Security

The safety and security of ourselves, our families and communities is on many of our minds. Particularly when we are used to being exposed to societies where violence and crime and war appears to be the the order of the day.

The way HoloWorld is organized, safety and security is built into the system itself and is much less dependent on luck or on forces outside the control of the individual community.

In other societies you might find the individual alone, pitted against a society that doesn't seem to care about him and that isn't able to protect him or provide him what he needs. Unfriendly elements of society can fairly freely seek this individual out and victimize him, and the main function of police agencies would be to seek out the offenders after the fact and try to punish them.

In HoloWorld the typical individual and his family are within a community of friendly and likeminded people, and they all know each other. It will be immediately apparent when somebody is a stranger and doesn't belong within the boundaries of the community.

The infra-structure of the old society was laid out so that strangers could move very freely amongst each other. Businesses and neighbourhoods were by their structure accessible in complete anonymity. Anybody can drive on a street, anybody can go into a store. The next customer in McDonalds might be a local resident who's hungry, or it might be a psychotic person with a machine gun he bought in the local sporting good store.

HoloWorld has a different structure in that most transactions happen between people who already know each other. The impersonal anonymity is largely gone.

People are free to move about as they choose. However, each community is likely to monitor and govern who they let into their midst, so there is no general freedom to roam around within communties where one isn't welcome.

HoloWorld overall has no central register of everybody. There is no central authority that tries to monitor and control everybody. However, local communties might keep very thorough registers of both their members and visitors to the community. They are also likely to be structured geographically and architecturally to facilitate this.

This doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's locked away in gated communities and are afraid of talking to strangers, although some will choose to live that way. Rather it means that life is structured more around personal relations than around anonymous transactions, and it means that housing and transportation are arranged so as to facilitate that.

A public street with many anonymous travelers does not necessarily lead directly to somebody's front door. Rather transportation is arranged so that you would travel to the entrance of the community and there would be extra steps necessary to arrive where somebody actually lives.

Most kinds of criminality require an atmosphere of impersonal anonymity. It is more difficult to steal in a place where everybody knows each other and everybody knows who comes and goes.

Issues of ownership and of settlement of grievances between individuals are taken care of within a community. There are no outside authorities who can move on individuals and confiscate their property to satisfy legal claims or taxes or anything of that nature. Any conflicts of interest issues would have to be addressed to the community as a whole.

Likewise with accusations of criminal conduct. A community will sort out criminal acts in their midst amongst themselves. There is no outside agency that comes in, without prior approval, and takes legal action.