A Digital Direct Democracy For the Modern Age

New submitter lordofthechia writes "Last month the White House created an online petition system through which constituents can directly voice any grievances and concerns to the US government. Any petition that reaches 25,000 signatures (5,000 originally) is promised an official reply. This weekend the first petitions will be closing, and already many have far exceeded the required number of signatures. Is this the way for the voice of the electorate to gain more weight in modern politics, or is it the web version of a placebo button? Will the President's office really consider the top pleas, which include petitions to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana, Forgive Student Loan Debt, and Abolish the TSA?"

Comments

That's not direct democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Direct democracy is where the people are in control of the decision-making process. This is a mass-petitioning system, where the people are granted by their ruler the ability to make a plea. This is functionally no different than a king saying he will grant an audience to any mob of more than 25,000 people who appear at the castle gates (how nice of him!). There is no guarantee that the ruler will act according to the will of the people. Even calling this democracy at all is a real stretch and a betrayal of the values of the founding fathers.

Real direct democracy is possible with internet tools, but this isn't it. The options for real democracy are:

1. Mixed democracy, where we keep the current representative system, but the representatives are legally bound to act according to the input of direct-democracy-style websites. For info on this, see the E2D initiative:
http://www.e2d-i.org/
and the many national member parties:
http://www.participedia.net/wiki/E2D_International#Signatory_Parties

2. Collaborative governance, where actual decision-making is directly and solely controlled by a collaborative consensus process. This system also requires a break from the status quo of hierarchies of governing states: it is starting by providing tools to replace the governments of tiny organizations, and will scale upward from there, disrupting and replacing the current system bit by bit, peacefully and slowly. Because it is consensus-based, it avoids the pitfalls of mob rule.
For info on this, see the Metagovernment project:
http://www.metagovernment.org/
and the many constituent projects which are involved in it:
http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Active_projects

Re:That's not direct democracy

[IamTheRealMike]

Yup, there is also a paper I wrote a while ago on delegated voting. Essentially you form a decision tree. Voters can delegate their vote to other people based on topic, with a "catch all" delegation of their local representative for anything that they don't take themselves or delegate to anyone else. It has the nice property that it can be implemented in a basically backwards compatible way - for people who don't care about politics nothing needs to change, but decisions have far more democratic legitimacy. Nobody can ever say their voice wasn't heard.

Re:That's not direct democracy

[SlippyToad]

Context aware voting, open 24/7 continuous to distribute the resources and fluidly change policy is what we should've had since a decade ago.

Our democracy was explicitly designed so that in theory it could not be run away with by zealous whackaloons. The only experience the Founders had in this regard was history, the disastrous self-destructive "direct democracy" you mention earlier as having been invented two fucking thousand years ago. Maybe you skimmed that section of history -- the original Greek Democracy experiment was considered a catastrophe because the mob ran away with the government.

This was to be avoided in our system by giving conservative tendencies greater weight than progressive ones. Thus the Senate which originally wasn't even meant to be elected by the People, and whose sole purpose is to slow-foot the ideas the hotheads in the House come up with.

Although at the time of the ratification of the Constitution the true horrors of the French Revolution were still in the future, the Founders also had the experience of the weak central government established by the Articles of Confederation to guide it.

Recently, zealous whackaloons came up with this idea that they'd be extra-ultra-super conservative, and use all of the built-in tendencies towards PREVENTING change as a way to lock in their ideology.

At any rate, one must plan and design a government very carefully. Just shouting a bunch of ill-concieved libertarian principles into the air is not going to cut it.

Re:That's not direct democracy

[transami]

Petition for the Real Thing

Not likely

[Hatta]

Obama has done this before. The number one question submitted was whether legalizing marijuana would contribute positively to the economy, in terms of providing jobs, tax revenue, and freeing up resources spent on law enforcement.

Obama laughed and said no. There was no discussion of any of the issues. I see no reason to believe he will take this any more seriously than he did before.

How long does he think he can keep up this charade of openness?

Re:Not likely

[Hatta]

Are you really going to write off the unjust imprisonment of thousands of harmless Americans as "a dead subject"? Anyone who doesn't see this as a travesty of justice is sick. Your dietary issues are quite frankly pathetic next to the harm marijuana prohibition causes.

Re:Sure beats the alternative

[batquux]

Now they "have to" give an official reply. Which will always be, "No."

Campaign

[DoofusOfDeath]

If I recall, Obama had something similar around the last time he wanted to get elected. My money is on this being a craven hollow gesture in order to recapture those whom he excited in his first Presidential campaign.

The problem is not that he's ignorant of what many citizens want (return of habeus corpus to those accused of terrorism; prosecution of CIA torturers; cessation of free trade deals and IP legislation that favor corporations over regular citizens; cessation (or reversal) of crony capitalism by Bernanke and Geithner; etc.) The problem is that he won't actually execute those ideas.

Simple rewriting

[Caerdwyn]

Allow me to summarize how this works:

• VOTE: Shall the US Government give you free money, taken from anybody except yourself without consideration for law, fairness, effort, contribution, or the damage done to the economy and future generations?
  • [ ] Yes
    [ ] Gimme!
    [ ] I'm entitled!
    [ ] Anybody who earns more money than me must have cheated, so yeah
    [ ] Hanging chad

I think that sums it up nicely. Or, to quote someone a hell of a lot smarter than most people:

• A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
  --Alexander Tytler

not Rep or Dem, so I'll take what I can get

[bcrowell]

I'm not a Republican or a Democrat, so I have very few meaningful ways of participating in the US political process. My congressman is a social-conservative Republican in a safe Republican district, so there is essentially no chance of ever getting rid of him. I did recently re-register Republican so that I could vote against him twice, once in the primary and once in the general election -- not that it will accomplish anything. Another benefit of being registered Republican is that I can vote against Rick Perry in the primary. And that's about it -- that's all I can do in electoral politics, and it ain't much. I'd love to have a chance to vote for a politician who was against the USA-PATRIOT Act, but I can't, because it has essentially 100% support in both of the major parties. Ditto for ending the disastrous War on Drugs, or for kicking America's habit of getting involved in multiple simultaneous wars thousands of miles away from home; all of these issues have zero traction in either of the two major parties.

So this petition thing may not be much, but I'll take what I can get. It might make it harder for politicians to claim that absolutely nobody cares about certain issues, and that would be a good thing.

Re:not Rep or Dem, so I'll take what I can get

[Vaphell]

what about Ron Paul?
against the USA-PATRIOT Act - check
ending the disastrous War on Drugs - check
kicking America's habit of getting involved in multiple simultaneous wars thousands of miles away from home - check

But I don't want a democracy

[gewalker]

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, if you can get 51% to vote for taking you life, your liberty, or your property -- you lost under mob rule. What I want is a rule of law, wherein government is limited by law and in practice to the domains in which it is permitted to act. You know, like a constitutional republic for example.

Neither the Democrats or the Republicans seem to be interested in this form of governance though.

Diff between Greeks & Electronic Direct Democr

[Toe, The]

The Greeks did not have computers, an internet, nor collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and concepts. These change things, and Greek direct democracy cannot be compared to the new forms being developed today.

The principle behind Metagovernment is that decisions are only made when there is a consensus. This means that mob rule and tyranny of the majority is impossible. Just because 80% of the people want it at that moment doesn't mean it's right... wait until almost everyone is on board, and you know you have found something good.

Now consensus might sound like an impossible goal, but it really isn't. The reason it is so hard to achieve these days is because we have a two-party system where each side benefits from distinguishing themselves from the others: in other words, they abhor a consensus. They thrive on conflict, and play up stupid issues to keep us divided.

When we mature beyond political parties, a consensus system will not be that hard to deal with. This is because collaborative governance tools are designed to push people toward consensus by helping them to find common ground. Without the interruption of politicians, this is not only possible, but truly wonderful. Synthesis is a much, much better form of decision-making than compromise.

You may ask what do we do if we can't find consensus? The answer is obvious: nothing! There is no reason to make a law if society isn't in consensus on it. That is the road to tyranny, suppression, and everything else bad in government. Real government of, by, and for the people must be about all of the people. If something is so urgent that it must be dealt with, then people will find a way to come to consensus... or else they don't really even agree on the urgency, do they?

The projects in Metagovernment have put a lot of thought into their systems, and some of them are extremely sophisticated. As they mature and gain adoption, they will mature. The fact that there are many different projects means that the real-world marketplace of ideas will pick the best solution going forward, providing yet another check on their potential to fail.

Now I am sure you can find some imperfections in all of this, but compare it to the status quo before you judge. Can a collaborative governance system really be worse than the plutocratic, authoritarian, tyrannic demagoguery we have now?

Re:Diff between Greeks & Electronic Direct Dem

[Kreigaffe]

To answer your last question first: Yes, absolutely, and even more than that it certainly would be.

Consensus is not a good thing.

Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.

There's only one, or at most very few, right answers. There's innumerable wrong answers. Consensus would be mixing the right answers with the wrong answers. That leaves you with a wrong answer.

I imagine that an overwhelming majority of people would agree that Fred Phelps should shut up. That's already a consensus. They're also wrong. He shouldn't shut up. Some states have passed laws so that the ways in which he was exercising his free speech are prohibited, but he's still allowed that free speech -- just not at the time and in the place he'd prefer, because how he was doing things was getting him the most attention. Even if the majority decides and agrees to a thing, it still may be a violation of someone's rights.

Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner. Compromise is 3 wolves and 1 sheep agreeing to only eat half the sheep.

We've got a system that was designed to be democratic while also eternally preserving the rights of that sheep. It's not ideal, but compromise, consensus, direct democracy? Good fucking lord those ideas are so much worse

Re:Diff between Greeks & Electronic Direct Dem

[Toe, The]

Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.

Your analysis assumes a static system, where you ask people a question and get an answer. Collaborative governance is a continuous process: consensus is never achieved at the outset: it is attained by debate, collaboration, and synthesis. All original proposals get rejected, and most subsequent ones do, until some genius comes up with something that actually works for everyone. That is something actually worthy of consensus.

Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner.

No, what you are describing is majority rule. It has nothing to do with consensus governance.

By comparison, I would describe our current system as three wolves charged with the safety of a thousand sheep. Guess what the wolves have for dinner every night??

Re:Diff between Greeks & Electronic Direct Dem

[Kreigaffe]

My point was that there are some answers, some solutions, which are *simply right*. Maybe that's to do nothing, even, but they are just.. exactly.. right. And, sometimes, a majority of people would disagree.

That doesn't mean it's not right. That means that a majority of people are wrong.

When you have something which is simply right, you can't compromise, you can't try and reach consensus. That would only dilute the right solution and make it wrong. Wanna invade Canada? Wanna strip-search 8 year old girls who try to fly on a plane? Wanna demand that people answer their location of origin and destination when stopped by police?

There's only one single right answer to all those issues: No. Even if 99% of the population disagrees, the right answer is still no. You can't compromise. You can't plead and make concessions. There's only one right answer.

Direct democracy fucks up those sorts of things. Constantly. Continually. If you think knee-jerk reactionaryism is rampant in our government now, just gander over to public opinion polls. There's your direct democracy. Holy mother of shit god, THAT is knee-jerk reactionaryism -- damn the facts, full emotional appeal ahead! Let's all do something so we feel like we've done something and to hell with the consequences! We're all in agreement, consensus has been reached, WE'RE FUCKING BANNING GRAPEFRUIT!

Re:Diff between Greeks & Electronic Direct Dem

[element-o.p.]

Policitians are the least likely to know what is right: the only thing they care about is what keeps them in power.

Actually, I think it may be even worse than that. With 540 elected officials in the Federal government alone (one president, one vice-president, one hundred elected senators, and 338 congressmen and women), I would wager that someone has the right answer to every problem our nation faces. It's just that most of them are more interested in being popular than in being right.