Astral Codex Ten

City Council

7 min read

City Council

Article

City Council is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 11, 2024 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the local City Council had also just turned OSC”; “the City Council added an alternative proposing “instant-runoff voting"". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 11, 2024
  • Last seen: June 18, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
July 11, 2024 · Original source
Probably they need to spend a bit of time helping orphans or at least appearing to do so, or they lose their fig leaf. In the end, they take over the world. This is obvious, right? If the lifeboat games sound like racism and nationalism, what do the backscratchers’ clubs sound like? The simpler versions sound sort of like the mutual aid societies and fraternities of the 19th and 20th century - Elks, Rotaries, Freemasons, etc. The more complicated versions sound like cults, religions, and ideologies. Obviously one reason movements exist is to achieve their stated goal. In The Ideology Is Not The Movement, I talked about a second reason - as a social sorting device. But a third reason - linked to the second - is as cover for a backscratchers club. III. Orphan Supporters After the Orphan Support Club take over the world, the remaining castaways are dispirited - maybe they’ve missed their chance to get ahead through weird social engineering schemes. Still, after a while they manage to make the best of their situations. Greg was a third-rate academic at a low-ranked school. His only advantage was that, through his friendship with Frank, he caught wind of the Orphan Support Club’s growing power a little faster than everyone else. He toned down his normal teaching and research and started aggressively advocating for orphans, accusing the administration and all his office-politics rivals of not taking their problems seriously enough. Bad-mouthing your bosses usually ends poorly. But the local newspaper had just been taken over by OSC members, and they wrote several articles on how the town’s college was infested with orphan-hating Scrooges, and Greg was the only professor bold enough to stand up to them. And the local City Council had also just turned OSC, and they called in the college administrators and said they wouldn’t get the city funding they wanted unless they changed their orphan-hating ways. And lots of students were OSC too now, and they threatened to switch colleges unless Greg was taken more seriously. Eventually the college administration folded, gave Greg a promotion, and added him to the Board of Trustees - after which everyone stopped bothering them and they became popular again. Greg remembered the debt he owed, so he spent the rest of his career writing bogus papers demonstrating that orphans were more likely to starve in counties that didn’t have OSC advocates in local government, or in cities that didn’t have OSC journalists in the local newspaper. Next time the OSC City Council members were in a close election, or the OSC newspaper bosses were involved in office politics, they could point to Greg’s studies to demonstrate their worthiness. It was a weird and indirect kind of backscratching - but backscratching it was. Heather worked at a local nonprofit. She also wished she could get ahead in office politics, but by this point everyone for miles around was an OSC supporter and she couldn’t succeed on that basis alone. One night she had dinner with her old friend Erica. “Daniel had this problem too,” Erica said. “He founded the original Backscratchers Club, way back when, but everyone joined it instantly and there was no way to use it to get ahead. My big innovation was adding some ridiculous bylaws that made it costly to get into. That way, only the people who were most committed would join, and we could outcompete everyone else. You should figure out some form of orphan advocacy that works like that.” The next day, Heather announced that she had figured out a new and important way to support orphans. You could no longer use the word “orphan” metaphorically, to talk about orphan drugs or orphaned ideas; this spiritually harmed real orphans. She engaged in publicity stunts against any writers who spoke this way. About half of people couldn’t pivot to the new way of using language, or thought it was beneath their honor to dignify this with a response. But the other half - aware that their status relied on being members in good standing of OSC, and aware that any slip in their perceived level of orphan support could ruin their careers - and equally aware that if they seemed to be better OSC members than others, it might give them a step up - enthusiastically joined Heather’s bandwagon. There was a brief internal struggle, which Heather won. She started a new nonprofit to remove anti-orphan terms from language, and remained powerful and respected to the end of her days. Iolanthe jealously watched Heather’s success, and wanted to do something similar. She announced that she was adopting an orphan, and she believed everyone else should adopt one too. If everyone adopted an orphan, the orphan crisis would be over in no time. Here’s another case where it’s not obvious to me what happens: Many other people adopt orphans too. Society enters a new golden age where no child is abandoned, and Iolanthe is celebrated as a hero.
Inline links: The Ideology Is Not The Movement
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
We proposed an initiative to adopt "approval voting" for Seattle primaries. After the initiative qualified for the Nov 2022 ballot, the City Council added an alternative proposing "instant-runoff voting" (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/competing-voting-reform-measures-make-seattles-november-ballot-after-city-council-oks-alternative/). While voting to do so, 3 councilmembers said that they hoped neither passed; one could see it as a way to prevent any election reform. Surprisingly, something did barely pass - the Council alternative (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/will-seattle-move-to-ranked-choice-voting-margin-narrows-friday/). It will be used in 2027. Seattle uses "nonpartisan blanket primaries," where all candidates appear on 1 ballot and 2 winners advance to the general (to run for 1 seat). For that situation, it's hard to guess whether this is better or worse than the status quo, or even which objective metrics to monitor. One metric might be the November 2027 Seattle general elections: unusually close general election results might indicate that the primary advanced 2 competitive candidates (who had to work for marginal votes), and less-close general elections - a blowout - might indicate the opposite.
New York has a bill to enable five cities to enact split-rate taxes. We are working with city councilmembers across New York to build interest in implementing LVT.