The whole picture · about 12 minutes
Whole-system sandbox
Elsewhere, the website explains subsystems one by one. Here they share one screen. Introduce an event and follow what each component passes to the next, in what order and over how many months. Switch off a tile and the event breaks down where the missing link is needed. This is the shortest route to seeing why no subsystem works alone.
Three things before you start
How to read this without mistaking it for a forecast
The numbers illustrate proportions
Indicators run from zero to one hundred and move a few points per step. No economic model or dataset underlies them: they show direction and allow comparisons between runs. Absolute values have no real-world meaning.
Nothing is random
Identical settings and enabled tiles always produce the same sequence. This is deliberate: the aim is to compare configurations, not simulate chance. A real system would, of course, involve uncertainty.
Events are not victories
One of the six ends in a draw rather than a success, with an explanation. A sandbox in which the designer always wins would be advertising, not a tool.
Ten subsystems, six events
The board
Select a tile to disable a subsystem. Choose an event and follow its path. Months advance automatically, the indicators update at each step and the log records what happened and what was missing.
Introduce an event
System settings
These are parameters, not immutable laws. The proposal assumes they will be set and revised through experience when initial assumptions prove mistaken.
What becomes visible from this height
Four things you cannot see by looking at one subsystem
No subsystem commands another
At no point does one component order another to act. Each starts because it receives something it needs from the previous one. That is the proposed distinction between a system and a hierarchy: there is no single top to take over.
The knowledge map is the bottleneck
Disable it and try any event: the sequence breaks in at least three places. That is why the Tree of Knowledge room was built before voting, and why the early years would largely be spent constructing the map.
Enter the Tree of Knowledge room →Money is a mechanism, not a prize
Disable Informatium and many sequences still advance, but voluntary activities stop happening. Checking, reviewing, judging and documenting failures are not civic duties here. They are work supported by income streams, intended to make participation worthwhile.
Decisions are a small part of the system
The Voting Portal appears once or twice in each event. Most steps involve measuring, checking, producing and accounting. What is often imagined as “another way to vote” is largely another economy, with voting attached.
What is deliberately left out
A dependency illustration, not a predictive model
The sandbox shows sequence and dependencies: what each component needs and what fails without it. It does not quantify outcomes. None of the numbers comes from data. There is no economic model, population model or measured timescale. Claiming that it “raises trust by twelve points” would describe a coloured bar, not reality.
The hardest events are absent: war, regional collapse, a deliberate attack on the knowledge map, or a dispute involving the people who build verification tools. The last is among the project’s most serious gaps. This sandbox does not pretend to answer it.
Most importantly: none of these six events has happened in practice, because the system operates nowhere. The sequences were written to illustrate how components connect, not drawn from observations.
A system is revealed not when everything works, but by what fails when one component breaks.
This page connects to
Where to go next
the same system through one person’s day
The whole picture 03Three systemscapitalism, communism and Informatium answering the same questions
Room 02Tree of Knowledgethe tile whose absence disrupts everything
Room 04Votingone tile explained in seventeen steps
11Implementation pathhow to get from today to functioning subsystems
GlossaryAll conceptsone-sentence definitions, a dependency map and a quiz
Sources: subsystem descriptions in Wiedza/ and clarifications from the Tree of Knowledge and voting rooms. The six event sequences were written for this page and do not appear in the source materials.