Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag

First, think about free cultural projects. Think about what happens when people disagree on the direction the project is taking. The project forks, right? Now, hold that thought in your head for a bit.

A new type of voting system

Now, lets talk about voting systems. When voting, a voter is presented with two functions: vote for one of the options, or don’t vote. I suggest we add a third: forward your vote to a third party.

This is the essence of “representative democracy”, but I’m talking about expanding it - in representative democracies everybody forwards their vote to a predefined subset of the people, and each representative has an equal weight in subjects. Here I’m saying anybody can forward their vote to anybody, and forwarding votes increases the weight of that individual’s vote.

The three functions of the vote:

1. Abstention
2. Direct vote
3. Elected proxy

So, for example, if Bob doesn’t have any particular interest in agriculture, he can forward his vote in an agriculture related issue to his friend Sam, whom he trusts to make the right decision about agricultural issues.

What’s more, Bob can choose to automatically forward his vote on all agricultural issues to Sam. And Sandy, who isn’t very political, but trusts Bob a lot, can choose to automatically forward her vote on all issues to Bob, except on issues about education, because she thinks her friend Tanya knows more about that.

The three options of the proxy:

1. Single issue electorate.
2. Categorical electorate.
3. Arrant electorate.

Importantly, they are all free to change their mind at any time. An agricultural matter may arise where Bob has an opinion - it’s not that he doesn’t trust Sam. It’s just that he wants to make his own call on this one. To make this viable, we need another feature: overriding. Until the closing of the polls on a specific issue, a voter may change her mind as often as she wants, and only the last decision is counted.

Changing your mind is allowed, within a generally accepted timeframe.

Consider that every single system of authority on Earth exists as a possible state of arrangement within this voting system. I should draw pictures to illustrate, but suffice a few examples:

1. Dictatorship:  Everybody forwards their vote to one person. (Let’s not hang ourselves in discussion on why this situation would arise)
2. Parliamentary democracy: Everybody forwards their votes in equal measure to the same group of people - in Iceland, 63 people.
3. Bicameral democracy: The social network is disconnected into two groups, one significantly larger. Within each of these subsets there is a parliamentary democracy configuration.

And so on.
For all of this to be viable, you need software that provides this functionality. Solving this sort of voting may be arbitrarily complicated and can only be done in a reasonable amount of time by a computer. This means, for security, we want everybody to use strong crypto - but that’s just a devil in the details, so let’s not go too deep into implementation.

For now, just assume that this software will be written. Now on to the juicy stuff.

Forking the Legal Codebase

It turns out that most countries leave their laws in the public domain. This means that by copying the laws in entirety you do not infringe on copyright. This is good. It also has the interesting side effect that there is nothing that stops you from making changes. Obviously these changes are not law, but they are still legal code.

Think of society as a running program, where the laws are one of the underlying logical components. If you change the laws, you change how the system works.

So take the voting system described above, and put it on a website. Call this your Shadow Parliament. Now, encourage every citizen of your country to sign up. Make some mechanism to ensure their identity - avoid giving people more than one account, and avoid giving people accounts who aren’t actually citizens of your polity. Now start the most interesting social experiment of all time. Two steps:

1. Every bill that appears on the real parliament is copied automatically onto the Shadow Parliament, where is undergoes the electoral process.
2. Bills can be proposed by members of the Shadow Parliament in the same way as they are proposed by delegates at the real parliament, and undergo the electoral process as such.

Slowly but surely, the two legal codebases will diverge.

How to bootstrap a Shadow Parliament

When you fork the legal code, obviously your Shadow Parliament needs to obey the laws on it, at least to the extent of the functionality of the parliament itself.

As a result, you first need to make, using the traditional legal process as described in your country’s laws, a legal parliament running on the copy. This means host general elections. There are probably some loopholes you can use to make that process fairly painless, but I suggest consulting some lawyers on how to do it “legally”. Remember that the polity you’re running is a clone, so size restrictions and other things might be a lot easier to overcome.

As soon as you have a working base of parliamentarians running on the copy, make a lot of changes to the laws (the first divergent steps) - and to the constitution! - to make a networked system legal on the law codebase. Make sure you change the laws so that forwarding votes is legal.

This is formality, but it’s something that needs to be done right in order for the experiment to work. If you botch it, somebody will call foul later on.

Making the claim

Every country has its fair share of controversial issues. These are the leverage for the next step. As the experiment continues, the legal system will diverge more and more as the real parliament and the Shadow Parliament show that they are representing the parliamentarians, the lobbyists, and the corruptors on the one hand, and the people on the other.

When you’ve got enough divergence, there might be reason to suggest that perhaps the legally elected legislature of your country isn’t actually doing its job properly, if indeed its job is to be the face of democracy. At some point during the divergence process, if you get enough traction, you’re going to have at least a few parliamentarians who start acting on the results of the Shadow Parliaments own votes. (By all means be careful to have closing dates on issues at least a few hours before they close in the real parliament!) These parliamentarians will be representing democracy, yes, but they will also be fueling the fire, because if they’re just doing exactly what the Shadow Parliament wants, why have them there at all?

So, when you have enough divergence, you might suggest a global merge of the two legal code projects - that the “real” parliament merges the differences from the shadow parliament into their own. This will mean that the Shadow Parliament’s lineage of law will legally supersede the old Parliament’s laws, and will effectively take over the legislative wing of your country’s government.

The cool thing

This is my hack. The beauty of this is equivalent to the beauty of the GPL. Richard Stallman recently chided me for using the word “viral” to describe the GPL… so I’ll refrain from using that word… but essentially, this idea has a few features that make it bulletproof.

The first is that the people in power won’t like it at all, but they cannot (legally) stop it from happening.

The second is that even though it is inherently subversive, the more people that know about the idea and understand its implications, the better.

The third is that it leads to more freedom, far more freedom, a kind of freedom nobody has ever experienced. It isn’t even Utopianism, that’s the great part. Proof of concept exists, right here, in this article. Now we’re only months away from running code.