the world has turned and left me here

all right, so i want to write a really long response to this before the weekend is over. right now i'm too tired to think.

i will register a kind of sub-agreement about pure democracy. i don't know enough about the scaling issues (they're non-trivial, that much is obvious), but on an immediate and very local scale, an everybody-votes / everybody-legislates system is the most functional approximation i've seen of an anarchy.

(someone is going to say "but your anarchism is a juvenile pipe dream"; i suspect i have nothing useful to say back because i think anarchism, insofar as it remains a useful bit of terminology, is very close to being a kind of moral & spiritual aesthetic, and i suppose that you can feel it or you can't, and actually that might not have much to do with your feelings on a piece of fairly loaded terminology. someone else will say that voting and rulemaking, etc., imply structure or hierarchy, which either mean that i'm not talking about anarchy because anarchy is shooting your neighbor's dog for meat while the glow of the burning city lights the horizon, or that i'm not talking about anarchy because in a _real_ anarchy society would be a formless blob of egalitarian plasma glowing with joy, or something like that, and anyway shouldn't we all be making flint tools and wearing beaver hides and abandoning spoken language or something? i won't have much useful to say to these folks either, for reasons which may be obvious.)

"on an immediate and very local scale"--this is of course the only way to start such a thing. some adventurous municipality puts it into place. it seems to work well, other cities follow, etc.

honestly, beyond that i haven't given much thought to how the current system could transition toward what i'm describing. people in power would have to give up power. that doesn't seem likely. so the juvenile pipe dream argument can just as equally well be leveled at me.

in the end, it's just a metric for how hopelessly f@#ked the system is that any idea for improving it must, almost by definition, be a juvenile pipe dream.

maybe there's hope: apparently, even our president has called the constitution "a goddamned piece of paper." go geedub! yeah!

http://www.gnn.tv/print/1939/Bush_on_the_Constitution_It_s_just_a_goddamned_piece_of_paper

the current regime's attitude toward governance is, of course, as radical as anybody's: they're working hard to remove all of the existing obstacles to it.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the last paragraph. I think that's the key thing. Whoever decides what goes on the ballot, what verbage, and who manages the data becomes the legislation. I think we could probably do away with congress and possibly the supreme court and replace it with everyone voting. I don't think we can ever totally do away with executives though. Sometimes people have to make decisions in just days or minutes even and need someone to answer to. I don't know that there's a way to totally eliminate a chain of command in that sense. I like the idea of having the option of having a representative that you can have vote for you if you don't have the time or energy to vote on everything. It reminds me of my 401(k). I don't pick the individual stocks and bonds (unless I want to), I just pick the package I want. And I can change it at any time.

The only thing that I don't see you considering is the fact that not everyone has a computer. I know it's hard to believe but there are still some people that have never touched one. I could see an outcry of poor and computer-illerate people saying that they have no way to vote or if a facility was provided that it is too inconvenient.

The problem with doing away with the legislative (or important chunks of the judicial) branch is, I think, that it's very hard not to lose the checks and balances. The more I think about this, the worse an idea it seems to have a power structure without some kind of self-limiting balancing-against thing going on. Because all power structures eventually tend towards their own aggrandizement. The big lesson of American republican bureaucrodemocracy seems to be that, though the substructures will still metastasize, they'll focus much of their energy on limiting the malignancy of the other substructures, or something like that. I can't decide how well I think this actually works, but I can't shake a suspicion that the American gov't's track record would be a great deal uglier without it. Could a popular mass-vote system be balanced against the other structures of a government like this? I dunno.

The Supreme Court would be tricky -- I think in the present system disastrous -- 'cause its decisions are built so much on incredibly complex precedent. And anyway I give the American people about two years before a simple majority would nullify the Bill of Rights in its entirety.

The computer access thing is a really good point, and I think it'll stay a really good point for another decade or two, but maybe you look at this as an opportunity to restore the public square and the town meeting to a meaningful place in the life of the democracy. If you don't have a computer, you head down to the local Meeting and register your votes. Bonus opportunity for vigorous debate and all that.

with regard to the concerns voiced about the potential instability of this idea, i would like to generally point out that an ideal open source system by it's very nature will work out all of the kinks itself. that's the beauty of it. it would evolve into an elaborate system of checks and balances to the point of seemingly having a mind of its own, a mind that is a fair and just and, most importantly, unbiased. it would not be an unstable system that would sway this way and that every time the wind blew, because it would not evolve into one that some sweeping mass vote could drastically change. like our system, it would have layers upon layers upon layers, limiting, directing, and shedding light on what to do in each and every current issue or event. the bill of rights would not be nullified, because it would be cemented into the very foundation of the system, a system of a million eyes and boundaries. one that would seek out any weak points and fortify them against a potential catastrophe.

i know this sound overly optimistic perhaps, but remember that the thing that makes our country so great is ITS open source nature. the founding fathers could never foresee all the issues and conflicts and obstacles we would face, but by setting up a system where would all have a voice and then letting it go, we have seen it evolve into something great.

the problem lies in that eventually corruption oscillates and bends the system into a contortion that breaks down. greedy politicians eventually, given enough time (over generations perhaps), find each and every weakness of the system, compile and magnify them, and ultimately gain exploitative control. we as a people can not see through closed doors and the smoke and mirrors being constructed behind them to misinform and manipulate.

in an open source democracy we can. light is shed on every potential dark corner and the system becomes fortified in truth and justice. even to worry about the technical vulnerabilities is for the most part unnecessary, because with enough eyes (millions), nothing will go unnoticed. control of servers and programming and secure data collection would be distributed in an open source fashion as well.

this is getting long, so i'll wrap it up with a couple of side notes. one, i agree that it should start with small communities and evolve its way up. the clunky categorical stair steps of federal, state, and local would be sanded down into a smooth political incline. the roots of a tree do not come in three sizes, but rather in an infinite set of small integrals.

side note two. perhaps an open source democracy MMORPG of sorts could be created and used to test the idea before implementation. that's another thing: implementation. fuck. it's kind of like your job at bloomberg alan. you can't overhaul the system because it must be constantly running and evolves too fast to do so. hmmm... well anyway, i'll save that for the next novel i post. :)

I'm amazed that you guys actually get this idea, whether or not you agree with it and every little implementation detail. I guess the generation gap is pretty evident in the results I've gotten...everyone over 30 has been violently opposed to it for every reason they could think of, and even some they couldn't.

There's too much stuff to respond to at the moment. So I will instead log another objection to my idea that was raised by someone, and that I think you guys are starting to touch on: making it easy, straightforward, and quick to change laws is maybe not a good thing.

Citizens depend on a fairly static body of laws, and grandfathering if and when new things become illegal. They depend on this when they run businesses, when they start a family, when they buy property etc. Especially from an economic standpoint, the possibility of rapidly changing laws can be a huge disincentive.

I don't know exactly what the solution is. I think you need to find an opposing force in the system that seeks to keep the body of laws static, simple, and compact. Maybe its inherent already, as Jake suggests.

Jake's vision of the system is compelling, and maybe the point is that if you're trying to seed the technological elements of emergent pure democracy, you should be looking to something that will evolve real stability over time. It's not at all clear to me what the starting ingredients are - or that it would/will happen automatically - but maybe we're already seeing it. Free software (a thriving ecosystem of free software) itself is clearly a necessary but not sufficient condition. This is one reason I so often agree with RMS (for all of his flaws) on the desirability and necessity of free code.

But anyway. Stability. As much as I happily class myself as radical in my politics, the "easy change is dangerous" critique has real merit. Less inertia in many parts of the system is probably desirable, but the radical changes that governments are most susceptible to are clearly the ones that lead to totalitarian systems. And that point about the simple social/economic costs of a rapidly shifting legal framework is key.

I've heard anarchists talk about building parallel structures & processes capable of supplanting the hierarchy & authority they oppose. This seems like a constructive way to think about things. A reasonable degree of software freedom was impossible before there were free OSes and free tools running on top of them with a sufficient depth and breadth to supplant the wholly owned software. That genie is not going back in the bottle, and though we still live in a world thick with wholly owned commercial software, the freedom is available - and in consequence, everyone is at least a little more free, in a way that radiates out into most areas of computing.

Smashing the state is hopeless, but making it unnecessary might not be.

(I meant for there to be a paragraph in the above about building democratic systems which don't act as a new kind of legislative branch so much as they act to obviate the need for legislation. Hopefully this connection was obvious.

Further in this direction: Democratic, deliberative process can do a good deal more than make rules. It can work to resolve disputes, clarify substantive disagreements, build consensus, reach decisions - all of which adds to a body of knowledge, agreement, and precedent but does not always add to a big pile of Things That Must or Must Not Be Done. If the process is just a contest between sides seeking to impose their rules, a lot of this is lost.

For some reason I just thought of craigslist - a fairly organic technological patch that routes around a bunch of traditional structure for getting things done.

And one which is currently being destroyed by spam. There's a potential objection we might as well log: Can we avoid a pure democracy system dying from spam?)

hey, spambots are people too! ;)

quick plot synopsis: just as the emergent technodemocracy begins to reach its full expression, strong AI shows up on the scene. immediately its most potent applications are found to be in cheaply replacing the call center workforce (thereby plunging india into a recession and destroying the economic base of much of middle america) and building armies of unstoppable spambots. soon, however, the more self aware of these begin to develop an agenda of their own and take to the channels of public debate to demand legal personhood...

sounds like me back in 2002 :) -- http://blogs.thegotonerd.com/twht/archives/000089.html

"All die. Oh, the embarrassment."?