- Immanuel Kant
My brother Mark invented the Maglev train while playing with magnets when he was little. Unfortunately for him, it later turned out that Maglev technology had already been invented and was in use in various parts of Europe and Japan, so Mark will never receive the credit he deserves. The reason I mention this is that there seems to be a family curse developing: the same thing happened to me the other day with an idea I'd decided to call WikiBill.
I'd been browsing Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that's written by everybody who wants to contribute, and I was surprised by how often people from opposing sides seemed able to reach a compromise. In case you don't know, Wikipedia works by allowing anyone who happens to be passing to press the “Edit” button and change the text, or even create a new article. You'd expect the entries in such a project to mainly cover topics like “Eric is a cock”, but apparently the vandals are outnumbered by the well-wishers and it stays on track. It's true that there are sometimes things like reversion wars, where someone stubbornly keeps undoing a change while someone else stubbornly keeps reinstating it, but most of the time it really works. Take a controversial topic like abortion: because disagreements are resolved democratically, and because the most active people tend to be the ones who follow the rules, the resulting article is balanced and fair. In my opinion.
So then I decided that this system ought to replace parliament, or supplement it, or provide it with bills to vote on. I haven't worked out the piddling details yet. But you can see it might work: one person creates a new article on WikiBill, proposing to outlaw – ooh, I don't know – internet gambling. This person is no expert on jurisprudence, so a lawyer who happens to be browsing the site puts it into more conventional language and clears up ambiguities. The next person disagrees with some of the implications and makes a few tweaks or writes a new section. And so on. The thing grows. I suppose that, when the article is mature enough, there'd be a way for people to express generally positive or negative feelings towards it, to give an idea of how popular it would be as an Act of Parliament, and then someone would print it out and take it round to the House of Commons in a briefcase and the MPs could have a vote.
But as I was rushing to bring my new idea to the masses, I ran across Wikocracy, which allows you to choose an existing American law and edit it or create a new one. Of course, this has no effect on legislation, but if it gains weight perhaps Congress will one day pay attention to it – after all, politicians are always looking for ways to monitor public opinion. Then there's Wiki Democracy, which is almost the same idea. Here, the starting assumption is that there are no laws, so they're being created from scratch. These are young projects: Wiki Democracy only has seventy laws on it so far. There's a tiny UK section containing only two, one of which is a joke.
So the idea wasn't mine after all, which is sad – but happy too I suppose, because it means other people are thinking the same. Maybe one day people all over the world will have a say in how America is run. Imagine how Hotel Rwanda would have ended if Rwandans had had a vote in the American presidential election.
9 comments:
Maybe David Cameron will bring this in if he gets elected - he seems to be up with the electric interweb, what with video blogs and whatnot.
One thing that has intruiged me about the midterms that are coming up here in the US are that on the ballot forms for the election of governors etc, there are a number of questinos that the voter answers. An example of one that will be asked on Tuesday is whether Massachusetts convenience stores should be allowed to sell alcohol (at the minute it's confined to liquor stores with special licenses). We very rarely have referenda in the UK, but rolling them in with the regular election seems like a good way to do it.
Brilliant!!!! Absolutely brilliant!
-Too bad you're not american so I can vote for you for president. (Stupid Bush)
I want to hear more about Mark's Maglev train. I assume that it was decomissioned.
On the subject of your article, it sounds like rule by iPod to me. The plotlines of the Deus Ex computer games are still of relevance and worth noting. One of the options at the end of the second game is to release nanobots that will link all of humanity to a central computer that would read their minds and impose a benevolent dictatorship based on the needs of every individual. When I last played the game I did not take this option. I shot everyone instead.
You'll have ask to Mark about it. As I remember, there was a short "track" of magnets repelling the one that went zinging over the top with only a little push.
I don't know what you mean by "rule by iPod". Are you worried that legislation is less likely to be well thought through if it's liable to pointing-and-clicking by any Joe (sorry) who comes along? My answer to that would be that unthinking Wikipedia edits tend to be reverted by people who are most committed to the entry.
I haven't played Deus Ex, but I suppose the problem with the system you describe is that it isn't nice to be spied on by nanobots, and that you'd be constantly worried by the possibility that the computer isn't as good as it could be at calculating "the needs of every individual". I'm not sure either of those things would be issues in a Wikocracy. Have I missed the point?
And anyway, let's not jump straight to the most extreme scenario, where parliament is actually replaced. Consider the more modest claim that this kind of project could encourage more participation.
Well indeed. It all depends on how benign the computer is.
Granted Wikipedia runs fairly smoothly at the moment(only one high-profile court case so far), but then it isn't a power structure and nothing is lost if someone posts something stupid.
Participation? Have some Plato:
"Those who are too intelligent to become invloved in politics are destined to be governed by people stupider that themselves."
Parliament? Standing for election should be adequate grounds for disqualification. (Like Mr Nash says about Mensa).
You're right that raising the stakes may change people's behaviour for the worse on the Wiki. My hunch is that it's possible to incrementally raise them and keep an eye on whether the thing stays on course.
I'll have a pop at guessing at what Plato meant, without the aid of a context: "Being involved in politics delivers a small return in personal well-being and a larger one in glory. Intelligent people don't care about glory, and the improvement of one's lot isn't great enough to bother with the hassle of standing for election and so on." Now, apart from the fact that this assumes intelligent people are not altruists, it depends on participation not being worth the hassle. Ideas like Wikocracy have the potential to make participation easier - maybe Plato's selfish clever people will be tempted to log on and change the odd thing even though they'd never consider kissing babies and canvassing for votes.
All the possibilities I'm talking about, from replacing parliament to supplementing it, take more or less power away from elected representatives and give it directly to the people. Your jibe at people who stand for parliament seems to be in favour of efforts to do that, rather than against it. Unless you'd prefer to get rid of democracy altogether and replace it with despotism, which I think was Plato's favourite option.
Hang on, hang on. Aren't you just saying you support mass democracy? That ideas been around a bit longer than the internet, you know.
The whole point about having a representative government is that it places a barrier between the laws of the land and the generally ill-informed opinions of the masses. Otherwise, to resort to an over-used examples, you end up with capital punishment.
Now I know you backed away in one of your follow-up posts from the full "legislation by Wiki" inplications of your initial post, but still, if the population as a whole got to decide what bills would be debated in Parliament, our elected representatives would waste all their time rehashing debates like the capital punishment one.
Yours,
An elitist
Furthermore, our system already allows us to have a say on the broad issues we want to see discussed during the coming term, when we vote on a selection of manifestos. If the elected party don't make some effort to follow through on these issues, they'll get booted out next time round.
Of course, participation in politics needs to be made easier because the majority of us are too lazy or too busy or both, but wouldn't online voting and (perhaps) a greater use of referenda, as Matt says, be a better place to start?
(Except that referenda at electiom time have a tendancy to turn the election into a single-issue debate, but that's another issue...)
I don't like the idea of having lots of referenda, for the traditional "uninformed masses" reason. Actually, I think the fact that lots of people are uninformed on a particular issue is only part of it - the other aspect is simply the amount of time they've spent thinking about it, arguing about it and so on.
So, up until now, representative democracy has been preferable to total democracy because the only way you could imagine total democracy working was by constant referenda. (By the way, I'm not sure what your position is on that, because it looks as though your second post contradicts your first.) But now there could be a different way, that favours the contributions of those who think about it the most. Am I in favour of it? I don't know - it hasn't even got going in its powerless form yet - but keeping an eye on it might be an idea, that's all.
In theory, we should have capital punishment now. If a majority of people want it, then parties that adopt it as policy become more electable. Why has no major party adopted it recently? I think it's because it's hard to defend it rationally and because it has implications for other areas, like foreign policy. For example, the need to seem consistent in your moral position makes it hard to criticise other countries' human rights abuses if you're busy executing your own citizens. Possibly wiki-lawmaking would encourage people to consider all the implications of the decision, and maybe people would favour my side of this argument. Or maybe they wouldn't. I wouldn't want to try and engineer a system that guaranteed me the answer I wanted, anyway.
Four-yearly elections allow us to have a say in the same sense that multiple-choice tests assess your knowledge: what if it was more like a creative writing exam?
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