Proposed Solution: A New Party
A proposal to give people a greater voice
We all know the issues. Impending collapse of the ocean currents, spiraling debt, automation threatening to take jobs, changes in world politics, insane healthcare costs. Every day people are calling for a 3rd party, or at least some solution to get new ideas represented.
And yet here we are. We are consistently seeing the least popular nominees on record. We are consistently seeing deadlock, government shutdowns, every bill seems to be thousands of pages that nobody reads, written by corporate lawyers. Anyway, no point in enumerating all the problems. How about solutions?
Imagine this: you’re walking down the street and you step in dog poop for the 3rd time this week. Instead of getting on Twitter and raging, or going on Nextdoor, you go to your party’s website. You create a proposal for an ordinance. Other people can vote it up. If enough do, your representative proposes it at the next city council meeting. You’re furious about abortion rights? Instead of just screaming, go to the federal constituency section of the party website, create a proposal.. add your comments into the discussion, maybe a video explaining your case. If people vote it up, your proposal can dictate the policy. You can directly inject solutions into the system instead of just arguing with people about them on the internet.
Some people think that we need an intellectual or financial elite to correct the masses. I adamantly disagree. Some people are hoping for an AGI or a strongman to come save us from our political dysfunction. These will not do the trick. An AGI is implicitly biased from whatever training data was put in… and as the world changes, even if that bias were acceptable originally, it won’t be later. A strong man is similarly biased by their view of reality. They cannot be a voice for the many people in many circumstances that exist in our country.
One of the best ways to explain the root cause of the issue is by what I call “shadow support”. A one-issue voter votes pro-life because that’s the one thing they care about. But the system doesn’t know why they voted that way. The system only sees a vote for a particular candidate. So when that candidate also supports tax cuts for the rich, the person has expressed “shadow support” for that issue. They don’t really have that intention, but that’s the result. How can the system properly represent us if it doesn’t even know what we want? So the root cause is an information systems problem.
Ultimately, we have too small a rudder steering too large a ship. In the 1700’s, a few votes a year was reasonable when the country was much smaller. The economy as measured by GDP is now nearly 10000x larger according to this estimate. We have not similarly scaled our input into the decision-making process. We need to massively scale the amount of engagement we have with our decision-making systems.
In order to do that, what we need is a direct democracy party. What this means is that the party would have an internal platform where people can vote directly on issues. Representatives would agree to vote according to the way constituents did on the platform, except possibly in extenuating circumstances.
This sort of party has precedent. It won the presidency in Italy a few years back, and now Italy has a ministry of direct democracy. It has the benefit of giving less room for corruption and misinterpretation of the will of the people. Representatives will be presented with the will of their constituency, and if they consistently fail to uphold it, it will be obvious, and they will not be chosen again as a representative.
The goals
The primary goal, in my opinion, should be to maximize the amount of information coming from every person into the decision-making process.
Some characteristics which should help in achieving that goal:
The platform should be massively interactive and encourage discussion. It could be almost like a form of social media, except one that actually has potentially positive output.
People should be able to collaboratively author their own bills and propose that the representative submit it. In this way, people get some direct say in what is submitted.
People should be able to modify the party’s policies and procedures from the ground up democratically through the platform. Any policy should be fair game.
Eventually it should use the latest technology including zero-knowledge proofs along decentralized technologies.
Initially, from a pragmatic perspective, representatives should be able to over-ride the results of a vote, but progressively more pressure could be added as the platform and voting starts to provide a coherent, stable voice
IMO from a strategic perspective, the party should not try to enter national elections initially. It should prove itself out with local councils, and focus on improving people’s voice in their individual local communities. This would allow time to prove itself out, and also to scale the platform.
Also, in service toward that primary goal, it seems that whatever platform is used to manage this party also be made open source so people can use it for all kinds of governance situations. Including open source project management.
This would allow a variety of uses other than a political party, for instance:
Local councils could adopt it to directly accept proposals from their people
If internal conflict becomes too fierce, the party could fork or branch off and the new party could be welcome to use the platform
Existing large parties could use the platform for their own members, which would be a huge win in giving millions of people a much bigger voice than they previously had
The platform could be used within companies to bring about more democratic decision-making to people’s daily lives
Rather than an end goal of being a single party that dominates the landscape, we can envision an ecosystem of these democratic parties and other institutions using the platform which have tools for collaboration not just internally, but also with each other.
There are some obscure projects which do this, especially in the crypto world. However, what we need is a pragmatic approach, working within the system we have, providing a platform that an average user will not just understand, but want to use.
The pragmatic approach acknowledges that people aren’t going to use something that provides no clear benefit to them. It also acknowledges that growing from a concept to something that impacts the world requires incentivizing people to work on. Without funding teams of people to work on both the platform and the party, it’s not going to get built in a way that tangibly improves people’s lives. And without an engine to produce that funding, it’s just relying on charity, which is just not something that can be relied on with the stakes where they are.
At each step of the way, the path needs to rely on incentivizing people to participate. However many people that is. So in the early stages, 5 people need to have tangible incentive to work on it, then 15, then 50, 100, 1000, etc. At each stage, there needs to be some idea for where those incentives are coming from. Otherwise you’re just relying on random chance, or people magically acting in unison, which is just less and less likely to happen the bigger the group you’re looking at.
To get to a party that could even move the needle the tiniest amount requires an engine, not just people’s charity. That engine can be the platform itself. There are lots of use cases for such a platform. There is a viable path to creating that engine.
I’ve been working on my conception of such a platform. If you’d like to accelerate it, subscribing will help. If you have a lot of money and want to invest in making something like this happen, that would be even better.. Make sure to tell me why you’re subscribing.