[clcaev]

The principal danger is the concentration of power. We should start by rejuvenating and supporting local communities and institutions, interpersonal human connections with primacy. Bottom up governance seems critical, it is where political discussion (with real examples) might happen without becoming a spectacle of identity.

[martin-t]

> The principal danger is the concentration of power.

Absolutely. Good people can cooperate or reach compromises for mutual benefit. Bad people are each in it for himself - while they do form alliances sometimes, ultimately working together is unnatural for them and often temporary.

Requiring any position of power to be always distributed among many people obviously makes it hard for a single person to abuse power but less obviously disadvantages bad people by its very nature on a deeper level.

> local communities and institutions

I have an idea which I for now call consent-based society. I need to think about it a lot more but for now:

People talk about rights and freedoms but can't decide where the rights of one person end and another person's begin. If we focus on consent, it may become simpler. People could then form larger and larger groups based on agreement (consent) to rules - a house, small village, city, state. But only as long as it benefits them - consent can be revoked at any time.

But of course, historically, nation states emerged because large hierarchical power structures are advantageous at war and it'll take a long time to get people away from considering them natural, correct or inevitable.

---

Anyway, I don't think your post really answers my question though. From what I read, liquid democracy seems like a form of bottom up governance.

[clcaev]

I'm curious to hear more of this "Informed Consent" based framework. I think disclosure of potential negative outcomes from a decision would help.

My concern with liquid democracy is about speed and predictability. Politics involves human relationships, traditions, compromises, etc. I'm worried rapidly switching would further erode local rule and undermine bottom up democracy. Recall referendum/elections seems to work well enough, they create a newsworthy topic so people may have time to absorb and adjust.

Regarding your question. Human behavior seems more a function of circumstances; trying on someone else's shoes can be heartbreaking, so it's often rationale to look the other way. Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?

For the US, we could start by dramatically expanding the house of representatives so races become more about local human connection rather than party identity. The Senate seems immovable architectural debt, however, its role to buffer sudden change seems important.

[martin-t]

> I'm curious to hear more of this "Informed Consent" based framework. I think disclosure of potential negative outcomes from a decision would help.

Maybe I was too optimistic. Instead of deciding who has what rights, we have to decide what requires consent and what does not.

Currently, in most legal systems, using any physical property of a person requires their consent - even if it just means walking about a plot of land they own without harming or devaluing it in any way. I want this to extend to intellectual property - if someone wants to build in top of my work, they should require my consent. This is partially motivated by 10 years of my work being effectively stolen by "AI" companies without any compensation for me.

There's still the issue that for example parody (or other examples or "fair use") is building on top of the original work but should probably be allowed. And that a lot of work is performed by groups - do you need consent from all of them or just more than half?

But I think it can be solved, it just needs more thought.

Maybe consent would end up as just a reframing of the current system but it can still be useful if it forced people to take different perspectives.

For example every salary negotiation is to some extent exploitative because the parties don't have equal information nor equal bargaining power. And a lot of people (ancaps especially) will try to keep denying this. Likening this to consent in sex can force them to either admit there's a massive power differential (and that we should try to reduce it) or claim power differentials are not an issue in sex either (and face the social challenges of defending that opinion).

> Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?

Maybe emotional was not a good phrase. What I have a massive issue with is people reacting to events and looking (voting) for the easiest solutions without considering their downstream effects.

There's also the fact politicians just lie without repercussions and people don't vote based on an objective reality but based on their impression which is based on what they hear.

How to solve that? As elitist as it sounds, I'd like to see a system where smarter people have a stronger vote. How much stronger? Idk. What is smarter? It could be raw intelligence, or knowledge of the subject matter or better skill at detecting lies and manipulation or a combination of those. It's hard but it should be talked about.

[clcaev]

I choose to think our current political challenges are human nature and historic, but increasingly unmoored by modern social isolation and addictive media without the dampening love (and healthy stress) of community. Ubiquitous estrangement within families is tragic; poignantly, the recent TX home death of a UK daughter by her father raised few eyebrows, let alone atonement or a societal reckoning. The prevalence of school shootings are another modern symptom. This runs very deep, there have been legal restrictions against extended households for decades, contractions of public spaces (libraries, malls) and barriers to community environments. We don't connect with neighbors let alone strangers: Amazon delivers to the doorstep. Now we even have AI "friends" trained by far off people with maligned incentives as our closest companions. We have forgotten how to cooperate. This isolation is toxic to the soul, it cannot and will not end well.

We urgently need 180° pivot, towards vibrant human-centered community centers and surrounding commercial districts within a few short blocks or a few minute gratis bus ride. This isn't luddite -- modern technology needs to support a human world, not the inverse. These centers must become the foundation of a renewed civics and democratic revival.

Technology is a necessary scaffolding for a modern, human-centered revival, especially with communication, logistics, transportation, and certainly democratic deliberation. Even so, universal participation in a slow-moving and bottom-up representative government with anonymous paper ballots is essential to restore the consent of the governed and relative peace.

[martin-t]

> unmoored by modern social isolation and addictive media without the dampening love (and healthy stress) of community.

You have a point about community but I think for different reasons.

Historically, most communities were created by randomness - closeness by physical proximity, childhood friend of a childhood friend, etc. Today many communities emerge around a common topic or interest and it leads to echo chambers. People used to be around people with different opinions and they had to accept that because for 20 people there were 15 opinions and no side got the upper hand. Now you have 20 people with 2 opinions split roughly 80:20 and the 20 are afraid to say anything for fear of being ostracized. (Numbers pulled out of my ass.)

And another reason is the lost of not just anonymity but also plausible deniability. You say something offline, 5 people hear it and you can judge their reaction, whether to go on or better keep your mouth shut. And of course they can pass on that you said it but with each step, the claim loses credibility and becomes gossip. Now you say something online, it's there forever. Even if you can delete the message, 5k people say it and there's always this one asshole who takes screenshots so even if you change your mind later, he can and will use them against you. (And don't let me get started how screenshot aren't links so even if you clarified you position later, he effectively takes it out of context in a way that he has the final word and you don't even know about it.)

A few weeks ago, I had a shower thought: A social network where LLM-generated or other people's posts get your name assigned to them randomly from time to time. So that 1) people are used to seeing random crazy shit said by you (any everyone else) and not taking it seriously 2) when you actually say something you want to take back, you can just claim it's one of those posts you didn't actually write. It's a stupid idea but I'd also like to see it tried to make sure it's stupid...

That being said, I have been thinking about a social network with multidimensional voting and a network of trust more seriously. One effect would be that posts from people you know personally would be assigned a much higher weight and it might lead to restoring bottom up communities you talk about.

Anyway, I agree with a lot of what you say but don't have much to add.

[clcaev]

Please be do careful about elitism. It's one thing to rely upon expert testimony or administrative roles, its quite another to assert a technocratic leadership.

In a human-centered world, people know and generally trust their local family doctor, for example, not carefully forged media personalities.

[martin-t]

I am not even sure what technocratic leadership means.

For one, I don't believe people should need to be led. Being led makes sense when quick decisions are more important than optimal decisions, such as in war. Other times, people should be free to lead their lives as they wish.

Another thing: experts can explain their opinions. I cringe every time I see a political discussion without a white board, diagrams, graphs and tables. It's just empty words them. If a politician thinks his decision is a good way to reach a goal, he should first state that goal, then discuss why his solution leads to it, what side effects it has and what alternatives there are. But the general public is partially incapable of this level of sophistication and partially disinterested.

The single most important thing I learned last year is "you can't make people care". It was from a talk about (I think) software freedoms, I haven't even watched the rest of the video, maybe it's one of the 893 videos I have bookmarked to watch later, but it made something click - as if I suddenly gained words to describe how I felt for years.

The reality of politics is that most people don't care about most things but their vote ends up influencing them anyway. I'd like elections/voting to be split into sufficient granularity that people only end up voting about the stuff they care about.

Finally, I don't think elitism is bad when it's justified. If somebody spends 50 hours researching who/what to vote for and another person spends 1 hour watching a political discussion while making dinner, their votes shouldn't have the same weight. IMO the only controversial part is how to measure that in a way that cannot be gamed or abused.

[clcaev]

It was a lovely discussion and made consider other approaches, thank you. Sadly, I’m must leave the conversation now. I’m very ill these past few years and am unlikely to recover.

I suggest reading Elinor Ostrom’s book, Governing the Commons. It describes fundamentals of successful cooperative organization. Specifically, successful cooperatives don’t grow bigger, they replicate bright spots while staying local and small, using umbrella organizations to coordinate similar or intertwined activities. This seems much more aligned with historical, decentralized hacker values. Ostrom describes democratic and expressly voluntary ways of organizing inherently monopolistic economic activity. For some industries, those with overwhelming network effects, I think it provides a model that is neither privately held nor government controlled, and when collaborative and nested, a workable decentralization.