Liquid Democracy
A potential future for DAOs and for the world.
Imagine Democracy without without politicians.
Imagine a system of governance that transparently focuses expertise onto the pressing problems without requiring everyone to think about every problem.
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 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.
We will discuss how liquid democracy can help solve the metacrisis.