The Digital Democracy — Part 1
A Modern Approach to Democracy
In a Nutshell:
There is power in democracy. There is benefit to using a wide range of perspective, information and experience to make a decision. With the help of technology, we can have live input and information-sharing for a variety of global operations, including politics, finance, science, technology, industry, and law.
Through a single electronic medium, we can keep citizens educated, informed on current affairs, and engaged with the developments of their society. But how can we make best use of our collective expertise and information to manage society while still accounting for public opinion?
Core Question:
How can we best use our technological advances to coordinate ourselves and manage society?
System Design Requirements:
Modernise democracy so that we make better use of the information and expertise available.
Allow participation without mandating it.
Gain perspective from a variety of people without being ruled by uninformed, uninterested masses.
Find a way to arrive at the best democratic solutions.
Empower the people — support the notion of educated/informed voting.
Broaden democratic input to areas where there is corruption, injustice, or centralisation of power (e.g. business).
Waterproof against corruption and collusion. Keep supreme executive power with the people.
Allow sourcing of information, input and ideas from all corners of society.
Discussion:
Imagine a world where you get to vote on anything. Absolutely anything. A world where the plans and decisions of all businesses, councils, and governments are open-source, well-documented, and posted on an easily accessible and navigable platform. Consider a world where those in the spotlight are true servants to the people, and you, the citizenry, may contribute to or dispute the proffered solutions. Do you imagine utopia or complete disaster?
The management of an honest and cohesive society ought to be transparent. Instead of government keeping an eye on us, it should be us who keeps an eye on government, making sure corruption doesn’t weevil its way into the upper echelons of society. But does this ‘us and them’ configuration by its very nature create division and distrust?
Like a business, the management of Planet Earth can be delegated, drawing upon its vast and eclectic human resources. If we can source ideas and contributions from the full breadth of society in a way that is clean, effective, and fair, we would be maximising our range of input, and not limiting ourselves to the narrow expertise of a select few.
The dense politics of government are slow, divided, and entrusted to individuals who are qualified in little more than argumentation. While some of those vying for office do have some impressive marks to their resumes, we are still putting our faith in small groups of people to make all the decisions for us. The policies of the right or the left are package deals, and even the most effective leader is not going to be able to conjure the optimal solutions across all sectors and dedicate him- or herself to the implementation.
Instead of voting on a group that is politically biased by definition, why can the people not vote for independent policies, individual solutions, and have a hand-picked taskforce whose qualifications and experience are custom-suited to the project at hand?
This is exactly what the digital democracy is capable of. With the use of algorithmic social platforms and AI, we can integrate personal information to select the appropriate heads and hands to coordinate a creative solution to any problem or industry.
Ultimately, it is people who are the most valuable resources. We are the creators and packagers of information, and we are the deciders of how to use it. But democracy is both fantastically beautiful and disturbingly dangerous.
As they say, the incredible thing about democracy is: anyone can vote! The terrifying thing about democracy is: anyone can vote…
And therein lies our core challenge. How can we make use of this huge pool of wisdom, expertise, experience, creativity, without things getting supremely messy, and without being ruled by uneducated, unqualified decision-making on complex subjects?
As Marcus Aurelius said, “The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the subject.”
Indeed. A world where the vote of an experienced expert is nullified by an indifferent ignoramus could be a dangerous place to live. However, I fear that is already our world.
At the same time, a world where a collusion of experts or financially influential people dictate all major developments sounds equally as dangerous, if not more so.
What we need is to find a way to empower people’s decision-making ability, creating a system that will, to a high degree of accuracy, use the best reasoning and expertise available for managing society. What, then, are the metrics by which we might characterise a ‘good vote’?
Understanding the topic of discussion is surely conducive to casting an informed vote, by which we might consider education and experience to be valid qualifications. Naturally, the education and experience would have to be somewhat relevant to the topic for it to be considered qualifying, as a person who has twenty years of experience and a PhD in one industry may have very little valid contribution to a subject outside of their field.
And what about those who have personal investment? If something is happening to you, or to a place you belong to, or you are tied to a discussion on a personal level, it seems only fair that your input should be counted as relevant.
So at least based on these three metrics — qualification, experience, and investment — we could consider weighting votes so that any one person’s authority in a vote is relative to the subject at hand. After all, isn’t it true that we each have relative relevance when it comes to global issues? Something that is so relevant in someone’s life is insignificant in another’s. In this way, contextual weighting means the power is constantly shifting, because power is contextual.
To analogise, your manager at work probably has authority over you because he or she has greater experience in the industry; but take them out of the office and put them on a boat in a stormy sea, and their authority might suddenly mean very little if they don’t know anything about sailing.
The same can be said about society. Outside of the mega-rich capitalists who are most focused on profit, it’s politicians who are designing our societies; and while they may seek expert input on certain matters, are these people really qualified to creatively problem-solve and socially engineer our futures? These people are self-bred to win votes, and pandering is their best strategy that doesn’t involve corruption. Do we want those who seek power and fame to mastermind our way of living? Do we want debaters and paper-pushers ruling us?
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” — Thucydides
Democracy is a popular idea for a reason. Having some say in how you live is critical for self-respect, and the only way to ensure you don’t end up forced to live in a way you don’t agree with. Millions if not billions have fought and died for democracy, and so if this is such a precious idea, why don’t we look for a way to do it properly? Why not empower the best, most attractive parts of democracy and try to minimise its weak points?
Democracy is the only way to ensure an agreeable, fair, attractive future that doesn’t eventually lead to autocracy. A monarch or singular ruler can be an attractive premise also, especially if they are elected, but even that one person has their blind spots and biases, and history will show us that great danger exists when one person has the power to start wars and drop atomic bombs. In a truly democratic society where the masses had to authenticate the commencement of a war, would we ever see one? It seems much more likely that public discussion would lead to other solutions and agreements that would invalidate the reasons for war, and that alone is a very strong argument for democracy.
So what is meant by a digital democracy?
With the advent of the Internet, we have for the first time in history the means to communicate instantly globe-wide, and in a variety of different media. Communication has thusly transformed into an ‘alien lifeform’ as David Bowie put it, and we have the whole of the Internet at our disposal — an open-book test for discussions on society. We the people are empowered with a bottomless pool of information, which is both supremely useful and slightly terrifying. And while there is surely no shortage of misinformation and misuse of information, without doubt this is something that ought to be refined rather than restricted.
Social media has opened the gate to engagement with our news feed, a two-way discussion with our information-providers. For the first time our current affairs can be discussed in a public forum without being limited by physical space or location, with our opinions validated (through likes, shares, etc.) and debated. We already see algorithms in place that feed relevant content to the individual, where the most popular or conversation-stimulating contributions rise to the top.
At present, this time and effort spent online only exists as a cultural experience, and the trillions of hours spent discussing and debating is gone to waste. But what if we could harness this? Social media is the perfect storm for garnering public engagement and input. We engage because we want to, and sometimes because we feel we have to. Whether through anonymous input or personal proclamation, there is a stimulation that lies in this engagement, made stronger still when the topics we contribute to are of personal interest.
Right now, democracy is the farce of the First World. We mere Johnnys and Janes are limited to a single vote once every three or four years. We don’t have the slightest input into the goings on of our local councils and city projects — and always limited in scope. Even if we get to pick between A and B, we rarely get to choose what option A and option B actually are. Nor are we privy to the process for how these ‘solutions’ or options are arrived at.
Digitalisation has only been made possible in the modern world, allowing for an active voter community that can receive and respond in real time. This leap in social-media technology means we can easily be notified and informed, even have our politics personalised so we can be voting on issues we actually care about. But here’s the genius part: voting and democracy don’t just have to be limited to politics. The entire management of our planet can be democratised, anything pulled up for questioning and improvement.
The Digital Democratic Platform (DDP) is a core piece to the TTS puzzle, and in itself manages a broad spectrum of activity, such as politics, business, finance, science, technology, law, industrial activity, jobs, and economic and societal problem-solving. It allows the people to converse, trade information and perspective, and ultimately delegate responsibility and budget.
Clever algorithms and artificial intelligence are superpowers that can be used to enhance our decision-making ability, using gravity-like thinking to pull people into their areas of interest so that discussion and engagement will occur organically. Refining those systems and guiding people towards resolution and voting should not be overly complex, and we already have similar software existing already that can curate and adjudicate when it comes to online discussion and information-sharing.
Taking it a step further, a platform like this can integrate personal profiles with updated understanding of the aformentioned qualification, experience, and personal investment of the individual, connecting the right people with the projects and problems of society. As the platform grows in its usage worldwide, the system itself can learn, and the solutions created in one area of the world can be offered as an option elsewhere, adding to the efficiency of global management.
The application of the software to physical problem-solving and project management can be done primarily through connecting real human beings, but it can also be integrated with global and local budgeting, putting together job sheets and performing some of the quantity surveying tasks that can help to manage the physical and human resources of society overall. This is a path to supreme efficiency, aligning and coordinating the efforts of society in a way that would reduce time and expense.
I will say that suddenly sharpened efficiency is not necessarily an objectively positive shift, as it would likely mean that some jobs will be drastically changed or made redundant, and we do not want to create a society that is characterised by laziness or that surrenders all thought and accountability to a faceless digital system. However, I don’t think this will be true threat to humanity if we approach it thoughtfully and uphold human accountability as a forming principle of the design. Having too much free time in a smoothly running, productive, abundant society is hardly a curse.
How would it work?
The most intuitive way to achieve an engaging, functional digital democracy would likely be through an open-source social media platform, something like the lovechild of Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Combining a versatile user interface, intuitive navigation, and personal profiles that are linked to something like a live digital CV, each human-created ‘forum’ (proposed development or identified societal issue) can by algorithm pull in the most appropriate contributors — likely locals with the appropriate experience, qualification, and personal investment.
Allowing for whatever forms of communication and information-sharing come naturally, including links, statistics, articles, pictures, videos, even memes, we can use AI and program design to help curate and organise this information for pragmatic and timely decision-making. In the specified timeframe (some projects and issues may be more urgent than others), the discussion and human-provided information can be read and ‘understood’ by an AI program, with the added option of the AI sourcing information from across the Internet and the other related forums across the planet. Only human votes would be counted, weighted appropriately according to their contextual relevance. But before anyone is permitted to vote, they must read the AI-curated cliffnotes from the forum discussion, with the most relevant (sometimes meaning highest-rated) contributions offered, so that even someone who has not engaged in the discussion can come in and quickly understand the most important points of each solution (there may be more than two) before casting their final vote.
This means we are effectively screening against totally uninformed opinions; and while it may not be an entirely perfect system, there’s a very strong likelihood that it would both correlate with and contribute to a better-informed and better-educated populace, thus feeding back in to intelligent decision-making.
In this way, it is ultimately people who make the decisions, although we can create a more intelligent and less biased way for people to receive their information and formulate their own opinions. A decentralisation of news that by nature invites discussion, rather than the one-way TV-style newscasting.
A project or issue, once agreed-upon in its direction and plans, could then invite relevant collaborators to form a specific taskforce to see the project through to completion, who would be rewarded duly. These would likely be a variety of experts from various related industries, although depending on the project or issue, a number from the public may also be invited to help insure against potential collusion. Forums could be shared manually, although a trending issue would naturally present itself to a wider community and evolve naturally with garnered attention.
While this is only a basic overview of how one part of the general projects and issues of society could be managed, the details of design, like any of the Ten-Tier System, are up for discussion. The proposed platform is only the logical intuitive solution we have conceptualised to enable a true global democracy.
Stay tuned for more on the Digital Democracy. Read Part II here to see how we can reimagine the economy and a democratic financing framework. Or click here to read about how artificial intelligence can help align the individual with the digitalised democratic platform. More info on the DDP here.