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We as humanity need to learn how to coordinate at a new level. You and I, like everyone else, are confronted with topics like:
- climate change
- environmental crisis
- economic crisis
- war
- epidemics
- inequality
All of these situations are fundamentally a failure to coordinate.
Our short-term interests seem polarized, but our long-term interests are definitely aligned. If we don't start to coordinate on the long-term goals, we will all die from the conflicts of interests as we all fight tooth and nail over our short-term interests.
Ordinary citizens only have a few options to try to make a difference: Use less electricity, get an electric car, eat organic. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we could put our minds together and focus our intentions on solving this crisis of crises, the metacrisis.
Growth happens in leaps
Our ability to coordinate made a leap when we developed language.
The second major leap was written text: laws, money and accounting, religion.
Our current governments were built solely on the technology of writing. They have become dependent on computers, but they were not designed with the possibilities networked computers offer.
There are 2 main dystopias on the horizon:
- An inability to coordinate, chaos, war, and economic turmoil, or
- Authoritarian top down control.
The path that avoids these two dystopias is democracy, where the government emerges from the will of the people.
Within democracy there are also extremes
- Direct Democracy is impossible in our modern democracies given the complexity of the process and information governments face.
- Representational Democracy is less cognitive load on citizens but politicians also don't have the expertise needed and are easy to corrupt.
The third option as I see it is Liquid Democracy where every citizen has the ability to either vote on everything or delegate any proposal or category of proposals, or all proposals, to any other citizen. People tend to delegate to others with more expertise, concentrating expertise onto the challenges the society faces. Because delegators can see the votes of their delegates and can change their delegation any time, it enforces a level of accountability not seen in current democratic systems.
Liquid democracy is only possible with modern networked computers.
There are several initiatives being built to support Liquid democracy. These include Flowback, Liquid Feedback, and Forby.io
When to use
- Liquid democracy is possibly the most transparent and flexible basis for group decision making and governance. However, you need software to manage it.
How to use
- Liquid Democracy requires networked computers and Liquid Democracy software in order to manage the large number of opinions
What you get
- Transparent and responsive governance that concentrates expertise onto the challenges we face.
More info and resources
An Introduction to Liquid Democracy
Redesigning governance for our connected future
medium.com
Liquid Democracy: True Democracy for the 21st Century
Liquid Democracy, a subset of Delegative Democracy, is a powerful voting model for collective decision making in large communities. Liquid…
medium.com
Liquid democracy
Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy, whereby an electorate engages in collective decision-making through direct participation and dynamic representation. This democratic system utilizes elements of both direct and representative democracy. Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy; voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy. Any individual may be delegated votes and these proxies may in turn delegate their vote as well as any votes they have been delegated by others resulting in "metadelegation".
en.wikipedia.org
Liquid Democracy Review
As we can't scale direct democracies we can think about how to create smarter representatives. Liquid democracy allows that through the vote delegation feature, so one can allow a trusted expert to speak on his/her behalf.
maxsemenchuk.com
Experts in the community
- JIM RUTT
- LOKE HAGBURG