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New Technology for Digital Democracy
Votester, A New Tool for Digital Democracy and Digital Demonstrations
by Anonymous
The Problem: Free-speech and right to assemble are threatened
Peaceful public assembly, free-speech and even civil-disobedience are essential to maintaining the balance of democracy in the USA and worldwide. Yet as recent public demonstrations have shown us (for example those against war, the IMF and the World Bank) in our modern-day society it is increasingly difficult, ineffective, and even dangerous for citizens to exercise their democratic rights to assembly and free-speech.
- Many nations do not allow open public dissent at all, and the penalties for participating in demonstrations are severe. In several cases, international governing and policy-making bodies have deliberately selected such nations for their meetings, in order to prevent demonstrations.
- Even in democratic nations such as the USA, peaceful demonstrators are often violently harassed, attacked, detained, arrested and imprisoned by police.
- The police are more organized and equipped than ever before with tear gasses, irritant sprays, stun guns, rubber bullets, water cannons, body armor, etc.
- Demonstrators can now be arrested and prosecuted as "domestic terrorists" if they participate in civil disobedience or their actions are deemed a threat to "national security."
- The mainstream media provides only scant, token coverage of large public protests and civil unrest, often whitewashing out incidents of police brutality, human rights violations, and violations of the right to free-speech and assembly.
- An increasingly large percentage of the world population (especially in developed nations) is over the age of 50 and cannot safely participate in public demonstrations due to the physical fragility and health risks associated with aging. They simply cannot risk getting beaten up by the police. In other words, the majority of citizens cannot safely assemble and demonstrate.
The Solution: Votester, a new tool for Digital Democracy
What is needed is a new technology that enables all citizens to safely and peacefully assemble, exercise their rights to free speech, and perform civil disobedience if necessary. This can be accomplished using an innovative application of open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology on the Internet, which we call "Votester." Votester does not exist yet. It is the hope of the authors that one or more groups of technologists reading this document will be inspired to create versions of it and make them freely available to the general public.
Votester enables peers to automatically send recurring email messages and/or HTTP requests to a set of addresses associated with a digital demonstration. The rate at which messages/requests are sent by each peer to each address is determined by either (a) a function of the number of people in the digital demonstration, or (b) the peer-owner's individual preferences.
The Votester function mentioned in (a) increases the number of messages and requests sent per peer, per unit time, proportionally as the number of peers in the digital demonstration increases. In other words, the number of parties endorsing a digital demonstration is used as an implicit measure of its legitimacy and thus allows for the digital demonstration to be "louder." This prevents Votester from being used to harass individuals on a small-scale, while still enabling it to be used for large-scale protests. As the number of peers in a digital demonstration increases, the number of email messages and http requests received per unit of time by the targets of the demonstration can become large enough their organizations and IT infrastructures are overloaded. For small digital demonstrations, Votester results in the equivalent of letter-writing campaigns. For large digital demonstrations - such as demonstrations that attract hundreds of thousands or millions of participants, Votester results in significant inconvenience or even denial-of-service for the targeted addresses.
For example, to protest the policies of the World Bank and the IMF, parties could run copies of Votester on their personal computers around the Internet. They could join a group called "World Bank and IMF demonstration." Members of this group would all receive a set of email formletters, email addresses and HTTP addresses. These might include addresses for the World Bank, IMF, politicians, corporations and even media organizations. Their peers would periodically send out the email formletter(s) to each address, and/or issue HTTP requests to any URLs included in the demonstration as well. The rate at which their peers send out messages and requests is determined as a function of the number of participants in the demonstration group: If more peers participate, each peer is allowed to send more messages per unit/time. For small scale demonstrations each peer might only send the email message once per week, but for large demonstrations each peer might send the email message once per day or even once per hour.
Votester provides a number of additional useful features to users:
- Peers report their activity to other peers in the digital demonstration, thus all peers can see the statistics of demonstrations that are taking place. Relevant statistics are included in email messages sent by peers for particular demonstrations. For example, an email protesting a policy includes information about the protest, stats about the number of peers involved in the protest and the number of messages sent by them.
- Peers also provide a directory of current and proposed protests, and a means for users to join protests, leave protests, post messages to discussion groups, propose new protests to the community, manage protests they start, and send announcements to protest-participants.
- Votester peers may send email messages via their owner's email accounts and/or via built-in sendmail capabilities and/or via public email servers on the network.
- Votester peers have dynamic IP addresses that change each time they are launched.
Benefits of Votester
It's legal. In the USA democratic system, it is not illegal for a citizen to send an email containing their opinion on an important issue to others in the society. Even if they send their email more than once, this is legal. It is also not illegal for a citizen to visit a Web page repeatedly. Since each Votester peer only sends a few messages (such as once per day, or once per hour, etc.) no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized, emergent activity of the entire group that results in large volumes of messages and requests being received by target addresses. Therefore no individual is liable. (Please Note: We are not lawyers and the legality of these claims still needs to be evaluated and established by professional lawyers, and no doubt they will be challenged by governments and others if and when Votester is deployed.)
It's non-violent. However annoying Votester may be it is not comparable to violent demonstrations in which property is damaged and/or humans are injured. Votester demonstrations are peaceful, they are simply email and HTTP campaigns. All that is exchanged is information.
It's safe. Participants in digital demonstrations are not physically at risk. They can make their opinions known without getting beaten up, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, etc. They can also protest without getting arrested.
It's effective. Digital demonstrations get noticed - they may actually cause enough inconvenience to target addresses that they can't help but notice them. They also cannot effectively be blocked by the police, so they last longer and can accomplish their objectives with fewer obstacles.
It's open. Anyone can participate in Votester demonstrations, including people who for reasons such as age, disability, ethnicity, economic status, etc. would not feel safe participating in physical demonstrations, or simply do not have the time or money to travel to a remote location and risk several days of detention etc.
It's unstoppable. Digital demonstrations are hard to block. Since messages come from dynamic IP addresses all over the network, targets have no effective way to shield themselves from them. They cannot anticipate the IP addresses that messages will be received from, and even if they block particular addresses, new parties are always joining and the IP addresses of participants change dynamically.
Conclusions
It is our hope that someone reading this will be inspired enough to create an implementation of Votester, and that they will release it as a free, open-source tool for the public. We believe that creating Votester will be an interesting project in its own right - for it presents a number of technical, social and user-interface design challenges that are worth solving. In particular, in order for Votester to succeed, it must provide strong anonymity protection to users, it must also facilitate a sense of community such that users can easily locate and participate in demonstrations of interest to them, finally it must be immune to attempts at hacking or misusing it so that it cannot be used for harassment by small groups and it cannot be blocked or manipulated by various parties.
...or does this sound like a Distributed.net-style of spam? I am not kidding. Maybe it's necessary in some countries to get the message across, but are we sure this is the only option? The potential for abuse here is utterly insane...
Class testers.VOTester
How to Download YouTube Videos
What if somebody hacks into votester's security protocols and (ab)uses thousands of systems to Ddos/spam the hell out of whoever they don't like?
Really, this looks like you are knowingly installing a Ddos zombie on your box, which is just waiting to be cracked and abused.
Not trolling.... sincerely worried.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
On first reading, this seems like it would be less effective than the flooding demonstration found in the slideshow from the link up top. The slideshow details basically a flood attack designed to essentially produce the "slashdot effect" to the website--this method just floods them with emails.
The /. method has the problem that the more bandwidth the target has, the less effective it is (and with demonstrations, it's likely we're going up against bigger purses). This e-mail deal seems way too easy to block and therefore does not solve the outstanding complications of the other.
I applaud their efforts (and to some extent success--consider Lufthansa), but since we're not anonymous in the digital world like we are in public, I think it'd take radical approaches to be effective. Of course, with the DMCA and it's broad verbiage, at what point is a digital demonstration an illegal digital riot? Imagine a few boxen on a webserver designed to filter out repeated protest e-mails--if the implementation mentioned above were improved enough to get past these filters, would that be breaking a security system?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
So the whole idea is to use up all the bandwidth available by some company you don't like, or crash their servers by sending too many people to their Web site, costing them potentially thousands of dollars?
No, I don't see a lawsuit coming...
What gets more press for your cause, e-mailing the IMF or trying to shut-down DC by sitting in the streets? It doesn't matter what you delieve in (right, left, whatever), effort and personal sacrifice gets the word out, sitting at home on your ass does not.
The author is basically asking for help in writing a P2P spamming and DDoS tool. Leaving aside the legality of this action (which it quite possible is not, particularly as laws start to come down hard on spammers), it begs the question of whether or not there is any place for a "demonstration" when it comes to digital democracy. If you want to demostrate online then I would suggest that you start by demonstrating a bit of responsibility by recongnizing that just because you disagree with someone does not give you the right to silence them -- this "tool" is nothing more than a tool for a few disaffected mobs to silence those whom they disagree with rather than actually participating in the political processes that have been established to deal with these grievances.
I would suggest that the authors stop wasting time working on a thinly disguised DDoS tool and instead actually try to see how political speech and democratic ideals can actually fit together. The past few years have seen the emergence of weblogs, community forums, indymedia, and a host of other digital tools for helping people build communities of discussion and distribute ideas and information that can be used to educate and inform. I would suggest that people actually interested in digital democracy seek out these tools and help to make them better.
There is nothin more immature than a child proclaiming that if people will not listen to what he has to say then he will scream and throw a temper tantrum so that no one else can have a conversation. Grow up!
I find that these types of demonstrations are going to be getting alot of people in trouble if they lack the ability to cover their tracks.
I met Max (hey Max nice job getting slashdoted!) at Defcon 10 and he has some interesting ideas (and code) to achieve this goal. Many people will attack this and call it "leftist destruction" and "a simple DOS (or ddos)." The fact remains that we lack a clear cut manner of (effective) protest in our world.
Even in America (TM) we have lost our rights to free speech. We have areas for protest inside a fence, a free speech zone even. People being shot. Protesters and their phantoms of lost liberty have become the evil of the world. In other parts of the world we have people killed for speaking out.
I personally know Tibetian monks that China would like to kill for simply speaking out against the state.
We as a whole cannot let this type of totalitarian behavoir exsist unchecked. Be it corperate, government, private citizen. We as a whole (planet) are letting the world fall back into the clutches of fascism under the guise of "freedom."
This is where the internet comes in.
Countries, corperations and the common man all rely in someway or another every day on the net. With the tools that Max doesn't provide it (could) allow some of the tech savvy (but not tech savvy enough to write their own tools) to fight back.
This is a non violent means of accomplishing this goal, that really sets it apart from the rest. No police will even shoot a protester on accident. Imagine that.
However this type of protest is not recognized as a proper form of policial/economic protest.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
So wait a sec here, if you restrict people that can vote to people that can blow $400, will those people put thought into it? I don't think so, I think people that can throw $400 away will go vote randomly because they can.
The concept allows for a broad type of interactions. You cannot stop 100,000 web requests from seperate ip space without *you* causing a DOS on yourself. What is the difference between real traffic and this? Nothing they are both legitimate clients. The same will go for mail. ftp. etc.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Forget easy access to voting -- something should be done to make it HARDER to vote. Heinlein didn't have a bad idea with military service requirements to vote, but that's not entirely practical -- instead, we should re-instate a poll tax of $400. If you aren't willing to pay hard cash for your rights to vote, then you shouldn't be able to vote. I honestly don't want apathists running the government anymore.
That's a bad, bad, BAD idea. The rich can vote on a whim. The poor simply can't afford to vote.
A better idea would be either service of some kind (military, non-military government, or charity), a minimum level of education, or [my favorite] a test.
If people, at the voting booth, have to pass a rather simple competency test, that'd screen out those that don't have a clue.
Or, we could have an "informed choice" law, that provided unbiased evaluations of each canditate's views. Or maybe just hvae an electronic reader that gives each candidate for each position five hundred words to express why they should be in office.
Hmm....
Why is it that every damn time something violent happens at one of these protests it is by 'infiltrators'? Did it every occur to you that there may just be some idiots in this protest movement?
If the protesters would police themselves and remove the idiots that cause the trouble before they had a chance to act, the police would have a much more difficult job arresting people. Then the protester would not look like violent thugs on the 6:00 News.
Also, doing some research and planing would help. (Don't have all the leaders in one place so they can be all ID'd and arrested at once. Also, learn map reading skills)
Let me be blunt: you are spoiled. To even attempt a comparison between the timid crowd control at IMF meetings and -- oh, I don't know, the entirety of the civil rights and labor movements in the U.S.? -- is naive. To suggest that the current state of affairs is somehow worse is laughable.
Tell you what -- I'm going to start an counter technology to Votester. It'll be called Cluester. Instead of spamming [pick a boogeyman] with P2P email, it'll bombard pampered activists with copies of Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." And the more people who join in, the more copies we can send out.
Seriously. Some people need to be reminded there was a world before CNN.
P.S. - Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civil disobedience where appropriate. I plan to be down in D.C. along with everyone else for next month's march against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. And I recognize there clearly remain a great many opressive regimes throughout the world. But it just hurts my teeth when people don't recognize how far they've come as they survey the distance left to go.
If the protesters would police themselves and remove the idiots that cause the trouble before they had a chance to act, the police would have a much more difficult job arresting people. Then the protester would not look like violent thugs on the 6:00 News.
Remember: That was why the Hoover FBI infiltrated the various 60s social movements; to get them to be extreme so they would look bad.
Also, doing some research and planing would help. (Don't have all the leaders in one place so they can be all ID'd and arrested at once. Also, learn map reading skills)
I think having an organization with a lawyer on hand, and some AV recording equipment, would be a sufficient check on police brutality.
Contacting the police ahead of time and letting them know that you will be protesting is probably a good idea too. Do it far enough in advance, and if you run into legal snags ("There was a riot at your last rally, so we're going to assume that one will happen again and not let you rally") you can come up with some alternative method of protest.
Give me a break. A digital demonstration will never get noticed as much as a physical one. Geeks, if you want something done get off your ass and get up there. Anyways, this sounds dangerously similar to eMail bombing someone, which I'm sure won't get you noticed in a positive way. Oooh, just annoy them to death. Sure, exact letter repetition gets you noticed. I know I open up every copy of the Nigerian money scam I get (*sarcasm folks*). Anyways, this story is boring. I'm moving on.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Anything other than each protester repeatedly hitting 'Reload' and/or 'Send' is DDOS and will be dismissed as such, even if nominally legal.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Really, if you want a "digital democracy", stop wasting time trying to shut down the corporate interests and work on software that the government could feel safe about using to let everyone voice their opinions at the polls.
My alma mater used a telnet (and now web-based) system to get more people involved in voting and it's translated into a 5-10% rise in voter turnout in the first few years.
Building a P2P-DDOS is going to do nothing but piss anyone who might have even been on your side off. Work smarter not louder.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I'm serious. This is completely ridiculous -- ever since JonKatz stopped posting, Michael has taken the reins of the "Putting Inane Bullshit On The Front Page" carriage and run with it.
In the name of everything that's holy, someone fire Michael. NOW.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
No, this post has nothing to do with agoraphobia. However, it does relate to your most interesting comment about the right to vote. Your point is, I assume, that you'd really rather that votes only be cast, and counted, if they are backed by a true wish to make a difference.
... but it did happen. And it was shushed. People were beaten for complaining about what goes on. Are you surprised there's apathy?
... those are the people who will run our lives. If it takes electronic voting to reach out to those who think the system doesn't work, then do so! Make sure they know their vote matters, whatever it takes.
I can understand your frustration with the voting system. I think, though, that your feelings about it can be better channeled by looking at the following problems:
-Not everyone would have the money to vote. Not everyone is fit for military service. (etc.) Imposing any restriction besides registration would imply a class-level difference, between those who can afford to vote, and those who cannot. I'd really rather not live in a country where only the (even mildly) rich may vote -- the laws have an effect one everyone's lives. As such, I'd even rather children be allowed to vote. And tourists. And anyone else who (at least for a short while) must live under the laws of the land. If the jurisdiction of law is going to be based on land-borders, votes should also be defined purely by land-borders.
-It's not apathy that is the root of the problem. It's not that people don't care about the issues; it's that they've already made up their minds ahead of time. I come from a rather (D) family, by girlfriend from a quite staunch (R) family. In both cases, I've observed people who will go to the voting booth because they care about the issue, but would willingly 'vote down the line' (check the box at the top saying you agree with said party on all issues.) We need to educate people to care about issues rather than grand theories. I grew up in europe, where there are quite a few more parties available to vote for. Here, you rarely have more than two choices: and two choices cannot possibly represent, accurately, all the different combinations of voting preferences of the american people. But they do. Because people here refuse to deal with individual issues. And that, I think, is even worse than apathy.
-Not being able to distinguish between (D) and (R) shouldn't surprise you: in europe, they're both considered centrist movements, compared to all other available political parties. You don't see here campaigns by neo-nazies or communists. The anarchists are barely represented. Independent? What does that mean? So really, no, the two aren't that different. If you see them as radically different, then you just have an extremely narrow vision of the political spectrum. Open your eyes.
-Representation is a problem: would it have mattered if I had voted (D) in the last presidential elections? No, because the deciding factor wasn't the state I'm in -- only in Florida did every vote count (that is, obviously so.) If we had a more direct approach, where 'popular vote' were actually the vote that counted, perhaps people would be more inclined to vote, no?
-Apathy isn't surprising: consider slashdot. Most of us are pissed off that our congresscritters (what a fond name) won't listen to us. Shouldn't they be listening? If they're not, and our votes don't really matter, then we're not left with much but civil disobedience. And with recent laws, that's not nearly as safe as it used to be. Check around -- police violence is a problem, and it's stifling even our ability to hold protests outdoors. Check the videos available from indymedia, raisethefist, etc. of protests, say, at the presidential elections? I hadn't even seen those on television
I'm sure others can add to this list. I'm all for democracy -- fair democracy. Democracy in which people feel empowered to make a difference in how their country is run, how their lives will be changed by the powers that be. If they don't feel they have that, it's useless. Lobbyists, people like our families, who vote based on how their parents (and churches) vote
In your opinion did the ebay dos of latter days not get onto the news? The papers? The court system?
Money is what matters.
When people block the whitehouse they used to stop the flow of communication, the flow of governing, now they do not. Cash still flows. The governing goes on. To be effective one must stop the flow. The form it takes now is the internet. It is time to use this medium that has brought back the ability to have civil disobedience.
I am a part of the activist community. I am also a geek. I think people all bring a trade to the table. So if you have the ability to bring computers to the activist table you should do so.
I suggest you get yourself a copy of "electronic civil disobedience" by the critical art ensemble.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
If you think going online and whining in some blog is going to bring about rapid change, you're pissing in the wind. The IMF protestors have one thing right - if you want attention you've got to break something. The Bolsheviks had it down even better - if you want real change you have to smash an entire system.
Are people like that fit to run the country because they're entitled to? Absolutely not! People that ignorant should not be allowed to vote, and ever since we removed all restrictions, this country has turned into a cesspool
He has a point, just look at our president.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Quoth the anonymous one: You have exactly zero proof that this will be effective, and I have a few points you don't appear to have considered.
Protests and civil disobedience depend largely on appeals to the "good side" of human nature. GandhiThe Mahatma and his followers were successful by-and-large because the Brits couldn't justify their actions to the rest of the world. Modern mass media played a huge role in Gandhi's success. There was tremendous pressure from home and the rest of the world to stop the brutality of British colonial rule.
Now, some of this brutality was carefully provoked by Gandhi & Co. specifically to discredit the Brits in the eyes of their own citizens and the rest of the world. Much like the war in Vietnam, once the public saw what was happening they had little stomach for it.
So what am I ranting about? What we need to learn about this is that the problem with protest is how you spin it in the media. Gandhi knew this, and you should learn it. Unarmed young men getting beaten is a sympathetic image, and impossible to deny. The excuse of, "They walked into my club" (while true), doesn't work as well when the blood is on their faces, but your hands and uniforms.
Digitally, however, no one gets hurt. Great. But no-risk protests don't work because you only win if the public sympathizes with you, and who's going to sympathize with a bunch of P2P geeks mailbombing Congress? No one - you'll be called a group of anarchist, terrorist hackers trying to interfere with the duties of the government.
If you were getting the shit kicked out of you on the Capitol steps it wouldn't matter what they called you - you're the one doing the bleeding, so you're going to get the sympathy.
But your plan entails no bleeding. No risk at all, you say. If Gandhi's followers had all stayed home and written polite letters, even in great volume, they would have gotten nowhere. No risk, no reward.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I'd take it one step further - $400 doesn't buy you a vote to elect a Congressdroid, $400 buys you a vote on a bill.
And at $400 per vote per bill, all of a sudden my vote counts as much as Hilary Rosen's.
Seems to me that under such a system, we'd have the DMCA repealed in a week, and there wouldn't be a goddamn thing Jack or Hilary could do about it.
> A better idea would be either service of some kind (military, non-military government, or charity), a minimum level of education, or [my favorite] a test.
I really like the idea of competency testing for voting even under our present system (I adopted this when I heard someone - seriously - advocating color-coded ballots for a municipal election so the illiterate couldn't be "discriminated against" because they couldn't read the candidates' names), so I'd combine both approaches. A competency test, and a $400 fee, per bill.
To prevent ballot stuffing by Jack and Hilary, it's still one vote per voter per bill. RIAA can still spend megabucks on a PR campaign, but they have to convince the Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks to spend $400 of their hard-earned money to enact the CBDTPA -- and that's gonna be much harder sell than convincing them to spend nothing to vote for "the guy with the better haircut because my favorite celebrity said to." (Or spending a few tens of kilobucks per Senator to be rewarded with a snort of coke from between a pair of plastic tits.)
One might even buy voting credits with tax dollars. Pay $40000 in tax, get 100 voting credits ("vote credits" would probably be cryptographic keys encrypted with the voter's public key) for that year.
I suppose the system could be defeated, by, say, RIAA and MPAA buying enough Congresscritters to introduce the same bill, every day, over and over again until the $100K/year (~200 votes/year) geeks finally run out of voting credits, but I'm gambling that the Copyright Cartel are like cockroaches, in that they wouldn't like to be forced out into the open like that.
If there's a large sit-down protest at an event or business, it attracts attention because everyone can see it, and it only inconveniences the target. This method would seem exactly the opposite. It inconveniences everyone, if the DDoS produces a significant drain on the network besides just the target; and it doesn't attract attention, because no one can walk past your email flood and ask you what you're doing and why you're doing it.
To quote Jim McCoy's comment,
Seems to me that the state-of-the-art in digital democracy is as a means for communication, organization, and education - not as an effective method of civil disobedience in itself, but as a means to effectively organize conventional methods of civil disobedience.
An much as we all like "cyberspace", meatspace has some useful properties as well, which allows us to do some things in reality that we can't easily do on the Internet. This plan attempts to mimic the real world in an entirely superficial--and therefore useless--way. I expect it's possible to duplicate something like the dynamic of a live protest on-line, but it will take much more infrastructure than this.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
...no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized..., ie a distributed denial of service. Wow. I didn't know thase were legal....
A *real* digital demonstration would be if a group of people each went home, wrote emails to their congresspersons, and sent them off. This would be legal, safe, open, and... probably not so effective. Dead trees are just harder to ignore than emails, and take more work to filter. This is all the more true if those emails are part of a DDOS attack.
In terms of resistance to government tampering, Publius or Free Haven would be a better way to get your ideas around if people would use them, which many people do.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Not only can the rich vote while the poor are disenfranchised, but rich organizations can sponsor those voters who will vote in their interest.
It occurs to me that proxy voting might be a better form of representative democracy than the current approach.
If every citizen could vote on every matter, most people wouldn't. But they could select a proxy to vote for them. They could switch to another proxy whenever they liked. Proxies would have one vote for each person who selected them.
There would be no such thing as "throwing your vote away" by voting for an unpopular political party. Each proxy would have one vote per person they represented. And on issues where you felt strongly, you could vote directly, rather than letting your proxy handle it.
This kind of change should encourage more diversity in political thinking, and might even restore some faith in the political process. That might lead to less apathy and more intelligent proxy selection.
There are many better forms of passive disobedience that get much more results
how about evading taxes,
ignoring copyrights,
blowing off patents,
using tax havens and other forms of
hiding assets,
get your perscriptions on the black market,
or from other countries that make illegal generics
keep your kids in home school or private school and out of the system
use lots of trade and barter whenever possible and never report it to anyone else, and buy anything like guns, pharmacuticals, that you can on the black market.
can you help smuggle or house an illegal aliean?
can you help supply guns to families in 3rd world countries that are having their freedom taken away?
You need to understand that others are trying to controll your life, and unless you are willing to take actions that destroy their power over you, you will be a slave.
Perhaps this is the problem, you are too willing to protest and make noise, but not willing enough to assert that controll that is rightfully yours.
Democracy initially allows people the freedom to do stuff, as time goes on people take advantage by performing criminal acts to get money/whatever, the politicians pass laws (Marijuana) that the people can't change so these criminals are tolerated and nurtured. When the criminals become too powerful, the people all of a sudden want a restrictive Government, their freedoms are curtailed (so what if a police dog smells marijuana in my car, does that really give him the right to search?). In a restrictive democracy the people cannot freely protest against Government (at the WTO protests an unarmed student was SHOT AND KILLED) and so resentment builds until a civil war/coup occurs. Perhaps a corporate oligopoly led by Bill Gates and Linus would be more peaceful in the long term?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Right now you might be looking at your high tax bill, but when your boss decides to downsize you due to "Feng Shui kaizen employment strategy", THEN you'll be panicking looking at your welfare credits and hoping to God that you didn't cash in your unemployment insurance.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
In a State with 10 million inhabitants, 2 million of which will "pay to vote" the probability of your vote making a difference = damn small
Therefore only stupid people will vote, and intelligent people will invest this $400 in the lottery which gives better odds.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
This tool exisits. Many like it exsist.
They have only been stopped when the people running it were total jackasses, they got what they deserved.
This is not terrorism. If it was then that is the role you take on when you use it. Change the law through action be it direct action or passive gradualism.
It will work. This is going to change the face of things. If you think it can be stopped read my comment about how it doesnt have to be run out of U.S.A..
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
My point stands - you do not get real change by asking for it. You have to take it.
I don't agree with this at all. Technical issues aside, it seems more as if the objective is to turn modern democracy into a online media web-poll. It's not that hard to demonstrate that nearly all of the people who pro-actively take part in public debate and make noise in the media are people who want to change something from whatever is already happening, whereas those who agree with the status quo have no reason to protest unless those other protesters really get up their nose.
It also stinks of laziness, which leads back to the same problem of inactivity. One of the biggest parts of democracy is that you're supposed to stand up for it. Claiming that you might get a finger broken is a poor excuse. It's true that active parcicipation in demonstrations doesn't always work, butbut if people can't even be bothered to leave their home to express their opinion, then maybe it's not worth taking notice of.
Making the whole participation process automated and easy is just encouraging people to get lazier and lazier. It encourages politicians to take less and less notice of it, and rightly so.
It's pointless to have a referendum on an issue that results in 95% of people wanting to change something, if 95% of people didn't turn out to vote.. and after a short time, that's what will happen. Naturally that 95% will be trying to claim victory in front of the mathematically challenged majority, but it still means that 95.4% of people either don't want a change or don't care. The whole exercise was meaningless.
This is the main reason that I don't sign petitions that are waved under my nose, and I don't send form letters that are identical to thousands of others. If and when I have an opinion to express, I'll put some effort in and express my opinion properly in my own words. It might not get read in detail, but at least it'll be visible as an opinion that took some effort to express.
Contrary to popular belief, this just acts as a smoother on the economy, the people will whine about high taxes during the boom time, and during the bad times they will thank God that their taxes pay for a welfare state. This doesn't damage the economy, because if we have a constant boom time, then the tax rate after a few decades will gradually decrease as enough welfare money would have been accumulated. Remember GDP = C+G+bla
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
It's amazing how uncreative political protests have become in this country. Enter street, sit down, chain arms, repeat. Stay at home, mail letters, complain, repeat. Ever notice that neither of these involves going to statehouses and talking to or yelling at legislatures? They do let you into those things, and for free no less. Sure, you get arrested for disturbing the peace, but that's a lot more satisfying thing to have on your arrest record than parading without a permit.
The place where people should be focusing their efforts is at the mechanics of government, not venting at society. And yes, we need a clearer separation between protesters and revolutionaries so that thousands of homeowners and parents can have their voices safely heard without the risk of arrest, and thousands of fearless college students can have something truly positive to do that will land them in jail, rather than just throwing a concert.
-What else can you do? Write for papers! They really don't have any money to spend on content these days, and love to print long, interesting editorial pieces. With smaller, more specific papers you are almost guarenteed to be printed. That way, you will be read by far more people than by commenting on slashdot, and your piece will be cited by lazy high-school students for years to come.
-Give speeches. Most city council meetings have open-floor sections, and your council member is far more likely to have an ear of someone who has an ear of the president than you do.
-Get arrested for something memorable and dramatic, like being beaten by cops or hijacking the satellite TV video (but not audio) signal during the state-of-the-union address to display images of victims of american emperialist policies.
-Talk about these things with people you don't know, constantly. Talk to the people behind the counter at your supermarket, the people on the street, and generally being an information source for anyone and everyone who is willing to give you the benifit of 30 seconds. Discuss, don't give speeches.
-Send annonymous bomb tips. Shuts down just about anything, and fast. Just remember that you can and probably will be tracked down unless you cover your tracks meticulously.
-Cut out the middleman and get state referrandums passed. You need several thousand signatures to get something on the ballot, but just think of the voice that gives your cause. Did medical marajuana have a chance of being taken seriously before getting on the ballot in California? Not really, but now...
-Hang signs from freeways and billboards. (you can guess what state I'm in). No, it's not legal, and they will eventually be taken down. But they will be seen by literally thousands of people per hour on their way to work. And really, whose voice deserves the audience, one of frank political discussion or one urging the purchase of a AT&T wireless services?
Join Calperg, Massperg, the Christian Coalition, or any other organization that you believe is aligned with your political goals, and donate one night a week to bettering mankind. Campaign finance reform really needs people.
-Be creative! Why did these people join hands to shut down Washington when many of them could have parked their busses? 500 dollars isn't unheard of for a car that has just enough life left in it to drive to downtown. That wouldn't be as effective as, say, a leafletting campaign, but it would at least be more than throwing a concert in a park.
-Finally, stay goal focused. If you want to stop one nasty timber company from logging, you can chain yourself to their equipment and park a bulldozer in front of their gate. If you want to stop the spread of the timber industry in the northwest, you need to help draft and push through legislation in the logging towns that limits the company's powers to exert emminent capitalism. If you want to stop Wells Fargo Bank from exploiting the gullibility of elderly patrons you can either smash their windows down, or start up an education campaign that targets the aged, along with legislation that prohibits such arrangements.
If the protesters wanted to be truly effective at getting the message about IRAQ out, they would have hung a screen over downtown DC and played Apocolypse Now all day.
Just as a side note, I'm replying to this person not because their comment was wrong or incomplete, but because it was inspirational and needed an amen.
amen.
The ______ Agenda
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> People ate well and indulged in excess long before market economies become dominant. Take a look at how the royals of Europe lived.
I have, and the ponit of my post was that as a result of free market economics, I (and hundreds of millions of "wage slaves" like me) live better than Louis XIV could have hoped to. Unless you're living on the street (unlikely), so do you.
> Building Versailles didn't save the French crown...why would fiber optics necessarily reinforce your system?
Building Versailles couldn't save the French crown. Marie said let 'em eat cake, but nobody had cake.
And yet today, I can buy a pretty nice cake for about 15 minutes' worth of work for my employer, and 10 minutes' worth of work for the Government.
The slogan of the French Revolution should have been "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Choose any two."
Could we accept, perhaps, a system in which votes are cast with a value of '1' per person, but make sure that in cases such as rural states (no offense meant) the specific problems of the area will be taken into account?
Do you have a proposal for such a system? The system is already heavily tilted toward the populous states, with regard to presidential elections at least. Presidents can already afford to almost completely ignore the voters in, for example, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming.
Personally, I think if you're going to change it, you need to change it in the opposite direction, to further strengthen the votes of people in these small states. I think the electoral college would do a great job, except for one thing: A state's votes are voted as a bloc. This means that a tiny majority of Californians, for example, has a huge effect on the national election. If electoral votes were allocated proportionally by the states, rather than voted as a bloc, the squabbling in Florida in the last election would have been over the allocation of one vote, rather than 25.
Just as a bit of history, it's worth remembering while thinking about such things, that the founders never intended for the President to be a popularly elected office at all. They left it completely up to the states to decide how to allocate their electoral votes -- a state would be perfectly within its rights to have the state legislature choose (as the Florida state legislature was threatening to do) and not involve the people at all.
It's also interesting to remember that the states' representatives to the U.S. House and Senate also weren't necessarily to be elected directly by the people, and many states did have their state legislatures choose these representatives for a while. I often wonder how this country would be different had that not been changed. Clearly, the states would have retained far more power than they now have, and the federal government would be far, far smaller than it is, since the U.S. congress would be directly under the control of the state legislatures.
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