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Although this sounds reasonable having everything published and voted on in real time turns out to just end back up with a representative democracy. This articl

by hpoe 7y ago

Although this sounds reasonable having everything published and voted on in real time turns out to just end back up with a representative democracy. This article explains some of the challenges with that idea much better than I can. https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597 https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...

anigbrowl 7y ago
This isn't what I'm proposing at all. I do get his points, which are sincerely made, but I have also been thinking about this for decades and put in a lot of time in participation and advocacy at all levels of the political process. I'm proposing getting rid of legislatures and the whole legislative process and having the legal code publicly accessible for editing by the public. It would be on a blockchain (for verifiability purposes), and there would a derivative graph (for functional evaluation purposes - quite necessary because the whole meaning of a law could be changed by a relatively tiny textual edit like 'you must do X' -> 'you must not do X'). Up to now most network analysis of law has been applied to the legal infrastructure that grows around individual cases and treating legal code itself as axiomatic; consider, rather, analysis of the code's own network properties as tremulously explored in section VI herein: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1246&context=jbtl http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?... The most immediate benefit of fully graphing the constitution/code/cases ecosystem would be the possibility of a serious pruning, to address the problem first pointed out in The Republic of a surfeit of laws that grows to such complexity that it crowds out confident understanding by the citizenry. We are quite a long way from replacing our existing legislative technology with a publically edited version, but the time to start exploring this is now, given the increasingly precarious state of our institutions and the widening asymmetry between our technological and legislative capacities. Put another way, we are innovating aster than our legal or political systems can keep up, and absent a consensus or voluntary dissensus on the social deployment of such innovation, it is more likely to be weaponized than any other outcome.

by hpoe 7y ago

anigbrowl 7y ago

This isn't what I'm proposing at all. I do get his points, which are sincerely made, but I have also been thinking about this for decades and put in a lot of time in participation and advocacy at all levels of the political process. I'm proposing getting rid of legislatures and the whole legislative process and having the legal code publicly accessible for editing by the public. It would be on a blockchain (for verifiability purposes), and there would a derivative graph (for functional evaluation purposes - quite necessary because the whole meaning of a law could be changed by a relatively tiny textual edit like 'you must do X' -> 'you must not do X'). Up to now most network analysis of law has been applied to the legal infrastructure that grows around individual cases and treating legal code itself as axiomatic; consider, rather, analysis of the code's own network properties as tremulously explored in section VI herein: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1246&context=jbtl http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?... The most immediate benefit of fully graphing the constitution/code/cases ecosystem would be the possibility of a serious pruning, to address the problem first pointed out in The Republic of a surfeit of laws that grows to such complexity that it crowds out confident understanding by the citizenry. We are quite a long way from replacing our existing legislative technology with a publically edited version, but the time to start exploring this is now, given the increasingly precarious state of our institutions and the widening asymmetry between our technological and legislative capacities. Put another way, we are innovating aster than our legal or political systems can keep up, and absent a consensus or voluntary dissensus on the social deployment of such innovation, it is more likely to be weaponized than any other outcome.