[dbspin]

Yes - and there are hundreds of thousands of small groups applying principles of direct democracy in practice, from democratic schools to consensus based art centres.

People have been collectively organising movements and spaces for many decades now, and the processes are pretty well worked out. Comparing utopian dropouts in the 60's running farms on vibes to dedicated activists establishing and maintaining consensus based social contracts is disingenuous. There's plenty to be criticised in terms of the practical aspects of these systems - from implementation to scalability, and good luck to the folks doing the hard work of improving them. But dismissing them out of hand is an argument from ignorance.

[Nevermark]

> small groups applying principles of direct democracy

Small groups. That is the problem. It can work but doesn't scale.

As the number of people go up, the need and benefits of more complex coordination go up. People's interactions, dependencies, needs, understandings and problems multiply in quantity, complexity and diversity.

People O(n). Decisions O(n^2).

Direct coordination becomes too costly in time and effort. And people get asked to make decisions in areas where they have no skin in the game, so put little care into their decisions, or seek selfish benefits opportunistically. Things get difficult and ugly.

The default is a descent into anarchy, which gets counter weighted by emergent initiatives that centralize decision making around people who care, have expertise, are good at taking power, etc. Acknowledged or not, "direct", as the universal principle of decision making, no longer works.

Better to see it coming and as directly and openly as possible, prescribe how indirect governance is to be done. As openly and accountably as possible.

Organizations and societies, like computer memory and and processing cores in server centers, need to bifurcate and modularize into different levels, types and policies, to remain efficient and reliable at scale.

[soco]

Once again for the last row: Switzerland. 9 millions inhabitants, 5.5 millions with voting rights, 0 anarchy. Is that still not big enough for the no true scotsman?

[Nevermark]

They have councils and parties, classic institutions of centralization and decision delegation. The people in those organizations, especially the leaders, have tremendous outsized power to decide and frame what issues and candidates are exposed to votes by the democracy as a whole. And of course, in the best position to maintain their own positions or set up their successors chances.

So no - they are not a direct democracy. For the unavoidable reasons I gave.

However yes, they are doing a fantastic and inspiring job of maintaining as much directness as possible. And at keeping the centralized and indirect processes formalized, open and accountable.

Vs. the US, where even the president isn't elected directly; lower offices are heavily controlled by whoever draws district maps, often the incumbents; only two parties have much power, and conspire together to maintain that - reducing citizen choices to only two preset menus of policies & governance styles; parties enforce litmus tests on their own candidates at all levels of office, vastly increasing party leadership power at the expense of eliminating 99% of potential alternative views. The result of all this power hoarding are many laws in significant opposition to majority views, and an institutionalization of two way service and influence with the rich. The highest court nomination process and members of the highest court have become aggressively politicized and brazenly unethical. Overall, the US system has become increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, divisive and dystopian.

Switzerland is amazing.

[dbspin]

I think this is a tremendously important discussion to have, perhaps the most important one we can have right now. One point I'll make not to counter what you've written above, but to reframe it slightly - is that many of the decisions we make about what needs to scale are cultural (and only narrowly rational).

We've somewhat arbitrarily settled on nation state scale geographic / population scales for governance which (a few less than democratic mega-nations aside), are pretty similar in size and complexity. This is a local maxima, rather than an inevitability. The ideal balance between federalised aspects of governance - which do need to be abstracted to some extent isn't obvious. It's reasonably likely that much smaller micro-states within stronger federalised economies could be more effective. That workplace level democracy can and does increase productivity. That in fact states where the level of consensus decision making is the business, the cooperative and the housing complex, could be more cohesive, less fractious and more stable. Could be more effective if we judge efficacy as best meeting the wellbeing needs of their population.

I'd take issue with the idea that centralisation of decision making is necessitated by having multiple layers of governance. I'd argue a canton style system of carrying forward the decisions and decision making authority of lower houses can also work. Where representation is absolutely essential, sortation can be used to prevent the creation of a distinct political class that is inevitably suborned by capital.

In terms of skin in the game - essentially all forms of consensus (which it's important to point out is radically different in theory and practice from direct democratic voting), require participation as the price of involvement. There is no voting without engagement, in fact in most consensus systems there is no voting at all. Participants become politically sophisticated through their involvement, and their level of involvement inevitably dictates their level of influence. For this to work, groups have to structure themselves such that a lot of the groups effort is spent engaged in decision making. Many of the specifics of the various consensus approaches push proponents of decisions into being responsible for the implementation of those decisions. There's no pretence that people don't affiliate, don't form minimal group paradigm loyalties, aren't selfish, or don't manipulate one another - an understanding of these processes is built into such systems. In fact they what leads to the cohesion that allows consensus to function.

But my key insight here is that many of ills of modern society arise from the idea that things should in fact 'scale'. Climate change and ecocide, the homogenisation of culture, the commodification of everyday life, the alienation that leads to polarisation and sensitisation and ultimately political extremism. All of it's rooted in an appeal to competing in a global scale market economy where goods and services move freely and people do not. Where all nations must grow or stagnate, where legal systems and free trade must be imposed at the barrel of a gun in order to allow the extractive system to continue to expand. This is one possible way for the world to work, in no means inevitable. Societies have existed with radically different affordances and compromises historically.

[Nevermark]

> But my key insight here is that many of ills of modern society arise from the idea that things should in fact 'scale'

Somehow, one way or another, dispute resolution has to scale to the number of people in the world. That isn't a chosen scale, it is the scale determined by present conditions.

For that to happen, given how many disputes exist between 8 billion people and all their groups and subgroups, there is going to be non-direct decision making.

You can point at subgroups with direct decision making, which is great when it works well, but that only works between those people, and they will invariably care about many things that extend beyond their group.

[dbspin]

> Somehow, one way or another, dispute resolution has to scale to the number of people in the world.

This isn't the case today. A small number of superpowers resolve territorial disputes mostly through court cases and negotiations, sometimes through violence. In all of these cases a tiny number of people are involved in the decision making process. What's happening is not dispute resolution at scale, its capricious and stochastic decision making corrupted by the same forces of transnational capital that put those decision makers in charge.

The global south isn't making any of the key decisions around climate change, AI, international trade etc. Neither are most developed countries. It's at most a cohort of G8 leaders and billionaires. It doesn't work, and moreover its failing - as the collapse of the liberal political order demonstrates. Our choice is to allow it to collapse into a new form of feudalism, or to actively participate in replacing it at every level of governance through civil dissent, and consensus based approaches.

[Nevermark]

> negotiations

That isn't anything like direct is it?

And even more disputes are settled in very indirect implicit ways. i.e. military capability is an implicit threat that tilts all kind of disputes in one direction or another.

I agree that global decision making isn't keeping up with the world's needs and problems. But pointing out something isn't working well is the easy part.

Improving on it, as apposed to simply critiquing it, is the first hard part. Or worse, tearing down what we have that works because it is imperfect, without a better system to replace it. As happens throughout history.

Much more difficult to design an alternate system that works - so unless someone has a serious alternative, improving what we have is best/only path forward. What does work today took millennia of slow progress.

Then the second hard part is the challenge of getting changes accepted and implemented. Since in the short run, everything is pushed and pulled by vested economic interests. Non-direct decision making not in the open, not any agreed upon process, and with little accountability.

The latter is the biggest problem. Especially when it corrupts what we have, as far as open and formalized decision and accountability systems. I.e. when it corrupts our politics, politicians, justice system, etc. Creating dense areas of hidden self-interested decisions trading in misdirected public power.

The most basic answer for most global problems is to start removing corruption. You can't do much if you don't get good sleep and healthy food and water. Likewise, massive global problems being mismanaged are going to need a less corrupt environment to make faster headway.

Otherwise, reality will eventually convince enough people to solve problems. That is a cost maximizing path, but surprisingly popular.