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.

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?

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

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.

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??