The Internet Blueprint Wants You To Crowdsource Digital Laws

will_edit_for_food writes "Are you fed up with anti-piracy acts that use scorched-earth tactics, like SOPA and PIPA — or secretly negotiated agreements like ACTA? Do you wonder why we the people don't propose our own laws, rather than just react whenever these bills slouch toward Congress to be born? Wouldn't you like a place where you and a few like-minded amateur lawmakers could get together and do it right? Public Knowledge has debuted the Internet Blueprint, a site for those technologically and politically inclined to gather ideas...and eventually submit them to sympathetic politicians."

Comments

As one who has tried hyperdemocracy, I like likes

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

When I tried to do hyper democracy, I wanted to be like Digg/Reddit, but I wanted factional voting. Factional voting is allowing republicans to view only republican upvotes and democrats to only see democrat upvotes. We had a ton of other features too. This is why we failed. We didn't embrace KISS. By just going with facebook likes, this saves you from writing an entire voting system! This is an eloquent approach. The only problem is a lot of people don't like Facebook. I guess these are tradeoffs.

Another challenge we faced when writing a hyper democracy website was: How do you validate they're a US voter? It could be someone from the Ukraine trying to change politics. Worse yet, it can be a million computer botnet from Nigeria trying to petition congress on something. We couldn't solve this problem in an eloquent fashion. We were going to have people physically sign up at booths across the nation to be validated, but even that doesn't solve stuff. My biggest worry is that if Facebook gets ingrained with politics and identification of people, is that Facebook will be mandatory for those getting political and that lying on Facebook about a fake ID would be a felony down the road.

My hats off to the eloquent interface: Just use Facebook likes instead of your own database. But that can come back to bite you in the long run.

My Platform Would Never Fly

[Greyfox]

Putting copyright back to its original length and carefully wording patent law to disallow software and business process patents or anything else that isn't an actual physical single-purpose machine. Explicitly stating that corporations are not people and may be regulated as the government sees fits. Explicitly stating that corruption and fraud are not protected free speech. Explicitly stating that corruption and subversion of our democratic process by plutocrats is not free speech and will not be tolerated. Explicitly stating that no man or entity is above the law (Looking at you, insider-trading Congressmen and Geneva-convention violating executives.)

After that some attention would need to be turned to carefully dismantling the mechanisms the two political parties have put in place to insure that no other party rises to power, and the mechanisms the very rich have managed to get written into law to insure that they remain very rich at the expense of everyone else. If we have to go back to banking and moneylending being sinful, that's fine with me. Lets start actually creating actual things again as the main value driver of our economy.

I don't suppose any of that would be very popular in Washington. And if I ever managed to run and get elected on such a platform I'm sure that Washington would corrupt me just like it's corrupted every other fresh-faced freshman ever to set foot in the place. Must be something in the water.

Re:Because more laws

[greg1104]

If we start testing candidates for those qualities, then we'll have smart, physically fit politicians who are still corporate shills. Frankly, I'd rather have the feebleminded, old and infirm ones we have now. I'd hate to think how much trouble energetic versions of them could cause.

Re:Because more laws

[rtb61]

Perhaps you have never heard of psychopathy testing which can not be cheated on. It measures emotional response and control with in the brain, so no, zero, zilch corporate shills (the ones left would be terrible liars hence honest politicians).