to make one himself, an organization that preempts corruption. How do we achieve this? With transparency from the outset that grounds every subsequent decision. With a system of representation that counts each vote as equal to any other. With the question, how far can we go without money?

Never has a society so mishandled basic, preventative measures like nutrition research and so overmedicated the ailing masses that are a result. It’s like sending your teenager out on the road without driving instruction and then spending $1200 to fix your car when he inevitably crashes (Bloomberg estimates this is how much Americans spend per year on prescription drugs). It defies common sense.

According to recent in-depth reporting by Politico, the government has spent a steadily decreasing percentage of its budget on nutrition research over the past few decades. As early as 1978, researchers called for strengthening the position of nutrition research and increasing funding, warning that otherwise we’d have a health epidemic on our hands. And that’s exactly what’s happened. 2018 spending on nutrition research by the NIH? About $2 billion. 2018 spending on pharmaceutical R&D? Almost $80 billion. Watch cable TV for 15 minutes or navigate to almost any website and you’ll be bombarded with pharmaceutical ads. The industry is a behemoth. We’re neglecting common sense prevention in favor of rampaging profit motivation.

Across the country there are food deserts where residents don’t have access to fresh, whole foods. Across the country, there are people with access to fresh, whole foods who are instead addicted to sugar and fast calories. Rethinking our relationship to food is fundamental to the MetaRepublic and we’ll address issues here like updating dietary recommendations. We’ll look into research that shows that all sugars are not equal, so that when you do choose sweets, you can choose more wisely. With your participation, we can remedy poor nutrition education — as with the MetaRepublic as a whole, it’s in our hands.

What is the Metarepublic? It’s an organization that you can fundamentally trust with representing and addressing your needs – something we feel has been slowly corroded in our current government. Revolutionary and creative, the main tenets of this metarepublic are that it banishes corruption, transcends geography, and reforms representation. There’s no membership fee; all that’s required is a willingness to take this as far as we can go. We’ll build a body that is transparent at all levels, with the free broadcasting of internal revenue streams and employment ledgers. Beyond that, it’s up to you, however, and we expect you’ll tell us what you want in face-to-face meetings, over the course of votes, in direct messages, you name it. States need a minimum of just seven people to fly and can be formed around any common denominator (Avocado Eaters, Freelance Writers, Selena Gomez Fans, Zen Purists… the marketplace is wide open). Then again, there’s nothing saying you must vote with your state – members can take their vote wherever they want, vote partially in one state and partially in another, or act as a completely free agent in this republic. Although not expected to cost much more than time in the beginning, soon enough we’ll want sources of funding. At the moment we’re hatching plans to market a line of food and drink in our home of New Hampshire, which could eventually involve some promising innovations in hydroponic foods. This reflects another interest of ours in reforming the (currently sorely underfunded and outmoded) nutrition guidelines to treat and prevent disease. More on this at a later date. For now, if you’ve just landed here, consider your satisfaction with your democracy and what you would change, from the ground up, if you had the chance. What state would you form, with whom? What do you believe is most essential about America and how could that be better expressed in the Metarepublic? Then take this chance to its limit.