I wanna see some radical takes.
Law is just software that runs on people. In the US, the programming language is English, the OS is the United States Government and the kernel is the Constitution. States can be thought of as containers within this system.
Our current system is badly corrupted and needs a reinstall. Our devs basically write malware to benefit their donars. We even have ransomware (such as the budget negotiations). Our current system, built on democratic principals as they were understood 250 years ago, is totally clogged up with bloat, malware and closed source code doing who knows what. All the platforms are maximum enshittified. It’s like a 15 year old Windows install where it’s the only computer in the house, your grandmother has been clicking on every flashy blinky ad, your grandfather fancies himself a software engineer and has been messing around in Control Panel and they won’t let you touch it because screw you, they got theirs. Meanwhile your parents are at work 80 hours a week and “don’t use the computer anyway” because they’re just too tired to care.
The only thing to do with a system like that is to nuke it and reinstall. Everyone knows you can’t repair it.
We should replace it with something much more opensource. How about direct democracy using some sort of… oh I don’t know, some system of commits and pull requests. If someone writes some racist bullshit, well, everyone can see who he was and you can flame him on law hub. You can even just ban bad actors and trolls.
Would it be perfect and uncorruptible? No. Would the community always make the kind of decisions I would want? Definitely no. Would it be a massive improvement over what we have? Hell yes.
So what is crime then if law is our OS? Virus?
Crime is an architectural feature of organizations of humans. It would still exist, even if we took the code off humans entirely.
What we call “Crime” is just a lack of buy in to the system and a willingness to operate outside its parameters for whatever reason.
There’s a sort of objective, philosophical definition of crime, like most people will probably agree that torture is a crime against humanity for instance. But for the purposes of legal code, crime is just choosing not to cooperate with the system when it gives you instructions or sets boundaries or attempts to impose consequences. There will be humans that make these kinds of choices for all kinds of various reasons for as long as there is a system that involves humans. Nothing about the model I’m proposing would fix that, although if you engineer your system more intelligently, taking human behavior into account, there will probably be a lot less crime and a lot less criminals.