[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.

[martin-t]

Sorry to hear that.

I added it to me to-read list.

And yes, I do also think scaling is the biggest challenge in bottom up / democratic / cooperative organizations, but I think their critics overstate it. Democratic states might be dysfunctional on many levels but they do function enough to not fall apart, mostly. Anyway, I guess I'll know more when I get to the book, thanks.