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Comment by jsemrau | Hacker News Reader

But we are not living in 2000 BC anymore. Public matters can be solved in distributed ways since the 1990s via public websites. What is happening right now is a much more fundamental change in the way cities operate.

1. The third social space (restaurants, cafe's, etc) becomes more and more irrelevant due to delivery services. So you can enjoy restaurant food within the comfort of your home. As a result urban space used for restaurants will likely decrease.

2. Retail is dying for a long while. Currently 10.3% of urban retail space in Singapore (where I live) is not used. Tendency increasing. The only thing working against the trend are co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators.

We have to come to terms that instead of building cities for cars we need to build cities for mobile humans with a cellphone.

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Maybe it works like that in Singapore. Personally, I think it's a pity. Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave labor in nearby silver mines and regularly voted to declare wars on other peoples. But some solutions were thought-provoking.

By moving public matters to a website you move them out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind. People think less of common good, and how the city should work. Public matters become distant, abstract and impersonal.

Many people value restaurant not exclusively for the food - which can be a bit stale or cold if it's delivered to you - but also for the service, pleasant atmosphere and sometimes to meet interesting people. And to show off.

I don't know how it works in Singapore, but in a traditional shop you can examine goods you'd like to purchase, try them on, ask questions, or even negotiate a little bit. In my country it's rare that a shop's website has accurate and complete descriptions for all items, or even photos from all sides. A shop may have a contact form or a person answering questions through instant messages, but you can't know if he/she is active and not on a coffee break. To make a perfect shop website you have to make special cases to emulate many kinds of service that you take for granted entering a physical shop.

Delivery works well for easily defined items like books that don't have many variants, such as books, and even then if you know precisely which book do you want. A recommendation system might or might not give you valuable suggestions. In a shop or library, you can browse a book or ask the librarian or clerk.

In some ways, delivery shops and shops in general are very inefficient. For example if you buy physical books, everyone must have their own book, whereas in a library one copy can be used by many people. In some ways it's much more efficient. Digital books are even more efficient, but publishers fight very hard to create artificial scarcity and disallow copying, which is next to free in cost.

But a digital version of a soldering iron, a hammer or climbing equipment won't suffice, and this could be handled similar to a library, even for a fee. These items are only needed occasionally in most homes - if you run your own workshop, it's another story.

>Maybe it works like that in Singapore. Personally, I think it's a pity. Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave labor in nearby silver mines

Considering that the US didn't allow poor people to vote until the mid 19th century (which ancient Athens allowed), didn't allow blacks to vote until much later, and women to vote until 1920s, and it still had slavery until 1860s -- that is, 2 and a half millennia after those ancient Athenians, I'd say they were quite ahead of the time in their democracy.

We agree on women and blacks. But good arguments have been made (weasel words because I don't remember the source) that a democracy where EVERYONE can vote is very susceptible to populism and demagogy. Under this system, two idiots are worth more than a genius. People living under a rock, not knowing what's going on in the neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much. How to deal with that ?

One way is by restricting who gets to vote. Should clinically insane people be allowed to vote ? How about criminals ? But where to draw the line ? Another is similar - some wise people would get more votes. Third way - provide decent free education to everyone. It has been achieved on a small scale (Finland), in fact Finnish education is much more than that.

I'm sympathetic to the Karl Popper's definition of democracy:

It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out of office is enough. That is democracy.

and

I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.

also

Democracy cannot be fully characterized as the rule of the majority, although the institution of general elections is most important. For a majority might rule in a tyrannical way. (The majority of those who are less than 6 ft. high may decide that the minority of those over 6 ft. shall pay all taxes.) In a democracy, the powers of the rulers must be limited;

>We agree on women and blacks. But good arguments have been made (weasel words because I don't remember the source) that a democracy where EVERYONE can vote is very susceptible to populism and demagogy. Under this system, two idiots are worth more than a genius.

The idea behind democracy, at least real athenian democracy, is that it doesn't matter who is an idiot and who is a genius.

Not just because they are all people, but mainly because since they are all to be affected by the decisions of a vote, they should all have a say.

If anything, when one was "too much of a genius" or too distinct from others, it was viewed with suspicion, and they could see themselves ostracised (with "ostraca" being the ancient greek word for sea-shells, but also the shards of pottery using for voting, upon which athenians wrote the names of people to exile from the city) [1].

(And come to think of it, some of the most disastrous, self serving, society destructing, laws and ideas, come not from "idiots" but for very clever and well educated people).

So democracy is not about "finding what's best". It's about people participating in it, whether their thinking (or lack thereof), having equal say on what should be done in their community.

That's why ancient athenians besides mass popular vote, they also gave some high official positions by lottery -- so anybody, at random, can get a chance to get to them (for a term).

>People living under a rock, not knowing what's going on in the neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much. How to deal with that ?

Accept it.

[1] Aristedes a.k.a. "Aristedes the just" was a renowned state-person, who everybody considered trustworthy and just (hence the nickname), and he had done much to prove himself so over the years. (...). Once, when there was a vote for ostacizing, (...) it is said that an illiterate voter who did not recognise Aristides approached the statesman and requested that he write the name of Aristides on his voting shard to ostracize him. The latter asked if Aristides had wronged him. "No," was the reply, "and I do not even know him, but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called 'the Just'." Aristides then wrote his own name on the ballot.

We are talking about knowledge, the knowledge how to regulate public life. There is no way to accept anything, in terms of information, from someone who knows nothing.

>We are talking about knowledge, the knowledge how to regulate public life.

There is no "knowledge to regulate" that has been imparted to some. The most educated "sages" have historically made the same (and worse) BS mistakes and disastrous policies as the ordinary citizen.

And even if it was, it's not their call to impart it to the rest of the people. Those who get the effects of a regulation should have a say on the design of the regulation.

>There is no way to accept anything, in terms of information, from someone who knows nothing.

There is a way. It's called democracy (even more so in direct than in modern "representative" diluted democracy, but still).

What there should not be a way of is for anybody, even if they know nothing, to accept the will of some other other them, without having their equal share in influencing what will happen. Those people would be slaves.

But the Founding Fathers were more inspired by Sparta than Athens (source: documentary by History Channel). Sparta had not just a constitution and voting, but also a couple of institutions:

  *  two kings (equivalent of president)
  * apella (public voting for males over 30...)
  * ephors (ministers)
  * gerusia (elders... so senate ? In practice they held the most power and Sparta was an oligarchy)

Remember that Athenians voted to sentence Socrates to death. Philosophers delighted in trolling, and Socrates specialized in inconvenient questions. Soon they regretted that because they needed his advice. But it was too late.

* * *

The issue is not that the decisions aren't perfect. Ignorant people are disturbingly easy to manipulate into voting. Stupid people can be outright dangerous. I think Carlo M. Cipolla argued it best: from social perspective, a stupid person is a person who causes harm to you while not getting any benefit for it or even getting hurt himself in the process.

Maybe (instead of age requirement?) there should be some kind of "public affairs" test based on knowledge of what happened in the last few years ? Something like that.

Then you end up back at Jim Crow laws. Look at how much ‘voting fraud’ is being used in certain states to apply conditions to voting and how it affects turnout.

There is just no good way to do such tests in a fully enfranchised democracy. It’s like parent tests or licenses people occasionally think of, ive thought it myself ‘no way should that scumbag be allowed to breed’ when reading about terrible abuse etc., but again those rules can and will end up applied to social undesirables and who decides that?

Rosa Parks was socially undesirable.

A huge fraction of "stupidity" is actually owed to engineered propaganda. The "public affairs" that one hears about are almost entirely dependent on the filter bubble blown by the media sources a person trusts. You could do a very good job of filtering by political party based on what current events a person had seen in their news.

Whoever wrote the test would control which culture-bubbles got to vote.

> Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave labor in nearby silver mines and regularly voted to declare wars on other peoples.

Considering there are still wars being fought in the modern world, even if we often choose not to call them such, I don't know that we can look upon that from a moral high ground.

As for slavery, some periodization / historical perspective is important here. "Modern/American slavery" is based upon a notion of racial superiority, but that was not always the case. I'm not well-acquainted with Ancient Greece in particular, but consider Ancient Rome[1], where slavery was much closer to a social class.

Further, there was a lot of mobility in and out of this class. You could become a failing to pay your debts, or being captured in war. Slaves, although property themselves, could earn money and own property; they sometimes recieved salaries from their masters. Freeing slaves was a common occurrence (not necessarily out of altruism; freed slaves often became clientes[2] of their former master). Freedmen (former slaves) were a very influential political blok).

Due to the amount of mobility, it was not uncommon for freedmen to own slaves, or former masters to become slaves; there was a very acute sense of "that could be me", exemplified in the Roman concept of humanitas[3], the concept that we are all human, and certain standards of empathy toward and treatment of one another (it's hard to translate well because there's no 1:1 concept that covers both the definition and connotations, nowadays; maybe the closest modern parallel is "one love").

I do not mean to imply slavery was a good thing (it wasn't) or that slaves were never abused (they were). But it is worth recognizing that the character of slavery has changed over the centuries/millenia.

[1]: Please note the Ancient Roman Empire spanned many hundreds of years; the above was not true for the entirety of its existence. [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_ancient_Rome [3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitas

I agree. It was largely the same in Africa. The worst slavery happened because, taken out of context, Africans were instantly identifiable as slaves.

I think there were some positive aspects to slavery. Currently widespread prison system has a major problem - the prisoners are a money drain on the society. There was no such problem with slaves because by definition they worked to support themselves. Unfortunately, often in ruthlessly harsh conditions. Still, it was more profitable to raid a village and enslave the survivors instead of slaughtering them.

> Public matters can be solved in distributed ways since the 1990s via public websites.

I don't think so. Public websites and Web based social networks are useful but final decisions are not made there. Really good relationships are only born during personal interactions. I don't say remote relationships are impossible but they usually cover only one side of your life - professional, entertainment etc. Personal relationships are much more diverse. The fact that you touch, feel, smell somebody, see the whole body makes a personal relationship much more complex than just a digital relationship. That's why people who can afford move out to suburban areas where you have time for such interactions. I think this is the only way to go. Some decentralized smart devices can help our lives but without personal interactions it won't be better.

> move out to suburban areas

I thought the entire point was to avoid other people.

I don’t think it’s the point but it is often the outcome.

I was surprised by that when I moved to the burbs.

Way easier to meet people in the city. I had his I guess sitcom vision of cook outs and July 4th type stuff (am Brit) and that happens but norm really amongst neighbors just nuclear and extended families.

We moved thinking we’d have kids by now but turns out we can’t have children - kids seem to be the only ‘in’ to the social scene here and we don’t have that. I’m agitating for a move back to the city but not sure my wife is ready to admit that’s our life now and give up then ‘normal’ path. 2500 Sqf, 3 beds and 3 baths for 2 people and two puppies does not make good economic or ecological sense.

> The third social space (restaurants, cafe's, etc) becomes more and more irrelevant due to delivery services.

Did you really mean to write that? :-)

To be fair, delivery services aren't really responsible for undermining the "third space" nature of these places: we've been treating them increasingly as retail conveniences for a very long time, failing to acknowledge their social and psychological role. But it is true that the rise in delivery makes the resulting isolation even more stark.

>But we are not living in 2000 BC anymore.

That's not really relevant. The idea of public space remains important.

>Public matters can be solved in distributed ways since the 1990s via public websites.

Seeing the other in a physical space is a whole different culture (and leads to whole other discussions and interactions) than merely exchanging messages in some forum.

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