Re: [WDDM] cyberdemocracy

[Joshua Petersen <joshupetersen(at)gmail.com>]

On the topic of a cyberdemocracy direct democracy, initially, it seems like a workable idea. However, there are some pitfalls in just saying, "Let's start voting online." This isn't to say that this isn't a good idea, far from it, but it's not that simple. It's pretty simple, but not that simple.

A few point to keep in mind about government:
1. A major form of legitimacy of a government is that the government's citizens recognize it as legitimate. This comes before even other countries recognizing it as legitimate. Which effectively requires:

1a. A government must have citizenship.
1b. The government must provide some influence into people's lives.
1c. The government must provide a standard for vital interactions (such as trade), and be able to provide (usually through some form of taxes) the ability to keep its own functions running.

These provide a few pitfalls for the cyberdemocracy:

1a: The government must attract citizens as a decentralized cyberdemocracy.Most governments have most of their citizens born into it, but in the cyberdemocracy, citizenship, at least for its early stages at minimum, is purely a matter of choice. (Assuming a government doesn't convert to a cyberdemocracy, but few political leaders would even begin to consider limiting their power in such a way.)

1b: With the decentralized effect that comes from converting to a cyberdemocracy, policing actions (until the cyberdemocracy becomes very commonplace) are neigh impossible. Policing action is one of the most common forms of social influence of a government. However, it's a form of negative reinforcement (fear of a negative action keeps you following the governments laws). Which works when you have territorial control, but when logging off and never getting back on removes you from a government, negative reinforcement just serves to get people to leave the government. A cyberdemocracy would have to focus on positive reinforcement. People would want to join the government (and stay with it) because the benefits of doing so far outweighed the negatives.

1c: Providing some major benefit for interaction (if not several) is vital for a government as it unifies the people, and provides some standard methods for carrying out living, as well as getting necessary services for the government met (usually done in the form of taxes which in turn pay for getting those services met). This is especially important for a cyberdemocracy due to the point in 1b. whereas a cyberdemocracy must provide positive reinforcement for membership.

Now, it would be rude of me to point out all these problems without providing at least one possible solution. I'm not saying my solution is the best, but it is one possible solution and the best I can come up with.

One of the traditional forms of binding a countries people together has often been the countries monetary system. And in fact, that is one of the binding features of the internet. It has no roads, and communication is already built into its framework, but various forms of payment, sources of such, etc. bounce around the internet all the freakin' time.

Although, trying to capitalize on an existing form of major currency would cause issues, because we're then taxing something they can easily handle someplace else for free. And trying to make a completely new currency for people to work would be fraught with the issue of people never even bothering dealing with something new and have a hard time of incorporating into their lives.

So a good way to bring together and unify a new cyberdemocracy would be to provide a currency that is both universal yet novel, thereby providing a quick and efficient means of trade while allowing the cyberdemocracy to take enough of this trade source to provide its own needs, all the while being a positive resource in people's lives rather than a negative for not being followed.

My suggestion is that we build our cyberdemocracy off a currency of time. This would work in the following way:

There would be a general policy of "Work 2 hours (for anyone, government included), get 1 hour worth of work from someone else (government included)"

This may seem like a detriment cost of work/payback at first glance, but it's value quickly becomes apparent. Working 2 hours in something you know how to do pays off by doing something you can't do yourself or would take you much longer. For example, a fence-builder might need dental work done. The works in the benefit for the fence-builder because he can build a fence for two hours and get an hour of dental work which he would have no hope of getting taken care of. The dentist just needs to work on teeth for four hours (something he's good at, obviously), and he can get that two-hour check up from a heart doctor on those weird palpatations he's feeling. The heart doctor, on the other hand, Spends a couple hours checking out someone's heart, and he doesn't have to deal with having to try and build that fence in his backyard on a cold day. And through all this process, the government is able to gain work being done by either these people or by other people who need their services as well.

The tax system is inherently included to keep the government running up to half of the work being done in the system... and in fact, keeping up work getting done for it would be beneficial for the system overall.)

Both getting and providing an education should be paid in hours by the government as well (up to a point), since it allows a person to then turn around and provide a high-skilled service to those who need it.

Working to get work done for you is easily understandable by most people.

People can easily vote for jobs that need more work done (road work, police work, etc.) and the government can allocate hours for it. Further, the system may later include a percentage system. (The more vital a job, it may work at an altered income rate, like working a disgusting job in the sewers may get you an hour's worth of work for you by only doing 1.1 hours work).

Also, by tracking of hours worked through the government system, and hours of work only being tradable to and from government website (otherwise, there's nothing tracking it), all of a sudden it trims 'fat' positions gained from trading some currency or commodity, greatly reducing causes of a rich/poor gap. "Wealth" would be determined literally by how much time you're willing to put into it. At the same time, it also make the cyberdemocracy vital to the process and providing something simple that would otherwise would be difficult. (Most people cannot easily find 'work' through online how and when they want. Positions with these desirable traits are generally limited to specialized IT and business individuals in our current systems.)

In fact, if someone is willing to contact me to help me work together on this, I have most of the processes on how to get a system like this up and running thought through, and instead of just talking, we could get something like this up and running as a good initial experiment. It would be an easy system to initially set up (just taking a bit of time and work) If it succeeds, great, we've got a self-sustaining cybergovernment up and running (which would of course run on a direct-democrcy government system). And if fails, we'll probably learn a lot about what does and doesn't work in a directdemocracy cyberdemocry in the process, which would be invaluable information for later attempts.

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 6:20 AM, <Alexander Kassios> wrote:

Lata I am also interested in DD platforms and might be able to contribute (depending on the project, programming language).

cheers,

Alex

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 2:12 PM, <Lata Gouveia> wrote:

Hello Andrzej,
Very interesting.

It's nice to know that someone on WDDM has a similar view of the practical aspects of DD.
With regards to HOW to attain DD I stand somewhere in between your notion of a spontaneous, natural technological outcome and the rather prescriptive methodologies that our colleagues here in WDDM tend to favor.

I agree almost entirely with everything you said, except that it leaves me with a feeling that we can just sit back and relax because DD will happen of its own accord. This might well happen, don't get me wrong... but I think some intention might also be required.

Also, there is the danger that Direct Democracy might not be a flawless concept, there are some major potential pitfalls that would almost certainly force people to abandon the experiment before it had a chance to reach maturity. I am talking here about public miss-information, the public's tendency for knee-jerk reactions and the public's tendency to shirk responsibility for their own actions. If politicians are convenient escape goats, there is a high probability that "the majority" would become the escape goat, unless the system reflected back to the user on an individual level a direct relationship between one's participation level and one's weight in decision making, just like the economic arena does.

I came to believe that a weighted vote solution might be of huge motivational value, where certain boundaries would have to be set up, like for instance a maximum inequality of 2 to 1... or even 10 to 1 (remember that in the current economy we have common inequalities of millions to 1 which in turn corrupt the representative system). Is there any mention of the possibility of weighted voting in the book you have mentioned?

At present I am in Luxembourg and I have finally found some programming Academics who are willing to help me put some platform ideas into practice. If you know of people who are working towards the creation of cyber DD platforms, please let me know because there might be some interesting potential for cross-polination of ideas with regards to a number of database functions and application variables.

Thanks again for your message.

Ted, please do me a favor and don't respond to this.
You don't own WDDM, Ahahaha!!!

Lata

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From: <WDDM webmaster>
To: wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Sent: Tue, 23 November, 2010 2:21:39
Subject: [WDDM] cyberdemocracy

*Date:* Sat, 6 Nov 2010 10:07:30 -0700 (PDT)
*Subject:* cyberdemocracy
*From:* Kaczmarczyk Andrzej
*To:* wddm@world-wide-democracy.net

Dear DD-ists,
I’m avid follower of DD. With some completion: I don’t perceive DD as a
pure political phenomenon, but as a technology driven occurrence that
can come about through civilization changes; I do perceive it as a
specific EDD, being associated with e-civilization and Information Society
development. Present parliamentary democracy is more than two centuries old,
has been tailored for territorially-oriented nation-states, has arisen when
democratic rulers exercised power only over muskets and sabers, not over
nuclear weapons’ push-buttons (soon about forty of them!). Neither there
were ubiquitous global socio-economic phenomena, nor global threats related
to biosphere, climate, energy resources. This all appears in full scale right
now, together with knowledge and technology unimaginable in times of
parliamentary democracy’s founding fathers. A course of transformation can be
deduced from observable trends of change in many areas of human activity,
and of use of artifacts of e-civilization in it. On the threshold of
postmodernity, characterized by social life regulation from its interior,
exercised by “flexible and fluctuating” networks rather than by structured
institutions, the old democratic paradigm loses its utility. Traditional
organizational structures are substituted be new ones, more flexible, more
participatory and more decentralized — taking advantage of self-organization
and “the wisdom of crowds”, so naturally affined to DD. Information and
knowledge become instantaneously accessible, transportable and can be
simultaneously distributed to an unlimited number of users. A new democratic
paradigm — which I call “cyberdemocracy” — should be compatible with this
altering world, so must be a participatory, flexible, and networked one.
And this is why cyberdemocracy won’t be an elegantly designed, simple entity
with its schema easy to absorb even for a child. It will arise in a
natural, evolutionary way, by the efforts of its distributed architects.
However it can be, and ought to be, a “user friendly” system, meaning it is
easy to use, not necessarily easy to understand; we are daily users of a
multitude of such systems. I’ve written a book about the phenomenon, titled
“Cyberdemocracy. Change of democratic paradigm in the 21st century”
(accessible in Amazon). The book includes seven chapters. The first six of
them present “as are” issues essential for the future cyberdemocracy,
i.e. current state and development trends of the Information Society,
the cyberspace, electronic democracy with its key tool in the form of
electronic voting, DD as cyberdemocracy’s key component, and additional
factors which can help the cyberdemocracy to cross the gate of history.
The final chapter presents a vision of the “would be” cyberdemocracy,
derived from those previous considerations. Each chapter includes its
ummary and conclusion, and all these summaries together form a digest
of the book.
Greetings
Andrzej Kaczmarczyk