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,
Heymondo, and
Wise.
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.