A prototype of a decentralized political party
hack.ether.camp
hack.ether.camp
Same deal with banning unlimited donations to candidates while allowing it to superpacs that technically aren't allowed to coordinate with the candidates. You haven't made candidates less beholden to big donors, you've just put the big donors totally in charge of the campaign, because their spending dwarfs the spending of the candidates themselves.
I'm not totally sold on your position, but I definitely agree that ideology has become a huge problem in politics. It's totally driven out the "git r done" types of real problem solvers in favor of deluded ideologues unwilling to compromise and therefore unable to do anything other than posture for their constituents. Meanwhile all the real wheeling and dealing is driven to the margins and into the dark.
I wonder if another symptom of what you describe is stuff being railroaded through with trade deals instead of domestic laws.
> you've just put the big donors totally in charge of the campaign, because their spending dwarfs the spending of the candidates themselves.
When the donors are the corporations, and earmarks result in higher profits for the corporations, a dangerous positive feedback loop occurs where you basically end up with corporations controlling the government instead of the elected politicians.
As far as the worst political decision of the past few decades, watch this video if you have an hour to spare. It lays out the case where adding transparency in congressional voting is really the root cause of Congress being so screwed up. It might change your mind... https://youtu.be/1gEz__sMVaY
Further, all of these theoretical goals break down when the theories collide with reality. All systems can be gamed, and the way to reduce the effects of it is not to embark on quixotic quest to create a completely transparent party where everybody has perfect information of all things at all time. Rather, focus on incentivising whistleblowers and removing corruption when it meets the light of day.
You'd be surprised how many people think that parties exist to promote a certain ideology and bring it into power -- not necessarily by getting elected.
Political parties are a concentrated form of voluntary voting. One of the reasons the USA's primaries system is such a caricature factory is because it's a concentrated form of a concentrated form of voluntary voting.
There are many people who propose models like these and don't think through the end game. The end game is that any party where elected representatives have their votes directly controlled by party members is a party that will be instantly stacked by well-organised single-issue whackjobs.
You like crypto? Too bad, the terrorists use it, vote it down. You're OK with gay marriage? Too bad, Jesus is agin it, vote it down.
Techno-utopianism doesn't solve for the fundamental constraint, which is that people will always disagree. No system can create smooth consensus. What is left is to design a safe, functioning system. Direct democracy's historical performance in this respect is abysmal, which is why we have representative democracy instead.
Nice proposal, looking forward what will come of it.
Sure, for the purposes of argument, you could draw a distinction.
The dynamics will look like direct democracy. With all the troubles there attending.
I imagine it would last until someone helpfully circulated a copy of Burke's Speech to the Electors of Bristol.
Could you explain why that leads to trouble? I'm not familiar with that speech.
This is representative democracy, isn't it? I'm confused.
> I'm not familiar with that speech.
It's a short speech and worth reading as one of the clearest explanations of a representative's role: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s7.h...
Is that true? It certainly has its critics, but in classical Greece it more than held its own in a highly competitive ecosystem for ~180 years. I'm sure at least that we need more experiments with different institutions.
Also, the direct democracy in, e.g. Athens actually encompassed a very limited number of people (adult males owners of land) so it's not 100% comparable with a modern version.
I do agree we should try more things though.
In fact, the Greek example that is often pointed to as an example of how not to do it. Even by the Greeks, who watched the dynamics up close. See, for example, Plato's fondness for tyranny of him and his buddies over democracy.
Plato's a great example of how much better antidemocratic views seem to have survived subsequent transmission. Whenever we read historical judgments instead of facts we need to keep in mind we're seeing what managed to keep getting copied over almost two millennia until the printing press, almost all of the time under ideologies where the prince's word was law.
My argument against is this: professional politicians and bureaucrats often have a hard time governing a nation, what makes anyone believe the aggregate decisions of the crowd would do any better. Admittedly it'd often be hard to do any worse, but make no mistake we are as, and probably more so, fallible and as easily influenced as any politian.
At least with representative democracy we, the crowd, have someone to blame / prosecute / shame / hang. And we probably secretively want that.
I guess I just don't believe that salvation from our own follies can be found in one political system or another. Politics is a shitty abstraction built on top of shitty people like me, what with my unconscious biases, prejudices, and personal preferences. I don't know what's best for other people, he'll I don't even know what's best for me. I mean, I have trouble deciding what to have for dinner let alone what is good economic or environmental policy for the next x period of time.
California has ballot initiatives, several of which have removed the legislature's powers in some taxes and some spending. Possibly to the detriment of the state, especially since it has dramatically narrowed the tax base.
I think it's possible that a DAO could be part of a system that does provide such an advantage -- it may even be the case that it alone confers one! But I don't know what it is and want to see one articulated.
This topic is of current interest to me, as I've been reading summaries of the history of political and philosophical trends lately[1]. The interplay of different power groups with economic, technological, and other factors to form novel systems for controlling their environment is very complex, and fun to speculate about, especially the internet's role in possibly allowing new power structures to exist that may lead to new systems.
1. In particular, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, which has been a surprising lot of fun.
Reads to me as: got an idea? Form a political party.
I predict internal politics will destroy this idea because any group that believes it is immune to politics is already infected but in denial.
We can't escape politics. It's what we do. It's the fundamental fractured structure of the human experience.
We need politics because it's the best and least harmless place to put those criminals we call politicians.
Also, amusing the domain is .camp. The word camp shares the same origins as the German word kamf which means to struggle. Yep, politics sure is a struggle.
It's a platform in development, and it's made huge strides in security and governance since the hack.
Online voting was used a few times (election candidates, electoral law, presidential candidate), but for some cases the options were pre-decided (i.e. which party should be chosen as an ally in the european parliament, only 3 options) and in some cases decisions were dropped from "above" (i.e. the current party "Directorate").
And mostly, it has not been used at all.
One now-deceased party founder had a strong vision of internet-based democracy, but it hasn't really materialized _yet_ .
That's why I built Benefactory, a platform for decentralized nonprofits. We can weave individual efforts into an organization with a strong brand so it's easier to attract recognition and further contributions.
Here's an organization dedicated to making Ethereum easier to use and build on top of: https://media.consensys.net/2016/09/07/introducing-the-commo...
Join our Slack and help us build a commonwealth for every genre of public benefit. http://slack.benefactory.cc/
The next revolutionary system will be adaptive algorithms, created for fairness, implemented by system engineers, with strong feedback mechanisms for improvements.