Introducing the democratic model and how to use it to create new systems of governance for the 21st century.
We’re a wonderful social animal with a twist compared to our primate cousins: we love to form bigger and bigger groups. For the past 2 millions years we grew from tribes using stones and branches, to cities with thousands of people and later even empires of millions thanks to writen laws and now with computers and code at our disposal it’s fairly obvious we’re about to build new types of governance; Size wise we’ve passed the billion mark for the largest groups (countries) and they all have in common to be a form of democracy.
How to evolve and organize our social structures in the near future? Who should have power? (Kratia in greec) who should rule the public affairs? (Res public)? Are the current systems of representative democracy or socialist democracy (89 millions member of the party can vote)
How should humans govern themselves is a question that have obsessed major philosophers, kings, religious leaders and the people in general for the past 5000 years we know about. This has led to wars, revolutions and the emergence of our modern democracies. We don’t really think much about how we got there on a daily basis since we got used to our representative democracies. Sometimes sadly we also got used to our voice not being useful and that’s a big problem in a democracy when the majority of the people are losing faith and trust in it.
This is why I’ve joined my co founder Gilles Mentré to work on building the non profit Electis.io to explore how electronic voting can work at scale for communities and later on how can we rethink the very mechanics of our democracies.
In this post I share my personal view on how we got there and will propose both a new model to describe democracies and share some ideas on how we humans could organized ourselves leveraging the latest technologies at our disposal.
Are our democracies alive and functioning? Are they really the best modernity can produce?
According to various survey things are not going well trust wise and can go as low as 20% of turst in a government! Democracies are now clearly reaching their limits while semi centralized regimes like in China (a socialist “democracy”) are thriving at the cost of individual freedom.
Is it the end of our liberal democracies? Was Marx right that democracy leads to socialism and socialism to communism? In this short essay I’d like to propose some tools and ideas on how to design new way to represent the people that you can apply to cities, countries, DAOs and many more organizations…
Part 1: How we ended up with democracy the worst form of government according to Plato?
Plato thought there was 5 types of government structures that he classified in order of preferences as :
- Artistocracy (his favorite one consist of a really well educated ruling class aristos meaning the best)
- Timocracy (A military lead power, think Sparta)
- Oligarchy (The rich are leading, Oli meaning few)
- Democracy (Something plato did not like since he saw it as attracting individuals who are motivated by personal gain to power something especially obvious in modern ages)
- Tyranny (A really really bad leader alone : The Tyran)
According to Plato government structures follow a cycle: “Kyklos”
let’s add to this cycle Aristotle ideas of monarchy and anarchy and Polybius idea of ochlarchy (mob rule / an ancester of anarchy) and we get the Polybius version of the Kyklos called Anacyclosis that could be summarized as this rather depressing cycle (it goes from top to bottom, note that democracy is one of the worst system)
Years later, Machiavelli revisited this Polybius cycle to complete it as simplified below (source)
So wether we like it or not 2,000 years later aristocracy is mostly gone (or is it?) and we now have a growing number of democracies. This is perfectly framed by Churchill’s famous quote “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others”
The end of the cycle?
Are we doomed to lose our democracies and follow this cycle of Power? One thing is sure representative democracies are not in a good shape. You can ask anyone around you or you can read numerous reports and surveys, the consensus is we’re not happy about our governments and the Republic in general. At the end of the day we don’t feel represented; a paradox when you see that those who do not really represent us anymore have the power to increase taxes and change laws that will impact us us for the decades to come and yet we accept it (it’s not that bad yet)
On the other hand and as mentioned before democracies are currently progressing worldwide still following plato’s cycle (https://ourworldindata.org/democracy). So the question is are we doomed to follow the Polybian cycle? Will our democracies come to an end?
We hope not, but this is why it becomes urgent to fix our democracies, and explore new directions!
Breaking the Cycle: Human, the weak point of our democracies
If you think of our current democratic models as a program and you put yourself in the shoes of a programmer looking for weak spots. It’s fairly obvious that whenever you need trust into a human is where things can go wrong. Do you trust journalists to be neutral? Do you trust the justice to be fair? Do you trust your representative to not be tempted by their personal gain and interest of power? If yes then you have a pretty solid system. But if you assume (like in Capitalism) that people are driven by their personal interest then you will start to wonder if our democracies may have become theatrocracies.
Is our Democracy a Theatrocracy?
In our representative democracies the power is a transitive one, legitimacy comes from voting for a candidate who in turns vote for laws we’re suppose to want. Turnout is an important part of the legitimacy of an eleciton. The first US elections had only 10% of the people participating, as the USA granted the right to vote to African American and women turnout rates got to almost 80% and droped to 60% 100 years later, 20% drop is not a small one and midterms are usually bellow 50%!
What shall we call democracies that do not represent the people? Plato called the Athenian democracy a theatrocracy I believe the same critic could be made of our representative democraties today. This could be explained (as you will see later) by the current Media being biased towards emotion. If we vote for someone because we like them or hate them, because we find them attractive or not we’re not building a solid democracy we’re just participating to this theatocracy… Another difficulty is the division of the vote, when people vote for or against something at 80% it’s easy to run a democracy, but when you have close to a 50/50 you end up risking facing the Tyranny of the majority aka Ochlocracy. It would seem fair that laws with 80% of support would be stronger than the one with 50.1% for example, something not taken into account in our democracies (multi dimensional laws..)
The 40x challenge of next gen democratic modelsThe 40x evolution!
In the time of Plato ancient greece had roughly 4 million people and the world 200 Million humans. At that time in Plato’s mind an ideal size for a city was 7 factorial now called Plato’s number : 7x6x5x4x3x2 = 5,040 people. Compare that to New York and its 8.4 Million people or the world with a population multiplied by 40 in size compared to Plato’s era (we are close to 8 billion) and you start to put in perspective the ancient text on which we now rely.
For example, the number 5040, was likely influenced by the Pythagorean sect not to mention that Plato very impractically believed that cities should always stay at that number! While we can admire the wisdom of Plato in regard to his time, we should not be shy about desacralizing our ancestors ideas especially when they are more than 2,000 years old. No one would think of managing a modern company following some ancient merchant book. But it is a fact we are influenced by our past even in business, for example venture capital relies on a 2/20 rules arbitrary chosen because of how Phenicians used to split the cost of crossing the mediterranean sea. So how can we build something new? What if you were to create a new democracy from scratch?
In a way that put us in the shoes of Jefferson when he had to build a new political structure for what would become the USA. He asked Benjamin Franklin then in Paris to send him all the books he could find about democracy (the power by the people) and republic (the common good). Jefferson went beyond Plato’s original idea and introduced the idea of an artificial artistocracy known as a Jeffersonian Democracy.
This was a great experiment, and it was not certain to succeed. This is well captured by a little story from the early days of the United States : “A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” While France was going through a revolution in 1789 The USA elected George Washington as its first president with 100% of votes (with double ones!) a score that would now raise suspicion anywhere! But it was done democracy was born. Few years later their brother in arms ended up organizing the first universal male suffrage in France in 1792.
We have certainly learned a couple of things on how to organize elections since Jefferson, George Washington and the french revolution. One obvious innovation in US democracy was the introduction of voter privacy: The ballots were made secrets in1890 .
Ok now we can vote but we still need to adress the subject of governance, a tricky subject since we’re only human after all. How are we making the right choice for the future? When no one knows the future (but gods… and that would explain a lot about monarchy but i will not go there :).
We have a lot of new fancy tools we could use to help us: Game theory, military experience, AI, encryptions and even Management all of these might help us to better govern in a democracy, but how?
Can our democratic structures that dates back to a time when the USA had less than 3 million people (and when you could win an election with 100% of the votes) can still work at the scale of half a billions people? What would you do if you were Jefferson today? How would we re invent democracy?
Modelling democracy
As usual when I talk about models let me start with E.P Box quote: “All models are wrong, some are useful” so let’s be useful! The goal of this model is dual, first it is to understand the fundamental pillars of any democracy second it is to show that there is almost an infinite amount of way to create democracies and this tool will be useful to compare them.
Social contract with Aristotle, Locke and Montesquieu
My purpose here is not to write the full curriculum for a political degree but to give you a 30,000 feet view of 2,000 of history so we can build a useful democratic model.
The subject we’re discussing here (how to build governance) is a critical one, we can observe how many great minds worked on it. We could have mentioned Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hobbes, Calvin, 法家 (Shang Yang), and so many who continued Aristotle and Plato’s work to developed a general model that introduced ideas now familiar to us such as the Separation of powers, constitution, assembly of citizen the role of citizen etc... I would highly recommend to read Fukuyama on the origin of political order to grasp this amazing human adventure.
19th and 20th century : The socialists and democracy against Capitalism
“Democracy is the road to socialism and socialism ultimately leads to communism” — Karl Marx
In the 19th century the capitalist system emerged naturally as a new political order out of trade since the 12th century through revolutions accross the wester world.
Capitalism is often criticized for increasing a gap between the rich and the poor (cf Piketty Capital in the 21st century). This is very similar to Plato’s idea of an aristocracy or at least of a plutocracy, those with wealth governs us. This was true for the first democracies including France where the only people allowed to vote where paying taxes and were male. The idea was that voting was not a right but a function that should be carried through what the French called le “vote censitaire”
The rise of socialist ideas, basically a fight for power against capitalism pushed for the idea of a vote as a right. It was trying to answer the delicate question of who should have power in our society: Should the many who support public goods have power or should those who produce private goods have power? Marx answered this by proposing to take over the mean of production of private goods and socialize it. Leading to the collapse of an unfair (sic) capitalist system. He even theorized that democracy always leads to socialism. An idea that libertarians also believe as we will see in the conclusion.
Where we are now is at a synthesis where both socialism and capitalism coexist in a social liberal system. One can observe the evolution of Tax to GDP to see the rise of power of this synthetic system. Most modern democracies are around 33% of tax to GDP ratio with some like France getting closer to 50% compared to less than 10% in the late 19th century. Will it stop rising or not is another debate, but are we well spending that money for the public good and are we making the right decision is also an important topic to discuss as we are thinking about the future of democracies.
I do believe that if we do nothing there is a real risk that our modern large democracies will collapse under their own burocratic weight and might be tempted to becomemore centralized to reduce their cost like in China (who only has a 17% GDP to tax ratio) with the side effect of reducing freedoms.
This would ultimately be at the cost of freedom, innovation and entrepreneurship a subject as you all know dear to me :) But my own opinion here does not matter, the question is are we getting there because the people want it or because an elite wants it?
TLDR;
Many of the most celebrated thinkers in history have developped theories on how we should organize ourselves and most of them where not happy with democracy.
“The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.” — Montesquieu
it’s amazing to think that in the course of 2000 years we really only experianced a handful types of governance models. And every time it took sweat and real blood to even try new models naturally facing the installed power / system at play.
I will argue that we need to test new form of governance we need to experiment we need to learn new way of organizing ourselves at the scale of the billions and we would love to achieve that peacefully!
Behavioral democracy
When economists realized that their prediction did not match reality (Allais Paradox) and with the rise of game theory and ideas like bonded rationality it became obvious that the basis for a rational Homos Economicus was not correct. Humans are irrational creature from a mathematical point. It does not mean that we don’t have a form of social rationality as explained by Hugo Mercier . The same goes for Democracy and political science. There is no such thing as the homo democraticus that would make the right choices for a community. People vote within many dimensions like how you look on TV or how you sound, basically how the media talks about you has a huge impact. On the other hand it looks like changing your mind is not an easy task especially with masses it is really hard, almost impossible when you re an adult (no russian bots cannot change how you think!)
Once we start to think of democracy as a behavioral science it becomes quiete obvious that our democratic systems can no longer be built by some genius writing some books on how to run society. We need an experimental based framework to learn and better model how our democracies work. Such experiment should be done from the bottom to top for the simple reason that nations are competing against each others and if an experiment failed it would have lasting impact. The soviet communist experiment lasted 70 years and ended up with millions of deaths…
“Democracy is not an exact science but a behavioral one as it it should be an experiment based field.”
The democratic cycle: One cycle to model them all
As usual like I did for the entrepreneurial journey model I start all my models by quoting the statistician E.P box: “All models are wrong, some are useful” you are warned!
Introducing the Democratic Cycle:
The first thing you’ll notice is the simplicity of the model, only 4 modules to represent any democracy. It does not mean we could not zoom on it and complexify it. Another thing that is not visible is how information circulates between modules, we assume everything external to the modules are public.
For example a constitution; a set of rules that defines how a democracy works woud be put in place by the Government module and produced by the Ranking Processit would therefore be public knowledge.
What matters are the fundamentals, the way these 4 modules can be tweak are infinite. The model is here to better study and compare democtratic systems not to be a guide on what the best model would be.
Like a programmer building a program we also need to think of the weaknesses of each modules, and different possible attacks especially when the system relies too much on trust as we will discuss further.
First module: The Nation
The Nation is in charge in a democracy. A nation being a group of people who wants to live together and who is heading in the same direction. It does not mean everyone wants the same thing all it means is the democracy will work as a subset of that general direction everyone wants. e.g the pursuit of happiness … The nation naturally produces data and also powers the government. The people even outside a democracy are the source of power to any governement / tyrant, something we often forget but well known at least since La Boétie. This could be implicit power like an acceptance of the rules produced by the system or explicit like paying taxes.
Second module: The Information Filter
The filter captures data produced by the people and transforms it into information. This raw data is first collected by sensors and then treated and transformed into informations. The same data could lead to conflicting informations, for example an event A will produce some data D captured on video for the sake of the example. This video will then produce reactions within the nation, some supportive some unsupportive, some asking for more some asking for less. All of this will be captured and treated by the information filter.
In a way that filter takes many voices and produces a synthesis of what people are thinking. In modern democracy that role is played by Mass Medias and journalists. Unfortunately as decribed by Chomsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model our filter might not be working well and be extremely biased. Education is a very important part of how the filter works and on how people interprets the Data. A rational functionning democratic cycle needs some ideal neutral education with critical thinking. This is why the first thing a dictator would do to get rid of democracy is to suppress the intellectuals and take over the education of the nation children by usually building some kind of a brain washing cult of personality around him/herself. This is also the marxist point of view in regards of religions and why secular education has been pushed as a reaction against religious education.
Third Module, The ranking process
This module is producing actionable informations, almost programs that will be used by the governemnt. These “programs” are what we call laws and they are encoded in plain English (or French or…) and are interpreted later on by the government. The more information is attached to the program the more likely it’s actionnable part will be efficient. For example one law might be more important than another one (dimension of importance) at the moment we usually have only few level of importance (e.g constitution is the higher rank, international law might be the lowest one) but within a constitution or a state law, what law matters more? There could also be conflicting laws, when it is the case the ranking process needs to help settles what order should be apply to reduce conflicts and optimize actionable data if not then the government will need to develop mechanism to manage such conflicting information, something usually done by the judiciary branch.
In modern democracies this module is powered by vote (could be indirect or direct, for a law via referendum or for someone who will vote the laws) and is usually taken by a national assembly producing the laws.
Forth module: The government
The role of the government is to execute on the actionable data it sets up rules and enforce them. The governement and the common good it manages is financed by the value created by the people via a Tax (the Taxation itslef emerges from the people, the information filter and the ranking process)
Our representative democracy modelled:
Our representative democracy as we see heavily relies on Voting and Medias (we could have added more arrowes of course) the government itself is theoratically stabilized by a balance and check system (assuming a mythical homo democraticus), yet in the case of the US Constitution (the rules of the game in a way) one of the most famous logician thought a totalitarian regime could happen c.f. the Godel’s loophole. We might never know Godel’s solution but it’s fairly obvious that you could “hack” such system for example by increasing taxes (power to the gov) and centralizing powers through few changes in the constitution. In general any changes made in a constitution via representative should be seen as a possible attack on democracy.
Our political system is powered by trust but ideally should not need it. We for example trust that the justice is independant and that journalists are neutral we trust our politicans to do what is best for the nation and not for themselves …
About Trust
Trust can be easily defined as the confidence of an outcome without a sufficient basis for it it is rooted in something our brain loves: hope and trust can bring hope when it works. Mathematically it can be modelized via game theory, a fun interactive exercice on the impact of cheaters vs those who tell the truth can be found here.
So If someone promesses A then you should expect A. If that same person promesses B then you will believe that B will happen. In case of a trust-less environment you will have to question any statements and will have to spend energy / time to verify it. The same goes with a government you don t want every citizen to always redo the work of everyone it would be conter productive, a machine could maybe help one day… But technology now enable transparency and even statistical trust-less environment like blockchains via POW (c.f https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault)
Trust and behavioral democracy.
We should think of this democratic cycle in the context of what we humans are: irrational creatures. Or to be more exact and to follow what Hugo Mercier idea that trust really is a social mechanism to get as rational as possible / convincing to the group. Meaning we are wired to discuss and convince other people and that is what we call rationality this is of course the role of the information filter module. Without proper debates and discussion of ideas it is likely that we will have an irrational set of subjects leading to actions that are not optimum neither. In the past few people could properly argue they lacked an education to even read or interprete information. Today we all love to debate, yet education itslef can be hacked and lead to an unfair interpretation of information (e.g Propaganda)
The economists introduced the idea of behavioral economics to take into account what makes us humans in economic models (instead of an ideal and theoretical homo-economicus) the same can be said about democracy, this model suppose some kind of homo-democraticus that does not exist in the real world. Studying this cycle within the idea of a behavioral study can lead to a better detection of hacks such as biased in journalism or education. Preventing these attacks seems natural when thinking of software yet we have not really introduced much since the idea of the freedom of the press. But who gets to be the press? The Media office can grant you a pass or not? Is it something where the nation as a say? All i’m pointing here are the backdoors to hack our democracies (thus why now more and more countries are owning media as a way to destabilize other nations)
We are influenced by emotions and what might be important to a group might not be what is important to the nation. We also know that a small organized group of 10% is enough to influence a majority of people, the same goes with what Tayeb described as the dictatorship of the minority something that echoes the idea of the dictatorship of the majority.
PART 2: Beyond representative democracy, exploring new models of democratic governance
In part 1 we covered our past, we saw that many many great thinkers tried to build government system that could work and be efficient at scale. We also saw that these would evolve based on experiments and technological innovation. This process is in a way very similar to programming and building a protocol. Some systems have been tried and failed (totalitarian regimes / communism etc…) yet when reading about the idea and seeing the execution it also feels like a great idea for a software and then this idea collapsing once it got hacked. This is of course a big subject of interest for e voting or DLTs. So let’s have some fun and introduce new solutions to this democratic cycle using modern knowledge and technological hope…
Anonymacracy: A fight for Anonymity on the horizon, rethinking democracy around privacy
Governments don’t like anonymity since it prevents them to re inforce rules and taxation. Recently both Europe and the USA are pushing anti-encryption laws in the name of fighting terrorism, or illegal networks, these bills are technically also allowing any government to track us therefore limiting our freedom in the name of “good”. This is of course also the case of private companies like facebook who’s marketing business model relies on tracking our private lives. (This was my motivation for co-founding massive few years ago with Brian Kennish an ex Googler and founder of https://disconnect.me and later on Jason Grad) What if we could reverse this idea and build a nation where privacy is a constitutional right: an Anonymacracy.
In an Anonymacracy, anonymity is a right and private communications will be encrypted. On the other hand while the real identity of representative would never been known, their communication would be made public. About criminal activities? How could a government deal with such things? The idea here would be to do so without the need to spy on private conversations but we could for example in such a society track people activity without knowing who they are. This might seem impossible but it would be rendered possible via specific technologies.
The anonynous nation: We are used to having names and ID card, in such a nation you would not have any of that. The system would be able to guaranty that you exist and are unique but would never share who you are with the network (this is of course a tricky problem, biometrics might be one way to deal with it another one could be soft but unique signals like how you write or talk another one could simply be the distribution of a unique ID with some proxy mixing like in TOR..) People who would never need to identify you in the real life at least not without your consent.
The decentralized Social Media (DSM) as the Information Filter: In an anonymacracy a decentralized social media will be needed, everyone can share whatever info they want to everyone (public data). Each citizen would also be able to tweak an AI driven filter as a way to censor at its level the information. In a way every citizen is a journalist a reader and an editor on the DSM. Any other media would just be a subset of this DSM. The sum of individual filters (they would also be public) can lead to a classification of subject by importance (most read/ most discussed / biggest concensus) without doubt AI will be helpful here (filters will likely be trained AIs)
The Anonymous representative and transparent voting : in this model we propose a representative anonymacracy, like in a democracy you would vote for someone to represent you, the difference here would be that you would not know who this person is in real life. It could be a woman a man a kid anyone around you… What matter would be their ideas their proposed action their measured ability to be trusted (yes we could introduce a trust score based on promess to action ratio) the constitution could only allow citizen with a high credit score (determined by a decentralized protocol) to participate as representative. Imagine one day you re being asked to chose between Bob839328 and Alex3829 as a president of your anonymous nation. You can click on their name see what they did the filter they use the proposed action, the past work they did, and any public conversation they had… You could filter to see other citizen you identified as likely minded / with similar DSM filters and who they would vote for… In an anonymacracy the vote would be public since the society is already secret and would naturally prevent cohercion.
The anonymous government : The privacy of the government is maintained by its use of encrypted way of communication, some public some private this will not be the choice of the representative but dictated by the constitution (it would be automatically disclosed in few years when secrecy is not needed) Laws will be written and voted by these anonymous representatives. And the justice will be done remotely by presenting some avatar face to the person being judged. Ultimately in this society privacy and freedom can be taken away if someone comits a crime considered bad by the community. The practicality of arresting someone might lead to some people in the law enforcement to also have no private life or to have to wear masks to keep there privacy intact.
AI-Cracy : No need to vote / AI driven representation
As my cofounder Gilles Mentré often says, we associate democracy to the idea of one vote one person. But what if we think of voting as just a tool that could be replaced? It’s a limited tool after all, who comes with the questions? (the information filter is usually managed by few people) who or what can you vote for? All these limitation could be adressed i believe in the near future by using AI. GPT3 (A generative pre trained transformer with over 175 billion parameters) is no science fiction and exists today can we already use it to replace voting or at least augment it? (augmented voting)
What a better example than using GPT3 to complete this article and the previous one about anonymacracy using GPT3 as shown bellow :
Below would be one possible A.I-Cracy model, the key being that voting is replaced by an AI driven reading. In this model I’ve used the Anonymacracy concept of a Shared DSM. The government would be made of public employees that would execute directly on the ranked decision made by the AI (that is of course approved and trained by the people) In such model we can hope that the AI will get better and better. Although we need to work on way to prevent the AI to being “Hacked” especially if 10% of the population is very vocal. As usual the devil lies in the detailed and it’s beyond the scope of this article to further zoom on this model but if curious about what such attack could look like, what happened on twitter to Tay a microsoft bot could be a good example : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
An A.I-Cracy could also produce laws that would be written in code (“code is law”) we are seeing such ideas already at play in the DLT world with Smart Contracts and DAOs…
Are A.I-cracies doomed to become a dictatorial dream? Is anonymacracy the solution?
We cannot talk about new models without assessing their risks too. Yuval Noah Harari argued that liberal democracies might be tempted to leverage technology as a way to better centralize power and therefore migh become tyrannies (back to our old cycles :)
“The conflict between democracy and dictatorship is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter.” -Yuval Noah Harari
We should ballance this point of view wiht the hope that a system where there are less humans could have less weak spots. A fully transparent system where trust is not or at least less needed will also be less likely to be “hacked”.
Technologies are by there very nature neutral, Bureaucracy after all was born 3,500 years ago with writing and was used by both modern dictators as long as well functioning democracies. The same of course can apply with technology. AI and technologies can also be great for the future of our democracies.
An easy way to detect a technological risk is check who is controlling the technology. Anything coming from the top could indeed be of great danger, this is why such systems like anonymacracies are likely to emerge as a reaction to technological and totalitarian regimes. But we can and should research democratic ways of using technologies. This will be the role of Anonymocrates!
The Rise of decentralized Hyper-Nations and DAOCracies: when Nations have no geographies.
As we previously shown we could keep building so many type of democracy avatar based for example like proposed by Cezar Hidalgo or by the many DAO experiments being done out there
An obvious advantage of technology is that it allow us to disincarnate the representative function (anonymacracy) and also to detach it from our geographies (Nation / State model). I’ve seen enought communities like startup weekend that I theorized as hyper-tribes (a non physically attached community projected to a virtual space) to know that they already exists. Hyper-Nations differ from Hyper-tribes by two factor, first they have a governance system (under a constitution / set of rules) secondly they have their own currencies. In such model we can easily imagine multiple models co existing appart from geographies and our current liberal democracy paradygm.
Multiple Hyper-Nations coexisting in the same geography
Imagine waking up in the morning and being tired of being French you want to join another nation let say e-Switzerland an hypernation strucured on the idea of low taxes and good chocolate :)
What if you could with just few clicks join this new nation and change your identity? This idea will very likely chocked Nationalists but as a result you would pay different taxes, have different rights and through open competition we can imagine seeing the emergence of a very solid democratic government system… Today changing from one country to another is a very difficult task even impossible in some cases the only option is to vote something difficult to do when you know your voice will never be heard and silenced by a majority.
What if you could vote with your e-feet? Designing purely digital Nations running on a decentralized system will open that door. I believed it will become a reality within the next few years but it will necesitate the adoption of an anonymacracy to avoid being made illegal by other states.
I sometimes think this would be a great introduction to a science fiction book: The year is 2050 and an hypernation has now reached 1b people, and no one knows who the president is, all we know is their alias: yoda31137, this hypernation has voted a new law that made illegal anyone who is part of its nation to own more than 1 billion of its e-dollars as long as launching the experiment of an AI driven justice system where the human error seen under a Weber’s law will be removed to build a more fair justice system.
Towards modeling simulating ranking and optimizing democratic systems
“In 1980, the General Accounting Office was tasked by Congress to determine how many Federal laws existed. By 1984 they hadn’t yet received a response. When asked why this was the case, the GAO stated that they were still counting… As of today, the sad truth is, nobody knows how many laws have been passed by Congress. To be sure, many laws currently in effect negate older and outdated laws which may still be in effect. For example, there is an old Federal law which outlaws taking a bath in the nude.” from Quora
The complexity built by our representative democracy is the equivallent of a very old and deprecated software. France for example don’t even know how many taxes there are and as we saw previously the USA don’t even know how many laws it has!
Even if AI at the moment lacks common sense, there is already a lot of our very inneficient bureaucracy that could beneficiate from it. I would love for example for an AI to read all the US Laws, something no human has ever and will never be able to do.
Let’s finish with some fun glympse of the future, I’ve played with GPT3 to ask it to explain the bill or rights with a golf metaphore:
And here is another one where I asked OpenAI to summarize a french law about same sex marriage in one line :
I hope this article is getting you excited about the future of our governments and our democracies. It is very likely that a thousand year from now we will look at our current forms of governance as very primitive, after all we replaced the chief of a tribe by a king and later by a president but we have not yet built the “perfect” system. Assuming it exists and assuming it is a great hope we should keep searching for it. But can we do it without violence?
Another important aspect of this model relies on how much power the people would trust the system with. We do see a natural tendency for our democractic systems to ask for more and more power, this is worrisome if you assume democratic systems ends up naturally taking power away from the people as some libertarian economist like Hans-Hermann Hoppe thinks:
“Consequently, not only will exploitation increase, whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money I I creation” (inflation) or legislative regulation. “ — Democracy the God that failed
On the other hand other democracies would happily pay more than 50% of taxes or even be fully taxed if they trust their government.
So wether democracy will evolve towards socialism like Marx predicted it or towards a trustless anonymacracy, one thing is sure it will evolve with our technologies. It could be towards an A.I-Cracy or a brain implant driven democracy or any kind of DAOCracy with smart contracts and AI judges (Any kind of decentralized autonomous organization is in a way a democracy) or a mix of them one thing is sure we will experience a cambrian explosion of democratic systems with hundreds of new governance systems competitng with each others in the years to come. It’s not a matter of if but when these new models will emerge and a good place to see them is within the thousands of decentralized ledgers projects but also and that’s what we re working on at electis within communities and cities!
— Franck Nouyrigat
[https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/democracy_final_jeg_1.pdf]
