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Fast-forward through the political preamble. BLM, Covid, George Floyd, China, Protests, etc. Lots of stuff going on, and I wanted to see if anyone has also thought about this...
Could technology improve and reform the current system of democracy and government? If so, then how do we go about doing it?
Democracy, in it's most basic form, is basically a majority ruling system with a single person representing 100's or 1000's of people. While this may have worked in older civilizations with a few thousand people, I can't say the same of current civilizations with millions and billions of people. With larger populations of people, it has become more difficult to govern and inform people of exactly what is going on. This phenomenon has been exacerbated and accelerated by technology, and there haven't been any technological breakthroughs in this regard for quite some time. I would say this is because governments have been using technology to fortify existing systems, rather than using technology to replace existing systems. To make an analogy, the government is using technology as if it were fixing and upgrading a computer, but when presented with a complex problem, you can't use a laptop to do the job of a supercomputer. In the current political climate, I feel like there needs to be a systemic change to the way humans govern ourselves, starting with the basics of representation.
So it got me thinking...with blockchain and the internet, would it be possible to create a web app that is directly linked to the government, where each individual represents themselves, where every individual has the ability to introduce bills, and where every individual can voice their own opinion in a constructive manner? In my mind, this website would be like a mix of Github and Facebook all in one. For those who do not know what GitHub is, it's basically an open-source version control that allows multiple software developers to work on a single project.
Ideally, a person or a group of people will author an open-source bill on GitLaw, much like how many open-source programs currently work on GitHub. Anyone can write a bill about anything they so desire, and you can even make your own version of someone else's bill if you so desire. In order to submit a change to the bill, you must request that the authors allow your change to their bill. This change request would then be reviewed by the authors, and if approved, they would allow your revisions to go into the main bill. Once a bill has been finalized, it would be go on the ballot to be voted on by referendum. Once the bill becomes a law, it can then be maintained and updated by the authors of the law. Any changes would require the law go through referendum again.
There are some things that need much consideration, such as cybersecurity, fraud, integration into the legislative branch, the role of representatives, and interference from foreign nations. Blockchain security is not absolutely impenetrable, and I'm not sure what other information would be needed to make sure an individual cannot have multiple accounts. Current representatives may throw a fit over commoners taking their day jobs and not allow this to be integrated into the government. People could also potentially write and pass terrible bills. This could also create an even larger gap between the left and right or between the rich and poor. There's a whole slew of problems that could come with this. Even with all of the potential pitfalls and problems, I still think that this is at least worth trying in a city as an experiment.
A quick google search led to a few articles and websites that describe what I was initially thinking of:
GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents - a Tourniquet for American Liberty
news.ycombinator.com
www.docracy.com
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That's a pretty neat idea. Think it would be pretty difficult though... Programming is far more easy to collaborate on than law where people's personal interests/property/beliefs are at stake. I'd be kind of afraid of the idea of any idiot writing laws and getting his friends to approve it too, but I suppose that's still preferable to a few bad actors hoarding all the power. Open source government..
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The biggest problems aren't even the huge technological problems around avoiding identity theft and impersonation. Those can be solved eventually. It's people problems like getting widespread buy-in from the public while simultaneously avoiding having too many cooks spoiling the broth. In a system like this how do you get people to agree on a budget? How do you decide which questions are on the ballot and which options are offered? How do you get a politically disengaged public to vote on potentially thousands of bills per year?
Technology doesn't provide a solution to these people problems.
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The whole "civilizational" aspect is a big problem here. Change in increments preserves societal stability. Design a government with some constitution, and provide it the means to change things it couldn't foresee. Citizens have the trust that nothing new and untested won't be sprung on them. Existing systems that are slow to change is actually a benefit of representative systems like Republics. Nobody has to worry that some tech-guru makes the wrong decision that seemed good at the time, and suddenly core stuff like laws, markets, and voting go bonkers. Imagine something goes out which is a single system and hackable or fails.
Technology has actually helped in terms of information. I understand the worry about people settling into tribal news feedback loops, but the far worse outcome would be only the tribe in possession of information-sharing technology would get its viewpoint seen. This has been a useful check on some institutions, which may become so biased that the viewers go elsewhere for the full story.
For your specific idea, I don't think citizens should need to be super engaged on the minutiae of voting on specific bills, sent to every member of the public for a vote. Representatives are useful for that. I can agree to using digital technology to submit bills for a vote; my state has a system where citizens can propose their own to put on a ballot, bypassing the representatives. It's just that a regular referendum is a terrible idea. Collect them on a voting day every other year, or every year if necessary, and have the vote. I wouldn't want anyone more concerned with grandkids or navigating a new business to miss a vote, or understanding a law, that affects them ... or angry that the last one the blockchain kidz put around was just 3 months ago and didn't reward the time invested reading the thing.
Online debates on current laws, by means of a very readable platform, would be nice.
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On June 23 2020 02:20 ZigguratOfUr wrote:
The biggest problems aren't even the huge technological problems around avoiding identity theft and impersonation. Those can be solved eventually. It's people problems like getting widespread buy-in from the public while simultaneously avoiding having too many cooks spoiling the broth. In a system like this how do you get people to agree on a budget? How do you decide which questions are on the ballot and which options are offered? How do you get a politically disengaged public to vote on potentially thousands of bills per year?
Technology doesn't provide a solution to these people problems.
What was going through my mind is that I wanted to give the individual citizen a larger voice than what we're offered right now. The idea is to promote political discourse and engagement in the general public, and maybe even to help educate people on what goes on in the government. If everyone started getting first-hand information through writing bills of their own, I think people would start becoming more politically active and wouldn't wait until someone died to start a global movement. Yes, there would be spoiled broth, but the ability to cook 1 million broths and to cross check each recipe with recipes from other restaurants is something no kitchen in the world can do.
To what extent these bills would cover is a detail that can be discussed later. For now, if this website were to launch next week, I would probably start with my local county, work my way up to the state, then maybe to the federal government...this process would probably take 5 to 10 years at each level to provide enough data to show that it can work.
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EPT
