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