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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

What intrigues me is that the "Hackers", who care about state, programs, and process, haven't turned attention to the State, and set about un-jacking its programs and streamlining its process.

Why haven't we got a robust git server with anonymous read-only access for everyone who pays taxes that holds all (unclassified) legislation/regulation affecting society?

Commits would be possible for elected officials/appointees only.

Similarly transparent treatment for the tax code.

Come on, Hackers: let's beat the entropy out of (or at least minimize it) in the res publica.

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If the elected officials & appointees actually cared for something like this, it would have existed already.

Ultimately, the problem is that the "res publica" is not actually for the public. The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.

Indeed, such an improvement would have to be insisted upon by the demos.

But the res publica has NEVER been a democracy at any point.

What we have is a gnarly attempt to scale from the individual to the group, the singular to the plural, the integer to the list(integer).

Hence my comment: technically savvier people like those who visit this site badly need to give this res publica an enema.

Engineers of all people should know that scaling is best achieved by distributed systems.

If only there were 50 smaller units of analysis beside the District of Columbia to which to distribute political power!

Admittedly, this many years on, it's hard to introduce fresh concepts. The only way for such smaller units of analysis to achieve any gravitas would be to acquire the notoriety of the States. . .

US states are too large themselves. For this to work, it needs to start literally at the very bottom - a local assembly on the block / neighborhood. From there, it can be scaled up indefinitely in a multi-layer federation.

>The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.

What does "meaningfully" mean, in this context?

It means that votes taken by the representative actually advance the specific interests of their constituents.

The problem is that, for this to be the case, constituents must have a working communication channel. But when you have a single representative ostensibly speaking for millions (or even tens of thousands) of people, any such channel is quickly overwhelmed, and becomes mostly a token thing.

Council democracy tries to solve it by ensuring that, at every level, each delegate speaks for a relatively small group of people - small enough that it can regularly assemble to keep the delegate under control at all times.

We have something like that in the UK, it shows you all the legislation and tracks changes made to them over time: https://www.legislation.gov.uk

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