Wikidemocracy

[bigbadgerjohnny]

Howdy Leip-ers,
I've decided to put together a "circular letter" about wikidemocracy and ask around to see if anyone might want to add to it.  If it gets long enough I'd like to publish it as a book, not to make money, but just to interest future historians about what folks thought about this new form of government circa 2012 C.E.

There's various ways to think about wikidemocracy, but I like to imagine it as a really big wiki and town hall USA legislature,  225 million souls instead of the current 535. 

I'm pasting a copy of the letter I wrote below, if tacking your name on with your response to the letter sounds interesting to you, please send me an e-mail at    settdigger@gmail.com

Thanks for listening!

Robin Wyatt Dunn



----




Dear Folks,

Wikidemocracy in America:  what is it?

There are few forms of direct democracy operational as of August 2012, and they all (the initiative, the referendum, the recall) act as adjuncts to aristocracies. 

Wikidemoracry is the agora, again.  The agora was the marketplace, where Athenian aristocrats circa 400 B.C. hung out and governed.  Wikidemocracy in America would be the agora, again.  A real big agora.  Instead of 535 Congresspeople (100 Senators and 435 Representatives), we’d have about 225 million American citizens over 18, all citizen-legislators, logging on, signing in, drinking their coffee, writin’ them some good laws (and bad ones).

We are comfortable with aristacry for good reason:  it is in our genes.  Biologists tells us our ape cousins have well established hierarchies where some get more food than others, and take others’ food away when they want.  Some theorize this was useful when famine came along:  let the poor die, the rich live, life goes on.

Now we know better, we hope.  Now we know all men and women and transgendered people are created equal, and they have equal opportunities, let us hope, to exercise their God-given talents and pursue happiness.  For whatever reason, let’s just chalk it up to history, democratic institutions are under threat all over this Earth.  Maybe the threat isn’t big!  Maybe it’s just this latent infection that won’t get too bad.  But why not respond to this “mild cold” with a mighty overhaul, why not try a crazy-sounding 21st Century political health spa, the wikidemocracy.

So, a big agora.  Obviously, already unworkable!  Although I’ve never been to Switzerland, just looking at their beautiful democratic processes of gathering 10,000 bodies together to vote in person at special times is charming, and inefficient.

And yet, lest we all become modern hermits and never leave our homes, we clearly need a strong balance between town halls and committed political Internet networks, a system of wikidemocracies.  You could have your local, state, and federal wiki pages.  All waiting for your laws, and your votes.

The advantages:  your children can legislate without getting elected!  You can teach them how to write a law, even how to write a good law.  Then you can argue with your neighbor about it.  You get some skin in the game.  You can’t blame Washington if you’re the government!  Make Lincoln’s famous words come true in reality, not just in spirit.

The disadvantages:  mob rule!  Our ancestors feared it.  The chief bad thing about mobs is when they get angry they get stupid.  This is why we have the Supreme Court, which still today loyally protects the rights of minorities.  In any wikidemocracy where I was a citizen, I would want a strong Supreme Court, just like we got know, to protect against the nasty sides of crowds when they decide to bite someone (gays, blacks, Jews, Commies, whoever it might be).

Mob rule!  Mobs are dirty.  All kinds of colors of people.  We haven’t vetted them in advance.  That one-legged Gypsy next door just had another goddamned baby.  In 18 years that goddamned Gypsy kid will be legislating in a wikidemocracy whether you like it or not.  They, if they’re a citizen, will be able to write and vote on laws in a wiki.

Mob rule!  Wow, there’s a lot of us.  225 million!   Multiply 535 (the current size of our legislature) by about 420,000, and there you’d have it.  So just stop to think:  every one of those 535 people we elected has the power to govern 420,000 people with their pen.  Why did we give them so much power?  The writers of the Constitution knew that historical republics were easily corrupted by foreign gifts, and so wrote down that Congressmen shouldn’t be allowed to receive them.  But how many “gifts” do they get from corporations now?  How many gifts do they have to get just to get re-elected?

And that’s the big gain in a Wiki-D, folks.  No more elections for Congress.  No more representatives.  You represent yourself.

Now remember, there are lots of ways to implement this.  We could have proxies, in at least two forms.  You want to keep your representative?  Okay, fine.  Designate your voting privilges as such on the wiki, put a check mark next to Darrel Issa’s name and select “all votes” or something and you never have to legislate even once.  But Issa, who might once have had a million constituents, might now only have seventeen.  Or he might even have more!  God knows, wikidemocracy is crazy enough, and the American people are crazy enough, maybe Congress would actually shrink!  And everyone would designate Obama their proxy, and he could become Emperor.  Another version of a proxy would be to have a “voting profile” of some kind that you could activate, if you were lazy, and then change later when you wanted.  God knows they’ve written enough lines of code to determine what you like to buy online, we could certainly examine what you like to vote on online.

Another cool structural function of a wikidemocracy was proposed by the Swedes, in the form of tug-of-war voting.  In this system, a bill never really leaves the floor.  You can vote on it forever.  But at some point, it reaches a critical mass (whatever the magical number is) where enough people have voted that it acquires teeth, and it goes over for the President’s signature.  (Do we want to leave the President the veto?  Think of how many laws he’s going to be signing!)

Mob rule!  Chaos, people will say.  I can hear Fox News chanting about it now, declaiming the virtues of nice, sane oligarchies.  Yeah, it’s messy.  But it would let us put our apathy aside.  It wouldn’t let us say “well I voted for the other guy.”  If you’re not legislating, you’re just sitting on your ass.

- -

The Technocrats and the Aristocrats

Even if our Founding Fathers crawled out of their graves tomorrow and gaveled in a New Constitutional Convention tomorrow and we signed it into law the same day, we’d still have rich and poor.  We’d still have educated and uneducated.

Rich people have time on their hands, and money to buy others’ time.  And technocrats have hard-won knowledge of how systems work.  They make government go, they grease those wheels and keep the lights on and keep the mail trucks fueled while our elected politicians glad hand each other and worry about terrorism.  We gonna need those technocrats.  They ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Time is a lot more complicated.  I don’t know why New England states never did manage to agree to have just a few paid days off a year to go to town hall meetings, but they didn’t.  I’m guessing they were just too afraid.  In the old capital/ labor conflict, capital won again.

So we’d need time.  One day off a month, for starters.  Paid out of the U.S. Treasury.  If you’re a hard-core legislator, sure, do it in your free time too, but that one day could be holy, if we wanted it to be.  sh**t, make it two.  Think how much we could change, add to the GNP with our collective spirit, how much we’d invest in the future of our country with those days off.

People are getting used to Wikipedia.  They’re getting used to Facebook.  People like democracy.  There’s a million details to argue over, some vital and some less so, but still before us is the simpler question:  why do it?  And why not?  Smart people remain unconvinced.  So let’s have us a circular letter, in honor of our ancestors.

Sincerely yours,

Robin Wyatt Dunn
Los Angeles, Calif.
August 13, 2012

[Foucaulf]

Oh, this is too easy...

There are few forms of direct democracy operational as of August 2012, and they all (the initiative, the referendum, the recall) act as adjuncts to aristocracies.

And even then they have been subsumed by them (you sound like a Socal person, you must have paid attention to Prop 8 ). That should have been your first warning. I'll play along with your usage of "aristocracy" for these first parts.

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And, like the Athenians, talking about these matters while supported by slave labour?

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Or maybe the elite classes like to preserve their interests through paying off others. Not a knock against the bigger argument as it is against pseudoscience babbling. I guess you did provide some tangential evidence following this, but I can respond by naming any one of the hundreds of peasant revolts throughout history.

Yet I wonder why you resort to a biological argument - is there a subconscious strategy here where you tie your idea into a narrative of progress?

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The irony you missed is that that pursuit of happiness conflicts more than ever with the democratic institution, in fact the former currently being on an offensive against the latter. That should have been the second warning.

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In reality, none of that exists. Why is that so? - that should have been your third warning.

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1) considering how some parents enclose their children in home schooling at best and abuse them to death at worst, it doesn't look good on your system if it sanctifies the parent's word even more. It appeals to the romantic societies of American conservatives, ignoring that they are obviously incapable of completely influencing their children.

2) The blame has to go somewhere. The good thing about blaming Washington is that at least Washington has heavy security.

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1) Is the sudden switch against mob rule supposed to be tongue-in-cheek? Your rhetorical style is getting harder to read - maybe you shouldn't be penning any laws.

2) This brings the inevitable questions on how an arbitration committee should be chosen. If it's anything like today's Wikipedia, the moderators/judges get chosen through brown nosing, patronage and even bribery. The process becomes self-selecting, since, of course, everyone except the judges have the same legislative mandate. Eventually the judges, being the only ones with exceptional power, will face the resentment of the majority.

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Because a certain minority among us have a positive enough image of the legislator to support him/her, and a majority among us have a positive enough image of that minority. Not that hard a question. Really the power keeps getting passed on, seized by each successive politician; those who gave the legislative power died a long time ago. A better question would be "how to take that power back", but that's a question law cannot easily answer without running into absurdities like the three warnings already mentioned.

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And how many donations they receive from regular people, even pre-Citizens United? That there are people who slavishly devote themselves to a candidate, so far as to wretch them from the jaws of plutocrat influence, is warning number four.

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Let's pause to reflect on the warnings previously mentioned. All in fact say around the same things: people do not care to represent themselves when they have better things to do. They could be producing things; they have friends to be with; compared to those, what increased benefit is there to sit at a town hall or make back-and-forths with strangers on the internet? No surprise those who debate on the internet are most adamant in their views, for only then can they obtain the highest pleasure in belief alone.

Most people naturally realize government is an artificial institution layered upon us. What is there to gain, then, by learning that institution's mannerisms and jargon in hope of some minute chance of influencing it? Those who do decide to learn all that organize together, because no one really want to waste the effort in doing everything themselves.

I differ in my criticisms from most people, because they would say most Americans are not educated enough to understand legal complexities. I would say most Americans are right not wasting their time. And, of those activist organizations, the majority do work on the ground, leaving only a few to actually suffer through the Congressional proceedings. But maybe that minority finds it pleasurable.

With all this talk about direct democracy, I always wonder: what happened to the idea of just getting out there and protesting? Indeed, what gets more news coverage: the backroom deals involved in making legislation or the mass rallies in support of a cause? There's this insipid belief that people ought to be exposed to the workings of the legislative class, as if those legislators are doing a higher kind of work.

So, no, I don't see why anyone needs an institution to remind themselves they are represented in a society, when they do so through existing alone. There are certainly more physical, tangible and fun ways to represent oneself in government than to be another peg in a bureaucracy of rules.


Hopefully I didn't go on too much with that response. I can elaborate further if needed; I could take a close look at the rest of your post. The real problem I have is that even your writing shows you're too creative for this kind of policy pablum.

[The Mikado]

Twice in one day (once IRL, to be fair) have I come across this notion.  Again, I point to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and the role he ascribes to demagoguery and rogues like Cleon and Alcibiades in Athens' fall, by misleading Athenians into stampeding into some pretty damn bad strategic decisions.

[bigbadgerjohnny]

Hey gents.  Thanks for being curious about wikidemocracy.  On a whim I decided to email various "experts" -- politicians and professors mostly, to ask them what they thought of wikidemocracy.  Most of them seemed to think it was when a senator gets a really cool web site.

Foucaulf, are you interested in the idea of the circular letter in published form at all?  In the 18th Century circular letters were basically what we'd call flyers, but I'm putting together a book that's a circular letter in a more logical way -  just people writing thoughtful responses on this subject, back and forth, as you already have done.  Could sure use your help, you write very clearly.  The book would most likely lose money, but even if it made money I'd be happy to donate it.

So:

Obviously ancient Athens was deeply flawed, as human nature is.  And we've got a reasonably -- in some ways -- democratic system set up now. 

Your chief objection seems to be that people are lazy.  They have better things to do.  By this argument, any form of government that can reliably deliver guns and butter and bread and circuses to the people could receive your blessing, presuming it leaves people with lots of tasty free time.

So:  how lazy are people?  I agree, they're pretty lazy.  But:  people are also smart, you seem to be willing to agree with that.  And wikidemocracy is very compatible with smart, lazy people.  Sit on all your ass all week?  Fine.  All month?  Great.  It's just like Congress.

Even if you only vote, say 2 times a year, and never write a single law, already your democratic contribution to society has gone up.  You're making your voice heard.  I assume, in this argument, that making your voice heard is a good thing.  Maybe you disagree, I don't know.

And voting twice a year on a couple random pieces of legislation could cost almost nothing:  a few bucks for bandwidth, and the time of course, that it takes to keep the system running and secure and operational.

But I am fully convinced that implementing a new form of government faces the enormous problem of political will, way way way ahead of any practical concerns.  Yes, it is technically challenging, yes, it would lead to social change, maybe even some dramatic social changes in some areas, yes it would require time and thought and energy and ingenuity and a little cash.  But it's not hard to do, speaking only of its feasability and do-ability.  Whether Americans would ever want such a thing, I've no idea.

You bring up another point which I don't think much of, but it's still important:  the pursuit of happiness conflicts with democratic values.  Any light reading on the subject of altruism in primates should put this objection aside.

Then you raise these objections, in regards to young people writing laws at home:

1) considering how some parents enclose their children in home schooling at best and abuse them to death at worst, it doesn't look good on your system if it sanctifies the parent's word even more. It appeals to the romantic societies of American conservatives, ignoring that they are obviously incapable of completely influencing their children.

2) The blame has to go somewhere. The good thing about blaming Washington is that at least Washington has heavy security.

As to (1), yes, there are bad parents.  Yes, bad parents with a legal adult living at home could tell their child to write bad laws.  This is a separate problem from our form of government.  i don't quite get what you're saying about the romanticism of American conservatives.  Yes, we have influence over our children, yes it waxes and wanes.

As to (2):  Blame.  Blame is very interesting and you're right that it has to go somewhere.  Think of good old Nazi Germany.  You could always say:  it was Hitler, rather than:  it was all of us.  If the Nuremburg Laws had been written on a wiki, Germans would have had an even harder time afterwards explaining themselves to the rest of the world.

So, we like scapegoats.  How much do Americans like scapegoats?  Do we like them so much that we're content to "elect" them endlessly, as they punish us and others with increasingly absurd blunders on the global stage?  Do Americans really just want to be able to hold on to the Simpsons argument "I voted for Kodos" whenever they feel the country is moving in the wrong direction?

Did Moses really lead the Hebrews out of bondage, or was it a lot of angry Hebrews helping point out the way?  This all brings us back to primate behavior.  The Alpha Dog is impressive.  he is Large.  He gets Many Mates.  Much Food.  Mucho Respecto.  When things go wrong, we all kick the sh**t out of him.  There is a beautiful symmetry in this social hierarchy:  much reward, much risk.

What is the risk in writing a wiki-law? 

Let's assume that you cannot write these laws anonymously, and that, should you really desire influence in your physical as well as virtual community, you have made it known that your username equals John Doe of 123 Main street on the east side of town, etc. 

There's still risk/ reward, insofar as you can then be an early adopter, a leader among equals, as opposed to the Alpha Male Who Rules All.

If you read Jared Diamond, many small tribal groups we encountered in the modern era used the government of the 'het-man' who did not have a bigger hut, rarely had more wives, and simply had more responsibilities.  A visitor could say hi to the het-man, and maybe the het-man was good at resolving disputes sometimes, that's about it.

I think we're more comfortable in, more ready for, and more adaptable to, a wikidemocracy than some people might be willing to admit.

Earlier you objected to some of my rhetorical forms, here's one of yours that appears weak to me:

"Most people naturally realize government is an artificial institution layered upon us. What is there to gain, then, by learning that institution's mannerisms and jargon in hope of some minute chance of influencing it? Those who do decide to learn all that organize together, because no one really want to waste the effort in doing everything themselves."

Who are these most people?  'You know, 3 out of 4 Whoozits Likes Momma Brand Apple Bacon.'  I take it you're a libertarian, great!  Libertarians should really be all gung-ho for wikidemocracy.  Libertarians love freedom!  But your flavor of libertarianism is pretty depressing:  it seems to involve a lot of embracing of futility.

Your argument here seems to be:  government as it exists today does not work.  Therefore all government does not work.  Therefore I should learn nothing about government.

This is unproductive thinking.

But, your last statement is certainly true, people act in groups.  In a wikidemocracy, I see no reason why we wouldn't have a total explosions of political parties and interest groups. 

You mention protesting.  It's so hard.

Look at the Orange Revolution:  they successfully got their corrupt president to leave Kiev, then got a corrupt replacement in a matter of weeks.

How do we build a wikidemocracy while standing in the streets?  We do not.  We build it by making it happen, by wanting it.

Canada wants a form of it:  they now have the "Online Party of Canada" which I believe is aimed at giving citizens veto power over some or all laws in Canada, I'm not sure.  They don't appear to be in favor of letting citizens write them.

Are we gonna let Canada beat us to a Democracy?

Did we sit idle when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Who's with me??