11 ms·

I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stac

by dsign 3y ago

I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to correct for bad legislation much faster.

ulnarkressty 3y ago
More targeted ad campaigns, as per the article. The interests will always be there.
logicchains 3y ago
>I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
- noman-land 3y ago
  I think you're basically describing the Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms used by blockchains.
- amelius 3y ago
  It's nice in theory but politicians will never allow themselves to be replaced by random people, so good luck getting this implemented.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    That’s not why it won’t work, the reason is even more fundamental: most people won’t want to do it because it’s a fucking hard job that puts you in the limelight.
  - 3seashells 3y ago
    Democratic Politics is not there to be efficient. It's there so sociopaths can backstab one another civilized.
- breuleux 3y ago
  Another advantage is that if you pay random citizens full time to oversee the government, they will be able to talk and negotiate with each other directly, they will have the time to actually study and think about the issues, and they will be able to subpoena the information they need to take good decisions. If you want people to vote meaningfully on issues, you have to empower them to cast the very best vote they could cast, and demarchy is basically the only way this could be done practically in a large society. The concept of a general election or general referendum is aberrant.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators. If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrators would have to provide all that. That would be bureaucracy in the literal sense of the word.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    There'd need to be some filtering before people take office. I like the idea of randomly selecting a small pool of candidates then voting within that pool. Maybe people elect and elector who's job it is to sit for 12 months just assessing people to hold actual power. Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Act%2C_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Ac...
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      The two-party system in the US probably works in a different way than the multi-party system in the EU. In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        These two positions are sitting in contradiction to each other. People chosen by lot are said to lead to administrators making the decisions and that would be bad ... but career politicians govern by giving decision making power to an administrator making the decision and that that is good. I don't think your original comment got to the heart of what you don't like about demarchy. Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.
- hn_acker 3y ago
  Some states in the US permanently ban felons from voting [1]. I want the eligible voting population to be all citizens over the age of 18 with no regard to history and conduct, because I favor universal suffrage and don't want governments to have leeway over who is "worthy" to vote in a democracy (yes, the US is a representative democracy). My population of eligible representative candidates in a demarchy would be the same. However, other people might not want current criminals or even former criminals to be eligible. Separately, some people might want candidates to pass an intelligence test. How could the US collectively decide the eligible population of representative candidates for a demarchy? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
  - Slava_Propanei 3y ago
    [dead]
layer8 3y ago
It would be much worse, witch-hunt style. Propaganda would run rampant. Also, many wouldn’t trust the voting system, because they won’t believe many actual outcomes to possibly be representative. Instead of blaming politicians, they would increasingly blame the voting system to be rigged by whoever is running it.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  > Open New Issue > New Law: "Propaganda is illegal" > Turnout: 93% for 5% against, 2% abstained > Law approved. Well boys we did it, propaganda is no more.
- hfuyf65 3y ago
  [dead]
stevarino 3y ago
California Prop 22 comes to mind, unfortunately: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_... There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition. The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict). If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Prop 22 was contrary to the interests of professional drivers, but probably in line with the interests of riders who benefit from drivers being exploited. When push comes to shove, a whole lot of people choose cheap service over their publicly espoused principles. For evidence of this, consider how many suburban boomers are eager to hire illegal immigrants to do lawn work around their McMansion for less than minimum wage. Most would probably tell you that minimum wage laws are good or that illegal immigrants should be deported (one or the other, depending on what side of the aisle they're on...) but when push comes to shove they both choose the lowest bidding contractor to do their yardwork. After all, they aren't yard-workers, just like most Californians aren't uber drivers.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
lock-the-spock 3y ago
Problem is that in that system the people able to shape opinion (= corporate media and the rich) will steer any debate in their direction. Second trouble is the dictatorship of the majority - you'll never get minority rights or issues of the disenfranchised addressed.
Tagbert 3y ago
People also become tired of engaging in the constant need to decide on various issues and disconnect. Legislator have to vote on hundreds of issues over the course of a year. Do you want to have to do a public vote every week? How do the people stay informed enough to understand the issues and options? How many times will they vote before it becomes too onerous and they stop participating? Then you just get the special interests voting on their issues. This happens a lot in the US in the primary elections. Everyone complains about the poor quality of Republican candidates and how they wish there were better options but the primary voter has already limited the field.
- fhackenberger 3y ago
  Have a look at 'liquid democracy' it would solve these issues. You basically choose someone to delegate your vote to, but can change that at any time, or vote yourself for specific decisions.
rasur 3y ago
They could adopt the Swiss Direct-Democracy model. But, they wouldn't.
- hef19898 3y ago
  The Swiss are the only ones using it, they are a small country as well. Hardly comparable with a multi-national body like the EU.
permo-w 3y ago
have you been on stack overflow recently? no thanks
Timon3 3y ago
I've been thinking that maybe we need the opposite - a citizens veto. The threshold would have to be high enough to ensure it's not abused by individual groups (maybe 2/3rds?), but the ability for the population to decide against measures (maybe even individual parts of omnibus bills) would create new controls against overreach without completely throwing away the current system.
- notrlyskeptik 3y ago
  No-confidence votes by citizens to remove misbehaving politicians from the their position and the states payroll, including pensions 'n stuff.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    I could see this leading to abuse through populism. A better way might be to track the number of vetoed laws brought in by each politician, and to have removal be an automatic consequence of too many. This would broaden the blast radius to everyone involved, making everyone accountable, while only going after repeat offenders.
jezzamon 3y ago
Take a look at the recent Australian referendum (disclaimer: like most young people I voted yes, but the outcome was no): Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023...
- dsign 3y ago
  Thanks for this really interesting piece of information, I didn't know about this referendum in Australia. Another commenter said that a true democracy would disenfranchise minorities, and I take the result of this poll as a data-point in favor of that argument.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  No won because the yes campaign was manipulative and deceptive, doing things like hiding the full content of the statement from the heart where it discussed reparation payments then getting Facebook to censor anyone who asked if it was being hidden. But it sounds like you don't actually understand anyone's views, at is often the case for young people. There's just your initial reaction (correct) and "fear" (incorrect). Emotional politics at its greatest.
njharman 3y ago
Instead of money spent to influence politicians, money will be spent to influence the masses. The net effect will be same, money "wins".
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Instead of money being spent on improving lives of politicians, money may end up being spent on improving lives of the masses.
- Gud 3y ago
  There is a direct democratic country, Switzerland. Look into how it works, it's a beautiful system.
momirlan 3y ago
you are assuming people are rational . anyway, there would be intense media campaigns to convince the regular joes of the merits if any absurdity.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to correct for bad legislation much faster. There is a better way: Checks and balances. Suppose that in order to pass anything of this nature it had to go through more steps: The union legislature had to agree, then a majority of the member state legislatures had to agree, then the general public had to vote in favor of it too. But to repeal it, it only takes one of those. That doesn't make it impossible for something terrible to happen -- in waves of populism everyone will vote for something terrible because to do otherwise is seen as siding with the "enemy" -- but it helps. Raises the threshold before something dangerous makes it into law. And it's the easier path to repeal which is the thing we most lack. It should be much easier for bad laws to be removed.
Zuiii 3y ago
Careful now. Regardless of what the proposed laws say, this kind of talk is exactly what this tech will eventually be used to crush. We're really lucky that slavery was mostly abolished before we regressed to this stage.
Gud 3y ago
Switzerland has a direct democratic system. It works great for them. Incidentally, they have very strong privacy laws. Full disclosure, I’m originally from a EU country but I am now a resident in Switzerland. Everyday I feel blessed to be living in a country where my fellow humans are in charge and not some ignorant fools who’s primary skill is to elbow themselves to power.

by dsign 3y ago

ulnarkressty 3y ago

More targeted ad campaigns, as per the article. The interests will always be there.

logicchains 3y ago

>I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.

noman-land 3y ago
I think you're basically describing the Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms used by blockchains.
amelius 3y ago
It's nice in theory but politicians will never allow themselves to be replaced by random people, so good luck getting this implemented.
- scott_w 3y ago
  That’s not why it won’t work, the reason is even more fundamental: most people won’t want to do it because it’s a fucking hard job that puts you in the limelight.
- 3seashells 3y ago
  Democratic Politics is not there to be efficient. It's there so sociopaths can backstab one another civilized.
breuleux 3y ago
Another advantage is that if you pay random citizens full time to oversee the government, they will be able to talk and negotiate with each other directly, they will have the time to actually study and think about the issues, and they will be able to subpoena the information they need to take good decisions. If you want people to vote meaningfully on issues, you have to empower them to cast the very best vote they could cast, and demarchy is basically the only way this could be done practically in a large society. The concept of a general election or general referendum is aberrant.
jltsiren 3y ago
It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators. If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrators would have to provide all that. That would be bureaucracy in the literal sense of the word.
- roenxi 3y ago
  There'd need to be some filtering before people take office. I like the idea of randomly selecting a small pool of candidates then voting within that pool. Maybe people elect and elector who's job it is to sit for 12 months just assessing people to hold actual power. Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Act%2C_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Ac...
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    The two-party system in the US probably works in a different way than the multi-party system in the EU. In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      These two positions are sitting in contradiction to each other. People chosen by lot are said to lead to administrators making the decisions and that would be bad ... but career politicians govern by giving decision making power to an administrator making the decision and that that is good. I don't think your original comment got to the heart of what you don't like about demarchy. Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.
hn_acker 3y ago
Some states in the US permanently ban felons from voting [1]. I want the eligible voting population to be all citizens over the age of 18 with no regard to history and conduct, because I favor universal suffrage and don't want governments to have leeway over who is "worthy" to vote in a democracy (yes, the US is a representative democracy). My population of eligible representative candidates in a demarchy would be the same. However, other people might not want current criminals or even former criminals to be eligible. Separately, some people might want candidates to pass an intelligence test. How could the US collectively decide the eligible population of representative candidates for a demarchy? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]

layer8 3y ago

It would be much worse, witch-hunt style. Propaganda would run rampant. Also, many wouldn’t trust the voting system, because they won’t believe many actual outcomes to possibly be representative. Instead of blaming politicians, they would increasingly blame the voting system to be rigged by whoever is running it.

moffkalast 3y ago
> Open New Issue > New Law: "Propaganda is illegal" > Turnout: 93% for 5% against, 2% abstained > Law approved. Well boys we did it, propaganda is no more.
hfuyf65 3y ago
[dead]

stevarino 3y ago

California Prop 22 comes to mind, unfortunately: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_... There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition. The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict). If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Prop 22 was contrary to the interests of professional drivers, but probably in line with the interests of riders who benefit from drivers being exploited. When push comes to shove, a whole lot of people choose cheap service over their publicly espoused principles. For evidence of this, consider how many suburban boomers are eager to hire illegal immigrants to do lawn work around their McMansion for less than minimum wage. Most would probably tell you that minimum wage laws are good or that illegal immigrants should be deported (one or the other, depending on what side of the aisle they're on...) but when push comes to shove they both choose the lowest bidding contractor to do their yardwork. After all, they aren't yard-workers, just like most Californians aren't uber drivers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

lock-the-spock 3y ago

Problem is that in that system the people able to shape opinion (= corporate media and the rich) will steer any debate in their direction. Second trouble is the dictatorship of the majority - you'll never get minority rights or issues of the disenfranchised addressed.

Tagbert 3y ago

People also become tired of engaging in the constant need to decide on various issues and disconnect. Legislator have to vote on hundreds of issues over the course of a year. Do you want to have to do a public vote every week? How do the people stay informed enough to understand the issues and options? How many times will they vote before it becomes too onerous and they stop participating? Then you just get the special interests voting on their issues. This happens a lot in the US in the primary elections. Everyone complains about the poor quality of Republican candidates and how they wish there were better options but the primary voter has already limited the field.

fhackenberger 3y ago
Have a look at 'liquid democracy' it would solve these issues. You basically choose someone to delegate your vote to, but can change that at any time, or vote yourself for specific decisions.

rasur 3y ago

They could adopt the Swiss Direct-Democracy model. But, they wouldn't.

hef19898 3y ago
The Swiss are the only ones using it, they are a small country as well. Hardly comparable with a multi-national body like the EU.

permo-w 3y ago

have you been on stack overflow recently? no thanks

Timon3 3y ago

I've been thinking that maybe we need the opposite - a citizens veto. The threshold would have to be high enough to ensure it's not abused by individual groups (maybe 2/3rds?), but the ability for the population to decide against measures (maybe even individual parts of omnibus bills) would create new controls against overreach without completely throwing away the current system.

notrlyskeptik 3y ago
No-confidence votes by citizens to remove misbehaving politicians from the their position and the states payroll, including pensions 'n stuff.
- Timon3 3y ago
  I could see this leading to abuse through populism. A better way might be to track the number of vetoed laws brought in by each politician, and to have removal be an automatic consequence of too many. This would broaden the blast radius to everyone involved, making everyone accountable, while only going after repeat offenders.

jezzamon 3y ago

Take a look at the recent Australian referendum (disclaimer: like most young people I voted yes, but the outcome was no): Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023...

dsign 3y ago
Thanks for this really interesting piece of information, I didn't know about this referendum in Australia. Another commenter said that a true democracy would disenfranchise minorities, and I take the result of this poll as a data-point in favor of that argument.
nvm0n2 3y ago
No won because the yes campaign was manipulative and deceptive, doing things like hiding the full content of the statement from the heart where it discussed reparation payments then getting Facebook to censor anyone who asked if it was being hidden. But it sounds like you don't actually understand anyone's views, at is often the case for young people. There's just your initial reaction (correct) and "fear" (incorrect). Emotional politics at its greatest.

njharman 3y ago

Instead of money spent to influence politicians, money will be spent to influence the masses. The net effect will be same, money "wins".

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Instead of money being spent on improving lives of politicians, money may end up being spent on improving lives of the masses.
Gud 3y ago
There is a direct democratic country, Switzerland. Look into how it works, it's a beautiful system.

momirlan 3y ago

you are assuming people are rational . anyway, there would be intense media campaigns to convince the regular joes of the merits if any absurdity.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to correct for bad legislation much faster. There is a better way: Checks and balances. Suppose that in order to pass anything of this nature it had to go through more steps: The union legislature had to agree, then a majority of the member state legislatures had to agree, then the general public had to vote in favor of it too. But to repeal it, it only takes one of those. That doesn't make it impossible for something terrible to happen -- in waves of populism everyone will vote for something terrible because to do otherwise is seen as siding with the "enemy" -- but it helps. Raises the threshold before something dangerous makes it into law. And it's the easier path to repeal which is the thing we most lack. It should be much easier for bad laws to be removed.

Zuiii 3y ago

Careful now. Regardless of what the proposed laws say, this kind of talk is exactly what this tech will eventually be used to crush. We're really lucky that slavery was mostly abolished before we regressed to this stage.

Gud 3y ago

Switzerland has a direct democratic system. It works great for them. Incidentally, they have very strong privacy laws. Full disclosure, I’m originally from a EU country but I am now a resident in Switzerland. Everyday I feel blessed to be living in a country where my fellow humans are in charge and not some ignorant fools who’s primary skill is to elbow themselves to power.