About

This page discuses the potential of a cybernetically-ran, fully automated, liquid democracy. I awkwardly wrote some forum posts about this in 2014 but I no longer agree with most of what was written there. Some platforms like it have been developed since then, namely BitNation, Horizon State, Decred, and Aragon, however they are all DAOs, which are antithetical to my goal. Better solutions to the problem of governance are proposed in the sections below.



Fundamental Problems in DAOs and Cryptogovs

With the transition of physical governments to fully online ones like the Estonian government, and gameification of citizenship by China's government, we're seeing a dichotomy emerge whereby online government is split between the borderless & open, and the authoritarian & closed. I used to think that for the sake of freedom of information and efficient data transfer standards, a base framework of online governance built off cryptocurrency would be developed, open to re-codes and re-compiles, allowing for many distros, akin to the number of altcoins spawned off of Bitcoin, but since 2014 it's become very clear that having thousands of altcoins is really horrendous. They only add noise to the ecosystem and detract from any kind of signal. Similarly, government should not be easy to fork, as that only serves to create exponential fractionalization and destroys any hope of cultural unity.

I also mistakenly thought it would be easy to integrate a voting platform, a law creation system, an internal communications system, and the ability to make your citizen profile (all personal information including medical records) as open or closed as you want for complete granular control over your privacy. This is obviously not so easy to do in a comprehensive and secure way, but it is also not impossible; the main thing I've learned in the last decade is that as long as you use basic two-key encryption and don't add the insane overhead of a cryptocurrency network, your platform will be extremely efficient, secure, and private.

DAOs fundamentally fail any kind of real governance task since their voting is typically based on what money-share of vote power you have, which always becomes a financial monarchy, and even if it's not based on that, a distributed voting platform is just as easily served by a simple p2p network, you don't need a blockchain for that, in fact you don't even need e2e encryption. Ideas like CityDAO, Kleros, and soulbound NFTs for "proof of attendance" are neat, maybe even preferable for local government, but not for a national government since there are obvious reasons you wouldn't actually want full voluntarism on that scale. Even if you did, the less centralized a system is, the less efficient the system is.

DAOs add incredibly large overheads to what is otherwise a very simple thing — a weighted voting platform and funds management system. You absolutely don't need proof-of-work to make that platform functional and secure. You don't need any other cryptocurrency protocol either. What you probably do need are names, locations, and guns — that is how you ensure people try stealing your stuff less often. I know libertarians reel from this, but a basic measure of accountability and enforcemnent is what the security of all civilizations have been predicated on, and the more centralized that authority is, the more effective it is. If you're worried about corruption, then just design a governmental system in which the people in it cannot become corrupted. This is even easier done than said, as we demonstrate in the next section.



Automation, Liquid, and Cybernetics

The political compass meme is dumb and tells you nothing about what someone's actual ideology is like, but filteries does. Sites like that offer very useful tools, so why aren't there public tools like this implemented into a fully-integrated online government interface that every citizen can tap into? Why isn't the government fully-online? The issue seems to be that we have a vampiric gerontocracy which no longer understands how the world works, and while they would blame it on overly-bloated bureaucracy, they also fully endorse bureaucracy and thank it for their jobs. Things like Nomic demonstrate the game theory behind direct democracy and how it always results in a broken system, but this is only because broken humans are the ones doing the voting; we could easily have the vast majority of government be automated, including voting, and thereby any inconsistency, as well as almost all corruption, is obviated in a single motion.

What I am proposing is a framework for the full automation of a distributed, delegated, liquid democracy. The vast majority of government functions can be trivially automated, making it unnecessary to have a narrow hierarchy in our government where less than 500 people get to make all decisions for 380 million others. The fix liquid democracy provides is to allow everyone a direct vote on any and all laws, but they can also delegate their vote by tacking it onto anyone else they want to represent their interests — however they vote is how your vote is also cast. This is like being able to dynamically decide your representative. This solves the problem of average citizens not having the time or care to read through legislation all day while still allowing them to directly vote on any and every law that goes through their government. You could also tack your vote onto several delegates at a time, and whatever arbitrary threshold of them votes in favor of a law, your vote is also cast. This stops your vote from being cast in favor of something the majority of your delegates didn't agree on and lets you decide how much agreeance is necessary. Lots of other functionality can be, and is, built off this basic idea (including lots of game-theoretical passive filters for disallowing people without critical thinking abilities from voting at all), but I'll skip past that for now.

Anyone can directly propose laws in this system, but that opens it up to lots of poorly-written dogshit ideation — most people want less government spending overall, but more spending in each particular category — so most people have views that conflict with themselves. The formal science of governance is called cybernetics (making notable use of decision theory), and it's what we are using to mitigate the prior mentioned problem, as well as many others. Our fix is to use something like /stone or GPT-4 to check whether a proposed law is internally consistent and automatically strike down any that fail this test (and then use quadratic funding to smooth out the resource allocation side). This can be extended to check for inconsistency with all pre-existing laws. This is a fully automated and purely objective way to filter out proposed laws before human eyes are forced to see them. We also believe it ought to be easier to remove a law than pass a new one, so the removal of a law is set at only needing a 50% majority, whereas passing a new one requires a 60% majority. These values are arbitrary and are just the defaults we set to test things.

We also overhauled our valuation framework — we remade all our economic architecture by using /percent, which results in drastically different financial systems and absolves a society its gini coefficient sins (and as a tangent, adopting MIDs and other data-based-finance mitigations are probably required to protect a society like the one being proposed). We are also working on a way to objectively assign people work that they love to do, are good at doing, and is actually needed, like an automated form of ikigai or 80,000 hours. It has become a lot easier to expand on the potential scope of application here because of recent developments in global services like those provided by SafetyWing and Heymondo.

Everything I have proposed here, amalgamated, consititutes a perfect system with no flaws and we are using it to run governance tests and toy with its mechanics. If you want to help us test stuff or you think this is all horribly misguided and want to yell at me, you can do that here.



Miscellaneous

An example of a superficially good idea for governance that has horrific consequences is Xenocracy. It ultimately fails because it is like accelerated Nomic. If there's any competitiveness then one principality would oppress all the others in such a way that they couldn't return the favor. Specifically, it disallows intra-level expertise areas from affecting any change to their own group. E.g., nuclear power never gets to exist because the majority will forever be FUD'ed into worrying about other groups getting nukes, and vice versa they disallow you from the same, all without the expert group getting a real say since they're so obscenely minoritized.

The worst problem is simply that it systematically strips people of basic rights, like the right to autonomy, or the right to what we understand as freedom and self-governance. What happens in both game theory and every historical example is most groups immediately reject being governed by what is invariably percieved as a foreign tyranny and the few that decide to stay on board and try it out will still violently fight to leave as soon as any unfavorable measures get passed.

The internet was the democratization of information, the invention of the internet marked the first time in history that information could flow frictionlessly. Bitcoin was the democratization of currency, the invention of Bitcoin marked the first time in history that currency could flow frictionlessly. I think technologies like these mark societal thresholds, points from which we cannot return to older ways. The cyebrnetic system outlined on this page marks a true democratization of governmental power, the first time in history that power can flow truly frictionlessly.