technology
politics
Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century
Fellow, Demos
University of Illinois-Chicago
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
February 20th, 2021
A few years ago, after an argument with Yascha Mounk, I realised that for some, democracy is an ideology that must be defended, and for others, it’s a technology that can be improved. The defence of democracy against the threat of populism, while somewhat contradictory, distracts us from the real challenge of building a better democracy. To quote Marc Dones: “Maybe a bunch of 25-year-old white male slave owners were not the most brilliant system designers to walk the planet. Maybe we should finally actually have that conversation. Maybe some of us have spent our lives engineering better governance structures and have some thoughts”.
Since the ancient Athenians first met in the Agora, the idea of democracy has presented a technical challenge: how are the interests of individuals translated into group decisions? The Athenians voted directly on matters of state but this became impractical so the Romans traded power for convenience and elected representatives. While the representative democratic system has prevailed, with the arrival of computers and the internet in the twentieth century, new systems were born.
From the 1950s, ones and zeroes began to replace ink on paper and people found new ways to make, use, and sell information. As the product of the democratic process, the law is information, and changing the format of the law can change the way that democracy works. The culmination of countless decisions made by generations of politicians voting for or against each piece of legislation, the large number of documents that constitutes the law can instead, we argue, be contained in one digital file, with every statute in force.
Those who want to change the law would copy and edit or “fork” this file, like a nation’s operating system, adding or removing legislation to make an alternate version. Instead of electing representatives, each person would support one version, and the version with the most support would be enforced. This describes a method of democratic decision-making that combines lots of individual choices in one decision. Unlike a one-time vote between two alternatives, each person would support one version, and could change their decision at any time.
New legislation would be put forward as an alternate version of the original file, not as an individual proposal, so political organisations would be free to develop complex answers to complex problems. Constant competition between organisations, to meet the needs of citizens would surface the best ideas and raise the capacity of the state. With no representatives to elect, power would remain with the people and the law would always be what most people wanted it to be. In 1872, seventy years after the invention of the steam-driven paper machine the Ballot Act introduced anonymous paper ballots in England, paving the way for universal suffrage. Seventy years after the inventions of the transistor, we hope that technology can once again improve democracy.
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