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Itty Bitty Bigger World - Residency
Jan. 16th, 2024 09:49 amItty Bitty Bigger World - Residency
I was once asked, as a thought exercise, to explain Protocol's view of residency as if someone had never been exposed to Protocol or lived in the modern world.
It's really hard to explain.
The inverse is also true. A lot of people who have grown up in a Protocol-compliant society don't understand much of human history either.
A famous science fiction writer, Lois McMaster Bujold, wrote in one of her books about a fraught confrontation between father and son over the son's choice of a wife. The son said at one point:
"My home is not a place. It is a person ... people."
This captures almost precisely the tension between the view of nationality by birthplace and nationality by tribal membership.
The predecessor state to San San, the United States of America, asserted categorically that a person born in the United States was therefore a United States citizen. They were entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - but if they lacked housing and starved to death in the cold, that was on them.
(Children raised in Protocol consider this shockingly cruel. "You mean they didn't care? Why didn't someone take them in?" When the discussion reaches the idea that there were entire classes of people - security guards and police - employed for the specific purpose of keeping them out of warmer places, the usual conclusion is that our ancestors were simply barbarians.)
Conversely, there are many cultural and tribal groups that believe that you must be born to parents who are members of a group, in order to be in that group. That same United States had a Bureau of Indian Affairs that tracked membership as a Native American by the percentage of your ancestry that was of tribal descent. Being born on a reservation meant nothing; having a mother of half blood meant you were only one quarter Indian. Last but not least, the Nazi empire used blood to determine if a person was Jewish - and that determination was often a death sentence.
So at one level, Protocol dodges the question. You're a citizen if you're a human. If you're homo sapiens sapiens, you're a human and therefore a citizen.
"No matter where you go, there you are."
At another level, the right of residency is one of the most difficult and thorny problems defined in Protocol.
The right of departure, to use a term coined by another science fiction writer, is one of the ways in which Protocol guards against slavery.
The only way you lose the right to leave your current residency situation is to be convicted of a serious crime. Otherwise you are welcome to leave, with your personal effects, and go somewhere else. If you can't leave, you're in civil or criminal custody - and Protocol puts strict limitations and controls on all custodial matters.
That does not mean you have the right to live in any particular place or in any particular way.
The private property rights enshrined in that same America - the one that would let you die in the cold - applied to real property (i.e. land and buildings) and to personal property (all the rest).
A person could live in a house they owned, or pay money to live in someone else's house (or apartment), or rent a space in a mobile home or trailer park and own or rent a mobile home or trailer within.
But just owning land did not mean you could build a house on it. Local governments asserted zoning regulations, themselves a crude and rudimentary form of Protocols that applied to safe and aesthetic dwellings.
The inverse was also true - just building a shelter on a piece of land gave you no rights to the land underneath. The shantytowns of the 2020s were a product of people being able to get construction materials but not land, so they assembled unsafe ramshackle shelter any way they could.
Empty houses would be 'guarded' to keep squatters from living in them, while shantytowns were demolished (and soon after, rebuilt, sometimes in the same places.) Students often complain, "This makes no sense! Why not put the homeless people in the houses and deal with the details later?"
One reason was that adverse possession could endanger the ownership of the empty buildings. But more practically, the homeless would damage or even destroy the houses by living in them.
"OK, keep them from damaging the houses by building them better or using surveillance to enforce right living methods!"
Ubquitious surveillance of the type we are accustomed to under Protocol was not yet widespread. But using it in that way would have been viewed as an invasion of privacy.
"So to protect their hypothetical right to privacy, you make them freeze publicly?"
There are a number of reasons the 2020s are referred to, to quote yet another science fiction writer, as the "Crazy Years."
In Protocol there are several ways that a person can establish a right of residency. Local governments, such as San San, are welcome to establish additional residency paths, but cannot interfere in Protocol rights.
1) Birthright. A person born in a Protocol state is a resident of that Protocol state. That means they have to be sheltered, fed, cared for and offered education and opportunity by that state. This applies to adults but especially to children. However, there is no right to a particular shelter location. Housing may be offered or assigned. A person can leave their current shelter and the state has to offer them some other shelter - but they don't have to be offered a better shelter in a more desirable location.
San San has large numbers of transitional housing options of many types. So there is always a right to leave and go somewhere else, but the somewhere else is about the same. You get a bed to sleep in every night, but have no particular right to the _same_ bed. It is convenient to provide that housing in one place, but Protocol does not require this.
2) Rental or ownership. If a space is owned or controlled by an entity, they can as an economic transaction provide residency in that space. Protocol defines minimums for safe human occupancy - the equivalent of an early 21st century 'capsule hotel' but there is no effective maximum. THe granting entity must comply with the notice requirements below prior to termination, but the renter can leave at any time, with or without notice, paying only for the time used and damages if any.
San San chooses to allow rentals and building ownership but not land ownership. As part of the founding of the San San Arcology, existing land rights were converted into ownership shares in the San San Arcology Corporation. A person or more often an entity can own the buildings or structures but the actual use of the land is assigned and governed by San San land use regulations, which are extremely complex and have built in assumptions such as "highest and best use," "historical use," "environmental conservation" (which means something very different), and "utility" (which has nothing to do with services and everything to do with efficiency.)
Some Protocol states permit land ownership. However, the concept of "economic battery" - depriving another person of the means of life without justifiable cause - comes into play. Often the use of land for a certain purpose requires devoting land to other uses in addition. If you wish to build a luxury home on your land, you must also contribute to efficiency housing in parallel.
Note that this applies to "renting rooms" as well as to hotels, motels, campgrounds, hostels, any way in which someone pays for access to put a roof over their head.
3) Cultural heritage. Protocol recognizes that some human communities and tribes have special rights to continue their historical practices. The classic example applied in every Protocol state is the so-called Travelers, Roma or Gypsies. A member of these groups has special rights to dedicated housing, campgrounds and cultural sites that are only for the use of that cultural group. Of particular importance is their right to refuse entry to their spaces or residency to persons who are not members of their groups, and even more importantly _set their own rules_ for who belongs to that group and who initially does not. This could include financial contributions, ancestry, or human relationships such as marriage, but could also include the ability to speak a language, to contribute to the culture as judged by a panel of cultural experts, or other criteria.
An important caveat of cultural heritage residency rights is that the criteria for granting residency can be as complex, convoluted and arcane as may be desired, but the revocation of any residency right becomes a matter of strict Protocol. Losing cultural residency must be a voluntary surrender or a punishment for criminal conviction. A violator may be socially ostracized but cannot lose their residency rights.
In San San, the "science fiction fandom" owns convention center spaces and houses that are intended for residency by registered science fiction fans. Obviously, anyone can be a fan of science fiction, but a capital-F Fan must have attended a certain number of conventions, worked a certain number of conventions, be a published artist, contribute heavily in labor or finances or both, and/or made a Friend of Fandom by vote of existing Fen to establish this form of residency.
4) Employment. A common 'perk' of post-economic employment status is the temporary, constrained right to live in surroundings that are convenient to the work. The conditions of employment remain a subject for local law, except that Protocol forbids what a prior age called racial or gender discrimination. Housing in sensitive areas often carries with it an obligation to live lightly and with due respect to the sensitive environment.
Employment related residency is casually revocable with the employment relationship. No one should live in a San San CHP Barracks unless they are a CHP officer.
5) Charity. A person, entity or member state can choose to grant residency above and beyond all of the types above, voluntarily. The only limit on charity residency is the requirement for notice prior to termination of residency. Otherwise, as it is not an economic transaction, the criteria for charity residency can be as arbitrary as the grantor wishes - including what Protocol would consider discrimination in an employment relationship. The right of departure also applies, with no required notice by the recipient who is leaving.
There is an important caveat to all five residency types.
Requirement is that residency over time requires notice of revocation proportional to the time spent in lawful occupancy.
Twenty-four hours = 4 hours.
Seventy-two hours = 12 hours.
One hundred sixty-eight hours (1 week) = 24 hours.
One month = 1 week.
One year = 1 month.
More than one year, less than 10 years = 2 months.
Ten years or more = 3 months.
This is a safeguard against sudden or unexpected homelessness, which is considered unnecessarily stressful on both the person and the Protocol state with obligation to house them.
San San chooses to have an additional safeguard against accusations of violating the residency rights of a San San resident.
In parallel with the public food dispenser system is the public beds system. This is a warren-like hostel setting in which a citizen's identity card opens the door to and temporarily rents - for 23 hours exactly - a safe space with bedding in which to sleep, with nearby restroom and shower facilities. This happens to meet the capsule hotel requirement of Protocol, but the 23 hour limit is specifically tailored to avoid creating any right to residency to any particular space. Any personal items left in a public bed are removed by bots before the room is flash-sterilized and bedding replaced. Bots also enforce the "one person per bed" rule with stunners. As there are public spaces in which human sexuality may be expressed, this does not violate any related Protocol rights.
A habitual uzer of a public bed is likely a VR or hard drug addict. Like public food dispensers, everyone has used one, but rarely and without pride in the fact.
I was once asked, as a thought exercise, to explain Protocol's view of residency as if someone had never been exposed to Protocol or lived in the modern world.
It's really hard to explain.
The inverse is also true. A lot of people who have grown up in a Protocol-compliant society don't understand much of human history either.
A famous science fiction writer, Lois McMaster Bujold, wrote in one of her books about a fraught confrontation between father and son over the son's choice of a wife. The son said at one point:
"My home is not a place. It is a person ... people."
This captures almost precisely the tension between the view of nationality by birthplace and nationality by tribal membership.
The predecessor state to San San, the United States of America, asserted categorically that a person born in the United States was therefore a United States citizen. They were entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - but if they lacked housing and starved to death in the cold, that was on them.
(Children raised in Protocol consider this shockingly cruel. "You mean they didn't care? Why didn't someone take them in?" When the discussion reaches the idea that there were entire classes of people - security guards and police - employed for the specific purpose of keeping them out of warmer places, the usual conclusion is that our ancestors were simply barbarians.)
Conversely, there are many cultural and tribal groups that believe that you must be born to parents who are members of a group, in order to be in that group. That same United States had a Bureau of Indian Affairs that tracked membership as a Native American by the percentage of your ancestry that was of tribal descent. Being born on a reservation meant nothing; having a mother of half blood meant you were only one quarter Indian. Last but not least, the Nazi empire used blood to determine if a person was Jewish - and that determination was often a death sentence.
So at one level, Protocol dodges the question. You're a citizen if you're a human. If you're homo sapiens sapiens, you're a human and therefore a citizen.
"No matter where you go, there you are."
At another level, the right of residency is one of the most difficult and thorny problems defined in Protocol.
The right of departure, to use a term coined by another science fiction writer, is one of the ways in which Protocol guards against slavery.
The only way you lose the right to leave your current residency situation is to be convicted of a serious crime. Otherwise you are welcome to leave, with your personal effects, and go somewhere else. If you can't leave, you're in civil or criminal custody - and Protocol puts strict limitations and controls on all custodial matters.
That does not mean you have the right to live in any particular place or in any particular way.
The private property rights enshrined in that same America - the one that would let you die in the cold - applied to real property (i.e. land and buildings) and to personal property (all the rest).
A person could live in a house they owned, or pay money to live in someone else's house (or apartment), or rent a space in a mobile home or trailer park and own or rent a mobile home or trailer within.
But just owning land did not mean you could build a house on it. Local governments asserted zoning regulations, themselves a crude and rudimentary form of Protocols that applied to safe and aesthetic dwellings.
The inverse was also true - just building a shelter on a piece of land gave you no rights to the land underneath. The shantytowns of the 2020s were a product of people being able to get construction materials but not land, so they assembled unsafe ramshackle shelter any way they could.
Empty houses would be 'guarded' to keep squatters from living in them, while shantytowns were demolished (and soon after, rebuilt, sometimes in the same places.) Students often complain, "This makes no sense! Why not put the homeless people in the houses and deal with the details later?"
One reason was that adverse possession could endanger the ownership of the empty buildings. But more practically, the homeless would damage or even destroy the houses by living in them.
"OK, keep them from damaging the houses by building them better or using surveillance to enforce right living methods!"
Ubquitious surveillance of the type we are accustomed to under Protocol was not yet widespread. But using it in that way would have been viewed as an invasion of privacy.
"So to protect their hypothetical right to privacy, you make them freeze publicly?"
There are a number of reasons the 2020s are referred to, to quote yet another science fiction writer, as the "Crazy Years."
In Protocol there are several ways that a person can establish a right of residency. Local governments, such as San San, are welcome to establish additional residency paths, but cannot interfere in Protocol rights.
1) Birthright. A person born in a Protocol state is a resident of that Protocol state. That means they have to be sheltered, fed, cared for and offered education and opportunity by that state. This applies to adults but especially to children. However, there is no right to a particular shelter location. Housing may be offered or assigned. A person can leave their current shelter and the state has to offer them some other shelter - but they don't have to be offered a better shelter in a more desirable location.
San San has large numbers of transitional housing options of many types. So there is always a right to leave and go somewhere else, but the somewhere else is about the same. You get a bed to sleep in every night, but have no particular right to the _same_ bed. It is convenient to provide that housing in one place, but Protocol does not require this.
2) Rental or ownership. If a space is owned or controlled by an entity, they can as an economic transaction provide residency in that space. Protocol defines minimums for safe human occupancy - the equivalent of an early 21st century 'capsule hotel' but there is no effective maximum. THe granting entity must comply with the notice requirements below prior to termination, but the renter can leave at any time, with or without notice, paying only for the time used and damages if any.
San San chooses to allow rentals and building ownership but not land ownership. As part of the founding of the San San Arcology, existing land rights were converted into ownership shares in the San San Arcology Corporation. A person or more often an entity can own the buildings or structures but the actual use of the land is assigned and governed by San San land use regulations, which are extremely complex and have built in assumptions such as "highest and best use," "historical use," "environmental conservation" (which means something very different), and "utility" (which has nothing to do with services and everything to do with efficiency.)
Some Protocol states permit land ownership. However, the concept of "economic battery" - depriving another person of the means of life without justifiable cause - comes into play. Often the use of land for a certain purpose requires devoting land to other uses in addition. If you wish to build a luxury home on your land, you must also contribute to efficiency housing in parallel.
Note that this applies to "renting rooms" as well as to hotels, motels, campgrounds, hostels, any way in which someone pays for access to put a roof over their head.
3) Cultural heritage. Protocol recognizes that some human communities and tribes have special rights to continue their historical practices. The classic example applied in every Protocol state is the so-called Travelers, Roma or Gypsies. A member of these groups has special rights to dedicated housing, campgrounds and cultural sites that are only for the use of that cultural group. Of particular importance is their right to refuse entry to their spaces or residency to persons who are not members of their groups, and even more importantly _set their own rules_ for who belongs to that group and who initially does not. This could include financial contributions, ancestry, or human relationships such as marriage, but could also include the ability to speak a language, to contribute to the culture as judged by a panel of cultural experts, or other criteria.
An important caveat of cultural heritage residency rights is that the criteria for granting residency can be as complex, convoluted and arcane as may be desired, but the revocation of any residency right becomes a matter of strict Protocol. Losing cultural residency must be a voluntary surrender or a punishment for criminal conviction. A violator may be socially ostracized but cannot lose their residency rights.
In San San, the "science fiction fandom" owns convention center spaces and houses that are intended for residency by registered science fiction fans. Obviously, anyone can be a fan of science fiction, but a capital-F Fan must have attended a certain number of conventions, worked a certain number of conventions, be a published artist, contribute heavily in labor or finances or both, and/or made a Friend of Fandom by vote of existing Fen to establish this form of residency.
4) Employment. A common 'perk' of post-economic employment status is the temporary, constrained right to live in surroundings that are convenient to the work. The conditions of employment remain a subject for local law, except that Protocol forbids what a prior age called racial or gender discrimination. Housing in sensitive areas often carries with it an obligation to live lightly and with due respect to the sensitive environment.
Employment related residency is casually revocable with the employment relationship. No one should live in a San San CHP Barracks unless they are a CHP officer.
5) Charity. A person, entity or member state can choose to grant residency above and beyond all of the types above, voluntarily. The only limit on charity residency is the requirement for notice prior to termination of residency. Otherwise, as it is not an economic transaction, the criteria for charity residency can be as arbitrary as the grantor wishes - including what Protocol would consider discrimination in an employment relationship. The right of departure also applies, with no required notice by the recipient who is leaving.
There is an important caveat to all five residency types.
Requirement is that residency over time requires notice of revocation proportional to the time spent in lawful occupancy.
Twenty-four hours = 4 hours.
Seventy-two hours = 12 hours.
One hundred sixty-eight hours (1 week) = 24 hours.
One month = 1 week.
One year = 1 month.
More than one year, less than 10 years = 2 months.
Ten years or more = 3 months.
This is a safeguard against sudden or unexpected homelessness, which is considered unnecessarily stressful on both the person and the Protocol state with obligation to house them.
San San chooses to have an additional safeguard against accusations of violating the residency rights of a San San resident.
In parallel with the public food dispenser system is the public beds system. This is a warren-like hostel setting in which a citizen's identity card opens the door to and temporarily rents - for 23 hours exactly - a safe space with bedding in which to sleep, with nearby restroom and shower facilities. This happens to meet the capsule hotel requirement of Protocol, but the 23 hour limit is specifically tailored to avoid creating any right to residency to any particular space. Any personal items left in a public bed are removed by bots before the room is flash-sterilized and bedding replaced. Bots also enforce the "one person per bed" rule with stunners. As there are public spaces in which human sexuality may be expressed, this does not violate any related Protocol rights.
A habitual uzer of a public bed is likely a VR or hard drug addict. Like public food dispensers, everyone has used one, but rarely and without pride in the fact.
