About

I'm Anthony Manning-Franklin and I had to create this website after accidentally envisioning an alternative economic paradigm that might, if we're lucky, prevent humanity from destroying itself while universally increasing quality of life for everyone on this planet… oops!

I used to write exclusively about software engineering and management at Antman Does Software, but as I watched my chosen and beloved craft increasingly used to enshittify the world, I found myself learning about economics, politics, and history. Combined with my knowledge in software, systems, and amateur hobbyist mathematics, I stumbled on three principles that became the foundation of the Democratic Economy:

• Companies must be democratically owned and operated by their employees.
• Ownership of wealth generating assets must naturally decay over time: An employee that worked for a company 20 years ago mustn't receive the same percentage of dividend payouts today as they did 20 years ago.
• Companies and individuals must have relativistic limits to potential profits and holdings; Our entire economy has been missing upper limits! A bug for society, but a feature in the eyes of shareholders, one that has given birth to the most profound yet subtle evil our species has invented: shareholder value.

Democratic governments and feudal economies cannot coexist indefinitely: The feudal economy eventually corrupts and captures the democratic government. The only way to break the Cycle of Anacyclosis is by creating a system of sustainable democracy, and the missing ingredient throughout human history has been a democratic economy.

Previously, societies have attempted to enforce weak limits on their economy via a central authority, typically legislation and taxes. Using a democratic system to control a feudal system is doomed to fail. Eventually, innate financial incentives to influence and corrupt the democratic system prevail, wealth and power is consolidated, and the democratic government breaks down.

Instead, democratic economies work in symbiosis with their democratic governments, each reinforcing the other. Democratic companies take our best natures and put them to work against the worst of our natures. The reason our species uniquely evolved this widespread hyper-cooperative ability was that we've evolved an altruistic instinct that allows us to form groups beyond our family members, and we evolved complementary instincts like gossip, shame, natural justice, morality, etc to prevent the exploitation of these altruistic instincts by individuals that did not share them.

Now that nations are no longer armed with simple weapons, but instead possess large arsenals of catastrophic weapons of mass destruction, the Cycle of Anacyclosis represents an existential threat to humanity and life on this planet. For that reason, I have created this website to spread The Democratic Economy and accelerate its adoption.