The following is the most comprehensive understanding of the spirit of this Public Square. It is a great relief and extremely beautiful to find people working so consistently on what is needed for a better world. I thank them all.
This article is a continuation of the ideas begun in A proposal for
governance in the post 2011 world
While revolutions around the world are in the streets for
democracy, we need to look at that very poorly defined and all encompassing
word by specifics, to review what we are asking for and why. The above proposal
already began to express the need for individual rights and sovereignty in any
democratic rule and will explore that in greater detail later; this article
will look at the decision making processes in a democracy. There are two
options commonly held to be our democratic choices; direct or representative
democracy.
Direct
democracy
A pure
direct democracy is a tyranny of the majority. As in all systems where groups
hold the highest power, individual rights are always at risk. When a majority
rules, there is no need for the majority to compromise and a minority will have
their needs unrepresented, resulting in governance by the majority, not
governance by the people.
A
direct democracy is impossible in actuality as no one can have the time to
participate in every decision concerning them, and certainly not to educate
themselves to provide meaningful input in every decision. To make the best
decisions, expertise is required on each topic. Direct democracy does not
always provide the best solutions, it provides the most popular, the most
expedient, or even the most advertised solutions, more frequently as the
decision becomes more complex.
Direct
democracy gives equal weight to all votes, the expert and the novice, the
completely dependent and the unaffected. Expert opinion is overshadowed by
volume, which negatively impacts the resulting decisions. Allowing votes by
people unaffected by the issue at hand results in not just uninformed decisions
but also persecution of minorities.
Direct
democracy is very susceptible to a hidden oligarchy, as those at the bottom of
the social classes have no time available to represent themselves or to study
the issues being debated. Secret clubs, and block voting are difficult to
combat and also do not lead to decisions of the most benefit to all.
Aristotle
warned of
a mob rule form of democracy … in which, not the law, but the
multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the law by their decrees. This
is a state of affairs brought about by the demagogues. For in democracies which
are subject to the law the best citizens hold the first place, and there are no
demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up. For
the people becomes a monarch … At all events this sort of democracy, which is
now a monarch, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise
monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; … The decrees of the demos
correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what
the flatterer is to the other. Both have great power; the flatterer with the
tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind which we are describing. The
demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring all
things to the popular assembly. And therefore they grow great, because the
people have an things in their hands, and they hold in their hands the votes of
the people, who are too ready to listen to them. Further, those who have any
complaint to bring against the magistrates say, ‘Let the people be judges’; the
people are too happy to accept the invitation; and so the authority of every
office is undermined. Such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it
is not a constitution at all; for where the laws have no authority, there is no
constitution. … So that if democracy be a real form of government, the sort of
system in which all things are regulated by decrees is clearly not even a
democracy in the true sense of the word, for decrees relate only to
particulars.
There
is a case to be made that governance by decree is governance by whim, and not
just governance under most definitions of the word. And following, there is a
case to be made for a constitution and a body of laws. If an individual is to
enter a binding social contract in a free society, it is just that they see the
constitution of the society they are contracting with.
Representative
democracy
The two
fundamental pillars of representative democracy, the principles that groups can
represent individuals and individuals can represent groups, are impossible in
practice.
Representative democracy is the most dishonest oligarchy of all as it insists
on the falsehood that the voice of its oligarchs are the voice of the people
and the subsequent falsehood that their rule is rule by the people.
In the
iron law of oligarchy, Robert Michels holds that any political system eventually
evolves into an oligarchy. Representative democracies have not eradicated
oligarchy, they have driven it to secrecy, a state of affairs ironically most
abhorrent in a democracy. Instead of confronting the problems inherent in an
oligarchy, democracy denies it exists while practicing it openly. If oligarchy
is necessary, as it seems it must be, it needs to be openly and transparently defined by all and guidelines
established to ensure the most widespread participation by all and knowledge
for all.
Representative
democracies do not provide for expertise in governance as representatives are
elected by land mass and time span, not system, and are usually elected for
charisma, not expertise. Athenian sortition likewise made no attempt at
combining expertise with authority. Subjects that the majority is unqualified
to speak on are delegated to similarly unqualified political representatives,
segregated from other representatives by land mass. These representatives
appoint experts who obtain their positions by cronyism with the politician
instead of expertise acknowledged by the entire interested population. The
politicians and experts in the current system then provide for no meaningful
feedback from users of the system, outside of occasional polls; these polls are
conducted on test populations which another group have decided shall be
considered representative of the population as a whole and used to provide
input on only the questions the experts decide. There is no transparency of any
meaningful kind that would allow users of the system to audit what the experts
were doing.
Problems in representative democracy have been more thoroughly
covered in
A
proposal for governance: Groups and individuals.
Concentric User Groups and
Epistemic Communities
It has
become evident that we need to look past the above methods of decision making
if we are to protect individual rights, allow input from all and reach
decisions using the greatest expertise we have available. This proposal has
discussed stigmergy as an efficient form of mass
organization for task completion. There is still a need for some form of
organization in smaller systems and in decision making to prevent involuntary
and unrecognized oligarchy and provide the most efficient and transparent use
of expertise.
Governments
up till now have acted as the final authority on all topics for an entire
region for an arbitrarily specified length of time or until they are overthrown
by another group. What these authorities govern is a series of systems,
controlled by the state or corporations, and run as dictatorships where
workers’ individual rights are exchanged for the basic necessities of life.
These systems have profit for the top of the hierarchy as their objective; they
are not set up to provide an efficient or superior service or product to the
users.
If
these systems were organized as autonomous, transparent, porous, concentric
user groups, they would be far better governed by themselves. The current
political structure does not recognize that every system is not of concern or
interest to everyone in the region, or that some users have far greater
knowledge and expertise in specific areas than others. We need a system where
responsibility and control rests with the entire user group and expertise is
acknowledged and put to best use.
Autonomous: each user group should consist of all
people affected by the system and no people not affected by the system.
Systems
should be organized by user groups, not by nations or treaties. International
systems would include things such as the internet, telecommunications and
knowledge, local systems would include things such as transit, food production
and social services, and in any situation where only one family or an
individual is affected, the responsibility would lie with only them. Each local
user group or individual would have access to outside user groups for trade,
shared knowledge, disaster relief, etc., autonomous but networked.
Transparent: all information related to the system
must be fully transparent in order for users to participate in tasks or
auditing.
Communication
should not be the full responsibility of the experts in the centre, but should
be carried over expertise bridges by full transparency and user participation;
it is the responsibility of each user in an open system to educate themselves
to their own level of comfort using the data and user population at each ring
to inform themselves. Their input and decision making impact would then be
commensurate with the expertise they acquire. The epistemic community in the
centre should not need to protect themselves from attacks from completely
uninformed users, the circles of expertise which promoted them to the centre should
also verify and explain their findings to the outer circles.
Current
systems primarily use a supposedly representative sample of the user group to
provide periodic feedback. This feedback is delivered as percentages of the
population which, as is usual in the current system, ignores the importance of
the individual. From an individual perspective, the chance of, for instance,
dying of a side effect from a pharmaceutical is either 0% or 100%, group
statistics have no effect on individual experience. Transparent user groups
allow feedback and ideas from the entire user group, an automatic testing and
validation system in place continually throughout development and operation.
Experts
are peer promoted based on reputation instead of certification by an external
authority. Each user of a system can review the work of the active members both
directly and through the expert review of the active member’s peers instead of
placing their faith in a third party certification. Additionally, experts can
be created by the system itself as users develop knowledge, expertise and
reputation and move towards the centre. Third party authorities such as
universities are no longer necessary.
Porous: contribution at all levels of each user
group must be open to all users with acceptance by peer review.
A side
effect of these user groups is that they provide workers with the three
motivators whicharguably provide
the greatest job satisfaction, autonomy, mastery and purpose. People can work
on anything they like, they are not required to submit resumes, acquire
accreditation, seniority, or approval from an individual authority. If their
work is good enough it will be accepted by the user group. Everyone can work on
the system that interests them, doing the jobs at the level they are capable
of, with as much or as little involvement as they choose.
Concentric: user groups should be formed in
concentric circles representing levels of expertise.
For
example, users: audit and provide feedback, contributors:
interested users who periodically present work for acceptance by the
members, members: have acquired expertise and been accepted as full
contributing members by the user group, and an epistemic core group:
recognized by the group as having the necessary level of expertise to provide
direction for the system.
Ideas
can never be furthered if discussion is always at the level of the novice and
the ideas of an expert can only be tested by other experts with equal
understanding of the topic; in a concentric user group, the receptive field is
stronger near the centre, so informed opinions will be heard more clearly by
experts in the centre, but full transparency will allow anyone from any part of
the system to be as informed as they wish to be by any other part.
In
representative democracy we have learned that people in general prefer to place
their faith in leaders who are like them instead of leaders who are so expert
they do not understand them. In order to avail ourselves of the greatest
expertise on each topic, we must place our most knowledgeable experts in a
position of transparent authority while also providing a 30 IQ
point bridge leading from their ideas to the casually interested
observer. According to Leta
Hollingworth’s research, to be a leader of their contemporaries a child
must be more intelligent but not too much more intelligent than them. A
discrepancy of more than about 30 points of IQ does not allow for leadership,
or even respect or effective communication.
Hollingworth
notes: A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they
live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from
themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many
a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the
belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one
of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if
personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this
be learned than that any school subject be mastered. Failure to learn how to
tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness,
disillusionment, and misanthropy [3, p. 259].
This
loss of expertise is a tragedy for both the experts and society. There needs to
be a method of organization that will use all expertise at the level it will be
most effective and yet avoid an authoritarian hierarchy. Epistemic communities
need to be placed at the centre of all systems so their expertise is available
to all working within the system. The systems however, must be completely
transparent to allow full auditing of information provided by the core group by
any interested users and passers by.
Concentric
circles bypass the divide between what people say and what they are willing to
do, as acceptance is based on performance not accreditation, resumes and
interviews. Titles are replaced by jobs and voices are amplified according to
the peer group acceptance earned. As in stigmergy, votes are frequently
replaced by actions, putting authority in the hands of those doing the work.
The jobs discussed in The financial system which offer no benefit to the user group
would be eliminated instead of put in a position of authority.
The keys to preventing a concentric user group from becoming a
tyrannical oligarchy are fulltransparency, peer promotion and porous acceptance of work
by peer review at all levels. When combined with stigmergy it can be hoped that the work produced
in these systems will finally be of the highest standard we can attain and the
work environments will be enjoyable and fulfilling for all.
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This article is a continuation of the ideas begun in A proposal for
governance in the post 2011 world
There are two underlying concepts which must be universally
accepted for the current system to function. These two concepts are that groups
may act as individuals and individuals may act as groups; two ideas which are
fundamentally unsound. While these contradictions were required in earlier attempts
at representative governance, the idea was always flawed in a democratic system
and recognized as being flawed. As we have progressed to the point where we can
eliminate these weaknesses, we have instead greatly increased their use and
stopped questioning their appropriateness. Presently these two concepts
contribute to fundamental paradoxes throughout the current system which can
only be remedied by rejection of the concepts.
Groups
acting as individuals
A group
is a collection of individuals united for a certain time and space by a
specific idea, experience or other common bond. Individuals have the ability to
associate, to exchange ideas, to agree, to cooperate, cohabit and in any other
way to collaborate, but the group they form does not become an individual. It
cannot logically be granted a voice, a vote, or political or legal power. It is
only in a system governed by groups and one which does not respect individual
rights that such power seems essential.
Any
group of affiliated people is an organization dedicated to promoting the
interests of its group members. Unlike individuals, who have the power to
change their minds and allegiances at will, an organization has a mandate to
promote a specific idea and represent a specific group. If a group were to fail
to promote its mandate and population above all others, the group would be
acting contrary to its reason for existence. A group has no place in a
consensus based system which respects all of its individual participants
equally and a group does not have the flexibility to accurately represent
individuals.
In a
system where groups representing individuals is the norm, as in the current
democratic political systems, there is a chronic problem of ensuring
representation of all minority groups and hearing their rights alongside other
larger groups. The issue is not solved by having more and louder minority
groups, in every conceivable combination, making futile attempts to ensure that
every group has a seat at every table and designing amplification algorithms
for their voices, it is solved by ridding ourselves of all groups speaking as
individuals and letting every individual speak for themselves. If individual
rights for everyone are put above any group consensus, are a given in every
assembly, if they are applied equally without distinction of any kind, there is
no need for any group to have further representation. The completely
incongruous situation we have found ourselves in under the current system,
where groups demand and sometimes obtain special ‘individual’ rights, would be
unnecessary. No group can properly represent the diversity of its members, only
the individuals can.
There
is no occasion for group endorsements or condemnations of anything when the
individuals have their own voices. Both condemnations and endorsements
encourage what ought to be assemblies of individuals with equal voices to place
undue importance on pleasing the individuals belonging to the opposing or
endorsing group. Dissenting voices from the group are not represented, and
individual nuance is lost.
When a
group announces (or more accurately, when an individual speaking for an entire
group announces) its endorsement of anything, the result is similar to a group
of friends attending a party. The object is to ensure they already know
everyone and their friends have promised to take their side in whatever
circumstances arise. They do not have to worry about meeting new people, much
less new ideas, they are bringing their current ones with them. Group
representation of individuals contributes to the infantilization of the
individuals and allows them to relax and not educate themselves or take part in
their own governance. When they do think for themselves, they are frequently
less interested in the topic than in the social aspect of being in solidarity
with their peers. Groupthink is not only a waste of potentially valuable
contributions, it can actually allow flawed initiatives to pass simply because
no one wishes to raise an objection, either the people who wish to maintain their
membership in a group or the people who are too intimidated to disagree with
the group.
Group
affiliation behind individual voices allows listeners to reject ideas before
hearing them. Labeling an idea as coming from The Left or The
Right is enough for many people to refuse to listen to it at all;
other equally irrelevant group affiliations result in equally damaging bigotry
which prevents communication on any topic. In a system which is built on
communication and consensus, such barriers are insupportable.
Corporatist
groups are fundamental to all centralized and totalitarian government systems,
and antithetical to all open and consensual governance. Corporatist groups
produce the same effect locally as they do nationally and globally; the cells
create the whole and it is a fundamental contradiction to expect corporatist
groups to create a consensual system. It is impossible to reconcile corporatist
thinking at any level with an open system of communication and governance.
A group may take an action together, may communicate, may
assemble, may agree on points, but a group never has one mind, one personality,
one set of values. A group is not an individual and must not be used to
represent individual thought.
Individuals
acting as groups
The first
question to be asked whenever this occurs, is why? Why can these individuals
not speak with their individual voices? Is there a flaw in the system that is
preventing them from being heard? Because the solution then is to fix the flaw,
we no longer live in a world where one individual has to make a long arduous
journey to appear in person to represent their town or region, there is no
reason why individuals cannot represent themselves in any circumstance. If the
members not speaking are not interested then they should not participate
instead of lending excess weight to another voice. If they are interested but
do not understand, the system needs to be changed to allow for ease of
understanding, probably by use of concentric user groups. If individual voices
cause too much noise, the system needs to be modified to provide a solution.
Individual voices are to be treasured, not lost for expedience.
Who
will have the right to represent a group? What will they be allowed to say?
What will the wording be? If any member of the group disagrees, if any word is
not approved, then the person speaking for the group is no longer representing
the group. That person is now speaking as an individual with words unfairly
weighted by group affiliation and the individuals in the represented group who
allowed this are equally guilty of misrepresenting themselves as being part of
a voice they failed to approve. An individual speaking for a group is a
dishonest mask for an unfairly weighted individual voice in almost every circumstance.
When
individuals speak as groups we frequently do not even know who the individuals
behind the groups are or what their individual opinions are. In many cases the
group is just the voice of one individual, sometimes an individual who speaks,
votes, exercises political and legal power and obtains money or other rewards
through many different groups. The group names encourage the public to attach
undue authority to an individual voice, to think they are donating time, money
or effort to a cause for many which benefits only one individual, to fail to
question the background or connections of an individual they do not see.
Corporatist
groups tend to be very personality driven systems, where a charismatic leader
is given authority not commensurate with any expertise or experience. Where the
representative falls short in knowledge or experience, they then have the
authority to hire the needed expertise; a perfectly fertile ground for
corruption and cronyism as well as incompetence. The representatives are assumed
to carry all of the attributes and values associated with the group and given
trust and blame not earned by themselves. The task of representing others is
impossible and perilous in actuality, so the job is rarely taken up by anyone
except as an opportunity to further a personal agenda.
if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to
be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share
in the government to the utmost. – Aristotle
It is
understood by all that groups and individuals are different entity types with
different attributes. The idea that the two may have their attributes exchanged
for expedience is no longer expedient. Corporatist groups contribute to an
extraordinary degree to the most problematic aspects of the current system,
starting with the ones illustrated here and escalating into legal corporate
personhood and democratic dictatorships. In order to create a system without
the same failings, these two concepts must be rejected as part of the design.
Individuals must begin to communicate as names, not nouns. Groups must be given
only those attributes which are logical to them, such as the ability to
assemble.
Voices,
votes, legal and political power are natural rights of individuals not groups.
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This article is a continuation of the ideas begun in A proposal for
governance in the post 2011 world
It was
agreed by most of the world in the past that privacy was a basic individual
right. All
individuals are private individuals, only their actions which affect public
life are of public interest. It is essential to democratic government, that
organizations which affect the public must be transparent to the public; without
full information, the public is incapable of making the decisions required to
participate in their own governance. In the past, any secrets by public
organizations, short of war secrets, were grounds for a scandal. A free media
and freedom of speech were essential in a democracy so that transparency of
public matters could be ensured.
Our
world has now changed so far that the public has to prove why it needs to know
any information about its government and go through an expensive and labour
intensive process to acquire information that will arrive, if it arrives at
all, after great delay and in a very censored form. Information on corporations
is simply unattainable except by illegal methods as corporations, which include
prison, intelligence, military, pharmaceutical, agricultural, and even police
agencies, are considered private. These private corporations now own rights to
global commons such as our oceans, space and electromagnetic field, as well as
the individual environments of each of us.
A huge
industry has built up around filtering, hoarding, spinning and occasionally
doling out to the public in innocuous bits without context all information
about organizations and actions which effect the public. The true information
that reaches the public is more than drowned out by the equally huge industry
of misinformation being produced and distributed by the same public
organizations. Our media exists to inform us that our right to information is
actually a right to know whether an arbitrarily selected private citizen has
had a haircut instead of a right to the information we need in order to govern
ourselves.
Another
massive industry exists to gather, store, analyze and distribute every
conceivable detail of private information on private citizens. Private
corporations gather and store information on every aspect of individual lives
and make it available to any organization with the finances or skill to
retrieve it. There is no discrimination in what is gathered as organizations
have decided that any private information is an unknown unknown, they may just
not know if they need it or not, so they need it all.
Legal
changes and popular propaganda have created such oxymoronic beasts as public
individuals and private corporations to cause confusion over these very clear
violations of the two basic principles.
There is no such thing as a private organization, outside of
purely social groups. There is no such thing as a public person, only public
actions by private individuals.
Radical
privacy and radical transparency
Under
the current system, even when people become convinced of the soundness of the
principles of privacy for individuals and transparency for organizations and
actions which effect the public, they advocate a modified version of this rule
as reasonable, the result of compromise and good sense, and not radical like a
whole hearted embrace of the principles would be. They point to many situations
where the principles in pure form simply would not work. Principles however, if
they are sound at all, must work in all cases. If they do not, there is a fault
either with the principle, or the case. The answer in our current society has
been to reject the principles as nice ideas which we will keep in our legal
foundations but ignore in reality as they are simply not practical. A more
accurate answer may be found by looking at the cases where these two principles
appear to produce poor results.
The
release of the US state cables was widely condemned because of the release of
the names of private individuals who were providing information to public
organizations. The exposure of any private individual to harm must be regarded
as an ill. But if harm had been caused, it would have been caused not by the
action which abided by the principles but by the earlier actions in violation
of the principles. The individuals in question had a right to privacy. Why were
their names recorded and placed in an extremely public and easy to access
database? Why were their names recorded at all? Why did those individuals need
to make secret reports about public organizations or actions to other public
organizations? If the principle regarding public organizations and actions was
followed, there would be no need for informants. If the principle regarding
privacy for individuals was followed, the names would never have been recorded.
Another
case frequently brought forward is the harm to individuals by drug cartels in
South America if the cartels knew about individuals who are reporting them.
Under the current system, they already know, as do the state cable informant’s
enemies. Once information about an individual is stored, the principle of
individual privacy which ought to protect that individual has been ignored,
leaving the individual completely exposed. Again, that individual ought also to
be protected by the principle of transparency for public organizations. If the
entire country was working together in a structure that allowed them to expose
all actions of the drug cartels, the individuals would not need to be put at
risk. If we apply the two principles from the beginning, they work in every
hazardous situation I have heard of so far.
Law
enforcement and military around the world have claimed the right to operate in
complete secret as that is the only way to catch ‘the bad guys’. Transparency
would enable the public to catch the bad guys on both sides. A public that was
involved in helping to enforce laws could accomplish far more than a police
force could by itself, as has been proven many times. Instead of blocking the
entire internet under the pretense of blocking child porn sites, the police
could just ask for the public to police the internet. If child porn or
terrorist plotting sites can be found by anyone, they can be found by everyone,
what is required is not secrecy and censorship but a proper structure for
policing which involves the public as well. The only time this would not work
is when the law is not one the pubic agrees with, which is a great method of
providing feedback that the law needs to be modified to represent the people
more accurately.
Diplomats
and others in positions of power have complained that transparency makes it
difficult for them to do their jobs. Where that is the case, the fault must be
found with their jobs. The current system is a massive, tangled tortuous mess
of intelligence, media, spokespeople, communication departments, freedom of
information laws and lobbies, actions and counteractions attempting to maintain
balance in a system which preaches democracy and practices fascism. The
dichotomy and confusion is caused by the current system, not the proposed one.
Entire industries would be made redundant by adherence to the principle of
transparency for public organizations. Transparency in its literal sense, not
selected pieces of isolated information wrapped up and presented by an
official, but full transparency, of the kind that would allow any passerby to
see exactly what an organization was up to. As the current powers have been
asking private individuals for decades, what do they have to hide?
The
kind of radical transparency that private individuals have been exposed to
needs to be turned on all organizations and actions which have any impact on
the public. Individuals have a right to privacy as part of the rights they
brought from a state of nature and did not voluntarily relinquish under our
democratic social contract. Organizations and actions which affect the public
are not protected by any such rights.
All
individuals have a right to privacy. All organizations and actions which affect
the public must be completely transparent to the public. These principles do
not work in isolation; the fault is not with the principles, but the isolation.
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This article is a continuation of the ideas begun in A proposal for
governance in the post 2011 world<
Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents
or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action
stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent.
In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other,
leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic
activity. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex,
seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or
even direct communication between the agents. - Wikipedia
Competition,
collaboration and stigmergy
The
internet has, in a few short years, become celebrated for the incredible
success of its mass collaborative efforts, most of which were actually not
produced by collaboration but by stigmergy. Stigmergy, a far more effective
means of handling large group efforts, is also the best hope for success in a
new governing system. This proposal has already suggested that new
governance be based on systems, not land mass, and that governance be by user
groups, not elected officials. Stigmergy is the most effective way for those
user groups to govern systems.
Systems
are currently primarily run by competitive organizations. Competition creates
redundancy, is slow and wastes resources on idea protection, advertisement, and
more. Competition also requires secrecy which blocks progress and causes lost
opportunities and ideas. Patents and copyrights further limit speed and the
potential for mass input of ideas. Collaboration between the people with the
greatest expertise does not happen unless they are hired by the same project.
The
alternative to competition has traditionally been collaboration. This is most
effective only in groups of two to eight people. For groups larger than 25,
collaboration is agonizingly slow, an exercise in personality management which
quickly degenerates into endless discussion and soothing of ruffled feathers,
is extremely vulnerable to agent provocateurs, and very seldom accomplishes
anything of value. Collaboration traditionally operates on the democratic
principle that all voices are equal, so it does not allow for leaders, or users
with greater expertise, energy or understanding to have greater influence than
those on the periphery.
Stigmergy
is neither competitive nor traditionally collaborative.
In a
competitive environment, a new idea is jealously guarded, legally protected and
shrouded in secrecy. Great effort is expended in finding supporters for the
idea while also ensuring that the idea remains covered by legal protections
such as non-disclosure agreements. The idea remains inextricably bound to the
creator until it is legally transferred to another owner and all contributors
work for the owner, not the idea. Contributors must then be rewarded by the
owner which further limits the potential for development and wastes more
resources in legal agreements, lawsuits, etc. Contributors have no interest in
whether the project succeeds or fails and no motivation to contribute more than
they are rewarded for.
If the
idea is instead developed collaboratively, it must first be pitched by the
originator, who will attempt to persuade a group to adopt the idea. The group
must be in agreement with the idea itself and with every stage of its
development. The majority of energy and resources are spent on communication,
persuasion, and personality management, and the working environment is fraught
with arguments and power struggles. Because the project is driven by a group,
albeit a collaborative one, the group is still competitive with other similar
outside projects, and still wastes resources and energy on secrecy, competitive
evangelizing, etc. Both competitive and collaborative projects will die if the
group that runs the project leaves and both will attract or repel contributors
based on the personalities of the existing group. Both are hierarchical systems
where individuals need to seek permission to contribute.
With
stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the
idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No individual needs
permission (competitive) or consensus (collaborative) to propose an idea or
initiate a project. There is no need to discuss or vote on the idea, if an idea
is exciting or necessary it will attract interest. The interest attracted will
be from people actively involved in the system and willing to put effort into
carrying the project further, not empty votes from people with little interest
or involvement. Since the project is supported or rejected based on contributed
effort, not empty votes, input from people with more commitment to the idea
will have greater weight. Stigmergy also puts individuals in control over their
own work, they do not need group permission to tell them what system to work on
or what part to contribute.
The
person with the initial idea may or may not carry the task further.
Evangelizing the idea is voluntary, by a group that is excited by the idea;
they may or may not be the ones to carry it out. It is unnecessary to seek
start up funding and supporters; if an idea is good it will receive the support
required. (In practise, that is not true yet, as few people have the
free time to put into volunteer projects because most are tied to compulsory
work under the existing financial
system.) Secrecy
and competition is unnecessary because once an idea is given, it and all new
development belongs to anyone who chooses to work on it. Anyone can submit work
for approval, the idea cannot die or be put on hold by personalities;
acceptance or rejection is for the work contributed, not the person
contributing it. All ideas are accepted or rejected based on the needs of the system.
Responsibility
and rights for the system rest with the entire user group, not just the
creators. There is no need for people to leave the system based on personality
conflicts as there is no need for communication outside of task completion and
there are usually plenty of jobs with complete autonomy. As no one owns the
system, there is no need for a competing group to be started to change
ownership to a different group.
Stigmergy
provides little scope for agent provocateurs as only the needs of the system
are considered and anyone working against the system’s functionality is much
easier to see and prevent than someone blocking progress with endless
discussion and creation of personality conflicts. Because the system is owned
by all, there is no one personality to target.
Splintering
As work
progresses and core team and members grow, more interested and dedicated
personalities emerge which begin to steer direction. Specialties are formed
around the core team’s interests as the core team produces the most work and
the work most valued by the rest of the user group. Systems beyond a certain
level of complexity begin to lack coherence as the group’s energy and focus
moves from broad to narrow, following the interests of the core team and the
availability of resources; parts of the original system will be left undone.
As more
members are added, more will experience frustration at limited usefulness or
autonomy. Some of these members will have an interest in the work left undone
and they will create a new node of like minded members and new people to take
care of the undone work. Alternatively, casual users and observers of the
system, who lack the desire or expertise to be a more active part of the
original system, will see the need created and create a new node. Rather than
the traditional corporate model of endless acquisition and expansion, stigmergy
encourages splintering into different nodes. Because each individual is
responsible only for their own work, and no one can direct a group of workers,
expansion means more work for the individual, a self limiting prospect. As a
system grows, the additional work requires either additional resources or
splintering; as communication is easier and there is more autonomy in smaller
groups, splintering is the more likely outcome of growth.
Communication
between nodes of a system is on an as needed basis. Transparency allows
information to travel freely between the various nodes, but a formal relationship
or communication method is neither necessary nor desirable. Information sharing
is driven by the information, not personal relationships. If data is relevant
to several nodes it will be immediately transmitted to all, no formal meetings
between official personalities are necessary.
Any
node can disappear without affecting the network, and the remaining necessary
functionality of that node can be taken up by other nodes. Nodes which find
they are performing the same tasks will likely join, or one will be rendered
obsolete by lack of use. New nodes are only created to fulfill a new need or
provide greater functionality; it is inefficient to have the same task
performed twice, and that only occurs if a second group discovers an
alternative method that the first group is unwilling to adopt. In that case,
the best system will win the most support from the user group, the other will
die or remain as a valued alternative. Any user can contribute to the node
which best matches their interests and abilities, or contribute to multiple
nodes.
In
practice: the Wikileaks system
Stigmergy
is already a working system in many parts of the internet. For an example close
to home, we can look at Wikileaks, from the point it began splintering. When
Wikileaks reached critical mass, when it was releasing a huge volume of data
and its resources were stretched far too thinly to cope with all of the extra
tasks, other groups began to pick up pieces of the original group’s mandate.
First
were the bloggers, tweeters (and occasionally journalists) who took over the
media relations for the organization. These were almost entirely individuals,
and the task quickly became one of countering misinformation. Direct
communication was unnecessary, information flowed through the Twitter hashtag
#Wikileaks and was occasionally filtered by the official Wikileaks Twitter
account. When the Swedish newspaper Expressen announced the legal case against
Assange, the Swedish forum Flashback began an investigative thread within 25
minutes of the first tweet from Expressen. That thread was responsible for
almost all of the initial investigation into the case, and was mined for
updates by journalists worldwide. English speakers were kept updated by RixstepNews which provided instant Twitter and blog
updates to any new developments on the forum.
When it
became apparent that a more organized setting was going to be necessary for
disseminating facts and dispelling fiction, three people had the idea for a
website, a number which quickly morphed to ten people from five continents. The
website WL
Central was
created in 72 hours. Of the initial three, one left within days as their
original site was more in line with the contributions they wished to make, and
another left within weeks due to other life commitments. Of the original ten,
extremely few contributed much or for long to WL Central, but most remain
supporters of both WL Central and Wikileaks and most have contributed a great
deal since in individual efforts and continue to evangelize for both WL Central
and Wikileaks. Many early members who wandered out have occasionally wandered
back in again as there is no official commitment to be kept.
As the
website grew and became more specialized, a great deal of the functionality was
taken up by other sites. WL Press took over the collation of media
coverage, SwedenVsAssangeprovided detailed coverage of the case against
Julian Assange, CablegateSearch andCableDrummer discovered new projects that were
helpful to all. Other supporters set up aFacebook page, a forum, and many other projects, while WL Central
became the place for related news, in depth cable investigation, and revolution
coverage. Many bloggers provided additional perspective from their blogs.
Anonymous provided broad support of many other kinds, and organizations such
as EFF, ACLU, Amnesty, and other human rights, and anti censorship
organizations, while not part of the Wikileaks system, were still nodes that
were connected by many shared values.
Besides
the sites that supported Wikileaks, many sites sprang up which offered the same
functionality but in a specialized area, either by region or by topic. Sites
such as the extremely successful BalkanLeaks could bring focus to a certain region
and combine their leaks with analysis of Wikileaks releases and in depth
journalism to get attention to local issues. The least successful of these
sites attempted to replicate Wikileaks, changing only the ownership. The most
significant and most successful was a simple little site called Tunileaks.
Tunileaks
became a node in the Wikileaks system when it created a site to pull all cables
related to Tunisia and publicize them in Tunisia, where they had been censored.
Because of the Wikileaks and censorship connections, the site was evangelized
on WL
Central and
on Twitter by WLC writers. Anonymous were also early followers, giving
assistance in mirroring the site and evangelizing on Twitter. On December 17,
2010, when a fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest
the injustice of the Ben Ali regime, his death was ignored for a month and a
half by the mainstream media, but not by the Wikileaks system. Because there
was already an active hashtag for Tunisia, followed by a global audience,
because WL Central, Anonymous and others had been made aware of the situation
in Tunisia, and because censorship everywhere had received much greater coverage
than was usual, Bouazizi’s immolation and subsequent death on January 4th did
not fall into a vacuum. The outpouring of support from all nodes of the system
was enough to cause the Tunisian uprising to be named both the Twitter Revolution and the
Wikileaks Revolution and the support helped encourage people around the world
to follow in Tunisia’s footsteps.
None of
the sites in this system are competitive, but neither are they particularly
collaborative. While communication is possible at any time, each is aware of
anything important happening in another node, and some people contribute to
more than one node, there are no official communication lines. There is no time
and no resources wasted on unnecessary communication, but if a node needs
support it is possible for support to be instantly given by every node in the
system. The establishment of wlfriends.org will hopefully give rise to many other
nodes, each performing a different support function or one tailored to a new
region.
The future
A new
system of governance that does not follow a competitive hierarchical model will
need to employ stigmergy in most of its working systems. It is neither
reasonable nor desirable for individual thought and action to be subjugated to
group consensus in matters which do not affect the group, and it is frankly
impossible to accomplish complex tasks if every decision must be presented for
approval; that is in fact the biggest weakness of the hierarchical model. The
incredible success of so many internet projects are the result of stigmergy,
not collaboration, and it is stigmergy that will help us build quickly,
efficiently and produce results far better than any of us can foresee at the
outset.
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This article is a continuation of the ideas begun in A proposal for
governance in the post 2011 world
It is
justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world. – Mary Wollstonecraft
An overriding concern of most people participating in the 2011
revolution has been the financial system. From the September 17 protests
against the financial institutions and the symbolism of Occupy Wall Street to
the widespread discussion of alternative currencies, money has received more
air time than even human rights and war. Indeed, the current human rights
atrocities and endless wars did not cause the revolution – it was the
unfairness of the economic systems (starting with the fining of a fruitseller
in Tunisia) which have been the driving force behind the 2011 protests.
With
all of this attention, it would be easy to assume that financial systems are a
very important part of any future society. But are they? Before we discuss
alternative systems or how to repair our current system, we need to look at why
we need a financial system at all. If we define the function of our financial
systems, form should follow easily, be it community currency, barter, p2p
digital, resource based or other.
The current
system
The
current financial system functions as a means to tie the work that is done for
corporations to basic essentials such as food and housing in an entirely
artificial relationship. Despite an abundance of basic essentials, individuals
or entire countries can be deprived of them based on the labour or rights they
are providing to corporations. A system where banks, governments, and many
other valueless institutions also stand between individuals and basic needs and
demand payment completes the creation of true wage slavery where no worker can
survive outside the system. By providing a complete disconnect between work
required to produce basic essentials and ownership or access to them, this
system also assures gross overabundance of resources for people who do no work
of value at all.
Wages
are commonly described as a motivator to work, we are told that no one would
work if they were not paid. This is belied by the amount of people raising
their children, cleaning their homes, tending their gardens, volunteering for
fire departments and writing open source software and it is belied by cultures
in myriad times and places which survived happily without a financial system.
Indeed it seems more as if all of the work that benefits society is or could
easily be unpaid, while pay is only required for work that is harmful to
society. Valuation of work rests with corporations and governments which ensure
that workers will engage in pointlessly dangerous and immoral work that they
would never do otherwise. Wages were created not to motivate us to work, but to
control our work.
The
jobs that corporations and governments have chosen to value are almost entirely
busywork, pointless jobs that would not exist in another system, jobs including
but not limited to everything in sales, finance, management, politics, and
more. The end result of corporate work is far too much product and products and
services that are detrimental to society and the environment, and poorly
distributed. Any attempts to stop this work are met with the cry that to do so
would cause job loss, which is promoted as a great evil as under this system
jobs equal basic essentials. Jobs are always touted as being in short supply,
valuable, and difficult to obtain, especially the ‘good’ jobs that pay the most
money. Jobs are, of course, not remotely scarce, any child can find hundreds of
valuable things to do at any time, but these valuable jobs have not had an
artificial monetary value associated with them.
Any for
profit system is not going to have social or environmental goals as its mandate
(even if it says it does) and a wage paying system is a for profit system. If
profit were removed, all decisions would be made for social goals, prison
systems would be trying to rehabilitate prisoners or study to find why they
were in violation of the law instead of just warehousing as many as possible,
medical research would be trying to improve health instead of selling
pharmaceuticals, and agriculture would be devoted to producing the most
nutritious food in the most environmentally responsible way. Removing profit
would also remove a great deal of the reason for competitiveness, secrecy and
spying within organizations, along with a great deal of the redundancy of
competing companies providing identical goods and services. Removing wages
attached to a specific system would give every individual the freedom to leave
any system they did not agree with or that began to malfunction due to core
team problems, a better alternative system or other.
On an
international level, the financial system serves to artificially control which
countries are wealthy and which are not, by manipulating prices for a running
shoe so that it is worth extremely little at the point of manufacture in China
but people are killing each other for it in the US. At a national level it
allows banks, who have no need of housing, to hoard millions of houses while
the children that used to live in them sleep in the streets. At an individual
level, the equating of life’s essentials with the financial system can control
life or death, fulfillment or wasted potential, contentment or misery. All of
society’s problems which could be solved by money, were caused by money.
Social
Impact
Paid
work creates poverty, where anyone not enabling the corporations and doing their
work lives in fear of the legal and societal persecution that comes with
poverty. Poverty is the hardest work of any available today. It is a very
expensive lifestyle, entailing endless fines, charges and fees levied by the
corporate and government world. It leaves no time to achieve any fulfillment,
is a life threatening health risk, and is extremely damaging to all personal
relationships. It is naturally almost universally dreaded.
Poverty
is also regarded as a moral failure, as society needs to blame the victim to
avoid blaming themselves for the situation the poor find themselves in. In this
way, courage, duty, industry, thrift, kindness, loyalty – all of the
traditional virtues may be replaced simply by wealth, the ultimate virtue
respected in society today.
The
very word ‘unemployed’ states idleness, when anyone who has been poor knows how
much work is involved, while wealth is used synonymously with success and
achievement. Paid work also artificially values one job above another (and
subsequently the person doing that job above the other) regardless of
individual preference. While menial work might be considered more enjoyable
than executive work by most people, providing exercise, social interaction and
purpose, the assigned values teach us to value pointless executive work
instead.
Paid
work occupies all of our time, and when we are outside the financial system
poverty is a full time job. This acts to cripple all volunteer work such as
community gardens and open source projects that would otherwise be done for
free and may undermine the system of wage control over individuals. For those
that volunteer anyway, the financial system ensures that their work, such as
child rearing or innovative thought, is kept from ever resulting in any kind of
independence and encourages those volunteers to collaborate with the corporate
system to obtain security. Volunteer work is also subject to the same moral
scrutiny as poverty, especially in recent years when a requirement of being
poor is frequently the oxymoronic compulsory volunteer work associated with
receiving basic essentials. Previously the domain of the rich and idle,
therefore commendable, volunteer work has now become tainted with the stench of
poverty, further limiting willing participants.
The current
financial system is therefore necessary to control our work, to control our
time, to create poverty, to create division and to force people to do work
which is harmful to society.
A modified
system
It is
possible, and frequently proposed, that the current financial system be
modified to make it accessible for all to earn the basic essentials of life
easily. This could be done by having far more types of work valued, by
providing various forms of charity, by forcing corporations to follow certain workplace
standards and many other tweaks and regulations. All are in the end just
modifications to the master slave relationship and none recognize the
underlying flaws in the system. Who would be the authority valuing the work,
administering the charity and enforcing the standards? Who has control of the
wages? Whoever maintains authority over the work of others maintains the
hierarchical system and prevents workers from having autonomy, mastery and
control over their own work. This infantilization of workers, even in a system
with worker’s rights, limits innovation, decreases satisfaction, and prevents
workers from reaching their full potential.
A currency
free system
It is
possible to operate a society with no financial system at all. Where surplus
exists, it can be given, traded or pooled communally to ensure there is no want
of basic essentials. This suggestion is frequently countered with the statement
that only primitive societies can operate in such a fashion, our society is too
complex, but that statement is never backed by any insurmountable obstacles.
Such a system is unlikely to appear soon in its pure form, but could exist to
cover at least basic essentials so that a society does not condemn a child to
starvation because a parent cannot provide for them. It would then also be
possible for people to follow the path that for them provides the greatest
satisfaction without being held to corporate slavery.
A great
fear associated with abolishing wages or providing anything ‘for free’ is that
some people may not work. This fear completely disregards the fact that there
have always been people who will not work and under the current system they
include the people receiving the highest monetary rewards. Because of the
artificial monetary value assigned to some jobs, people who elect to do
demanding and valuable work with no associated corporate wage are sneered at as
‘welfare mothers’, etc. and made to believe they are acting as parasites on
society while corporate executives who provide no societal value are hailed as
great successes. A 2010study showed that executives, managers,
supervisors, and financial professionals account for about 60 percent of the
top 0.1 percent of income earners in the US in recent years. In a system where
all work was directly tied to the product or service produced, there would be
far more societal pressure for people to do something of direct value, and the
people contributing nothing would be exposed. With a more open system it would
also be far easier for people with current difficulties getting work in the
corporate environment to produce something of value.
The
internet has always had a strong anti-currency bias. The earliest email spam
promotions only served to increase the divide between the corporate world which
took over the surface and the underground which remained as before, populated
by people derisively referred to as parent’s basement dwellers due to the very
real truth that their work seldom brought income. The difference between worlds
is nowhere more apparent than between Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire Facebook
creator and prodigy of the corporate world, and moot, founder of the most
wildly influential, popular and completely unprofitable financially, website
4chan. With no financial incentives the internet has managed to create
collaborative efforts which have pushed the potential of society far beyond
what could have been possible before the internet. In the words of Captain
Jean-Luc Picard “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving
force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
While
it is doubtful that freeing people to obtain basic essentials outside of
corporate bondage would result in more people than usual not working, it is
very likely that the increase in art and innovation would be dramatic. It would
also change the perception in society of the value of volunteer work if it were
open to everyone to participate in it, and the type of work produced would be
valued by society, not corporations.
Property
Ownership
A
system which does not allow property ownership overlooks the fact that property
ownership always exists, it has simply transferred ownership, with all of the
rights and responsibilities, to a group instead of an individual.
Property
ownership causes problems when control of property is held outside of the user
group. When a community owns an individual’s home, an individual owns a
community’s public space, or a nation state lays claim to an ocean, problems
are inevitable. Ownership implies rights and decision making; as with other
systems, the rights and decision making for property must lie with the user
group of that property to minimize conflict and provide the most effective
stewardship. Property ownership will be discussed further in a later article.
It was once
considered inconceivable that the world could run without slavery for the exact
same reasons people are now putting forward for retaining wages, our modern
slavery.
Resources:
Cooperative
Economy in the Great Depression http://jonathanrowe.org/money-cooperative-economy-in-the-great-depression
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Optimism is a political act. In fact, these days, cynicism is
obedience. – Alex Steffen
The world is long overdue for a completely new system of
governance. The need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque
authority has been removed by technology. Governance by nation states is now as
arbitrary and illogical as city states were earlier found to be. Corporations
have the freedom to live in a world without borders or social responsibility,
to own property no individual can claim and to control a one world government
and legal system, with insupportable consequences for the world’s resources and
individual rights. To effect the change we require in 2012, to give individuals
control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance
and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.
The world is long overdue for a completely new system of
governance. The need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque
authority has been removed by technology. Governance by nation states is now as
arbitrary and illogical as city states were earlier found to be. Corporations
have the freedom to live in a world without borders or social responsibility,
to own property no individual can claim and to control a one world government
and legal system, with insupportable consequences for the world’s resources and
individual rights. To effect the change we require in 2012, to give individuals
control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance
and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.
Individual
Rights
In any
system where groups have power, individual rights are always at risk. Both pure
democracy and communism have brought human rights horrors every bit as
reprehensible as fascist states; in order to guard against genocide, torture,
and other persecution of individuals in the name of the greater good, a system
must safeguard individual rights above all other authority.
Article
2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies that individual rights
are to be applied equally without distinction of any kind, such as race,
colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social
origin, property, birth or other status. With the addition of age, this would
prevent discrimination against any group. Groups are not individuals and no
group is entitled to special and further rights or protections under individual
rights.
A
recognition of individual rights will include life, liberty, security of
person, access to the basic essentials of life including knowledge, privacy and
personal autonomy in matters not affecting the rest of society, free
development of personality and potential, and a fair legal system which does
not promote wishes of the group over rights of the individual.
Autonomous
peer to peer user groups for systems
Governments
up till now have been run by hierarchical groups, which act as the final
authority on all topics for an entire region for an arbitrarily specified
length of time or until they are overthrown by another group. What these
authorities govern is a series of systems, controlled by the state or
corporations, and run as dictatorships where workers’ individual rights are
exchanged for the basic necessities of life. These systems have profit for the
top of the hierarchy as their objective; they are not set up to provide an
efficient or superior service or product to the users.
If
these systems were organized as autonomous, transparent, porous, peer to peer
user groups, they would be far better governed by themselves. The current
political structure does not recognize that every system is not of concern or
interest to everyone in the region, or that some users have far greater
knowledge and expertise in specific areas than others. We need a system where
responsibility and control rests with the entire user group and expertise is
acknowledged and put to best use.
Autonomous: each user group should consist of all people
affected by the system and no people not affected by the system.
Transparent: all information related to the system must
be fully transparent in order for users to participate in tasks or auditing.
Porous: contribution at all levels of each user
group must be open to all users with acceptance by peer review.
Peer to peer: each user group should consist of users: audit and provide feedback,contributors: interested users who periodically present work for acceptance
by the members,members: have acquired expertise and been accepted as
full contributing members by the user group, and a core group: recognized by the group as having the
necessary level of expertise to provide direction for the system.
Meritocracy: A side effect of these user groups is that
they provide workers with the three motivators which provide the greatest job
satisfaction, autonomy, mastery and purpose. People can work on anything they
like, they are not required to submit resumes, acquire accreditation,
seniority, or approval from an individual authority. If their work is good
enough it will be accepted by the user group. Everyone can work on the system
that interests them, doing the jobs at the level they are capable of, with as
much or as little involvement as they choose.
Systems
should be organized by user groups, not by nations or treaties. International
systems would include things such as the internet, telecommunications and
knowledge, local systems would include things such as transit, food production
and social services, and in any situation where only one family or an individual
is affected, the responsibility would lie with only them. Each local user group
or individual would have access to outside user groups for trade, shared
knowledge, disaster relief, etc., autonomous but networked.
Global
commons
Anything
which is not only of global interest but also does not belong to any one
generation cannot be destroyed and cannot be claimed as the property of any
individual, group, corporation or government. Global commons would include
space, the atmosphere and electromagnetic field, deep sea ocean, land and water
masses of sufficient size to have global impact, areas of the biosphere which
are rare or important enough to be of global concern, and knowledge. Knowledge
includes discoveries, history, creative works, and the information people
require in order to govern themselves and excludes personal information
regarding individuals. There should be no restriction on the use of ideas,
although creativity needs to be compensated and credited.
Anything
belonging to the global commons must be held under stewardship of a porous and
transparent peer to peer organization set up for the purpose, and the mandate
for all global commons must include the protection and preservation of the
commons. All systems which affect the commons must work with the commons in
their design and implementation.
2010 we
woke up. 2011 we stood up. 2012 we take over.
Continuing
articles:
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