who brings legislation, how is it developed and then be worked on? if all everyone gets is a vote, or to delegate their vote, who is actually making the policy? The parties?
delegate structures are good and more democratic, but if capitalism still exists, like he rightly points out, money will remain in politics. He concedes there will still be corruption but it will be more dispersed, which is harder? I think it will be very similar. You delegate your vote on the environment to an 'environmental' org that you have seen, but that org is actually funded by a firm somewhere.
For the majority of people, they will pick the most visible org like 'sierra club' or whatever.
if capitalism still exists, class still exists, which means voters or delegates of voters will vote according to their class position. This is tolerable if everyone had to vote themselves, because majority of us are working class, but in capitalism we have all sorts of divisions within the working class like race, sex, education etc. Capitalists will still use this with big ads to ensure that the working class is divided. the 9/11 example is poignant.
liquid democracy will slow the capitalists hold on power down, yes. but like with other socialist electoral projects, if anything actually threatens the structure of capital, the rich will flock to fascism. They will put money in ads for slowly chipping away at any real democracy. They will get the policy makers to put forward a well dressed bill that looks like it is making peoples lives better, but really erodes their power. Shit, they will arm militias and PMC's to prevent any actual radical change in how our economy runs. If it means they will lose their millions or billions and thus their power, they would rather kill people or at least enough of them would. All it takes is some socio-economic turmoil and one crazy elon musk with enough money to put hitler shit into action.
I really appreciate the clarity and depth of thought here. And yet, I worry that there's a ceiling to the level of systemic complexity that our species can sustainably manage. You're trying to upgrade the "medieval institutions" that E.O. Wilson names, but I don't know that our collective emotional or cognitive capacity can be upgraded or evolved at a sufficient enough rate to inhabit the system you're suggesting (let alone the tech that we've already built and continue to build!)
Serious question: in what way is direct democracy less liquid than liquid democracy?
I don't really need complex software to find out the opinion of people whose competency and character I trust. And they're already free to do the same and refine their opinions that way.
Love the idea of liquid democracies. Anyone aware of any strong open source projects looking to build a platform to do this? Agree the DAO isn’t suitable for this use case.
Excellent post! This alone could serve as primer to my entire blog. I am currently developing a digital democracy constitutional framework from scratch, one justification essay at a time, that heavily relies on continuous approval, vote defferal, and introduces revokability of both labor and policy approval distinct from standardized political clocks. I feel the concept of liquid democracy has been reiterated many many times, but never included as part of a larger build. How does continuous approval approach a generally liked candidate who makes a bad call? Or a generally solid policy that has undergone implementation revisions that have bastardized the original intention? How does a voter who is generally not dialed in, but cares deeply about specific issues, interact with their fights? These questions need mechanical answers not the theoretical hand waving they've been provided in literature past.
A very interesting note here, Jim. I missed your 2018/2019 articles over on Medium, so thank you for sharing here. As I read this I see how this might really work on the broad issues that we face, as a nation. And getting a real say in an issue versus a issuing a blank-check vote along a 1 out of 2 choice for representation is very appealing. I'd actually feel very empowered in a big way, a lot more than I feel at the moment. A few things that popped into my feeble brain are 1) how to explain and execute this across 100% of the electorate is a big task, lot's of work to educate process, result verification along the proxy lines as individuals change proxies, 2) lots of folks are freaking out about the technology surge of AI, and I would suspect that some (not I) would have an issue with the technology required to do this effort well, and my first thoughts were use of blockchain technology as an implementation mechanism, and 3) I'm still trying to see if this would work all the way down to the extreme local level. My street, my neighborhood, my county, etc. It could render gerrymandering obsolete - everybody has a say in everything all the time. Interesting, very interesting. In principle all of this seems to me to be doable, and has merit in all of the places I'd like to see it in. Any ideas on ways to phase this in instead of a 100% cutover to a new system? Thanks for the note, Jim.
Wouldn't it be nice if people cared enough to, as you say, get up off their asses and go down to the corner store and buy a liquid democracy? We haven't bred revolutionaries for many generations. And so, we reread After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Or audit a podcast, wait for the collapse, and react.
Support for liquid democracy is what I’ve been saying for decades, and I still think it deserves support. But I also don’t believe it is anywhere near enough, or fast enough.
The meta-mechanism problem is real, but you can stack that on top of the participation problem, and then add the fact that existing governing systems have to buy into it before any of it matters. These are bigger obstacles than most people acknowledge. There has never been an example of meaningful participation much beyond one percent of a population, and examples of existing governing systems voluntarily adopting structural change are nearly nonexistent.
Jim, I’d like to point out a slight tension between your last essay “The Silent Sky” and this push for liquid democracy. I’m sure you’re aware of it. The first essay makes clear how little time we may actually have, and yet the hope here is that liquid democracy gets adopted at sufficient scale, across enough of the world, to address these global problems in time? I say this knowing full well that you’re aware of this dilemma. But what else is there?
This is where I step out from behind the dumpster.
There may be an option you haven’t considered. Before you reach for your gun, a little name dropping: I’ve spoken with your friend Sharon Lewis, and she seems to think this angle is worth exploring. We’re both hoping you might be willing to dig a little deeper.
I want to be clear upfront that this is not a proposal for a new way to govern. It is simply a method of measuring public opinion, with a lot of useful data attached to it. If done right, it would be a self-governing worldwide public institution that earns the trust of people through a level of transparency that hasn’t been achieved before. We expect it to go viral, and we don’t need permission from anyone to make it happen.
Our website is a work in progress. We’re all volunteers, so things move slowly but steadily. There’s enough there to get a clear sense of what we’re trying to do, and there are essays already written that will be posted in the next week or two that will fill in more of the picture.
PS: I love what you’re doing, and what you’ve built. Audible changed my life, and I’m halfway through your podcast catalogue. I can tell you, it has aged very well.
One note on the website: the banner that says “Knowledge As Our Saviour” will be coming down soon. I know it’s not a great look. As I said, it’s a work in progress.
In addition to the issues you mentioned, I think there are some other non-obvious problems with liquid democracy.
A major potential flaw is that having every person vote directly (via delegates or otherwise) on every single issue has the potential to make every decision into the maximally populist decision. That may result in incoherent policies. Less taxes? Yes! More spending on health care and schools? Also yes!
Meanwhile, actual good governance is about making tradeoffs. The real question shouldn't be "do you want less taxes?" AND "do you want better public schools?", but rather about what tradeoffs you are willing to make.
That's why, even in a liquid democracy, those who put proposals to a vote still hold an important role to play, as well as a lot of the power. They're the ones who need to be responsible for ensuring that the set of policies are actually coherent, and what tradeoffs to suggest in the first place.
But then it might be difficult to actually pass sensible proposals. For example, almost everyone will be unhappy with some aspects of a budget proposal. So if any proposal gets voted on an approve-reject basis, it might actually be difficult to pass sensible proposals. Liquid democracy could ironically make parliament illiquid.
One option might be to have votes not just about whether to approve or reject proposals, but to rank competing proposals. For example, different parties might come up with different budget proposals that are then being ranked via direct vote.
I'm not sure what the best solutions are, but the issues seem surmountable. My greater point is that a serious proposal for liquid democracy needs to address not just how voting is done, but also the complementary aspect of the system which decides what votes are being cast on.
A way to produce more coherence while reyaing bottom up self organization would be to require any legislation that incurs costs to require a funding source. An IRS replacement could over funding services such as .x% addition to income tax or sales tax or property tax. Thus the cost of each proposal would be clear and capped.
Incenting Delegates is key... but so is incenting the bulk of participation. I ran into a wall with that while running a very similar campaign at the federal congressional level. Payment might work, but payment also feels like the heaviest logistical lift. There is another path which may work better, which leaves the voting system alone and instead does self-allocation of federal taxes. I built a portal that allowed people to play out that process across all domains of spending and i got quite a lot of emgagement. Called it the new irs. Left a decent press imprint you can look up.
Some interesting ideas in here, Jim. I would add one more thing. And that is moving away from universal suffrage to stakeholder suffrage. The right to vote in national, state, and local elections should be reserved for those who are NET taxpayers in said jurisdictions. That is, if your income from the federal government in all forms (salary, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, EBT, etc.) exceeds your total Federal tax bill (income tax + FICA) you should not be voting in federal elections.
Voters have to know and trust the system enough to enforce at the polls their representatives’ obedience. In effect LD needs to occupy the role that DJT does now, but based on voter allegiance to a very abstract system rather than the appeal of entertainment personality fandom.
Jim, I like the possibilities here, and I agree with your foundational premise that the speed of our representative democracy is long overdue for a boost. I have misgivings about including entities as delegates. Even nonprofits are denominated in dollars, and giving them a seat at the table all but guarantees a lever back to plutocracy.
If I might propose one modification, it’s that only registered voters may serve as delegates. This should be a conversation between citizens, not Citizens United.
who brings legislation, how is it developed and then be worked on? if all everyone gets is a vote, or to delegate their vote, who is actually making the policy? The parties?
delegate structures are good and more democratic, but if capitalism still exists, like he rightly points out, money will remain in politics. He concedes there will still be corruption but it will be more dispersed, which is harder? I think it will be very similar. You delegate your vote on the environment to an 'environmental' org that you have seen, but that org is actually funded by a firm somewhere.
For the majority of people, they will pick the most visible org like 'sierra club' or whatever.
if capitalism still exists, class still exists, which means voters or delegates of voters will vote according to their class position. This is tolerable if everyone had to vote themselves, because majority of us are working class, but in capitalism we have all sorts of divisions within the working class like race, sex, education etc. Capitalists will still use this with big ads to ensure that the working class is divided. the 9/11 example is poignant.
liquid democracy will slow the capitalists hold on power down, yes. but like with other socialist electoral projects, if anything actually threatens the structure of capital, the rich will flock to fascism. They will put money in ads for slowly chipping away at any real democracy. They will get the policy makers to put forward a well dressed bill that looks like it is making peoples lives better, but really erodes their power. Shit, they will arm militias and PMC's to prevent any actual radical change in how our economy runs. If it means they will lose their millions or billions and thus their power, they would rather kill people or at least enough of them would. All it takes is some socio-economic turmoil and one crazy elon musk with enough money to put hitler shit into action.
I really appreciate the clarity and depth of thought here. And yet, I worry that there's a ceiling to the level of systemic complexity that our species can sustainably manage. You're trying to upgrade the "medieval institutions" that E.O. Wilson names, but I don't know that our collective emotional or cognitive capacity can be upgraded or evolved at a sufficient enough rate to inhabit the system you're suggesting (let alone the tech that we've already built and continue to build!)
Serious question: in what way is direct democracy less liquid than liquid democracy?
I don't really need complex software to find out the opinion of people whose competency and character I trust. And they're already free to do the same and refine their opinions that way.
Love the idea of liquid democracies. Anyone aware of any strong open source projects looking to build a platform to do this? Agree the DAO isn’t suitable for this use case.
Excellent post! This alone could serve as primer to my entire blog. I am currently developing a digital democracy constitutional framework from scratch, one justification essay at a time, that heavily relies on continuous approval, vote defferal, and introduces revokability of both labor and policy approval distinct from standardized political clocks. I feel the concept of liquid democracy has been reiterated many many times, but never included as part of a larger build. How does continuous approval approach a generally liked candidate who makes a bad call? Or a generally solid policy that has undergone implementation revisions that have bastardized the original intention? How does a voter who is generally not dialed in, but cares deeply about specific issues, interact with their fights? These questions need mechanical answers not the theoretical hand waving they've been provided in literature past.
A very interesting note here, Jim. I missed your 2018/2019 articles over on Medium, so thank you for sharing here. As I read this I see how this might really work on the broad issues that we face, as a nation. And getting a real say in an issue versus a issuing a blank-check vote along a 1 out of 2 choice for representation is very appealing. I'd actually feel very empowered in a big way, a lot more than I feel at the moment. A few things that popped into my feeble brain are 1) how to explain and execute this across 100% of the electorate is a big task, lot's of work to educate process, result verification along the proxy lines as individuals change proxies, 2) lots of folks are freaking out about the technology surge of AI, and I would suspect that some (not I) would have an issue with the technology required to do this effort well, and my first thoughts were use of blockchain technology as an implementation mechanism, and 3) I'm still trying to see if this would work all the way down to the extreme local level. My street, my neighborhood, my county, etc. It could render gerrymandering obsolete - everybody has a say in everything all the time. Interesting, very interesting. In principle all of this seems to me to be doable, and has merit in all of the places I'd like to see it in. Any ideas on ways to phase this in instead of a 100% cutover to a new system? Thanks for the note, Jim.
Wouldn't it be nice if people cared enough to, as you say, get up off their asses and go down to the corner store and buy a liquid democracy? We haven't bred revolutionaries for many generations. And so, we reread After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Or audit a podcast, wait for the collapse, and react.
Support for liquid democracy is what I’ve been saying for decades, and I still think it deserves support. But I also don’t believe it is anywhere near enough, or fast enough.
The meta-mechanism problem is real, but you can stack that on top of the participation problem, and then add the fact that existing governing systems have to buy into it before any of it matters. These are bigger obstacles than most people acknowledge. There has never been an example of meaningful participation much beyond one percent of a population, and examples of existing governing systems voluntarily adopting structural change are nearly nonexistent.
Jim, I’d like to point out a slight tension between your last essay “The Silent Sky” and this push for liquid democracy. I’m sure you’re aware of it. The first essay makes clear how little time we may actually have, and yet the hope here is that liquid democracy gets adopted at sufficient scale, across enough of the world, to address these global problems in time? I say this knowing full well that you’re aware of this dilemma. But what else is there?
This is where I step out from behind the dumpster.
There may be an option you haven’t considered. Before you reach for your gun, a little name dropping: I’ve spoken with your friend Sharon Lewis, and she seems to think this angle is worth exploring. We’re both hoping you might be willing to dig a little deeper.
I want to be clear upfront that this is not a proposal for a new way to govern. It is simply a method of measuring public opinion, with a lot of useful data attached to it. If done right, it would be a self-governing worldwide public institution that earns the trust of people through a level of transparency that hasn’t been achieved before. We expect it to go viral, and we don’t need permission from anyone to make it happen.
Our website is a work in progress. We’re all volunteers, so things move slowly but steadily. There’s enough there to get a clear sense of what we’re trying to do, and there are essays already written that will be posted in the next week or two that will fill in more of the picture.
https://kaosnow.com/index.html
PS: I love what you’re doing, and what you’ve built. Audible changed my life, and I’m halfway through your podcast catalogue. I can tell you, it has aged very well.
One note on the website: the banner that says “Knowledge As Our Saviour” will be coming down soon. I know it’s not a great look. As I said, it’s a work in progress.
In addition to the issues you mentioned, I think there are some other non-obvious problems with liquid democracy.
A major potential flaw is that having every person vote directly (via delegates or otherwise) on every single issue has the potential to make every decision into the maximally populist decision. That may result in incoherent policies. Less taxes? Yes! More spending on health care and schools? Also yes!
Meanwhile, actual good governance is about making tradeoffs. The real question shouldn't be "do you want less taxes?" AND "do you want better public schools?", but rather about what tradeoffs you are willing to make.
That's why, even in a liquid democracy, those who put proposals to a vote still hold an important role to play, as well as a lot of the power. They're the ones who need to be responsible for ensuring that the set of policies are actually coherent, and what tradeoffs to suggest in the first place.
But then it might be difficult to actually pass sensible proposals. For example, almost everyone will be unhappy with some aspects of a budget proposal. So if any proposal gets voted on an approve-reject basis, it might actually be difficult to pass sensible proposals. Liquid democracy could ironically make parliament illiquid.
One option might be to have votes not just about whether to approve or reject proposals, but to rank competing proposals. For example, different parties might come up with different budget proposals that are then being ranked via direct vote.
I'm not sure what the best solutions are, but the issues seem surmountable. My greater point is that a serious proposal for liquid democracy needs to address not just how voting is done, but also the complementary aspect of the system which decides what votes are being cast on.
A way to produce more coherence while reyaing bottom up self organization would be to require any legislation that incurs costs to require a funding source. An IRS replacement could over funding services such as .x% addition to income tax or sales tax or property tax. Thus the cost of each proposal would be clear and capped.
Incenting Delegates is key... but so is incenting the bulk of participation. I ran into a wall with that while running a very similar campaign at the federal congressional level. Payment might work, but payment also feels like the heaviest logistical lift. There is another path which may work better, which leaves the voting system alone and instead does self-allocation of federal taxes. I built a portal that allowed people to play out that process across all domains of spending and i got quite a lot of emgagement. Called it the new irs. Left a decent press imprint you can look up.
Some interesting ideas in here, Jim. I would add one more thing. And that is moving away from universal suffrage to stakeholder suffrage. The right to vote in national, state, and local elections should be reserved for those who are NET taxpayers in said jurisdictions. That is, if your income from the federal government in all forms (salary, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, EBT, etc.) exceeds your total Federal tax bill (income tax + FICA) you should not be voting in federal elections.
Voters have to know and trust the system enough to enforce at the polls their representatives’ obedience. In effect LD needs to occupy the role that DJT does now, but based on voter allegiance to a very abstract system rather than the appeal of entertainment personality fandom.
Jim, I like the possibilities here, and I agree with your foundational premise that the speed of our representative democracy is long overdue for a boost. I have misgivings about including entities as delegates. Even nonprofits are denominated in dollars, and giving them a seat at the table all but guarantees a lever back to plutocracy.
If I might propose one modification, it’s that only registered voters may serve as delegates. This should be a conversation between citizens, not Citizens United.