manifestos.world

The Vision Charter Jacob built. A repository of all the visions people have for the world.

What Jacob says about it

"I made a website. It's got two parts, but the part is called Vision Charter — by going to manifestos.world. And the point is, I want to remember a database of all the visions that people have for the world."

The two-part structure isn't fully explained in this transcript; only the Vision Charter half is described.

Why it exists

"I want to see which visions you want to use my taste to curate and decide which ones I like. And we can use our collective taste."

Two purposes braided together:

Inventory — make explicit the actual variety of visions humans hold for the world. Most policy debates assume narrow defaults; making the variety visible reveals hidden options.
Taste-curation — Jacob's "philosopher kings" instinct. The right visions, curated by the right taste, become more visible and easier for others to adopt or refine.

The "philosopher kings" framing

Jacob is explicit about his bias here:

"I'm a philosopher-kings kind of guy at some level, where I think people with really good taste — the world would be best if people with actually good taste have the power to exert that taste. And I don't know if I have the best taste, but I've got good taste, I think — so maybe I can nominate a better-taste person."

The framing is uncomfortable in egalitarian register. Jacob pre-empts the discomfort by:

Not claiming to be the philosopher-king himself
Framing it as using one's taste to nominate, not as ruling
Treating it as a stage, not a final structure (collective taste eventually scales)

Connection to David's question

David asked the question that prompted this:

"Let's say you have 100,000 of the most intelligent humans on the planet, and they each come from different personal experiences... and therefore they each have first-principle'd their way to a different vision they see in the world. What vision after 100 years actually gets built?"

Jacob's answer: manifestos.world is the surfacing layer. Make all 100,000 visions explicit and queryable; let collective taste differentiate; let the best ideas propagate.

What's missing from the Vision Charter alone

The Vision Charter inventories visions. It doesn't yet do:

Debate graphs — which would model agreement and disagreement explicitly. Jacob mentions this as a target: "you can have a debate graph of human-human debate as well, on top of that."
Issue tracker — the World Issue Tracker is a separate project for known problems (vs. desired future states).
Progress bars — the World Progress Bar is the measurement layer.

Together, these four would form the substrate for the collective sense-making half of Humanity 3.0 (the other half being collective action — see Accretive Collective Action).

Status

The transcript doesn't describe usage / scale / who's contributing. The site exists; how active it is would need verification.

World Issue Tracker — companion project for problems
World Progress Bar — measurement layer
Vision for the World — the larger frame
IdeaFlow — the substrate technology

Inspirations & adjacent thinking

Great User Interface Cures Scarcity — Fry & Lieberman

whycantwe.org/great-user-interface-cures-scarcity

Christopher Fry & Henry Lieberman (~2017, part of the Why Can't We All Just Get Along? essay series, whycantwe.org).

Thesis: Material scarcity is mostly the residue of complex top-down supply chains, not an innate feature of human nature. Tools like AI, automation, and 3D printing have the raw power to end it, but usability is the bottleneck — if the means of production stay locked behind technical complexity, they stay centralized. When UIs become intuitive enough that anyone can simply tell a machine what they need and have it design and fabricate, the means of production get democratized, traditional supply chains get bypassed, and the scarcity-driven Prisoner's Dilemma loses its grip.

Why it belongs on the Vision Charter: This is a foundational vision for what post-scarcity actually requires — a counterweight to visions that assume the technology alone is enough. It pairs naturally with manifestos.world's premise: surface the variety of visions, then make the missing infrastructure (great UIs) actually cheap to build.

The Justify lineage (same authors)

Fry & Lieberman's MIT Software Agents Group also built Justify — an interactive end-user development environment for deliberation: hierarchies of typed points (pro / con / mathematical / aesthetic / …), inference rules summarizing groups of points, "interactive browsing modes [as] visualizers or debuggers for arguments." Public artifacts: book Why Can't We All Just Get Along? How Science Can Enable a More Cooperative Future (Fry & Lieberman, 2018), whycantwe.org/mit-course.

Justify is the prior art for the debate-graph layer this page already names as missing from the Vision Charter ("you can have a debate graph of human-human debate as well, on top of that").

Realtime hierarchical debate outliner (open WIT issue)

worldissuetracker.com/issue/ff959aa4-5ede-45ef-84cf-6579d39ef65a

Filed 2026-05-08. Modern LLMs can do live, audience-facing argument structuring on any debate stream — finally closing the loop Justify's research argued for, since Justify always required participants to author structure manually. Audience-facing visualization on top of a typed-points + fallacy ontology, deployed during a live political/council/podcast debate. Companion to manifestos.world on the deliberation side.

Other essays in the same series at whycantwe.org: No Income Housing, Preventing Pandemics, Village Justice, A Science of Language, How to Invent a Language — each maps to "what post-scarcity infrastructure looks like in domain X."
Fry & Lieberman MIT course: whycantwe.org/mit-course — public curriculum form of the book's argument; useful primer when introducing the framing to others.
Henry Lieberman's homepage: web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/ — full bibliography for adjacent commonsense-AI / human-centered-AI work.