Carne Ross of the Independent Diplomat, the former British diplomat who has started his own novel independent lobbying operation for various movements needing diplomatic services, has a blog musing about democracy online and how something could be devised with the use of social media tools that would be "instead of" the UN Security Council and could seriously debate the world's issues without the annoying features of states that get in the way of progress. He calls it nothing less than "a global political revolution".
I should say right off that I distrust "global political revolutions" on the whole -- the revolutionaries in them are often willing to cut corners on violence and too often develop narratives excusing and overlooking bad things.
And I don't think transnational, wired elite networks, even with a lot of my friends and colleagues in them, are a way the world can be run justly. I'm not for replacing states with NGO panels. Carne Ross is understandably loathing states after having to be up close and personal with them particularly for years at the UN and now he wants basically to have them disappear and establish a new world order. I'm coming at this from a different angle having been with NGOs for 30 years, and I think he just has no idea how awful it's going to get having a few non-state actors run the whole world on Facebook.
I think people like Carne Ross would benefit from studying the largest online experiment in democracy in the history of the world -- Second Life -- with 1.5 million people logging on regularly from all over the world, and deliberating in many different kinds of ways, and most of all voting (at least until about 2-3 weeks from now when the developers remove this salient feature from a world that has had it for 7 years). I don't know if he has never even had to have any lengthy exposure to the IRC channels and other big real-time discussions online and he may not have any idea.
For those who dismiss Second Life as somehow a "game" or some losers' sex paradise or the place all the big companies left, well, you're missing out on an extraordinary online social experiment that you'd have to spend millions coding yourself -- and it's all right here to be used for free, even.
The issues debated and voted on aren't trivial; they're the very stuff of the Internet. For example, right now, 1,531 voted on a feature to block an inworld device that was exposing privacy -- the sort of thing that riles Facebook users daily, sometimes en masse, and sometimes reaches the mainstream press as a burning issue. Here, people are *inside the software* and are trying to get the devs to *patch it to do something about it*.
This prolonged and heated battle over a feature I proposed, Web-382 -- only had 20 votes, but many more comments, and ultimately was implemented -- only to be defeated in other ways. It was an important exposition of the problem that plagues every online democracy with coded tools: the problem of some people closing other people's proposals as being too weak, too off-topic, too repetitive, too undoable, etc. etc. I fought for the right for anyone -- anyone, not just special committees or the develoeprs -- to open a proposal and attract votes and not have it closed. It's not as if it clutters the view -- this is an interface where you only find what you are looking for by searching for a type of feature, date, key word, author name, etc.
Make no mistake about it: the Lindens are removing voting for reasons that don't just have to do with their claim that "they don't heed it"; it's part of a definitely ideological trend among technologists and one that is antithetical to democracy, in fact. There is a growing fad now based on various philosophies, such as "deliberative democracy" which is basically -- in my book -- what we used to call "democratic centralism" in the Politburo. It involves deliberations by a defined group of experts who review issues with rationality and alleged good will and arrive at "the right" decision collaboratively, without "needing" to vote. This is a very compressed rendition of a complex set of ideas with different schools and debates and such, but basically, it's no accident that geeks reach for taking out the "no" vote: this isn't just a technical platformist problem of "gaming the system" or "negativity"; a straight up and down vote is ultimately about power, and power is not what platformists wish to cede. Forcing "deliberative democracy" as a faddish new method on people; forcing "direct democracy" and scorning representative democracy; these are all part and parcel of a quest for power, above all.
There are at least seven deadly flaws in any online democracy scheme (and probably more), and they are, in brief:
1. Problems of verification of identity, the use of alts and sock puppets; and now "persona management," the manipulation of online voices through the use of bots or software programs
2. Problems of lack of ethics due to the hacker culture of the developers of any coded system and any artifact or facet of online life made by software in which the user has no say
3. Problems of technical exigencies -- it can be difficult to display and manipulate data; it can be hard to merge proposals reasonably; it can be hard to search for relevant issues, etc.
4. The politics of who gets to frame the issues online. The geeks themselves coding the system? A self-selected group of "good citizens"? Anybody?
5. The politics of who gets to moderate speech, how it is moderated, whether there is free speech, whether the concept of the "troll" or the "flame-bait" is wielded by one group to maintain power over another; issues of due process
6. The problem of no "no" vote. Usually in online deliberative democracy and similar ideologically-driven exercises, the proposal to remove the "no" vote is made on grounds that allowing "no" can be "gamed" maliciously; or that it can be "too negative" etc. That this doesn't obtain in a real-life organic situation such as a proposition in California about whether you are for or against gay marriage seldom perturbs the proponents of the "no no vote".
7. The problem of "housekeepers" -- the greatest challenge of any democracy isn't just protecting the people (the users) from the state (the coders), it's protecting people from each other (minorities from majorities) --there are always people who want to close others' proposals as "undoable"; people who declare certain ones "duplications"; the "tyranny of who shows up" (the regulars who "have no lives" do everything); the problem of retiring proposals with too few votes, of "voting comments up and down," etc.
In following these "7 deadly flaws," you have three main battles at first in establishing the system:
Coder Ethics
The first battle of any deliberative democracy experiment *should* be (but rarely is) about the coders and their ethics. How honest will they be in setting up the system? Do the users participate in decisions about the code with them on an equal basis or are they dismissed as "technologically incompetent"? Do the coders insist on handling everything and then disempower the user? Do they bleed their own ideologies into the tools (copyleftism, collectivism)? Are they accountable? Do they make decisions without notification or involvement of the user base? Unfortunately, the ethics and morals and culture of the coders are the last thing people in an online democracy ever think of; they take it for granted until it is too late.
Watch Out for No No Vote
The second battle is over the "no no vote" situation. You will be surprised how many times people who seem to be "for democracy" and "democratic" suddenly began to demand that the "no" be removed. Watch for it. If you cannot keep the "no," that's the first sime that you are already in a disempowered situation. You should not be frog-marched into accepting the "no no" by tales of how "positive, progressive proposals" should be put rather than evoking a "negative".
All that happens when you remove the normal organic "no" from any human system through such social engineering is that it merely shows up elsewhere. People make proposals that are in fact the "no" to other proposals, put in positive version.
What is the Constituency?
The third battle to be fought is over the power source; the source of legitimacy for the entire exercise. In real life, there were elements like "committees of correspondence" and "the constituent assembly" and the drafting of the Constitution before the vote -- and that's no accident, it's because you do need to establish what the community is, its common goals, its rules of the road, before you begin debates and votes.
Nowadays its fashionable to say the Constitutional framers are now disqualified because they were white property owners and even slave-owners. I reject that as multicultural Marxist claptrap. I see entire college text books and recommended reading lists in college these days with this discredited notion. That this bunch of white guys still made a system that produce the vote for women, the end of slavery and and civil rights for minorities, somehow escapes them. They found this model working too slow? Did they want to try the model over in China, Russia, India, Brazil, whatever then? Please.
It also shows a shocking lack of appreciation of how the Supreme Court defines the Constitution in rulings that become the law of the land and how important that is in defining the modern issues and updating the system. The notion that the Constitution is "like" Orville Wright's airplane that we would want to update to be sure to have the latest model (the analogy used by one professor) is just silly: the Supreme Court *is* the updating model.
And you have to drill down with this -- what exactly do these Marxist professor types really mean by saying that there had to be women, blacks, Native Americans, etc. in the constitutional drafting club? Do they mean that their presence would bring some special insights, some *different* way of doing things, some *better* way? Not really. Are they saying that these groups represent monolithic thinking in each case? All women, all Native Americans, all blacks are each perfectly uniform political groups? See, that's their implied notion. And that's really silly.
You want diversity? Even minorities that you brought to have diversity are more diverse than you seem willing to admit, professors. In fact, usually what I find in these debates that what this is about is to have "the people of colour" and "the disenfranchised" stand in to launch the Trojan Horse to dismantle capitalism, representative democracy, etc. and replace it with a revolutionary People's Commissariat. Usually the utopian complaining about the actualities of the framers imagine they could get something completely different than the messy democracy they have now with its liberal capitalism and unequal results -- they imagine if they could have a multicultural scene like the Soviet movie Circus (multiculturalism comes from the Soviet ideological campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s), everything would be fine. Everything would be different *the way they want to make it, with this sort of instrumentality*.
So complaints about this sort of "lack of diversity" is usually a stalking horse for "lack of a majoritarianism that would insert my point of view". I always watch for this in everything from a Personal Democracy Forum on up. Why the crying and wringing of hands by the Deanna Zandt's of the world (educated in German radicalism) that there are too many white people in the audience, or too many men? If we brought her Clarence Thomas, the black conservative Supreme Court justice, would that fix it for her? Of course not. If we brought her Pamela Geller, the conservative blogger who obsesses about Islam, would that fix the female problem? Of course not. Because it was never about real gender or real race representation, but the exploitation of these groups as icons of a "progressive" movement that will bring justice to us all -- if only they get the meeting packed lol.
The constituency of these onling things is never clear. It's whoever shows up. Or an invited group that lets in outsiders only in dribs or drabs "in the beta". Or whatever it is. But somewhere there's somebody who is going to insist on "civility" or who will demand moderation or demand exclusion -- and the question is to determine whether a) this person or group is legitimate b) they are honest brokers for conflict and disputes c) they will not eject people who disagree with them on specious grounds of being "trolls", etc.
There's a lot here. It really is not simple. People who think they are in a likeminded group may find they aren't when they disagree on these modalities.
How to Protect Dissent and Minorities and Adjudicate Disputes?
But where the pain really starts is when people who do not agree, who come from wildly different backgrounds, levels of education, value systems, etc. have to share this set of very inadequate tools -- and they will always be inadequate because *they are not organic, they are coded in a binary black/white system*.
The problems really start to ensue when there is no way to protect minorities or dissenters because there is a "forking" view common to open-source culture -- one strong dictator and his minions decide the course for the group, and others are told "there's the door". Or worse, in the name of accommodating dissent, endless deliberations are held to get "consensus," which is merely a means of wearing down dissenters. Because of the ideological refusal to have up and down yes/no votes, the group stalls endlessly. The way in which dissent and disagreement will be adjudicated really matters. Occupy Wall Street might still be in Zucotti park if the majority had been able to rein in the minority who refused to stick to the group's community agreement not to have drumming after 11 pm and if they had been able to stop urinating in the street, drug use, and even sexual assault by ejecting the people who engaged in those disruptive activities.
Where Will the Experiment Take Place?
It would be great if Carne Ross could intuitively realize that the place for his deliberative experiment is Second Life -- for a lot of reasons. But likely due to the snickering or disparagement of his peers, he'll be convinced that a Facebook or some other still-to-be-cooded Online Deliberator will be invented -- somebody's Moodle or Muddle -- and he'll use that. And it will have no no vote.
I can't help thinking of that 8,000 person online "massively multi student online course" or whatever it was called with the goofy Connectivists who used various gadgets to try to sift opinion ostensibly in "deliberation," but it was really the two instructors, a close set of their very closely-knit ideological friends and a smaller outer ring of fanboyz that set everything. You have to watch this sort of filtering because filtering under the guise of housekeeping and tidying up is often very political, and gets away with not being so. Remember: Stalin took the minutes in the Politburo. Look at how that turned out.
Below is my response to Carne's blog -- with lots and lots of detail -- which didn't clear the mod queue. Likely it was too long for the template.
Continue reading "The Seven Deadly Flaws of Online Democracy " »
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